It looked like
a haunted house.
Or possibly
more accurately, thought Elaine McGee, also known as Captain Ochre, as she
stared up at the blank windows, it looked like the sort of house you expected to
be haunted.
“Creepy isn’t
it?” said Iain Taggart, Captain Grey, his voice at her elbow making her jump.
“Hmm,”she replied, taking in the crumbling columns that
supported the front porch, the ivy smashing into the windows, the missing tiles
from the roof. Yeah, creepy was certainly a fair description of it. The only
problem was that the house also felt familiar. “Almost makes me wish I’d stayed
back at Dragon Airbase with Paul and Simone and Adam and Serena,” she added as
an afterthought.
Grey laughed. “I dinae
think they’d have thanked you for that,” he said, his warm Glaswegian accent
washing away her fears. “In fact, I think Adam was prepared to pay us to leave
for a wee bit of privacy.” He smiled. “Anyway, touring a haunted house isn’t the
worst idea Mario could have come up with for things to do.”
Thinking over
the things her partner, Mario Moro, also known as Captain Magenta, might have
suggested on how to spend a cold, wet October evening in the middle of Wales
while they waited for the fog to clear so that they could return to Skybase, Ochre had to agree. Visiting a haunted house was
definitely not the worst.
In fact, it
might relieve some of the tension of the last mission. That had being what
Lieutenant Peach had suggested, when he arranged this, contacting the guide to
arrange to take them and to overlook the fact that they were all still armed and
in uniform. The fog was due to lift in a couple of hours; they just needed
something to do with the time until then. Magenta had jumped on the idea, and
even Ochre and Grey had had to admit it didn’t sound too bad. That was before she saw the house.
“I think our
guide has finally arrived,” she said, pointing to where Mario stood with
Rhapsody and Harmony Angels, along with Captains Indigo and Brown. Mario was
waving rapidly in their direction.
Grey held out
one hand. “Ladies first.”
Ochre smiled
and walked towards the group, taking comfort in the steady plod of Grey’s
footsteps behind her.
Their tour
guide was a kid who didn’t look old enough to be out that late at night,
although appearances were probably deceptive. She grinned as she saw the two of
them approaching.
“This the last of your party?” she asked. When Mario nodded,
she began: “OK, My name is Alison, welcome to Moyle’s
Hall, possibly the best and most thoroughly documented haunting in Britain…”
She undoubtedly
said a lot more, but Elaine didn’t hear anything else. Moyle’s Hall.
Suddenly she knew why this house seemed very familiar.
It was the coldest October since records began. At least that was what the BBC
said, as security checked us out at the guards’ post.
Officially we should have reported them. Radios weren’t supposed to be used at the posts. Too distracting in the event of an attack. But out here, the
radio was probably being used to ward off the sleepiness of hypothermia and the
boredom of watch.
Certainly they looked at our papers with more
caution than was necessary, peering into the freezing jeep to confirm that I was
Elaine McGee, and my partner was Caroline Gorlisis, both of the UN Security Forces, nicknamed
“The Genevas”. They stared at those bloody awful photos until
Caroline lost her temper and snapped at them: “Arrest us and get us in the warm or let us
go.”
That made them laugh, as they handed back our papers and raised the
barriers before retreating back to their hut.
“Bastards probably have a fan heater in there as
well,” Caroline muttered once we were on the road again. I didn’t comment on her
language. We were both tense.
Out here, surrounded by the Welsh hills, it was
supposed to be safe, supposed to be a rest centre. A break before you slipped
back into the madness of the Terrorist Wars.
The thought that the madness could find us here
was… unnerving, to put it mildly.
Caroline drove along the steep Welsh roads,
cursing the black ice and the gritters in equal
measure, while I studied the reports from the base. We had interviewed all the
witnesses before we left; this was just to refresh my memory.
The accounts were simple enough. Over the last few
weeks, figures had been observed entering and leaving the house. They were
generally thought to be students or young people in their early twenties.
They were described as wearing outlandish and
bright clothing and everyone who had seen them had said there was something odd
about the figures.
I checked the documents again. The house in
question, Moyle’s Hall, was empty after a family dispute over a will, which had
been ongoing for the last thirty years. It was a largish place, and at least
according to the solicitors, still connected to the mains and the water board,
though neither showed any use over the last few months.
“The source of the haunting remains
unidentified to this day.” Alison had finished, staring round at the group.
“Now, if you want to follow me around the back, I’ll tell you a bit about the
house and stories that surround it.”
The group of Spectrum captains and agents trooped amiably behind
their guide. The drive, which they had walked down to get to the house,
was muddy, a testimony to the wet October which had being plaguing the British
Isles this year.
Grey pulled a
face, as a particularly nasty clump nearly yanked his boots off. Ochre ducked
her head to hide a smile as the guide called them to stick close together and
not to get lost.
“Eve of Destruction?” I suggested, looking at Caroline,
running though the list of the extremist organisations in my head as she guided
us slowly up the drive. “Or Flowers of the Forest? They’re supposed to use very
bright colours.”
“Question then becomes what would either of them
be doing in Wales?” Caroline asked, almost absent-mindedly as she surveyed the
driveway in the beam of the headlight. “Eve of Destruction is North American,
primarily, and Flowers of the Forest started in Scotland.”
Other than our tyre tracks, the driveway was
clear. Whoever had been here, they hadn’t come in a vehicle. Either that or the
ground was too frozen to show up any tracks.
“They’re both fairly stringently anti-war,” I
observed. Bombing for peace is a contradiction in terms, but these guys could
justify it somehow. “And the base isn’t that far from here.”
Caroline gave a nervous grunt of agreement, as we
climbed out of the jeep.
Both of us wore the Geneva coats, huge navy padded
things that went down to just above the top of our knee length boots.
Originally they had been designed and issued for use in Russia and Northern
Europe, but the weather had made them all but standard issue across the board.
Once wrapped up in them, it was borderline
impossible to tell if the person you were questioning or even facing, was male
or female, particularly if the hoods, with their drop down gas masks, were up.
We both checked our sidearms
and opened the door with the key the solicitors had dropped off earlier. The
front door swung open, flinging up a cloud of dust.
“OK,” Alison said, smiling. “Like I said at the
start, the true history of the haunting is unknown.”
“Didn’t know a
haunting could have a true history,” Grey whispered in an undertone. Ochre
grinned, but again, lowered her head to hide it as the guide’s eyes fell upon
them.
“However, there
are several theories, based on the description of the ghosts, that the house may
be built on the remains of a monastery or priory, but recent archaeological
excavations in the area have found no evidence. Others connect these mysterious
figures with the so-called ‘Bloody Acre’, one of the
many suggested sites for a battle where King Arthur is supposed to have defeated
Mordred. It is suggested that these figures may be searching for dead
friends or family. Again, there’s no proof. What is certain is that they have
been witnessed by numerous people, sometimes in groups, on several occasions.
The earliest report we have of these sightings, and the most details, came from
the United Nations Security Forces, or Genevas. But it’s wasn’t the only one, by any means.” Alison smiled apologetically, reaching
into her pocket for a key. “After the initial Geneva report, the solicitors in
charge of the property sealed the front door and it would be too expensive to
unseal it.”
If Ochre
recalled correctly, they had been only too glad to, hoping that if the property
was uninhabitable, the dispute between the legatees would sort itself out.
Evidently they had been partly correct.
“It’s quiet,” Caroline remarked.
“Too quiet,” I agreed. Houses have their own
rhythms, their own pace. Even when they’re empty, there’s still life in them,
still noise, but this one was silent. Silent as the grave.
Almost immediately I wished I hadn’t thought that.
“Split up?” I suggested, tentatively.
Caroline
nodded, briskly. “Split up. I’ll go left, you go right. Meet up at the stairs.”
“You find anything, you yell,” I said with a false
cheerfulness. I believe that either of us would have been happier if the other
had vetoed the idea of splitting up, but the truth was we both knew our duty.
There was nothing to suggest that anyone had been in here. The dust lay
undisturbed about an inch thick across the walls and the banisters. The key had
been stiff in the lock. There was in short absolutely no evidence that there was
anyone in the house but us.
And yet, I was fairly certain both of us were
thinking that the guys we had spoken to back at base had been telling the truth
or if they hadn’t, they were the best liars I’d ever encountered. And as I
already said, there was something about the house that didn’t feel right.
Atmosphere is the wrong word; it was more like the house was separate from the
real world outside. Or maybe that’s just projecting.
“See you in a bit,” Caroline
said,
an almost undetectable note of unease slipping into her voice. I just nodded and
turned on my torch, shinning the low level beam around the right side of the
huge entrance hall.
The windows were covered in grime, meaning almost
no light penetrated. There were four rooms, leading off the entrance hall, two
on each of the side walls, with the stair case which dominated the middle of the
hall. The doors were either propped open, or missing, it was hard to tell in the
poor light.
I paused at the first one, shining my torch
around, but it was as empty and dusty as the main hall. There was a door at the
end of the room, leading into a room beyond and suddenly I saw a flash of
colour, like someone walking in front of the door.
I slid my hand down and reached for my sidearm.
The dust muffled my footsteps, as I moved to the door, keeping my back against
the wall, and leaned around.
Nothing. The room was dark and empty, the dust
undisturbed. Yet I was certain what I’d seen hadn’t been a hallucination or a
trick of the light.
I knew someone had been here.
“The first reported sighting took place in this
room.” Alison shone a torch around. It was still dark, but the room looked
considerably cleaner than the last time Ochre had been in here. The cobwebs
hanging from the corners had the solid look of cotton wool, rather than the
floating flimsiness of spider’s webs.
“31st
October 2060, Emma Jackson and her friends were playing around the house. They
freely admitted to having broken a window to gain access and were exploring. One
of Emma’s friends, Sophia Kind, said she saw a figure in the parlour, which is
just across the hall, but Emma’s experiences were the most dramatic. She said
that she had brought her roller skates with her and finding the dining room here
has a wonderfully smooth pine wood floor, she decided to use them while her
friends explored the rest of the house.”
The guide paused for dramatic effect, swinging
her torch beam towards the door furthest away from the group.
“Emma skated to the middle of the room, at
which point she noticed that the temperature had dropped by several degrees. Then a figure robed in black entered through
this door here and walked towards her.” Alison
looked around to make sure that they were taking this all in. “Emma was
terrified and hid behind that old arm chair.” She pointed her torch at a
moth-eaten chair, draped with cotton wool cobwebs. “From there, both doors are
clearly visible. There was nowhere for either the figure or Emma to go without
being seen. Instead, the figure just vanished.” She looked around the group with
a smile. “Emma admitted that she didn’t hang around, she just got the hell out
of there. I’m aware that on its own, this incident probably wouldn’t have made
much impact on the world of the paranormal. Certainly, we wouldn’t have achieved
our reputation as a bona fide haunted house if it hadn’t being for the release
in 2064 of classified documents from the UN which related those kinds of events
in the UK. These included the Southampton UFO, the vampire of Glamis Castle and…” Again, she paused for dramatic effect. “The report of two Geneva or UN Security Service police officers,
which took place in the 2050s. Unfortunately we don’t have either
officer’s name, for reasons of their privacy, but…”
From somewhere
a projector whirled into life, making Harmony grab at Mario in fright at the
sudden noise.
“… We have this.”
Two images
flickered onto the back wall. The
Spectrum officers could easily identify them as military photos, probably from
the late 2050s from their colour and focus. They had been cropped to remove the
date, but the time stamps were clearly visible at the bottom of the photos. They
showed that the two images had been taken a minute apart. Clearly visible in one
were the tracks of small wheels and some footprints. In the other, there was
only white dust. Ochre leaned closer for a better look. She could remember the
photos being mentioned, but this was the first time she had seen them.
Caroline was waiting for me by the stairs. “Find
anything?” I asked.
“Not sure.” Caroline paused and asked, “You?”
“Not sure.” I sighed. “I thought I saw someone,
but it must have just been a trick of the light.”
“Hmm.” Caroline didn’t sound convinced.
“You?”
Caroline hesitated and then said, “I thought I saw
marks in the first room that looked like wheels. I took a picture and followed
them into the centre, where they just stopped.”
“And?” I asked nervously.
“When I turned around, there were no marks in the
dust.” She added in an undertone, “Not even my boot prints.”
We both digested this in silence. “Can I see the
photo?” I asked, nervously. Caroline reached into the folds of her coat to hand
the camera over to me when we both heard it.
A woman’s scream.
“Upstairs,” Caroline barked and we both ran up
like we were fleeing the devil himself.
“I’m starting
to wish I’d stayed at Dragon Base, until the fog cleared,” Grey groused to
Elaine as they headed up the stairs. “Even being glared at by Blue is
better than this. Ghosts?
I doubt they’ve seen any spirits in this house unless they were the liquid
kind.”
“Hmmm,” Ochre’s
reply was non-committal, but that didn’t seem to bother Grey.
“Those photos
could show different parts of the room, and the girl was probably spooked by a
curtain or something.”
There had been
no curtains downstairs, but Ochre didn’t mention that. Beneath their feet, the
stairs gave a deliberate creak.
Grey frowned
down at them. “No ghosts here some oil and a duster wouldn’t fix.”
Upstairs was worse than down.
We’d been told that the guy whose death had
started the will dispute had spent most of his last few weeks in a couple of
rooms downstairs. The upper floors had been unoccupied ever since, so the dust
and grime was thicker. Plus, when we’d run upstairs, we’d kicked up a storm of
the stuff.
We must have discussed it, but I don’t remember
it, because we both had pulled our gas masks down from the thick hoods, before
we hit the landing. Didn’t help with the visibility, but at least we weren’t
coughing and wheezing.
I’m not entirely sure what either of us expected.
After hearing the scream from downstairs, it could have been anything from some
teenagers messing around to a torture workshop.
At the same time, I’m sure neither of us expected
them.
The lighting
upstairs was designed to be even more atmospheric than downstairs, which meant
there was less of it. They walked closer together, eyes scanning the darkness to
try and figure out what came next.
At a doorway,
Alison paused.
“This is where
undoubtedly the most dramatic of the sightings took place. Again, it comes from
the Genevas’ reports. Both agents, interviewed
separately, stated that they heard a scream.”
She pressed a
button and a woman’s cry of terror echoed around the upstairs.
“They ran
upstairs to this very spot, where they saw…”
Suddenly a
pounding of feet on wooden stairs could be heard.
“Very good!” Grey muttered to Ochre. “That sounds almost
real.”
Ochre was about
to reply, when she noticed something. A white cloud was rising up the stairs.
One glance at
the guide’s horrified face removed any suspicion from her mind that this was
part of the tour. Then, from the depth of the clouds, two figures emerged and
froze, like the cloth-draped black pillars they resembled.
Huge dark
circles peered out beneath black hoods, looking as though they were as confused
by the situation as the Spectrum agents.
Ochre watched,
as from the second figure came a strange gabbling of words. The voice was
familiar. And then she looked at them.
She really
looked at them.
They were older than we expected, mostly in their
mid-thirties, though there was a teenager with them. Most wore bright tabards
over black clothes and American style baseball caps in the same bright colours,
though some, exclusively women, I remember noticing, wore white tight fitting
jumpsuits.
And they were all armed.
“Throw down your weapons and identify yourself!” I
barely had the puff to force those words out through the mask. They stared at
us, confused.
For a moment I wondered if there was a problem
with the radio in the mask, and if that was why they didn’t obey my order.
Then the figure nearest us, a man with a bright
pink tabard, began to move a hand towards his waist.
Caroline raised her pistol.
“Caroline! No!” a voice called out.
Caroline was startled and her finger slipped,
firing the pistol. There was a second where everything, even the bullet
travelling through mid-air, seemed to freeze.
Then the figures vanished and Caroline and I were
alone in the dark hall with no clues as to what had happened.
The bullet
missed, striking against the wall and tumbling to the floor, rusting before
their eyes, until it lay smooth and silent, as though it had lain there for
years.
The figures
were no longer there and the cloud had vanished.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Grey turned around to
look at Ochre. “Elaine? You alright?”
Ochre was
laughing, a low, breathless, hysterical laugh. “It was us all along. Don’t you
see? It was us!”
Grey grabbed
her arm and glared at the guide. “I think we’d better cut the tour short, don’t
you? Do you have a first-aider?”
Alison, who was in shock, seemed to pull herself together, and
pushed through the crowd to be at the head of the group again. But Ochre
wasn’t aware of her.
“It was us,”
she repeated.
I reached out and pushed down Caroline’s
outstretched arm, the pistol still in her hand. Gripping her arm, I quickly
dragged both of us down the stairs and out of the house.
We got into the jeep, Caroline again in the
driver’s seat. For a moment, I reached
for the keys, but Caroline turned, glaring at me and I just meekly climbed the
passenger’s side.
We drove in complete silence until we reached the
gate house. Caroline turned the engine off. We sat there motionless, not
speaking, as outside the guards yelled at us to identify ourselves. Then, seeing
the pair of us sitting there, covered in an unknown powder, in blank silence,
our gas masks still down, they started yelling for the decontamination crews.
“Why did you tell me not to?” Caroline asked. I
never asked her what she meant by that.
“It was us,”
Elaine repeated, calmer now, as Grey thrust a cup of strong tea into her hands.
Contrasting with the rest of the house, the first aid room leading off the old
kitchen was clean and brightly lit. “The figures, they must have been us.”
“Elaine.” Grey
reached for the blanket on the bed, but Ochre pushed him away as she had done
the last five times.
“Emma Jackson
was a teenager. She’d have been too young to recognise a Geneva coat. Caroline saw the rollerblade tracks, I saw one
of Emma’s friends and she caught sight of me, the scream from upstairs, it all
fits.”
“Elaine.” Grey’s voice was desperate.
Ochre looked up at him. “The
Genevas’ report. I was one of them.”
“You what?” Grey looked befuddled.
“I was
stationed here in 2059. I was one of the two Genevas
who came to the house to investigate.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “We
had our masks on. There was a fault with mine, the radio wouldn’t work. Caroline
heard me call from in front of her, when I was actually standing behind her. It
was me who was calling, only it wasn’t really me who was calling.
It was… that other me. The older me.”
“The older you?” Grey was more and more puzzled.
She waved to
herself. “Me… The
present me. When I called just now? Caroline heard that – I heard it too!
That was what startled her, why she fired.”
Grey stared at
her, unsure if she should believe her; if she was all right. Ochre glared at him furiously, angry that
he should doubt her. “Well, if you don’t believe me, check the bullet! You’ll
see it’ll match UN Security Services’ records.”
“Elaine.” Grey
sounded perplexed. “What are you saying? I don’t get it.”
“I do.” Ochre
nodded thoughtfully. “Of course, that must be the only explanation. Time must
have…” She waved her hand, “ ... Slipped. We must have
gone through something when we ran upstairs, maybe the house is some sort of
portal, I don’t know… but I know that’s what happened. Caroline and I ran
upstairs in 2059 and some way or another, we ran into a group of Spectrum
officers in 2068. The scream… ITV was in its infancy back then. Think of how
brilliant MP3 would have sounded to someone used to vinyl, for example… We thought it was a real person
screaming. We – Caroline and I –
thought they – us – were terrorists.
The kids who saw us – Caroline and me – thought we were ghosts. The coats with
their hoods made us look like monks, so that’s what they told people they saw. It all makes
sense.”
“It all makes
sense, you say?” Grey retorted with perplexity.
“I think it sounds absolutely crazy!”
“I know.” Ochre
shook her head. “It all makes sense… but that doesn’t mean I can explain how it actually happened!”
Author’s Notes:
The idea from this story actually came from
another one that wouldn’t go anywhere. I was thinking about what would happen if
the ghosts saw us, thinking about how different the clothes from as little as
ten years ago look to us today. Would they report people in strange or even
historic clothing?
Then I started thinking about what would happen if
you saw yourself ten years from now? Would you know yourself? The rest of the
story kinda of happened from there. Like Ochre, I
don’t know entirely what’s happening.
Don’t ask me what ITV is, other than a TV channel,
I just needed some initials for the new sound wave, light years ahead of us. As
I said in the story, if you took an MP3 sound track back to when vinyl first
came out and played it, it would probably sound good enough to deceive people.
Massive thanks as always to the Beta team. Don’t
know how you guys do this year after year, but I’m grateful you do.
I own nothing.
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