Lady of the Shades Read Online Free Page B

more. They’re all places that Joe has introduced me to, steering me clear of the usual tourist hotspots, giving me an insider’s taste of the city.
    The other thing I’ve really noticed this time is that London’s landscape is smudged with the fingerprints of the dead. I trudge the streets, lined with houses that date back hundreds
of years, built on plague sites and Roman burial grounds, their foundations teeming with history, and it’s as if I’m taking a stroll through the largest mausoleum in the world, where
phantoms jostle for space with the living. The hairs on my arms stand to attention, shapes flicker at the periphery of my vision and the air crackles with the whispered conversations of the dead.
Whether they’re imagined or real, it’s an amazing place to visit, but I wouldn’t be able to live here. A few months of this and I’d be fit for Bedlam.
    I’ve been exploring the city, either with Joe – he runs a small electrical repairs shop on a part-time basis, so has plenty of free time on his hands – or by myself. I use
cabs, buses and the Tube more often than not, searching for shades of the dead among the detritus of the living.
    I didn’t always believe in an afterlife. In truth, I’m still not convinced. But I’m open to the possibility of it now, and have been since I attracted my own coterie of
other-worldly spirits.
    My ghosts follow me everywhere, four men, one woman and a nine-year-old girl, haunting my every waking step, standing guard while I sleep, ever vigilant, spitefully waiting for a chance to catch
me unawares and shock me. I know they’re probably delusional projections. The six are shades of people I knew, whose deaths darkened the corridors of my mind. The spectral figures are almost
certainly products of a guilty subconscious. But I wanted them to be real. I
needed
them to be real. So I opened myself up to the possibility that there’s a life after death, and
I’ve been searching for proof of that ever since. The quest for answers has helped keep me sane. Or as sane as someone who sees ghosts can be!
    All of my novels focus on where ghosts come from, how they form, why they exist. In my first three I looked at how souls could be bound to this realm by magical or spiritual forces. This time I
want to take a more scientific approach. I’ve pretty much exhausted the mystical angles, at least for the time being. Time to travel down another route in search of something that might
explain how and why
my
ghosts came to haunt me, that might provide me with the means to banish them from my line of sight, back to whatever dark holes the army of the dead rest up in.
    I really am vague about the plot. That wasn’t a lie. I know I’m going to focus on spontaneous human combustion – because it lets me explore the concept that ghosts might be the
result of a violent, unnatural death – but I’m not sure where I want to go with it. I’m relying heavily on research for inspiration and direction. Right now I have no idea where
it’s going to lead me.
    We meet Pierre Vallance in his local Starbucks. At first we chat about the States. I’ve noticed that lots of people here like to discuss America with me when they hear my
accent. The media keeps telling us that the US has lost its standing as the world’s foremost superpower, that China, India and Russia are taking over, but from what I’ve experienced in
my travels, America is still the place that everyone wants to talk about.
    When Pierre’s had his fix of Stateside tittle-tattle, he tells us about his life as a sceptical medium. Pierre has heard voices all his life. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but became
a medium so that he could explore (and exploit) his talent. Over time he came to the conclusion that his brain acted as an amplifier for electromagnetic signals which the people close to him were
transmitting.
    ‘When people think, their brains generate waves,’ he explains, sipping an espresso. ‘I somehow