The Everlasting (4 page)

A groan . . . a moan . . . like branches in a tree shifting against one another.

He turned his head left and right, cupping his ears. Water pipes creaked and ticked beneath the floorboards. Perhaps in his half-sleeping state he'd heard that, and assigned it a much more sinister source.

Him?
he thought.
Lewis?
Maybe he had been quizzed by a ghost all those years ago, maybe not. Perhaps, as Helen suggested, the death of his grandfather had pressed close around him, inviting in all his other fears and coalescing in this figure that sought knowledge with the intimation of violence.

Scott almost called out to ask who was there, but even the thought of that made him smile. He was not in a bad horror movie right now. Instead he reached for the towel and began to dry himself off.

That noise again, louder and more definite.

Scott wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped from the bath. He knew all the creaking floorboards and managed to avoid most of them, but standing at the head of the stairs he stepped on a loose board, wincing as it echoed down the stairwell.

The groan had stopped.

He thought of calling the police, but realized he had nothing to tell them.

Scott picked up a heavy barometer set in granite from the shelf beside the stairwell and started down, stepping on the edges of the treads. A car pulled up outside his neighbor's house and honked its horn, and he used the opportunity to dash down the final few stairs.

He turned and faced along the hallway. Three doors headed off from there, all of them half-open. He exhaled and grew still.

Then he started moving forward, and it was his study he went to first.

There was no sign of any intruders. The patio doors
that led into the garden were still closed, as was the window. Nothing seemed out of place. But Scott suddenly thought he'd recognized that sound—or at least could place its possible cause—and when he went to his desk he saw that he was right.

The drawer had been forced. The lock still held, though the wood around it had splintered. One more heave with whatever had been used to do this and the drawer would have sprung open.

He tried to look through the crack between drawer and desk, but it was too dark inside to see whether the letter was still there.

Someone did this!
Scott thought suddenly. He placed the barometer on the desk and picked up his brass letter opener. He was about to move back into the hallway when something caught his attention in the garden. From the corner of his eye he saw a shape down by the bushes, a tall, gray form standing motionless and watching the house. He turned to look, blinked, and the garden was empty.

“Fuck!” He exhaled. He panted a few quick breaths, scanned the lawn, the shrub borders, tried to see beneath the willow tree, but he could see no one out there.

The house suddenly felt very empty. Scott realized that before now it had felt occupied, holding its breath as though awaiting some event to come and go. Now it was just him.

He touched the desk where the wood was splintered. It spiked at his fingertips, and he relished the sensation because it was so real. Could a ghost do
this? He was not sure. He knew nothing about ghosts, other than what he thought he had experienced when he was sixteen. He wasn't even sure he believed in them.

He shoved at the drawer, but the lock was bent and deformed, allowing no movement either way.

“Papa, what have you
given
me?”

The phone rang, startling Scott. The towel fell from around his waist, and he uttered a nervous giggle. He sat in the swivel chair behind his desk and picked up the receiver.

“Hi, babe. Wondering how you are.”

“I'm not too bad,” Scott said, amazed at the ease of his lie. “You?”

“Fine. Well, Jess is bad-mouthing me to Alex again, so I'm taking her out to lunch to find out what the fuck the problem is. Other than that . . . hunky-dory.”

“Good.” He stared at the open study door, expecting it to darken at any moment.

“Sure you're okay? Did you have your bath?”

“Just got out. Sitting here naked right now, in fact.” He listened for footsteps out in the hallway, the living room, upstairs.

Helen laughed quietly. “Well, I'll be home earlyish tonight,” she said. “We can sort that out then, if you like.”

And even though Scott was scared, and he felt eyes upon him, and something about the garden just wasn't right whichever way he looked at it, he managed to muster a gentle laugh and say, “Yes, I like.” Helen hung up. Scott dropped the receiver back onto
his desk, and he wrapped the towel around him again as he stood.

He stared into the garden, keeping back from the patio doors. He knew that with the sun where it was in the morning, it was difficult to see into the study from outside, even with the blinds open. It was all shadows inside. He looked directly at where he'd seen the shape, turned his head, and tried to catch it from the corner of his eye, glancing left and right. The garden remained as empty as the house, and he decided to go upstairs to dress.

He glanced at the drawer as he went.
Something
did
that!

Scott left the room and wandered around downstairs, checking every doorway, alcove, and cupboard. Upstairs he did the same, with no idea what he would do were he to find someone or something hiding there.

In his bedroom, as he was hauling on a pair of jeans, the enormity of what had happened suddenly hit him. He sat heavily on the bed and sighed, rubbing his hands across his scalp and enjoying the prickle of his shorn hair. It felt like a softer version of splintered wood.

He pulled on a shirt and ran back downstairs to his study. It was empty. He used the granite barometer to finish the job someone else had started, and when the drawer slipped open he breathed a sigh of relief to see the letter still there. He folded it in half—no longer mindful of its brittleness—and shoved it into his jeans pocket.

Then he turned and faced the garden, arms crossed. “Want it now?” he asked. And against his better judgment, and in perfect tune with the bad horror film he had convinced himself he was not in, he said, “Come and get it.”

Throughout that afternoon he kept returning to his study to look at the desk. He touched the bent lock and the ragged wound in the wood, trying to find a scar where a crowbar or screwdriver had been inserted to jimmy the drawer open. There was nothing. Only the torn wood, the bent metal. And each time he returned he tried to come up with some other explanation. Could he have caught his belt on the handle and ripped it open? But it was a strong oak desk, the lock old but firm. Perhaps he'd slammed it too hard that morning after depositing the letter inside, and ruptured the wood around the lock? But he thought not.

And there were those groans he'd heard when he was in the bath. Wood on wood, or the sounds of effort.

He did not go out into the garden again. Something seemed wrong out there. He could not make out what
it was, but the more he looked, the more unsettled and hemmed in he began to feel. The light was fine, the trees and bushes moved in time with the subtle breeze, birds probed the lawn for worms and insects, shadows remained where they should have been, butterflies rode the air like ash from a distant fire. It was fine, yet everything felt wrong. He went from spending ten minutes staring out the window to an hour avoiding looking outside at all.

He rang Helen again. Her voice mail picked up, and he remembered her saying she had a meeting that afternoon. So he rang twice more and listened to her voice.

Around three o'clock Scott slouched down on the settee and popped a DVD into the machine. As the title sequence of
The Thing
played out, he pulled the letter from his pocket and read it one more time. The sound of the TV retreated; the feel of the settee grew increasingly personal. When he finished the letter and read the scrawled
Papa
at the end, he closed his eyes against the rosebud brushing against the living room window. Perhaps when he woke again it would have bloomed and died and it would be autumn, and the letter would be forgotten.

He and Helen were going to Rome in October for a few days. They traveled well. Having never had kids they'd saved a tidy sum through their working careers, though Scott sometimes thought the more money they had, the sadder it made them.

He shifted on the settee, listened to the men in the Antarctic slowly growing apart, and felt the brush of
something against his cheek, as though the rose had grown all the way through the glass.

Papa taps his cheek again, and Scott wakes. He's almost fourteen, and he's taken to sleeping away hot afternoons as the summer holidays blaze their way toward the autumn term.

It's a familiar memory, and Scott relives it as a viewer. It's like a waking dream that he has lived many times before. He knows what is coming next.

“Get up and shake your ass,” Papa says. “We have to go to the woods!”

“Why?”

“We just do!” The old man is excited and animated, shifting here and there in Scott's room as the boy pulls on shoes and socks, baseball cap, jacket.

“You don't need that; it's hotter than the Sahara's arse out there, boy.”

Scott smiles and drops his jacket onto the bed. His cigarettes are in there. Papa doesn't yet know that he smokes, and Scott has already decided that he might never tell.

“Come on! Before it's too late!”

“What is it, Papa?” Scott hurries out after his grandfather, and it takes until they're through the gate and out onto the village street before the old man speaks again.

“The day's wasting away, boy, and you're letting it pass you by. Sleeping in the day! I'm over seventy, and I still don't have an afternoon nap! So what are you, Scotty? A young baby who needs a couple of hours to
see him through to bedtime? Or an old man recharging his batteries and waiting for the next meal to tick away another part of his life?”

“Neither,” Scott says. It's a familiar speech, a familiar game.

Papa stops and leans close. “You sleep, and things might pass you by. You'll miss things. And some things are too valuable to miss. You know?” He nudges Scott in the ribs and laughs, eyes twinkling like those of a man fifty years younger.

They walk along the street until they reach the wide gate into the field. Across the field, past the old lightning-struck oak, the edge of the wood beckons with the promise of cool shadows and more stories from Papa. Scott never tires of these excursions, and any sleep residue has already been burned away by the sun. He's excited, and he already knows what he's going to ask Papa to talk about today.

“So, the war,” Scott says, and Papa grows quiet, and all the weight of his years presses him down toward the ground. He looks at his grandson and smiles a sad, lost smile. For a second it's as though he died in the war, and this thing before Scott is the ghost of the man he used to be.

Here the memory usually ends, fading away as the two of them step out into the field. But this time the memory goes on and Scott is living it, not merely observing. Before it was like watching a movie, but now he's playing the lead role.

“You don't want to know about the war,” Papa says.

“I do.”

“I've told you everything there is to tell, three times over.” They're passing the old oak tree now, and Papa pauses to catch his breath. He leans against the side of the tree that is still sprouting.

“But there's more,” Scott says. “I know there is. There has to be.”

“And why does there have to be?”

“There's always more with you, Papa.” Scott smiles, and revels in the smile his grandfather sends in return.

“I only hope you never have to go through the things I did,” Papa says, and then he is telling Scott about his time in Africa fighting Rommel. It's a familiar story, but Scott is content to let it flow because he senses that something else is coming. Papa is telling the story faster than usual, for a start. Almost as though he's keen to move past the battles and death to reach somewhere else.

They arrive at the edge of the woods, climb the stile, and enter the shadows with a grateful sigh. The heat is nowhere near as bad in here. Sunlight probes through the tree canopy and speckles the ground, and Scott tries to step only on shadows.

Papa leads the way, taking a different route from normal and heading beneath the pine trees. Wood ants' nests rise here and there from the forest floor, some of them as high as Scott's waist, and he can see the creepy movement of thousands of ants as they
walk by. Sometimes when there's no breeze he can stand still and hear the movement of countless ants over fallen leaves and pine needles. On those occasions it's almost as if the whole forest is alive, and he is a living invader allowed passage through from one side to the other. He often wonders what would happen were he to abuse that permission.

They come to a clearing where there's a fallen tree. Papa brushes the tree off and sits, sighing as he leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. He has told Scott about the Battle of El Alamein, the devastation at Tobruk, and now he has fallen silent. But Scott knows that there is more to say.

The forest seems to know it as well. Birds have gone quiet, and even the secretive rustle of wood ants has ceased.

“Papa?” Scott asks expectantly.

“Scott,” the old man says. “We found something. Lewis and I, we found something out there in the desert. A munitions dump went up, and a day later we were sent to make sure nothing was left lying around. There were craters. . . .” He drifts off again, looking between the trees.

“Papa? What did you find there?”

“I can't say,” he says. “It's not possible, and I can't say. One day, perhaps. If you see me dead, maybe then I'll tell you.”

“I don't understand. You're scaring me.”