A Report on a Haunting and Other Stories
Three weird tales by
Rufus Woodward
Olgada Press
Chapbook no. 4
2015
www.shorecliffhorror.com
First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by The Olgada Press, Edinburgh, UK.
All rights reserved
Copyright Olgada 2015
The right of Olgada to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them under the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, by any means, with prior permission of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Contents
A Report on a Haunting at Number 11 Erskine Street, Aberdeen
Missing Pages
A Crescent-shaped Scar
A report on a haunting at number 11 Erskine Street, Aberdeen
It has been a long night, I know, and we’re all tired now. We’ve all taken a glass or two, maybe some of us a little more, and I’m sure I can’t be the only one who is beginning to think of the journey home ahead of me, to dream of a warm bed and a soft pillow into which I might sink my head. But be still a while, wont you? Wait a little longer before you go. Let’s find time for one last strange tale to send us out into the night. We’ve had a good few stories tonight already – weird tales, horrible tales of odd happenings and peculiar people. How about one last true story to round off the evening? A true story to wind the night down while the fire still burns and the candles still glow. Does anyone have one for us? Does anyone have a story to share? You do? Yes, thank you. Come up here beside me. Take the armchair by the fire. Make yourself comfortable, and tell us your tale.
***
This is my story. It is a ghost story and a true story – always a promising combination, I know you’ll agree. A ghost story, I say, although I fear that description will raise some expectations my little narrative will struggle to meet. There are few bloodthirsty visions here, no messages from the dead, few heart-stopping terrors. In fact, and I want to be as truthful about this as I can, let me say at the outset that whatever ghosts or spirits appeared on the night I am about to describe to you, I myself did not see any of them. That may disappoint you. It certainly disappointed me. I have had a long life so far, but this story is the closest I have ever come to a real taste of the supernatural and it aches in me that I did not actually set eyes on any of the things that others claimed to see.
If disappointment were all this story had to offer, though, it would make for a rather dull end to this evening. No. There is a little more to it than that. I may not have seen the ghost that appeared that night, but plenty of other people did. And here is the rub – when they saw it, the face they were staring at was mine.
***
I was eighteen years old when I first moved into the flat at number 11 Erskine Street. Eighteen years old and about as naïve and guileless as any man could ever claim to be. I see young people around today and I startle at how confident they seem, how sure of themselves, how safe in their own skins. I was nothing like that. I was a thin, pale, under-nourished, under-exercised, social incompetent; a clumsy, clueless wreck of a boy, only one step, one cruel word, one disappointment, one humiliation away from tears, more or less, for most hours of the day. At least, that’s the way I remember it now.
This was my second year as an undergraduate and Erskine Street was my first effort at finding a place of my own to live. My first place away from home, away from the safety net of halls of residence and I cannot emphasise too strongly just exactly how ill-prepared I was for the move. I do sometimes think back upon that time with a fond affection for the poor gangling fool I remember being, but it is impossible also to avoid cringing at the memory of those early days struggling with even the most basic requirements of adult life. Washing and cleaning, paying bills, shopping, cooking, there is no challenge you could name so simple that I could not have failed it.
The summer before moving in had been a difficult one. I’d spent weeks trawling through classified ads and accommodation listings, trying to find a room before the start of the autumn term. I must have looked at dozens of flats in that time, spoken to dozens of potential flatmates, but nothing worked out. Rooms I thought were available turned out to be taken. Arrangements I thought had been made turned out to be broken. It was a frustrating time and by the end of August I was becoming quite anxious about my chances of ever finding a place at all.
It was with some relief, then, that I seized upon the advertised room at the flat at Erskine Street. It was perfectly suited to me in practically every way, so much so that even if I’d had the opportunity I could hardly have handpicked anything better. It was on the top floor of a four storey granite tenement. Not too far from college, but within walking distance of town, it was a single room in a small flat shared with one other male student. Not only that, the advert when I saw it was posted not in the usual classified spaces or even through the University’s accommodation service. Rather, it was posted on a noticeboard in the University Library - one small A5 sheet printed in black and white and stuck on a board underneath notices about library fines and short loan regulations. A strange way and strange place to advertise anything, one might think, particularly in the middle of the academic off season when the library was sparsely populated and passing trade at a minimum. For me, though, this was a major advantage, since it reduced the likelihood the flat had been visited or taken already, unlike the scores of other properties I’d seen through other means.
That was one advantage. Even greater than that, though, was the rent. It was cheap. Staggeringly cheap, in fact. As quoted on the notice I saw in the library that day, the rent came in at almost a third less than most other flats I’d looked at, so low, indeed, that at first I assumed it to be an error. It was the sort of rent you’d expect from a flat with some sort of major structural defect, a flat barely fit for human habitation perhaps. For some people, I suspect that low rent alone might have been enough for them to discount the room as too good to be true, as not worth the time of a second look. Perhaps I did not have the sense to be so suspicious, or maybe I was too desperate to think so deeply, I don’t know. Whichever it was, I wasted no time. I called the number from a payphone in the library itself, arranged to visit it that very afternoon, and by the time the day was out I’d agreed to move in on the following Saturday. My summer of frustration was over. The relief was tremendous.
***
The flat itself was nothing remarkable. It fitted perfectly the stereotype of standard issue student accommodation of the period. It had two bedrooms, one much larger than the other, a living room with galley kitchen, threadbare carpets, condensation on the windows and something that looked very much like mould growing on the arm of the sofa. It was one flat among a block of other, identical apartments all sharing the one dark, dingy stairwell. In that part of the city at that time, these blocks were full of transient populations of one sort or another, mostly students and offshore workers, and this one was no different. Of all the properties in the building only one, perhaps two, seemed to be occupied by owners who lived there on a more or less permanent basis. The rest of us were ephemera, there and gone, little more than passers by.
It was, i
n all, the type of place that most people would not look twice at, but that I and all the other undergraduates in town, swimming away at the bottom of the property food chain, snapped up as a matter of course. More than that, these flats were, for some of my classmates, almost a kind of perverse lifestyle choice. There may well have been better places available, but most of the people I knew seemed to gravitate towards these more squalid, sordid offerings. There was almost a kind of competition about it, to see who could claim to live in the worst, the most decrepit, disreputable hole in the city. We shared stories, sometimes even true stories, of fleas and maggots, of stains and rising damp and of life-threatening, coughing, spluttering gas boilers always on the verge of explosion. Compared to some of these tales, 11 Erskine Street really wasn’t all that bad and, to be honest, I was glad to have it. I would have accepted a lot worse.
When I arrived that weekend my new flatmate had already moved in ahead of me. Paul was older than me by a good few years, a Post-grad student with dark spiky hair and a broad North East accent. He struck me as an odd sort of guy right from the start. God only knows what he made of me. I’d only spoken to him briefly on the phone before moving in so I didn’t know quite what to expect. In my head a part of me was still naïve enough to imagine we’d hit it off right away and be best friends for ever, but it didn’t work out like that at all.
We just never got along, Paul and I. Perhaps I did something to offend him. Maybe there was some kind of youthful obnoxiousness about me that put him off - this is actually very likely – but he seemed to take an instant dislike to me right from the start. I remember clearly his first words to me as we stood together in the dim, dark hallway of the flat, me dropping my heavy holdall of clothes and books on the floor at my feet, holding out my arm for a handshake that did not materialise.
“I got here first,” he said. “So I took the bigger room.” He pointed towards a door beside us in the hall. “That one there is yours.”
I opened the door and stepped inside. There was a bed and a desk, a chest of drawers and a bookcase. There was just enough space on the floor for me to set down my holdall again in front of me, just about enough space, in fact, for me to fit in all my belongings, so long as I didn’t accumulate anything new or, heaven forbid, want to have any company over. “Compact and cosy,” I said with an attempt at a smile and turned around, but Paul had gone already. I opened my mouth to call after him, but thought better of it. Instead, I went to the door and closed it in front of me. I sat on the bed and began to unpack.
***
If things with Paul were uncomfortable on that first day, they did not get any better the more time we spent together. We spoke only rarely, as little as we could, to be honest, and every time we did there seemed to be some misunderstanding, an odd failure of communication that set one or other of us in a bad mood, seething over some petty irritation or other. Right from the start he made no attempt to hide his contempt for me. Any time our paths crossed he would make some comment or other, some slight or needling joke at my expense, some mocking of the subject I was studying, the books I read, the way I spoke, even the clothes I wore and the food I bought.
Whatever the situation, he was the sort of person who would seek out any opportunity to knock me down and, I suppose, in doing so, demonstrate his own unimpeachable superiority. I’d like to be able to tell how I rose above all this schoolboy taunting and turned a noble, dignified other cheek to it all, but I can’t. In truth, I was no better than he was. I bit on every hook he dangled for me. I rose to every jibe. Every day there was an exchange between us, a snapping, posturing bout of point scoring. It was pathetic, I know, even then I knew, but I couldn’t help it. That was just the way things were.
Thinking back now I don’t imagine he was really a bad person. In fact, I suspect he was probably going through some problems of his own at the time that made him difficult to live with. He was working through a research masters as I recall and, although I can’t pretend to know anything for sure, I had the impression that it was not going well. There was a girl he was seeing at the time as well. Again, its possible that things there were not all he hoped they’d be.
Whatever his problems, I was the last person he would talk to about them. I was the last person he’d want to even know about them, most likely. But the thing was, there was no-one else in the world better placed to see it all, and know what it was doing to him. Our bedrooms shared a connecting wall, after all, one too thin for either one of us to hold many secrets from the other. At night, I could hear him struggle in the grip of his nightmares. I could hear him call out in his sleep, let out great, gasping bellows that woke me in the middle of the night. Who he was shouting to, or at, I have no idea. If it was words he spoke, I could never make them out. All that came through the wall to me were those bellowing gasps of fear and of confusion.
Occasionally, I think, he would walk in his sleep. I would wake at 2 or 3 in the morning and hear him banging and thumping around next door. This was quite disturbing for me and I’d lie awake listening, wondering if was doing himself any harm, wondering I ought to go next door and help him. Usually, of course, I did no such thing. Only once did the noise grow so loud and his shouting so fierce that I put aside my apprehensions, ignored any petty disagreements we might have between us, to step in and offer some help.
It was not only the volume of his cries that set that night apart from all the others, it was the duration of the attack. At 2.30 am I woke to hear a crash coming from Paul’s room. By 3.15 he still had not settled back to sleep. I heard shouts, strange guttural roars coming through the wall beside me. I heard his footsteps stomp across the room from one side to another, his fists thump against the wall. I heard him gasping for breath, panting and sighing and a strange scratching noise as though of fingernails against plaster. After 45 minutes of this, more than twice as long as any other attack I could remember, I decided I’d waited long enough. I climbed out of my bed, put my dressing gown on and left my room.
I opened his door and switched on the light. Here is what I saw. Paul was standing in his pyjamas by the big bay window that stretched right across the far wall of his room. He had wrapped himself up in the great thick curtain that hung by the window and was thrashing and flapping his arms around as though wrestling with someone, shouting and roaring as he did so. When the light came on he stopped suddenly. He let the curtains drop and turned to look around him. The expression on his face was quite unlike anything I’d ever seen on him before. He seemed like a child, scared and lost. He looked over towards me. For a moment I though he was about to turn angry, to snap at me for coming into his room uninvited, but he never did.
“Did you see someone in here just now?” he said, his voice small and wobbling.
I shook my head. “No, Paul. There’s no-one here.”
“No. Of course not.” He said. “Of course not.”
“Are you alright, Paul?” I asked. “Can I do anything?”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
***
As it turned out, Paul and I didn’t have to put up with one another for very long. Come Christmas he’d been offered a job somewhere in another town. He left and I had the whole flat to myself for a while.
The landlady called me up the day after Paul moved out and asked if I wouldn’t mind taking care of finding a replacement for her. She was a lovely, if peculiar old lady. She lived on a caravan park right at the edge of the city and only popped in to see us a couple of times a year to apologise for the rent being so high (which it obviously wasn’t) and to make sure we hadn’t destroyed the place (which we hadn’t quite). She was a nervous, lady who spoke quickly and, on leaving us, always gave the impression of being glad to be out of the flat. Paul used to say she was involved in some weird religious organisations, some commune or other. He called her an ‘occult-terrorist’ for some reason, but coming from him that could ha
ve meant anything. Whatever her situation was, she was clearly either too busy or too disinterested to want to have anything to do with finding new tenants. This was fine by me and left me with a free reign to choose whoever I wished.
I wrote up a few notices and posted them around the campus that next week. The response was underwhelming to say the least. Maybe it was the time of year, maybe my advertising copy left a lot to be desired, but I managed to drum up the grand total of three replies. One was from a guy who wanted to move in with his girlfriend – which seemed a crazy idea given how tiny our living space was.
One was from an art student who wanted to use the living room as a studio space – which again, was less attractive to me than he seemed to imagine. And one guy, Iain, who was an information science PhD candidate who was happy to take the small room off my hands and let me move into the bigger room, didn’t seem to notice that I’d forgotten to wash the dishes for the couple of days before he came over and, most importantly of all, had his own TV. that he didn’t mind sharing. It wasn’t a difficult choice. Three weeks later, the first weeks of the new year and the new semester, Iain moved in.
In the meantime, in those three or four weeks I had the place to myself, I took the opportunity to move all my belongings into my new home in the bigger room next door. The rent on that room was a little higher (a whopping £10 a month extra), but it was so obviously the better choice. It had the big bay window that looked out over the city and out to sea. It had an armchair and a built in wardrobe. It had a bigger bookshelf, a proper desk. Most of all, it had actual floor space. It wasn’t the grandest room in the world, but compared to my old room it was like a palace – you could actually take two steps at a time without cracking your shins on something.