Spookshow: Book 3: The Women in the walls Read online

  Contents

  title page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

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  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  epilogue

  newsletter

  other works

  bio

  the

  S P O O K S H O W

  The women in the walls

  Book Three

  Tim McGregor

  Perdido Pub

  TORONTO

  1

  Holyhead, Wales

  JOHN GANTRY STEPPED out of the cab and looked up at the house before him. Sheltered behind a low stone wall, it was narrow and badly weathered with little to distinguish itself from any of the other houses on the row.

  Gantry bent down to look in on the cab driver. “You sure this is the place?”

  “This is the address you gave me,” the driver grumbled. “Whether or not this is the place, well, I really can’t say.”

  It didn’t look promising. Gantry lit a cigarette and lowered his expectations. He was familiar with disappointments and dashed hopes. Lord knew he had tracked down more than his share of rubbish leads. What’s one more? Five hours from London out here to the Irish sea at Holyhead. No good was going to come out of a town with a name like that.

  “Do you want me to wait?” asked the driver.

  “Nah. But leave me your mobile, yeah?”

  Gantry retrieved his bag from the back seat, paid the driver and looked up at the house again. Set farther back from the road than the other houses on the lane, it seemed downcast and neglected. Empty, almost.

  Turning his collar up against the cold wind whistling off the sea, he rang the bell and flicked the cigarette into the hedge. The door opened instantly and a woman stood silhouetted against the light within.

  “I’m looking for James Honeychurch,” Gantry said. “Do I have the right house?”

  The woman stepped aside and waved him in. “He’s expecting you.”

  Gantry moved past the woman into the foyer, chewing over what the woman had said. He had never met Honeychurch before, nor had he contacted him before coming. Surprise was an element Gantry used whenever possible. Not this time though.

  “This way,” the woman said, leading the way down a narrow hallway and through a small kitchen. She had dark hair and olive skin but her eyes were startlingly grey and Gantry found it hard not to stare at them. He warned himself not to get distracted but it was difficult to look elsewhere. The woman was stunning.

  “Cold out there tonight,” she said. “Do you want tea?”

  “I’d love some. Thank you.”

  “I’ll bring some down.” The woman opened a door and turned on the light switch. “Through here. He’s waiting. Mind your step, though. It’s a tad steep.”

  He felt an odd reluctance to leave the woman’s presence. He held out his hand and poured on the charm. He wasn’t above flirting with married women. “My name’s Gantry. John Gantry.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said, shooing him on. “Down you go.”

  The steps were not so much steep as they were downright treacherous in their incline. He almost lost his footing twice, going round and round as the stairs descended far beyond any normal cellar. A landing finally appeared and he pushed through the doorway and stopped. What presented itself there seemed as if he’d stepped into another location altogether. A large hall with high ceilings and hanging lights. The walls were lined with books and shelves of material. Two long stacks of shelves took up space in the centre of the hall, giving the place the look of a dusty library.

  To the left glowed a fire in a hearth, ringed by two tall wingback chairs. In one sat an old man.

  “Mr. Honeychurch?” Gantry said, crossing to the fireplace.

  The old man sat slumped with his chin tucked into his chest. A soft purr of snores could be heard above the crackle of the fire.

  “Brilliant,” Gantry muttered. He set the bag down and tapped the old man’s arm. “C’mon, granddad. Time to wake up.”

  The man’s eyes opened and he sat up. “Mister Gantry. Beg your pardon, I must have nodded off waiting for you.”

  Gantry looked the man over. He looked like any old pensioner in his cardy and slippers. “You knew I was coming?”

  “I expected you a long time ago, lad. What took you so long?”

  “I wasn’t even sure you existed until a month ago.” Gantry tried not to take offence. For years he had heard whispers of a man who traded in the unusual, the sacred along with the profane. It had taken ages just to get the name Honeychurch, to say nothing of an address. And here the old codger was telling him he was late to the party.

  Gantry nodded at the space around them. The stacks of books and curios crowded onto shelves, some of it spilling to the floor. “So this is it then. Your collection.”

  Honeychurch pushed his glasses back up his nose. “It is. But it’s not a collection, you see. That implies ownership. I’m more of an archivist, really.”

  “You mean you don’t own any of this stuff?”

  “No one really owns anything, do they? The material things, at any rate.” Honeychurch stood and invited his guest to take the chair opposite him. “I’m more of a custodian of these items. Until they move on. Ah, here’s the tea.”

  The woman with the distracting eyes made her way down the narrow steps with grace, balancing the tea tray gracefully in one hand. She slid the tray onto the table before the hearth and looked at Mr. Honeychurch. “Did you rest?”

  “I did, thank you, darling.” The old man poured the tea with a shaky hand. “Did you meet Mr. Gantry?”

  “Yes.” The woman settled daintily on the arm of Honeychurch’s chair.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” Gantry said.

  “Sugar?” she asked.

  “It’s Adele,” said Honeychurch. “You’ll have to excuse my wife, Mr. Gantry. She doesn’t always like visitors.”

  Gantry gnarled his brow. Wife? There had to be at least thirty years difference between the pensioner and the stunning woman perched next to him.

  “Let’s get down to business,” Honeychurch said, clapping his hands together. “You know how this works, Mr. Gantry?”

  “It’s a simple barter.”

  “If,” Adele Honeychurch cautioned, “you have something to worth bartering.”

  “Right.”

  Honeychurch’s collection, or archive as the old man insisted, was fabled within the shady circles John Gantry moved in. The barter was dead simple; one article for another. If what one brought was found worthy. That was entirely up to the old man’s discretion. The interesting part was what one received in trade. According to the old man, you got what you needed but not necessarily what one wanted. No negotiating, no withdrawing. The deal was settled. The question of how Honeychurch knew what one needed exactly was a bit fuzzy and Gantry wa
s eager to see it played out. He reached into the bag and laid a cloth-wrapped bundle on the table. “You tell me.”

  Adele took the bundle and, holding it before her husband, folded back the layers. Inside lay a dark, gnarled object that resembled a petrified knot of wood. “What is it?” she asked.

  Gantry sipped his tea, watching the old man study the thing.

  “It’s a human heart,” Honeychurch said.

  “This?” sputtered Adele. “It looks like a stone.”

  “Not just any old heart,” Gantry said. “The heart of a poet.”

  “Ah, but which one?” countered Honeychurch.

  “Shelley.”

  “Shelley?” said Adele. “Who’s she?”

  “He,” corrected her husband. “One of the great Romantics.”

  “He’s having us on,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure,” Honeychurch replied. “Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. When his body washed ashore, the locals burned it on the beach as was their custom. Yet, there was one part of him that would not burn.”

  “That’s a fairy tale,” Adele said.

  Honeychurch turned the withered piece over in his hands, examining it from every angle. “I thought his wife buried this with their son?”

  “She did,” Gantry said. “Someone nicked it.”

  “And what makes you think I’d want something as ghastly as this?”

  “Come on. The heart of a poet? One cherished by the woman who wrote Frankenstein? You want it.”

  The old man continued to examine the petrified thing for a moment. Adele rolled her eyes, suspecting a scam.

  Gantry smiled. Time to close the deal. “There’s one more reason. A peculiar one. Hold it in your palm.”

  Honeychurch let the thing rest in the centre of his hand. “What now?”

  “Wait for it.” Gantry looked at his watch. “Any second now.”

  The seconds ticked on. Then the old man flinched. “It moved.”

  Adele sat up. “What do you mean it moved?”

  “It beat.” Honeychurch looked up at his guest. “How often does it do that?”

  “Once every seven days. I timed it. Always on a Monday, at this time.”

  “That’s awfully precise. Was that when he died?”

  “No,” said Gantry. “I looked it up. Its when he and Mary wed.”

  “Aww,” cooed Adele. “That’s sweet.”

  The old man’s eyes sparkled and Gantry knew he was hooked. He shook out a cigarette and lit up, knowing the old man wasn’t likely to object to smoking inside his house now. “We have a deal then?”

  “Yes, yes. Thank you for bringing it to me.” Honeychurch and his wife got up from the chair. “Now for your trade. Darling, do you mind?”

  Adele sighed and both men watched her walk away. Honeychurch said, “You know how this part works?”

  “Sort of. I get something I need, not something I want. Right? How that’s done exactly is a bit of a mystery.”

  “That part is all Adele,” Honeychurch said. “She’s the one who knows that. Her special talent.”

  “How does she know?”

  The old man shrugged. “It’s more intuition and feeling, really. Not exactly something you can measure.”

  Adele moved down the stacks of books and curiosities. She stopped and put a finger to her lips as if thinking. Farther down the aisle stood a ladder against the shelves. She took the ladder and moved it across to the opposite rack and climbed up. She rifled through the shelf, dropping books and papers to the floor.

  “Mind the inventory, dear,” Honeychurch called out.

  “Aha!” she exclaimed. Descending the ladder, she returned to the fireplace with something in her hand. “Here it is.”

  Gantry took it from her, his face withering by degrees. It was just a magazine. A very old one at that. A pulp fiction magazine from the thirties or maybe the forties, with a lurid cover and a sensational title. Uncanny Tales, issue 32.

  “Is this a joke?” Gantry asked.

  “Not at all,” the old man said. He looked to his wife.

  “This is what you’ll need,” she said coolly, as if any fool could see that.

  “An old rag? How the hell do I need this?”

  “I have no idea,” Adele said. “I just know that you do. Or you will, soon.”

  “If Adele says you need it then you most certainly will, Mr. Gantry.”

  “You gotta admit,” Gantry said. “It seems a bit out of whack, yeah? The heart of a poet for an old mag?”

  Honeychurch shrugged and smiled. “Oh I don’t know. What else would you do with the undying heart of a Romantic?”

  “Sell it for a nice turn on Ebay for one.” Gantry rolled up the magazine, shoved it in his coat pocket and headed for the stairs. His mood clouded at each step. Maybe the old man was just a nutter after all.

  Ten minutes later, Gantry planted himself on a stool at the first pub he came across. It wasn’t until the second pint was poured that the gall in his gut from being taken had burned off. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, he reasoned. How much could one make selling a desiccated human heart online anyway? He slipped the rolled up magazine from his coat pocket and laid it on the bar before him.

  He couldn’t make any sense of it, this leftover piece of throwaway culture from a bygone era. He squinted at the date in the upper corner: 1943. The cover illustration showed a half-naked woman tied to a post and being threatened by a man in a robe and a skull mask. In the background, a square-jawed hero was rushing to the rescue. The title of the magazine was blocked in bold red letters above the illustration. A list of story titles pushed to the margin.

  He leafed through the yellowed pages. All the stories within had lurid pulp titles like Curse of the Blue Scorpion, Death on the Apache Trail and Ravished by a Monster. Each story was peppered with spot illustrations highlighting the derring-do of the heroes or titillating poses of the femme fatales. He stopped to skim through one story, his eye caught by the illustrations of a spooky house and another showing robed figures performing some sinister ritual. He flipped through the rest of the pages to the back cover. Nothing leaped out at him. As an artifact of a certain era and place, it was interesting but nothing more. He pushed it aside and reached for his pint.

  He’d been taken. That much was clear. Either that or old Honeychurch was barking mad.

  He thought back to the old man’s wife and her grey eyes. Something about Adele was magnetic and he had forced himself not to gawk at the woman. He didn’t understand the massive age difference but, given the woman’s abilities, he suspected something dodgy was going on. A certain glamour, the kind that masks the truth. Something hidden from plain sight.

  He opened the magazine again and turned to the story that caught his attention earlier. Another lurid title. “We have always lived in the Murder House” by H. G. Albee. He skimmed through the story again. A haunted house tale but nothing unusual stood out. The illustrations that accompanied it were conventional and workmanlike; a spooky house, a graveyard, a spider’s web.

  There was nothing that stood out in the piece, nothing to explain why it held his attention. The writing wasn’t bad, a tad more elegant than the usual purple prose one finds in such tales. He looked at the writer’s name again and read the little biography sketch printed in tiny type at the end of the story.

  H. G. Albee is a history professor, writer, journalist and expert in the occult. He resides in the pleasant city of Hamilton, Ontario.

  Gantry took another sip and contemplated the one detail that finally presented itself to him. It was a stretch, this tidbit about the author’s location, but it was all he had to go on.

  Hamilton.

  The Hammer.

  2

  Hamilton

  “WHAT IS IT?” Billie asked.

  “I just got a chill,” said Jen, folding her arms to stifle a shiver despite the unseasonably warm night. “Like someone just walked over my grave.”

  Unlikely, Billie thought. The
chill had had less to do with future grave-treading than it did with the dead soul that had just brushed past Jen. Being that close to the dead would chill one to the bone instantly. A fact Billie knew all too well.

  The ghost still hadn’t spotted Billie yet and she meant to keep it that way. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with the dead tonight. Or ever again, if she had any say in the matter.

  The dead woman had entered the party in Jen’s backyard, uninvited of course, through the gate that led to the alley. She moved under the patio lanterns strung over the backyard, drifting through the crowd like a lonely debutante unable to find a dance partner at a ball. Her long skirt and drab apron marked her as working class from a century ago. A washerwoman, Billie thought. Or maybe housekeeper of some kind. The dead woman searched the faces of the party-goers, as if looking for someone she knew but Billie knew that the spirit was looking for her. She kept stopping to adjust her ill-fitting bonnet. Even pinned as it was to her hair, the little headpiece slid backward because the back of the woman’s head was missing. A great gaping hole yawned there, foul with blood and brains and bone splinters.

  A suicide, Billie guessed. Via a gun in the mouth. Which was unusual for a woman. Guns were a man’s preferred exit method. Loud and violent. Most women opted for poison or a blade across a vein. Something less destructive than the blast of a gunshot.

  “Have you seen Adam?” Jen asked, rising up on her toes to scan over the crowd in her backyard.

  Jen’s boyfriend of four years. The party was theirs, one last barbecue before the weather turned too cold. The turnout was good, the backyard filled with friends of both hosts. Billie looked through the faces but shrugged. “He was here a minute ago.”

  “He should have put the ribs on the grill by now,” Jen fretted. “He’ll ruin everything if he leaves it too late.”

  “I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

  “But I had it all timed. I just wanted it to be perfect.”

  Billie tried not to roll her eyes. Her friend’s insistence on perfection in all things was annoying, to say the least. She wondered what Jen would say if she knew there was a dead woman wandering around her party with the back of her head blown off. “Nothing’s ever perfect, Jen.”