The Lady in the Coat

By Anna Ryan

Why does she scare you so, The Lady in the Coat?

Isaac is having a night out with some of his work mates and sees The Lady in the Coat kidnap a man from the table next to his. All of his mates tell him that he was drunk and had imagined it.

A short while after this incident, Isaac runs into high flying accountant, Axton Thatcher. They both admit they have had near-death/terrifying experiences with The Lady in the Coat. After sharing their terrifying stories, they make the brave but necessary decision to follow The Lady in the Coat.

Who will win?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Ryan
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463776582

Anna Ryan

My name is Anna Ryan; I'm 25 years old and live in Wanganui, New Zealand.My love of writing started when I was at primary school when we were allowed to write stories. I can remember that I was really proud of one that I had written because I wrote: “and then a sudden gust of wind picked up its speed!” At the time I thought it was the best line I had ever written.It wasn't until my late teens, after I read ‘Change of Heat’ by Jodi Picoult (that book changed my life), that I started taking writing seriously. Since 2017, I have found my comfort zone writing in the horror, mystery and crime genres.To date I have written three novels: The Lady in the Coat, Amelia (The Sly and Hokey Detective Series #1), Shadow Watcher (The Sly and Hokey Detective Series #2).Recently I published my first short story collection, Deceptive Cadence.Stephen King, Jodi Picoult, Shirley Jackson, George R.R. Martin, Sophie Kinsella, J.K Rowling, Suzanne Collins and Agatha Christie are some of my favourite authors.

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Copyright property of Anna Ryan 2017.

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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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ISBN: 9781980333920

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Anna X

The Lady in the Coat

"Why does she scare you so, The Lady in the Coat?"

Prologue:

Strange things happen all the time. Strange things happen when you’re sober, and strange things happen when you’re drunk. The only difference between the latter two is that alcohol leads you to believe that what you thought you had seen weren’t in fact real.

This is precisely the battle I have been waging for many years after the fact. I like to believe that maybe I was unconsciously drunk the whole time that this all went down. Hah, I should have such luck! My mother told me, using every big word she could immediately summon, that that scenario would be highly unlikely – near on impossible.

‘Isaac, you need to start accepting what happened and what you went through, rather than perpetuate your denial with impossible scenarios.’

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that all before. You know the usual shit they tell you: ‘Isaac, you need to talk about your problems.’ ‘Isaac, are you okay after what happened?’

And when you tell them the answer, they try and fob it off by saying that time will heal the scars. Then right before your eyes, they find a speck of dust on the coffee table highly interesting. I know that much is not true. Time does not heal the scars you own; it just gives new, fresh scars time to overshadow the old ones.

No one wants to really know how a certain situation or scenario affected you, apart from those gossips who relish all the dirty details. I’m talking about the ones that take too long looking at something in a shop, just so they can hear what so and so said about this or that.

On the other side of the coin, there are the people you actually want to talk to about this stuff. As soon as you loosely grasp the topic and start to feel comfortable, they pull the rug out from under you, turn the tables and whip out, ‘It’s only been a month, Isaac. Give the therapy a chance to work.’

Mate, I don’t need therapy. I just need someone to listen to me, and help me to realise that what Axton Thatcher and I experienced wasn’t fake or a fucking Halloween joke, that it was 100% real and that it actually happened.

Axton and I have talked in depth about what we went through only once. That was enough for the both of us. Friends and family told us that it would help the healing process if we sat down and talked about what happened a month ago. We laughed at their ignorance. They weren’t there. Axton and I both know what happened because we were both there. We both experienced it. We both remember stuff that we will never forget. So what gives the people that weren’t there, the right to offer up advice?

Sorry, I need to keep control of my anger. I will tell you more in due time.

So, to answer the question: No, going over the past didn’t help Axton and me. It only brought the damage in us back to the surface; raw and real.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for everyone that has tried to help me; the psychologists, the police, and the various others. But just for once, I would like someone in my family or a close friend to ask me to tell them everything. How masculine is that?! But seriously, all joking aside, that’s all I want. If one of my mates would say, ‘Hey Isaac, let’s grab a beer after work and have a yarn?’ That would honestly be awesome.

So, due to the fact that none of my family members volunteered for the job, and my friends are all either too busy or too scared, I have decided to write it all down from start to finish.

Buckle in, because this story is so insane and unreal that most people think that Axton and I made it up, but is it so unreal that you just have to believe it?

Chapter One:

My story, I am going to call: "The Lady in the Coat’, begins when I was out having a beer or five with my work mates. It wasn’t a special occasion or anything like that, but it was a Friday night, and sometimes ya just have to have a cold one with the guys to congratulate yourself on making it through the week.

And mate, what a week it was! We had the big bosses in the office making sure we did everything right, and met targets. Our bosses were on our backs to make sure that they looked good. Essentially, we were all on our best behaviour and pretended like everything was great, and that we were smashing our targets. When, in reality, we weren’t. Our boss was a very controlling mind of guy, and that’s putting it nicely. He controlled who each of us sold to and how we spoke to them. Even if I had a really good relationship with one of our firm’s clients, even if I had previously dealt with them, he would give that client to someone else. And, if any of us so much as said one wrong word to a client, he would hear it. (He never gave us any examples of wrong words, but I doubt they would have been obvious ones like shit or ‘fuck"). And, guess what? He could be in the next room talking on the phone to someone who probably wasn’t as important as he made them out to be. You’d turn your head back to your computer screen so it looked like you were walking hard, when you’d hear the clip clop of business shoes on concrete as he came waltzing over to your desk to say that you spoke to so and so incorrectly. Was I rude to them? No. Did I swear at them? No. Was I polite? Yes.

Who knows what his deal was, but that’s what he was like.

At least now you can see why we all had to get out of there on a Friday night and drown our anger and frustration in food and alcohol.

That Friday I think we went to a pub called The Flying Pig straight after work. We arrived at The Flying Pig at around 6:30pm and ordered alcohol and food. It was a beautiful, still night – not a cloud in the sky - so we sat outside on a long wooden table. In attendance was: Me, Aaron, Mitchell, Bianca and Ash. (Because of the therapy I have remembered all of the minor details. And no, the manager wasn’t with us).

We were sitting, talking and drinking the night away. Looking back now, it was perfect. Not because we were all living our dreams or anything remotely like that. It was perfect because I was having food, drinks and a yarn with people that I actually enjoyed working and hanging out with. And to top it off, the weather was awesome. It wasn’t windy and the temperature was warm; nothing unbearable.

If my memory serves me correctly, I was onto my second beer when the following incident happened. And keep in mind that I had been eating food throughout the whole night. When we arrived, we ordered a meal each, and then we ordered bar food like wedges and stuff. So drunk, I was not.

Before I carry on with the story, let me make the scene a bit clearer for you.

My work mates and I were sitting at a long table outside the front of the restaurant. The table could seat six people, so it wasn’t a massive table. On either side of us there were tables of maybe four to eight people doing the same as us: talking, drinking and eating. I was sitting in between Ash and Bianca (Bianca being at the head of the table), so I had my back to the restaurant and was unable to see the comings and goings. But I could see what was going down on either side, and in front of me. Mitchell was sitting at the opposite end of the table to Bianca, and Liz and Aaron were sitting opposite Ash and I.

I think Mitchell was talking about something he had done the previous weekend. He was an outdoorsman through and through; and on that previous weekend, he had caught a massive fish which I believe it was a Brown Trout. Mitchell was still talking about the ‘massive Brown Trout’ he had caught last weekend, when something...or someone caught my attention.

There was good lighting around where we were sitting as well as around the other tables. I mean the lighting was good enough that you could see mosquitoes and other flying bugs hovering around, so I knew that what I saw wasn’t an animal or something moving in the darkness. Oh no. It was much scarier than that.

Slowly but surely, walking or floating towards our table was a figure wearing a long black coat with a hood covering the majority of the face. You could see the mouth and the chin, but everything else was covered with the black coat. The figure made its way purposefully up to our table and eyed everyone with an intense curiosity. I don’t know if it sensed that I could see it, and that made it feel threatened, but it floated off toward the table to the left of us, looked around, decided that that table of people wasn’t up to par, and moved to the table of people on our right. The figure didn’t stop in front of the people sitting at the table of people on our right hand side. This time, the figure moved around the perimeter and studied each individual person up close. No one, I repeat, no one at that table or at any other table for that matter, batted an eyelid; even when the figure was right up in their face. I did see a couple of people shiver when the figure floated past them.

The figure must have spent at least ten or fifteen minutes intently studying everyone seated at that table. Suddenly, the figure came to a definite decision and swooped over to a man that was sitting with his back to the pub. He was cradling a handle of beer, laughing with his family or friends; he looked to be having a great time. The figure’s mouth split into a satisfied smile, baring a shiny collection of sharp canine teeth. She had found what she was looking for; she had found her target. I can’t even fathom it. In a matter of seconds, the man’s jovial laughter stopped; his smile was erased from his face.

The figure abruptly stopped grinning and clenched her mouth shut. Then, like a professional, the figure swooped an arm up and around the man, and he was gone without a trace.

No one else appeared to have noticed. I reckon that they must have been put under some sort of a hypnotic spell by the figure in the black coat.

I had to rub my eyes to make sure that I hadn’t been imagining things. I shook my head to try and clear it and looked over at the table to our right. The man hadn’t reappeared. I did, however, see the figure cloaked in the long hooded black coat walk, no, float - it definitely floated - down the street away from