The Ghost Summoner

An Extract from The Basils Road Cannibal

THE GHOST SUMMONER

(This story I had from a poor fellow in the final stages of delirium tremens, he was convinced that what he saw was true!)

Ghosts must be very lonely creatures, because you never hear much about them getting together for a party or anything, but once we had a fellow turn up who reckoned that he had a machine that would not only let us see the ghosts, but let them see each other! He'd come to Stevenage to try out his machine because we was supposed to have more ghosts per acre than anywhere else that he could afford to travel to! We was very interested because although we'd all heard about our local ghosts we'd never seen any of 'em, it was always a friend of a friend that had done the actual looking!

Wheatcroft was his name, and we understood he'd come down from Cambridge, or was it up from Oxford, one of those university places anyway.

Now he'd heard much the same tales that we had, I guess they've been told so many times that everyone up and down the county knows 'em by heart, but I'll tell you again anyway!

First there's the ghostly Roman soldiers, not a whole legion, just a little squad of a dozen of 'em. They used to march down the centre of the High Street at three in the morning, and if you hailed them the officer, the 'centurion' I think they call it, would ask how far it was to Welwyn, which I think is pretty odd since surely he'd have spoken in Latin, him being Roman and from ancient times, but there it is!

Secondly there was the ghostly stage coach with the headless driver what people say had 'is 'ead blown off by a highwayman. That came along at about the same time, and people said it would go on for all eternity 'cos the driver didn't know where he was going, not having no 'ead!

Then there was Old Black Jake, who was a real person we'd all heard about, who cut 'is throat! Narsty business! He was a brewer fallen on hard times, and no one would buy 'is ale, so 'e loaded up three great barrels on a cart and offered free ale to all who wanted it, but no one would believe 'im, and 'e cut 'is throat in desperation, here in the High Street, right outside the Rose to shame the publican. Jake was supposed to be seen at all hours of the night offering travellers free ale, and if you took a mug of it people said you'd be drunk for a fortnight!

Well, Wheatcroft wanted some witnesses to what 'is machine would do in summoning ghosts and letting them talk to each other, and he was offering free beer for anyone as would help him out. It meant sitting up all night, but the weather was good, and none of us had anything else to do so we went along, six of us, and Wheatcroft had chairs brought out from the White Hart and set out on the pavement outside, then, at about midnight he got his machine set up. There was a few people sat up to watch, but after a half hour or so he'd assembled the machine, which just sort of buzzed gently and every now and then gave out blue sparks, and nothing seemed to be happening so they all went off to bed. That left the seven of us sitting there, and Wheatcroft issuing a beer ration every so often to keep us interested. This was before the street lights were put in, so after the pubs had put out their oil lamps the whole street was in darkness, apart from Wheatcroft's machine which gave more of its blue sparks once in a while.

We was all thinking that even with free beer it was all a bit daft when we actually saw, with our own eyes, the Roman soldiers! Yes! There they were, just like people had said they would be,'cept that the odd thing was you could only see the top half of 'em! From the waist downwards they was below ground level! I suppose that the old road surface used to be a lot lower down before they improved the surface with the Macadaming.

They came level with us, and Wheatcroft calls out to them, asking where they was going.

"Welwyn, except we never get there, it's too far given what's left of the day, so we'll just have to start again from Clavium in the morning. Beastly business, suppose one day we might make it!". He had a plummy sort of officer voice, and he stepped up from the road onto the pavement, took off his helmet and sat down. He wasn't solid, you could see through him.