Author Archives: Rose Garnett

The Ghost Formerly Known As….

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I sat with the crime-scene photographs and the dead star of the show swaying above them leaching most of the light from my desk lamp and the warmth from the room. The ghost was a hulking, tattered thing with little memory of the person it had been in life and driven more than a little mad by its brutal exit. The taint of mildew, mould and rot saturated the air, as though I was standing in the middle of an old grave. As long as it didn’t have my name on it, I wasn’t too concerned.

Yet.

I took off the dark glasses and studied it with more interest. There was a partial notion of a face: a snub nose so extreme it could have graced a shrunken head, and a sliding slant of facial feature that only just fell this side of human. This was what happened to the dead. Over time they forgot the exact size and shape of the flesh over-coats they had worn in life. Finally they lost all resemblance to the people they had been, spiritually decomposing in ironic homage to the way of the flesh. At the end they were nothing more than a plume of dirty smoke or patch of cold that you might feel as a shiver down your spine if you walked through it, but nothing more. The emotions were always last to go, stubbornly clinging on like dim-witted hangers-on after the main attraction had upped sticks and gotten the hell out of Dodge.

But some ghosts had a compelling reason to hang on delaying the decay and I was looking at a prime example. In life, it had been a woman called Amy, murdered in one of the most baffling unsolved cases I’d ever come across. From the evidence the police did manage to find, there was no avoiding the conclusion that death had been a release. The marks on the bones showed that flesh had been cut raising the grim possibility it had been done while she was still alive. The bindings found with the pitiful remains, told a dismal tale of captivity for at least a few days, maybe a week. A rusty hook and three skewers with traces of old blood had been found in her lonely cellar grave leading police to the conclusion Amy had been tortured until they had ground her down into so much meat. These weren’t empty guesses: the police had seen this type of murder before, not often, but enough know a thing or two about this type of predator and what they got off on.

So no, it had not been hard to work out why the ghost formerly known as Amy had decided to stick around.

The question was, what was it going to do now?

On the face of it you’d think there was nothing to fear from what was after all only a collection of spectral filaments. And nine times out of ten you’d be right. But the unadulterated rage that held this spectre together made it the exception that proved the rule. The fact that I had summoned it by using the photographs and some of Amy’s old clothes supplied by her grieving family didn’t protect me.

“Amy,” I murmured, “listen to me.”

The ghost howled, more sense than sound of an emotion so intense my vision began to spot, colours flashing at the periphery, and I could feel the first stirrings of a monster migraine. It lowered its partially composed face to mine, the intense cold raising the hackles on the back of my neck, and began to swirl around the chair I sat in, faster, faster, creating a thick, choking blanket making it impossible to breathe without extreme effort.

“Amy,” I whispered, traitorous tongue unable to shape the clotted air into meaningful sound. “Ben and Sarah-”

But apparently the ghost understood, because it keened, a high despairing sound sharp enough to shatter the glass of whisky on my desk, soaking my papers and lobbing an eye watering stench of ethanol into the room for good measure. But that must have distracted it somehow because the pressure eased slightly and my breathing adjusted itself to the restricted supply of air.

“Amy,” I said deliberately using its name in life as much as possible, “Jerry’s asked me to find and kill the people who did this to you. I said I would.”

Promises, the very words that contain them, have power and no one knows that better than the dead. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when it let me go. What I wasn’t prepared for was force of it and I almost fell off the chair, choking. As I righted myself and my lungs became reacquainted with an unrestricted oxygen supply, it calmly took up its original position hanging like a ragged curtain above the photographs as though nothing had happened.

Now all I had to do was come up with the goods.

What Deacon Brodie Did Next

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Of course every Edinburgher worth his or her salt knew that old story. He had been a councillor and skilled cabinet maker by day and a gambler and rotten thief by night. The cabinet maker got invited into his victims’ homes where he took wax impressions of their keys, and the thief sneaked back while they were sleeping and robbed them blind. He led this double life until caught and hung on a gibbet ironically designed by his own fair hand.

Or so legend would have it.

But rumours persisted that he did not really die on the gallows and was instead spirited away to another life in the Americas.

The lesson to me was clear: don’t spend your time designing gibbets. If you do, you’d better have a rope-proof escape plan.

Dead Men Hunting

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Despite the terrorist toxic gas story not everyone had left Dodge as I discovered walking down Lothian Road. It was a lonely trek under a steely sky, head bent against the rain squall driving into my face and chased by a nipping wind fresh from the icy waters of the North Sea.

I needed to clear my head and now my sanctuary had been invaded, the best place to do that was to take mind and body both for a walk and see where it took me. I turned left at Shandwick Place into the city’s West End, normally a thrumming hub, but now a water sodden, wind blown waste land.

The darkened windows of the Art Deco building that had housed Fraser’s Department Store stared onto the street like the empty eye sockets of a long dead giant. A particularly vicious tug of the wind almost cost me my hat and by the time I had things under control the welcome orange glow of lights bursting out of the crepuscular gloom from a Starbucks at the corner of Palmerston Place had me in their tractor beam. Hurrying towards it I found to my utter amazement that it was indeed open for business.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, maybe no matter what happens, nuclear war, bubonic plague, return of the living dead, there will always be a Starbucks, staffed and ready to serve. It was housed in an imposing building, a bank in a former life with high vaulted ceilings, now reduced to eking a living trying to pretend it was someone’s living room where strangers came to drink coffee. Two rooms were connected by stairs with a long counter near the door, behind which a skinny young man with lank blond hair did the necessary.

I sat in the furthest away room and sipped my drink, glaring unseeingly at the chocolate cake I’d also bought. There was even a smattering of customers determined to pretend that it was just another day in the land of the living. All of them young, bright eyed and feverish, creating the kind of vibe that I had always imagined would have been around during the war but had never thought I’d get to experience first hand.

I took the creased paper out of my wallet and dialled the number it contained on my mobile. No answer and there was no way in hell I was leaving a message, because the only thing I could think of was a long, profane and detailed list of what she could do to herself and with what.

I wondered how many people had stayed in Edinburgh and why. The lunatic stay-at-homes in the room I was in consisted of a huddle of young women at the table next to mine. They were pouring what looked suspiciously like whisky into their coffee cups and giggling with the manic intensity of people who clearly believed, like REM, that it really was the end of the world as we knew it. Except feeling fine wasn’t even on the menu.

Sad, messed up, crazy, maybe, but fine was for lunatics and suicides.

The rain was a blurry sheet outside, life beyond the confines of the window reduced to a smear of grey and sepia. A dark shape slid by blotting out what meagre light the day was willing to offer. The dead were becoming more substantial by the day and this darkness was a pack of them out on the hunt.

I felt the heft of their attention as surely as if it had been a rope tightened around my neck. The barbed hooks of their desires and wants trailed gently over my thoughts searching for a hold, an anchor, a breach in my defences to latch onto. I kept my mind a careful blank because my wants weren’t so different from theirs and I needed the additional temptation like a hole in the head.

The darkness slid by a second time like a crocodile circling an injured baby antelope that had fallen into the river. The girls fell silent, whisky consumption halted as they scented danger. What had these particular antelopes seen in last few days?

I was about to find out what the lives of ordinary folk had come down to on the first Boxing Day after the dead had risen in Auld Reekie.

The Meadows By Gaslight

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There it was again. A soft footfall behind me somewhere out there in the darkness. I whipped round seeing nothing but the sodium glow of arching streetlights on the walkways that criss-crossed the grass of the Meadows. Another gust of wind tore through leafless trees like teasing whispers in a classroom where the only one who didn’t know what was going on was me.

A scrape of claws on stone as though something was gathering itself for flight and a trickling growl the only warning in the split second before it struck me square in the back taking me down, down, down onto concrete and a spreading pool of blood.

The Last Drop

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A crowd of thousands appeared from nowhere and I was trapped in the middle of a milling, shrieking mob. Buffeted this way and that under louring, rain soaked skies and choking on mud and worse, I began to feel oddly disconnected, as though this was happening to someone else.

Or at least I did, right up until the moment the roaring, filthy throng surged unexpectedly forward, carrying me along for the ride. I prayed to the god unlucky enough to rule over such rabble that it wasn’t a one-way ticket.

As though in answer, the forward momentum came to an abrupt halt and a deep throated baying began. There was no mistaking that sound: something or someone was going to die.

Even had I been deaf the source of such collective joy was blindingly obvious as it loomed above the heads of the crowd a mere hundred yards in front of me. But it still took me a moment to recognise it for what it was: gibbet and hangman’s noose perched jauntily on top of a raised, wooden platform.

Some lucky soul was heading for the short drop with the sudden stop.

The stark, clean lines of the gibbet made gothic poetry against a darkened sky.

Until it occurred to me that it might be meant for me…

The Good Old Days

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Time fled, but its passage brought no progress.

The shacks were now impossibly high, cinched in by the stone girdle that doubled as the city wall. Without warning, I was snatched into the air by an irresistible force. A brief panicked moment of vertigo before falling down, down and downwards into the infarcted heart of the city.

I had time only for a brief impression of towering tenements leaching the light from the sky before being dumped with great force into a sea of mud, driving the breathe from my body. I thrashed around in the stuff for what seemed like an age, trying to propel myself upright while clawing the worst of it out of my eyes and nose, finally managing to spit a great gobbet of it back where it belonged.

Except it wasn’t mud.

The unmistakable and overpowering smell of excrement aborted that particular delusion in the time it took to take in a lungful. As I retched uselessly on an empty stomach, an old picture I’d seen somewhere came to mind.

But no mere picture could have prepared me for the grim reality: I was now in what had been the old Lawnmarket.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. It was now raining, a grey, incontinent affair that stalked me like a jealous lover as I tried and failed to wade through the filth underfoot. Each mis-step threatened to suck the boots from my feet and the steel from my soul as my world narrowed to the Armageddon that was one foot in front of the other.

In The Beginning

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Eventually I came to an oddly familiar crag precariously perched on a series of hills above an estuary. A dark sky boiled above oily waves as they dashed themselves on the rocks beneath as though urging them on in their suicidal ambitions.

I had never seen such a bleak, dispiriting place.

Who could live here and more importantly, why?

The roiling clouds cleared just enough for me to make out signs of what passed for human habitation: a series of shambling, dilapidated shacks that looked like the track of some contagion upon diseased skin.

Now I knew what I was looking at and wished to the god I didn’t believe that I had been left in ignorance.

Edinburgh, mon amour.

Hell’s Bells

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” Merry Christmas Rose.”

I couldn’t believe midnight had struck and here I was spending Christmas with a half man, half beast. And not in a good way. What the hell had happened to my life that this was where I’d ended up?

But Hell was definitely not going to mend me and one of these days I was going to have to come to terms with that. But for now I slipped between clean cotton sheets and into a dreamless sleep that not even the revenants at the window could keep me from.

The Grass Is Always Meaner

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The white light of dawn did not flatter Greyfriars Cemetery. Not that this discouraged the ill advised idiots that flocked here in their droves with no idea about what they were messing with, or what the place was really for. As for me, it had always been my dearest ambition not to be found dead here.

Around four hundred years ago, the cemetery had moonlighted briefly as an open air prison for over a thousand people, their suffering leaving an indelible stain, like smoke damage in a diseased lung. It had been this little wheeze that had attracted such dark energies to the place, rather than its day job as a bone-yard. Now it pulsed with a febrile heat, as though something was about to hatch and I knew I was running out of time.

The great vaults were ornately carved: grinning skulls and coy angels coupled together in a sexless dance of death and resurrection; obsessively carved by the living in the hope of making sense of their own one way ticket.

Many of them were so old that the stone itself was crumbling as though in wry tribute to the way of all flesh. Theses cages of stone and iron were of course only for those rich enough to afford such pointless ostentation, constructed to keep the corpses safe from the attentions of the body-snatchers, or Resurrection Men as they were ironically known. They failed of course.

The grass on the other hand looked healthy and vigorous, fed on the superior nutrients leached from the great and the good. At least they had finally given something back to the community.

Flesh Fish

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I sat in the car because, simply, there was nowhere else to go.

To the west, the darkening stain of an oncoming storm gradually cast a caul over the deserted street where I was parked and the sensation of being smothered was very nearly overwhelming. Yet there was still a shimmering quality to the air, as though trying to contain something that was intent on getting out.

I knew the feeling.

To my left was a fish shop which, although it displayed the closed sign, still had meat of indeterminate origin in the window. Great, grey eels were stacked on one side next to what looked like a small pieces of shark meat. Dun coloured fillets rubbed innards with something that had a huge head and lots of small, sharp teeth reminding me of an old school-mate from primary school.

A blurred burst of purple and red in the interior of the shop made me look again. The darkened interior stared blankly back at me and the hairs began to rise on the back of my neck because in that brief monent I had seen a familiar hulking shape: a creature I knew had never been burdened with the vulgarity of a pulse and the flesh over-coat that contained it.

Two doors down in the window above the grocer’s, the corner of a net curtain twitched as though hastily dropped by whatever was behind it. I was trapped in the eye of the storm, knowing that something irrevocable was just about come crashing down, something from which neither I nor this benighted village was ever going to escape.

I did what I normally did when faced with the end of the world, the end of humanity, the end of the end: I pulled out my hip flask and drained it dry.