Eglantine (11 page)

Nobody else talked much. Richard told us a story about an English goldsmith named Frederick Thompson, who in 1905 suddenly found himself painting pictures. At the same time, he began to suffer from hallucinations – visions of country scenes – which became the subjects of these pictures. A year after he started to paint, he went to an exhibition of works by an artist named Robert Swain Gifford, who had died some years earlier. He heard a voice in his head say, ‘You see what I have done. Can you not take up and finish my work?’

It was soon discovered that Frederick’s paintings closely resembled scenes which had been well known to the painter Robert Gifford – but which Frederick himself had never seen.

‘Lordy,’ said Ray, when Richard had finished. ‘I hope
I
don’t start getting hallucinations. That’s all I need.’

‘The moment
anyone
starts getting hallucinations, we’re moving house,’ Mum declared. Then she caught her breath, as high heels sounded overhead. They began to rap briskly down the stairs, signalling Delora’s return.

We waited anxiously, our mouths full of food.

‘Well,’ Delora said brightly, upon entering the kitchen. ‘That was interesting.’ I noticed that, despite her encouraging smile, she looked different. Less bouncy. Her eyes seemed tired – almost dazed – and her hair was ruffled. Her wrinkles were more obvious.

‘There’s a
massive
amount of disruption up there, really massive,’ she went on, collapsing into a chair. Gratefully, she accepted Mum’s offer of another glass of wine. ‘I could feel it the minute I walked in.’

‘That room has an electromagnetic reading of point twelve,’ Richard observed, but Delora didn’t seem to hear. She swallowed a mouthful of wine, shut her eyes, massaged her forehead, and continued.

‘Did you say that this girl – this Eglantine – did you say that she died of starvation?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, when no one else did.

‘Well, that’s odd.’ Delora was frowning. Her eyes were still shut. ‘Because I would almost have thought that she’d drowned. I had the impression of someone falling into water.’

‘Water?’ said Mum. ‘You mean, like bathwater?’

‘No. Like the sea.’ Delora opened her eyes. ‘A heavy sea, near a cliff. Did Eglantine ever fall into the sea?’

I sat up straight. I swallowed. Can you guess what I was thinking?

‘No,’ I croaked, ‘but I bet Emilie did.’

Everyone turned to look at me.

‘Emilie is the character in Eglantine’s fairytale,’ I explained, and gave everyone a quick sketch of the unfinished story. ‘It ended up with Emilie waiting for Osric on the edge of a cliff,’ I said, ‘while he battled with a storm. If Emilie fell into the sea, it would be an unhappy ending. No wonder Eglantine didn’t like the ending that I wrote – she wanted something like Romeo and Juliet.’ I then revealed my theory about Eglantine being a writer, unable to rest until her story was complete. ‘Maybe the only way to get rid of her,’ I concluded, ‘is to help her write the end of the story.’

For a while, nobody spoke. Bethan kept stuffing food into his mouth, but he did it slowly, without taking his eyes off my face. Ray uttered a drawn-out, long-suffering sigh. Mum chewed on her fingernails. Richard pushed his glasses up his nose and glanced at Delora.

Delora began to nod, thoughtfully.

‘Well, that makes sense,’ she said. ‘Okay. Right. Not a problem.’ She stood up. ‘Anybody got a pen and paper?’

Startled glances were exchanged.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Mum.

‘I’m going to help her finish her story. It might take a while, though. Could I have a coffee, do you think, and – oh, something to write on? You got a card table, love, and a little chair?’

Mum stood up slowly, wearing a dazed expression. So did Ray. They stumbled about, looking for coffee and card tables, while Richard began to gabble on – in his breathy, excited way – about channelling and automatists.

While the card table was being erected in Bethan’s bedroom, Richard told me about someone called Mrs Curran, who had produced several astoundingly accurate historical novels between 1910 and 1930, set in periods about which she knew nothing. It was claimed she was simply the tool of a dead woman named Patience Worth, whose words were being ‘channelled’ through her.

‘I guess the same theory applies here,’ said Richard, hovering on the stairs. ‘I’d like to record it. Do you think Delora would mind being filmed?’

‘Ask her,’ I rejoined.

So he did. And Delora replied that she’d be
delighted
, nothing would please her more than being stuck all night in a bedroom with Richard Boyer. She fluttered her eyelashes when she said this, and Richard looked a bit startled. I was surprised, too. But after studying him, I decided that he was quite handsome, behind his glasses – he had nice curly hair, at least, and big eyes, and a straight nose. He was younger than Delora, too.

‘I won’t even
try
to open myself up until the whole house is settled,’ Delora told Mum. ‘From what you’ve told me, she only manifests herself when you’re all asleep, so she obviously doesn’t like a lot of noise and movement. I’ll wait until you’re in bed, and see what I can do.’ She coughed into her nicotine-stained fingers. ‘I’m not promising anything, mind you, but I’ll do my best.’

‘And how much more will this cost?’ Mum asked. ‘I mean, if you’re here the whole night -’

‘Oh! Don’t worry about that,’ Richard interjected. ‘I’ll pay the extra fee.’

‘But Richard -’

‘No, no. Really. I want to see this.’

Delora made a noise like someone presented with a particularly yummy piece of chocolate cake, and patted Richard’s cheek. ‘Gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I love him. I want to take him home in my purse.’ Then she sat down to polish off a bowl of spaghetti, and I went away to do my homework.

For the rest of that evening, until I went to bed, I could hear Delora chattering away downstairs in the kitchen. She was still down there when I drifted off to sleep.

I have to admit that I just couldn’t picture Eglantine Higgins getting on with Delora Star-burn. By this time, I had a very strong impression of Eglantine Higgins – I thought that she must have been quite serious, and fierce, and clever and poetic – and Delora didn’t seem to be any of those things. What’s more, Delora never stopped talking. How was she going to hear Eglantine if she never stopped talking?

I was expecting to be awakened as soon as Delora came upstairs. I didn’t see how she could sit in the next room with Richard Boyer and not start talking in her cockatoo voice about motorway tolls, or her ex-husband, or renovating old houses. So I was
very
surprised when I woke up the next morning at about half past five and realised I had slept all night through.

Outside, the light was pearly and dim. Bethan was snoring. Quietly, I got out of bed and slipped onto the landing, which was deserted. The door of Bethan’s bedroom stood open, but there was no one inside. An empty cup stood on the card table, and Richard’s video camera was turned off.

I looked around at the white walls. Ray had painted over them, the day before, and they didn’t appear to have been touched since then. At a glance, I couldn’t see any new lines of script. But I didn’t linger, because at that moment I heard the faint sound of voices from downstairs.

I don’t think I’ve ever made it from the upstairs landing down to the kitchen so quickly.

‘Well?’ I gasped, throwing myself through the kitchen door. ‘What happened?’ Even as I spoke, I realised that
something
must have happened. I could tell, just from the atmosphere in that room. It wasn’t tense or excited, though – don’t get me wrong. On the contrary, it was incredibly peaceful. Pale sunlight slanted through the window. Cups of coffee steamed gently on the table. Delora and Richard were sitting opposite Mum and Ray, and they all looked terribly tired, but not distressed. They looked tired in a good way.

Mum reached for me.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said, putting her arm around my waist.

‘What happened? Oh!’ I had spotted the exercise book lying open in front of her. ‘Is that -?’

‘Yes.’ Mum smiled. ‘It’s the story. The
whole
story.’

‘You mean, from beginning to end?’

‘Yes.’

I dragged the book towards me. The writing wasn’t familiar – it must have been Delora’s. But the words were certainly familiar.
Once there lived in
a bleak clime a white-bearded king
.

Hurriedly, I flicked through the pages until I reached the last one.
Morning came
, I read,
and still
the princess stood on the lofty cliff. She saw spars and pieces
of the wreck in the sea below. She climbed, by a winding path,
down the cliff-side to the beach. She saw Osric lying dead.
She saw the men dead around her – in each eye a reproach,
and each clammy mouth seeming to say, It is thou!

She cast herself into the pounding waves, and was never
seen again
.

‘Oh, dear,’ I murmured, as my eyes filled with tears. ‘So it
was
like Romeo and Juliet.’

‘I was only a conduit,’ Delora replied dreamily. ‘I allowed her inspiration to break through from the spirit realm. It was blocked there. The last lines couldn’t push through, because they hadn’t manifested themselves here before.’

‘It was like Frederick Thompson,’ Richard added. ‘Like Mrs Curran. I got it all on film. She was amazing, absolutely amazing. The room was pitch black.’ He and Delora beamed at each other.

I read the last paragraph.
But now
, it said,
if I
should relate that the lady’s disappointed affianced went
back to his father’s realm, where the two made war upon the
white-bearded king – ah, how dreamy, and alien, and far
away would it not seem? And this because the tale of the
lovers is complete. Loves are immortal, just as lovers are.
Tales of these, and of these alone, are ever new – because love
never dies
.

The End
.

‘Is there any more writing on the walls?’ I asked.

‘Not that I could see,’ Richard replied.

‘Are you sure? Have you checked?’

‘You have a look, Allie,’ Ray suggested, in a weary but contented kind of way. ‘You’ve got better eyes than we have.’

So I went back upstairs to Bethan’s room. Before I left the kitchen, however, I stopped in front of Delora. She must have been smoking, because I could smell it on her breath.

‘Did you actually see Eglantine?’ I inquired awkwardly. ‘Did you – I mean, did you speak to her?’ Suddenly, I realised how much I would have loved to speak to her myself. I so badly wanted to ask her questions, look at her face, find out why her story had been the most important thing in her life.

But Delora shook her head.

‘I don’t know, love,’ she said in her husky voice. ‘I don’t know if I spoke to her. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember a thing.’

‘You don’t remember any of it?’

‘Nope. Never do. It’s like I go to sleep, and wake up when it’s all over.’

I stared at her, and she smiled back at me. Her eyes were small and brown. They looked older than the rest of her.

And the rest of her, I should tell you, looked pretty old in that clear morning light. Even her lips had lines on them.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you must be . . . I mean, you’re very clever.’

‘Thanks, love.’

After that, I went upstairs. I looked and looked. I got up on a chair and looked; I got down on my knees and looked. I scanned every centimetre of the walls in Bethan’s room, and after half an hour, I had found only one line of script, written under the window.

It said,
The End
.

CHAPTER
# twelve

It was the end, too. Well – it was and it wasn’t. Eglantine did stop writing, so Bethan was able to move back into his bedroom (which was painted with another two coats of white paint, just to be on the safe side). He was a little reluctant, at first, in case Eglantine was still there, and Mum had to spend one night in the room herself to reassure him. When she reported that she’d had no dreams about choking, he agreed to try out the room himself. After a week of that, he moved all his toys out of my room, and things returned to normal – in one sense.

But in another sense they didn’t, because people were still interested in Eglantine. Richard Boyer was one of these people. He was very upset when he learned that we had painted over Eglantine’s writing on the ceiling of Bethan’s bedroom. And we couldn’t give him a piece of the bedroom wall to make him feel better, because the wall was made of lath and plaster – not gyprock – and wouldn’t have responded well to being hacked about. So Richard was unable to establish, without doubt, that our mysterious writing had been of a paranormal nature.

Nevertheless, it was a case that received a lot of attention. Channel Nine even ran a short item on Eglantine, using Richard’s videotape of Delora, and of the single line of script that he had managed to photograph as it slowly appeared on Bethan’s bedroom wall. Delora was interviewed, too. She was wearing false fingernails, painted purple, which must have been about ten centimetres long.

Anyway, you can imagine what happened next. We were
swamped
with mail – most of it from weirdos – asking us to interpret their dreams, or requesting permission to visit our house, or describing other examples of haunted rooms. Mum passed all of these letters on to PRISM. In the end, she didn’t even bother to read them. She also had to take down the sign that she had put up over the front door not long after the writing stopped. The sign had said
Eglantine
, because all the other houses on our street were called something (like
St Elmo
or
Bideawee
), and she thought it might be nice to name our house after its absent ghost. (I think she was feeling a bit guilty about Eglantine, now that we were rid of her.) But poor Mum hadn’t counted on all the stickybeaks. We had people knocking on the front door, asking if ours was ‘the haunted house’. We had people hanging around taking pictures, and other people peering through our living-room window. Now, most of the sticky-beaks aren’t quite sure which terrace is ours.