Eglantine (10 page)

‘I really think we’re going to have to,’ Mum moaned later. ‘We can’t go on like this, how can we? We can’t live here while Eglantine’s in charge.’

‘She won’t be for much longer,’ Ray said. ‘We’ll get rid of her, I know we will.’

‘But
how
, Ray? How?’

He didn’t have an answer. I didn’t have an answer. I wished that I did, because it made me feel weird to see Mum so upset. In fact, I now felt more angry with Eglantine than sorry for her.

Fortunately, Mr McGarrigle called Mum the next day with the name of a psychic, and a question about finger-cymbals. Had he left his finger-cymbals in Bethan’s bedroom? No? Oh, dear. Then he must have dropped them somewhere on the way to his car.

We had some other calls on Friday, too.

The first was from Richard Boyer. He rang up to report that, so far, the chemical engineer consulted about Eglantine’s writing hadn’t made much progress. He had a few ideas, but couldn’t prove any of them without something concrete to work with. Would it be all right if Richard came back and removed a small piece of Bethan’s bedroom wall? Or perhaps just took some paint samples?

Mum replied that she would think about it and get back to him.

The second call was from a member of the Australian Ghost Hunters Society, who said that he had read about our case on the ‘Strange Nation’ website, a site which monitored Australian media for stories about hauntings, UFO spottings, and anything else that might defy logical explanation. Our case, he explained, had been mentioned – briefly – because someone must have read our local newspaper. When asked how he had tracked down our telephone number, he replied that it hadn’t been hard, because he had our name and suburb. Now, could he ask Mum, please, exactly what the
content
of our ‘automatic writings’ might be?

Mum referred him to Richard Boyer.

The third and last call was from a television journalist. Her name was Bryony Birtles, and she was doing research for Channel Nine. She had heard about our case, and had already talked to Sylvia Klineberg. Would it be okay if she were to talk to Mum? Maybe she could come around, and have a look at Bethan’s bedroom walls? Just as a sort of research trip, to see if the story was worth pursuing.

Mum, to my surprise, was rather cautious. She said she didn’t know. She said she would have to talk to the family. She promised that she would call back with an answer.

Then she confessed to me that she was beginning to wonder if things were getting out of hand. She didn’t like the idea of people reading about us on the internet, and calling us out of the blue. It was unnerving.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know what to do.’

I didn’t, either. So far, Mrs Procter hadn’t been any help. She told me at lunchtime that she hadn’t been able to find Eglantine’s fairytale anywhere. But she promised to fax it through to her old English lecturer, who was an ‘expert’ on Victorian literature. If the fairytale existed anywhere, he would be able to find it, she said.

Meanwhile, I would just have to sit and wait.

‘One thing I
do
think we should do,’ said Mum, ‘is paint Bethan’s room again. I really think we should do that tomorrow.’

Ray paused in the act of winding spaghetti around his fork. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What’s the point? I’m sure it won’t do any good. The writing will just come back again.’

‘Yes, but it’s
black
now, Ray. The room is black – have you looked at it, lately? And black is a bad colour. It’s associated with inactivity: stagnant water energy. Death. Diminishment. In the psyche, black plays the role of the shadow figure. Whereas white is the colour of healing and purifying.’

Ray sighed. ‘So you want
me
to paint it again. Is that right?’ he said.

‘Please.’

He couldn’t say no, though he wasn’t happy. He went to bed grumpy, and Mum went to bed worried. Bethan went to bed and snored. Talk about thunder energy. Even when I threw a pillow at his head, he didn’t wake up.

I felt like stuffing something up his nose – or down his throat. And I wondered gloomily if that was Eglantine’s problem. Perhaps she just didn’t like it when people snored.

I dreamed about Eglantine, that night, though it wasn’t the stomach-pump dream. I dreamed of a hand – Eglantine’s hand. It was pale and thin. There was too much hair on it. All I could see was the hand, with a frill of lace around its wrist, holding a pen. It was writing and writing. It went on and on. But it wasn’t writing on a wall.

It was writing in a journal, like mine. A bound book of blank pages – blank, white pages. The writing was familiar. The words were familiar.

I woke to the sound of Mum screaming, and fell over as I rushed, half-asleep, to the door.

It was morning. The sun was up. Mum stood on the landing, shaking from head to foot. When I grabbed her arm, and begged to know what was wrong, she pointed.

Eglantine had written a new line of text. But it wasn’t inside Bethan’s room.

It was on the wall of the landing.

CHAPTER
# eleven

‘We’ve got to leave!’ Mum gabbled. ‘We’ve got to leave this house
now
!’

‘No, we don’t,’ said Ray. ‘Calm down, Judy.’

‘Didn’t you see? Ray, it’s
escaped out of the room
!’

‘And do you know why? Because the walls of that room are black, now.’ Ray stirred sugar into Mum’s coffee and brought it over to her. She was sitting at the kitchen table. ‘You can’t see what’s written inside that room any more,’ he said, ‘so the writing’s moved outside it. All we have to do is paint the room again. Like you said. Then it will move back inside.’

‘But it
can
get out, Ray! This means that it
can
get out! It might be roaming all over the house every night. It might have been in our
bedroom
!’

Bethan began to snivel. I was so surprised that I put my arm around him.

‘Look,’ said Ray. He spoke quite sternly. Even though he’s not very big, and wears glasses, and hasn’t got much in the way of muscles, he looked quite scary, then. He looked like someone that no one – not even Eglantine – should be messing with.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘let’s not overreact, eh? Let’s not start frightening each other. Judy? This isn’t useful.’

Mum blinked. She glanced at Bethan, and cleared her throat, and said, ‘No. Okay. Um . . . right.’

‘First of all, we should have breakfast and get dressed,’ Ray went on. ‘Then I’ll go and get some white paint, and you can ring Trish or the psychic or whoever you want to ring, and we’ll decide what to do from there. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Mum. ‘It was that wretched Bryce. He got me all worked up.’

‘I know,’ Ray replied, soothingly. ‘It’s all right, kids. We’ll sort it out. Now . . .’ He took a deep breath. ‘Anyone for pancakes?’

After breakfast, I went back upstairs. My hands were shaking as I studied the line on the landing wall (
So the smooth-faced boy that came the morrow eve
) before entering Bethan’s bedroom again. Stepping into it was like stepping into a cave. The walls and ceiling were black, with pinpricks of white paint showing through here and there, like stars in a night sky. All the little piles of pebbles and rice and stuff had been taken away. So had the sheets that had been draped over Bethan’s furniture.

‘What do you want?’ I said aloud, trying to stop my voice from shaking the way my hands were. I was on the verge of tears. For the first time, I was feeling . . . not frightened, exactly, but anxious. Very, very anxious. ‘Eglantine? What
is
it, with you?’

And then I remembered my dream.

I remembered the hand, writing, writing, writing. In a journal, not on a wall. In a
book
.

Perhaps Eglantine hadn’t been
reading
the fairytale after all. Perhaps she had been writing it because it was her
own
story, out of her own head, but she hadn’t been able to finish it before she died.

Perhaps she was
obsessed
with the story, and couldn’t rest in peace until she’d finished it.

I leaned against the wall, thinking hard. It seemed to make sense. I wasn’t a writer myself, but I was a reader and a solver of puzzles. I knew how hard it was, sometimes, to let something go. To put a book down, turn off the light, and fall asleep. I remembered all the times I’d taken a torch to bed, so that I could secretly finish something. I remembered how often I’d lain awake, turning words or numbers or plots around and around in my head. What if Eglantine had been the same? What if she had felt the same about writing stories as I sometimes did about reading them? What if she had felt absolutely
compelled
to get the words out of her mind, onto the page?

I remembered what Mum had said about Eglantine’s willpower. Perhaps the full force of her will had been directed towards finishing and publishing her story, so that she would become famous. Or maybe in the hope that the boy who had disappointed her would read her story, and feel ashamed that he hadn’t loved her as much as Osric had loved Emilie.

Maybe I was right. Maybe I’d found the root of the problem. But even if I had, what good would it do me? Because, after all, I couldn’t finish the story for her. I’d tried already, and it hadn’t worked. If an ending was what she wanted, I couldn’t supply the right kind of ending. I didn’t see how
anybody
could. Not if the story had been coming out of her own head.

I went downstairs and looked very carefully through
Idylls of the King
, but it was no good. Eglantine hadn’t marked it with a single note or comment of any kind – except her name, and the date, and the quote from Milton.

‘Don’t run away with that,’ Mum remarked, as she passed me on her way out the door. ‘The psychic’s coming tonight, and she said it would help if we had any personal items. Belonging to Eglantine.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘You mean you’ve rung the psychic?’

‘I’ve rung the psychic. I told her it was an emergency.’ ‘Do you think she can help?’

‘She said she’d try. She said she’s had one or two successes in the past.’ Mum paused, with her hand on the doorknob. ‘I’m going shopping. Is there anything you need, specially?’

My own bedroom, I thought, but didn’t say it aloud.

‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t touch that book,’ she added, pulling open the front door. ‘God knows where it’s been, Allie. Ray’s right – we should have burned it.’

‘But then what would the psychic have used?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’

‘Mum! Wait!’ She was halfway down the front path, so I stuck my head out the window. ‘Mum, what’s the psychic’s name?’

‘Delora Starburn.’

Delora Starburn! I wondered if it was a made-up name, and decided that it probably was. I wondered what sort of person gave herself a name like that, and pictured someone very much like Trish, only with wilder hair.

I was wrong, though. Delora Starburn didn’t look a bit like Trish. When she arrived, late that afternoon, she was wearing pink leather trousers (with legs on them that ended halfway down her calves), very high heels, a jacket trimmed with fake fur, and
lots
of makeup. Her hair was long and blond, except where a streak of darker hair showed at the parting. Her skin was so tanned that it had almost cracked in places; she had a square face and a rough, squawking voice like a cockatoo’s. Her breath smelled of cigarette smoke.

‘Hello, sweetie,’ she beamed when I opened the front door. ‘Is your mum home? She’s expecting me.’

‘Are you the -?’

‘I’m Delora. Who are you?’

My first thought was: shouldn’t you already know who I am? Being a psychic, and everything? But of course I didn’t say it.

‘I’m Alethea.’

‘What a gorgeous name! Oh, hello. Judy, is it?

I’m Delora.’

For the next ten minutes, Delora talked nonstop. She clattered down the hall, exclaiming over ‘this gorgeous, gorgeous house’. When she was introduced to Richard Boyer, who had wanted to be on hand during our ‘psychical experiment’, she practically shrieked with delight, declared that he must be a Virgo (‘Am I right? I knew it!’), and launched into a long, confusing story about her cousin’s computer, which had ‘gremlins’ in it that were destroying her cousin’s life work. She even managed to talk while she was drinking a glass of wine. Clacking about on her high heels, she cooed over Mum’s Tasmanian-ash kitchen cupboards and explained that she was late because there had been a pile-up on the freeway, and a huge traffic jam.

‘Oh,
thank
you, sweetie!’ she exclaimed, when I presented her with
Idylls of the King
. ‘This was hers, you say? Oh, good.’

‘There’s her name,’ I pointed out, turning to the flyleaf.

‘Yes, I see. I didn’t even know if I’d make it at
all
, because my car, I tell you, it’s falling apart, it’s such a
bomb
. . .’

Everyone sat around dumbly as she raved on. We were trying to be polite, but wondering all the time when she was actually going to knuckle down and do some work. Finally, however, she finished her wine, set the glass down on the kitchen table, and declared, ‘Right. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Then she left the room. We could hear her noisy heels on the staircase.

‘What’s she doing?’ Bethan asked Mum.

‘I – I don’t know.’ Mum looked at Ray. ‘Do you think – I mean -’ ‘She’s probably going to the toilet,’ Ray retorted, drily. ‘Don’t worry. She’ll be back. There’s no one up there to talk to.’

‘She’s not at all what I expected,’ Mum remarked, and turned to Richard. ‘Are psychics usually like that?’

But Richard just giggled nervously, and shrugged, and pushed his glasses up his nose.

‘Well . . . I suppose I’d better get on with dinner,’ Mum sighed. ‘Thank God it’s spaghetti. Looks as if we might be feeding
her
, as well.’

Delora was upstairs for nearly an hour. After about fifteen minutes, Mum began to get worried, but Ray told her not to fret, because if Delora needed anything, she would certainly ask for it. (‘I don’t think she’d be backward in coming forward,’ he said.) At six o’clock, Mum served up the spaghetti and salad, insisting that Richard join us, even though he protested that he didn’t want to put her to any trouble. As we ate, we kept listening for footsteps on the stairs. Mum, I think, listened particularly hard; at one point she made a comment about Delora stealing her jewellery, and she was only half-joking.