The Mansion (A Jack Nightingale Short Story) by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short story, haunting, haunted house, exorcism, ghost fiction, occult detective, supernatural detective, ghost book
Publisher: Stephen Leather

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Nightingale took off the robe, dressed and hurried down to the wine cellar. He went to the brick wall above the fieldstone foundation and rapped it with his knuckles but all he did was hurt himself. He went off in search of something to knock with and found Alena in the kitchen. He mimed using a hammer and she pulled a wooden mallet from a drawer that looked as if it was used to tenderise steak. Nightingale shook his head and held out his hands. ‘Bigger,’ he said. ‘Grande!’

‘Grande?’

‘Grande. Bigger.’

She nodded and took him to a storage room filled with tools. Nightingale grabbed a pickaxe. ‘Perfect,’ he said. He frowned as he tried to remember the Italian for flashlight. ‘Torcia elletrica,’ he said eventually and Alena smiled.

‘Torcia elletrica,’ she said, and pulled one out of a drawer.

He thanked her, then went back to the wine cellar and tapped the pickaxe against the brickwork until he found a section that resonated like a bell. He smashed the pickaxe at the brick wall and it crumbled inward. He hit it again, breaking through the wall. Four more smacks with the pickaxe opened a meter-wide hole with an empty space inside.

He put down the pickaxe and shone the flashlight into the hole. He saw nothing but crumbled brick and earth. But then his eyes adjusted and he saw an earthen wall, eroded over time. Sticking out of it was a small portion of white cloth. He tugged at it but it held firm. Standing on his toes, he seized the corner of cloth in both hands, and tugged.

Bits of mud and soil dislodged from the wall and crumbled over his hands, but a six-inch section of the cloth came free. He found himself holding onto a skeletonized human wrist.

‘I’m going to have to ask you to come out of there,’ said a voice behind him. It was Pike. Nightingale did as he was told, squirming awkwardly backward out of the hole, his hair peppered with dust and dirt. Pike stood in front of him, pointing a gun at his chest. He was in his butler’s outfit, minus the tailcoat.

‘You killed her,’ said Nightingale.

‘It was an accident.’

‘What, and then you accidentally bricked her up?’

‘I had no choice. They’d have put me in prison.’

‘Not if it was really an accident.’

‘I pushed her. She fell against a rack. It was over in seconds.’

‘Then you should have called the cops and explained.’ Realisation dawned and he pointed a finger at Pike. ‘She caught you stealing wine, is that it? Even if they didn’t do you for murder, the thefts would put you behind bars.’

‘It was a perk of the job. The guy before me did it. Warner pays shit money, you take what you can. All the staff do it.’

‘And you were selling the good stuff?’

Pike shrugged. ‘A bottle or two.’ He waved his gun at the racks. ‘He’s not going to drink one percent of this.’

‘So you were stealing, she caught you, and you killed her?’

‘She pushed me.

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