Tomorrow's Ghosts by Charles Christian Read Free Book Online

honoured in his own land. In fact it’s hard to take them seriously at all.”

9. Like Fire in the Sun
    When the end comes, it comes suddenly, messily and in a fireball that can be seen from 20 miles away.
    John Patmos is the culprit. In the early morning he sets off in his white Ford Transit dropside truck. Actually
his
is not the correct word to use. Technically speaking, the truck still belongs to the firm of Carlisle builders it was stolen from seven years previously. After being fitted with false plates and bogus registration papers, it had changed hands several times before finally being bought by Patmos. In his case, no subterfuge was necessary because Patmos still had difficulty reading English. He also had difficulty understanding English law, which is why on this particular day, as on all days, he is driving the Transit untaxed, uninsured and without a valid driver’s licence.
    Somewhere just to the north of Saxmundham, he swings onto an empty stretch of the A12 where, dazzled by the bright low sun of a spring morning shining in his eyes, he temporarily loses his bearings and veers onto the wrong side of the road.
    Thirty seconds later, as he accelerates around a corner, his truck ploughs smack into a pale-blue Beetle heading in the opposite direction. He has no time to brake because he doesn’t see the other vehicle coming.
    The impact throws Patmos, who of course isn’t wearing a seatbelt, through the Transit’s windscreen. He bounces off the roof of the other car before landing by the side of the road, where he is impaled on the iron railings at the entrance to a farm track.
    The driver in the other car is not so lucky.
    The subsequent police investigation reveals that not only did the late John Patmos display a cavalier attitude towards his adoptive country’s road traffic laws but he also disregarded a host of other official rules, including the distinctly obscure
Petroleum Spirit Plastic Containers Regulations 1982
which control the amount of petrol you can legally store at home.
    I’d always noticed the lights had a tendency to flicker at John’s beach hut but had assumed it was just dodgy wiring. What I hadn’t realised was the hut had no mains electricity supply. Instead John and some of his neighbours had rigged up portable petrol generators to power their lighting and electrical appliances. This particular morning John had been on his way back from his no-questions-asked-source with a fresh supply of petrol, all stored unlawfully in a collection of five litre plastic containers rolling around the back of his truck.
    Whether it was an escape of petroleum fumes, a loose fitting lid on one of the petrol containers, the truck’s wiring shorting out or a combination of all three, we’ll never know. What is certain is when the collision occurs, Patmos’ illicit cargo of petrol explodes in a fireball that consumes both vehicles in a blaze of such intensity and ferocity that it is only after the wreckage is damped down that the rescue services recognise the charred fragments inside the car as being the remains of a woman.
    Carmaggedon!
is the punningly cruel but apposite headline the local
East Anglian Daily Times
newspaper uses to describe the accident. There is also the suggestion that the occupant of the VW was doubly unlucky because, being a Beetle, the petrol tank was mounted in the front luggage compartment, just inches away from the driver’s seat.
    As for Patmos? He dies before he can be cut free from the railings but, ever the mystic, his final words are “I saw her. I saw Azraella, the Angel of Death.”

10. The Face at the Window
    There’s a ghost in my house.
    It still sits at the upstairs window and it still waves at me only now I deliberately try not to look. I’m afraid of making eye contact. The haunting was disconcerting at the best of times although I had learned to live with it. But now... now I know who the ghost is, or at least was, I no longer have the stomach for it.
    Logic