Six of the Best Page 6

  Vinny beamed from ear to ear and began to descend the stairs. Three at a time he took them, and grabbing his bag from the front room made his way to the front door as we descended after him.

  “Well now!” he almost shouted, opening the door and stepping on to the path. A small white something moved in the bushes behind him. “I am totally shocked. Amazed, in fact! So far this evening I have recorded” He hesitated for a moment as a small transparent mouse scampered across his feet before disappearing into the hedge, “Yes. Erm, where was I? Oh yes! So far I have recorded four instances of total materialisation, one case of ectoplasm; two prolonged experiences of what are best referred to as advanced other worldly experiences. Most gratifying!” He tapped his notebook before placing in to his black bag which was now slung about his shoulder. “He paused for thought, seeming to be completely astonished at his experiences. It was if all his Christmases had come along at once.

  “On the down side” he continued, frowning, “I have also had to endure a conversation of what must have been an hour and a half concerning the best way to grow cucumbers.” He paused to think for a while and he looked a little embarrassed. “I also discovered that I’m not very good at poker.” He frowned once again, and patted his pocket. “Lost ten quid, I did.” With that he went down the path with a cheery goodnight and as he turned in to the street called back, “I’ll be back tomorrow.” and he was gone.

  “Don’t you even think of bringing him back tomorrow night” I snarled at Dai and closed the door.

  That night and the rest of the day it got worse. It seemed as if I could not walk in to any room in the house now without coming across (or walking through - and believe you me, that isn’t pleasant at all) yet another ghost, whether it be human, animal or in some very odd instances vegetables as well. I even threw the eggs away out of the fridge as a precaution. Mind you, three of them seemed to have left of their own accord anyway. I even noticed that the postman seemed to be leaving our mail by the garden gate instead of putting it through the letter box.

  I had had enough. Dragging a reluctant Dai upstairs we went to have a word with dad.

  “Now dad” I said, “We’ve had enough now. I didn’t mind the fuss before because it was nice to see you.” The four cards players had stopped mid game and were looking at me in surprise. Dad dropped his ghostly cards on to the table, where they lay shimmering in just the kind of way that playing cards don’t. Dai seemed to be hovering by the door just in case. “But all you do is sit there playing cards all day.” Dad looked disappointed at me when I said that, but I had had enough by now. “So I want you to go. There’s spooks and ghosts and what have you all over the house. You’ve opened a doorway dad and I want to close it after you on your way out.”

  Dad looked even more disappointed now but then he just sighed and picked up his cards again.

  “It’s about the sandwich, isn’t it? He said, and smiled. “Well if it makes you feel any better I’ll have a cheese and pickle. I would imagine the boys here would enjoy one too.” The other three ghosts nodded eagerly and started their game up again.

  “Not that we’ll be doing much eating of them” giggled Thomas, and the other three joined in.

  Dai heard the snort from me and instinctively backed away a pace or two. “That’s it!” I yelled, and the card game stopped briefly, before one of them (I am not sure which one. The red mist had descended by now) tutted loudly. As loud as I could (and I saw Dai flinch from where he now stood by the door) I roared. As loud as I could. I could take no more. This had to be sorted out here and now.

  “MOTHER!” I yelled, as loud as I could. In front of me the card game came to a sudden, blinding stop. There was a sound like the tolling of a bell and a stiff wind shook the curtains in the room. At least dad had the sense to look afraid, and Dai didn’t seem to be having any trouble joining in either.

  Slowly, before me, the shape of my mother began to materialise until she stood in front of me, though I must say that she was no more solid looking than dad was. She definitely looked a lot crosser however.

  “Howell?” She growled, using dad’s Christian name. “What on Earth do you think you are doing?”

  Dad looked just more than a little taken aback.

  “Well now, Mother” he started but she was not having any of it.

  “Don’t you mother me, you annoying little man. Now get you back to where you should be!” and with a wave of her hand dad - and the card game, suddenly vanished. All at once the whole house felt, well, more peaceful somehow.

  “And just you wait until I get back there” she shouted at nothing at all, but everything at once. “You’ll be for it!” and then she turned and smiled at me. Besides me Dai looked as if he was approaching the beginning of a short but eventful fainting fit.

  “Sorry about that darling.” she smiled at me, and reached to stroke my face. Of course, I felt nothing. But I did. I felt all of it.

  “You know what he is like. Never known a man get bored so quickly. But don’t worry about him sneaking back. Believe you me; I’m going to keep him more than busy!”

  Slowly she began to fade, and as she did so she gave me one last smile.

  “Mum? I asked eager to clear something up. “What’s all that about the knitting, then?”

  Just before she went she smiled even broader. I recognised the smile from when I was little. That and the tone too.

  “Don’t be silly, Gwen darling” she said as she faded to nothing. “Where on Earth do you think clouds come from?” Then she was gone.

  Beside me Dai swooned and at last succumbed to the forces of gravity. Luckily the bed caught him.

  Now all this was a few years back now and since then not a single unusual thing has happened in the house to either of us. Just as well, too! Strange really, but it took us both a bit of time to get back to normal what with all that had gone on and all. Vinny took some convincing not to come back as well, though I put my foot down about that one!

  Funny thing is that to this day neither of us can bear to watch a horror film on the telly or anything to do with ghosts or the like. Even on Halloween when the trick or treaters come around we turn all the lights off and hide. Dai was a bit disappointed at first. Used to look forward to his annual presenting of his chocolate covered sprouts to all the kids, he did. Great big kid himself as well though, if you ask me!

  One thing both of us have begun to enjoy together though also brings us a bit of a laugh and sometimes we both stand in the garden, wondering. Its clouds, of course.

  Aren’t clouds just wonderful?

  The Ghost Next Door

  Me dad use to say that in Liverpool there was always a ghost next door. As a kid I spent many a dark night huddled under the covers in case the ghost from next door decided it liked our house better, because we didn’t seem to have our own ghost so there must definitely be one at number eleven. But as I grew up I began to realise that what he had really meant was that Liverpool as a city was full of stories about ghosts. Scousers love stories, of course, and if they include a ghost or something unexplained happening, all the better. I suppose it's that mix of Irish and Welsh as well as God knows what else. It just seems to invite tall tales.

  Dad even had a tale of his own. When he was a kid him and his mates used to play down by Garston docks and there was an abandoned warehouse there that was pretty much just bits of roof left with no walls at all. Just a few metal beams holding what was left of the roof up. Bloody health and safety would have a fit at the thought of kids being able to knock about there these days, but when me dad was a kid that was where they used to play. There was even a little watchman's hut there that was more or less still intact even though it hadn't been used for years and one day they were all playing there when the watchman turned up, and waving at them he went into the hut. Now they all thought that this was a bit odd because, as I say, there was nothing for him to actually watch over any more and after a while they plucked up courage to go and knock on the door to the s
mall shed and ask him what he thought he was doing.

  I imagine you probably know where this is heading, because of course when they finally got fed up of knocking on the hut door and opened it the small shed was completely empty. In fact, it looked as if it had been empty for years. There was no other way out of there and they hadn't taken their eyes off it since the old bloke had arrived. Needless to say, they got out of there pretty quick!

  So you see, everyone in Liverpool has a ghost story to tell. Everyone seems to have a favourite one, and sometimes they grow in the telling. It would be fair to say that most of them are complete nonsense, but then you never know. You just never know. That's the hook.

  My mate Jack swears he was followed home once after a night at the pub by a tall white shape that stopped when he stopped and started up again when he did. He had however sunk a fair few jars that night and these days he’s more likely to laugh it off as the effects of a dodgy kebab that he just happened to be attempting to get home in one piece at the time. I've noticed that. It's a bit strange but when something like that happens whoever it is can't wait to tell anyone that will listen all of the gory details as soon as they possibly can. Give it a few years though, and they began to shrug it off. It was a dodgy pie. I was off me head on Guinness. How was I to know it was the bizzies following me? So on and so forth. Give it a few years more and then they'll deny that it ever happened at all, and even sometimes even accuse you of making it up in the first place!

  Still, there we go. Liverpool is full of stories, some of them involving ghosts, many of them not. It's the ones involving the ghosts that I'm going to tell you about now. Well, sort of.

  When we were kids there were two of us who lived in the same street and we were as close as you could get. His name is Jack. We used to play together, go to the same school together and that carried on when we were teenagers. We had ideas of forming a band when we were about fourteen or fifteen, but neither of us could play a musical instrument so that put the kibosh on that pretty much. I'm Peter, and as I say, me and Jack were as close as that. Of course when we left school and set out looking for a job we didn't exactly have a great deal of choice about where we were headed for career wise. We were expected to bring a wage in! I found myself working in a garage, being taught how to service cars whilst at the same time having to clean the bloody things in the showroom at least twice a week. Some kind of general dogsbody is what I was, but it brought some money in so that was the end of it. Jack got a job in the factory down the road not far from where we both lived. Mind you, I think it would be fair to say that he hated his job as much as I hated mine!

  Whatever money we brought in was dutifully handed over to our parents each week and we were given a few quid back which was just enough for a few nights out on the beer and perhaps a few other bits and bobs every now and then. It seems a whole lifetime away now, but at the time we were both happy and stayed close friends even though we now more or less worked full time. Isn’t it funny how time flies? I carried on working in the garage for a few years, Jack in the factory. He was the first to get married. I followed him a few years later. Mind you, he was the first to get divorced as well. Sadly, I then proceeded to follow him down that particular route myself a few years later too. No kids for either of us. Just as well, I suppose. Throughout all of this we both remained firm friends. Couple of pints on a Friday night and maybe a darts match mid-week if we could be bothered. If not just a few jars and a chat.

  On my thirty ninth birthday I was made redundant and found myself out of work for probably the first time in my life. I had my own little place that had more or less been paid for with the money my mum and dad left me when the last one of them passed, so at least I had a roof over my head. Six months later Jack was made redundant too when the factory he had worked at for all his adult life suddenly upped sticks and moved to Holland. Nice. So there we were. The pair of us both forty next year, out of work and on the scrap heap. Life is funny, isn’t it? How had it all come to this? Time passes so quickly, doesn’t it? First grey hair is never far away! Nevertheless every dinner time Jack and I would wander down to the pub and nurse a half so we could compare our efforts to find a job. That was the plan. Most of the time we just talked about what had been on the telly the night before. Jobs were hardly growing on the trees. That was a fact.

  On this particular day we were talking about some series that was going on at the minute about the supernatural and we got around to talking about ghosts and what have you, and how when I was a kid my dad always used to say there was always a ghost next door in Liverpool, and how I had taken that literally at the time. We were both having a laugh about it when suddenly Jack went very quiet. We had both been talking over the course of the last few months of setting ourselves up in a business of our own, but to be honest I was a pretty average mechanic and Jack, although a dab hand at packing meat, was in just about as much demand as I was. There was definitely a down turn in the amateur meat packing market, for certain. It was more or less a case of wanting to have our own business, as I’d always kind of liked the sound of that despite the fact that we were in fact a pretty clueless pair of bastards who weren’t actually qualified to set up any sort of business at all. Unless of course it involved a vague knowledge of the working of a car engine, or packing meat.

  “Ghost tours.” said Jack. “Every big city has one. They had one in York when I was there a few years ago and the tourists were lapping it up.”

  “Tourists? In Liverpool?” I asked, and Jack nodded. The more I thought of it, Liverpool was crawling with them these days, what with the Albert Dock and the Beatles Story museum. Not to mention the Matthew Street Festival. The Summer Pops. They both seemed to get busier and busier every year.

  “They used to charge about eight quid a person in York.” he said. “Thirty odd people at a time. That’s two hundred and forty quid a night.”

  “Do you know any ghosts, like?” I asked and Jack laughed.

  “We can make that bit up. Everybody else does. We could always ask your ghost next door, couldn’t we? What do you think?”

  I paused for a minute while I considered it. It seemed like a pretty daft idea to me. I mean, what did either of us know about doing a ghost tour? I even managed to get lost explaining various bits of a car engine, never mind ghosts and what have you.

  “There’s probably loads of them already.” I concluded. “Besides. There’s only the two of us. We’d need help.” Jack nodded, thinking about this.

  “Tell you what. I’ll have a look on the Internet in the library on my way home. Do a bit of research. Then we can have a chat about it tomorrow.” We agreed to this and after nursing our halves for another half hour or so we went our separate ways.

  The next day found us in the pub again. To tell the truth I had more or less forgotten about our chat from the day before, but Jack was well and truly fired up. “There are one or two ghost walks already.” he said, “But I think that there’s loads of room for another one. The good news is that the average price is between ten and twelve quid. That’s a little bit more than I thought.” So we pushed the idea back and forwards a few times, and it seemed to be down to me to try and put the dampeners on it. I still thought it was a pretty daft idea. Good money, but not that easy a thing to set up. Add to that the fact that neither of us knew a bloody thing about it!

  Jack, of course, was having none of it.

  “Say twelve quid per person. Thirty five people at a time. That’s just the other side of four hundred quid a night. Say we do it four nights a week.” He tried to do the maths in his head but gave up. That’s not a bad little earner, is that, Pete” he finished. Sounded like it to me too.

  “You probably need a licence.” I said, stubbornly clutching at straws. “And people to help. That all adds up. Before you know where you are there would be bugger all left.” Jack looked deflated.

  “You don’t need a licence.” he said. I’ve looked at the business model of the other tours.” I raised my ey
es at this.

  “Business model?” I said. I think it was probably at that point that I knew that Jack was deadly serious about this. We both laughed. “Okay.” I conceded, “Break it down for me. What exactly does a ghost tour, or a ghost walk - whatever you want to call it - actually do?”

  Jack surprised me by getting a small notepad out of his coat. It looked as if it was a new one as well. Still had the price sticker on the front. “Usually the tour will last about two hours, and visit about six different places, where an actor or player of some sort will pretend to be a ghost.”

  “Six people?” I laughed. “Well that’s that out of the window then! It’ll cost too much to pay six people! We’d end up doing it for nothing!”

  “No.” sighed Jack. “The actors usually take a few roles each. Get them dressed up and then swap costumes so that way nobody would notice the difference. Two actors maximum, I would say.” he continued, consulting his notes. “You would need a tour leader, who guides the people from the different locations, and perhaps another one as a marshal who would make sure everyone keeps up and what have you. Someone else to ferry the two actors about. That would probably do it.”

  “You’d need to advertise as well.” I said, but Jack shook his head at this.

  “Get down the dock with leaflets and what have you. We could even sell tickets as we did it. Easy.”

  I paused to take this all in. “So” I said, sipping my half of lager very carefully. “A tour leader who can tell stories. Two actors, a marshal and a driver. And that’s it?”

  “Yeah.” said Jack grinning from ear to ear. “Pretty straight forward, hey? Once we got under way we could get in touch with the local papers and radio stations. Free publicity, like.”

  I was impressed. He had really thought this through. To be honest I was more or less humouring him when I tentatively agreed to at least look in to it a bit further, but I kind of got sucked in to it the more I looked at it. You see, I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a story teller, and when Jack gave me the job of coming up with six ghost stories for the tour I was interested straight away. Hook, line and bloody sinker. After a week or so I had some stuff ready and Jack came round mine to go through it.