Haunted (4 page)

"Your Sally?" The youth's voice was still not
quite steady, but he was beginning to come back to himself, here in
the comforting earthiness of Terry's half-empty bar with its
workaday smells and sounds.

"Yep," said Sam, quite distracted from
sharks. Sally was a topic not raised in the bar for a long time. "A
girl with funny, chopped short hair? That darned flowered dress she
always used to wear, flapping about her ankles?"

"She ain't been around for quite a stretch,"
said Jake slowly.

The young man laughed shakily, running a hand
through his thick, dark hair. He eyed the three people who had
addressed him, and then seemed to plumb for Terry as the most
reliable, turning back to her. "Sally?" he prompted.

Terry was half-turned away, straightening a
row of bottles on the shelf behind the bar with unusual fussiness.
"Sally died in 1933," she said at length, briefly, when the pause
seemed to stretch too long. "Sally Munro. She was twenty nine,
unmarried, and quite mad."

Jake ventured a wheezy laugh at that
trenchant summary. "I remember her," he volunteered suddenly,
"just. I was five when she died. And her Pa was fishing mates with
mine. He mourned old man Munro for a long time."

"Old man Munro?" The visitor's eyes had
swivelled over to Jake's leathery brown face, weather-beaten into a
mask. "I thought it was his daughter who died? Why did your father
mourn the old man?"

"Oh, he died first," said Terry. "Him and Ma
Munro. But first of all, Mikey died."

"Who's that?"

"Her brother," said Sam Sharkey.

"Her son," said Terry, in the same
breath.

Tom Wiggins, overcome with curiosity, had
finally drifted over to the bar under the pretence of wanting
another drink. Used to offering advice, he took the glass which
Terry tendered him, settled down comfortably on the stool on the
other side of the new arrival, and came up with another nugget of
the same.

"Why don't you just tell the poor fella the
whole story, from the beginning?" he suggested serenely. "It ain't
every day you see a ghost, and y'all are just making things a sight
worse."

Everyone seemed to look to Terry then. They
had been fishermen; and after that, they were drinkers. Terry was
the educated one, the one to tell the tale, even though most of the
men there had had a personal brush with the story and Terry herself
hadn't even been born when Sally Munro had died. But Terry sighed,
parked her elbows firmly on the counter, and leaned her full weight
on them. "I suppose you'd better know," she said.

The life of a fisherman's wife was a hard and
tough one; drudgery wore the women out fast. But Sally Munro was
not yet a wife, and she was still young enough to be beautiful -
she had been only a few weeks shy of nineteen when Lazarus had come
to the village. They called him that because he had been snatched
back from the sea, brought back from the edge, so nearly dead that
a lot of his mates found it hard to believe that he was still with
them, plying the same nets. Perhaps it was because of that
near-death that he had been so wild, so reckless; he took without
thought for the consequences, because he had been vouchsafed a
glimpse of the end of the world and now lived only to delay its
second coming for as long as possible and to cram as much living
into the rest of his days as was humanly possible before he would
be finally called to account. Sally was eighteen, fresh and pretty,
and Lazarus was there, young, headstrong, charismatic. By the time
Sally found out she was pregnant, Lazarus was gone.

They hid the pregnancy; instead, Sally's
mother put padded cushions under her clothes as Sally grew large,
eventually pleading a bad pregnancy and withdrawing more or less
completely from the public eye. Only a very few knew the identity
of the real mother-to-be; and people whispered a bit about the
strangeness of it all, but by and large the baby boy who made his
appearance in the Munros' hut in due course was accepted as being
Sally's little brother.

His real father and his grandfather, whom he
called Pa, both earning a living eking out a silver harvest from
the sea, it wasn't surprising that young Michael (that had been
Lazarus's real name, and Sally had insisted, but that was the last
decision she got to make about her child) soon took it for granted
that this was in his own future, too. He began pestering his "Pa"
to let him go out with the men on the fishing boat when he was as
young as five. Sally said he was too young; her parents agreed. But
he asked the next year, and the year after that, and in the year he
turned nine his Pa's answer changed.

"I suppose you're old enough to be useful,"
he had said.

"He's too young," said Sally desperately.

"Pa said I can go! Pa said I can go!" lilted
the boy, dancing round the kitchen. It was the best birthday
present, ever, he assured his parents when he was put to bed that
night. If he groused a little at being waked before sunrise the
next morning, the bad mood was soon swept away by the excitement.
Sally watched in morose silence from the door of the cottage as her
father and her son walked away into the whitening darkness of
impending morning.

The boat limped back after the sudden storm
which had swept the coast, crippled, no longer fully manned. Three
crew they had lost in the ocean's fury. One of them was Michael
Munro, who had turned nine a few short hours before. Sally's father
had suffered a broken arm trying to save him, but it had been
impossible to hold on. He returned, to his wife's tears and
lamentations and the dry-eyed, burning gaze of his daughter. The
man who'd helped Pa Munro home remembered later the words Sally had
flung like rocks at his feet, words which he had been puzzled
by:

"You killed my son," she had said. Only
that.

"She must have repeated what the missus had
been saying," the man would tell his wife later, snug in their own
bed. "Mikey was her brother, we all know that."

Sally may have had to come to terms with the
deception her life had had to embrace, she may have ceded Mikey to
her parents, because she could see that had been the only way. But
if she had given up her son's life, she could not forgive his
death. Her parents had both indulgently said that Mikey could go on
that fishing trip. But she, Sally, she had known he was too young.
The fact that death came impartially to the fisher-folk, that two
other men, both grown, had also drowned, was something she had
pushed to the back of her mind. All she could think of was that her
parents had said yes, and Mikey had died; her parents had killed
her son.

While those who had been spared gave thanks
for their deliverance in the only way many knew how - in the bar,
then kept by Terry's grandfather, or in the bed of either wife or
one of the two painted "ladies" whose trade, in a tumbledown little
house at the far end of the village, was well-known to all -
Sally's father was dying in his own bed, stabbed twice by the sharp
gutting knife Ma Munro used for cleaning fish. And Ma Munro herself
was already dead beside him, the blade which, in her hand, had slit
so many fish bellies now turned against her own.

Sally left them there, in the bloody bed, the
knife dropped beside them on the floor, and wandered barefoot, in
the long, shapeless floral dress she had taken to wearing
constantly, as if to hide a voluminous secret about her body,
towards the old pier. She'd hacked off her long hair, quite
mindlessly, without even thinking about it, just before she had
turned the barbering blade on her sleeping parents - the cottage
kitchen floor was awash with long, tangled dark strands; perhaps
she was trying to convince herself that it was Sally who was really
dead, and she was no longer the girl but Mikey, her son, the boy
claimed by the sea. It hadn't worked. That was when she must have
turned the knife on her parents. She looked a bit of a scarecrow,
the chopped hair, the flapping dress, the huge dark eyes in the
white, pasty face.

She stood there for a long time, at the far
edge of the pier, shivering in the cold wind that blew in from the
sea, as though she were waiting for a boat to come in. For Mikey.
But Mikey would never come home again. And then, sometime towards
dawn, she simply stepped off the pier into the element which had
taken her son. They found her body washed up a mile or so down on
Long Beach the next day.

"By this stage it was all known, of course,"
Terry said. "Lazarus, the seduction, the baby. The village blamed
her for what she did when the boy was lost, but they wouldn't have
blamed her for conceiving him. At least that's what my mother
always said."

"She knew them? The Munros?"

"No, not really; second-hand hearsay, most of
what she knew. But I think she was right. The place wasn't half as
mediaeval as they liked to make out, not even back then."

"And what happened after?"

"Well," shrugged Terry, "you've seen the
'after'. She wanders on the pier sometimes. We haven't seen her for
a while, but hers is an unquiet spirit, and do you blame her?
Still, she's never harmed anyone... after she was dead, I mean. And
there's no ill omens, nobody dies after she's been seen, or
anything like that. She's a sad little thing."

The young man sat in silence for a while
after that, pondering the story over yet another glass of brandy.
Terry drifted away to attend to her nightly duty of rescuing old
Adam before he fell quite asleep and off his stool, doing his old
bones an injury. Sam seized his chance and sidled over, muttering
something about "this place" having plenty of good stories, and did
the visitor know that he, Sam, once faced off a Great White shark -
man eater, that was... Jake left the counter in disgust, nursing
his drink, crossing over to where the nightly instalment of the
chess game was beginning to be drawn towards its usual inconclusive
end to offer advice diametrically opposed to that of Tom Wiggins,
annoying the latter considerably at this intrusion into what he
considered to be his own private territory. The visitor, to whom,
after all, the oft-told shark tale had the virtue of not having
been heard a hundred times before, listened with commendable
patience, and Sam blossomed under the attention.

He was all set to start again when he reached
the end, but the young man said he had to go. So they escorted him
outside like royalty, Terry and Sam and Will and Georgy, who had
left off politics for the night and were best friends again, and
Terry asked him to drop by again, and he said he would, although
they both knew he would probably be gone by the end of the weekend,
back to the big city where he wore a grey suit and programmed
computers for a living - or something like that. He was, after all
one of Them, the summer crowd, the weekend people who drifted in
and out of the town, who had taken the place from those to whom it
had always belonged but who were themselves, nevertheless,
insubstantial wraiths, as much ghosts in their tenuous presence as
the hapless spirit which haunted the old pier, empty now of even
the ghosts of the old fishing boats which bobbed there once.

This had occurred to Terry as she was
cleaning up that night, after closing time. She was strangely
disturbed by the evening, almost as if it had been Sally Munro
herself who had troubled the peace of her establishment rather than
one of the witnesses to Sally's sudden reappearance on her pier.
Terry's head ached oddly, a dull pain behind her eyes, and she
decided to take a walk before bedtime, just to clear her mind. She
wasn't altogether surprised when her feet took her unbidden towards
the old pier; and perhaps even less so to see the rather too
corporeal shape of her erstwhile young visitor sitting on the edge,
dangling his feet over the dark water lapping quietly around the
wooden piles supporting the jetty. Waiting for the ghost, perhaps,
from whom he had fled so hastily. Or just watching the dusting of
stars on the quiet ocean in the quiet night.

Midnight at Spanish Gardens:
"Alexander's language is lovely and poetic...the imagery is
beautiful, the setting is compelling...But it's the characters that
drive this story, in all of their imperfection, in all of their
passion or disconnection or feeling of failure." -
Alana Abbott,
Flames Rising

The Secrets of Jin-shei:
"Vivid and
involving'... both an exotic journey into the imagination, and a
graceful exploration of the heart." -
SF Site

Changer of Days:
"Powerful characters
and a powerful setting help to deliver what I am thrilled to say is
a great bloody book." -
Altair

Gift of the Unmage:
"This latest book
seems as if it is going to be your standard coming-of-age magician
tale, but then you realize it is so much more. It is philosophy, it
is science fiction, and it is beautiful." -
Kelly A.
Ohlert

Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories
(Macmillan, UK, 1995)

Houses in Africa (David Ling, New Zealand,
1995)

Letters from the Fire (Harper Collins New
Zealand, 1999)

Secrets of Jin Shei (HarperCollins, USA,
2004/2005)

The Hidden Queen (Eos, USA, 2005)

Changer of Days (Eos, USA, 2005)

Embers of Heaven (HarperCollins , UK,
2006)

Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax, (Kos
Books 2010)

Midnight at Spanish Gardens (Sky Warrior
Publishing 2011)

WORLDWEAVERS Series

1) Gift of the Unmage (HarperCollins, USA,
2007)

2) Spellspam (HarperCollins, USA, 2008)

3) Cybermage (Harpercollins, USA, 2009)