The Haunting of Emily Stone Read online

  “Time passes differently on the other side,” Emily explained. “At least, that's what the voice told me when I was younger. A few seconds over there seems like a day or more for us. All of this, from when I was a girl to today, has probably just seemed like a minute or two to the woman on the other side of the wall.”

  “It was really cold,” Lizzie added.

  “So this woman pulled you through,” Robert continued, making a note on his pad, “and then what?”

  “That's when she offered me the deal,” Emily replied.

  “What deal?”

  “When I went into the bedroom tonight,” she continued, “after I heard the noises, there were something in there. I heard the voice. She told me she didn't want Lizzie, that she just wanted to come through me to get back into this world. She said that if I agreed to stop resisting, she'd let Lizzie come back, that I could save Lizzie if I gave myself to her.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “Of course I agreed.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “And then the wall just seemed to...” She paused. “There was an explosion of light, and Lizzie came stumbling through. I told her to be good, to get out of there, and then a hand came through and grabbed my legs. It started pulling me into the hole, and then...”

  “And then?” he asked.

  “And then you showed up,” she added, with a hint of bitterness, “and saved me. You made me break the deal.”

  “Do you think I made the wrong decision?”

  “I think I was willing to accept the deal. I understand why you did it, but I was still willing to accept whatever she offered me, so long as she left Lizzie alone.”

  “What would have happened if I hadn't been there?” he asked.

  “I would have been trapped on the other side, on the wall, and the woman would have been in this world again.” She paused. “She said she just wanted to be here. She said her life was taken from her, she said she was too young and that it was unfair, and she said she wanted another chance to spend time in this world. She just wants to be a ghost, to see this place again. I don't think she's evil, I think she's just desperate.”

  “And a good climber, apparently,” he muttered, making another note.

  “Do you know about the wall?” Emily asked. “I mean, does this story make any sense to you at all?”

  “I've read about something similar once,” he replied. “There's an old book that mentions something that might be the wall you're talking about. Doug's trying to get a copy sent to us, but it's very hard to get its custodians to let it out of their sight. What we have to focus on right now is the fact that you still might not be safe.”

  “You have to let me complete the deal I made,” Emily replied. “It's the only way to stop it coming after us.”

  “That might not be true.”

  “It'll try again tonight,” she continued. “I have to, she said as much. She'll either take Lizzie and try to force her way through her soul, which she says is a harder route, or she'll take me, which she says is easier.” She paused for a moment, with tears in her eyes. “I'm willing to give up my life if it means my daughter is safe.”

  “Mummy,” Lizzie whispered, “what does that mean?”

  “It means everything's going to be okay,” she replied, leaning down and kissing the top of Lizzie's head before turning to Robert. “It can still reach us here, you know. The house has nothing to do with anything, it's just where we happened to be. Now we're here, and it'll still come. I know what I have to do.”

  “We can still work something out,” Robert told her, before hearing voices in the next room. Glancing at the door for a moment, he realized Douglas was talking to someone. “Wait right here,” he added as he got to his feet. “I'll be back in a moment.”

  Heading to the door, he slipped through into the next room and stopped as soon as he saw Jenna standing by the desk with Douglas.

  “Hey,” she said, turning to him with a faint but apprehensive smile. “Sounds like you've got a lot going on here.”

  ***

  “Of course I came back,” she continued a few minutes later, as they reached the cafeteria. “When Doug told me what had happened, I got on the first flight back.”

  “And Tim wasn't annoyed?”

  “His name's Tom,” she replied with a faint smile, “and... I'll make it up to him later.”

  “Sorry to drag you away from the skiing season,” he added, grabbing a sandwich from the counter.

  “Douglas Whale is the most level-headed, least hyperbolic man I've ever met in my life,” she replied. “When he called me and started describing the events of last night, I just knew I had to come and be part of whatever the hell you guys are doing. Believe me, last-minute plane tickets aren't cheap.”

  “I guess the gang's back together,” he muttered, heading to the cash desk.

  “Don't get ahead of yourself,” she replied. She kept quiet as they paid, preferring not to say anything more until they were out of anyone else's earshot. “You do realize that you're harboring a wanted criminal, don't you?” she continued. “Seriously, Rob, they mentioned it on the radio! How long do you think it's going to take before they put two and two together, and come after you? They're going to figure out what's happening eventually, and then you're going to be in trouble as well! You lied to the police!”

  “I had to.”

  “You always have to go to extremes, don't you?”

  “Did they mention the house?” he asked, sidestepping her question.

  “What about it?”

  “I assume the police have looked over the place. Did they say on the news whether there was any damage after everything that happened last night?”

  “No, but apparently the neighbors reported seeing two weird men with Emily,” she continued. “Does that ring any bells? Do you and Doug have any idea who the two weird men might have been?”

  “Well, Doug's a little strange,” he replied, “but -”

  “I'm serious!” Stepping in front of him to block his way, she paused for a moment. “I take it this means you're no longer a skeptic?”

  “It means I'm...” He paused. “You should have seen it last night, Jenna. It was right there in front of us, I even saw something in there, something reaching out from some kind of...” Another pause. “I was about to describe it as a portal to another world, but frankly that'd sound ridiculous. It was a doorway to some place, though, and from Lizzie's description, it sounds very much like the land of the dead. You've read the Myrkia, right?”

  “Parts of it. It's kind of long-winded.”

  “Right. Even I haven't quite read it all, I skipped some of the addenda. Whoever wrote it, they had a very dry style, but the basic information in that book, and the descriptions of the world inhabited by dead souls... It's remarkably similar to the things that Lizzie and Emily have been talking about.”

  “So what do we do now?” Jenna asked. “Doug seems to think that whatever's out there, it's still coming after Emily.”

  “I'm sure it is. We have to be ready for tonight.”

  “Then I'm in,” she replied.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I didn't fly all the way back just to make coffee,” she pointed out. “I always knew... Well, that's not true. I always hoped that one day you'd get interested in this stuff again.” She paused, as if there was something else she wanted to say. “Maybe -”

  “Jenna -”

  “We should get back to Doug and the others,” she continued, interrupting him. “And... Have you seen the news today? Have you read any of the reports about Emily and Lizzie going missing?”

  He shook his head. “To be honest, I've kind of been avoiding them.”

  “Then I guess there's another part of this mess that you don't know about. Rob, something else happened last night. It's probably just a coincidence, but I think at the very least you need to tell Emily.”

  ***

  “I don't know how to react,” Emily repl
ied, staring at the floor with a hint of shock in her eyes. “Does that make me a bad person?”

  “Not at all,” Robert told her. “We all grieve in our own way.”

  “It's not like she was a candidate for Mother of the Year,” she continued, “but she was still... What exactly happened, again?”

  “From what I read,” Jenna replied, “your mother died peacefully in her sleep at the nursing home.”

  “They always say that, though, don't they?” Emily pointed out, sniffing back tears. “They want to spare the families.” She paused, before turning to Robert. “You don't think it could be connected to all of this, do you?”

  “I don't see how,” he replied, “but we can't rule anything out at the moment. There's so much about this that we don't know.”

  “The voice, the woman, the... whatever she is... She didn't mention my mother at all.”

  “Then it probably was just a coincidence,” Jenna told her. “Had your mother been ill lately?”

  “Only for the past decade or so,” Emily muttered with a faint, sad smile. “She was always complaining about aches and pains, but she talked a lot less once the dementia had really taken root. I remember once, she...” Pausing, she turned to Robert again. “One time, right at the start, when her symptoms were first showing, I asked her how it felt. She said it was as if someone was clawing at her mind, scraping away her memories and thoughts, almost as if they were trying to hollow out her skull from the inside. I guess it's at least possible that -”

  “Let's not go down that avenue just yet,” Robert told her. “We need to focus on you and Lizzie.”

  “She wasn't always the old harpy you met,” Emily continued. “You know what people are like, they tend to embrace stereotypes and start acting up, but I swear she could be...” She paused again, thinking back to the better times with her mother. “There was more to her. A lot more. Believe it or not, she could be kind and she could be caring, and she definitely wasn't the worst mother in the world. Obviously she made some bad decisions, but...”

  “She was still your mother,” Jenna said after a moment, reaching out and putting a hand on Emily's shoulder. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

  “But there'll be time for this later,” Emily replied, taking a deep breath as if she was trying to steel herself. “I can think about her tomorrow. Today we need to focus on this thing that's going to be coming after Lizzie and me. It's not going to give up, is it?”

  “I doubt it,” Robert replied. “Not after all this time.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  He paused for a moment. “The only thing we can do. Somehow, we're going to end it. Tonight.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Fifty-nine years ago

  “Joyce! Stanley! Come on!”

  Joyce and her brother Stanley both turned at the same time, looking out from under the rain-soaked awning and watching as their father waved at them from the doorway of a cafe.

  “Move!” he shouted, before heading inside.

  “I hate Blackpool,” Stanley muttered dourly.

  “It's probably okay in summer,” Joyce replied, turning to him.

  “We can't afford to come in summer,” he pointed out. “We can only afford to come in November. I'm freezing.”

  “Me too.” Getting to her feet, she headed to the edge of the awning and watched as torrential rain pounded the small square in front of the cafe. For a moment, she felt as if she was in the most desolate place in the whole world, and when she looked up at the sky she found it hard to believe that the sun was still shining somewhere behind the thick clouds.

  “We're gonna get soaked by the time we're halfway,” Stanley muttered, stopping next to her.

  “Yep,” she replied.

  “And for what? A sandwich in some grubby cafe.”

  “It might be a nice sandwich.”

  “You're an idiot.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two bent, scuffed cigarettes. “I half-inched these from the car. Want one?”

  She opened her mouth to turn him down, but suddenly he slipped one of the cigarettes into her hand and pulled a box of matches from his pocket.

  “Stick it in your mouth,” he told her.

  Doing as she was told, she watched him light a match and hold it up to the cigarette. Once it was lit, he did the same to his.

  “Just breathe in slow,” he continued, “and -”

  Before he could finish, she started coughing, and in the process she dropped the cigarette into a puddle.

  “Idiot!” he hissed. “You've ruined it now!” As if to prove his point, he took a long, slow drag on his own and then breathed out.

  “That stinks,” she replied, waving the smoke away.

  “You'll get used to it. It's what grown-ups do.”

  She paused for a moment. “Got any more?”

  He smiled, before letting her try his. “Don't drop it,” he warned her.

  She took a puff and, this time, she managed not to cough.

  “I just want to hibernate,” he added. “Next winter, stick me in a box with some straw, and I'll sleep for six months. Like the neighbor's tortoise.”

  “When I grow up,” Joyce replied, watching rain hitting the puddles as she took another drag on the cigarette, “I'm not going to have holidays in Blackpool. I'm going to have holidays in the sun, somewhere really exotic and hot.”

  “How are you gonna afford that?”

  “I'm gonna get a job, stupid.”

  “You're a girl.”

  “I'm still gonna get a job, and when I have a family of my own, and a rich husband, we're gonna go somewhere really posh and expensive for our holidays.”

  “Whatever,” Stanley muttered, grabbing the cigarette from her. He took another drag, before pressing the tip against the wall to put it out and then slipping it back into his pocket. Ahead of them, the rain had intensified. “We'll have more later. You ready to do this?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” he replied. “Three. Two.” He paused. “One!”

  Together, they ran out into the rain.

  Twenty-four years ago

  “So you're saying we can't sue any of them?” Joyce snapped, sitting on the stairs as she spoke to the lawyer over the phone. “Fat lot of good you are, then.”

  Slamming the phone down, she lit another cigarette and took a long, slow drag. Looking over at the window, she realized it was raining again.

  “Mummy?”

  Turning, she saw that Emily was at the top of the stairs.

  “I thought I told you to go to bed?”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Never mind. No-one.”

  “You sounded angry.”

  “I'll sound angrier in a minute if you don't sod off to bed.” She took another drag. “Go on, scram. You've got school in the morning.”

  “But -”

  “Bed!” she shouted. “Now!”

  Once Emily had gone back to her room, Joyce hauled herself up and made her way to the front room. She grabbed a bottle of sherry and poured herself a glass, before flopping down on the sofa and taking a couple more drags on her cigarette. Leaning back, she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to empty her mind, while holding smoke in her mouth for as long as she could manage. Finally, slowly, she exhaled, and she opened her eyes to watch as the smoke rose up toward the ceiling.

  “Fuckers,” she muttered finally. “People with money... They won't give us the time of day.”

  Reaching over to the coffee table, she was about to check the Radio Times when she spotted the holiday brochures she'd picked up in town a few weeks earlier. Grabbing one, she flicked it open until she found the page with a turned-down corner. She'd gone through all the brochures carefully a few days earlier and finally she'd found a hotel in southern Majorca that looked absolutely perfect. Looking at the photos again, she saw the beautiful, large pool with its blue water glistening under the Mediterranean sun, and then she turned to the photos of a nearby beach, sho
wing happy families playing together.

  “One day, kid,” she whispered, flicking through a few more pages as she tried to imagine herself and Emily on a beach. “One bloody day.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Today

  “This is it,” Robert said as he set the huge, delicate book on the table. “The Myrkia.”

  “It smells,” Lizzie replied, taking a half-step back so she could watch from behind her mother.

  “It positively stinks,” Robert added with a smile. “This thing spends most of its time locked away in one of the oldest libraries in the country. Seriously, it's a miracle Doug managed to persuade them to send it to us. The damn thing's worth in excess of five million pounds.”

  “It's the only extant copy,” Douglas muttered, slipping his hands into a set of plastic gloves. “We believe around twenty were originally printed when it was published a few hundred years ago. Since then, the Myrkia has faded into obscurity, and most people would tell you that's a perfectly fine thing. As far as the academic world is concerned, the Myrkia is a curio at best, and a waste of time at worst.”

  “So why's it relevant to us?” Emily asked, eying the book with suspicion. “I don't understand.”

  “Almost everything you two have said to us,” Robert replied, “seems to reference events that are described in this book. The Myrkia was written by an anonymous Londoner who claimed to be receiving the text, word for word, from some kind of spirit that contacted him. He claimed that the spirit told him this was the true book of the dead, an account not only of what it's like to die, but also of the afterlife. Almost like a guidebook to some vast, lost world, the place souls end up when they die. Most people have dismissed the whole thing as a failed stunt.”

  “You won't find many people studying this thing,” Douglas continued. “It's far too obscure.”

  “The Myrkia describes the land of the dead in great detail,” Jenna explained. “Most accounts of such places tend to focus on a state of being, on the experience of being dead. The Myrkia is different. It catalogs a vast world with various different areas. There are rivers, mountains, valleys... even towns and cities. If you read this book, you get the impression that the world of the dead is just as rich and just as varied as the world of the living.”