Spectral Shadows - The supernatural novellas by Robert Westall by Westall Robert

Author:Westall, Robert [Westall, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Novellas, Short Fiction
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2016-06-19T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

We sat in the front of Hermione’s Metro, in the nearest lay-by, and stared at our enlargement. J. Montague Wheeler looked even nastier, enlarged. Every tiny line of his face was visible; they were great men, those old Edwardian photographers; beat the modern boys for detail every time. The impression that the awful man knew some great joke that nobody else knew grew stronger all the time.

And the two boys . . . one about fourteen, one a bit younger. That same look was on their faces too. It boded no good for the other Neptunes; come to that, it boded no good for the whole universe. It slowly made their faces into the faces of . . . certain photographs of the Kray twins, when they were in a relaxed mood . . . certain Nazi faces, wreathed in enjoyment over a game with an Alsatian dog. Faces that had stepped outside life, had seen life’s stage scenery from the back, and knew what a fraud it was.

‘Three of them,’ said Hermione. ‘And three skeletons in the boat . . . it’s a big coincidence.’

‘I doubt it,’ I said, with a dry throat. ‘They don’t look like victims to me. They look more like the ones who did it. And sat back and laughed. They looked as if drowning baby monkeys would be very amusing, as far as they were concerned.’

We stared at the enlargement for another long time, and I for one was feeling worse and worse.

Finally, Hermione said, ‘We can’t sit here all day,’ and rolled up the enlargement and put it back in its tube. ‘We need to know more.’

‘How?’ My voice came out in a sort of wail.

‘If somebody this rich vanished, it’d be in the papers. At the time. What we need is the local Wheatstone papers for 1913 . . . Wheatstone Public Library’s what we need next.’

She started the car, and drove off, fast.

Wheatstone Public Library, in the afternoon, was a good place to lay ghosts. Unlike the rest of gothic Wheatstone, almost in defiance of gothic Wheatstone, it was a simple classical building in red brick and sandstone, like a well-mannered barn.

And the reference library was the least ghostly of all. Durable wall-to-wall carpeting, a neat beech reception-desk where middle-aged ladies requested books on the history of canals around London, the development of the English apple tree, or a reasoned catalogue of the products of the Bow potteries in the eighteenth century. A fat good-natured bespectacled man took eager schoolchildren with spiral-backed notebooks through the development of the London sewage system, or the imports of tanned hides through the East India docks. Not so much educating them as telling them what to write in their projects. The air was loud with demands for rubbers, spare biros, and the tinkle of dropped drawing-board clips.

And along one wall, the row of microfilm machines, which we had to queue for, so great was the demand of housewives doing their family history.

We got machines in the end, and were now busy suffering.

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