Spirit (23 page)

‘I know things have been bad for you,' he told her. ‘I just want you to know that I'm here to help you out now. Old playmates, huh? You should go through your dad's papers, you know. See what kind of insurance he's got, life insurance, pension, disability insurance. His savings won't last for ever.'

‘Thanks, I will.'

‘Goodnight, then, sweet Elizabeth,' he said, and they kissed – a long, lingering, exploratory kiss. Elizabeth's hand brushed accidentally against his front and she felt how hard he was, and that feeling was imprinted on her nerves for hours to come, in the same way that a dazzling light is imprinted on the eye. By the time the rear lights of his Frazer had disappeared behind the trees, she knew that she was dangerously infatuated with him. But then, she supposed that she always had been.

She went around the house, damping down the fires and drawing back the dusty velvet drapes. She didn't like coming downstairs in the morning to find the house in darkness. The house was silent and filled with heavy regret. All the house could do now was to wait for Elizabeth's father to be moved to hospital, or to die, and then it would welcome a new family. The days of the Buchanan household were gone for ever: Elizabeth, Laura and Peggy, their giggling echoing in the corridors, their slippers scampering down the stairs.

Elizabeth poked the living-room fire until the last log collapsed deep into the hearth, and set up the fireguard around it. Then she walked through to the kitchen, drew back the gingham curtains, and ran the tap for a glass of cold water to take to bed.

She didn't look out of the window at first, but then the moon suddenly appeared from behind the clouds, almost a full moon, fuzzy and pearly-blue. She was filling her glass, and she dropped it into the sink in fright. Right in the middle of the tennis court stood a small white figure in a coat and beret, a small white lonely figure as still as death.

‘Oh, my God,' whispered Elizabeth. ‘Oh, my God, no. Don't let it be that.'

Swallowing with fear, she went to the kitchen door and lifted down the old duffel coat that her father always wore when he
went out to fetch firewood. She pulled it on, unlocked the door, and stepped out into the frosty night. This time there was no cat to watch her with slitted, disapproving eyes; Ampersand had died three years ago, under the wheels of a furniture truck.

She crossed the lawn in a hurried, uneven lope. The figure hadn't moved. It stood exactly in the centre of the tennis court, facing the house. In the moonlight she could see already that its face was a kind of dirty grey, and that its eyes were smudgy and dark.

She slowed down as she reached the tennis court itself, and she approached the figure with extreme nervousness and caution. Eventually, however, she was near enough to touch it, although she didn't. She didn't have to, because she knew what it was made of.

It was the snow-angel that she and Laura had made for Peggy. It was dressed in Peggy's brown beret and Peggy's red kilt and Peggy's brown tweed coat. It had a misshapen fertilizer sack for a face, and two black holes for eyes, burned with a red-hot poker.

It was the snow-angel, made of snow, even though it hadn't snowed since early April.

Elizabeth stared at it, her breath smoking, her heart beating far too fast. What did this mean? What did all of this mean? Had somebody built it for her, to taunt her? Or had they built it to frighten her father?

Maybe it was nothing more than a strange, random occurrence – one of those supernatural phenomena like faces that appeared in mirrors and empty rooms that filled up with blowflies and voices that sobbed in the night. Maybe it had no rational meaning at all.

All the same, it frightened Elizabeth badly. She felt as if she was being given a warning. Who else knew about the snow-angel, apart from father and mommy, herself and Laura? Nobody. Nobody at all. But father was paralysed, mommy was
still in her clinic, only semi-rational most of the time, and Laura was three thousand miles away in California. What was even more bewildering than who might have built it was
how
they had built it. It was unseasonably cold for October, but not cold enough to snow. Yet, inexplicably, here was a snow-angel, just as the pool had frozen over in the middle of June and the Reverend Dick Bracewaite had died of frostbite on a sweltering summer's afternoon.

‘The winter did it,' the Peggy-girl had told her, in father's bedroom. But what did that mean? ‘The winter did it.' There was no winter anywhere; no trace of winter; not real winter; not yet.

Elizabeth circled around the snow-angel. She could even
smell
the coldness of it. It stared at her mockingly with its charred, lopsided eyes. She stood still, and looked around the gardens. There was a thin, chilly wind blowing, which set the dry leaves rustling across the lawns. More clouds began to run across the moon, and the darkness thickened. Only the snow-angel remained luminous and bright.

Elizabeth was tempted to find a shovel and knock the figure down. But then she thought, no, I'll go get Mrs Patrick out of bed, and I'll ask her to come here and see it for herself. Then at least I'll have a witness, and I'll know for sure that I'm not going completely insane.

She hurried back to the house, went inside, and locked the kitchen door. She left the house by the front door, crossed the driveway, and hurried down the street, turning off at the shingle-graded track that led down to Mrs Patrick's farmhouse. There were no lights down the track and only a single light visible at Green Pond Farm, and almost the only way in which she could tell where she was walking was because of the skinny silver birches which lined the track on either side, each as white and thin as a sudden shriek. Her feet crunched on the shingle. Invisible animals scurried through the undergrowth; sleeping birds stirred.

Three-quarters of the way down the track, she thought she heard another sound – the sound of somebody singing. She stopped and listened, but all she could hear was the wind in the branches and the crackling of dead leaves. She turned back and looked towards the house. It looked very large and dilapidated from here, almost abandoned. She thought of the photograph album with all of those images of the Peggy-girl in it, and she thought for a chilling split second that she could see the Peggy-girl standing beside the front of the house, but then she realized that it was nothing but the white-painted garage door, framed into a shifting, irregular shape by the leafless bushes that grew beside it.

She carried on walking – through the gate and past the pigsties. The Patricks didn't keep pigs any longer, but they still smelled of pig. She went up the steps of the front verandah and pressed the doorbell.

While she waited, she listened to the night. She could hear a train rattling very far away; and the sound of branches creaking. She was sure she could hear someone singing, someone very high and clear. At first she thought it was the Patricks' television, but it had such clarity that it didn't sound like television, and apart from that the words were very strung out, with long silences in between, as if somebody was walking and singing at the same time, and sometimes forgetting to sing.

She almost caught it, but then the front door opened, and the screen door squeaked. It was Dan Philips. Mrs Patrick's younger brother, who mostly ran the farm these days, him and his wife Bridget. His fiery red hair was mostly grey these days, but he was just as ruddy and bulbous as the rest of the family, and he looked just like Mrs Patrick dressed up as a man.

‘Why Lizzie Buchanan, is that you?'

‘Hallo, Mr Philips. Has Mrs Patrick gone to bed yet?'

‘She's not here. Seamus had one of his turns about an hour ago, worst one so far. The doctor came and they've taken him
down across to New Milford, so that they can keep their eye on him.'

Oh, I'm so sorry. He's going to be all right, isn't he?'

Dan Philips shrugged. ‘We're all saying our prayers, Lizzie.'

Elizabeth hesitated for a moment, and then she said, ‘I know this is a terrible imposition, Mr Philips, but do you think you could spare just five minutes to look at something?'

‘I don't know . . . I'm supposed to be waiting on the telephone.'

‘It won't even take five minutes, I promise you. It's something in the garden, back at the house. It's kind of a phenomenon, and I need a witness.'

‘It's a what?'

‘A phenomenon. Something really strange. The trouble is, it's not going to last, and I don't think anybody is going to believe me, unless somebody else takes a look at it.'

‘I'm sorry, Lizzie, I'm not sure. If my sister calls – '

‘It really won't take a moment, Mr Philips. I promise you.'

He gave her an odd, questioning look. ‘It wouldn't be a flying saucer, would it? I was reading about them flying saucers in the paper. Some guy from Wyoming got himself kidnapped.'

‘Nothing like that. Please.'

He thought hard for a moment. Then he said, ‘All right, then. I'll take the phone off the hook so they'll know that I'm still here.'

He went back into the farmhouse and returned a few moments later, shucking on his green raglan overcoat.

‘I really appreciate this,' Elizabeth told him, and meant it.

They walked up the track together. The wind had died away, but the temperature had dropped dramatically, two or three degrees below freezing, and they found themselves walking unusually quickly, not because they were pushed for time, but to keep themselves warm. Their breath fumed; and
all around them they could hear the soft crackling of hoar frost, as it froze the branches and the fallen leaves.

‘Snappy night,' Dan remarked, pushing his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. ‘Never knew it so cold as this, this time of year.'

Elizabeth said nothing, but hurried on.

They reached the house, and walked around the darkened conservatory towards the tennis court. The grass was thick with frost now, and they left glittering footprints behind them.

‘What is it you want me to see?' asked Dan, puffing.

Elizabeth crossed the tennis court. The snow-angel had gone. She looked around everywhere. She stared at the ground to see if there were any trace of shovel marks, or scattered snow. But there was nothing, only the hard sparkling frost. No snow-angel, no beret, no coat, no kilt. No sacking face with poker-burned holes for eyes.

‘It
was
here,' she said, in frustration.

‘Maybe if you tell me what I was, I might be able to help you look for it,' Dan suggested.

‘I don't think you'd believe me. That was why I wanted you to see it for yourself.'

‘Well, if it's gone, I don't see that it makes too much difference.'

Elizabeth peered into the darkness, and gave an involuntary shiver. She felt that there was something concealed in the night, some cold and heartless presence, something that was more than just a white-faced manifestation of her drowned sister. Something that was
huge
.

Dan looked at his wristwatch. ‘I'm sorry, Lizzie, I'm going to have to get back.'

‘All right, I'll tell you what it was. It was a figure made of snow.'

There was a long pause, and then Dan Philips said, ‘We haven't had any snow.'

‘That was why I wanted you to see it.'

‘When you say “a figure”?'

‘It was a little girl, all made out of snow. She wore a beret and a coat and she had a sack for her face.'

Dan slowly surveyed the garden, his hands on his hips, sucking in his lips. Then he said, ‘Nope. If it was here before, it surely aint here now.'

He was just about to turn to go when Elizabeth thought she glimpsed a small white shape on the very far side of the garden, underneath the overhanging trees.

‘Look,' she said. ‘Isn't that somebody there?'

Dan peered at it with his eyes slitted. ‘Could be. You want to take a quick look?'

They walked down the sloping garden. It was very dark now, and Elizabeth stumbled twice. The second time Dan caught her elbow, and said, ‘Have a care, now. You don't want to go breaking your ankle. Even a phenomenon aint worth that.'

They reached the trees; but the small white shape had vanished, if it had really been here at all.

‘I'm sorry to have dragged you all the way up here for nothing,' said Elizabeth. ‘I just hope you don't think that I'm going out of my mind.'

‘Don't believe that's for me to say, Lizzie,' Dan Philips replied.

He turned to go; but as he turned there was an ear-splitting fusillade of crackling noises from the trees. He said, ‘What the hell?' and Elizabeth couldn't stop herself from gasping.

The crackling went on and on. Right in front of their eyes, branch by branch, twig by twig, the oaks turned frosty white. They looked as if they were being sprayed by a firehose on an icy day, building up fantastic lumps and columns and sparkling stalactites. In fact, the temperature had plummeted so low that they were being coated in frozen moisture out of the air.

Soon the trees scarcely looked like trees at all, but extraordinary twisted temples, glistening with cold, with gargoyles and balustrades and spires. Whole branches splintered and came lurching off, overburdened with ice. Trunks split in half. And all the time the temperature dropped and dropped and kept on dropping. The lawns all around them were thickly encrusted with frost, and the grass was so intensely frozen that it snapped when they stepped on it.

‘What is it?' Elizabeth screamed. ‘Why is it getting so cold?'

‘Don't ask me!' Dan shouted back at her. ‘But I think it's time you and me beat the retreat!'

They started to run back up the lawn. But they hadn't gone more than six or seven paces when Elizabeth looked back over her shoulder and saw the white-faced Peggy-girl standing just in front of the frozen trees. Both of her arms were raised, as if she were hailing them, or calling them to come back. Elizabeth snatched at Dan's sleeve. Both of them stopped running.