Free Walking With Ghosts (A short story) by David Leadbeater Page A

from your Inspector? Then I’d say ‘get a bloody move on, Leigh, and stop wasting our damn time.”
    And Josie moved off, following the pavement towards Stonegate, her senses tingling with unease. Joe was getting so close to retirement now he often said he could feel it tightening around his shoulders like the links of heavy chain. His wife had died three years ago; the kids long since, too, had flown and nested elsewhere. The job was, sadly, all he had left.
    At Stonegate they paused outside the silent coffee shop on the corner, and looked both ways down the cobbled intersection. Joe shrugged at her. “You choose.”
    She pointed to the right, not knowing she had just made the worst decision of her life.
     
    ****
     
    “You gotta read ‘em,” Joe was saying, taking every opportunity to impart his knowledge to his recruit. “Not just the shifty eyes or the damn body language. You gotta learn the art. You can tell a lot by the way a man dresses, by the watch he wears or doesn’t, by the way he responds to a mention of kids or family, or Christmas. It’s all there, right in that reaction.”
    Josie thought about her six-year-old, Emily, with her emotions as transparent as summer rain, standing innocent and rational in the clearest light, and said: “What makes a man the man he becomes, Joe? Do you know that? ”
    “Nurture,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve seen a man in all his states, Josie and, believe me, nature’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
    They plodded on through the still night, checking out the blank windows and darkened shop interiors, and the only noise was the noise of their passing.
    Abruptly, shockingly, there was a scream. Josie had never heard anything like it. At first she froze, unable to make the connection between the calm night and the terror conveyed by that single, terrible wail. But then Joe snapped straight and began to run. Josie raced after him on legs made rubbery by fear, her gear bouncing around on her vest and belt.
    “What the hell?” Joe was talking, talking fast to himself as if he needed the reassurance. Josie didn’t have time to ask as he skidded to a halt and studied the shadows to his left.
    “It came from Swinegate?” Josie panted.
    “How’d you know?”
    Joe didn’t even need to shrug. The answer was obvious. Been here before. . .
    But Josie wondered if he ever had been here before. They took off down Swinegate, past Kennedy’s Wine bar where she met and fancied Simon on the first date, and stopped at the blind corner.
    Now, to their right, was a darkened courtyard. “You couldn’t have known, Joe,” Josie now said with a shudder. “You’ve heard this before, right?”
    “Twice,” he said. “Same scream. Same place.”
    “Have you, umm, every seen. . .”
    “No.”
    “Has anyone?”
    Joe made no reply. The silence made the hairs on the back of Josie’s neck stand on end.
    “There’s a story,” Joe was whispering, as if afraid he might wake something up, “that tells of an orphanage that stood around here in the eighteenth century. There were murders, terrible rituals. A greedy man fed the poor kids very little, and gave them no medicine, so they frequently died. He didn’t dispose of the bodies, but left them to fester and rot. Then, on one foggy night just like this he thought he heard their screams, the screams of the tormented dead, so he killed all the remaining children in fits of fury. When the authorities found him, wandering the streets covered in blood, they took him to Bootham Asylum, a place then regarded as truly haunted.”
    Josie’s eyes were wider than dinner plates. “Are you seriously trying to scare the crap out of me? That’s a story for sleepovers or campfires, surely?”
    Joe shrugged, not laughing. “All these stories have a basis. Somewhere. The children’s ghosts are said to be trapped there, screaming still.”
    “Stop it,” Josie snapped. “Are you done?”
    “One other thing, and the reason I mention all