Somewhere: Chapter 1 (Pt 1)

 CHAPTER ONE (Pt 1)

 

 Half past eight on a sunny August morning in the Council building of the English city of York.

Elsie Goforth, a petite, wiry woman in her early fifties, stood in what the management of the Council called the Breakout Room and the workforce of the Council called the kitchen. She was informing a tap what she thought of it.

It was a new tap, supposed to produce boiling water of its own accord, although apparently no-one had informed the water. Elsie growled softly as the coffee bag in her mug obediently drowned in lukewarm liquid. “No point letting you brew.”

She added milk and shoved the mug in the microwave.

“Morning, Elsie.”

“Oh Christ, this fucking tap.”

Ciaran Ellis grinned. His dark hair needed a comb, but he was still more suavely dressed than a twenty-six-year-old in a local government office should be.

He knew not to expect cheery greetings from his boss in the morning. It wasn’t personal. “You know that new guy in Electoral Services? The one with the skull earrings and the orange Doc Martens? He’s just asked me if I believe in God.”

The microwave pinged and Elsie retrieved her mug. “Bit heavy for half past eight in the morning.”

“He said he was interested because of what we do.”

“What’s God got to do with we do?” Elsie sipped and pulled a face. “Microwaved coffee. There is no God.”

Ciaran put his own mug into the microwave. “Ghosts. The afterlife, as he put it. Wanted to know if it had affected my views.”

“I trust you told him there’s no such things as ghosts. Special Environmental Services investigates Echoes of the past that resonate and cause manifestations which, on occasion, make your pictures fall off the wall and put the wind up your dog. And can make your house difficult to sell, if the buyer is fond of their pictures and their pets. I’ll leave God up to you.”

The microwave pinged again, and Ciaran added instant coffee to his mug. “Doc Marten says Echoes show there definitely is life after death. Consciousness. Sentience. You know.”  

“He can say what he likes.” Elsie moved towards the door. “What’s left behind has no consciousness, or sentience. It is a measurable energy residue.”

“Maybe that’s hard for people of faith to accept?”

“That’s their problem. Religion is not famous for letting facts get in the way of a comforting notion. Like whoever dreamed up that bloody tap.”

Ciaran followed her. “Many referrals this morning?”

 “It’s Monday, Ciaran. Of course there’ll be many referrals. An entire weekend of the population hearing peculiar noises in the plumbing and seeing strange lights on their porch cams. Monday morning allocation meetings. Yet more proof there is no God.”

“I’ll refer Doc Marten to you next time. You could destroy anyone’s faith.”

“Then my work here is done. See you in Pod One, if you survive that coffee.”

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

Morning allocation meetings were held in one of the see-through domes that the management of the Council called Freeform Meeting Hubs and the workforce of the Council called Pods. They were tucked into corners of the open plan floor space, each big enough to hold half a dozen people round a white melamine table. They put Elsie in mind of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Sometimes, during particularly boring meetings, she imagined her whole team rising, dead-eyed, to move with the rest of the first floor towards the nearest exit, there to fan out and obliterate the unpodded people of the city.

Sometimes Elsie thought she’d worked in these offices long enough.

Promptly at nine o’clock, five bums were planted on five plastic moulded seats.

“There’s seven new referrals,” said Annis Crane, the team’s admin worker.

Elsie thought Annis was very good at her job. Excellent in fact. Efficient, meticulous, conscientious. Everyone thought that. And no-one could make head nor tail of her. She had two expressions: vaguely bored and vaguely disapproving. They never varied, whether she was at an allocations meeting or the Christmas Do, to which she always came for reasons no-one could fathom. She never seemed to enjoy herself, but then she never seemed definitively not to enjoy herself either. People who drew her name for Secret Santa had been known to offer considerable sums of money for a swap. They never got any takers.

“First one?” said Elsie crisply. Annis collated each day’s referrals. Elsie thought the admin worker probably felt she could do a much better job of running the morning meeting than Elsie did, and Elsie was not at all sure the admin worker wasn’t right.

Annis handed her a referral sheet from the bundle on the table. The Council’s efforts to go paperless had never quite taken off in Special Environmental Services. Elsie liked having a piece of paper in her hand. It was somehow reassuring.

She perused this one and grinned. “Ah, our old friends the Lloyd family. Joe Lloyd’s been banging holes in the walls again and now there’s something emerged from somewhere that’s going to murder them all in their beds.”

There was a smothered groan from Elsie’s right. Chris Eldon buried his head in his hands.

Elsie had been present at Chris’s fiftieth birthday celebrations, on the Saturday just gone. She wondered if it was a prolonged hangover, rather than the Lloyds, which was making him look bilious. Chris, being a veteran of various Council departments, knew pretty much every family in the city, by reputation if nothing else. He was related to a quarter of them.

She suppressed a smile. “Thank you, Christopher. You had them last, didn’t you?”

Annis said, “I checked with Housing. Caitlin, the daughter, is pregnant. They’ve applied for somewhere with another bedroom.”

Elsie sighed. “They’re always applying for somewhere with another bedroom or another bathroom or cleaner air. Caitlin will have to put in her own application, I would imagine. Or they’ll have to chuck out that lad of theirs – what’s his name?”

“Arnold,” said Chris. “Drug dealer of this parish. In a small, pocket-money kind of way.”

“If he’s dealing drugs from the property,” said Elsie, “something crawling out of the brickwork will be the least of their worries. Chris, go and do some readings. We’ll have to give it the once over, just to rule out the very unlikely chance they’ve disturbed something.”

“You can disturb something by banging a hole in the wall?” Jack Hanson had joined the team the previous Friday, when he’d been given the introductions and the guided tour, and received the Induction Manual. His round, pink face had looked anxious from the moment he walked through the door. Now his eyes were liquid pools of uncertainty.

“If the Curtain’s a bit thin at that spot,” said Elsie, “the vibrations from the banging can cause a ripple effect which may let more Echoes through.”

“Oh,” said Jack.

Obviously the lad had had better things to do over the weekend than read his Manual. Elsie managed a brief smile. “You’re unlikely to cause trouble by putting up a picture, but taking a sledgehammer to the bathroom tiles might do it.”

Jack frowned and seemed about to ask another question.

“Moving on,” said Elsie briskly. There was keeping the new recruit informed, and then there was extending an allocation meeting beyond its natural life with questions that could be answered by reading the Manual. She looked at the next sheet. “Right, this is a straightforward OMS. Other Matters Survey,” she remembered to add for Jack’s benefit, on the assumption he was unlikely to have found it in the Manual. “Exley Avenue — nothing very exciting up there, as far as I remember?”

“Nothing ever found up there at all,” said Annis.

“Waste of bloody time then,” muttered Chris.

Seeing Jack’s questioning look Elsie said, “Statutory duty for every property on the market in potentially affected areas, in other words the whole of York. Downside of living in the most haunted city in the country. According to the Tourist Office.”

Chris glowered. “We’ve got caseloads busting at the seams and they’re sending us off to do bloody surveys. If that’s what they want they need to cough up for more investigators. Or get the Estate Agents or the sellers to pay for it.”

“Ask Central Office to propose it to government,” said Elsie. “For now, it’s part of the job.”

Chris produced a noise somewhere between a snort and a raspberry. That’s some hangover, Elsie thought. Chris, like herself, could never be described as a morning person, but his natural affability usually carried him through until elevenses, when his brain would finally respond to more caffeine and some form of chocolate.

“Let’s see what else we’ve got,” she said, “and we’ll shove the OMS in where we can. Next?”

“A new Grey Lady at the theatre.” Annis handed Elsie the sheet.

Elsie shook her head. “It’s all that mucking about they’re doing with the pipes in the basement. I did warn them. It’s on the site of a medieval nunnery, for God’s sake. What did they think was going to happen? Ciaran, you know the bloke who runs the theatre, so you do that one. Jack can go with you. His first visit!”

Jack’s expression was one of terror rather than enthusiasm. He wasn’t like this in interview, Elsie thought. Was he? There had been only one other applicant for the job, a woman who, Annis informed Elsie after some research, was already hosting a podcast on the supernatural and carrying enough agendas and baggage to sink a battleship. It was an occupational hazard whenever Special Environmental Services recruited.

Elsie was further discouraged when Ciaran gave Jack one of his enigmatic smiles. Jack blushed.

Ciaran liked being enigmatic. He was never as enigmatic as he thought he was, because the enigma was only ever a lead-in to flirting. Ciaran flirted with anybody. Isla, Jack’s predecessor, had transferred to the team in Edinburgh when Ciaran broke her heart.

Not again, thought Elsie. Go flirt with Mr Orange-Doc-Martens-And-Skeleton-Earrings. Let Electoral Services do the recruiting.

She sighed. “Next?”

Annis said, “There’s a video from the police.”

 

Pt 2 is here:: Somewhere: Chapter 1 (Pt 2) | ABCtales

Picture by Alan Murray-Rust, copyright free from Wikimedia Commons: File:York City Walls, western section - geograph.org.uk - 6011369.jpg - Wikimedia Commons