“Right here,” I said, pointing at a massive oak tree bowed down with snow like an old giant that had frozen to death. Between the dark and the driving storm, visibility was just down to a few feet and I’d almost missed the turn off.

“The house is about a mile down this road.”

“Christ Rose, give me some notice.”

“You try noticing anything from the back seat at night in a snow storm. See that light up there? That’s Vic and Michael’s place.”

“What, up that bastard hill? We’ll never get the car up there.”

He was right as it turned out, we couldn’t. The car kept sliding and eventually slid into a bank of soft snow from where it couldn’t be moved. Swearing, Rufus forced the car door open and had to do the same for mine. He stood with difficulty, snow encasing his legs up to mid-thigh and claiming the rest of him under a clotted blanket of ice crystals.

“Can’t you call your friends to come get us?” he shouted above the noise of the wind. “The weather’s too bad and I won’t be able to lug you all that way.”

“They weren’t in when I called. I’ll give it a another go,” I said, dialling.

“What?”

I suppressed a smile.

“You made me drive all this way to the middle of nowhere, for fu-”

“We’re just outside Perth,”I reminded him primly. “It’s hardly the middle of nowhere. Oh hi, Vic. It’s me. Everything sweet? Sorry to hear that. Listen, we’ve got a bit of a problem. We’re at the bottom of the hill, cars in a snow drift and I’m not in great shape. Can you come get us?”

“Well? Are they coming?”

“They said they’re busy and could we come back tomorrow. I’m kidding,” I said as he punched the roof of the car. “Listen be cool with Vic and Michael. Try not to piss them off.”

A dark shape materialised behind him, an arm closed around his throat pulling him backwards. He yelped something incomprehensible and then started choking as the arm was pulled tighter. A high laugh rang out and then something thumped the window beside me as a smeared bestial face pressed itself against the glass, nose flattened, teeth bared.

“Hi guys,” I said. “That was quick. Say hello to Rufus.”

Esther may have looked like your kindly neighbourhood grand-mother but she was the high priestess of a feared fringe cult and no one in their wrong mind, never mind their right, crossed her.

On the plus side, you always knew where you were with Esther. Tyson must indeed have been new. I never knew why she stooped to working in the club as their security, but then she most likely had reasons of her own. She always did. She probably didn’t get my problem with Lionel Ritchie so we were even.

“Rose,” she called after me as I walked down the corridor to the bar.

I turned.

“After tonight please don’t come here again. It wouldn’t be…wise.”

She stared after me as I walked down the stairs, the force of which I could feel as if it were a gun pressed into the middle of my back. It didn’t bode well that the boss was willing for me to come in tonight but that after that I was effectively barred.

The landing below boasted a massive oak door with a neon green snake above it, its tongue flickering in and out as the light changed. It looked overdone, ludicrous a clumsy half-assed attempt to depict a door-way to another world. Typical of satan-botherers, but different from how I remembered the place. Back then, the worst excesses of some of the clientele had been tempered presumably to widen the appeal of the club.

I took the last steps down to the landing pausing beneath the snake. The tackiness I could just about take, but something else was wrong about that door-way. I paused, staring at the frame surrounding the door. There appeared to be a coagulated darkness hanging in moving clumps around it as though it was alive with a dull hen-sick green just visible somewhere at its core. I hadn’t seen so many elementals cluster around a mere door before. They were the bacteria of the supernatural world, lying in wait for live prey to attach themselves to and infect. There was life in the club all right, but judging by the bouncer, most of it wasn’t sentient.

As though to confirm that thought, something fell from the door-jamb creating an inky pool visible even on the already dark tiled floor. But that wasn’t what bothered me. I took my glasses off to get a better view and quickly wished I hadn’t. The tell-tale phosphorescent crimson and orange of violent death lit the place up like a fun-fair; so bright I had to quickly put my glasses back in place.

I called the Deadlights and they circled me in lazy loops of white and blue lights. I took my first steps through the door and I heard a sizzle and the screech of something exiting life as it dropped from above onto them. At least I wouldn’t have a little passenger riding me for the rest of the night. But that was where the positives ended. I walked into a vast room with a high-vaulted ceiling covered in sigils of unknown origin. Pretentious, moi?

A vast mirror ball turned slowly sending light shards to the far flung corners of the room and swallowed by the light from the equally vast curved bar that dominated the far wall. It was empty but there were hidden rooms branching off from the main one, where people could talk or get up to less innocent activities. Not that there was any music playing, nor anyone to hear it judging by the empty tables around the circular dance-floor. The DJ had obviously not arrived yet. When I used to come here it was a guy called Dave who had failed to come to terms with the sad fact that he was never going to be the next Aleister Crowley. He liked German death-metal leavened, strangely enough by the odd Lionel Ritchie and Chris de Burgh tracks thrown in for the sheer hell of it. And hell it most certainly was….

Martin didn’t mind that he was dead so much as the fact that he’d been killed by his unloving wife of twenty-three years. To add insult to injury the bitch was now living the high life in what had been their suburban semi in Fairmilehead on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

She had laced his dinner with arsenic night after night for weeks and smiled at him over the dinner table as he’d eaten every last poisoned mouthful. She’d tended him devotedly as he’d vomited his guts up and held his hand when the pain got so bad he’d begged her to put a pillow over his face to release him from the agony. Eventually she had relented and, picking up one of the over-stuffed pillows she liked so much, had lowered it gently onto his face with a little quirk of her mouth he didn’t recall having ever seen before.

He had tried not to fight of course, but found that his wasted body’s instinct to survive thought differently. He began to struggle, to signal to her that he’d changed his mind, that she didn’t have to carry out her grisly promise after all. But she only bore down harder with a strength he hadn’t known she had in her. The last sound he heard before he died was his wife’s voice:

“I hope you go to hell you fat bastard. It’s more than you deserve after what you’ve done.”

That was strange he’d thought, because he hadn’t been fat at the end. On the contrary the weeks and months of illness had rendered him skeletal, skin hanging in folds around a wasted frame as though he was wearing a flesh suit that was far too big.

Well, she had got her wish. Except he didn’t think he was in hell. No, it looked very much like he was still here in the home sweet home they’d shared together for over two decades. He had tried to leave, but found he couldn’t get further than the gate at the end of the garden. This was unfortunate as he subsequently discovered that he had also fallen victim to the oldest cliché in the book: she had been having an affaire with his so-called best friend Cliff Morgan, the man he’d played golf with at the Swanston Golf Club twice a month for almost as long as he’d been married to Mary.

Well, as he had been fond of saying when he was alive, this was indeed a pretty pickle. The first time Cliff had come round, he’d tried to get through to him, screaming himself hoarse to make his friend understand what Mary had done. It was only when Cliff put one hand on Mary’s breast, while unbuttoning his trousers with the other that he realised the full horror of his predicament. What was he to do?

What, he wondered, had Mary had meant when she’d referred to something he’d done. He couldn’t for the life or even death of him fathom that one out. He also wasn’t sure what had upset him the most: Mary’s betrayal or Cliff’s. To his surprise, on balance it was his friend’s behaviour that had disturbed him the most. She had killed him to be sure and he wasn’t about to forget that; but strangely it was Cliff’s defection that had cut him to the quick. He hoped fervently that didn’t mean he was some sort of homo. No, that wouldn’t do at all.

Tonight the traitorous love-birds were having a romantic dinner for two: scented candles, roses, and the big dining table set as though it was a fancy restaurant. She of course was done up like a dog’s dinner in a pink evening dress that was far too tight and revealing in all the wrong places for her frumpy body. He had done that hideous Bobbie Charlton comb-over that Colin and Mary had used to laugh about behind his back. Well, she wasn’t laughing now, the two-faced cow, as she slid her stocking-clad foot up and down Cliff’s pinstriped leg and gazed adoringly into his eyes.

Maybe this was hell. Doomed to imprisonment in his own house watching his killer and his best friend canoodle with not a thing he could do about it.

Or at least that’s what he’d thought. Just the other day (although time was fluid in this state so he couldn’t really be sure) he’d met another occupant of the house that could see, hear and understand him perfectly. She said she’d died in the house when she was young and she certainly didn’t look older than sixteen. She told him she used to watch over him when he’d been alive to which he retorted that she had obviously not done a very good job given recent events. She huffed for a few hours and only came round after he’d apologised profusely. Some assiduous flattery and ego massaging later (of which he was rather proud of given he’d never had to do it before), she revealed that yes, there was a way to intervene in the physical world after all. It was tricky and dangerous, even for ghosts such as they, but it could be done.

It would be done, he thought grimly. If it was the last thing he ever did, it would be done. After he’d learned how, the why and when would look after themselves.