True Calling - Book Three of the Connor True Series, Page 3

see you Grandmother” Connor explained, shuffling his feel as if he were eight years old again. Even when she was dead, Grandmother Nnedinma’s matriarchal authority had not diminished although Connor had expected nothing less.

  “I wanted to see you, to make sure you are alright and to say I’m sorry for not being there when you died”. Connor heard his voice die away a little as a bubble of grief rose up through him. He had been trying not to think about her death since he had eventually made it home last night.

  “Connor, do not fret about me, child. I have served my time with the living and now I am here and there is nothing that can be done about it”.

  Connor paused and said “Have you seen anyone else yet? Grandpa?”

  “No, I have not seen him here”.

  “Well it’s early days yet”.

  “Early days?” she laughed; her sharp voice cut through the evening landscape. “Connor, you must realise that time does not exist here. I do not know if I have been here for five minutes or for five years. It is all the same. All of this…” she swept her arms around theatrically. “This is all that the Afterlife offers. It is a terrible place and certainly not safe for any living person”.

  In the distance Connor thought he heard a sound but he could just have easily imagined it in this eerie realm.

  “I think you have come here to ask something of me? Mmm?” his grandmother prompted shrewdly, pulling herself up to look at him over the top of her thin framed glasses.

  Connor nodded. “Grandmother Nnedinma. There was something else. I don’t know if it is possible, but when I leave here, are you able to seal the doorway again?”

  “Do not worry about that my boy” she laughed, with her cheery smile. “Yes, I can do it for you. May I see you’re doorway? I have often wondered what it would look like and now I can actually see it for myself”.

  Connor could not ignore the sound in the twilight as it came again. It was becoming a little clearer as if something was drawing closer. It was a voice, of that he was certain.

  “Can you hear that?” Connor asked peering into the shadows. A chilling sensation prickled down his spine as he suddenly felt they were being watched.

  “Can I hear what? What is it that you can hear my boy?” she asked peering around cautiously. “I do not know what it is but it is always best to assume the worst, Connor. We must go, quickly” she urged him suddenly, her harsh accent suddenly sounding less self-assured. An icy memory of being hunted through Cavendish Woods last night chilled his mind as Grandmother Nnedinma took his arm in her dark tanned hand that was still cracked with age. Together they ran into the lonely night of the Afterlife. Every time he had witnessed someone being chased by demons they never managed to escape; the demon would always catch them.

  Connor was ready to conjure his doorway and jump through in a moment. If there was something out there he would have to take Grandmother Nnedinma with him. But was that possible? Could he actually take her through? Would she still exist in his mind? And if so what then? Not that any of that mattered though. He couldn’t leave her here to face a demon so getting her away from here was the important thing.

  “I can hear something out there, Connor; we do not have much time. When the demon come’s it will get us” his grandmother panted. “Open the door and I will go with you. Once on the other side I will seal the door closed and do not worry” she reassured but with an odd tone to her voice that Connor had not heard before.

  “I will not get stuck in your mind, my boy. At the last moment I’ll cross back over here to emerge at a different location well away from the monster”.

  She paused and looked around as if she could see something that he could not. Her grip was surprisingly strong on his arm so she did not lose him to the horror that pursued them. Her skin, Connor noticed as they rushed deeper into the gathering gloom, had become very cold. Probably a reaction to the horrors she had already experienced in her short time here.

  As if reading his mind she said “Yes I feel cold. I have no blood in my veins unlike you. But over here I am real. On this side, it is you that is the ghost. I appear solid and normal but you are just a faint image, a phantom” she smiled wickedly.

  “What’s out there?” Connor breathed as his uncertainty deepened. The uncertainty he felt now dwarfed any of the recent fear he had experienced hiding in the woods from Dale Tanner. He felt the tide of fear pulling him down into a sea of panic and wash away his courage like so much flotsam.

  “I do not know and I do not like it. It is getting louder and we need to be going” Grandmother Nnedinma explained. “We’ve stayed in the same place for too long”.

  Out in the darkness the weird echoing sounds died away a little and the pair increased the distance between themselves and whatever was out there. Connor could feel his pulse slowing down a little despite the unseen danger that could be all around them.

  “Over here you cannot stay in one place for too long, I have learned. That is how people get taken by demons. You need to keep moving, you need to press forward all the time. Death is a long lonely walk, Connor. But you must move swiftly and not dawdle”.

  The phantom voice came again, sounding nearer than ever this time and Connor felt his chest tightening in fear. Grandmother Nnedinma’s fingers gripped his arm tighter almost painfully. Her sharp eyes light up wildly for a moment and she looked around furtively like a gazelle in the savannah, sensing danger close by.

  “Come now Connor, open your doorway. We need to go through, now” she instructed testily.

  “Can you across through it?” Connor asked with a different kind of unease.

  “Of course I can. I cannot seal it from this side because there is nothing here. I am dead. I need to go into your mind and close it for you. That is where the door exists, in your mind, not here. So you need to open it my boy” her voice sounded less loud but just as forthright. “The demons are coming and we need to go before they take us. There is not much time. Come on, quickly” Grandmother Nnedinma said with an urgency that bordered on insanity. Her eyes were suddenly wild with a maniacal stare and she looked all around her as if expecting to see something at any minute.

  Connor’s anxiety swept over him drowning his strength as nightmare fantasies of huge demonic monsters, swept into his mind with a tidal force. Connor nervously glanced at Grandmother Nnedinma and then out into the darkness around them. An odd ghostly light seemed to emanate from Connor’s body which he had not noticed before. This must be the light; the beacon that Grandmother Nnedinma had warned him would attract the demons. He was the one luring them here, he realised. He needed to go before they were both taken.

  “Open the door now Connor. Now before the demon comes” Grandmother Nnedinma snapped again. Her fearful grip on his arm was now so painful he had to twist his arm out from beneath her biting fingers. She glared at him with a look that he had never seen before.

  He regarded her with increasing apprehension and shuffled a little further away as he opened the doorway back into his living mind. Looking into the shadow his eyes were unable to penetrate the murky waves around them. Something was approaching them; there was no doubt about that.

  Connor felt his insides sinking.

  The muffled sounds were louder, almost upon them now. There were two distinct voices in the blackness. Connor could just make out the hollow impression of his doorway against the black-grey clouds that had enveloped them both. Grandmother Nnedinma took a step towards the doorway. Connor let her go first but just as she reached it something broke through the gloom. The charging beast bellowed loudly as it leapt at Grandmother Nnedinma.

  Connor didn’t have time to react as a second figure materialised from the shadows. This second creature was smaller in height but it came straight for him. It too was yelling something loudly.

  The first creature pounced on top of Grandmother Nnedinma, knocking her to the ground just in front of the psychic entrance to his mind. Connor could do nothing as he watched in frozen horror as h
is adversary closed in on him. Somehow Grandmother Nnedinma managed to roll free of the creature and scrambled to her feet.

  “Connor, run!” she shouted at him.

  But he could not leave her.

  “Connor! Run, child. Run!” She screamed again and it was then that Connor realised that the voice urging him to go wasn’t coming from Grandmother Nnedinma. It was her voice but coming from the second person who had emerged from the shadows.

  Connor hesitated in confusion. There was a cry and looked over to the Grandmother Nnedinma he had been talking to just moments before. Only she was no longer his grandmother. She pulled herself up to her full height and kept on growing. The figure that had attacked her was on the floor but as he got to his feet, the giant demonic figure that had taken on the appearance of his grandmother bent down and batted him way with a hand that was now the size of a small car. The man flew several feet into the air and dropped to the floor in a heap.

  Urgent, clinging hands grabbed Connor and he jumped around to see the real Grandmother Nnedinma before him. His breathing was shallow and thin but as her old leathery hands cupped his face he felt his panic recede a little. There was no doubt that this was his grandmother.

  “Go, and make my beautiful great grandchildren” she said, her biting Nigerian accent said taking on a gentleness that could