𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞┃ Anthony Lockwood┃2┃

Chapter Twenty Five - Tension

Too late for anything, but they gave it a go.

No sooner had the tape dispenser hit the glass than Holly and Nola dived behind the nearest available shelter. It was a low display case, like a kind of open-topped table, stuffed with a hundred varieties of golfing sock. Holly and Nola crouched there, bent close, their faces nearly touching. Bobby Vernon was crumpled between them, half conscious, breathing heavily.

It was very quiet in the room. True, the psychic echo of their argument rebounded between the walls, on and on and on. Invisible lines of power thrummed in the room, taut as piano wire, heavy with built-up charge. But the only actual sound was a soft, rhythmic rustling. Nola peeped up from behind the case and looked over at the till. She saw the counter, with its jagged crack and the tape dispenser sticking up from the fractured glass like the bow of a sinking ship.

A little stack of papers – brochures, maybe – laid on the glass. One corner of the stack was riffling in a non-existent wind. The pages would ripple upwards, then fall still, then ripple up again.

Nola ducked back down.

"Can you see anything?" Holly asked. The terror was clear in her eyes. Her voice shook with the effort of trying to rebuild her shattered emotional calm.

Nola nodded.

Holly stared at Nola. A twist of hair had fallen in front of her face. She was chewing the end, eyes wide in the half-dark. "So... so the Fittes Manual says the first thing we have to do is establish Type." She said.

Nola knew quite well what the Fittes Manual said. But, damp fear had replaced the remains of anger in her belly. She just nodded again. "Yes."

"We know it's kinetic." She breathed. "It moves things around. But is there any kind of apparition?"

Nola peeped up above the socks again. She could smell the lanolin in the wool, and the cleanness of the plastic packaging. The thought crossed her mind that Lockwood and George both needed socks, and that it would be Christmas soon. Her next thought (less pleasant) was that it was highly unlikely she'd survive the night to even get to Christmas. She looked across the hall. It was now empty of all the dark shapes that had clustered there earlier. Either they'd been driven back, or absorbed into the mass of cold, pulsating energy that hung vibrating around them– energy that their argument had summoned into being. She ducked her head down once more. "No."

"No apparition? Oh, so it's a... so it might just be a—"

"It's a Poltergeist, Holly. Yes, it is."

She swallowed. "Okay..."

Nola dropped Vernon's leg and reached out to grip Holly's arm. "But it's not going to be like Cotton Street." She whispered. "This time it's going to be fine. You understand that? We're going to get out of this, Holly. Come on. We can do it. We just need to get down two floors and across to the entrance. That's not too far, is it? We do it quietly, and we do it carefully, and we don't attract its attention.'"

Over on the distant counter, the papers rippled, on-off, on-off, their hum soft and rhythmic like the purring of a giant cat.

"But Poltergeists—"

"Poltergeists are blind, Holly. They respond to emotion, noise and stress. So listen to me. We make for the back stairs – they're the closest. We go down to the ground floor and we find the others. We do it all step by step, stage by stage, very quietly and very calmly, and we never, ever panic. If we keep everything nice and neutral, it's likely it won't even notice us again."

Nola gazed at Holly steadily in what she hoped was a calm, reassuring manner. On balance, it was probably a more wild-eyed lunatic stare.

"Good luck with that..." Bobby Vernon said. He was only half conscious, but he knew.