"Through here," Vagabond said, leading Cleaner through the tall, narrow shelves filled with old books.
"I'm right with you," Cleaner replied, brushing aside an old cobweb.
The parish archive office was an old, silent, dusty building near the school. It was open only for three days of the week, and for a few hours at most. Today, Vagabond was lucky.
"The archivist says the records pertaining to the old Lucas family are round the back here," Vagabond said, taking a left turn. "He said to follow the light from the window." He looked. "Ah, here we are."
The light came through a stained glass Gothic window in the east wall; the early sunlight illuminated the whole room with a strange rosy glow, tinted by the different colours of the glass. The horizontal beams of light seemed to stand out, highlighted by ambient dust in the dry air.
"Where are these records, you say?" Cleaner asked. Vagabond turned, looked at the shelves, picked one seemingly at random and went for it.
The light seemed to shine directly on a single volume; a large bound book standing slightly proud of its neighbours on the third shelf up. Vagabond reached for it, pulled it out. It was incredibly heavy; the dust layered over it was thick, and the gap it left behind was filled with the ancient remains of torn cobwebs and the long dead corpses of spiders.
"See?" Vagabond said, turning the spine to Cleaner. It read "Peterleigh Parish Record - 1801."
"Okay, you found it," Cleaner said. "Get it open. Let's read it, see what it has to say."
They took the volume to a reading table, laid it out on the old polished wood, pried open the aged vellum pages. The spine of the huge old book creaked and cracked, but it yielded. Time worn pages gave up their text in faded ink to the eyes of the two hunters.
"Okay," Vagabond said. "Let's get the digital camera, the memory cards, the lighting equipment and the notebook from the car. Oh, and don't forget the biro."
Libra approached the glass fronted doors of the premises of his business. Around his neck was a magnetic ID card on a chain. There was a pad beside the doors; he lifted up the card, touched it to the pad. He had to lean in to ensure the card reached the pad; in doing so, the little CCTV camera caught a good glimpse of his face.
The door slid open, and Libra went to work.
"Good morning, Mr Stewart," said the pretty receptionist behind the desk in the lobby. Libra nodded, smiled encouragement, headed for the elevators. Behind him, the phone rang, and the receptionist picked it up. "Monarch Recruitment Agency. How may I help you?" she chirped. The working day had begun.
The topside office was Spartan, the way Libra liked it. The desk sat with the big window framing it; the seat was one of those large - backed executive chairs in leatherette, designed to intimidate candidates.
It still creaked when he sat in it.
The bookshelf in the left wall contained several noted business texts by well known authors. Tom Peters. Dale Carnegie. The One Minute Manager. Mixed in among them were other texts. The Art of War for Executives. The Book of Five Rings. The Tao Te Ching.
The desk was solid, polished wood, and it dominated the room. In the near corner opposite the door was a small chill area based around a comfortable sofa set into the corner, and two big easy chairs surrounding a low table with a telephone extension and a laptop docking port. Another docking port and extension graced the desk, and Libra wasted no time taking out the expensive laptop from his briefcase and docking it into the station.
A few minutes later, and the work he'd been doing over the weekend was in the system.
"Right," Libra said, with a sigh. He looked at the clock, reached for the intercom.
"No calls for an hour, Miss Haversham," he said. "I'm busy."
"Right you are, Mr Stewart," the voice of the secretary replied over the hands free set.
Libra opened the briefcase on his lap, took out the file and laid it open on the desk. The photographs taken at the scene of the crime were grim. Libra shuffled them, pondered their significance.
There was something bad going down in town. Of that, Libra was certain. An ancient evil, if that didn't sound too hackneyed. He preferred the much less ancient evils - ram raiding, adult Internet porn, S Club 7. That much he could handle. Well, apart from S Club 7, anyway.
"Here," Vagabond said. "On this page."
Cleaner took a snapshot of the page. "What is it?"
"A reference to an incident where a priest was called out from the parish here on a terrible night in September, 1801, to exorcise Taplin from a dreadful demon which had 'sorely beset the place.'"
"And?" Cleaner said.
"And that's it," Vagabond replied. "It'd be insignificant, were it not for the date. September 13, 1801. The date is to the day I got imbued in 1999. Coincidence? I don't think so."
"Are there any other leads?" Cleaner asked.
"Only a reference to a certain Mad Nannie, who lived up Taplin Way, and whose death was recorded … two days later. She was said to be a witch according to the parish records, and …" Vagabond fell silent.
"What?" Cleaner asked. "What?"
"She'd asked for confession," Vagabond said. "She'd wanted to die shriven, because, it says here, 'she has seen the face of the Devil Himself, not two days before, such horrendous visage as was more than what mortals could bear.'" He read on. "Here," he interjected, and: "Here, too." He looked up.
"This thing that's come into our town," he said to Cleaner. "It's the exact same thing that my ancestor faced, two centuries ago."
"How did he defeat it, then?" Cleaner asked. "He couldn't have been imbued, could he?"
"No," Vagabond replied. "And if I read these records aright, he'd have needed a little help." He closed the book, picked it up. "Let's take this back. We have no further use for it. We'll now need to look in the records for 1803, the year Isiah Lucas died."
"Why?"
"I want to record his confession," Vagabond said. "Some things he will have wanted to get off his chest before he went, and I'll bet this is one of them."
After lugging the volume back to the shelf it came from, Cleaner and Vagabond lugged the 1803 volume all the way back to the reading desk, Cleaner complaining about why the couldn't have done this with both books at the same time. Once again, the book was set upon the reading desk and opened, and amid clouds of dust the patient finger of Vagabond traced the faded letters of hands long since dead, until …
"Here," he said, pausing with his finger at the top of a page he'd just turned to. "It begins here."
Cleaner and Vagabond read the words of Isiah Lucas' deathbed confession for a while in silence. They looked at one another a moment.
"Take photos," Vagabond said. "Lots of them. Use up all the spare memory cartridges if you have to." He sighed. "I've got to tell Libra about this."
"You're quite the historian, Vagabond," Libra said, as they strolled down towards the footpath beside the river. The sun was out, but it was damned cold.
"Well, I was a teacher once," Vagabond replied. "If it wasn't science, it was history."
"You saw it where?" Libra asked, as they made their way down towards the riverside, pushing through the crowds doing their late Christmas shopping.
"On the old waterfront," Vagabond replied. "On a wall. There's an old warehouse where they store heavy machinery parts. Cranes, JCB backhoes, bulldozers. I saw it on the wall there."
"And it was old when you saw it?" Libra said.
"Must have been," Vagabond said. "I'd just gone native, you know?"
"You'd abandoned your old life, and started life on the street," Libra said. Vagabond nodded.
"Just about this time last year," he said. "There didn't seem much point. The Millennium was coming, Tony Blair was setting up that awful Dome - didn't it feel wrong when you turned the sight on it?"
"I wasn't imbued then," Libra replied. "But I didn't need the sight to tell you that."
"And the dead were walking the streets, poisoning spirits, occupying corpses." Vagabond looked up with pained eyes at Libra. "I didn't think they needed teachers in Hell."
He stopped. "And then I saw this."
It was old and faded, but it was hunter sign. It had been sprayed onto the corrugated iron wall of the warehouse, very small, so as to be unobtrusive.
The five solid dots of the cross-shaped sign that read "imbued." Linked to it, a circle with two dots either side, joined to the circle with straight arms. Connected to that sign, a rectangle with dots on the corners and an unconnected dot in the centre.
"Alone," Libra said. "In danger."
"And look at this," Vagabond said, pointing to the last sign: the rectangular box with four dots in the corners, an unconnected dot in the centre and a circle around it.
Libra's face was like stone. "Help."
"This was over three months old when I became a street person," Vagabond said. "He must have been imbued, faced down a monster and died near here. And there was nobody imbued in this town until me. Of that, I can be certain."
"Why do you say 'near here?'"
"There's another sign just up the road," Vagabond replied. "Some people reported a big pile of dust there one day. I guess the imbued must have got his prey, but ..."
They wandered up the road, to where Libra could see another, unmistakeable sign sprayed onto a stone wall. Crossed arms, and a circle above them, with a line through the circle.
"The first imbued in town had time to say goodbye here," Vagabond said, tears in his eyes, "before he went to meet his fate."
"And there was nothing after that time? No more imbuings?"
"As far as I can tell," Vagabond said. "This is a small town. It's possible be could have cleared it entirely of monsters, and the Heralds only imbued new people when new monsters moved in."
Libra was pensive. "And now the place is swarming with them," he said. "It's possible that one monster could have been powerful enough to keep others at bay?"
"Like a shark in a small pond," Vagabond replied.
The corridor of the hotel room was dimly lit by the early morning light from the skylight above. The door to one of the rooms opened, and two young men emerged. One man was red haired, clean shaven, dressed in a leather jacket, black T shirt and jeans; the other was taller, a black man with a moustache and graded hair, wearing a pink T shirt and leather trousers.
"The host was plainly unsuitable," said the first one, the black man. "I mean, look. Is this the best he could do?"
"You picked the body," the other said. "You had no idea he'd be …"
"Different?" said the first.
"I blame the hostess of this place," said the second. "He sent you to the wrong establishment."
"No," the black man said, "I think she sent my host to the right establishment …"
They were halfway down the stairs, when they heard the piercing scream from the floor above.
"You left one of the witnesses alive," said the black man. "The woman lives."
The screaming continued. The pair looked at one another, heard a commotion.
"No time to go back to silence her," said the second one. "Come on. I've got my host's carriage. We must return to the place where we concealed the item."
"Why did we have to come so far?"
"To deter investigation - or at least, to delay it." He ran his hands over his body. "Nobody will connect us to the two upstairs. We will have time, at least for now."
The call came in as Libra was about to tuck into an early morning snack from the tea trolley. Rushing back to his desk, his food and beverage forgotten, Libra picked up the handset. "Yes," he said.
"We have located the place," Vagabond said. "Where it all began."
"Where?"
"Taplin," Vagabond replied. "An old church, served from Peterleigh. It's long gone - the Luftwaffe made short work of it in 1943 - and there's been nothing to disturb it until recently."
"What disturbed it, then?"
"They're building offices over the site."
"The outbreak was here," Vestal said, amid the sound of heavy construction machinery. She and Libra stood, wearing hard hats and construction boots, amid rumbling JCB backhoes and trucks. Around them, scaffolding and girders were going up over the sites of future offices, and the ground was churned mud as far as the eye could see.
"Here?" Libra said, shouting to be heard.
"Right under our feet," Vestal replied. "There was a stone right here, covering a huge well. The workers removed the pieces, threw them away, and concreted in the hole; but this is where they dug them up."
"What were they doing here?"
"Laying the foundations for another building they've since abandoned," Vestal replied. "They sent in geological specialists to the site, and they found some sort of contamination here, under where the objects lay. They're now building the office they were going to build here, about fifty yards behind you."
Libra turned, saw the new building forming behind them.
"Did you retrieve the pieces?"
"Just about," she said. "I saved them from the skip before they took it away."
"Where are they?"
"Site foreman's office."
"Why did you say you wanted these?" the foreman asked, in the office when they arrived a few minutes later.
"I heard it was some sort of antiquity," Libra lied. "It might look good in the garden or something. How much?"
"You can keep 'em," the foreman replied. "The JCB that ran over 'em just died. It's been in the repair shop since Thursday. The engineers say they can't get it to go again. It's dead. Complete write-off."
"That's a shame," Libra said, looking at the five fragments of sandstone before him. "This stone isn't from round these parts, is it?" he asked. The foreman shrugged.
Libra looked at the stone with the sight. Definitely something out of place. With a soft grunt, he called up his crystal senses, let the world crystallise into cold, hard clarity, like the morning of his first hangover back at the barracks. The markings on the slabs were just plain wrong. But he also caught the gist of them.
"They're a warning," he murmured, rubbing his forehead.
"What?" the foreman asked.
"Oh, just thinking of the patio garden, facing east. They'll look good in the back yard in the morning. Don't you think?" he said, smiling at Vestal.
The foreman nodded. "Anyway, why did you want to come to the Taplin Business Park in the first place?" he asked.
"I've got my own business," Libra said. "I might be interested in one of these offices when they're built."
"So why did you come down here now?"
"I wanted to see which one of them had the best view," Libra replied. "There's one that looks like a very promising site."
The foreman nodded, tapped his nose and winked. "Right you are," he said.
On the way home in the car, Libra glanced to Vestal. "Think I overdid it?"
"Not at all," Vestal replied. "You do own your own business, now."
"Yes, that's right," Libra said. "I do."
"So where did you say it was?" Cleaner asked Vagabond, as they came up to the old church. Beside the building was a wrought iron gate, locked with a padlock.
"The parish records say it's back here," Vagabond said, taking the holdall off his shoulder and placing it on the ground. He rooted about in one of the side pockets, came up with a key. "Father Morris says I've got to bring this back as soon to the rectory as we're done."
"You know him?"
Vagabond nodded. "He's served me soup on several occasions. He's with the Sally Army."
"Oh."
The gate swung open on rusty hinges. The back of the old church felt cold, lonely, unvisited. With a shopping mall on the right, an office block on the left and a car park behind it, the ancient site felt like a prison.
"The place has been full for over seventy years," Vagabond said. "It used to be wide open spaces, until the Sixties. Now look at it. Forty foot brick and concrete walls on all sides, and it gets maybe two, three hours of sunlight a day." He flicked on the sight.
A dozen lonely old ghosts sitting on grave markers looked up at him with sad, drained eyes.
"They remind me of my old Grandad," Cleaner said, her eyes welling with tears. "He looked like this is the old folks' home before he went."
Vagabond also felt the sadness. He let the walls climb up, shutting off the pain and despair slightly. "Put yours up fully, Cleaner," he said. "You don't need to know how these people feel. That's my job."
"It's all right," Cleaner said, pausing. A moment later, she gave a visible effort to pull herself together, became cold, clinical, detached. "Where's that grave marker?"
"Just over there," Vagabond said. "Plot 17." They made their way over to the stones lining the old stone wall.
"Here it is," Cleaner said, bending down to examine the moss - covered headstone. "They just moved the stones, looks like, when they took over the land for the car park." She looked up at Vagabond, who stared down with bleary eyes.
"This is it," Vagabond replied, taking out a camera and leaving the holdall open. "Let's clean it up a bit, and take some photos of it now."
A few moments of scraping off the moss from the stone later, and they were ready. Vagabond stood back, aiming the camera at the stone. He took a few rapid snaps, the flash pulsing, filling the enclosure with brilliant light.
Then he repeated this with the film camera; more rapid flashes, the whirr of the motor drive echoing off the cold stone walls.
"Er, Martin," Cleaner said.
"What is it?" Vagabond asked, turning around.
The ghosts had stood up off the markers they were sitting on, and had wandered over to the strange mortals, crowding them, peering over their shoulders to see what they were doing.
"This is eerie," Vagabond said.
"I'll say," Cleaner replied. "Part of me is shitting myself right now."
"Me too, though you'd never notice the change in smell with me," Vagabond said, looking at the silent spirits. "Did any of you know the chap whose stone this was?" he asked. "Just on the off chance," he added.
The faces looked at one another, shook their heads slowly, solemnly.
"They're curious," Cleaner said. "How long has it been since you saw anybody?"
One of the ghosts turned to look at her, mouthed silently. Cleaner caught the phrase "Thirty five years."
"It's been that long?" she asked. The ghosts nodded.
"I can barely hear them," Vagabond said. "They're here, but barely here, if you know what I mean."
"I can't hear them at all," Cleaner said. "Only read their lips."
The lead ghost turned to Vagabond, mouthed a question.
"Yes," Vagabond said. "Yes, I can. I think I can. But not right now. Soon, hopefully." He looked to Cleaner. "Come on. Let's go."
"Where to?"
"Let's get back to Libra, get this lot processed ... and then we're going to come back here in a few days. Hopefully, we'll have sorted out this lot first."
"Why are we coming back here?"
"To help out these old spirits."
The holdall chirped. Vagabond opened it, took out a cellphone, answered the call. "Yes?" Silence. "You certain? Where? Okay, thanks." He looked at Cleaner, who looked at him with bemusement.
"What does a street person need a cellphone for?" she asked.
"What else?" he replied. "We need company as much as everyone." His face became sombre. "There's been a development. I'm going to call it in."
Libra rushed up to Miss Haversham's desk. "You called me on the cellphone. What is it?"
"A Mr Lucas called," Miss Haversham replied. "He says to pass on the message," she rummaged in among her papers, "'they found the reporter. In Liverpool.' That's what the message says."
"You noted this down, verbatim," Libra said. "Thank you."
"Er, Gordon," Miss Haversham said, "he left a cellphone number. Do you want it?"
"I already have it, thanks," Libra replied, exiting the office. "I've suddenly got another client to see. I could be the rest of the afternoon. Take care of business for me."
"Certainly, sir," Miss Haversham replied, opening the appointments diary. "Just as well," she said. "He was scheduled to play golf this afternoon, anyway." She picked up the phone, began to make her calls.
"And this is what came out," Libra said. Zeiss looked at the photo, nodded.
"Remember that face on Mars thing?" he told Libra.
"I remember," Libra replied.
"And then NASA sent the Mars Global Surveyor over, and they took that photo which showed that the 'face' was just a worn down old mountain, after all?"
"Yeah," Libra replied.
"Well, this ... is the Face of Peterleigh," Zeiss said, with a sigh.
What had looked like hunter sign on the grave stone had turned out to be patches of moss and lichens, tricks of the light. Nothing more.
"For a minute, I thought we had a genuine mystery on our hands," Libra said. "Good job this didn't get out onto the hunter-net. We'd be a laughing stock."
"Still, though, there's something weird about that dream," Vagabond said. "It all felt so real." He looked at the headstone, then at the photo which no longer appeared to be inscribed with hunter sign. "Could it be the Heralds' way of alerting us to this ancestor, by altering our perceptions?"
"That, or wish fulfilment," Libra replied. "You remember showing me that sign last year? Maybe you were thinking of the town's first imbued, the one who died a few months before you turned up. And you were getting it mixed up with your ancestor Isiah."
"Yes, that's probably it," Vagabond said, pondering the imponderables a moment.
"So let's recap," Libra said. "What happened back in 1801?"
"Well, this place has always had legends of possessions and evil spirits, moreso than most other parts of the country," Vagabond said. "It turned out that there may have been more truth to the tales than we first thought.
"Of course, a lot of the records we have are patchy, and purely subjective in most cases, but what it looks like is this. More than 200 years ago, this place, this whole region, was disturbed by a plague of hauntings and possessions. People were seen to be acting totally out of character, dancing and behaving in a lewd and lascivious manner. You wouldn't notice that sort of behaviour today, but in a tiny little place like Taplin where everybody knows everyone else, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
"Isiah found that there was a pattern to the possessions. Always two, always hetero, always demonstrations of inappropriate sexual behaviour. Fathers and their own daughters; husbands and other men's wives. Things like that. It was as if the hosts' bodies were being ridden, being used as love dolls."
"Sick," Libra said. "Then what?"
"Isiah gathered a few men to help him," Vagabond said. "On his deathbed, he confessed to making a deal with a local witch to try to trap the evil spirits in a place where they'd lie undisturbed for ever, if possible.
"The old parish church had its own well. It was a place of pilgrimage for many years, and it was considered holy ground. Isiah worked on a plan that involved a witch, a carefully constructed stone … and two sacrifices, volunteers who would gladly lay down their lives to vanquish evil."
"Oh, my God," Libra said.
"You get it," Vagabond said. "The witch built the stone to trap the evil. She went down the well, carved warding and imprisoning words of power into the stone, and spent many days carving the capstone. Then there was the act of sacrifice; the two young volunteers from the village deliberately flaunted themselves in the street before the current possession victims, allowed themselves to be taken over.
"The ghosts did not realise until too late that the couple had just taken laudanum. As they were possessed, the drug took over. It trapped the spirits inside their bodies long enough for them to be taken to the church, to be dumped into the well."
"I take it," Libra said, "that at first the spell didn't work."
"They escaped from the volunteers' bodies, and came after Isiah," Vagabond said. "He took the famous dip into the midden, the entity pursuing him - apparently, these two could fuse together into some monstrous form if they were desperate - pounced on a horse in frustration, and Isiah escaped."
"And the box?"
"Apparently, they were desperate to get at what was inside that box," Vagabond said. "It's somehow tied to them. The intention was that the box would go into the well too, but that never happened."
"Anything else?" Libra asked. "Anything to suggest a way of defeating these vagabond ghosts?"
Vagabond looked up at the reference. "Apparently, a parishioner, an angler, took a dip in the river to escape one of the possessing spirits when it came for him in 1792. According to the old witch's account at the time, the river's spirit protected his soul from moral jeopardy." He shrugged. "Maybe that's why Isiah was on his way into Peterleigh at the time; to throw that box into the river."
"In any case," Cleaner said, "the plan may have worked after all. Mad Nannie completed the ritual and put the capstone in place. Her magic must have done the trick; it sealed up the well, trapping what was inside it at last."
"Until the capstone was bulldozed, on the orders of one Gordon Spencer of the Taplin Planning Department," Libra said. "No wonder they chose him and his secretary to start off their current spree. It must have been their way of thanking him."
"Bastards," Vagabond said.
"Now, about that reporter?" Libra asked.
"The TV presenter? Sheila Armstrong?" Vagabond said. Libra nodded. "They found her in a hotel on Merseyside, some cheap bed and breakfast place. She was with that TV cameraman chap. They both looked like they'd been put through a blender. Sheila remembers nothing, only waking up with blood on her hands." Vagabond was grim. "The other lad didn't survive. I don't think Sheila was intended to survive, either."
"Two more victims of the hitchhikers," Libra said.
"There's something else," Zeiss added. "There was an item, according to Vagabond. It was supposed to have been taken by the couple, but neither of them remembers it in the room."
"An item? Oh, the lead box," Libra replied. "The hitchhikers must have taken it when they vacated the bodies."
"Which means that they must have lured somebody else into the hotel room," Zeiss said. "They're inside some other people now, and they could be anywhere."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because they can't very well have taken the box with them when they left," Libra said. "They have to occupy bodies to have a physical presence in the world; for example, to carry a big lead box around."
There was a pause.
"Unless they hid the box somewhere," Cleaner said. "Hopefully, they'll either have stashed it somewhere in town, or gone to the flat of one of the hosts and left it there. But why would they want to go to Liverpool?"
"They may have gone to Merseyside to jump into two new bodies, then return incognito," Vagabond said. "Carrying a big thing like that box is bound to get you noticed. They'll likely have concealed it before going off to find new bodies to occupy."
"They could have gone into Chester if all they needed was to find new bodies," Vestal said. "Why did they go all the way to Liverpool?"
"Better nightlife," Zeiss responded.
"And maybe to confuse the trail a little," Libra replied. "Try to throw us off the scent by operating out of the region, somewhere we'd never think of, a place they've never operated in before."
"Pity, isn't it, that the places that used to be three days away are now a twenty minute drive away and through the Mersey Tunnel?" Vestal asked.
"Or that there'd be such a thing as television and local press like the Daily Post to keep people well informed," Zeiss added.
"They must have gone out on the pull, to lure new people in," Cleaner said.
"Separately," Vagabond replied. "Kevin was gay. There has to be a gay bar he went to in Liverpool. There's plenty of them on Merseyside."
"Did the spirit know the host was gay?" Zeiss asked.
"He would have, if he'd tried to pick up a straight Scouser," Libra replied. "He'd have got his head kicked in. Now, where in Liverpool did you say this hotel was?" Libra asked.
By: Fiat Knox
Copyright © Fiat Knox, 2001