Retrial

Hey everyone, it's Christmas. Have a ghost story.

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‘It will be standing in the corner’, the dead man told her. ‘In the far-right of the room. That’s always where it starts.’

Jia found something persuasive in the dead man’s voice; an urgency that carried through the distance and metal of the phonograph recording. A need to be heard above the whir of the very machine delivering the message.

So she looked.

At first, she could see nothing in the thin light of her budget electric lantern. Books and folders stood stacked and decaying, dying messages from a century previous. Dust danced, but like people who’d rather just be going home to bed.

Jia narrowed her eyes, let her pupils widen. There.

It was standing in the corner.

The figure had its back to her. It stood in the shadow of boxes she’d not yet looked at. That and the weak light saved her from being able to make much out. A thin, grooved body, glistening and concave; an hourglass that demons might use to apportion their torture. A squat, creased head, swaying slowly from side to side as if searching the wall in front of it for an exit.

Or a meal.

‘Crap,’ she whispered.

‘Do not stop playing these recordings,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do NOT stop, or it will notice you.’
There was a click as the wax cylinder containing the message reached the end of its groove. With it no longer turning the number ‘1’ could once again be seen stencilled at one end.

The figure’s head began turning, very slowly, towards her.

Hands shaking, Jia reached for the phonograph, still balanced precariously atop the small table she’d found it on, beside the old furnace in the complex’s sealed basement. Sealed until she’d broken in, anyway, like a cat on its last life still determined to live up to its rep.

Jia removed the played cylinder, replaced it with the next, set the needle.

‘It will still mooove’ the dead man continued, his tinny voice slowing and deepening where time had warped the wax grooves into which he’d poured his words. ‘But this way, you can buuuy time for the others to reeeach you.’

Jia looked again. The figure had left the boxes now, shark-bulk muscle moving silently on insect limbs. Mucus glittered at its edges. It still did not turn to face her, looking instead down a short side passage leading off from the main basement.

‘It iiiiis imperative you make nooo other sound’, the dead man said. ‘We know now how tooo treat these cylinders so to stave off murderous rage from the subject. It will stiiill move, but slowly’.

A click signalled the end of another recording. Jia forced herself not to look at the monstrous figure as she set the next one spinning.

When she glanced hurriedly back, it had shifted once more.

‘The subject will now be approaching,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do not move, and dooo not panic. Avoid looking at its face, as this can cause alarm aaaand in some cases madness.’

Jia didn’t understand. The creature still had its back to her, and had moved away, entering a tunnel that led outside the wan light of her cheap lantern. It took another step away as she watched, a twisting lunge of glittering horror, fast and slow in all the wrong places. It didn’t so much walk as throw itself down a flight of stairs that didn’t actually exist.

‘We have reecorded many reactions to an incoming subject,’ the dead man said. ‘These incluuude goose-bumps, wailing and the gnashing of teeth, garment-rending, ichthyophobia, ichthyophilia, deeemands for compensation or danger money, and diarrhoea, listed iiiiin increasing likelihood of promptiiiing an attack.’

Jia felt frustration and confusion seep into her fear. It didn’t so much dilute it, as freeze along with it, ­bulking out her unrest. Just what the hell had these people been doing down here? How many lives had been lost so some smug prick could use their deaths to record a how-to guide on avoiding immediate murder? And why had this all simply been sealed away, instead of actually dealt with?

The monster was still tumbling away from her, thin and lurching and obviously unbound by the dead man’s narration. Suddenly it froze just outside the lantern’s circle, a darkness silhouetted against deeper darkness.

It was facing the right-hand wall, apparently staring at something there.

‘Survivors are reeequired to complete paperwork detailing any and aall psychological damage following the encounter, and tooo rate the experience out of ten, compared to previous interactions with suuupernatural horrors.’

Jia scooped up her lantern, turned the control that focussed the beam, and, taking great care not to spill light on the creature itself, passed her circle across the musty brick it appeared focussed on.
Her light bounced glinting off a switch, angular and upright.

The machine clicked once more, and the creature’s head again began to slowly swivel toward her.
Jia reached for the final cylinder, thinking desperately. The door behind her was too far away – she’d never reach it before the horror reached her. The door ahead was far closer, but she had no idea where it led, or even whether it was unlocked. Maybe the creature would start moving away again, and give her more time to run? Either way, once the last cylinder ran out she’d have to make her move.

Jia had almost inserted the cylinder when she felt it. Something attached to its end, just next to the number ‘4’. A small blob of wax, with a faint trail leading back to the main cylinder from which it had once dripped, liquid and warm.

Understanding hit like chain-shot, splintering, dragging down. The recordings hadn’t been warped by time. They’d been warped by heat.

Realisation and terror made her clumsy. She got the last cylinder running, but knocked all the others off the table in doing so. Instinctively she reached down to recover them, putting her hand on the phonograph’s table to steady herself.

Immediately the table shifted, creaking as it turned on a hidden axle until it settled with the phonograph facing away from her.

Jia barely even noticed the creature as it threw the switch and ignited the furnace.

It was a rotating table.

She’d been looking in the wrong corner.

The second creature had hold of her before she could move. Jia yelled in surprise and pain, tried to twist herself free. All she accomplished was turning to face what held her. She caught a blur of bone and sucker-mouths, and huge, sightless eyes.

‘Rescue should nooow have been enacted,’ the dead man told her. ‘Otherwise, death is certain.’

‘Screw all three of you’, Jia spat.

She heard a collapsing laugh, like the mockery of a battleship, and then simply darkness.

When Jia awoke, she was burning.