A Haunting Memory.

I had returned to Glasgow less than three months when the haunting first started, though it was a while longer before I realised that it was happening. I'd left London after an ugly breakup with my girlfriend at the time, Jessica. There's no real point in going over the details which led to our breakup, but needless to say that after it, all I wanted to do was clear my head and get as far away from London as possible. It is a predatory city, one that will swallow you whole if it gets a whiff of you being vulnerable or lonely.

I moved to a flat in Battlefield which I shared with two other twenty-something guys, Brian and Clark. They were good lads. Clark even got me a job in the telecoms centre he worked at in internet customer support. Before long settled into my new life. Brian worked as an engineer for a heavy engineering plant firm and was often away, so most of the time it was just me and Clark in the flat. We shared a love of German motorik music and science-fiction movies -especially the late 60's early 70's dystopian stuff- so we got along fine. We'd sit getting wasted listening to Amon Duul or watching Soylent Green, talking fairly pretentious bullshit the whole time. I felt comfortable there, at least I did at first.

One night we were watching Tarakovsky's Stalker and Clark got up to take a piss. He was gone for a minute or two when I heard him scream, followed by a stream of forthright swearing. I leapt off the old green leather sofa and rushed out to find him, worried he might have had a bad accident. He stood standing motionless in the hall, his mouth wide open, his face drained of all colour. He was looking into my bedroom, his finger shaking as he pointed into the room. When I asked him what was wrong his reply was a barely managed “Jesus.”

I looked but saw nothing, except the unmade bed and usual tip that was my bedroom. I was puzzled “What?”

“You don't see it? Her?” He said, still trembling, “on the bed?”

I shook my head, immediately wondering if the E we had taken two hours earlier had gotten the better of him. I raised my hands palms up and shrugged “I don't know what you mean.”

“There.” He insisted. “On the fucking bed, she's… oh God that's fucking horrible.”

I pulled at his arm. “Come away.” I insisted. “You're just freaking out.”

His face was filled with confusion and disbelief when he looked at me and he was about to protest when he looked back into the bedroom and said “Gone. I...”

“Yeah Clark, you just had a moment, mate. Come back into the living room, it's fine.”

He nodded and staggered into the living room like a drunk, plopped himself down on the sofa and said “Wow, that was… I've had hallucinations before but that was fucking insane.”

I handed him a beer and told him to chill. He tried his best, but I could tell something had happened that had unravelled him. He became sullen and erratic over the next couple of weeks. I began to think that the drugs had taken their toll. He moved out the day after paying his share of the month's rent. He stopped turning up at work and eventually I heard from his sister that he'd snapped and been sectioned after trying to jump in the Clyde. I always felt that was such a shame, he was a good bloke was Clark.

After that I had the flat pretty much to myself. Brian came home from time to time, but mostly just to sleep for a night or two. He had a girlfriend and a family that took up a lot of his time, but it was fine. We negotiated to pay a bit more each, I took the majority of the slack but he was good enough to pay an extra hundred quid towards the rent which made it easier for me. I wasn't in any rush to have another full-time flatmate. As good a bloke as Clark was, living in close proximity with another can sometimes be grating.

Things settled into a nice comfortable rut for me. I was earning surprisingly good money, made a few friends to hang out with, I felt a lot better being back in Glasgow than I ever had in London. I even began to forget what a toll the place had taken on me. Everything was going swimmingly for the better part of the year. It wasn't until I had a party at mine on Hogmanay that things got weird again. My friend Gerry had, a month or so before, started seeing this Portuguese kook called Imelda. She was one of those “spiritual” bores, always dressed in black, covered in tattoos, her hair changed colour from week to week, that sort of girl, y'know? One that thought crystals had healing energy and that there were all sorts of fairies and elves everywhere, that sort of shite.

She wasn't in the flat five minutes before she started complaining there was some kind of “oppressive energy” in the place. We'd all been around her enough to know her game. She'd say things like that so someone would take the bait and she could harp on about her uninteresting interests. No-one was biting that night, we were all too jolly, the wine and beer were flowing, there was plenty of chong and whizz on the go, everyone was off their tits well before the bells. Imelda seemed to relax and so the party was in full swing. My downstairs neighbours, who I had invited only out of courtesy and to stop them phoning the cops if things got rowdy, came up and joined the party with a couple of their friends. It was a good night, well up until Imelda freaked out.

I wasn't sure what had happened, all I knew was that I heard her scream and then rant in Portuguese before running out the front door. She left her coat, bag, purse the lot. Gerry ran after her and the party took a downturn rapidly after her exit. He came back up, all apologetic and told us she refused to spend any more time in the house. He collected her stuff and left. Her drama fair drew the energy out of the night but as it was approaching three in the morning people were starting to wind down anyway. It was no big deal.

It was the fourth of January when he told me what had happened. Apparently she had gone into the toilets to do another line and when she came out she had saw, what she said, was a dead girl, lying naked on my bed. 

According to Imelda, so he said, the girl had long black hair, blood all over her neck and face and one of her eyes was just a black bloody hole. It was then that I remembered Clark's freak out and began to consider the possibility that perhaps both of them had seen something. Don't get me wrong, I found it silly, I'd certainly never seen or “felt” anything but it seemed too specific to be merely coincidence.

It wasn't until I was sitting one day in Starbucks on Sauchiehall Street, eating my lunch that I began to take it seriously. As always, the place was busy. I became aware of one of the customers staring at my table. He was an old guy, maybe in his sixties, just staring at me, no not at me, across from me, his eyes wide with horror and shock. He grabbed the person next to him and pointed, said something I couldn't here but the other person just looked at the table, then gave the man a look as if to say “are you mental?”

A few seconds passed with the old guy explaining something, he looked back at the table and then all the tension seemed to leave his body, he shook his head and apologised, even gave me a look to say “sorry”. I suspected I knew what he'd seen and began to come to the realisation that I was being haunted.

There were further incidents. A taxi driver nearly skidded off the motorway one night, threw me out of his cab in disgust until I made him look again. A new girl at work sat beside me and fainted, was escorted from the premises saying she'd seen a dead girl with long black hair. she never came back. Occasionally, no matter where I was, this kind of reaction would happen. Friends and colleagues began to avoid me, rumours started, whisper campaigns. I found myself becoming an outcast.

It was becoming intolerable. I decided I needed to solve the problem and it was obvious what I had to do. I took a week's holiday from work and got a train down to London, booked myself at a premier inn for a few days and then hired a van and bought a shovel.

On the second night, just after one A.M. I left the hotel and drove the van to Richmond Park. It took me a while to get my bearings but eventually I found the trees, near the pen ponds. The big rock was exactly where I had left it. It took me about four or five minutes to dig up enough earth to find Jessica, where I'd left her almost a year before. She was almost unrecognisable now, the ground had taken it's toll on her naked flesh, but she still had one eye, the other I had gouged out in a fit of rage, still had the dried blood around her neck where I had slit her throat and still had her long black hair.

I pulled her body from the grave I left her in, covered it in tarpaulin and then hoisted it into the van. I drove miles that night, trying to find somewhere vacant and distant enough from humanity that I could finally be done with her. I found a disused scrapyard near Wembley stadium and after depositing the body on the ground, still covered in the tarp, poured petrol over it and set it alight. I guess it was the blaze that attracted the passing police car.

This is as much of a confession as you're getting.