When Austen Pickering left The Wyrd Museum to return to his lodgings, Neil hastened back to the caretaker’s apartment, taking care to leave Quoth in The Fossil Room once again. It proved to be a wise precaution, for Brian Chapman was in a terrible mood. He had only been awake for half an hour and it was now nearly two o’clock.
When he realised the time, he had looked into his sons’ bedroom but found it empty. Hurrying into the kitchen, he discovered a pool of spilled milk near the fridge and a bowl of half-eaten cereal in the sink. Tutting, he left the apartment to search for them.
Josh was playing in the walled yard, with a coat pulled on over his pyjamas and a pair of Wellington boots covering his bare feet. The little boy told him that he hadn’t seen his brother all day and that he’d tried to shake his father awake. When his efforts had failed, he had made his own breakfast.
Brian ran his hands through his greasy hair and pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d had an awful night and was now even more determined to look for another job. Anything. Just to get out of this hideous place was all that he craved and nothing anyone could say would change his mind. It wasn’t like him to sleep so late and he was more angry at himself than anyone else.
Neil hated it when his father was like this and decided against mentioning Austen Pickering, for that would certainly have made matters worse. The only course to take was to let Brian calm down. So, shutting himself away from the squall of his father’s temper, the boy calmly began to make sandwiches for them all.
Miss Ursula had not set any new work for Brian to do, so in the afternoon he slipped out, hoping that she wouldn’t notice. Entrusted with looking after Josh, Neil took the four-year-old to find Quoth. The child was scared of the raven at first, but he was soon tickling him under the beak, feeding him ham sandwiches and laughing at his absurd speech.
At four o’clock, a morose jingling announced Austen Pickering’s return and Neil ran to the entrance to admit him. Three large, much-battered suitcases surrounded the grizzle-haired man as he waited upon the steps, and he grumbled to Neil about the exorbitant cost of cabs in London, whilst the boy helped him to haul the luggage inside.
‘You’ve certainly brought enough!’ Neil exclaimed. ‘What sort of equipment have you got in here?’
‘That witch of a landlady told me to sling my hook! Got a terrible tongue on her, that cat has,’ the man puffed, dragging a heavy portmanteau under the sculpted archway. ‘She’s chucked me out – this is everything I had with me. You know, lad, it’s the living what scare me most. The dead I can deal with.’
Neil contemplated the suitcases thoughtfully. ‘So, you’re staying here then?’
‘Makes sense really,’ the ghost hunter replied. ‘I’d have to be spending the nights here anyway, so I might as well stop. No point shelling out for a new room when I won’t even be there. The Websters won’t mind, I’m sure.’
But Neil was not thinking about them; he was wondering what his father would have to say.
‘You know,’ Mr Pickering reflected, ‘I’m sure that nosy woman had been furtling through my stuff. She’d best not have messed with any of my apparatus. It’s already getting dark and I want to get started straight away.’
When Brian Chapman returned to the museum he discovered, to his consternation, that Austen Pickering had taken over one corner of The Fossil Room and was busily setting up his equipment in the rest of the available space. Several of the connecting rooms also contained one or two experiments; lengths of string were fixed across windows and doorways, and a dusting of flour was sprinkled over certain areas of the floor.
Neil’s father regarded the man with irritation. He had certainly made himself at home. His mackintosh was hanging from a segment of vertebrae jutting conveniently from a fine example of an ichthyosaur skeleton set into the far wall. His highly-polished brogues had been placed neatly beneath a cabinet and his feet were now cosily snug in a pair of slippers.
That disease-ridden raven was playing in one of the cases, tugging at a spare pair of braces he had unearthed amongst a pile of vests, and the newcomer himself was talking to his sons about haunted houses.
‘Blood and sand!’ Brian mumbled. ‘It’s one thing after another in here.’
There was, of course, nothing he could do about it. If his eccentric employers wanted to have seances, then it was up to them, but he wasn’t going to permit Josh to remain and listen to this nonsense.
Brian had spent the afternoon trawling the local markets and public houses, asking after casual work, and had eventually ended up in the job centre. His searches had not been successful, but he had brought a bundle of newspapers and leaflets home with him. Leaving the ghost hunter to his own business, he returned to the caretaker’s apartment, with his four-year-old son trailing reluctantly behind.
Neil heaved a sigh of relief. For a moment he had thought his father would demand that he join them, but Mr Chapman’s mood had mellowed in the time he had been out and he was obviously too anxious to hunt through the papers to begin an argument.
‘Doesn’t say much, your dad,’ Austen Pickering commented. ‘Now, where did I pack my pullover? Be draughty in here tonight – already turned a mite chilly.’
Neil glanced at him. The old man was busy putting new batteries inside an old tape recorder and the boy cast his eyes over the apparatus he had arranged on the glass surface of the display cabinets.
The ghost hunter’s paraphernalia was disappointingly mundane. Neil had envisaged sophisticated electronic gadgets which bleeped and flashed at a phantom’s approach. But the most advanced piece of technology was an ordinary camera, loaded with infra-red film.
As far as he could see, coupled with the tape recorder, that was as far as scientific instruments had progressed with regard to studying spectres. The rest of the ‘equipment’ was hardly impressive. There was a flashlight, at least a dozen balls of twine, a carrier bag filled with candles, several thermometers, a tape measure and a packet of chalks. The familiar notebook had joined forces with a clipboard, a bag of flour and a small, brown glass bottle.
‘Smelling salts,’ Mr Pickering explained, seeing the boy’s curious expression. ‘It has been known for people to swoon with fright when they come into contact with the spirit world. Always pays to be prepared.’
Neil began to suspect that the old man had never actually seen anything ghostly at all before, and that the smelling salts were for himself. Perhaps he was just a harmless crank who had let his hobby turn into an obsession. At the moment, anyone looking at him could mistake Mr Pickering for a lonely old pensioner settling himself down for a quiet night in front of his stamp collection, rather than preparing to see in the early hours, keeping watch for the supernatural.
‘Do you think you’ll see anything?’ Neil asked.
The old man peered at him over his spectacles. ‘Who can tell?’ he answered. ‘I might be here a week before I hear so much as a creaking floorboard.’
Neil groaned inwardly and realised how much he had been looking forward to what might never materialise.
‘Then again,’ the old man added, ‘there’s so much bottled up in here, I think it’ll be more a case of what won’t I see. Soon as I tweak the cork that’s holding it all in place, just stand back is all I’ll say.’
Neil brightened up – perhaps he wasn’t a fraud after all.
‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen,’ the ghost hunter continued. ‘Misty shapes drifting over the ground, blurred figures melting into walls – investigated the lot, I have.’
‘What was the most frightening?’ Neil asked ghoulishly.
Mr Pickering reached into a case for