The Darkening Read Online Free PDF Page B

explained that there was no physical reason she could see for him to be having hallucinations.
    Not ten minutes later, waiting for a bus on New Cavendish Street, he saw a portly middle-aged woman gag on a sandwich and fall to her knees. ‘You all right?’ he called, leaping to help her up. His hands passed through her and he landed painfully on all fours on the gum-sticky concrete, shaving skin off his palms. He scrambled up, aware that a small crowd of commuters had taken careful steps backwards, trying not to look at him. The choking woman rolled on her back, sausage fingers to her throat, heaving and turning blue until she fell still . . . and vanished.
    Nicholas found himself apologising to the crowd, and stalked away on shaking knees to find another bus stop.
    He saw them every day after that. Curled broken in space, the invisible wrecks of crashed cars around their suspended bodies. Falling from buildings. Screaming silently as long gone flames turned their splitting skin red and black.
    He was sure he was going mad.
    And that feeling grew worse when he went back to work.
    The ‘you-all-right?’ winks and ‘lovely service’ pats on the back lasted a day or two but felt an eternity, so he was glad to get in a van and leave London. But the gladness was short-lived.
    His canny hunts led him into wet-throated cellars, dust-cauled attics, lean-boned garages, weed-choked caravans. Grey places, rich and still. Places that were disturbing to stand alone in when the light was fading from the damp sky outside. These gloomy rooms where he found his booty left such a harrowed feeling in him that he was never tempted to keep any of his finds for himself. Not one old Smithwick’s sign, not one dented Royal typewriter, Hignett cigarette card, Ekco bakelite wireless or Meerschaum pipe. Nothing. They were all strangely tainted. It was only after his fall down the steps and thump on the back of the head that Nicholas understood at last why those grim, quiet places where he found his dusty curios gave him the willies.
    They were haunted.
    Now, in those silent attics, garages, basements and back rooms, behind boarded windows or under musty eaves or paused on damp cellar stairs, he watched empty-eyed men throw ropes over rafters, thin farmers ease their yellow teeth over shotgun barrels, tight-jawed mothers stir rat poison into tea, young men slip hosing over car exhaust pipes . . . over and over and over. To make the horrors worse, he was invariably accompanied by the home’s new owner or executor, who couldn’t see the ghost and chattered about the charming virtues of the world’s love affair with all things old, about the latest foot-and-mouth scare, about the weather, unaware that lonely death was being silently repeated right before their florid faces. And the ghosts, in return, took no notice of their living landlords, spouses, children, enemies . . . yet they all watched Nicholas. Their dead eyes rolled to him. They knew he could see them.
    Nicholas stuck with his job for three weeks. Then, shaking and sleepless, he quit.

    He had felt perpetually like crying. The dead were everywhere. He had to tell someone.
    In the end, he confided in just three people.
    The first was his workmate Toby, a full-faced cabinet-maker who headed the team that prefabricated the stalls and bars of the Irish pubs that Nicholas would later line with books, rods, copper kettles and Box Brownies. Toby was a bit of a tree-hugger, often talking about how the wood under his hands felt alive, always reading his horoscope in the Daily Star . He seemed the sort of chap who might listen to a story about hauntings. Nicholas was most of the way through explaining his fall on the stairs, the attack by the dead boy with the screwdriver, his consequent calls to police and hunts through newspaper microfiche files to discover that in 1988 a Keith Yerwood had stabbed his girlfriend, Veronica Roy, nearly to death on the stairs of her flat - my flat! - when he