Arnos Hell by Eamonn Murphy

Author:Eamonn Murphy [Murphy, Eamonn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Halloween, Ghost, Supernatural, Arnos Vale, NHS
Publisher: Eamonn Murphy
Published: 2017-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Eddie sprawled on the floor, staring at the window shutter as at an enemy. “That was close.”

Bob bent to help him up. He noticed that Eddie had gone pale. “Are you okay?”

Eddie winked. “It missed me. I’ll live. Bit of a scare though.” He grabbed a chair and sat down, gripping the arms so the girls wouldn’t see his fingers trembling.

Bob decided he might as well sit down like everyone else. It seemed to be time for another conference. He pulled a seat up next to Caroline and touched her leg reassuringly. She ran her hands through her hair then down over her face as if trying to pull fatigue away. She took his hand, squeezed it and tried to smile. “They told me night shifts were hell in this place.”

“Arnos Hell,” he punned weakly. The old cemetery had been built in a valley known as Arnos Vale because it resembled the area around the river Arno in Italy.

“At least the lights are still on.” He squeezed her hand back, remembering the earlier incident in the corridor.

Paula said, “Look at the rest of the windows.”

Bob looked. The shutters had not come down on the other windows, only on the broken one.

“Maybe it’s a fail-safe security measure built into the system,” said Nancy. “If you break a window the shutter comes down to fill the gap.”

“That would make sense,” said Mandy. She sat on a swivel chair from where she had acted as a caustic spectator to Eddie’s attempts. Now she clumsily rolled the chair over to him and patted his knee. “Nice try though.”

“It doesn’t make much sense to me,” said Paula. “If all the shutters came down I could see it: but one? And the one shutter that would frustrate our attempts to get out. I don’t like it.”

“Are you suggesting a malign intelligence at work,” said Eddie. He sounded as if he half believed it himself.

“I’m suggesting it’s a possibility. Or even a probability.” Paula leaned forward and counted off points on her fingers for emphasis. “Look. One, we have seen a ghost. Either that or we were subject to some sort of mass hallucination. Two, he warned us that another spirit bore us ill will and wanted to destroy the building. Three, this was preceded by inexplicable happenings on our computer screens, voices from nowhere on the headphones and then the phones going down. Four, the doors don’t work. Five, we try to get out of a window and the shutter comes down, on that window only. Five by itself might be passed off as reasonable but with the other points” – she leaned back in her chair – “I think there is a malign intelligence at work.”

“And your conclusion?” said Bob, impressed by this structured analysis of the situation, which, he supposed, was what one learned at University.

“We should get off our asses and get the Hell out of here. Pronto.”

“Let’s have a vote again,” said Eddie. “All those in favour lean to the left, all those against lean to the right.

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