The Books of Blood

THE BOOK OF BLOOD

THE DEAD HAVE HIGHWAYS.  

          They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages,across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty,violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view. 

          They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections. 

          It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world. The traffic is heavy at the cross-roads, and the voices of the dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers that separate one reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable feet. 

          Such an intersection on the highway of the dead was located at Number 65, Tollington Place. Just a brick-fronted, mock Georgian detached house, Number 65 was unremarkable in every other way. An old, forgettable house,stripped of the cheap grandeur it had once laid claim to, it had stood empty for a decade or more. 

           It was not rising damp that drove tenants from Number 65. It was not the rot in the cellars, or the subsidence that had opened a crack in the front of the house that ran from doorstep to eaves, it was the noise of passage. In the upper storey the din of that traffic never ceased. It cracked the plaster on the walls and it warped the beams. It rattled the windows. It rattled the mind too. Number 65,Tollington Place was a haunted house, and no-one could possess it for long without insanity setting in. 

          At some time in its history a horror had been committed in that house. No one knew when, or what. But even to the untrained observer the oppressive atmosphere of the house, particularly the top storey, was unmistakable. There was a memory and a promise of blood in the air of Number 65, a scent that lingered in the sinuses, and turned the strongest stomach. The building and its environs were shunned by vermin, by birds, even by flies. Now woodlice crawled in its kitchen, no starling had nested in its attic.Whatever violence had been done there, it had opened the house up, as surely as a knife slits a fish's belly; and through that cut, that wound in the world, the dead peered out, and had their say.That was the rumour anyway. 

          It was the third week of the investigation at 65, Tollington Place.Three weeks of unprecedented success in the realm of the paranormal. Using a newcomer to the business, a twenty-year-old called Simon McNeal, as a medium, the Essex University Parapsychology Unit had recorded all but incontrovertible evidence of life after death.