Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ereader ebook .txt) 📕

out of the wooden box. Haz knelt and immediately started making a fuss of the old boxer dog while I grabbed Webster’s lead from the hook outside my dad’s door. The juk gave a great, full-bodied yawn, and lead attached, plodded along loyally beside us.

We barely exchanged a word as we left the main gate and followed the boundary of the wood. Not a hint of movement among those trees. I guessed that whatever night creatures called this place their home had been frightened away by the glare and bellow of the fair. Breathing deeply, I caught the autumnal scent of bonfires on the air, and perhaps prompted by this, the image of a burning pyre ignited in my head—a figure lashed to a stake, screaming, writhing, caged in fire…

“I’m sorry, what?”

I realised Haz had been speaking.

“Nothing,” he murmured, slipping his hand out of mine. “Doesn’t matter.”

I was about to say something when Webster bristled at my side. I glanced down to find his hackles raised, his teeth bared. His attention was fixed on the blank façade of the house in front of us. Purley Rectory seemed to have loomed out of the clearing without me being aware that we’d even approached it. I told Webster to hush and followed Haz to the low iron railing that ran around the front garden, a stretch of grassless, flowerless scrub so desolate that even weeds appeared to shun it.

The house itself was a big, square, redbrick building in the style of the Gothic Revival. All sharp angles, decorative dripstones, and overly ornate flourishes. Planted into the steep, sloping roof, a regiment of towering chimneys stood like guardians on a battlement. It was a house of contrasts. Features leaped out and caught the eye: one window larger and misaligned with the rest, an eave hanging out of balance, a small, pagan face randomly etched into a cornerstone. The overall effect was one of clutter and disorder, as if the architect had been unable to bear contemplating any single part of his design for too long.

Above the overhang of the porch, a light shone at a first-floor window. With the rest of the house in darkness, that single bright chink gave the place a watchful air. I wondered if Miss Rowell was still busy inside, trying to comply with the production team’s request to make Purley more ‘old-timey.’ Just to the right of the rectory stood those expensive trailers, each with a ‘Ghost Seekers’ decal slapped onto the side.

Suddenly Haz turned to me, his eyes bright. “Did you tell her?”

Webster glanced between us and whined.

“Haz.” I sighed. “I’d never—”

“Then how’d she know? About what happened?” He crossed his arms, cupped his elbows with his hands. “About my dad.”

“Harry.” I tried to reach for him but he pulled back. “Think about it. You’re thirty-two years old. Like most people your age, you’ve probably lost an older relative at some point in your life, and what are the odds that person had grey hair and a smile a bit like yours? Tilda didn’t say who it was—it might have been your grandfather.”

“She said he had a hole in his body full of pain.”

“OK,” I agreed. “But did she say what kind of pain or where it was located? It might have been cancer or heart trouble, anything at all. I mean, who doesn’t have an elderly relative with aches and pains?”

“She said I took his pain away,” Haz said.

“She said you, ‘took his pain from him,’” I corrected gently. “A kind word or a joke can take someone’s mind off their pain. Do you see? This is how dukkerin—” He shot me a questioning glance. “Fortune telling, mediumship, call it what you like, this is how it works. The ‘psychic’ makes general statements that sound specific and you fill in the blanks.”

“So why did she say those things?” he asked. “To be cruel?”

I shook my head. “She might have thought it would bring you comfort. She’s been playing this role all her life, remember. I don’t even think she knows she’s making it up.”

Making it up? Then how did she know about Garris’ victims and about Lenny Kerrigan? Because those too had been generalities, I reasoned, and in the moment I had mistakenly interpreted them as specific knowledge. As a Traveller, Tilda was well aware of the legend of the Jericho freaks, a story refreshed in her mind by the recent anniversary in Bradbury End. Again, it was all coincidence, all illusion—the human mind seeking patterns in things that weren’t there.

“So none of it’s real,” Haz said. “Not Aunt Tilda’s dukkerin, not even the ghosts of this ugly old house?”

While Webster went to nose around in the undergrowth, I slipped my hand back into Harry’s. It felt ice cold as I threaded our fingers together.

“People make their own ghosts,” I said. “This world is dark enough without the spirits of the dead troubling anyone.”

“Perhaps.” I saw his jaw set tight. “But you’re not a total pragmatist, Scott. I know you’re not. I mean, why do you read books and write stories if this is all there is? Words, books, poetry, they move you in a way you can’t explain. It’s the same with me and music. So I suppose you’ll say that it’s all just neurons firing in the brain. Dopamine hits to help make this whole sad spectacle of life seem bearable so that we can keep the human race turning on its hamster wheel. But I know you sense it, just like I do. Some kind of essence we can’t explain.”

“I don’t deny people feel that way,” I said. “And yes, spirituality has inspired incredible art and music and literature. You could even say our entire culture is based on it. The search for something bigger than ourselves. But do I think it has any substance in reality?” I shook my head. “You’re wrong, Haz. I am a pragmatist. Show me evidence and I’ll believe there’s something more than those little firing neurons. Until