Don't

In the mid-seventies, a group of young teenagers went out on All Hallows Eve with the intent to frighten another member of their peer group. Their scratched-together costumes would not have frightened her, but the fishing rod scraping at her bedroom window did. So much so, in fact, she suffered a psychotic break so severe that she was institutionalised. She has been institutionalised ever since. 

*****

Transcript of a conversation between Dr Alex Lee [AL] and Dr Sarah Lipscombe [SL] in the High Tor Restaurant, Castleton. [All small talk, ordering, side orders, drinks, introductions and farewells, have been removed]. 

AL I read your paper about how a belief in the supernatural can cause psychosis. You’re not, I believe, suggesting that the supernatural exists –

SL Who says I’m not?

AL Sorry. I thought you were quite clear that it’s the mind, and only the mind, that is capable of destroying a human host. 

SL That’s the rational approach. So, tell me about your patient.

AL When she was fourteen, a group of her friends decided to re-enact a scene from Hammer House of Horror, which used to run on a Saturday night, after or overlapping Match of the Day.

SL Remember it well. Mum or Dad, sometimes both, down the pub, us with a packet of crisps, can of coke, scared to death on the settee. 

AL Yep. Only my patient never watched anything like that, hence the prank. She was scared to death of anything supernatural. Hated halloween, hated ghost stories. 

SL Count Dracula scraping on the window. I remember that one. You have to invite them in. Was she normal before this incident?

AL Just an ordinary teenager. But when her mother came to her room in the morning, she’d wet the bed and her hair, which had been almost black, was threaded with grey. 

SL So the kids unwittingly blew a fuse.

AL Yeah, and no one’s ever found the trip switch. 

SL So a simple case of being scared out of your wits?

AL I think there’s more to it. [hesitation]. For the purpose of flow, would you mind if we based our conversation on the assumption that ghosts —

SL Exist.

AL Yes

SL OK, but what makes you think that?

AL The morning after, the subject was sent to her parents’ bedroom while mum changed the bedsheets. Only there’s a scream, and she tell’s her mother there’s a body in the corner. An elderly woman. The house was an inheritance, and my patient’s grandmother died in the room while peering through the nets, nosing on the neighbours. The mother told me this later. The daughter didn’t know that. 

SL Umm. We’ve all read the case studies on people who’ve sustained a blow to the head and woke up fluent in a foreign language. Did she receive a blow to the head?

AL Nope. But the foreign language analogy is interesting, don’t you think? It’s not a flight of fancy to suddenly find yourself conversing in Macedonian. It’s a pretty solid indication that the brain is capable of anything. 

SL Perhaps those stories need to be fact-checked. So many myths circulate. 

AL I agree. But ever since that night, my patient has seen ghosts just about everywhere - and all the incidents that can be verified have been verified. For instance, when it became clear their daughter was in serious trouble, the parents called a taxi to take her to a facility. But she refused to get in because she insisted there was a body in the back, and that the body, clearly dead, winked at her. The taxi driver confirmed that at least one person has died in the back of his cab over the years. 

SL So in short, the dead people she sees are real?

AL Yes. 

SL And how does she live? Day to day?

AL Quietly. She rarely leaves her room. She’s been in a few facilities over the years, and every room she accepts is one where no one has died. So she can go in the garden, sometimes sits out in the sun, and she has plenty of visitors. She likes chess and card games, and I mean, she’s just so normal. If you didn’t know her problem, you couldn’t imagine there was anything wrong with her. 

SL So she’s self-aware?

AL In every respect. She’s on some pretty strong anxiety meds, but nothing else. All the evidence suggests that she really does see ghosts. They don’t roam, like the stories you read of Catherine Howard running around Hampton Court before her arrest and beheading. They appear to exist within the prescribed confines of where they died. So she’s safe in a place where nothing’s happened. 

SL It throws my paper to the wolves. 

AL Not really. Your version is more scientifically appropriate. We all know that everyone is born with a conjoined evil twin. Their mind. It’s how we make our living, Sarah.

SL Umm. You know, doing my research I came across a lot of unsettling evidence. In fact, I was glad to see the back of it. Your patient isn’t the only one, and although I admit it’s rare and usually triggered, some are born with the condition. It must be terrifying, real or imagined.

AL Would you be prepared to hand the research over to me? If it’s a new psychopathy, it deserves to be studied more widely. 

SL Don’t.

AL Really?

SL I chose not to pursue it, Alex. You should take my advice. In the end I deliberately elected to publish a paper which described the symptoms of phasmophobia and suggested some treatment approaches, but you yourself have hinted at the difficulties with taking it forward. Some of them aren’t making it up, so where does that leave us? We’re scientists. Beyond inducing a comatose state, there is no cure for being frightened to death. And if you spend too much time studying this phenomenon, it will get to you. 

AL Has it got to you, Sarah? 

SL No. 

*****

It rained heavily on the drive back to Manchester and Alex’s eyes were strained by the running water and the disembodied headlights. But his low mood was not weather-induced. He was concerned about his old colleague. She had changed markedly since her move to Derbyshire following a little problem with alcohol. Burn-out, as he would put it. Dealing with the mentally ill takes its toll, and he’s no stranger to the bottle himself. He doesn’t judge her, although he worries all the same. She was reluctant to part with her unwanted research papers, and several times during their meeting she seemed distracted by something over his shoulder. When he chanced a look himself, there was nothing unusual there. Just a family, but no one sat at the spot Sarah kept glancing at. It was as if no one wanted that particular seat, piled as it was with coats and un-wrapped presents. 

“Don’t,” she said. 

When he was a kid, (about the same age his patient went prematurely grey), he and his mates attempted ouija in his bedroom. They’d just got started, with the glass moving by its own locomotion, when his mother barged in and gathered it all up in her arms: the board, the glass, the scraps of lettered paper. 

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t invite them in.” 

At no point in his childhood, or since, had his mother expressed any views on the supernatural. But she was forceful about it, and because she was always so sweet and calm, he never tried that game again. 

He hears what Sarah was trying to tell him, because he’s not obtuse or unimaginative. He knows that his patient sees ghosts, because the evidence proves it. Several weeks ago, a night nurse was walking the corridors when he had a major heart attack and died. The patients were all locked down, and the matter was dealt with swiftly and with little fuss. No one knew, except the staff.

And yet, the following morning, his patient, housed in a different part of the building, happened to walk through that corridor and screamed. She saw him, lying there, long after he was sent to the morgue. 

He believes his patient. She sees them. And although she didn’t invite them, they got in anyway. 

Because of a prank that went all awry. 

He decides to leave it. His patient is cared for and has some quality of life. The institutional walls are all she has known for fifty years and counting. What purpose would it serve to try and prove something groundbreaking? A sop to his vanity which might unleash a curse on the world? He can't explain it, and what can't be explained is better ignored. It is the only way his patient keeps her sanity, and it's his job to preserve that. His clearly defined function.

*****

Sarah stays in the restaurant for some time after Alex has left. She orders another wine, and on second thoughts, asks the waiter to leave the bottle. She knows she is getting a little drunk; that she must cut a sad figure, an ageing woman sitting alone and trying not to move her lips in internal speech, or hum the rhythm of the dialogue out loud. The family has left, but the dead man is still there, slumped over the table. 

She settles her gaze on the view from the window. Her face does not reflect well. The sky is darkening, and in the gloaming, she sees a man standing on top of Penton Tor. She knows what he’s about to do, so she looks away. She wants to scream at the world, but psychologists don’t raise their voices. No, she won’t scream. That facility has been trained out of her. She wants to tell the world, in a strong, unequivocal voice, to leave all that alone because one day, perhaps when you are old, when you have a drink problem, or a drug problem, or a kids-leaving-home problem, or a husband-working-away problem, or a new-(old)-house problem, with a man-hanging-in-the barn problem, and a jumpers-on-the-pavement problem, she wants to tell the world that they will find you. They will fucking find you and they won’t let you go. 

All of human misery demands an audience. So don’t buy a ticket. 

She drinks more, knowing that she will later vomit purple in the sink. She carries on drinking until the owner turfs her out, and she wobbles home to the stone house in the dell where, over three hundred years, a demanding number of people have died. 

*****

‘Darling?’

‘Yessh.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘No. No, I’m —‘

‘Think I don’t know that voice by now, Sarah? 

‘Sozzz’

‘Okay, love, Don’t worry. I’m back tomorrow.’

‘It was me.’

‘What?’

‘It was me that scraped the fishing rod against her window.’

‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Sarah.’

‘Was me.’

‘Okay. Make a cup of tea. Watch Antiques Roadshow. Run a bath. I’m back tomorrow.’

‘Yesh Shir.’

She makes a cup of tea, although the mechanics of it are hard. She spends minutes deciding what to do with the tea bag before leaving it in the cup. She watches Antiques Roadshow, but there are three of everybody and everything. She knows this feeling and falls asleep on the settee. 

She’s awake at nine thirty. Her mouth is dry from the wine and snoring. She tumbles into the kitchen and makes a better cup of tea. She smokes a cigarette out the kitchen door, looking at the barn. And then she decides to follow the third part of her husband’s advice; to run a bath. Clunky plumbing. There is work to be done there. She pours another wine while she’s waiting and ignores the tea. Tomorrow, when Jerry is home, she’ll stop. 

In the bedroom, she moisturises her face. She used to be photogenic but she isn’t now. The ghosts have taken her light. Perhaps that is what they feed on. Bastards. Why can’t they just go quietly? Of course, most of them must do, otherwise she would be knee-deep in bodies. It is the irresolute, stubborn, pissed-off people who remain. She hates them.

Fact: if you’re a ghost, you were a bastard.

Fact: Cowards.

Fact: They can’t physically hurt you.

Fact: They can. 

She hears the bath water as she walks along the corridor. It is nearly full. She can tell. We can we all tell when a bath is nearly full. There are no words to describe the sound, but it’s tonal. There is a room at the end of the corridor where her youngest son stayed last week. He was happy in it, but she hears the screams of childbirth and the lamentations of a dead mother and child. She has never been in that room. 

She’s in her dressing gown, hair up in a scraped bun, face creamy. She smells the sharp tang of blood coming from the door, and she thinks, I could ignore this. I could just go to bed right now. But the tap is still running, so she must go in. 

She can hear her phone ringing downstairs. Could be Alex, (she knows he was worried about her), could be her husband, could be one of her children. But the tap is running and so she must go in. 

She leaves the door open to clear the steam. The water is red and there is a body in it, with wrists slit in the long, vertical, "I am not fucking around here" manner.

The body was hers.