Paul M. Feeney was born in Scotland, has lived all over the UK, and currently resides in Aberdeen. An avid and passionate fiction reader – his first love being horror and all things dark – he started writing in 2011 and has since had a number of short stories in publication or forthcoming. His debut novella, The Last Bus, was published by Crowded Quarantine Publications as a limited signed & numbered paperback in late 2015, and his second novella, Kids, was released mid-2016, through Dark Minds Press. Cursed, his stand-alone novelette featuring his shape-shifting PI Garrison Wake, was released in 2021 by Demain Publishing. Under the name Paul Michaels, he writes quieter fiction and occasional reviews for This is Horror. He is currently working on his first novel, as well as numerous short stories and novellas.
Links: https://linktr.ee/PaulFny75
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James Sinclair is a haunted man. He sees ghosts. He also ‘clears’ them, helping them on their way to the next realm, even if he doesn’t quite know how he does it. Most of his work is relatively straightforward, even if it does leave him drained and weary. But now and again, he gets involved in cases which have the potential to break him. To destroy him.
In this extract, he is on his way to meet a client who may well get him involved in just such a case...
On this particular chilly autumn day, I’m walking through the centre of Glasgow, hunched down and tucked into my coat. There’s something particularly biting about the Scottish weather, an ability of the climate to sneak past clothes, skin, and flesh, and needle deep into your bones. It’s malicious, I’m telling you – Scottish weather is almost alive, harbours intent and ill-will.
But it isn’t just the wind and gusted spatterings of fine rain – known as smirr – which are causing me to hunker into myself. No, that’s an almost unconscious posture I’ve developed over the years. You see, as much as I love the place, cities are the worst possible environment to be in if, like me, you see ghosts.
Think about it...
Think about how many people have lived here over the course of hundreds of years. Or in the case of Glesga, nearly two thousand.
How many souls have occupied the houses and flats in this place? And how many have died right here in the bosom of this city, in their homes? And that’s not to mention hospitals, orphanages back in the day, homeless shelters, the cold, inhospitable streets themselves. Car crashes, football crushes, a fucking helicopter landing on a pub, the nasty Clyde River, our chronic, shitty health. Battles which were fought back in the dark ages on the ground the place is built and more recent rampant criminal activity. Cities are charnel houses stretching through history when you stop to ponder, inevitable when you have this many people living on top of each other, generation after generation.
Despite what the tourist boards would have you believe, with their happy adverts full of smiles and sunshine (ha, there’s some irony for you), Glasgow – and Scotland itself, to a certain extent – has always been a place synonymous with darkness, hardship, and violence. Many people here have lived miserable, painful lives, often cut short through tragic accident, disease, or aggressive brutality. We might be, generally speaking, a welcoming, generous people despite the stereotype, but we’re also as likely to slice the skin off your face or crack the nut on you if you slight us. Like many places, there’s a deeply embedded duality in our culture, though I often think it’s particularly pronounced in Scotland – poverty next to wealth, privilege next to oppression, openness next to the closed-minded parochial.
Anyway, before I go off on a rant, the point of this is to say a lot of people in this city have died under stressful circumstances, and as I said before, that seems to be the conditions under which the dead linger. Even accounting for the fact most pass on to wherever it is they go (don’t ask; that’s one thing I don’t know), it still leaves plenty clinging on. And whatever it is I have in me which allows me to see them, seems to call out to them, makes me a beacon in their grey existences.
So, for most people, a walk through the city involves little more than dodging other, self-absorbed pedestrians, pickpockets, NEDS, and Big Issue sellers and homeless folk begging (these last two I’m always happy to help out since they definitely have it worse than me). On the other hand, a simple walk around the city for me involves studiously avoiding lingering phantoms.
For example – I’m currently heading down Argyle Street towards the Trongate area of Glasgow. But before getting there, I have to navigate a path beset by spirits. That’s not to say there are throngs of ghosts haunting the streets; I wouldn’t want to alarm anyone, even if you can’t see them. As I said above, most of the dead depart for whatever awaits on the other side. But that still leaves dozens of shades clinging to the grey streets, wandering between – and through – the walls of this city’s buildings.
Over there, where Argyle Street turns up into Queen Street, stands the forlorn figure of a man in his early twenties. I found the news report online after first seeing him a couple of years back. He was the victim of a random, senseless stabbing (ha, when are stabbings ever not senseless?) one night, some alcohol-fuelled brawl no-one has ever really got to the bottom of. His spirit lingers on the wet pavement outside a Next; I’m guessing that’s where his body expired, emergency services unable to race against the violence of the attack or the steady stripping of resources. You’d think a big city boasting a number of hospitals would have a plethora of ambulances to send, but increased populations mean increased incidents, and there’s only so much help to go around. Less, when resources are not what they should be.
Anyway, as I cross the road, I make sure to avert my eyes, my attention. I can’t explain what it is which draws these phantoms to me, beyond it clearly being related to my ability to see them in the first place. But part of it, I believe, requires my intent, my will. I think it takes a level of attentiveness on my behalf towards these wraiths. I half recall physics lessons concerning the ‘observer affecting the observed’, or that old and overused Nietzsche quote about gazing into the abyss (there’s also the other part of that passage which mentions battling monsters, but I try not to dwell). I’ve found if I’m far enough away and don’t direct lingering attention towards them, ghosts, more often than not, aren’t aware of me.
Moving swiftly on, I pass HMV, Topshop, Debenhams. It’s not yet ten in the morning and there aren’t that many shoppers about – the crowds of early workers long since chained to their desks or locked in their offices and those who don’t work won’t be out their beds yet – but still I must play that game of dodge the pedestrian. I sometimes think people do it deliberately, make a point of walking straight at others, like it's a game of chicken they just have to win. Invariably, it’s guys who do this, some sad, toxic masculine instinct. I used to know a fella, a sort-of friend from school, who belligerently refused to get out the way of these guys. Women, kids, old folks, sure, but if he saw a lad or a group of lads who embodied this trait, he himself would not budge; fight fire with fire, I suppose. Helped he was built like a tank.
Anyway, I’m scrawny, and not intimidating in the slightest, so I just get to fuck out everyone’s way.
As I pass the entrance to the train station, I glance in. Amongst the crowd of commuters coming and going are grey, spectral figures of varying transparency. Some will be suicides, people at the end of their tethers who decided for whatever reason throwing themselves in front of a train was the way to end their suffering. Others might be victims of disaster, a train crash or perhaps even a fire in the station. Still others could be from before the place was built, belligerently clinging on decades after they died. I’ve encountered ghosts centuries old, so it’s perfectly feasible. I just don’t know for sure about these ones because, to be frank, I don’t want to know. I don’t carry out my services for free – not because I’m callous or indifferent to the plight of these phantoms, though I may well have a cynical streak in me. No, it’s because the act of clearing takes a huge toll on me, both mentally and physically. So, if I’m going to do this (and I don’t for a moment believe what I do is some kind of calling), I might as well get paid for it.
I carry on my way.
I’ll be turning off just before I hit Glasgow Cross and thank fuck for that. For a while, it was a place of execution in the city, including a martyred Catholic saint. Not only that, but many criminals had their ears nailed to the wood posts amongst other tortures. It’s the sort of thing which was rife in the city for centuries, even up to only a few decades ago. There’s that dark side of Glasgow and Scotland again, the history they’d rather everyone forgot. And to be fair, I’m happy to avoid the stains it has left behind.
I turn off down a side street into the dingier, back roads of the Trongate. Down here, the big-name brands give way to more downmarket ventures – charity shops, places selling second-hand goods, pubs (something Glasgow has more than enough of), tattoo parlours, tatty clothes shops, and independent cafes. It’s to one of the latter I’m headed, a place called Full of Beans (something else us Scots think we’re great at is ‘amusing’ names for businesses – The Codfather, a fish and chip shop, Wean’s World, a place selling clothes for kids, Florist Gump...).
I open the door and head in.
(C) Paul M. Feeney 2022