The Paranormal Detection Agency Read online

  The Paranormal Detection Agency

  by Anne Brooke

  The Paranormal Detection Agency by Anne Brooke

  The moment he walked through the door, I knew he’d be trouble. He stood for a moment in the doorframe, evidently taking time to decide whether to make a final step into my domain or not. He was over six foot, maybe six-foot-two, I’d guess, with dark hair and green eyes. Willowy, just the way I liked my men. When he saw me, he smiled, and I couldn’t help but smile in return. I liked the way his lips quirked, as if he was holding something back but wouldn’t object too much if you found it.

  Definitely trouble.

  However, what really nailed the trouble category of the man now taking a hesitant step into my office was the water-imp peering over his left shoulder and pointing at me.

  I didn’t particularly get along with water-imps, though heaven knows I’d tried hard enough in the past. They were okay up to a point, but the constant giggling and pointing always got to me in the end. They never had much conversation and tended to trip you up a lot if they realized you could see them. Neither quality was a great start to a long-term friendship.

  “Hello!” my assistant Miranda piped up from her desk. By dint of being nearest the door, she was the default reception desk. And by “assistant” I actually mean “aunt.” I couldn’t afford an assistant, or indeed a receptionist, so my aunt was the next best thing. “Welcome to the Paranormal Detectives Agency. Can I help you?”

  “Detection, Miranda,” I hissed, as I stood and stretched out my hand to the demi-god with the water-imp. Well, nobody’s perfect. “It’s detection, not detectives. We’re not ghosts ourselves. But welcome anyway, Mister …”

  “Riley.” The demi-god finally spoke, his accent faintly northern. “Aaron Riley. You must be John Atkinson, the owner.”

  “Yes, that’s me.” I confirmed the obvious and shook his hand. “My friends call me Jack.”

  A snort came from the direction of my aunt’s desk, but I ignored it. “How can we help you?” I said instead to Mr. Riley.

  He let go of my hand, sadly, and glanced around, as if checking to see if the answer to the question might be somewhere in the office. The water-imp copied his movements in a slightly spooky (no pun intended) way and began to giggle silently. I stifled a sigh. The pesky beast hadn’t taken long to get started.

  “It’s complicated,” my visitor said at last. “I’m not even sure why I’m here, if I’m honest. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  This was, almost word for word, exactly what everyone who ever came to ask for help said to me. They never believed in ghosts and it was always complicated.

  “That’s not a problem,” I said, and it really wasn’t. “Why don’t I get Miranda to make us a drink, and we can talk about it. Would you like tea or coffee?”

  “Tea, please.”

  Over Mr. Riley’s shoulder, and taking care not to look at the water-imp—attention only made them worse—I sent my best hopeful smile in my aunt’s direction. “Miranda, would you mind getting Mr. Riley here a tea and me a coffee? Thank you.”

  From behind Mr. Riley’s back, aunt Miranda rolled her eyes and gave me the finger, but she tip-tapped out to the kitchen anyway with a quick simper and a swagger of her hips. Not bad going for a sixty-year-old. A few seconds later, I heard the sound of the kettle being switched on. I only hoped she wouldn’t add any of her “herbal remedies” to the resulting mix. I didn’t want another repeat of the police interest we had to go through last month. The least said about this little incident, the better.

  “Please,” I said to Mr. Riley, with a wave of my hand, “come and sit down, and tell me your situation.”

  As he turned toward the threadbare red sofa lurking like a familiar in the corner of the office, the imp spat a swift jet of water in my direction, and I only just managed to dodge it by leaping sideways and slamming my leg right against my desk. The trouble with water-imp spit was how it was only visible to other people once it hit you and tended to be a particularly nasty shade of green. Something to do with their origins in the sea, I believed, though nobody ever knew for sure, and the imps weren’t telling.

  As I stifled a swift curse for the sake of professionalism, Mr. Riley’s gaze swung back to me. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh yes,” I lied, attempting to smile and rub my leg without appearing to be too weird. “I’m fine. Please, Mr. Riley, do sit.”

  “Thank you,” he said with a frown and did so. I joined him. “But call me Aaron. Mr. Riley sounds too much like my father. If he knew I was here, he’d probably kill me.”

  “Which wouldn’t be a problem for me, though payment might be trickier,” I said, only half-joking before realizing how off-the-wall it would sound to anyone who wasn’t a detective of the paranormal. “Sorry. I mean I’m sure it won’t come to it.”

  Before I could dig myself any deeper into the hole I’d started, Aunt Miranda returned carrying a tray loaded with steaming mugs of tea and coffee, a matching sugar bowl and milk jug, and a vast plate of hobnobs.

  Thank heavens for hobnobs. They solved a wide variety of ills.

  “Here you are, dears,” Miranda sang out, leaning over to deposit her goodies on the table and almost depositing her substantial breasts in Mr. Riley’s—Aaron’s—face as well. He blinked wildly and veered backward in an attempt to avoid the less-than-buried treasure, at the same time as the water-imp flung himself right on top of Miranda’s greatest assets with a merry cry.

  Water-imps were rather partial to breasts. I might have forgotten to mention this, though, as a gay man, breasts didn’t come onto my radar. Miranda couldn’t see what Aaron had brought in—she didn’t have the gift—but she could certainly feel it. She let out a fearsome shriek as the creature scrabbled across her skin and the tray dropped the rest of the way to the table. Somehow, Aaron saved it from disaster, though a large dollop of milk landed with a splash on the floor. I leapt up and pulled the imp away from my aunt’s chest before throwing it across my desk, where it landed with a thump and a furious chattering on my computer keyboard. I only hoped the dryness of my latest financial reports might keep it busy for a while.

  Miranda rearranged her front, wiped up the milk with her handkerchief and harrumphed before tip-tapping back to her desk. I smiled as sanely as I could at my potential new client before sitting back down on the sofa. Aaron’s gaze was fixed on mine. “Hobnob?” I asked him.

  A short silence followed, in which he had every right to get up and run screaming from my office back into the normality of the outside world. Instead, he gulped and took a biscuit.

  “Yes, I think I will,” he said.

  “So, tell me what the problem is,” I said.

  It didn’t take him long. Aaron had moved in to his grandmother’s old house a couple of months ago, during the summer. She’d left it to him in her will the year before, but probate had only just been completed. He told me he’d been fond of the old lady and was happy to do the place up before selling it on or living in it himself. He’d not decided yet. Over the past month, there’d been a series of incidents nobody had been able to explain.

  “Such as?” I prompted him. It was always best to deal in specifics, especially at an early stage, as it helped me work out whether I could be of any use or not.

  Aaron hesitated. “It sounds strange, but during the daytime, it’s becoming almost impossible to stay in the house, mainly in the kitchen. There’s a terrible sensation of fear and then pain. It comes in waves so it’s bearable for a while, but it wears you down the more you stay inside. The builders were fine upstairs, but now they’re starting on doing up the ground floor, they’ve experienced it themselves. I hadn’t said anyt
hing as I thought it was just something affecting me. I was wrong.”

  “I see,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. It often helped my thought process, though Aunt Miranda always said there was no point helping anything that didn’t actually exist. Family, eh?

  From what Aaron said, it didn’t appear to be anything to do with the water-imp. They never used emotions in any manifestations, according to all the books and my own casework experience. All the imps used was a heck of a lot of dirty water, and Aaron hadn’t mentioned it.

  “There’s another thing,” my visitor added, just when I thought he’d finished. “I find little puddles of water all over the place, and they’re getting worse. Nothing I can’t clear up in a few seconds, but it’s bloody annoying, I can tell you. The builders aren’t happy about it either.”

  Oh. So much for my initial theory then. What did I know? Nothing. I gave the water-imp a hard stare, but it was far too busy thumping up and down on my keyboard to convey anything useful to me. Luckily, it was also having too good a time to think about getting my computer wet, and its current lack of solid form meant it wouldn’t be sending anything peculiar to any unsuspecting client.

  “I see,” I said, hoping I came across as the sort of man Aaron could trust to solve his problems. “Very interesting. I’m happy to take a look for you and try to find out what’s going on. I charge an initial forty pounds for a first site visit and then fifty pounds per hour, with an additional charge if I need to use any special equipment. Miranda here can give you our price list so you’ll know what you’re getting and how we might be able to solve your problem. If it’s a haunting. Sometimes, there’s a perfectly natural explanation.”

  As I was talking, my aunt had put together the usual potential client pack and handed it to Aaron. It consisted of a few positive reviews from satisfied customers, a couple of write-ups in the local paper, and a picture of me at work during an early haunting case. I’d chosen this one because it was different from the usual shots of ghost-hunters looking moody in a studio. I thought it made me stand out. Plus I looked rather good in it, which didn’t go amiss. A man had his pride.

  Miranda smirked at me as she handed it over, but I chose to ignore her, and Aaron didn’t notice. He leafed through for a moment and then looked me in the eye again.

  “I’m still not sure I believe all this,” he said, “but I’m at the stage where I’ll try anything to see if it works. One thing puzzles me, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you do find out it’s a ghost, or you try to con me into changing my mind about the supernatural, how do you get rid of it?”

  I smiled. The question usually came up at some point, and I always told the truth.

  “I get in contact with it and ask it to leave,” I said. “I have the gift, you see, and most ghosts are surprisingly polite. Which is why my success rate is so good. If I can’t do it just by asking, then I perform a cleansing ceremony. Between those two approaches, I’ve never failed so far. It’s not a boast, as I know there’ll be a first time one day. It’s simply a fact.”

  Having said all there was to say, I shut up. Aaron frowned, but his gaze didn’t leave mine. For a couple of seconds, when I could hardly breathe, he stared at me as if he were searching for the deceit he was sure he’d find. He didn’t find it, which wasn’t a shock to me, as it wasn’t there.

  Then he blinked and looked away, folding up the brochure and putting it under his arm. “All right. How does Thursday at ten A.M. suit you?”

  Ever the professional, I moved toward the computer, brushed the engrossed water-imp off onto the chair and checked my diary. It was as empty as I’d known it would be. I’d checked it five times already this morning.

  “I think Miranda can juggle my schedules so I can make that day,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Aaron said and shook my hand before taking out his business card and placing it on Miranda’s desk. “My home address is on the back. I’ll look forward to seeing you, Mr. Atkinson.”

  “Jack,” I said.

  “Yes, of course,” he replied. “Jack.”

  Then he was gone. The water-imp went with him without any persuasion, which was a blessing. And I was left with a slight tingle on my palm from where he’d touched me, and a rather sarcastic aunt. In that respect, there was no change then.

  *

  Being able to talk to ghosts wasn’t easy, and I’d learnt this at a very early age. I was six years old when I met my first dead person, and she didn’t have a great deal of charm. She was an old headmistress of the village school who’d been well in her eighties when she died, and she wasn’t much impressed with death as a concept. She was even less impressed with me as someone whom she blamed for keeping her on Earth, especially as she’d had her fill of pesky children and took every opportunity to voice her opinion.

  For a month or so, I was convinced she was a friend of my parents and it was my task to endure her for their sakes. I had no idea she was actually dead. It was only when she began to force me to do detention, a task which involved writing out “I must not raise the dead and prevent them from going to the next life” for an hour every other day that my mother realized something odd was going on in her household.

  Since then, I’d learnt to control the experience and, later still, to make an almost reasonable living out of it. If asking ghosts to leave me alone didn’t work, the trick, as I found out from my mother, was to build a wall in my mind and think the offending visitors right to the other side of it.

  This approach worked for me, but for other people, the talking solution was almost foolproof, hence the reason for the Paranormal Detection Agency. I might not be able to solve all the problems of the undead, but I wanted to try where I could.

  All of which helped to explain the reason for my standing outside Aaron’s house at ten that Thursday morning, or rather just a little before. How I hated being late. I walked up the garden path, dodging the piles of builders’ rubble, as Aaron opened the front door and greeted me with a warm smile. He must have heard the arrival of my car. I made a mental note to upgrade the engine. It wasn’t the car of a professional.

  “Jack!” he said, and something in me couldn’t help tingling at the way he said my name. “Please, come in.”

  I followed him through the hallway, which had been stripped back to the plaster. From the looks of it, the wall awaited the attention of the three paint pots stacked up in the corner. Champagne cornflower, it was called, though the picture on the pots was cream-colored rather than blue.

  Aaron turned left into the kitchen, and I turned left in his wake. I had a glimpse of various white goods in the middle of the room in preparation for a thorough refit before something hard punched me in the stomach, and I went down with a groan.

  “What the—” Aaron swung around as I landed with a crash on the tiled floor, but I wasn’t able to respond. Whatever had gone on, the attacker decided to follow up the initial advantage with a swift upper cut to my jaw, and I skidded backward until the nearest kitchen cupboard brought me to an ungainly halt. I wasn’t a fighting man under any circumstances and even less so when I couldn’t see my opponent.

  I could feel him though—and it was definitely a him. Someone large and angry and with an axe to grind. I only hoped it wasn’t a real one. Just in case, I ducked as I felt the anger surge closer and heard a loud crash just above my head. Aaron shouted a warning, but I was already in high emergency mode.

  “Get out of the kitchen,” I yelled, just as the kettle rose into the air scarily fast and deposited its water in a swoosh across the table. Thank the Lord, it wasn’t boiling.

  Aaron obeyed, though I suspected it was the sight of the levitating kettle rather than my aura of command. On the way to the door, he grabbed me as I struggled to get up and shoved me outside, slamming the door shut behind him.

  A burst of noise and psychic energy exploded in the kitchen, though thankfully I guessed Aaron only heard the noise. Psychic energy could be nasty. Th
en silence returned.

  Aaron was the first to recover. “What the bloody hell is that? What the hell have you done?”

  “Why do you think it’s my fault?” I began to argue back at him, but then realized he was probably right. “I think whatever is here isn’t very happy I’ve arrived.”

  He snorted and then, sadly, let go of my arms. I was beginning to enjoy the feel of his fingers on my skin. “Yes, even I can tell that,” he said. “Weren’t you supposed to make things better, not worse?”

  Again, this was probably a little unfair, but it was his first experience of ghostly fury, so I couldn’t blame him. My own first encounter with rage from beyond the grave had involved wailing banshees and a storm, and I had no intention of going through any such thing again. Kettles were fairly minor in the scale of the fury of the dead.

  I shook myself and gazed right back at him. “Yes, you’re right. I wasn’t really prepared for any psychic anomaly. I thought it was just an initial visit. From what you told me, I should’ve been better prepared. I’m sorry about your kitchen.”

  He shrugged, then offered a wry smile. “It’s okay. You should’ve seen what it was like before the builders got to work on it. My grandmother did have some very odd tastes in décor. Whatever’s going on in there, it can’t be any more horrific. I didn’t mean to accuse you. I’m not used to this sort of thing.”

  I smiled back. “No reason why you should be. It sounds quieter now. So your kitchen ghost is more prepared for me. If I take it steadily, we should be all right. Shall we go back in?”

  Aaron’s eyes widened. “You think it’s going to be safe?”

  “Oh yes. Your ghost will want to assess what’s going on before he takes any action again. I surprised him, that’s all. Besides, there’s another good reason we should be fine.”

  “Which is?”

  “The psychic energy he blasted at us was enough to have him gathering strength until the vampires wake up. We’re in no immediate danger.”

  Aaron simply stared at me.