The Last Days of Jack Sparks Read online

  Alistair Sparks: ‘There follows a 4 November 2014 email from Sherilyn Chastain to her sister Elizabeth Buckstable, a forensic scientist in New York City . . .’

  Hey Lizzy!

  Hope all’s cool with you, Don and the kiddywinks.

  Also hope the attachment on this email doesn’t end up in spam. It contains something I need you to look at urgently.

  Jack Sparks, this notorious Brit journalist, visited today to interview me. Last thing I needed when I’ve been so burnt out and stressed after the whole London thing. But he kept asking and asking, and in the end I thought why the hell not.

  It was a strange experience. But then, he’s a very strange guy. For one thing, he was supposed to be showing me a YouTube video, but then he produced this crazy paperback book too and wanted my opinion on that . . .

  He smelt of booze from the moment I opened the door. Having read up on him, I knew he was a bit of a druggie – wrote a whole book about doing them, in fact – and you can sure as shit tell there’s emotional instability. We had a false start with the interview: just after we settled on the balcony, he said he’d lost something and started scrabbling around for it.

  He wouldn’t tell me what he’d lost, which was sus. Made me think it was a bag of drugs, which would piss me right off. So I asked him point blank, no shit, and he swore it was nothing to do with drugs.

  He got all agitated and searched the balcony, then looked down over the side, thinking he’d dropped it into the garden seven floors down. I know the lady, so we went to search the area. Half an hour later, Jack hadn’t found what he was after. He came out of my bathroom with red eyes. At first, I thought he’d got stoned, but there was no smell of weed in there. He’d been crying, for sure. Then he went all sheepish, saying he’d found it in a pocket he’d forgotten about. He blamed his jet lag and said it was just an embarrassing little thing with real sentimental value. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and still ain’t. Anyway, we finally got down to talking.

  Lizzy, this guy lives online. First thing he did on the balcony was take a selfie with the sea in the background and stick it on social media. Even during the interview, he had the phone cradled next to the ashtray on his lap. You could see his eyes flicking down every thirty seconds. For a journalist, he’s also a really bad listener. Too much diarrhoea of the mouth.

  Something about this book he’s writing doesn’t add up, and it makes me afraid for him. Neg energy hangs around the guy in clouds, whether he believes that stuff or not. He fought his theological corner hard as a lion, but still wanted my opinion on this video he’s investigating. If I’m such a crazy bitch, why would he even care?

  I did keep quiet about one aspect of this video of his, partly because he’d never believe me. He’d think I was mind-gaming him. And he already seems freaked enough about this priest’s book.

  So, yeah, the book. Whereas he taped my opinion of the video on the record, he only produced that book when he’d stopped recording.

  I’ll never forget how he pulled this thing out of his bag. This bundle of shiny silver foil that smelt like a dead bonfire. He was talking about it all casually, while holding it by one corner like it was bloody radioactive. He smiled and said it was ‘just this stupid joke’ and ‘probably nothing’, but his eyes told a different story. He was scared of how I’d react.

  Needless to say, I yelled at him. Told him to stuff it right back in his bag. He was shocked, so I explained that he couldn’t just produce random objects in my home. I had no idea what he had there and it might have been cursed as fuck. I told him, ‘You’ve gotta be really careful with cursed objects: they leak. That shit’s like tar and it wants to hurt people.’ He carried on pretending to be all casual, while blatantly soiling his pants. So we left the building and I took him to my lock-up around the corner, explaining that I needed to protect myself under secure lab conditions.

  On the way, he told me what was so weird about the book. I won’t tell you this info in case it prejudices your own thoughts, but it made me even more pissed off that he’d brought it to my apartment without permission.

  When we got inside the lock-up, he looked around and reverted to journo mode, firing more questions. I told him how all the copper mesh on the walls basically turned the place into a huge Faraday cage, but the concept whooshed over his head. Funny, seeing as he’s s’posed to be such a science fanboy, and Michael Faraday was even a bloody Pom!

  The book, as you’ll see in the attached PDF, was The Devil’s Victims by Father Primo Di Stefano. I didn’t so much as touch the thing until Jack had put it in my psychically sealed and cleansed examination box – and even then I used special gloves. My lock-up might already be a sacred space, but there’s no harm in added precautions. If this thing is legit, then it’s something new to me. So I treated it as carefully as I’d treated anything before in my life.

  Before leaving the UK, Jack had set fire to the book, burning almost half of the pages before changing his mind and deciding to seek my opinion. I pushed my gloved hands into the box and picked up what remained. Jack watched me like a hawk. Thank God I’m an expert at appearing calm for the sake of clients. Yeah, clients might as well be your kids – you become their barometer of how scared they should be.

  Jack got all jittery and was really distracting me, so I ordered him to rack off. Said I’d see him on Friday.

  As I write this, I’m back home after a heavy shower combined with a ritual cleansing. I’ve reached no firm conclusions on the book. I’ll examine it again tonight, but in the meantime, purlease take a look at the PDF, which contains photographs of the singed front and back covers, plus many surviving pages from inside. I’d really value your thoughts.

  I’d like to think someone’s playing a trick on the guy with the book, maybe to try and teach him a lesson, but my gut says the thing shouldn’t exist. Combined with that video, it all spells bad ju-ju.

  I hope there’s something I can do to help Jack. At first my current clients, the Lengs, refused to let him tag along on Friday’s job, but thankfully they changed their minds when he offered them a bunch of cash.

  Perhaps if he sees Fang and me at work, it might broaden his mind. He might realise that the path he walks is narrow and self-destructive. It might not be too late for him to get off it.

  Otherwise, if I’m honest? That guy has no fuckin’ idea how screwed he is.

  Love to everyone,

  Sx

  1 When the true nature of the video came to light, YouTube and every other online video platform banned it. They continue to ban its every reappearance. The video, however, still spreads via torrent sites – Alistair.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sherilyn Chastain and I run side by side along a corridor, limbs pumping.

  ‘The entity knows we’ve got it,’ she says. ‘It’ll avoid us for as long as it can, but it can’t hide forever.’

  To our left, through a series of stylised rectangular portholes, the shores of Lantau Island and the other boats in the marina go sadly unadmired. We’re far more interested in capturing and dealing with this ghost.

  Or at least Chastain is interested in that. I’m interested in watching her and sidekick Fang pretend to catch a pretend thing for their clients’ benefit. These fascinating specimens are the very definition of people making a fuss over nothing.

  I always knew I’d have to visit a haunted house during the making of this book. That much was a given. I just never expected that house to be on water. And in fairness, neither did I expect this Hong Kong trip to permanently alter my thoughts on the supernatural.

  Chastain jabs a finger at the floor. ‘Last level. Fang: seal up behind us.’ She darts through a side door, which reveals stairs going down. As I follow, two steps at a time for the hell of it, Fang hangs back to perform the door-sealing ritual, her face set in grim concentration. A Chinese girl barely out of her teens, acting like she’s been doing this for a century.

  ‘Jack!’ Chastain’s urgent alarm rebounds off the wal
ls as I blunder in through the next door down, confused. I arrive in a long corridor that runs the length of the boat’s underbelly. Chastain’s head moves as if following something along the corridor towards me.

  A sudden wind lashes my face and blows my hair up.

  Chastain barks out a military order. ‘Get back!’

  What do you do? When you’re an atheist, and a mad combat magician tells you to take immediate action to avoid an incoming paranormal entity on a Hong Kong houseboat, what exactly do you do about that?

  So it’s two hours ago, and the Lengs are not happy with Sherilyn Chastain, not happy at all. They bristle with resentment and mistrust, which is interesting. It also makes having lunch with them an uncomfortable experience.

  The Lengs, Chastain, Fang and I are dining al fresco at a Thai restaurant on Lantau Island’s Discovery Bay Plaza. It’s a gorgeous day, but windy. Every few minutes, a muscular gust forces us all to hold down the tablecloth and our wine glasses. This shared experience may not exactly break the ice, but there’s at least a hairline crack. Fang doesn’t help one bit. No charm offensive here. She just sits in her black hoodie and her metal-plated New Rock boots, which weigh more than she does. Straight-backed and austere, she spoons soup from bowl to mouth, tracking birds as they fly, moving her eyes not her head. I’m convinced she’s one of those creepy new human-replacement droids.

  The largest of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, Lantau boasts scenery that does its damnedest to distract me from both the conversation and my rancid hangover. It’s so much greener than the city. Buildings jut sparsely up from mountains. A quarter-moon sliver of beach provides a focal point for sunbathers, while the vast choppy sea carries a billion bobbing diamonds. You’d never know that in a nearby bay sits a boat that has reportedly put Guiren and Jiao Leng’s family through a living hell.

  My fresh green curry looks exquisite when I photograph it for my followers, but I’m finding it hard to eat. In my defence, the last three nights have been big. I’ve barely slept. Last night alone, I ventured off the beaten track in the party district of Wan Chai. On those narrower, darker and more intriguing streets, where market stalls were locked up for the night, I found bars and people dedicated to the pursuit of oblivion. I dimly recall onlookers wolf-whistling as tequila and triple sec were poured straight from the bottles into my mouth, all to a ‘Gangnam Style’ soundtrack. Hence the cold-sweat horrors that cling to me today.

  I’ve also made headway in my video investigation. This week, it became clear that my social media sniffer dogs – the great unwashed Sparks-following public – have no idea where the video came from and are unlikely to find out. It also became clear that the only websites sufficiently enthused to mount an in-depth analysis believe in the supernatural and are therefore not to be trusted. So in the early hours of Wednesday morning, while loaded, I took matters into my own hands. I watched the video again and again, obsessing over each and every pixel. And on the fifty-sixth viewing, I finally saw something no one else had noticed. Something that only appears when Camera Boy dips his frame to very briefly capture the lower part of a wall.

  You never quite see the whole thing, but you see enough to determine what it is: a two-pin plug socket embedded in that wall. Two vertical slits with an arch-shaped hole beneath them, the whole thing resembling a tiny shocked face. This means the video was shot in North America. Or Canada. Oh, or Mexico. Which admittedly doesn’t narrow things down as much as I’d prefer, but hey, we now have the correct continent, ladies and gents.

  The net closes in . . .

  The Lengs are a naturally attractive couple, upon whom trauma has taken its toll.

  The flesh around their eyes is baggier and darker than it should be on people in their mid-thirties, even given the ferocious work ethic of China’s professionals, and they’re prone to lapse into ten-mile stares. Guiren’s left arm rests in a sling and he pops painkillers between his starter and main. Thanks to those charlatans Maddelena and Maria Corvi, I’m vigilant for signs that the Lengs are stooges hired to make Chastain look good. Thus far, the fact that they’re disgruntled customers is achieving quite the opposite. So will this afternoon’s findings correspond to my existing SPOOKS List? Are the Lengs either lying or being lied to?

  They initially refused to have a journalist involved today. Only when they were told my name and realised they’d read and adored all my books did they acquiesce. I’m not allowed to actually quiz them myself, but it’s agreed that they will relate their story, to serve the dual purpose of informing me while allowing everybody to agree on the events so far.

  Chastain is modelling an unshowy business suit with her hair no less purple but slicked back. Even your modern combat magician has to ape corporate standards to reassure their clients. She speaks Cantonese fluently back at the Lengs, while Fang translates for my benefit, ignoring all requests for repetition or clarification. Truth be told, Fang doesn’t like me. I’ve tried bonding with her over rock music, but she only likes Scandinavian black metal nonsense. Bands with spiky, incomprehensible logos.

  In September, Guiren and Jiao ‘got tired of paying rent’ (oh, the poor lambs) and decided to have their own houseboat built. Despite high operating costs and the occasional typhoon, houseboat-living is perfectly viable and popular in Hong Kong, with many communities clustered in bays around the region. Of course, it’s especially viable when you’re minted.

  The couple moved in on 30 September, which they claim was an auspicious date for a big move. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear all that astrology talk was meaningless twaddle. The Lengs’ dream of ‘calm and centred living’, to ease the stress of their work as finance directors for one of Hong Kong’s biggest media companies, quickly became a nightmare once they took residence.

  On the third night, Guiren awoke to hear distant footsteps. ‘It was like someone pacing about, endlessly,’ he says. ‘I didn’t wake Jiao or the children: I just got up, grabbed a torch as a weapon and crept in the direction of the sound. I followed the footsteps up a level to the captain’s bridge, which we use as a living space, because the boat is only ever moved when something needs to be repaired.

  ‘The footsteps stopped when I entered. There were no other sounds, apart from the wind and water outside. The first things I noticed were my and Jiao’s computer screens, which sit side by side at the front. They were both on, even though we’d turned them off. The browsers were open and each showed full-screen videos of blazing fire.’

  Gripping his torch so tight that he cracked the casing, Guiren searched the boat from bow to stern, finding nothing and no one. Assuming some freak had broken in, he had the locks changed, telling Jiao they were faulty. I’ve no idea why he lied to his wife. The woman is so clearly ruthless that I’d set her on an intruder in a heartbeat.

  Yet Guiren couldn’t keep his secret for long. The night after he switched those locks, the footsteps returned, closer to the bedroom. This time, they woke Jiao and five-year-old Bo, the youngest of their three daughters. Guiren locked his family in one bedroom, then mounted another search.

  ‘That night,’ he says, ‘I saw a face in the fire on the monitor screens. A silhouetted face twisted into a silent scream. It kept moving from one monitor to the other, as if tormented.’

  That’s when the kids started screaming. According to Jiao, they were being attacked by an invisible force. She claims she tried to protect them, ‘but how do you fight thin air?’

  ‘The kids all ended up with bruises and scrapes,’ says Guiren. ‘At the time, I stupidly thought my family had suffered hysteria in that locked room, scaring themselves, bumping into each other. Still, I moved them to an apartment in the city and stayed on the boat by myself. I was determined to find out what was going on.’

  Guiren became fixated on the idea of the intruder’s behaviour escalating to kidnappings and ransom demands. He even assigned a bodyguard to live in his family’s apartment. Then, one night, on the boat, something happened that led him to call Sherilyn Chast
ain.

  ‘The footsteps came back, but now they were harder, faster. Whoever this was, they were running around the boat. Running like crazy. The boat even shook, like they were careering into the walls. I heard things fall and break.’

  That night, Guiren was armed with more than a torch. He declines to specify the exact nature of the weapon due to restrictive national laws, but you can imagine. ‘I edged along a corridor on the starboard side. The floor was covered in broken glass, because our family portrait had been ripped from the wall and hurled to the ground. Further along the corridor, the monitors were glowing again on the bridge. Something came along that corridor at me fast, with footsteps to match. The best way I can describe it is a cloud of smoke in mid-air. A fat smoke cloud, thrashing about. I knew then that we were dealing with something . . . elemental. Suddenly it was all around me. This whirlwind: screaming, spinning me, hurling me against walls. I was so scared. I managed to get away, then ran and jumped over the side of the boat into the marina. The shock of the cold water at four a.m. almost killed me. I don’t know whether it was the spirit’s attack or the fall, but I ended up with this arm broken in three places.’

  It’s a compelling story, but what’s the reality here? If you’re anything like me, you may sense a different and disturbing tale bubbling beneath. But when one of Guiren’s work colleagues discreetly pointed him in Sherilyn Chastain’s direction, the Aussie formed her own narrative.

  Two weeks back, Chastain and Fang visited to assess the boat. Chastain did indeed detect a presence on board, then tried to deal with it the following day. They left satisfied their work was done, but this was seemingly not the case.

  Five nights ago, those restless nocturnal feet made a big comeback. The Lengs’ kids had already fallen ill with some grim vomiting bug, and Jiao suffered splitting headaches. When a dismayed Guiren investigated new footsteps, once again in the middle of the night, those bridge monitors again showed the screaming face in fire, jerking from one to the other. And once again while he wasn’t present, the spirit attacked the kids, this time throwing Bo against a wall and giving her concussion. As the family fled the boat, middle daughter Mei-Hua fell screaming into the water, narrowly missing one of the poles supporting the jetty. Guiren jumped in and managed to save her, but the experience left everyone ‘very badly shaken’ and living back at the apartment.