”Joanne’s dead,” the man in front of us said matter-of-factly. On one hand, hearing the words out loud was a shock, yet on the other hand, deep down I had suspected as much the moment I heard her voice on the walkie talkie.
It was a knock at my door that had prompted this road trip. The morning after the incident with the oak tree, Tara turned up. Quickly pushing past the increasing discomfort about people from my childhood so easily finding my address, we spent the morning coming up with a plan.
After, of course, reflecting on the events of the previous day. Tara insisted that I tried to attack her and then pushed her in the river. I insisted, of course, that I had saved her from certain death.
I was initially reluctant to believe her, until she pointed out that her version of events made much more sense than mine, which was difficult to argue with. Until she finally admitted that she’d seen me pull my own teeth out and use them to play hopscotch and we were back to square one. Neither of us knew what to believe but we both knew that we needed help and so Tara got to work finding an address. Six hours later, there we were.
The man tried to close the door on us but Tara reached out an arm and stopped it. She looked up sheepishly. “I’m sorry. But we need to talk to you about Joanne. Please. I think she’s haunting us.
*
The man, whose name was Derek, looked to be in his seventies and was so large that I was surprised he could fit down the hallway. Every few steps he wheezed and stopped to catch his breath. We were led into a kitchen where we sat at a table while Derek grumbled and clattered around with the cups. He seemed strangely calm about the idea that the two strangers in his kitchen were apparently being haunted.
“How did you know Joanne?” he said.
“We went to school with her, before…” I replied.
“Before my brother and his wife were arrested.”
“So Joanne was your niece?” I said.
“Yep. Came to live with me and my wife afterwards.”
“Your wife, is she home?” said Tara.
“Dead,” he said. “Died a few months after Joanne moved in. So you say you’re having some sort of problem?”
Derek listened and sipped his tea patiently as we told him our story.
“So how is it that you think I can help you?”
“When we knew Joanne, she was really into ghosts. Did she tell you anything? Anything that could be useful to us?” I said.
“Her and her husband would be off every weekend on ghost hunting adventures. Maybe she upset something that she shouldn’t out there.”
“You believe then? In ghosts?” said Tara.
“Of course. And a lot more on top of that. You’d be an idiot not to.”
“So what do you think we should do?” I asked.
He sat up straight and looked me right in the eye. “Go home. Ignore it. Carry on with your lives.”
“But you just said-”
“You’d be an idiot not to believe. You’d be even more of an idiot to get caught up in it.”
“You said she had a husband. Is he-” I started.
“Dead,” said Derek.
“A drop of Nelson’s blood wouldn’t do us any harm,” came a sing-song voice. Startled, I almost flew out of my seat, and so did Derek. It seemed the ghost conversation had made him jumpy.
Tara raised her eyebrow at us both as a little girl ran in with a toy fire engine in her hand, looking like a younger, but otherwise uncannily similar version of the Joanne I had known.
“Grandad, I’m hungry,” she grinned.
“It’ll be time to eat soon,” he sighed.
The little girl looked at each of us in turn, smiled coyly and then skipped away.
“Joanne’s daughter,” Derek said glumly.
There was no reason Joanne wouldn’t have had a daughter, but the thought seemed almost amusing somehow. The idea of her being someone’s mum, changing nappies, singing nursery rhymes. It was just so… not Joanne.
“She lives here?” said Tara.
“Yep. There’s nobody else to raise her. It’s the least I can do for Joanne,” he said. His eyes didn’t quite meet ours and I got the impression he was holding a lot of emotion back. “I wasn’t ever going to be a good replacement parent to a teenage girl. I never had kids of my own. Didn’t want ‘em. We took Joanne in because it was the right thing to do but I never wanted her there. Not really. She knew it too, no doubt.”
“That’s sad,” I said, to myself more than anything.
“Perhaps. But there’s no changing that now. I was never unkind to the girl. I kept her warm and fed and safe until she was old enough to go her own way. And God, she had a better life here than she did with her parents, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
“Bit of a low bar, isn’t it?” I said. Tara shot me a “shut up” look which I ignored. Hearing that Joanne didn’t get to live in a loving home even after her parents were caught was making me bubble with rage.
“I did a lot of things wrong. I’m not proud of it,” he nodded.
“You’re making up for it now,” said Tara sympathetically, nodding to the toy kitchen shoved in the corner.
“Well,” he said, draining the rest of his tea and slapping his knees in a way that indicated it was time for us to leave. I rose to my feet but Tara stayed seated.
“Sir, did Joanne leave behind anything that could help us? Diaries or journals or-”
“You want to read her diary?” he frowned.
“Not like that. It’s not that we want to pry. I meant specifically any ghost stuff-”
“Thought I told you you should leave that stuff alone.”
“I wish we could, but whatever is happening to us… it won’t leave us alone.”
Derek got up, mumbling under his breath and left the room. He returned only a few minutes later with four binders as well as a briefcase that none of us could open but that Joanne apparently always took with her on her ‘ghost adventures’.
“I sorted most of her stuff out. Donated it. Sold it. Binned it. But this stuff. I couldn’t throw this stuff away.”
“It’s a lot of memories,” said Tara sympathetically.
“No. I literally cannot throw it away.”
I nodded. “I understand. I have a walkie talkie I can’t destroy.”
“I want it all gone. If you two are going on some kind of mission, then I hope it helps you. But I want it all out of my house. If there was any unfinished business of hers then it’s either in here or it’s nowhere. You asked for help. Take it or leave it.”
*
Tara offered to drive us back and so I sat in the passenger seat trying every combination I could on the briefcase. I was up to 4123 when she u-turned so sharply that I smacked my head on the passenger window. I looked up, fully expecting to have narrowly missed hitting someone, but the road was empty.
“Tara…?”
“Derek was lying to us.”
“About what? Please don’t say we’re going back there. I think we’ve tested his patience enough.”
“Matty, please don’t be angry with me. But I’ve not been completely honest with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look. Joanne contacted me, years back, and invited me to her wedding. And well, I went.”
Whatever I had been expecting, this was not it. “What? How? Why?”
“She found me online and sent me a message. I thought it was a bit out of the blue. She invited me and I felt bad saying no. So I thought, well why not? You know. It might be fun to see her.”
“Wait, so you guys kept in touch?”
“No. That was the first I had heard from her. She barely even acknowledged me at the wedding. And then we never spoke again after that. Until of course I got the letter, just like you did.”
“Well why didn’t she invite me?”
“I don’t know, Matty.”
“I’ve looked for her online over the years. I never found anything,” I said. I knew this wasn’t the time and Tara wasn’t the person to do this to, but I felt surprisingly betrayed by this revelation.
“She had a different surname when she contacted me. I guess after everything that happened, she didn’t want to be associated with her parents. But Matty, we need to focus. Derek wasn’t there.”
“Is that a surprise? Sounds like he didn’t exactly make her feel welcome into his home.”
“But isn’t it weird? She had almost no guests on her side. Honestly, I got the impression she was only inviting me to get the numbers up. Isn’t it weird that she invited me to the wedding and not him?”
“Maybe he couldn’t come. Maybe he was sick.”
“They droned on in the speeches for ages about people who couldn’t be there. He wasn’t mentioned at all.”
“It’s like he said, they weren’t close.”
“No, they weren’t. So how did he know that her and her husband went on ghost hunting adventures every weekend? How did he know that she brought the briefcase with her every time? Why is he the one who sorted out all her belongings? The one who took on raising her child?” Tara said.
“He said there was nobody else.”
“But there was. There were so many people on her husband’s side of the family. They all seemed really close. There’s no way that not a single one of them would take on raising the child after Joanne and her husband both died.”
“Maybe things changed since the wedding. Maybe they fell out with his side of the family. I don’t know. Look, Tara. Derek’s given us everything he’s going to give us. Let’s just drop it.”
*
Tara won the argument, and I spent the drive back to Derek’s with a lump in my throat. It suddenly felt very obvious that Joanne could easily have reached out to me over the years and chose not to. I felt a fool for not considering it sooner. Joanne had a horrible thing happen to her, but she grew up to be at least a somewhat normal adult with a somewhat normal life, and, like all of us in the 21st century, the ability to contact people from her childhood. I had always kept myself easy to find and present online. She just didn’t want to find me.
When we arrived back at Derek’s house, all of the lights were off. Tara rapped hard at the door, and, getting no answer, pushed it open and crept inside.
“I’m hungry.” The little girl’s voice came from behind the door that Derek had entered to get the files.
“I’m exhausted,” begged Derek’s voice. He sounded like he was crying.
“I know,” she said. “You’re getting old. I can tell.”
“Look, just give me a bit longer.”
“Fine,” she said and the door flew open. Tara and I stepped back out of view, partly not to alarm the little girl in the dark and partly because something felt really… wrong.
Once we’d heard her footsteps trail off up the stairs, we pushed open the door to find Derek in a small study, packing things hastily into a suitcase.
“Jesus Christ! Why are you breaking into my house? There’s no more tea.”
“Derek, you need to tell us the truth. What’s going on?”
“You guys need to go. It’s not safe here. I told you. Don’t get involved with all this anymore than you already have.”
When we didn’t leave, he just sighed and shook his head. “Joanne turned up at my house a couple of weeks before she died, with all that stuff I just gave you, telling me I was going to need to take over from her. Carry on her ghost hunting. I told her I couldn’t. Look at me. I’m old and tired. I said no. I thought that was the end of it.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“Next thing I hear she’s dead and then all this weird stuff starts happening to me. I start getting these visitors at all times of night and I start seeing things that aren’t there. And then this appears and starts growing all over my body.”
Derek pulled down his shirt to show what looked like a bright red tattoo. Rows and rows of concentric circles, starting at his collarbone and spreading out over his torso.
“And Joanne’s daughter?” I asked.
“Joanne never had a daughter. That thing, it just turned up and- Get in the wardrobe. Now. Don’t make a sound.”
The tone of his voice was serious enough to make us comply, and not a millisecond after we closed the doors on ourselves, the little girl burst into the room.
“You’re taking too long. Wh- Ah. Going on a trip?”
“Just sorting some things out for storage. That’s all. Look. You should know that I passed everything onto those two people who were here earlier. They can do a better job than I can. They want to do it. And it must be what Joanne wants too. They say she’s been contacting them.”
“It’s not her choice. Or yours. Only death releases you.”
“Please. I’m not cut out for it.”
“As you wish,” she said.
Regrettably, I was looking through the keyhole at that very moment. The little girl tilted her head to the side, her face almost pitying, and then her body started to convulse. Cracks and crunches of bones breaking. The sound of flesh tearing as her body lurched and jolted.
The girl’s face started to rip into two, right down the middle, revealing two gaping holes where eyes once were. And then rows and rows of tiny pointed teeth covering every inch of the head. The rest of the little girl’s skin peeled off, the skin underneath black and charred.
I looked away just before the creature descended on a sobbing Derek.
It seemed to go on for such a long time. Cracks and snaps and squelches and gurgles. I shut my eyes tight.
Tara reached out to hold my hand and I squeezed, willing it to be over. I shoved the other finger into my ear as the sounds of flesh ripping and hungry slurping grew louder. It stopped suddenly and I felt Tara exhale next to me.
The wardrobe door flung open before I could fully open my eyes. The little girl was back, but covered head to toe in thick crimson.
She smiled coyly at each of us. “Looks like you have some work to do. We’ll be watching.” And with that, she skipped off happily right out of the front door.
*
I drove us both back to my house. I tried to comfort myself that perhaps this was a hallucination or something similar, like how I’d seen things in the park that couldn’t have been true. It was when we arrived back at my house that I truly knew that there was no going back. Tara grabbed the unopenable briefcase to bring inside and it flung open at her touch. A small speck of colour caught my eye and I pulled her sleeve up. Three, small, red concentric circles had appeared on her wrist.