“It’s a ghost-hunting kit, isn’t it?”
Eddie nodded. “I thought since we were investigating a haunting, it would be best to be prepared.”
“We’re not investigating a haunting,” Audrey reminded him. “We’re interviewing an amateur historian from Ironbridge about a local legend.”
“A local legend about a”—Eddie’s voice fell into that deep, trembly tone that’s the universal code for supernatural—“ghoooooost baaaaaarge.”
“And you think we’re going to see this ghost barge at two thirty on a Monday in June?”
Not willing to let go of a good thing, Eddie waggled his ghost detector. “Ghooooost baaaaarge.”
Sometimes you just had to let people have things. And, when you got right down to it, who was Audrey Lane to take a ghost barge away from a perfectly nice man who she was beginning to suspect was really a fourteen-year-old boy in elaborate cosplay.
Accepting her ghostly fate, she unlocked the car door and got into the driver’s seat, leaving Eddie to pile in beside her with his overpriced collection of EMF meters and EVP recorders, each of which he insisted on explaining to Audrey duringthe eleven-minute drive to Ironbridge. Or at least he insisted on explaining them as well as he was able, which wasn’t very, possibly because their function was intentionally vague to stop people demanding refunds.
The most significant landmark in Ironbridge was—and every time Audrey mentioned this to somebody who wasn’t from Shropshire, they thought it was a joke—the Iron Bridge. It was, she would then explain to them, an iron bridge of genuine historical significance, the first of its kind in the world. Except today she would instead be explaining to them that it wasalso, allegedly, the best spot from which to see the terrible Ghost Barge of the Severn Valley.
They’d arranged to meet their contact at the north end of the bridge, which was where they often arranged to meet people when they came to Ironbridge. It was, however, somewhere Audrey was beginning to think they shouldstopmeeting people, because the north end of the bridge was also home to a shop that specialised in hand-raised pork pies, and Eddie tended to find that distracting.
So Audrey waited on a bench overlooking the gorge while Eddie grabbed himself a selection of pies, pasties, sausage rolls, and pork scratchings. To her relief, this time at least he managed to get back before the interviewee arrived.
Her name was Melissa Pope and she was a sensible, tweedy woman in her mid-forties who turned out to be a folklorist rather than a ghost hunter. Which to Audrey was a blessed relief, and to Eddie a crushing disappointment.
“So you’ve never actually seen a ghost?” he asked while inelegantly cutting himself a slice of pork pie.
“No.”
“Or a ghoul?”
“No.”
“Goblin? Spectre? Poltergeist?”
Melissa Pope was, in Audrey’s estimation, handling this rather well. “No. And I think poltergeists are meant to be invisible.”
“Banshee? Barghest? Bandersnatch.”
“No, no, and that’s from ‘Jabberwocky.’ Now, shall we talk about the barge?”
It was, in the end, a better interview than Audrey had been fearing, despite the supernatural theme and the pie crumbs. They got some interesting quotes about the ghost barge itself, about its journey up the Severn ending in Jackfield, where there was some evidence of plague bodies having been buried at the end of the seventeenth century.
“I think for me,” Melissa Pope concluded, “that’s what makes ghost stories so fascinating. It’s not the ghost, it’s—well, it’s the story. The plague hit Shropshire extremely hard and that must have been this huge traumatic event for people back then, and today we still get…I suppose we get echoes and memories of it. That’s what legends like this are, when you get right down to it.”
Eddie was looking at his EVP recorder, bitterly disappointed. “So there isn’t really a ghost barge?”
“There might be.” From her tone, Melissa probably had this conversation a lot and was used to being diplomatic. “I’m not saying people are wrong for believing in mysterious things if they want to. Just that…to me it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. It doesn’t even matter if there really were plague barges running up the Severn in those days, although I think there probably were. What matters is the connection. Come up onto the bridge at night, look down into the gorge, and you’ll see ghosts. Even if you don’t believe in an afterlife.”
“Wait.” Eddie looked briefly thrilled. “So thereareghosts?”Then abruptly unthrilled. “Oh. You mean metaphorically, don’t you?”
Melissa Pope gave an enigmatic smile.
But Eddie was continuing to dethrill. “This is like when I was little and my dad said my mum was coming home from hospital with a present for me and it turned out to be my brother.” He rummaged disconsolately in his bag of pork scratchings. “Like, he’s an okay guy. But I really wanted a PlayStation.”
They wrapped the interview there, and after making Audrey swear to look after what was left of his pies, Eddie went out onto the bridge to take some shots of the gorge that they could use to illustrate where the nonexistent-but-possibly-metaphorically-resonant-ghost-barge might be seen if you showed up at the right time of night. Mostly it was just an opportunity to get some pretty pictures of the view that would give locals a warm glow of recognition and, if they were lucky, inspire outsiders to drop by and visit the village.
While she was waiting, Audrey let the parts of her brain that did this sort of thing automatically unpick the story and look for its heart. Given how little she’d wanted to be involved with it, she’d found it surprisingly moving in the end. Ghosts she had no time for, but there were some kinds of magic she definitely did believe in. The magic of places and people. The way they worked upon each other and time worked upon them.
How you weren’t just what you were now. You were everything you’d ever been.
