Watkins drives in such a haze that he almost misses Wilson’s house. As he drags the vehicle to a halt across the street, the events from the last hour swirl through his head, the mental racket it creates so deafening that finding the clarity of mind to do anything efficiently is a chore. When at last he does surface, he notices a peculiar lack of activity in the house’s surrounds. He would have expected a horde of journalists to swamp the building, but the only presences are that of three unidentified figures standing near a pair of police cars and a mortician’s van.

A spectral gloom seems to have settled into the atmosphere, hovering over the place with a disturbing malevolence. As Watkins opens the car door, he is buffeted by a volatile gasp of wind which tugs and tears at his clothing as he steps onto the pavement. The trees along the roadside are devoid of leaves, and as the gust blows through them, the bare branches twist and click and scrape at the sky. It’s strange, he thinks to himself, but it’s almost like the air itself is angry.

A rectangle of light flashes from the front wall: The door is opening. A figure steps into the frame. All that is identifiable of the shape is that it is tall, but a little slouched. It pauses, perhaps speaking with someone inside, then shuts the door and hurries over to the other shapes in the garden.

Now sufficiently intrigued, Watkins makes for the house himself.

As he approaches, the group becomes discernible. Three of them are just Goslington policemen. The person who just left the house is an elderly man. He is dark of skin, and much older than everyone else there, probably in his early sixties, as evidenced by his silver beard. He is dressed in a white lab-coat, beige, checked trousers, and a rumpled shirt, which is missing several buttons near the collar. Watkins glances down at the front pocket of the coat and sees “A. Smylie, ME” printed on an ID tag.

“Doctor Smylie?” he asks.

Smylie, momentarily surprised at the presence of the young man before him, cocks his head to the side and waits patiently.

“Yes?”

Upon noting Watkins’s lack of uniform, he remains distrustful.

“Are you a reporter, boy?”

Watkins toys with what to say. His mind, still foggy from the recent events, cannot come up with anything besides the truth, so he goes with that.

“No sir, my name is Gavin Watkins. I-”

A flicker of realisation zaps across Smylie’s face.

“Watkins! Of course! Old Richard’s long-lost protégé! Sorry, mi-boy, sorry, sorry. You can’t be too careful these days with all of these raptors in the press lurking in the shadows. Look, you’d better hurry and let yourself in. There’s a young woman in there who insisted upon seeing the body. Says she’s Richard’s long lost daughter, would you believe! I tried to dissuade her, but I’m afraid she was mightily determined. That, and I have a weak spot for anyone who knows their English. She’s been in there long enough, and I would like my- er, the body now, if you please.”

“What makes you think that I would have any more progress than you?” Watkins asks him.

“She wants to see you, not me. Told me as much. Said if I saw you to send you straight to her, and here you are. Now, fond as I am of chit-chat, that body’s deteriorating as we speak, and we’re going to lose too much information if it sits there much longer.”

The body. Watkins had forgotten that it will henceforth be referred to as “the body”. There is an uncomfortable amount of identity and personality lost through the simple change from proper to common noun.

“Sure,” Watkins said, almost not recognising his own voice, “I’ll go see her.”

This day just gets weirder.

“By the way, you’ll want to cover your hands and feet,” Smylie says, holding out gloves and shoe coverings. Watkins takes them and puts them on, thanking Smylie absent-mindedly.

With that, Smylie strolls towards his van, and Watkins finds himself staring into the doorway. A stream of glowing amber pours out onto the doorstep and, for a moment, it feels to Watkins as if he were looking into a portal to another world. What awaits him in there? 

A trepidatious step brings him into the entrance hall. The smell of pine and wood-varnish recalls phantom images of Wilson furiously rubbing the oily liquid into his floors, utterly disinterested in the message that Watkins was trying to deliver from the academy, and threatening him with community service should he dare step across the threshold. Wilson did so love working on those wooden floors. Watkins had to assist him many times as punishment in his academy days, although Wilson would always grumble that it was hardly a punishment at all.

He wanders through the central passageway, passing silent, darkened doorways in a procession, guiding him towards the oaken door that will bring him to the study. At last he is faced with it. There is a final trace of hesitation in him as he decides whether or not he wants to be faced with the physical reality of his mentor’s death. It passes. He reaches for the knob and turns it. He can hear the grumbling of thunder outside. The door groans open.

The clouds build. Drops of water tap at the windows.

Lightning splits the room. Blinding white.

At the sight that greets him, his wits are completely anaesthetised, and he is barely able to make an assessment at all. He tries to focus his thoughts on information; on perceiving it, processing it and understanding it, but there is only one thing that his mind cares about: Red hair, again. The colour of fallen leaves. Tied back, hanging from the shoulders of a ghost crouched over his mentor’s dead body.

Recognition hits him before he has time to process what he is seeing. As far as he knows, he is looking at the back of a long-dead memory. A memory that shouldn’t be here. Emily. The last person he’d ever loved. There she is, right in front of him. It can’t be. An impulse strikes. He must tell this ghost to leave. It does not belong. Before he can stop himself, he gasps, “No. No. You can’t be here. I remember. I killed you.”

The ghost remains unmoved. He cannot tell if it has seen him, but there is movement. The stream of red rotates, enough for a hint of a face to emerge.

A parting in the clouds, but brief. Silver light slithers through the glass.

More aware of his surroundings now, he realises that the ghost is speaking.

“I’ve been thinking of what to say to him. It’s the first time we’ve met, after all. ‘Hey dad’, seemed a bit twee to me, but I can’t really think of anything better.”

It’s as if he’d said nothing. Perhaps he’d imagined that he’d said it. “I killed you.” It isn’t a statement that one would ignore. It must be. He didn’t say it after all. For goodness sake, what’s wrong with him?

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The ghost says something else at this moment, but he only hears mumbles. Suddenly, she is in front of him, cocking her head to the side like a bemused cat.

“You’re not mute, by any chance, are you? My father didn’t say anything about that.”

Old scars are beginning to ache. These are memories that he has brought under control up until now, but the balance has been disturbed. He has been disturbed. He can feel his thoughts winding up, gently building into a whirl. He tries to focus on something, anything else. But he can’t. She looks so much like her, and he hates that. Hates her for it. But this is not Emily. He knows that. He recognises this girl’s face from the photograph. This is Wilson’s daughter. He knows that, but it makes little difference. He can already feel himself shutting down.

Her eyes shift about with a sudden uncertainty and she leans forward, a touch more cautious than she was before.

“I’m sorry, do I have the wrong person? Are you-?”

He must reply. Keep up the face. Yes. That will help. “Gavin Watkins, yes.”

“Oh good, I was beginning to get a little bit worried, there!” She emits a nervous laugh.

The awkwardness of the situation intensifies, but she presses forward. She holds out a hand in hesitant greeting and introduces herself as “Erin” Lewis. “That’s E-I-R-I-A-N, if you please,” she explains. “I’m told my father was fond of weird spellings.”

When an answer is not forthcoming, her confusion intensifies. “Is there something wrong?” she asks, feeling a little bit self-conscious.

Yes, he wishes he could say. Yes, something is very wrong. He’s seeing the world through clouded lenses and his chest feels like it’s calcifying itself. He’d spent years learning to hide from his past, and now it’s like someone has opened a valve and flooded him, neck-deep, in a world that he had tried to forget. Yes, he’d like to say that something is wrong, but he’d be burdening a stranger with things she would not need to know. He remains silent as he searches for a reply that could change the direction of the conversation.

She squints her eyes at him for a moment, and he feels the uncomfortable sensation of one mind probing another. He realises that he has been staring at her for a long time. He rips his gaze away from her and pretends to be searching the room. Lewis is now behind him, hands behind her back, craning her neck to see what he’s doing. She watches him carry out this charade for a good while, seeming to process his actions like a fine sieve, becoming gradually more and more amused as she notices the random nature of his searching.

“You know,” she says, kicking the carpet absent-mindedly, “I don’t know much about” – she looks at the body and then back at Watkins – “you and him, so I don’t know if this is just making it worse, but… don’t you at least want to see for yourself?” She gestures to Wilson’s body with a tilt of the head, but Watkins isn’t looking. He can’t. If he does, he isn’t sure he would be able handle it.

As the silence persists, Lewis seems to come to a gradual realisation.

“Do you, um… Do you maybe need me to go out for a bit? I’m pretty much done in here, so I could… I could just wait with the M.E.”

He barely hears himself say it, but Watkins manages to mumble “Sure… thanks.”

With an acknowledging nod, Lewis begins her retreat from the room. Just as she reaches the doorway, she turns her head for one last look. With a barely perceptible scrunch of her eyelids, she mutters under her breath, “Can’t even look at the body. I wish I felt half so guilty.” With that, she slinks away.

Her departure doesn’t do much to ease his mind. If anything, it may have been better if she had stayed. The balance is gone. That means only one thing: The visions will come back. It is only a matter of counting each and every second until it happens.

One.

Two. He shuts his eyes.

Three. He shuts his ears.

Four. The corpse stands up.

He can’t see it or hear it, but he knows that it’s happened.

A hand grabs his shoulder.

He trips over himself in panic and slams forward onto the floor. He whips round and confirms the truth with his own eyes. There, in front of him, is the chief’s body, standing on its own two feet. Its chest is soaked with blood oozing from a hive of bullet-holes punched into its shirt. Its face, pallid and putrefying, is painted with a red capital “A”. It’s enough to make Watkins scurry backwards and screech, “Get away! Get away from me!”

The corpse looks confused. “But I called you here,” it says with its head cocked to the side.

Watkins shakes his head vigorously. “You didn’t. The real you did. You are just a monster in my head.”

“But I called you here. And now you must help me.”

Watkins backs himself into the wall and presses his arms against it for reassurance. “I need to get home,” he huffs, his breathing getting faster and faster. “Coming here was a mistake.”

The corpse locks its eyes on him. “Just like everything else you’ve done,” it says.

Watkins pushes on the wall and slowly straightens his knees. “Just ignore it,” he mutters to himself.

“I trained a champion, not a coward,” says the corpse. “The Watkins I know wouldn’t back away from me.”

“It isn’t here. Ignore it. Just get to the door, Gavin. Just get to the door and you can find help,” Watkins tells himself.

“There is no help, boy. There never was. Not for you, and not for me. You belong in the same place as me for what you did.”

“No. Stop it. Stop talking like that. You don’t even sound like him, now.”

“I don’t have to. You know I speak the truth.”

“No, you don’t. You only say things that hurt.”

The corpse grins, its dead eyes clouding with malice. “And you only do things that hurt. Don’t you, boy?”

“No.”

“No? Should I ask Emily, then?”

Watkins’s eyes twitch at the name.

“No, please.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t. Just don’t say that name.”

“Why can’t I? It’s a lovely name.”

“You know exactly why.”

“Is it because you are still afraid of that name? Is that it? Is it because you can’t face what you did, all those years ago?”

“Stop, please.”

“Why should I, huh? Why should I give you a break? Tell me what makes you special enough to deserve a chance to live guilt-free when she never got hers? Tell me! TELL ME!” it screams, leaning right into his face so that he can almost smell the acrid stench of its breath.

“I’M SORRY!”

“Mr Watkins?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Watkins weeps, burying his face in his hands.

“Shit,” Lewis cusses. “He needs anti-psychotics. Fast. I have no idea how it was left un-treated for so long.”

“Will we be able to move him like this?”

“Maybe not. But you focus on your job, doctor. Get the body out of here and into your morgue. I’ll do my best to look after him for now.”

Smylie tries unsuccessfully to sound unflustered. “Right you are, young lady. First-things-first. Perhaps you could drive him home?”

“I don’t know where that is, to be honest. I only just got here.”

“Right… How about this, then: You could follow me in the van, and when we get to the morgue we can figure it out from there.”

Lewis tries her best to think while confronted with the bizarre behaviour of the man she’s just met. In the end, she is unable to find a better alternative.

“... Okay. Let’s do that.”

Watkins is only vaguely conscious of the presence coaxing him through the house, but it is a balm to his troubled mind. Each gentle prod of “Just through here” and “How are you holding up?” draws a nod from him, bringing him back to lucidity. Before he knows it, streams of silver light pour down around him, and the smell of damp earth fills his lungs. He gazes up into the sky and there it is: the kind face of the moon, peeping through a tear in the clouds overhead. He feels much better now.

“You okay with getting into the car?”

Lewis eyes him with concern. He is aware for the first time of everything that has just happened.

“Yes, yeah, sorry,” he mutters. “I, uh, I think I’ll be okay for now.”

She holds her gaze over him for a while, but seems satisfied with the answer. He leads the way to his car and starts reaching for his keys.

“Ahem.”

He looks up and she’s holding her hand out, curling her fingers repeatedly in a beckoning motion.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Really. I can drive. I do it all the time.”

She shakes her head. “After what I saw in the there, I’m not letting you behind that wheel.”

He faces her and squares his body up. “But it’s over now. I’ll be alright. There’s no need to worry.”

She keeps her arm extended.

“Be that as it may, I would rather not take the chance of a blackout on the road. It’s a miracle you haven’t killed anyone (or yourself) by now. Don’t make me call them on you.” – She nods in the direction of the police who are helping Smylie to cart the body into the van.

Realising the impasse that his compulsory companion has created, he reluctantly hands over the keys and sits in the passenger seat. Lewis scurries over to Smylie, tells him something to which he nods vigorously, and then scurries back to the car, hops into the driver’s seat and says “Let’s get you home” with a smile. “You can direct me, right?”

“Yeah, of course. Go this way, first.”

As the car slides onto the avenue and the trees drift past, Watkins’s consciousness retreats into itself. He needs quiet. He needs to be able to think.

The branches above wave in a light breeze. A puff of air sighs through the boughs and settles into a gentle swirl that stirs dried leaves upon the lawn. It pushes them out onto the pavement and away into the distance, and they roll about aimlessly in the smoulder of the streetlights. The wind used to sing through these trees in the years that Watkins knew this house, but something has changed. They seem bent, still and solemn, almost as if they are weeping.