The Last Days of Jack Sparks Read online

  All aboard the ghost train . . .

  The video is technically in colour, but so much black, grey and white are involved that it’s mostly monochrome. The quality seems to place it in the digital age, but it’s difficult to be sure. That is one of the avenues I intend to pursue during my investigation, m’lud.

  The scene is dark, but with just enough light for us to see the basis of what’s going on. Even if we don’t fully understand it.

  We are in a corridor in some kind of basement, or boiler room area, or both. Throughout what follows, there’s a low, droning hum. The aforementioned light seems to come from a single bare bulb hanging at the end of a cord, which we glimpse at around the seven-second mark. The bulb is caked in dust, which dulls the light it gives out.

  We know it’s cold, from the misted breath of whoever’s filming. For ease of reference, we’ll call this person Camera Boy. There is no audio-visual evidence to suggest he’s a guy, but let’s face it, no girl’s going to be stupid enough to go filming in a cold, dark, spooky basement.

  The camera is only a foot or two above ground level. It moves forward slowly, bumping as it goes. Feels very much like Camera Boy is crawling forward on his knees. To the left, a couple of feet away, there’s a plain brick wall, the stone chipped, faded, old. To our immediate right is a spaghetti junction of pipes on the other wall, each a couple of inches thick. They’re different primary colours, although much of the paint has peeled away. These pipes feed in and out of old-fashioned dust-caked boxes with dials and gauges on them.

  We see that this corridor will widen up ahead, into an area flooded with black. That’s where the wall with the pipes turns off to the right, forming a sharp corner. As Camera Boy approaches that corner, he stays close to this wall but slows down, as if wary of the imminent turn. We now hear as well as see his breath, which is fast and spidery. He’s really quite scared.

  There’s a pause. You can almost feel Camera Boy steeling himself. You can almost smell Camera Boy shitting himself. (Eleanor: I’ll probably choose just one of these two sentences later. I know which one Little Miss Prim will prefer . . .)

  Then he’s crawling again, closing in on that corner.

  Don’t worry: the video doesn’t end there. That would have been infuriating beyond belief, wouldn’t it? No, there are still about thirty seconds left.

  Apparently being vaguely sensible, Camera Boy doesn’t go blundering around that corner. Instead, he peeps, millimetre by millimetre. Impossible to tell for sure, but maybe he even edges the camera around the corner first, while keeping his own head back with an eye on the viewfinder. That’s what I’d do, whether I believed in ghosts or not.

  It takes a while for the camera to focus on what it sees, because it’s gloomy and abstract. Eventually, though, we lay our eyes on a little scene across the basement floor. Camera Boy does too, because there’s a sharp intake of breath and the camera wobbles.

  For the next few seconds, the only noise will be provided by that bass-heavy hum, which now sounds like it emanates from a generator.

  In the centre of this space, one person is lying down and one person is standing.

  At least, I think that’s a person on the floor. It’s almost completely obscured by thick shadow. We see an arm, maybe a hand, get the general sense of a humanoid shape, nothing more. It could be a shop window dummy, or a scarecrow, but it certainly looks like an actual human person on their front, completely still, with only their top half in shot.

  Conversely, as I tried to explain to Bex before, the camera’s framing only allows us to see the lower half of the person standing over them. We see this person’s legs and feet, which face away from us. They seem to be bare and, in these poor lighting conditions, appear quite black. They also appear to be . . . well, transparent. You can see through them, in the classic ghost tradition. These legs come very slowly in and out of sight in the manner of Christmas tree lights in fade mode, while never vanishing entirely or appearing fully corporeal. The effect is subtle and admittedly disquieting.

  Camera Boy seems inclined to agree, because he whispers five words.

  ‘Oh God . . . this is it.’

  These are the only words he utters throughout the clip. Because it’s such a thin reed of a whisper and can only be heard with the volume cranked right up, it’s still impossible – for me, at least – to discern the gender.

  The camera half ducks back around the corner, as if Camera Boy fears having been heard. The right-hand half of the screen is abruptly obscured by a vertical slice of wall.

  Across the room, those legs and feet remain still. Their state of slow, steady flux continues, blending in and out of existence.

  Perhaps confident that he wasn’t heard after all, Camera Boy moves the camera back into position, away from the cover the wall affords him.

  With timing worthy of cinematic horror icons like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, the figure across the room begins to slowly, oh so painfully slowly, turn around.

  It seems to take our hero a while to realise that those feet are shifting position, a few inches at a time, to face him. Maybe his own eyes have been distracted, lingering on that body on the floor.

  When he registers what’s going on, we soon know all about it. For three seconds the camera becomes a jerky blur of brick, pipe, misty breath and nothing, as he concentrates on getting the hell out of here.

  The camera settles down, though it’s still very bumpy, to show us that corner, from which we now scurry away, backwards, low, possibly on our arse.

  Something comes around the corner, fast.

  We see only the dangling feet of that pitch-black spectre as it floats right at us.

  Camera Boy doesn’t scream or yell. Instead, his dry vocal cords click and pop. It’s as if they can’t produce an adequate response and give up the ghost, so to speak. The camera spasms and shakes, jerks to the right, briefly captures that mess of metal pipes . . .

  And that’s where the video ends.

  One thing I didn’t mention: three other words besides ‘Oh God . . . this is it’ are spoken during the video. In my opinion, these words have been overdubbed, rather than having been recorded live during filming. They are spoken neutrally by what sounds like a young girl with an accent from somewhere like Spain or Italy. The voice is not entirely dissimilar to Maria Corvi’s. It can’t be her, though, fright fans, so don’t get excited.

  One second into the video, the voice says, ‘Adramelech.’

  Exactly halfway through, at the twenty-second mark, the voice says, ‘Mephistopheles.’

  One second before the video ends, the voice says, ‘Baphomet.’

  Bex wriggles on the corner of my bed, rubbing bare arms. ‘Bloody hell. Goosey-bumps.’

  I’m gutted: this could have been a green light to hug the scared drunk girl. But no. Because Lawrence. Because vomit stains. Because life.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It’s the best ghost video I’ve seen. They did a good job.’

  ‘What . . . so you don’t think it’s real?’

  The scorn in my voice surprises even me. ‘Bex, who do you think you’re talking to? I mean, I suppose it would convince some people.’

  ‘That fadey-legs thing . . . that’s a ghost.’

  ‘Oh God, woman! Don’t you think it’s all a bit too neat?’

  ‘Don’t “woman” me, you fucking tit.’

  ‘It’s all too, y’know . . . Blair Witch. Something scary happens at the end, the camera goes berserk, then blackout.’

  ‘If a ghost flew round a corner at me, then that would, to be fair, signal the end of my interest in filming. My camera work would suffer.’

  She’s so annoying and confusing. Funny and heart-pulping. As we debate the video, I reinstate it on my YouTube channel, then post as follows:

  ‘It’s back! Anyone know anything about the origin of this scary video? Email [email protected]: [YouTube link].’

  ‘Hey, hold on,’ says Bex. ‘You didn’t film this yourself, did you
?’

  I glower over my shoulder at her.

  ‘Just checking,’ she protests. ‘Can we watch it again?’

  ‘I’m too tired,’ I say, fighting the strong urge to watch it with her till dawn. To do anything with her till dawn. Count the Artex bumps on the ceiling. Separate a vast mound of pins into categories by length.

  She stands with reluctance, an unsteady sleepwalker. High-fives me on her way past, then melts out into the darkness. Heading for the room that will soon revert to being either my study or a home to some new dickhead tenant who’ll leave snarky Post-it notes everywhere.

  I’d meant to ask what she made of ‘Adramelech’, ‘Mephistopheles’ and ‘Baphomet’, which Google swiftly confirms to be the names of demons and devils. Never mind, it’ll be a good excuse to talk to her again tomorrow. But no, no, triple no, I should ignore that instinct. Distancing myself from Bex is the right thing to do. Nothing stays the same forever and, God knows, it’s her loss.

  I yank a bottle of Jack out from under the desk, fish an old pack of cigarettes from a drawer and watch the video until I fall asleep in my chair.

  Come morning, I feel like I’m finally seeing the video properly for the first time. On Halloween I was drunk and careless, watching it on that small phone screen. Last night, I was drunk and preoccupied with Bex. In the cold light of day, when I’m sober, if acutely dehydrated and sprinkled with toast crumbs, the video is so much more vivid. I had wondered whether clarity might sap its power, but this remains undiminished. I also notice more detail. For instance, the outline of a door on the boiler room’s back wall: the entrance to an ancient lift shaft. There are two small square windows in this door, and every few seconds, we glimpse the silhouette of old-school mechanisms within. The apparent lack of button on the wall beside the lift door suggests we’re talking pre-automatic, pre-1950s.

  My immediate plan of action is to scour the video for clues to its origin, while hunting down an expert to analyse it. Cardiff Calvin may be awesome, but as an IT manager he has limited insight to offer in this respect. He notes that the video’s resolution is ‘hard to pin down, because YouTube re-encodes everything you upload. But at a guess, it looks like it was shot in recent years, perhaps with a phone rather than a camcorder? Deffo too jumpy to be a GoPro.’

  My feet itch. My passport bounces on my desk, begging for action. The urge to leave is partly down to Bex, who seems intent on spending the day pouting around in her bra and pants with her hair in a towel. But while I’m noodling this video, I may as well travel and discover just how super the supernatural world can be. So I decide to become a leaf on the winds of social media:

  ‘Guys! Tell me where the scariest, most SCIENTIFICALLY DEMONSTRABLE spooks hang out. Anywhere in the world. Go!’

  Suggestions flood in for the rest of the day. I find myself invited all around the planet, and soon discover that there are an insane number of global paranormal-interest groups. One such group, Bras¸ov Inc., based in Transylvania, claims to have found Count Dracula’s actual skull buried near ancient ruins. Given that Count Dracula is a fictional character, I respectfully decline their suggestion that I come and hold the thing in my own two hands. They counter that they actually meant Vlad the Impaler, the real-life character upon whom Bram Stoker supposedly based Count Dracula, and who was apparently also known as Dracula. At this point, I ask why a real-life person’s skull would be of any interest to a man searching for the supernatural. Comms go quiet after that. Some people really will do anything for a bit of attention: their desperation consumes all reason.

  A motley stateside crew named the Hollywood Paranormals write to tell me they’re preparing a modern-day version of something called the Harold Experiment from the seventies. I don’t read too far into it, but basically they want to see whether the human mind can invent and produce a bespoke ghost. Naturally, they want Jack Sparks involved. Fairly interesting stuff, which certainly beats Dracula’s skull, but ultimately too esoteric. As I said, I don’t believe the human mind can actually hallucinate a ghost, sans LSD. I also want to at least give people a chance to prove that real ghosts of the dead exist, as opposed to ghosts of the mind, so I wish group leader Astral Way all the best with his experiment and open the next email . . .

  . . . which is a hacking threat from some dildo called Oscar, who bravely uses an untraceable email account. His mustard gas vitriol wafts from the screen. ‘Only an idiot would write a book about something they don’t believe in. You think the Devil’s so funny? You should ask yourself, Mr Jack Sparks, what the Devil thinks of you.’ No doubt shortly before his mummy tells him it’s time for bed, Oscar signs off with, ‘You have displeased many in the hacking community, Mr Sparks. We will SHUT YOU DOWN.’

  Amusingly impotent rattle-throwing trolls aside, none of the other invitations entice. It’s all blah, blah, blah. ‘Read my blog’ this; ‘I have a doctorate in the paranormal’ that. After hours of carpet-bombing from spiritual snake-oil salesmen and people with Kindle books to promote, indirect recommendations hold far more sway with me. So I start to pay more attention to those.

  One name pops up in my feed more than any other.

  Sherilyn Chastain’s Hong Kong Island apartment is hard to find, even when you have her address and the use of Google Maps. This is no doubt deliberate, given that her profession must attract even more lunatics than Dawkins or myself. Twice, I’m forced to phone her for directions. Each time, she provides the information in a clipped, businesslike manner, uttering the bare minimum of words.

  Just as the video impressed me by underselling itself, Sherilyn Chastain attracted me by letting others do all the shouting from rooftops. ‘You should totally talk to SChastainReal,’ advised MightieAtom6 from New Jersey, among so many others. ‘She’ll point you in the right direction and make sure you don’t screw this book up.’ Thanks for the advice, MightieAtom6, although I’m not in the habit of making mistakes (give or take the odd ounce of pre-rehab cocaine).

  Chastain’s website is low-key. A brief bio describes her Perth upbringing as the daughter of a local lawyer and a French artist. The rest focuses on her various paid services as a combat magician. Yes, you read that right: combat magician. Combat magic is new to me, but it sounds so very dramatic that I must know more.

  Hong Kong’s summer heatwave has long gone, leaving the air relatively cool but still more humid than I’m used to. I’m soon cloaked in sweat from traipsing these hectic and riotously colourful streets, whose market stalls sell everything you can imagine. Each street has a theme: you turn from one selling goldfish into the next selling shoes, then into another selling electronic goods. I’m assailed by that wonderwall of unique aromas that only China and various global Chinatown outposts can build. It’s hard to believe open-air food stalls (dai pai dongs) are on the decline locally, because they’re glorious. Like most sky-scraping cities, Hong Kong transforms you into a mouse running around an unfathomably tall maze, but the sights, smells and tastes are worth it.

  Every other minute, my phone vibrates in my hand, signifying a new email in my inbox dedicated to information on the video. So far, four in every ten messages has been from someone claiming to have filmed it themselves. Unless they were all on the same crew, this is patently impossible. Of these emails, I’m replying to the ones that sound fundamentally plausible and don’t make their confession with fuckwit text-speak. I tread carefully and remain non-committal, asking them to tell me just a little more, a little more . . . and waiting for them to trip up or just not get back to me. There’s no way I want to throw any babies out with the bathwater here, but I’ve also come to understand how frustrating it must be for murder detectives when fruit loops confess to homicides they didn’t commit.

  The video has captured people’s imaginations, bagging me over twelve thousand new followers as a result. Those who have blogged and posted about it tend to either present it as the first genuine supernatural event ever captured on film, or rip it apart as nonsense. I see very little middle grou
nd. Some lazily and stupidly imply I’ve engineered the whole thing. I suppose the video having appeared on my own YouTube channel has played a big part there, but there’s no call for the likes of CrazyHotBuzz.com to write, ‘This dumb and clearly fabricated video surely has to be attention-starved junkie Sparks’ last roll of the dice. We sure hope so.’ As if I care what a bunch of inconsequential hipsters think. Let them keep quacking into the void. (Eleanor: I did email you and Murray about this but received no response – please have our legal guys remove their libel ASAP!)

  While becoming legally high simply by passing incense stalls, I skip an incoming call that ends up as a new voicemail message. It’s the third I’ve received from Astral Way of the Hollywood Paranormals since I turned them down. The man does not comprehend the word ‘no’. How did he even get my number? He non-stop invites me to hook up on social media, and his voicemails become more passive-aggressive each time. The first message introduced me to his soft Californian hippy accent: ‘I would advise you to take a little more time to think about this decision. Believe me, Jack, when I say that our experiment cannot be ignored.’ I smirk my way through his latest recording, as he asks, ‘Please do me the courtesy of calling me back, provided you’re not too busy, of course. And since you’re visiting Sherilyn Chastain, perhaps you might want to ask her about our group’s highly respected status in the paranormal community. Thank you.’

  Is anything more cringe-worthy than someone being curtly formal?

  When a text springs up from Bex (‘Looks like I might be shacking up with lover boy sooner than expected – will next week be okay?’), I’m very relieved to turn a corner and finally clock Sherilyn Chastain’s street sign.

  I once again consider what I’m trying to achieve here. Given that Chastain is a noted and respected member of what Astral Way calls the paranormal community, I’d like her thoughts on the video’s authenticity or otherwise. Can’t hurt. I also want to see if speaking to her, and perhaps learning more about what she does, can add a new hypothesis to my SPOOKS List. After hanging out with one of the world’s foremost combat magicians, will I decide there’s actually a third explanation for people seeing ghosts, besides them lying or being lied to by others?