Short Stories
Some special short treats from our authors
Darkness by Allan Martin
As a psychiatric social worker, I came up against many cases of psychological conditions brought on by the madness of our social order. A society which puts personal profit above any notion of morality or social benefit, and condemns those who are poor as lazy or incompetent; which sexualises seven and eight-year-olds to sell them clothing and is shocked when paedophiles emerge; and which demands that to be successful, women must be beautiful and men handsome. A society which drives people into madness because they cannot cope, or because they do not conform, or because they have no moral template against which to measure their attitudes or their behaviour. A society in which I was trapped as much as anyone else, and even though I recognised how our social order had destroyed the mental health of its most vulnerable, I would have courted the madhouse myself if I had tried to challenge it. Like so many, I tried to stay in my mental burrow and leave the mad world beyond my doorstep.
But the story I’m going to tell you now is all the more strange, in that, while much of it I could have explained away in terms of psycho-social factors and conditions, there remained beneath the surface strata that I could not comprehend, that were beyond the vocabulary which my training at the University of South-East Scotland had put at my disposal.
It began with the electronic tones of ‘Dixie’ from my doorbell. Back at the flat after a day’s work, I’d finished my bland microwave low-calorie lasagne, treated myself to a mini chocolate ice-lolly, put my feet up, poured myself a second glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and had just put Series 3 of Vera into the DVD player when the doorbell musician intervened. Flicking on the intercom I soon learned it was Steve Chalmers, and buzzed the main door open.
I’d known Steve for about five years. She’d had some trouble when she first arrived here, as Constable Stephanie Chalmers, and discovered that her male colleagues expected both domestic chores and sexual favours from her, and a few were rather persistent in their demands. While she was willing to share in the former, she was not prepared to offer the latter, and things became so tense that she needed time off for ‘stress-related illness’ and was referred by her GP to me. We developed a number of strategies to protect her personal space and toughen up her personality. One suggestion I made was to drop ‘Steph’ in favour of ‘Steve.’ Apart from the fact that ‘Steve’ was non-gender-specific, and the presumption would often be that it was masculine, simply hardening the consonant from an F to a V gave the name a tougher sound. Voicing the V was a more assertive act. I kept an eye on her after that, and it all seemed to work; she told her persecutors what to do with themselves, and settled down to get on with the job.
Steve wasn’t one for spontaneous visiting, so I knew something was up. With a comfy seat and a glass of wine in her hand, she told me. “You know, Anne, I wouldn’t come to see you out of the blue unless it was something important. The fact is, I’ve been having some bad dreams recently, and I’m not coping with them. I wondered if you could help.”
“I’ll do my best,” I reassured her, “First, tell me, are they about a particular event or person, or more vague or unfocused?”
“Yes, something very specific.”
“And you think this event triggered the dreams?”
“Yes. I’ve had nothing like this before, even, you know, when I first came here.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said, “Particular events or people that worry us are easier to deal with, because we know where to start. So take your time, and tell me about it. We’ll come to the dreams in a minute. First tell me about the event you think set them off.”
“OK. Twelve days ago, a week ago Thursday, that is, in the morning, we got a call at the station from a member of the public. They’d found a body. Andy Graham and myself were sent to check. 14 Chandlery Road, near the harbour, second floor flat above the Chinese takeaway. More of a bed-sit than a flat, and a dead girl on the bed.”
“Did seeing her frighten you?”
“No, not then anyway. She’d not been murdered, at least there was no sign of violence. I guessed a drug overdose. But there was no sign she was a user, you know, marks on the arms and so on. We soon noticed the bottle and the packets on the table. She’d taken about forty paracetamol tablets, washed them down with just over half a bottle of vodka. That was confirmed at the post-mortem. I was OK until I read the note. It was on the table too. It just said, ‘God help me. I can’t escape the darkness.’ The dead girl, she became a human being at that moment. It was as if I could feel her pain, deep down.” She drew a tissue from the box I always kept on the coffee table, and wiped her eyes. “Her name was Emily Shanks, she was seventeen. She’d only been in the flat two months. She’d been lying there several days before she was found. By a maintenance man sent by the housing association once a month to check all the flats. He was quite upset by it too.”
“What did you find out about Emily’s background?”
“Until she moved to the flat, she lived with her dad in one of those semis out beyond Watergate, overlooking the sea. The family moved there when they were new, not long after she was born. Emily was the only child. But her mother left when she was about eight or nine.”
“Any idea why?”
“No. There was no complaint to us about violence or anything. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course. She moved to a flat at the other end of the town, in one of those old tenements near the ropeworks. Didn’t have an easy time, started drinking heavily. We had her in overnight a couple of times. Died four years ago. Cirrhosis.”
“How come she didn’t take Emily with her when she left?”
“She wanted to. The father went to court to prevent it. Claimed she was unfit, prone to drunkenness, mentally unstable. Seems he’s in the same lodge as the sheriff, so he got an order, including a ban on the mother visiting. She could only see her daughter once a month, at a place chosen by the father, as long as there was a lawyer present, which she had to pay for. She only saw Emily a couple of times after that.”
“Tell me more about the father.”
“Lewis Shanks, now aged fifty-two, salesman at the caravan dealership out on the West Road. He was very cut up about Emily’s death, said he’d lost his only friend. He’d pleaded with her not move out. Knew she wouldn’t be able to cope. ‘Young for her age,’ he said, ‘and a bit simple.’ Those were his actual words. He said the note was childish, showed she wasn’t up to living on her own.”
“Did Emily have any friends? From school maybe?”
“Apparently a bit of a loner, quiet, didn’t join in much. A couple of girls told me years ago they’d asked her to come to their house for tea, but she’d turned it down, said her dad didn’t allow it. They thought she was afraid of him. They didn’t persist.” Steve shook her head slowly, then took another slug of wine.
“OK, Steve, now tell me about the dreams.”
“They started two or three days after we found her. They’re all quite similar. I see her, Emily, standing, just looking at me. Usually she’s at the bottom of the bed. Looking just the way I found her, except that her eyes are open. Then she speaks. ‘The darkness. The darkness. Help me out.’ That’s all. At least, variations of that. Then she reaches out her hand towards me. And screams. That’s when I wake up. Sometimes it’s me that’s screaming.”
“Have there been any which were different in any way?”
“Two nights ago I woke up from the dream, damp with sweat as usual, and rolled over in bed. And there she was, lying next to me, staring at me, something black dribbling from her mouth, I knew it was blood. She opened her mouth, it was like a void, as if I could look right down into darkness that was so deep. I felt myself retch, and woke up, switched the light on. That had been a dream, too, with a dream inside it. Last night I had to leave the bedside light on all night. And then I dreamt I was standing by my bed, the light still on, and she was lying on it, just like I found her. All of a sudden the light went out, and then I felt her arms round me and she was holding me tight and weeping. And I felt the weeping inside my head too. Then she kissed me, on the cheek, and it was so cold, the cold spread from her to me, spread right through my body, so that I felt heavier and heavier, that I was sinking through the floor, and I reached out my hand and grabbed hold of the bed, pulled myself towards it, hit my head on the bedside table, woke up again. Kneeling by the bed. And the impression of her body was still there, on the downie. I can’t deal with this, Anne. I don’t know where it’s going, what’ll happen next.” She tried to grasp the wine glass, but her hand was shaking so much, she stopped. “Oh God, I’m going to spill the wine now. Anne, what’s happening to me?”
“Steve, stay calm, we’ll sort this out. Tell me, do you feel she wants you do something. That she’s giving you a message?” I didn’t ask this because I believed in ghosts, but because sometimes the dream message can be just that, a message from the subconscious suggesting a path which the conscious mind suppresses.
“Yes, I’m sure of that. But I don’t know what it is. Maybe she doesn’t either.”
“One last thing. Do you have a picture of Emily?”
Steve rummaged in the over-the-shoulder leather bag she’d put by her chair, pulled out a folded A4 sheet, and handed it to me. On the top half was a photograph. Taken at the seaside somewhere, it showed three people, a big man with crude features, a thick moustache and a beer gut, a thin and sad-looking woman, with long straggly hair, and a child of perhaps eight or nine, who stared at the camera with a faint smile. “That’s Emily with her mum and dad. Obviously it was taken before the mother left. I think they’re on the beach at Stonehaven. You can keep that one. I found the original in Emily’s flat, and scanned it.”
I put the picture on my desk, next to the laptop. “Steve,” I said, “I really think you should stay here tonight. Leave the spare room door open so if you shout I’ll hear. I’ll leave my bedroom door open too. Tomorrow, I’ll think about what we can do, maybe phone a couple of people.”
That night the dreams did not come. But I was sure that for Steve it was not the end. The reality of dreams can be palpable, but these disturbed me. There was more here than I could understand. After Steve had gone off to her own place to change for work, I phoned my old tutor, Henrik van Lederer. He’d retired not long after I graduated, must be nearly eighty now. His voice was weaker than I remembered, but he was pleased to hear from me, and listened patiently to the story.
“My dear,” he said, when I’d finished, “Yes, you were right to call. You haven’t said it, but I agree with you. I don’t think it’s subconscious either. But a dead person, well, that’s difficult to believe, isn’t it. There are two possible theories we might look at here. One is some sort of telepathy. The idea is that there are strata of consciousness, levels of brain activity below those we recognise, where individuals communicate unspoken messages, by what mechanism we don’t know. Identical twins can often sense each other’s emotions, even thousands of miles apart. Maybe the so-called ‘second sight’ works the same way. This unexplained means of communication is what we may be dealing with here.”
“But from a dead person? Surely that’s not possible.”
“No. I agree. What’s more likely is that she has received the messages from someone close to Emily, someone who has been very emotionally affected by her death.”
“That could be the father. She met him, but only once.”
“That may be enough. If the subconscious message lodged in the deep levels of the brain, it could be enough to trigger these symptoms.”
“You said there were two theories.”
“Yes. The other is a little more, shall we say, speculative. This is the idea that time is not as chronological as we perceive, that in fact we force time into a sequential pathway, because in that way our brains can master it. Thus, the story we make of living life is an arrangement of synchronous pieces, chunks of reality without a date-stamp, if you like. If we couple that with the first theory, what Steve could be receiving are messages from the living Emily, sent at a time she was still alive.”
“But Emily never met Steve. Why would she target her?”
“I must admit, that’s trickier. But all I can say is that there are limits to what we know. Ghosts are an easy rationalisation of phenomena that we can’t explain. It’s the same with dreams. An old woman with the second sight may be a better interpreter than a psychiatrist with the complete works of Freud, Jung and Adler on his shelf.” He paused for a moment. I could hear pages flicking. “Listen, Anne, I’ve a suggestion of someone who might help, and she’s not too far away from you. Henrietta Guthrie. Mrs Guthrie is what they used to call a medium.”
“You’re not suggesting we have a séance, and ask Emily just what she wants?”
“Mrs Guthrie doesn’t project other people’s voices, or generate ectoplasm, or talk to a spirit guide who fought with Napoleon. No, she’s more a catalyst to this deep brain communication that I’ve been referring to. Why that is, I don’t know. But in her presence that sort of communication does seem to happen more readily. I’ll give you her phone number. And don’t worry, Anne, you won’t be swindled. She doesn’t charge for her services, indeed, she’s reluctant to offer them, and will need to be convinced that she can help.”
I phoned Mrs Guthrie, who asked me to come and see her later that morning. She turned out to be the wife of a farmer, whose home was not far to the north of our town, and a little inland. A plump and smiling woman, who’d put aside her bread making when I arrived. She explained that she had inherited her ‘gift’ from her grandmother, and only employed it if she really felt there was a need. Over coffee and scones, sitting at her kitchen table, I told the story again. After she’d heard it, she excused herself, and went out the back door. I assumed she needed to feed chickens or something like that, but then I saw her at the edge of the field that stretched away from the farmhouse up towards a line of gaunt trees on a distant ridge, staring into the distance. Following her line of sight, I saw a single standing stone, lopsided and black, as if it had erupted from the brown earth like an unwanted tooth. After perhaps ten minutes she returned, and offered her help. “But it won’t work with just your friend. We need someone close to Emily too, preferably the father. From what you say, he seems the closest. I don’t know if you could persuade him to attend. Some people can be very difficult.”
That afternoon I called in at the caravan dealership. Beyond a line of brand new caravans and camper vans, in a glass-fronted showroom, I found Edward Shanks. He was easy to spot, since I’d seen his picture, but the impression was depressing. He looked ten years older than his age, his short-cropped grey hair emphasising the battered contours of his puffy red face, the moustache had gone, and I couldn’t fail to notice the enormous stomach which bulged out to push itself against the edge of his desk. He also wheezed slightly as he spoke. But his eyes, red-rimmed as they were, I couldn’t read. I explained who I was and that I knew someone who had been involved in Emily’s case, and who felt that Emily was trying to send a message.
“I must meet her,” he said at once. “I loved Emily, she was my one joy in life, you know. I miss her so much. Yes, I’m sure she’s trying to talk to us from the other side, trying to reach me. To explain herself to me. You know she only left that silly note. Poor child, why did she ever leave me. I knew it would all end badly.”
I went on to explain to him that I knew someone who might make the communication happen more readily.
“You mean a medium,” he gasped, “Bloody swindlers! She’d suss out who we were, and pretend there was a message from the afterlife. ‘Everything’s fine. We’re having tea with Elvis and Mozart. Hope all well.’ Then charge us a bomb. No way.”
I explained that this wasn’t a medium, merely someone who seemed to have the ability to enable unusual forms of communication take place. She had a proven record of success, and would charge no money. Would he be interested in giving it a try? I gave him my card and asked him to have a think about it, and get back to me. I hadn’t got to the showroom door before he called me back.
“All right,” he said, “it’s worth a shot. Here’s my card. Call me when you need to fix a date.”
The meeting – I don’t like to use theword séance – was set for nine pm the following Monday evening, Mrs Guthrie explaining that night-time seemed to be best for such communications. In the days leading up to it, Steve reported that her symptoms had abated somewhat. She still had dreams, but the girl seemed only to be looking at her. As if somehow she already knew that the meeting had been set up.
I took Steve to the farmhouse in my own car. Shortly afterwards Mr Shanks’s big Volvo crunched up the gravel track. Mrs Guthrie led us past a room from which I could hear the sound of a TV game show, into a parlour which I guessed was little-used, and sat us round a heavy circular table of highly-polished red-brown wood. The thick lined curtains were closed and the room lit by two standard lamps in opposite corners.
“This was my grandmother’s table,” she explained, “It seems to work better sitting round this. Maybe her power is in it too. In the wood. Don’t you think wood and stone soak up memories? Natural materials. She sat Mr Shanks opposite herself, me on her left, and Steve on her right, thus opposite me.
“Aren’t we supposed to hold hands?” asked Shanks, “The table seems a bit too big for that. We’d have to stretch. Could be a bit tricky with my tummy, like.”
“No,” said Mrs Guthrie, “That doesn’t seem to make any difference. But lay them flat on the table, if you can. And just in case anyone’s worried about anything scary happening, be reassured that I have a pedal under my foot that switches the lights on and off. Although our session will be conducted in the dark, if anything untoward should happen, I’ll put the lights on right away. One other thing. My purpose here is only to facilitate communication between others. I don’t speak in funny voices or indeed take any part in your communication. My presence seems to help it, that’s all I know. When I turn the lights off, we should all be silent and try to empty our minds of the thoughts that we brought in here. If you can’t empty your mind completely, just try to hold an image in your mind of the person you want to communicate with. That’s all.”
I heard a click below the table and the lights dimmed and then went out. Darkness filled the room. All I could hear was Shanks’s wheezing breaths. For a while – I don’t know how long – that’s all there was. But the darkness seemed to thicken and lap around us, began to seem alive. I wondered whether I was imagining it, whether the setting controlled by Mrs Guthrie wasn’t triggering some primeval reaction deep down in my brain somewhere, the fear in primitive man of the things that were out there in the dark, things that were worthy of fear.
I shut my eyes, and tried to think of Emily. The picture came into my mind, the photograph of the family on the beach. I saw that the figures were moving ever so slightly, as if the wind was blowing at their hair. I looked closer, into the frame, onto the beach, and noticed one of them was talking. But it wasn’t Emily. It was her mother’s image that expanded to fill my head, and I heard her words, and at the same time I was speaking them.
“Edward, my Edward, my Edward, my Edward, my ...”
“Linda?” Shanks’s voice seemed to be muffled by the darkness, “What are you doing here? I don’t want to hear from you. You’re dead. Where’s Emily? Emily, where are you, where are you, my baby?”
Then another voice, but I knew it, it was Steve’s. “I’m here, Daddy, I’m in the darkness. It’s not good here in the darkness. Dark and cold. Cold and dark.”
And I was talking again, voicing the image in my head, as I was also aware that Steve was doing the same, projecting out of her head the voice that came into it, becoming the mouthpiece of Emily, as I was that of her mother. “What did you do to your baby, Edward? How did you show your love to her? What did I find that afternoon, when I came home early, and heard the crying, and saw what tore my heart out. I tried to save her, Edward, to save you both. But you wouldn’t let me. You used your friends to silence me, declare me to be mad. Then I really went mad, I obliged you, didn’t I. I looked for the darkness then, Edward, found it in alcohol, but it took a while. Years. Years, Edward, my years that shall be yours, my sweet.”
“Shut up, Linda, you bitch!” shouted Shanks, “You were always mad. You were never right in the head, never. Now shut up. Let me talk to Emily. Emily, where are you, where are you?”
“I’m here Daddy,” said Steve’s voice, “Right here, in the darkness. Mummy’s right, you see. I sought the darkness too. I tried so long to get away from you, but you always had a reason, a plea, an excuse, a declaration of love, a hug, a hot wet tongue licking me. My father. But when I got away, it was too late. I knew I was too soiled, good for nothing, not for life, only for darkness. And I found it. But it’s cold and empty, hollow, like a cavern of nothingness, darkness you can feel, crawling on your skin, creeping over you, seeping into every pore of your body, soiling you again and again. That’s no good, Daddy.”
“Emily, my love,” called Shanks, “What are talking about. Surely you love me, like I love you. Remember you’re Daddy’s special girl. Remember?”
Then we were both talking, Steve and I, Emily and Linda, the little girl and the sad woman in the picture. Except that I was the sad woman and Steve was the little girl. We both talked together, talking unison, we were as one. “We’re coming out of the darkness now, Edward, now that we’ve met you again, now that we see you again, now that we can be with you again, once and for all time, hold us Edward. Hold us.”
“Of course,” he cried , “Of course. My babies, my babies.”
And then I felt my self, my consciousness, extending across the dark, feeling like a ghostly tentacle for Shanks. I felt his hot brow, wet with sweat, ran my finger over his face, through the stubble on his cheeks and chin, caressed his eyeballs under their lids. And then I was inside his head, and I knew Steve was there too, and we were Emily and Linda, and inside his skull there was a maelstrom of blackness, swirling around so that we were cast hither and thither, spun around and turned upside down, and then sank deeper and deeper into his mind, into his consciousness, and below, into his unconscious, and below, into the depth that was thick as mud, as slime, and then I heard myself, and I couldn’t hear her but I knew Steve was saying it too. “Now the darkness is yours, Edward. Enjoy!” And we flew out of him, exploding out through his eyes, bursting the eyeballs and spraying the jelly and the fluid, and the lens twirling in the darkness as it sped away from him. And then there was a terrible scream, and the lights were on again.
I was still in my seat, my hands on the table, as was Steve opposite me. She looked exhausted and pale, and I could see trickles of sweat down her face. Mrs Guthrie sat impassively, motioning us all to stay still. Shanks was still in his seat too, his head downwards on the table, cushioned by his arms. A dark puddle of blood grew around it. All at once, with a deep groan, he raised his head, and we stared at him, looking where we knew his eyes should be.
And there they were, red-rimmed but intact. And we saw, too, that he’d scratched his head on both sides, deep rents from which blood seeped and dripped relentlessly onto the table.
“Put the light on!” he shouted, “Put the bloody light on. Get those bitches out of here! Both of them.” He stared around wildly. “Put the bloody light on! Get me out of this darkness!”
He never regained his sight. For the next four years he was kept in the psychiatric ward, isolated, as a danger to the others. He was in constant torment, plagued by visions the doctors could only guess at. He tore and bit at his own body, to destroy it if he could. But the doctors kept him alive, prolonging his torture until he managed, one day when his lunch was being delivered, to break out of his room and run through the ward screaming until he blundered into the cleaning trolley. Groping for a bottle of bleach, he drank it all, and was half way through a second before he began to writhe as the liquid burned him to death from the inside out.
Steve never had the dreams again. And she was different, too, after that, more assertive, more confident, more intelligent. She’s now a detective chief inspector, the best we’ve got.
And me. I couldn’t do my job any more. Dishing out psychobabble to the lost of our society, pretending there was a meaningful route for them. I spent six months in a Buddhist retreat centre near Arisaig, and came out a vegetarian and a revolutionary. Now I run a bookshop and cafe in Thurso, and sales of my book Capitalism as Psychosis keep my head above water while I write the next one.
(c) Allan Martin 2018
First published in iScot magazine, No. 40, April 2018.
