Walking With Ghosts (A short story) Read online

  Kett suddenly pushed himself forward. “Wait. Twice?”

  “Yes, Sir. The second time right after I though Joe had died, for the first time.”

  “Christ, Leigh. If you’re right, that means this ain’t done yet. Something else is going to happen today...”

  ****

  Josie surfaced from Kett’s stifling office near nine in the morning. Christ, her shift was technically only half way through, and it had already changed her life. Technically, because Kett had just ordered her to take a few days off, to come back fresh after Joe’s funeral.

  It was the right thing, and something she needed to do.

  The squad room was running as competently as ever, but with a subdued air. There were no good-humoured cracks, no harmless, bawdy comments. Dust motes spun listlessly through heavy air drained of brightness and laughter, and now coloured dull grey instead of red and gold.

  Colleagues caught her eye, a few nodded. She made her way to her desk and sat down heavily.

  Sunday morning, nine-o-clock. The one person who could lift her spirits would still be in bed, dreaming a bunch of lovely, untainted dreams. No matter. Josie needed her anchor, her innocent muse. She tapped speed-dial one and waited with her head down.

  “Mum?” The voice was stifled with sleep.

  “Hi, darling.” Josie could barely speak.

  There was a rustle of covers and pyjamas and toys and, most likely, a torch. “Mum?”

  Emily’s youthful concern shook Josie into lucidity. “Just thought I’d let you know, Em, I’ll be home early today. Soon.”

  Her six-year-old practically squealed, in the way of children going from lethargy to fully alert at the speed of sound. “Now?”

  “Soon, darling, soon. Tell Simon to make blueberry waffles for ten.” She needed them.

  More squeals and a sudden hang up, and Josie found her lips had curled up into a smile. She placed the phone gently back into its cradle, lost in thoughts of Emily and Joe and the unpredictability of life when a large shadow fell across her desk.

  “Leigh.”

  It was Paul Kett and he was drip-white, as if he’d spent the last night walking with ghosts.

  Josie felt a dreadful sense of foreboding. . .

  . . .and remembered Joe’s words: she only screams when something terrible is going to happen . .

  . . . as Kett spoke words no sane person should ever have to hear.

  “A six-year-old girl was just abducted from Coney Street. It’s him, Leigh. He just took another kid from under our Goddamn noses.”

  PART 3

  The girl’s name was Kayleigh Bryant. She was six. Emily’s age. Before she realised what she was doing, Josie was already dipping a toe into those dreadful waters, wondering, suffocating, delving deeper and deeper, until she no longer had to wonder, and deliberately dragged herself back to reality before fear for her safe Emily debilitated her.

  “I’m staying,” she said to Kett’s back. “I can’t go home.”

  “You’re no good now, Leigh.”

  “I will be, Sir. My. . .my daughter’s six.” She met his eyes as he spun around. “I can do this. I want to.”

  “Fine. Listen!” His calm, raised voice quieted the station. “CID will be here soon. This little girl must be found. That’s all.”

  Josie felt a bloom of respect. With that economical sentence Paul Kett had just delivered a blunt order, in disguise, to everyone to bypass their rivalries and get their jobs done fast. He’d reminded them of the stakes and delivered it all with a modicum of respect.

  He gave her one more moment. “Joe will have to wait a while, Leigh. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  ****

  The centre of York on a Sunday afternoon bore no relation to the York where Joe Morris met his snarling death. Tourists and locals thronged the streets in a mismatched muddle of the purposeful and the pointless. Josie fought her way through the masses to get to the latest crime scene, this one on Low Petergate, just past a French Cafe. She was a spare on this, and thus forced to go it alone. Her quick calls to Emily and Simon were the polar opposites- to the first all apologetic and angry, to the second all fury and understated desperation.

  Cops were everywhere. Josie knew about a third of them, the rest regarded her appearance with everything from mild disinterest to outright suspicion. She quickly got among them, deciding the best foot forward was the one that joined the fray.

  She found herself on the edge of a group of policeman, and at their centre stood the distraught parents.

  Josie came to a thundering stop, a tangle of emotions suddenly confusing her feet. The mother was hysterical, hanging on both to her husband and a big policeman. A WPC was trying to coax her away from the scene and, most likely, to a waiting ambulance. The father was just standing there, shell-shocked, as if all the worlds and dreams he’d ever built has come smashing down around him.

  The expression on both their faces broke Josie’s heart. It screamed the single word: please! The fear they radiated was a manifestation of the unspoken fear every parent in every corner of the world would always secretly harbour.

  Please find our daughter. . .please bring her back to us.

  Little Kayleigh Bryant, their daughter, was a black-haired six-year-old with a scrunched up nose and a happy-go-lucky nature. She’d been hiding from her dad in a clothes’ shop when the man had grabbed her. She’d been wearing a royal-blue dress with frills and pictures of Princesses on the front and had been carrying her little red blanket, the comforter that never left her side.

  Josie had to look away from the distraught parents. She found herself face to face with another new recruit, Stuart Anders, a tall gangly youth with a face like a horse, and teeth to match. “Jesus, Josie,” he said under his breath, “there’s a hundred cops here, it seems, with nothing to do.”

  “What happened? Do we even know which way he took her?”

  Anders nodded to a mobile van blocking half the street. “They’re checking surveillance right now. Trouble is,” he made a motion with his head that included all the cops and the Sunday shopping crowd. “easy to get lost.”

  Josie checked her watch. Noon. “That’s two hours already,” she said. “Christ, it all seems so slow when you want stuff to happen.”

  Anders pointed as a second van’s doors were flung wide and six cops jumped out, followed by some civilians. The cops were waving A4 sheets as if in triumph.

  Josie knew what that meant.

  “Eye-witness sketch,” Anders now looked a bit brighter. In such depression even the merest token is inspirational.

  Josie waited until her turn came for the handout. The composite was grainy, showing a blonde-haired man with bushy eyebrows, long straggly hair and a hook nose. Dark eyes. But probably his most outstanding feature was his spade-like chin. He’d been wearing a blue jacket and jeans, and carrying a rucksack.

  “Well,” Anders said. “He can’t shave that off.”

  She glanced away from Anders then and looked both ways along the street. She stopped when, at the limit of her eye-line, she thought she saw something glimmer from the roof of a building.

  “What’s. . .?“

  Anders swung round. “Eh?”

  Josie clammed up, only too aware of all that had happened since the start of her shift. “Nothing,” she said, and she drifted slowly away from the new constable. After a minute she mingled with the flow of pedestrians without every taking her eyes away from the spot where she had seen the glimmer.

  She now found herself back at the corner of Stonegate, beside the tiny Starbucks. The staff inside were beavering away, but the long queue had begun to snake out the door. To Josie’s right was a short street that led to York Minster. When she looked up at the place her mind had marked she saw nothing. Just an old roof.

  And tiles. Cast stonework. Dirty iron guttering.

  Damn. Her imagination was firing on all the wrong cylinders. She was about to look away when she saw something she couldn’t believe. It
was there, before her eyes, but she couldn’t process it.

  There was something else on the roof. An old stone gargoyle. There were a lot of these scattered around the roofs of York for one reason or another, a veritable chain of the grotesque. This one was pocked and stained and ugly, but there was a shadow writhing around its head like a demonic halo.

  Josie stared hard.

  And when she did so she heard the whispering. A sibilant murmur, like a woman who whispers into the ear of her lover late, late at night. She blinked and shook her head, but the noise continued, never above an undertone, but constant, unfaltering. It was as if the gargoyle was talking to her, a demon bending the ear of a willing supplicant.

  The whisper shot off like a leaf caught by a harsh gust of wind. Josie eyes were drawn in that direction and fixed upon a second glimmering, another knot of darkness that all but beckoned her with long, twisted fingers.

  She moved immediately, before the phenomenon could disappear. In a moment she was staring up at a second gargoyle, this one in the shape of winged serpent with long, jagged teeth. The whispering roiled around her head and a thought hit her. Did these ancient gargoyles have some kind of sentience? Perhaps they listened, silent statues surveying humanity and all its magnificent quirks.

  Perhaps, in the bright light of day, the ghosts still chattered and lurked and watched, biding their time, awaiting their moment.

  Now the whisper flew off again. Josie followed it past the St Michael Le Belfry church and close to the Minster. The Gothic cathedral now reared up in all its majesty, overseeing all, and drawing every eye - even locals - as they walked by. The Minster was graced with many a gargoyle, some old and some new, and Josie saw two more glimmerings before she found herself in another inner courtyard similar to the one Joe and she encountered the previous night. So far the whisperings had moved her from light and noise into darkness and solitude despite the Sunday frenzy that surrounded her.

  She exited the courtyard, her mind still buzzing, and found herself facing the Treasurer’s House, the site of the best known ghost story in one of the best known ghost story cities in the world.

  The Legionnaires.

  Josie turned away, but felt her glance drawn back there. Later, the voices promised her.

  She turned away again, and came face to face with Kayleigh Bryant’s abductor.

  ****

  He was walking briskly around the corner. She made eye contact with him, saw the immense shovel chin. His face fell, his nose flared and he started to run like a hunted dog. Josie didn’t hesitate for a second but gave chase whilst fumbling for her radio, baton, and Taser all at the same time.

  “Stop!” Oh, for the intervention of a heroic bystander. That’s all it would take; all it would take to help save a little girl’s life and catch a grave-digging monster.

  The man dropped a carrier bag. Josie noted snacks and Pepsi and fruit tumbling out along the tarmac, all items that would help to keep a young victim quiet. She pounded the pavement, screaming into her radio, determined to keep this bastard in sight even if her heart burst.

  Shop facades flew by in a blur. Pedestrians stood and stared. One old guy looked like he might consider tackling the fleeing man, but when he moved in closer the look on the old man’s face suddenly turned to abject fear. Josie sped past him a second later, getting closer.

  They ran under the castle walls at Monkgate Bar. A car slewed in front of Josie, narrowly missing her, but she vaulted its bonnet and hit the ground faster than ever. Her quarry turned a sharp corner and was momentarily lost from sight, but then she saw flashes of his clothing as he climbed a nearby stone staircase.

  Damn, the bastard was heading for the castle walls. The medieval walls almost completely encircled York, and still spanned the entry gates into the city- called bars. Josie raced up the time-worn steps in pursuit.

  “Stop!” She knew he wouldn’t. He was fast, already a good thirty feet in front of her, but he was coming up to a group of tourists. Josie steeled herself and pounded on. Her radio crackled at her belt but she couldn’t lose focus by answering it.

  “Look out!” she cried just as he ran into the tourists, anything to cause a distraction. An old woman fell against the castle walls, banging her head. A young couple toppled off the inside ledge and went rolling onto the soft grass a few feet below.

  Josie heard sirens behind her, splitting the day in half. Yes!

  The man must have heard them too, for he turned around as if surveying his options. In that moment, Josie redoubled her efforts and came to within six feet of him. Then, unbelievably, he clambered atop the castle walls themselves. Josie dived for his legs, sure he would never jump. The drop on the other side had to be thirty feet or more.

  Her outstretched fingers brushed his cement-stained trainers as he leapt into space. Josie’s headlong dive sent her crashing into the stone wall, grazing her face and ripping a nasty cut above her right eye. She was up in a second though, and clambering atop the walls herself.

  She saw him far below, rolling as he landed, rolling, rolling down the rest of the hill.

  Miraculously unhurt. If there was a God, she thought, this bastard should have just broken everything except his neck.

  Josie looked at the hand that had brushed his clothing. It was covered in some kind of orange residue. She ignored it and eyed the drop. Her target scrambled and crawled and dragged himself to his feet and shot off without even a glance back. He was heading for the huddle of private and student buildings opposite. In there they would lose him.

  Josie thought of Emily and hesitated, but riding on the back of that came an image of little Kayleigh Bryant, dressing that morning in her frilly blue dress, the one she loved with the Princesses on it, and of how she might now be sobbing and clutching that red comforter blanket.

  Josie leapt into space. The drop was far worse than she had imagined. The green grass rushed up at her, but never seemed to get there. She willed it up faster, heart racing, braced for the impact. When it came, Josie bent her legs and rolled. As she turned over a slice of sharp pain travelled from her right ankle to her knee. She cried out, came to a stop, and paused for a moment, panting breathlessly.

  On her knees, she peered from under a bedraggled fringe. Kayleigh Bryant’s abductor had scuttled heedlessly across the road and was even now vaulting a low wall into someone’s backyard. Josie could see the flashing blue lights coming around the corner; she could see the policemen inside the cars, craning their necks in search of the assailant. They were close, very close.

  Close. . .but too late.

  PART 4

  The light began to fade, the western skies quickly becoming a patchwork curtain of purple and orange and gold. The tone inside the makeshift HQ had grown decidedly more sombre these last few hours. Josie’s sighting and chase had given the whole team a morale boost, but any further sightings had dampened their spirits like a downpour snuffs out a burning candle.

  Josie’s ankle had been strapped. Now she could move, with difficulty, but she could walk, and that’s all she needed. Her shift had technically ended hours ago, but there was no way she was going home. No way anyone was going home.

  This thing would end on their shift, no matter when that ending would be.

  She hobbled out and into the darkening day. On instinct she glanced up at the nearby roofs, wondering.

  The gargoyles gazed back impassively at her, their stony faces full of hate and accusation.

  But she’d tried, dammit. She felt her own need to give something back weighing like a dead man’s noose around her shoulders. Luck and happenstance had bested her, not lack of will or desire or a poor effort.

  She felt the night enshroud her. Darkness weaved its spell and began to alter the perceptions in her brain. Instead of thinking like a cop, like an investigator, she studied the places where shadow met shadow, letting her vision pour into the inky blackness.

  Were the omnipresent ghosts chattering at her now, leading her on?

 
With nothing left to lose Josie walked wilfully into their embrace. Her gaze strayed upwards again, but if there was a darkness above the gargoyles’ heads tonight it was lost in shadow.

  But there was no mistaking the red glints in their eyes.

  Again, they led her on. Along Low Petergate. Each step made the dread churn in her stomach. Each step invited the blackness to her even more until she felt as if light had never existed in this world. There was a feeling in the air, a foreboding, that something unspeakable was happening tonight, and Josie felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising again.

  At Goodramgate she was guided to her left, past the old White Swan pub. Noise and merriment drifted from the open doors and windows, but failed to penetrate Josie’s ethereal cocoon. Goodramgate opened out at the end into a normally busy intersection. But tonight, perhaps it was just because it was Sunday, or maybe because everyone had heard the horrific news about Kayleigh Bryant, the streets were deserted. Even the nearby Italian and Indian restaurants were subdued and sparsely populated.

  Josie looked ahead and felt a prickle of fear as a thin, ethereal mist began to drift across the floor. The back of the Minster was to her left, College Street ahead. Her eyes were drawn to the one place they shied away from, the one place she instinctively knew she was being manoeuvred towards.

  The Treasurer’s House.

  The site of York’s biggest and scariest ghost story. This was where the Legionnaires walked.

  Josie stopped and took a breath. She rubbed her nose and face as if trying to make sure she was still real. And then she heard a horn, desolate in the distance, like the last, dying horn sounded on the last blood-soaked battlefield.

  A pale light glimmered across the buildings ahead. The fog drifted across it in patchwork glimmers of white and grey. Somewhere an old gate groaned as it swung back and forth on rusted hinges. Josie stared, her whole body clenched in shock as the entire wall in front of her started to flicker and fade away. What appeared was a huge carthorse, ridden by a tired-looking Roman soldier. The horse pounded the ground with great hooves, but silence overwhelmed everything, as if the night had been robbed of its voice.