by Ashley Stokes
“McShine?” I said. The woman looked up from her whiskey tumbler, smiled. Relieved, I tucked my suitcase and rucksack under the bar and slipped onto the tall stool next to her. Only the Visitee would have responded to my knowing her user-name on r/eerie_england. It was on this subreddit that I first became aware of her situation, or as I prefer to think of it, her situation first became aware of me.
“Drink?” she said, gesturing across the optics and over to a flint-faced seadog of a landlord hunched over a tabloid at the end of the bar behind me.
I told her I do not drink. This is not strictly true, as you know, but I didn’t want anything to interfere with my perceptions during the gathering phase of a new Visitee relationship. You know how easily these things can go wrong. You said once that when you worked alone, before The Great Disorder, the Year of Fear, 100% of the Visitees – those visited by Things that Should Not Be – you had investigated were obvious fakes and hoaxers with the odd credulous loon thrown in. They could get a little salty at the dry, withering tone of your exposés, the reports for your paranormal blog you readily shared on eerie_england. It was these pieces, their wit if not their kneejerk skepticism, that drew me to you in the first place, initially as just someone to DM during the year of Isolation, the year we hid from the violet spores. Of course, as we know, since the Disorder, since we started our ill-fated collaboration, me the psychic detective girl and you the paranormal investigator I called The Paranormaliser, visits became more frequent, sightings and postings more bizarre, and often much harder for you to dismiss, the logical explanation harder to find, locating the hoax more vexatious. My hunch was that McShine wasn’t hoaxing. I knew that if you were here beside me, you would have assumed that she was. That was, of course, the way that we worked, the balance we struck.
I insisted on a soft drink. McShine ordered me a Pepsi, made small talk, icebreaker stuff, told me she liked my hair, that there was something Sixties-Catwoman going on there. She liked my glasses, too. I did not say I liked the look of anything about her. I am past liking.
Red neon spot lamps made it feel like we were not holed-up in White Ness, the east of England seaside town that more than just time forgot, but in a dive in East Berlin or Sex-Tourist Amsterdam. My mind’s eye gamed me into visualising White Ness as not struggling under the oppressive greyness of a November afternoon, but thumping at the heart of night, buzzing at a witching hour. It felt dark outside when it was not dark outside. The bar was called Red Sunrise. I’d eventually found it in a basement below a burnt-out-husk of a casino once called the Silver Rose. I’d lost internet as soon as I arrived in White Ness. I was dead to Google Maps. I had wandered the resort’s deserted streets for some time, the sea hushing and hissing in the distance, until I found the Visitee’s appointed rendezvous.
McShine insisted I call her Ally. We clinked glasses. I mentioned that Red Sunrise is a curious name for a bar.
“When I was a kid,” she said, “this was the snug bar of an old-man pub upstairs called The Keel Haul that was next door to the casino. Then conspiracy iguanaheads burned the casino down and burned the pub with it. It burned down even more when its ruin was struck by lightning during the Great Disorder. I wasn’t living here either. We sat out Isolation in Jane’s flat in London. This place is new. Phoenix from the flames. Some bright spark’s business plan. Banking on the more interesting characters in Shite Ness always needing somewhere to hang-out and be heartbroken together.” She nodded over her shoulder at the unoccupied nooks and niches. “There’s plenty of heartbreak here, but rarely anyone interesting. Anyway, the name refers to red sky at night, Sailor’s delight, red sky in the morning, Sailor’s warning.”
“I thought that was shepherds warning?” I said.
“It means, don’t leave. You are here for the duration.” She laughed, made herself laugh to reassure me in some way. I could sense in her what I’d recently, since you left, started to experience. I called it Vacancy. Her Vacancy was still with her, in her, in the room and clinging, yearning and threatening to overwhelm her. I knew then I had been right to connect with this Visitee. It was right to continue our work, despite what had happened before, despite what happened to us, and to you during our last investigation, and to me. It was right that I continue on my own, without you, despite the Vacancy I was myself experiencing.
I said to Ally, “You’re sure Jane is still here?”
“You have found people like Jane before?”
I nodded, said I had. You would know I was not strictly telling the truth here. You would know that what I should have explained is that I have, in the past, found traces, or more accurately, vestiges.
I first became aware of The McShine Situation when, about six months after you left, I started to lurk again on r/eerie-england. You might have assumed I would have given the subreddit a wide berth, seeing as it was one of your practices to find Visitees there, rather than letting them come to us. You know that eerie-england had led us to the abandoned estate at Crobe, the eye hospital, the ruins of the Orgar Madhouse, the Chalk Ghost under Wallend Spur, the Black Lamia of Lake Mott and ultimately to Hinwick where I abandoned you and you subsequently vanished. You know these excursions had an effect on me. I deteriorated after each one: the Ghost ripping through me, the eyes of the lurker in the trees. You know I wanted us to stop the paranormal investigations.
Still, I returned to eerie-england mainly to keep up with the fevered discussions surrounding a 1998 British found footage horror film called The Claustrophile that seems to mean a lot to some of the madder boys but also seems not to have been released at all. While browsing for new Claustrophile gossip, I came across the first of three posts that would come to outline what I call The McShine Situation.
McShine continued to say that during the nights, her girlfriend became increasingly concerned that someone else was in the house. Then someone was in their bed alongside them. She experienced sensations she should not have. On the third night she said she had woken up in the dark and from the window saw a house on the beach that had not been there before. She was trying to focus on it when someone pulled on her hand as if to lead her away. Her screaming woke McShine. McShine then described how, after a trip to the beach the next day, where it was categorically proved that no house was there, the girlfriend had started to speak in a language unknown to McShine or her mobile’s translation app. The next morning the girlfriend was gone, and the internal doors of the house, which she’d closed to ward the apparition away from the bedroom, and the front door were all wide open. The girlfriend had not returned. The girlfriend was still missing.
The second and third posts were photographs, the first taken by McShine, the second allegedly recovered from the girlfriend’s left-behind iPhone. The first shows a gently sloping patch of rough lawn stretching down to a shingly beach, groyns in the middle-distance, the island in White Ness Bay, the kidney-dish-shaped Shipwreck Head poking up in the far-distance. The island’s outcrop is a dark hump in the second photograph, taken at night, the same shot but in the foreground a squat black house, its windows lit up, its outline smeared and blazing with glare.
The usual suspects on eerie-england – Urgh-Urgh-Urgh, Crestedblack19, Rocknrollpangolin – went into either analytics high gear or heresy-hunter-killer-mode. They all assumed The McShine Situation was all a bit of fun, a hoax, until two days later, several national newspapers reported a Jane Moffo had vanished from the White Ness area. Of course, we were all used to vanishings by then. As you know, thirteen percent of the world’s population ‘Drifted’ during the Disorder, were overcome by spores and the Purple Haze delirium induced by breathing them in. Millions wandered off in a depersonalized state, died of exposure or accident or simply vanished. It was easy to be inured to the fate of Jane Moffo. It was easy to assume she was just another casualty of the post-Disorder world. A lot of people reported seeing things, videoed things, their CCTV and dashcams capturing things that should not be, that want us. The Standing Dead. The Vlox Shapeshifters. Things from the other side of time. Old things allowed back in. Creatures from my mind’s eye that I thought only I could see. That someone had simply wandered off was low-key, routine, uncataclysmic, semi-drab. For me, though, being aware from a young age of Things that Should Not Be, sensing them, fearing them, there was something compelling about Jane Moffo, something eerie, something sad. There was something about her that made me feel I could help. You and I: we did want to help people.
This is when I DM’d McShine. I knew this is what you would have done. You would have consulted me, but you would have proactively sought out McShine whether I’d protested or not. She was a Visitee to be helped. I am too sensitive and need to face my fears. This was the thinking that led us to Hinwick and its filthy canal.
In Red Sunset, Ally made sure that the landlord wasn’t looking and passed to me a padded envelope. It was full of banknotes, and a long key that felt almost burningly cold.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I am not a service. You don’t pay for me. In fact, a transaction might interfere with my…”
“Think of it as a cleaning fee. You’ll need to do some of that, too.”
“I don’t want it.”
“If you want more afterwards, just ping me.”
Outside Red Sunset I stood and waited while Ally rummaged in her parka for a vape she didn’t find. It had started to rain, at first, long grey streaks like pencil strokes, then a cold, hard barrage. We put up our hoods and marched, past the whitewashed windows of shut-up ice-cream parlours and tattooists, theme-pubs, strip clubs, penny arcades, dead chip shops, a blackened gift emporium, piled high inside with hundreds of burst inflatable floats and toys.
“They were hanging on here,” said Ally, “until the…you know. And there were big fruit farms but when they went, there were no pickers to drink the bars dry at weekends.” She pointed out a minimarket that still traded, and a post office that doubled as a police station. “If you get sick,” she said, “message me. If you rely on local services, you might as well be waiting for Godot. And I can’t guarantee you won’t catch something exotic in that house.”
I wanted to ask about her aunt, what was she like, any history of oddness, but I realised the implications of what Ally had just said.
“You’re not coming with me?” I had assumed she was not leaving me there alone.
She paused. Rain hammered on our hoods. The town was thinning out, the houses further apart now, many hopelessly for sale and many boarded up. We were clearly at the outskirts. She tried to take my hand but I did not want her to take my hand.
“I can’t go back there,” she said.
“It would help,” I said. “If Jane wishes to be unfolded, it is to you she will unfold, not me. The love-bond acts as a counter-magnet.”
“Who says we are in love? I just liked the taste of her humous.”
“I can feel it,” I said. “You are dishonest not just with me, but with her and to yourself.”
“You’re weird, Rowena,” she said. “Follow this road. A mile. Keep left. You’ll see it. Salt House.”
I stared up the road, in the direction I was supposed to follow, and decided to ask Ally to reconsider. I did not desire her company, only her Vacancy’s throb. When I looked around, she was gone. I could feel fear in the swirl of rain where she’d been standing, fear in the patter and crack of it. I had the money. She did not know me other than my first name. We used Reddit Chat to communicate. I could have taken the cash and ran. I should have. You would not have.
It was about a mile and a half walk from the rubble of what would have once been a mid-sized supermarket on the edge of White Ness, then along a coastal road and a dry-stone wall to the only house left. No traffic. Heavy rain. If anything the rain was heavier and the key colder in my hand by the time I reached the porch of Salt House. I was sodden. It was hardly a house, a pebble-dashed stub of a bungalow more abruptly-promoted chalet or outdoor toilet block than a house, a home. In the hall, its period 1950s linoleum was still in place. A row of yellow rubber-ball-tipped coat hooks alarmed me somehow. Pronounced smell of mould. Pronounced smell of damp. The light indoors had a brackish, silvery quality that made me feel like I was wading through a Soviet surrealist film. In the kitchen the cooker and the fridge had been removed. I would have to walk into White Ness every day to eat or buy groceries. There was no shower in the bathroom, but there was hot running water. Whether it would run long enough for a bath, I did not yet know, and I would want to bleach and scrub that bath before I sat in it. There was a lounge with sepia-coloured oblongs on the walls where pictures or mirrors once hung. Rainwater like slugs trails slid down the window. Looking at the sea was like looking through lavatory glass. I never returned to this room. I let it be.
The bedroom was in a better condition, perhaps because Ally and Jane had been living here five weeks ago and had tidied it up, made the bed, changed the lightbulbs, dehumidified. I put down my bags and looked out in the direction of Shipwreck Head. There was some dark lump out there that I assumed was the island. From this angle, Jane had seen a house on the beach. More than this, she had taken a picture of it that did seem bona fide, worth investigating anyway, despite some on eerie-england claiming it was taken in the past before subsidence had moved the beach a little further inland, or sea waters had risen. I picked up my case, lay it on the bed, unzipped. If this house stood abandoned where we lived, in our neighbourhood, it would be, by now, trashed by iguanaheads, blitzed and smothered by graffiti, if not burnt out at the end of some wild punk orgy or sham-ritual. I wondered why they had left it alone. The bored youth. The doomed youth of White Ness. It was not a comfort to me. Whatever it was that kept the iguanaheads away, I could feel it, too. It was close to me, but not close enough to name. I could not tell whether a man or a woman or something other than man or woman. I missed you. You would have convinced me this was all in my mind. At the end of our initial Reddit Chats, I promised Ally I would stay here for three days to look for Jane and Jane’s beach house. I took off my shoes and my wet clothes. I toweled myself down and found my robe in my case. I hooded up, sat crossed-legged on the bed. I closed my eyes. I started to look for Jane and any cracks or folds. It look a while. Outlines were thick and deep. I faded into rooms within rooms and the violet outlines of ancient places. There were other people’s memories here, and the scratches and droppings left by those who feed off memories. Tall lilac shadows drifted by, none of which unfolded, revealed themselves, spoke, tempted, longed for me, showed me they were Jane Moffa and what was done to Jane. I tumbled through a web of purple stars in deep tunnels a long way down.
I snapped my eyes open. It was the deepest dark of the night. Silence. I was stiff in my lotus position. Now I could sense them here, Ally and Jane. They were snuggled up in the bed behind me, wearing pyjama bottoms and T-shirts against the October chill and the house that had not been heated since the Disorder. Ally was the outer spoon, one arm draped over Jane’s waist, asleep, her breathing a purr in Jane’s ear. We used to lay together like this; we could sleep together like cats in a basket. Jane was awake, though, sensed someone, something somewhere else in the house, darkness shifting, distilling, solidifying. I shook my head, let my hood slip. I sensed it, too. It had moved from the lounge. It had something of the bearing of the Chalk Ghost of Wallend Spur about it, though I was aware that the sensation that one’s icy thrust had left with me never corrects and all I was feeling here was the slow rhythm of its aftershock. One thing can infiltrate another thing’s aura. Whatever it was, it was outside the bedroom door now. I was not afraid of it. I stood. Flexed. Stretched. I could not feel its presence now. By the window, I looked out at the beach. No beach house. No lights. I sat back down. I shut my extra senses down, those insights and instincts that you would insist, however playfully, however well-meant, are only my overactive imagination, mild schizophrenia, extreme synesthesia, the effect of too much weed when I was a teenage graveyard-huddle goth girl in fishnets and a Cure T-shirt, or some unresolved childhood trauma that together we did often try to locate and interrogate. The house was quiet. I was left with my own Vacancy. Vacancy: some restless, unresolved person or conflict that however hard we try to find closure, to leave behind, still wishes to take form, to be, that wants us back.
The next morning, I walked into White Ness in the rain. I didn’t find White Ness frightening in the way that Hinwick was frightening. White Ness is a shit hole abandoned to the sea and the rain and the fires. Hinwick radiated evil. It blackened my blood and my spit just being there. I wandered the streets and wished I had you to help me balance this case, The McShine Situation, explore the rational explanations. You would have wanted two of these disproved before we waxed supernatural. One: Jane had hoaxed the beach house pic to fake her own death to escape some unpleasant personal circumstance. Two: Ally had done something to Jane and hoaxed the beach hut pic to distract from this.
In Red Sunset, I propped up the bar at midday and ate a basket of scampi and greasy crinkle-cut chips. The place was desolate, just me and the old landlord geezer. Quentin’s the name but his friends call him Quartzy. Talked like he might have been a lot of fun in his era.
I told him I was staying at Salt House. His eyes lost their shine. He said, you know she died there, Old Prudence Elder. Starved. During Isolation. You know how the oldie off-liners often perished. Starved in her armchair. She’d usually spit at you just to say hello, the old cunt. That missing girl, the niece’s squeeze … same house … same fingers … same beach.
That night, after dark, I robed up and typed a long DM to Ally, in devil’s advocate mode, posing what I assumed would be your two rational explanations and Quartzy’s phantasmagorical take, before I remembered I had no signal at Salt House. I then added that I felt the house was making something worse for me, and I would not be staying the third night. I would return her money, donate it to charity or come back later to Salt House with her or with a team. I was sure I could recruit some willing paranormals on eerie-england. I did not say I had felt Jane’s Vacancy. I did not say that the presence in the house was not Prudence unless Prudence was never Prudence and always otherly, a Vlox or some shapeshifting entity that you don’t believe in. My gut said Prudence was doornail-dead and happy in her grave. Whatever hovered and eavesdropped in Salt House came from elsewhere. I did not say that my own Vacancy was attracting it, whatever it was. I had been brooding, analysing, trying to advance my understanding of Vacancy. Jane, Ally, me: we have Vacancy. No sense in the air or the mould that Prudence had Vacancy, too. I kept all talk of Vacancy to myself. My idea of Vacancy was, at that moment, half-developed, still to be evolved.
I would send the message as soon as I could tomorrow, in Red Sunset en route to the bus station and my ride back to what passes now for civilization. I put on my sleep mask, hooded up, rolled on my side. I was leaving part-way through an investigation again. This is what I did in Hinwick. This is why I am alive, and you are dead.
Something broad-shouldered and naked was standing at the foot of the bed but when I tried to rouse myself to face it, it slunk off. I pulled up the mask. Some faint light that could be the moon drifted in through the window but sleep took me back before I could get out of bed. And in my mind’s eye, I was then walking up an avenue of London plane trees holding my uncle’s hand, heading for a display flat he wanted to show me even though I am ten years old. I was alone in the tunnel underneath the Tower That Fell on Wallend Spur and the Chalk Ghost came from behind me and into me and I almost vomited up my insides. Then you said this never really happened and I was wandering the corridors of that hotel in Hinwick, trying to breathe, trying to declog the stink of black mould in that room, making the decision to leave you there, exhausted with not being listened to, exhausted by you not believing in the things that I knew were so real that they could touch me, mesh with me and leave some part of them inside me and take some part of me away forever. I still wanted you to believe me. It was back again. I felt its vague outline and weightless tread around the bedframe. I seemed to sink into some fathomless darkness. When I awoke, I was warm and felt like I had surfaced from a drinking binge blackout and did not know what I had done or who I had woken up beside, what mess we had made. I shifted, I wriggled. I had squirmed out of the robe but not the mask. Something kissed my neck and my ear and all along my spine and there was urgent, heavy breathing and you rolled me on my side and lifted up my thigh, pressed down on my other thigh with your palm, slowly drew your nails across my skin, exerted pressure, caressed, kissed lower and lower, towards me, and you felt exciting and necessary until I realised that it was not you, that you were still dead, drowned in Hinwick Canal, and that the breathing was not your breathing, that it was the slow crash of the waves and beneath me was not mattress but beach shingle. It was no longer touching me but it had not gone. It wanted to remove my mask but I did not want it to. If it took off the mask, I would only see what it wanted me to see. I could already sense the house on the beach, its vast chambers and passageways, rooms beyond rooms. I was being led by my Vacancy. My Vacancy had not left me and I had not left my Vacancy. My hand was in my Vacancy’s hand. My Vacancy slipped off my mask. It lifted away on the breeze. The breeze against me was not the best of it, nor the stones against my bare feet. We stepped forward, hand in hand. I opened my eyes. Inside the house, the lights flickered, the lights dazzled. Something dwindled. Something surged. Something shimmered at the threshold, someone else. It wasn’t Jane yet. Jane was Ally’s Vacancy and you are mine. My Vacancy will find Ally one day even if Jane’s does not, though it will. We will all fold into one. I sensed someone wanted me to escape here. I knew they wanted me gone. I understood. I got it. If you were here, it was something I could prove to you. Prove. Hammer home. My Vacancy let go of my hand. The one on the threshold crept forward to keep me and, to the background whoosh of waves and skitter of shingle, some sort of exchange was made in the dark.