Ghostwalk (16 page)

Fifteen

T
o find Prickwillow and Dilys Kite I drove out across the Fens. The road beyond the great north roundabout gave way eventually to the flat blackened land of the Fens, where once there were meres and reedbeds, alders, curlews, and sedge warblers. The road seemed to curl its way along a ridge newly and only slightly risen from a seabed, only recently exposed to the sky. Above it the sky was a great arch of clouds, shades of blue and crisp white that afternoon, shading to grey and pale purple bruise over towards Ely, where diagonal streaks of light and dark marked out the edges of a rainstorm behind the flattened outline of the cathedral.

The guidebook to East Anglia describes this landscape north of Ely as “the black Fens, where celery and onions grow in endless weedless rows down hedgeless billiard-table fields.” It’s more beautiful than that, though, and darker too, particularly in winter, when nothing breaks the black soil for miles, except for the straight edges of roads, drains, and hedgerows, and the rusted corrugated iron of sheds and bunkers. Black as black. No, not really like a billiard table—more like the flattened shapes of a Mondrian painting, in black, greens, browns, and greys. Here and there reeds fringe the waterways and feather the wind that blows in from the Urals.

The poet Tennyson came out to the Fens when he was a student at Cambridge in the 1830s, already sick with love for poetry and for his friend Arthur Hallam. He used this thin light and flattened, river-riven landscape and lowering sky in several of his poems, but it’s the Lady of Shalott I see when I’m watching the willows trail their leaves on the edge of rivers. The lady who left the tower by the river, where she’d been imprisoned by a spell, because she’d fallen in love with a beautiful knight who had ridden past her window. She sailed down the river to Camelot, knowing that she would die now that she’d broken the spell. And as she passes down the river, consumed by her desire, “willows whiten, aspens quiver, little breezes dusk and shiver.” The Lady of Shalott, entangled in her web,
falls
; she is always falling, or fallen. Tennyson found her in this black, wet land.

Prickwillow’s not old; even the pumping station, which is now a museum, only dates from 1922. The land the village stands on, where the River Lark meets the River Ouse, would have risen from the marshy waters in the late seventeenth century, when they drained the Fens and brought the land up out of the marsh. Before that this village, the land where Mrs. Kite’s bungalow stands and the pub, the pump-engine museum, and the church, were all waterlogged peat, covered with sedge, dangerous black land, full of exhalations of gas bubbling up from long-rotted ancient bog oaks, their long-limbed shadows turning invisibly beneath apparently solid surfaces. Apart from the church and the stone houses clustered along the bend in the river, Prickwillow looks temporary, half rotted and rotting: rusting corrugated iron sheds, abandoned gardens, the metal shells of cars and boats scattered about like fossils emerging from mud. There’s a stagnancy about it like a still-life painting, objects caught suspended in the act of passing. Even the river is apparently still, like glass.

After the draining of the Fens, willows found a place here along the riverbanks, making perfect mirror images of themselves in the water. Then thatchers brought their boats upriver to cut skewers of flexible willow wood here to hold down the thatch on their roofs. They called them prickets. Willow pricket. Prickwillow.

There’s no burial ground in Prickwillow—the water table is too high even now and the ground too saturated. The dead must be interred instead at Ely. Death would somehow be suspended here too, like time.

Dilys Kite’s house looked like a bed-and-breakfast—a bungalow in what appeared to be a housing estate to the side of the village. Two brightly painted gnomes stood squatly in the garden, one fishing, the other with trousers round his ankles. Curved borders hosted late snapdragons and nasturtiums, curling around a well-manicured lawn, in the centre of which someone had placed a mock Tudor well. Now why, I wondered, would a medium live in a bungalow and not, as one might have thought, in a cottage with thick walls and low beams? Perhaps it would be too noisy. If you are picking up traffic all the time from the other side, an old cottage would be deafening. Much better to live in a fifties bungalow among the picket fences and gnomes of village life. Empty walls. And a well with no hole down into the peat below.

Dilys Kite—psychic, medium, clairvoyant—didn’t advertise, of course. People just found her when they needed her, she often said. Found their way to Prickwillow from America, New Zealand, London, Cambridge. Wind chimes hanging from the porch, in this wind, were hectic and out of key. I had a cold sore on my bottom lip, just pushing its way through to the surface. My eyes were hot and seemed to be getting hotter. I had to blink now to see sharply—fen light, I thought.

I had imagined, or tried to imagine, a husband for Dilys Kite, but there was no husband. She came to the door alone, her glass eye turned slightly askew, slippers on her feet. Yes, this particular memory runs like a dream. I can’t see too well. She can’t see at all but she also sees everything. When she has made the tea in her little kitchen and I have taken a seat in her dark sitting room and talked a little about her roses and the autumn weather, she asks me to turn off my phone, explaining, as if she were telling me about stain remover, that mobile phones disturb the spirit world.

“Shall we go through?” she asks. She takes my tea from me, puts it on a tray, opens a little door into a conservatory overlooking her garden, and carries the tray through there, into the light. I follow. There’s an element of showmanship in all of this, the rustle of expectation. She motions for me to take a seat on one side of the room and she takes another—her seat, I knew that. It has that air about it.

“I’ve come because…” Someone had to start somewhere.

“I know why you are here, dear,” she began, closing her eyes and settling back into her chair. “You’ve come because you’ve seen what Elizabeth left unfinished in that house. You must try to finish it, close it down, but you won’t be able to do that on your own. You don’t know enough.”

“And you do?”

“Elizabeth came here often, especially towards the end. She had a theory, and she was looking for evidence to prove it.”

“By contacting the dead?” I failed to erase the sneer in my voice. “Elizabeth wasn’t like that. She was a serious scholar.”

“No, she wasn’t ‘like that,’ as you put it,” Dilys said, without taking offence, “but she came to believe, when there was no other way. She wanted to know certain things for which there were no records. It was a kind of obsession for her.”

“About Newt—?”

She put her finger to her lips quickly. “No, my dear. You mustn’t say his name here. We’ve made that mistake only once before.” She motioned to a burn mark on the wall, high up above my head. I didn’t ask.

I thought of you and wondered what a neuroscientist would say about parapsychology. Would you see clairvoyance as a version of schizophrenia? How would you diagnose what people called Dilys Kite’s “gift”; what drugs would you give her? There’s a chemical in the brain that produces hallucinations and visions, I think you showed me an article once in
New Scientist
about that—some stupid headline about how all those medieval mystics just had more than their fair share of this chemical. No angels—no, in the end it’s all a matter of chemicals surging through the frontal lobes.

“There’s a boy,” Dilys said. “One of those who died. Elizabeth should have left it all alone. She would never admit that. She just did what she had to do, I suppose. The boy has been here often. He’s here with us now.”

She pointed behind me. I ignored it. I wasn’t going to be spooked by any of this hocus-pocus. I’d come here to find out what Dilys Kite knew about her friend, not to contact the dead. I wouldn’t lose it, as Elizabeth had done. I knew where reason ended and irrationality began, even if Elizabeth had forgotten how to find that edge.

“What did she find?”

“You’ve not finished reading her book?”

“Yes, I’ve finished reading it, but it doesn’t say. The last two chapters are missing.”

Dilys sighed with a degree of of exasperation. “But she
did
finish it. That’s the point. She rang me that last weekend to tell me she had finished it. There were no missing chapters.”

“Well, it’s not finished now,” I said. “The last two existing chapters are only in note form. I’ve checked all her computer files. There’s one computer file with the entire text in it labelled
The Alchemist,
and there’s a printout. They are both exactly the same—the book dwindles into notes.”

“Well, well. Perhaps that’s best after all. What kind of notes?”

There were posters of Native Americans on the brick-wall end of Dilys’s rather draughty conservatory. Roses, drifts of red and pink and orange beyond, another well-manicured garden. Wicker easy chairs. A coffee table. Green mock-marble vinyl on the floor. This was just a suburban conservatory in October.

“The last two chapters of
The Alchemist
,” I said, trying not to let my eyes wander around the walls. “Some of the text is polished, probably even finished. She describes Newton’s appointment to the fellowship at Trinity in 1667. Most of that material, right down to his buying clothes for the celebrations and being given a key to all the rooms and to the bowling green and the tennis courts—all of that is there; it’s wonderful. But then there are pages in between that are just in note form. Names, places, dates. Some sections in the hard copy are scratched out. The electronic version is full of gaps and little notes to herself.”

“As if the file had reverted to an earlier draft?”

“Yes, how do you know?”

“My dear, Elizabeth talked to me a good deal about that manuscript. We did many things for Elizabeth and with that manuscript. Nothing made any difference. What computer are you using? Hers?”

“No, mine. I brought a laptop.”

“Good. Don’t use hers. Best not.” She poured more tea into tiny ornate cups from a small metal teapot and passed me a ginger biscuit on a china dish.

“Why? Viruses?” I asked. Would Dilys Kite know about computer viruses?

“Oh no. She never had any viruses in that computer. She was very careful about that. Just accidents. Electricity shortages. Files that disappeared. Words that came up on the screen on their own when she would be working on a chapter.”

“What words?”

“NABED was one. That came up many times. Upside down. Back to front.”

“NABED? The name of the animal-liberation group?”

“Yes, but that, I believe, is entirely coincidental. I’ve been trying to work out what it stands for. Probably something like National Army Against Biochemical Experimentation and Death or Destruction. Interesting, don’t you think?”

“Could someone have been hacking into her computer? Some kind of propaganda campaign by the group? It could have been a simple malfunction. Or even a virus.”

“She wasn’t connected to the Internet there.”

“She could have picked up a virus in all sorts of ways.”

“Yes, I expect she probably could. I’m sure there’s a rational explanation. Is that what you think it was…or, should I say, is? Your computer is doing the same things, isn’t it? Your laptop?” She stopped and looked at me rather intensely. “Are you remembering yet? Are you beginning to remember?”

This was no kind of remembering I knew. It started in the form of a déjà vu, or at least it had all of the sensation of a déjà vu—the vividness of colour and taste, the confusion, the absolute certainty that I had been there before, sitting and drinking tea, eating a ginger biscuit, looking out into that garden. But I know that the memory as it came to me in Dilys Kite’s conservatory that afternoon, thick and embossed and finely textured, was not my own. I had to put down the teacup—porcelain, delicate, with its lilies of the valley—because my hand was no longer my own. Déjà vu is a sensation in the head, a kind of rush of perception. The rest of that memory, such as it was, came up from my loins and spread outwards, filling my chest, and stayed, steadied, in the base of my throat, so that I couldn’t swallow. I closed my eyes. It filled me up—from my loins to my fingers and toes, down all the arteries and sinews and down all the optic and fibrous nerves. It filled me to the brim. I had a sensation of bursting in my chest, like a plum that is about to split its skin. I sat still so that I wouldn’t split. I tried to breathe slowly.

When you don’t believe in the paranormal, as I didn’t and might even say still don’t, such sensations, even if understood in material terms—as something, say, brought on by a mind-altering drug or as distortions of perception caused by powerful suggestion—are very unsettling. Part of you just absents yourself, looks on with curiosity, while whatever “it” is just walks on in.

“What do you see?” Dilys sighed. Somewhere out there in the conservatory, she had put down her teacup and switched on a tape recorder. Though she was silhouetted against the garden window, her features indistinct, I could see that she was watching me. But I also knew she could see nothing. I wondered whether she had put something in my tea. Perhaps that was how she made her money—by stimulating hallucinations. I was quite powerless to refuse her now. Everything here in this conservatory was falling away.

“Give it up,” she said somewhere to my left. “Give it up.”

I closed my eyes. I remembered that she had done nothing to hypnotise me. I tried to remember that she was half blind, and a friend of Elizabeth’s. I could see her tattoo and the pearls around her neck now in the darkness behind my closed eyes, but I could also see flowers unfolding, shapes and shadows passing across the darkness, coming closer. Somewhere there I thought I saw oysters, whites and fringed black edges against the darkness.

“A river,” I said. “At least I think it is a river. I can see ripples on the surface of the water. There’s a mist along the edge of the water. There are two swans over on the other side where the grass is longer. And a moorhen. It is cold. Dark. I can hear an owl in the trees on the other side of the river.”