Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

Nicholas waited till the boy had backed off the stairs, then scurried up, grabbed the boxes and shattered photograph, and ran to his car, shaking hard, not looking back.

A CAT scan — booked on the pretext of solving the now-vanished headaches — revealed his brain to be perhaps two per cent smaller than average, but otherwise normal.

But nothing was normal.

He was seeing the dead.

After his vision of the boy with the screwdriver, Nicholas drove home to his new and humbly tiny Greenford flat, took three Nytols and slid into a thick and dreamless sleep. The next day, he’d been able to dismiss the boy as a Fata Morgana brought on by the bash to the back of the skull, but the CAT scan results were a mixed blessing.

‘Seeing things?’ the radiologist asked. ‘What kind of things?’

The look on the woman’s face made Nicholas whip out the first lie he could think of, like an under-rehearsed magician pulling out a badly hidden bouquet. ‘Freckles. All over people. Dark, join-the-dot kinds of freckles. .’

She’d explained that there was no physical reason she could see for him to be having hallucinations.

Not ten minutes later, waiting for a bus on New Cavendish Street, he saw a portly middle-aged woman gag on a sandwich and fall to her knees. ‘You all right?’ he called, leaping to help her up. His hands passed through her and he landed painfully on all fours on the gum-sticky concrete, shaving skin off his palms. He scrambled up, aware that a small crowd of commuters had taken careful steps backwards, trying not to look at him. The choking woman rolled on her back, sausage fingers to her throat, heaving and turning blue until she fell still. . and vanished.

Nicholas found himself apologising to the crowd, and stalked away on shaking knees to find another bus stop.

He saw them every day after that. Curled broken in space, the invisible wrecks of crashed cars around their suspended bodies. Falling from buildings. Screaming silently as long gone flames turned their splitting skin red and black.

He was sure he was going mad.

And that feeling grew worse when he went back to work.

The ‘you-all-right?’ winks and ‘lovely service’ pats on the back lasted a day or two but felt an eternity, so he was glad to get in a van and leave London. But the gladness was short-lived.

His canny hunts led him into wet-throated cellars, dust-cauled attics, lean-boned garages, weed-choked caravans. Grey places, rich and still. Places that were disturbing to stand alone in when the light was fading from the damp sky outside. These gloomy rooms where he found his booty left such a harrowed feeling in him that he was never tempted to keep any of his finds for himself. Not one old Smithwick’s sign, not one dented Royal typewriter, Hignett cigarette card, Ekco bakelite wireless or Meerschaum pipe. Nothing. They were all strangely tainted. It was only after his fall down the steps and thump on the back of the head that Nicholas understood at last why those grim, quiet places where he found his dusty curios gave him the willies.

They were haunted.

Now, in those silent attics, garages, basements and back rooms, behind boarded windows or under musty eaves or paused on damp cellar stairs, he watched empty-eyed men throw ropes over rafters, thin farmers ease their yellow teeth over shotgun barrels, tight-jawed mothers stir rat poison into tea, young men slip hosing over car exhaust pipes. . over and over and over. To make the horrors worse, he was invariably accompanied by the home’s new owner or executor, who couldn’t see the ghost and chattered about the charming virtues of the world’s love affair with all things old, about the latest foot-and-mouth scare, about the weather, unaware that lonely death was being silently repeated right before their florid faces. And the ghosts, in return, took no notice of their living landlords, spouses, children, enemies. . yet they all watched Nicholas. Their dead eyes rolled to him. They knew he could see them.

Nicholas stuck with his job for three weeks. Then, shaking and sleepless, he quit.

He had felt perpetually like crying. The dead were everywhere. He had to tell someone.

In the end, he confided in just three people.

The first was his workmate Toby, a full-faced cabinet-maker who headed the team that prefabricated the stalls and bars of the Irish pubs that Nicholas would later line with books, rods, copper kettles and Box Brownies. Toby was a bit of a tree-hugger, often talking about how the wood under his hands felt alive, always reading his horoscope in the Daily Star . He seemed the sort of chap who might listen to a story about hauntings. Nicholas was most of the way through explaining his fall on the stairs, the attack by the dead boy with the screwdriver, his consequent calls to police and hunts through newspaper microfiche files to discover that in 1988 a Keith Yerwood had stabbed his girlfriend, Veronica Roy, nearly to death on the stairs of her flat — my flat! — when he noticed the expression on Toby’s face. It had been hard for Nicholas to place; he’d never seen anyone regard him that way before: it looked a little like confusion, a bit like scepticism, somewhat like anxiety. . and yet it was something completely different, something solid and primal. Then he placed it. It was fear. Toby was afraid of him. The chat ended there. Very soon after, Toby began avoiding him on the shop floor and stopped returning his calls.

Nicholas finally found the courage to make an appointment to see a psychologist. He told the bird-fingered, beak-nosed doctor about Cate’s death, about the headaches, the fall on the stairs and the haunted places. She nodded, took notes. He told her that other people thought he was a bit crazy, but he wasn’t. From the small amount of research he’d done, the ghosts he saw correlated with records of deaths. The ghosts were real .

She nodded some more, and looked up from her notes. ‘Do you think you’re unwell?’

The question irritated him.

‘I’m seeing the dead. It certainly doesn’t feel fucking healthy.’

She nodded again and propped her head on an avian fist.

‘Do you miss your wife?’

Nicholas hesitated. Was that a trick question? ‘Yes.’

She pursed her thin lips. ‘And do you think you could be inventing these “ghosts” in the hope that you might, at least for yourself, bring your wife back?’

The question struck like a cricket bat.

He’d been seeing strangers’ ghosts for nearly a month, but had never thought about the possibility of seeing Cate again.

He hurried home to Greenford, heart racing, and grabbed the spare key for the as yet unsold Ealing flat.

The sun had dropped below the city’s grey skyline when he hurried past the ‘For Sale’ sign around to the back of the complex (he studiously avoided the front stairs) and up the rear stairwell to their little place. The flat was clean and empty as a robbed tomb. His heart was throbbing in his chest so hard that his fingers shook. He strode through the echoing kitchen, past the still lounge room, to the bathroom. It was clean now — the long line through the dust where Cate’s heel had slid as her neck swung down on its fatal parabola to the bath edge was long gone, the plaster dust all swept away. The shower curtain that had popped from the rail as she’d fruitlessly grabbed to save herself had been replaced. The ceiling remained unpainted.

And she was there.

Straining high on an invisible ladder.

‘Cate?’

She turned at the sound of his voice. Put one foot down to a step in the air, another. . then one foot slipped and kicked out from under her. One plaster-dusted hand struck out, grabbing at empty space. The other closed around a shower curtain that wouldn’t hold her. She fell. Her mouth opened in a small ‘O’ of surprise. One heel hit the floor, and slid out — much as his own must have done finding the Boots bag — and she arced backwards. Nicholas dived to catch her, and his fingers smacked painfully into the tiles. Right under his face, her neck struck the hard, tooth-white edge of the bath and her hair tossed backwards. The goggles wrenched off. And her eyes stared up at nothing, dusting white under a phantom mist of powder. Her chest deflated slowly and didn’t rise again.