The Ghosts of Hexley Airport Page 4

  “Yeah. She's just... I don't know, she's just looking out the window. Check the cameras, you must be able to see her!”

  “That's going to be tricky,” he replied. “I know this might seem hard to believe, but there's actually a dead-spot in that particular area. They've never been able to get the cameras working properly to cover those seats. Casey, are you sure it's not just a trick of the light? Or a shadow, maybe?”

  “There's a woman right there!” she said firmly. “What should I do? Are you going to come down here?”

  “I'll be there in two minutes,” he replied. “Don't approach her, Casey. Just stay where you are and -”

  Before he could finish, the line buzzed with a brief burst of interference, and then a faint clicking sound indicated that the call had been cut.

  “Tom?”

  She tried to get him back, but now the phone refused to connect. After trying a couple more times, she looked back over toward the woman and saw that she was still sitting in the seat, just as before. This time, however, Casey saw that the woman's face was being reflected in the glass of the window, with a very faint set of features just about visible against the swirling storm. She couldn't help noticing that the woman's eyes seemed very dark, like two pits, but she told herself the light was just a little odd in this part of the hall.

  After looking over her shoulder and seeing that there was no sign of anyone else, Casey turned back to the woman.

  “Someone's coming, okay?” she explained. “Just hold on tight and...”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “Right,” she continued finally, clearly struggling to work out exactly what she should do.

  She glanced over her shoulder, but there was still no sign of Tom coming to the rescue, and then she turned just in time to see the woman getting up from the seat and walking calmly toward the door ahead.

  “Hey, wait!” Casey called out, hurrying around the seats and rushing to reach the woman, who slipped through the doorway and out of sight around a corner. “Hold on! I don't think you can go that way!”

  As soon as she reached the corner and looked into the corridor, Casey saw that there was no sign of the woman. She hesitated, looking for a door or a passage leading off to either side, trying to figure out which way the woman had gone, but there was absolutely no way out of the corridor other than walking all the way to the far end. And that, by any stretch of the imagination, was clearly impossible in the space of just a few seconds.

  “Hello?” she called out tentatively, her voice filled now with a kind of trembling fear. “M'am? Can I please speak to you for a moment?”

  She waited, before taking a couple more steps forward and double-checking that there was definitely no kind of hidden panel that might open to let a figure slip out of sight. Once she was sure that there was no way anyone could hurry away, she paused for a few more seconds, before turning to head back the way she'd just come.

  “Where's my daughter?” a woman gasped right behind her, lunging at Casey and grabbing her shoulder, staring with sunken eyes set in a burned and bloodied face. “What have you done with her?”

  Chapter Three

  The self-service tea and coffee machine stood on a counter in the corner of the newsstand, with Styrofoam cups piled neatly nearby. Now that the airport was closed for the night, the machine had been undisturbed for several hours, although a white light continually blinked on and off next to the water level indicator. Nothing was wrong. The machine was simply flashing the light so that the first person to open the newsstand in the morning would remember to turn the handle and start letting the water heat up again.

  And then, with no warning, a red light suddenly flashed on near the bottom of the machine's casing, and a jet of cool water dribbled from one of the nozzles, collecting in the over-spill tray. The water continued to run for precisely eleven seconds, which was the predetermined time loaded into the machine's memory, and then the entire contraption fell still again, save for the white light that carried on blinking relentlessly.

  The newsstand was otherwise shrouded in darkness. In the distance, however, a set of calm footsteps could just about be heard making their way through another part of the departure area, even though there was no sign of anyone and none of the motion-sensitive sensors had been tripped.

  ***

  “Oh, come on now,” Tom said with a weary smile as he handed Casey another cup of tea in the security office, “I'm sure it wasn't that bad.”

  “Her face was burned,” she replied, reaching up and touching one side of her own face, to indicate the area where the woman's cheekbones and jaw had been showing through. “All around here. And what was left of her looked so pale, like it was sticking real tight to her skull, and her were all sunken in and...”

  Her voice trailed off. She wasn't crying, but her eyes were distinctly watery as she stared into space for a moment, as if she was reliving the moment over and over again. At the same time, the more she described what she'd seen, the more the whole story sounded completely unbelievable, even though the image was burned into her mind's eye. After a moment, she realized that she probably sounded completely insane.

  “And then she disappeared, eh?” Tom asked. “Puff, like that?”

  “I can't describe it,” she replied, still staring over toward the office's far wall, her eyes unfocused and filled with shock. “She was so clearly right in front of me, and then a fraction of a second later she was gone. And then maybe two or three seconds later, before I could even react... Well, that's when you showed up.”

  “And scared the nasty monster away.”

  Turning to him, Casey let her mouth hang open for a moment.

  “I'm not lying,” she said finally. “I really saw her!”

  He sighed.

  “I did, Tom!”

  He checked his watch. “Maybe the -”

  “One of the cameras must have caught something,” she continued, setting the tea down and then getting up from the chair, hurrying to the control board and looking at the various video feeds. “She was sitting near gate fourteen at first. There was a sign for a flight with a call number, DSE9191 I think, and then the woman went into the corridor next to the gate, the one that runs through to the baggage reclaim hall.” Tapping at various buttons, she brought up a replay screen and began to search for the right camera, although after a moment she started muttering under her breath as she found herself cycling through various blank images.

  “I told you,” Tom told her, “the cameras are a bit wonky in that part of the departure terminal. Tech have been saying they're gonna fix it for donkey's years, but I don't think they know what the problem is in the first place.”

  “I saw someone!”

  “None of the motion sensors have been triggered.”

  “I saw her!”

  “So you keep saying.”

  She turned to him. “You don't believe me, do you?”

  “I believe it can be very spooky out there, all alone in the terminal in the hours before the place reopens. The terminal's designed to handle thousands of people at a time. When there's no-one there, it's like the emptiness is... louder, somehow.” He paused, eyeing her with a hint of sympathy. “The human mind is a powerful thing, Casey. At times of stress, we can trick ourselves into thinking we saw something, even when there was nothing there.”

  “She was sitting on a seat,” Casey stammered, “and then she got up and walked away. And then I turned around and she asked me -”

  “Where her daughter is,” he replied, “I remember, you already told me. But the point is, there's absolutely no way some woman could possibly be wandering around at this time of night, not in the building and not outside. You've got to accept that whatever you think you saw, you were wrong. It was your mind playing tricks on you.”

  Turning back to look at the monitors, Casey watched them for any hint of movement.

  “It's doing it again,” she said suddenly.

  “What is?”

  She
pointed up at one of the monitors on the left, where the facial recognition system was once more trying to frame and analyze a patch of empty air. This time, its attention was focused on the area near the security barriers, and the system continually tried to place a flickering rectangle around a face that it seemed to think should be somewhere on the image. A face that was nowhere to be seen.

  “What's it picking up?” Casey whispered, as the rectangle began to move across the screen before disappearing from view. Whatever the system had been trying to identify, the target had seemingly drifted out of the camera's viewpoint.

  “Are you sure someone hasn't been filling your head with stories of Old Eve?” Tom asked.

  She turned to him. “Stories of who?”

  He sighed again. “You haven't heard about her?”

  She shook her head.

  “You know about the disaster here, right? Ten years ago, when a passenger plane took off from Hexley and then suffered a major engine failure? It tried to turn around and come back for an emergency landing, but they never made it to the runway. The plane went down at the airport's perimeter. Two hundred and eleven passengers and seven crew members died, most on impact and some...” He hesitated for a moment. “Well, they reckon some of the poor souls died in the fire, before the rescue crews could get to them. Screams were heard, apparently.”

  “I know the story,” Casey replied. “That was when the airport got all these upgrades, right? After the crash?”

  He nodded.

  “So who -”

  “Since even before the night of that accident,” he continued, interrupting her, “there have been some superstitious people who reckon there's a spirit kinda looking over the airport. They call her Old Eve 'cause some nutter a few years ago claimed he recognized her as a woman named Eve Hoffman who died in a car accident here in the 70's. If you believe all these people, which I don't, but if you do... Well, they say she watches over the place.”

  “Like a ghost?”

  “Before you get too excited,” he added, “people who claim to have seen her are usually nut-jobs to begin with. And they all say she's an older woman, in her fifties.”

  “The woman I saw tonight was closer to her thirties.”

  “The woman you think you saw.”

  She sighed.

  “So I'm guessing,” he continued, “that you heard about Old Eve, and the story set something off subconsciously and you had some kind of mild episode out there. Maybe being outside in the storm spooked you and set something running.”

  “I'm not crazy!”

  “And then once you were in the building, something got your head spinning and your mind filled in a few gaps and -”

  “She was really there!”

  “And the end result,” he added with a heavy sigh, “is that here we are, discussing this like there's even the remotest chance that it's possible.” He paused, eyeing her with a hint of pity mixed with exasperation. “Please, love, don't be one of those people.”

  “One of what people?”

  “The ones who go on about ghosts. There's nothing like that at Hexley. There's nothing like that anywhere, by my reckoning. It's like I said. The human mind's a powerful thing and it can make us think we see things. Things that aren't there.”

  “But...”

  Her voice trailed off for a moment.

  “I did see her,” she added finally. “Just for a second, just until I blinked, but I did see a woman.”

  Sighing yet again, Tom grabbed the logbook and slid it toward her across the table.

  “That's where we're supposed to write down anything notable that happens during the graveyard shift,” he explained. “Then the higher-ups go through it, and they investigate anything they reckon is worth investigating. If it's something big, something that might be to do with security, they really go to town. No stone un-turned, and all that. So if you want to be the girl who writes a ghost story in the logbook, I'm not gonna stop you. Just be aware that people won't take you very seriously. I mean, you want to keep your job here, don't you?”

  Staring at the logbook, Casey seemed torn. After a moment, she reached toward the pen, but then she held back as if she'd changed her mind.

  “We checked everywhere after I found you earlier,” Tom continued. “If I thought for one second that there might be someone oose in the building, I'd tear the place apart trying to find her. But there's no-one, love. Just you and me, and then in about forty minutes the engineers and fuel guys'll show up to start getting things ready for when the airport reopens in the morning. Now why don't you sit down and have a nice cuppa, and forget about what you thought you saw? I'm sure that in the cold light of day, you'll feel much calmer.”

  Casey hesitated for a few seconds, still looking at the logbook, and then she cautiously took a seat at the desk.

  “That's better,” Tom said, sliding the cup of tea toward her. “Go on, while it's still hot.”

  He watched as Casey began sipping from the tea. As the pair of them sat in silence for a few minutes, the bank of monitors continually flickered and cycled through various different black-and-white shots of the empty airport. Not one of the shots showed even the faintest hint of a figure, whether inside the terminal building or out where the snowstorm was still swirling around the dark, parked planes. And as Tom finally started telling Casey all about the bunions on his feet, and as Casey tried to take her mind of her experiences by asking a few questions, neither of them paid any attention to the monitor at the very top left of the wall, which had begun to show a shot from the eastern end of the terminal building, covering the check-in area and the hallway that led through to security.

  If they had been paying attention, they would have noticed the faint shadow of a figure stepping briefly past the camera and then disappearing into the seating area near the first bank of departure boards.

  ***

  “I'm home!” Casey called out as she struggled to pull her scarf off. She could hear her mother pottering about in the kitchen. “I just need to eat and then go to bed. I'm exhausted.”

  Heading along the narrow, cramped hallway, she realize her mother seemed to be talking to someone. By the time she got to the door, she'd already guessed what was happening, and sure enough she found her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a laptop open.

  “So tell me, Elizabeth,” a tinny voice said over the laptop's speakers, “why you wanted to seek out a consultation today?”

  “I live in Hexley,” Casey's mother replied earnestly.

  Casey headed over to the counter and reached for the fridge, before suddenly realizing that perhaps she felt a little nauseous. She hesitated, figuring she could always eat later, and then she turned to find that her mother's online conversation seemed to have hit a snag.

  “You know,” her mother continued finally. “Hexley!”

  “Is that in England?”

  “The Hexley disaster! The plane crash!”

  “Oh, right,” the man on the other end of the line replied. “And what is it about the Hexley disaster that makes you want to have a reading of your psychic energy?”

  “Mum, seriously?” Casey said, rolling her eyes. “How much is this costing you? I thought we agreed that you'd stop -”

  “This town,” her mother said firmly, interrupting her, “is filled with so much negative energy, it's overwhelming.” She paused, keeping her eyes fixed on the screen. “Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning. Like I'm literally drowning in the pain and sorrow that fills the air all around us.”

  “Well, you've come to the right place,” the man replied. “Today, Elizabeth, I'm going to give you a full psychic rundown, so we can figure out exactly how you're being affected. And then I'll tell you how you can combat the negative energy.”

  “My first shift went okay,” Casey said. “In care you were -”

  “I don't want to combat it,” her mother told the man. “I want to reach out and speak to it.”

  “How much are you paying these con-men?” C
asey asked. “Mum, we talked about this. You can't afford to keep spending money on this kind of rubbish.”

  “My daughter Casey is here,” her mother continued tartly, as if she was annoyed at the interruption.

  “Oh, I'm sorry,” Casey said, heading to the door, “am I in the way? I didn't mean to interrupt your vitally important seance. I'll be in my room, sleeping, for most of the day. I'm working again tonight, so I really need to get some shut-eye. Can you promise me one thing? When you're finally done with this ridiculous set-up, don't come and wake me up, okay? I really, really need to sleep.”

  “Sometimes family members don't understand what we're going through,” the man on the laptop said. “That's okay. I'm here to help you and guide you.”

  “Sure, that's what's wrong here,” Casey said under her breath, as she made her way into the hallway and then up the stairs. “It's not that my mother's being ripped off again by a bunch of online fraudsters living on the other side of the planet. Hell, no, that's not a problem at all!”

  Once she was in her room, she pushed the door shut and stood in silence for a moment, although she quickly realized she could still hear her mother's voice in the kitchen below. She knew full well that sooner or later there'd be a knock on the bedroom door, and her mother would finally want to know all the details of her first shift. Grabbing a piece of paper, she scribbled 'DO NOT DISTURB' in big letters and taped it on the door, before heading to the bed and sitting down for a moment. Every muscle in her body was aching from all the walking during the shift, but she figured she'd get used to that eventually.

  Settling back, she closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the street outside her window. Finally, slowly, she began to drift off into much-needed sleep.

  Chapter Four

  “I know you're there,” the man whispered, as he stood naked in the middle of the darkened room and waited to hear the creaking sound again. “There's no need to hide, not from me. No need to be shy. I've seen you before. I've seen all of you, so why don't you just get it over with and show yourselves again?”