The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (20 page)

“Are we stuck here? Forever?” asked Julie. “Do we have to haunt the place where we died?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I wish I did. My brothers knew a bit about ghosts. I should have paid closer attention. Oh, I hope Fawn has gone on to heaven! I don’t want her wandering in the desert, all alone!”

“Shhh, listen,” said Julie.

There was the soft crying again, beneath them. The sound of scratching, clawing.

“What do you think that is?” Julie asked.

Charity shook her head. “It’s what I’ve been hearing off and on. I thought it might be a dog beneath the motel, scampered there out of the sun maybe.”

“No, it’s a human sound.”

They both listened. Whimpering, scraping. Under the floor.

Charity kneeled down on the rug. She put her face to the floor. “Who are you?”

More weeping, louder now. More scratching.

“Are you hurt? Do you need help?”

A soft, tiny voice. “Help.”

“How can I help you?”

“Help.”

Instinctively, Charity put her hand to the floor, through the floor into the crawl space, and felt about. Her fingers brushed against some fine, soft hair, and she gasped.

“What is it?” asked Julie.

“I don’t know.” Her fingers traced the hair, down to a soft jaw line, a small chest, and bony shoulder. She felt about and grasped an arm.

“What are you doing?”

“Wait.”

She pulled. Slowly, carefully, drawing her hand back up out of the floor, ready to let go of the arm should it refuse to move through with her. But it didn’t. The body came through, huffing, shuddering.

It was a small boy, no more than five. He had raven-black hair and brown eyes. He was dressed only in a pair of short trousers. His feet were bare. There was blood at the corners of his mouth, and his chest appeared sunken, and dirt and small bits of gravel were embedded in places along his skin.

“Hi, there,” said Charity. “What’s your name?”

He sniffed and rubbed his nose. It was then Charity saw the nubs of his fingers. He had been digging, clawing, and had worn them clear to the bone.

“Honey,” said Charity. “We won’t hurt you. What is your name?”

He looked at Julie, then back at Charity, not seeming terrified by their appearances. He said, “Nantan.”

“Is that an Apache name?”

He nodded.

“How did you get down there under the motel?”

The boy shrugged.

“How long have you been down there?”

The boy’s face creased up and he began to cry again. His words were broken, desperate. “He threw me in the hole. Covered me up. Said I was nothing but trouble!”

“What man?”

“The man that build this place.”

God . . . and how old is this motel? Thirty years, maybe?

Charity tried to hug him but there was little of substance to hold. Nonetheless, she remained there on her knees, her arms encircling the boy, trying her best to replicate what had been easy in life.

Then Julie said, “Would he sleep? Could we put him to bed? Perhaps he would at least rest.”

“We can try.”

Charity sat back on her heels and held out her hand to Nantan. He took it. Julie grasped his other hand.

And they all felt it. A strange and sudden surge between them, a blue, undulating energy that took their dead hearts and set them pounding.

Julie almost let go but Charity said, “No, don’t! Don’t let go!”

“Why?”

“Just don’t, please. Let’s get up together.”

“Why?”

“Please?”

“I guess,” said Julie.

The three of them stood then, a young woman, a girl, and a little boy. Charity’s brothers had said there were magic numbers ghosts used to their advantage. One was three. And here they were, three ghosts, holding hands. There was something special there. There was power.

She led Julie and Nantan to the door.

“What are you doing?” asked Julie.

“Trying something.” Charity closed her eyes, thought about Fawn, dead, her body God only knew where now. Perhaps her spirit lingered on the outskirts of Flinton, not knowing what happened or what to do about it all.

“Come with me,” said Charity. “And don’t let go of each other, OK?”

“OK,” said Julie.

Nantan nodded.

She pushed through the door. The others came with her, sliding silently out on to the uneven concrete walk then across the night-darkened parking lot.

Yes! Yes!

Together, they could go where they needed to go. Together, they would take care of the business each needed to take care of. They had all the time in the world to figure it out and get it done.

You will be avenged, sister. I may see you again. I may not. But you will be avenged. You will be freed!

Flinton wasn’t so much hell as hellish. Not so much owned by the devil as bedevilled by humans and their cruelty. Charity led the others down the road, heading westward through the shadows, casting none of their own. She imagined herself shaking the town’s foul soil from her feet.

And as the silver moon rose over the desert and dogs barked behind chain link fences, she smiled her first smile in years, savouring the expressions she would see on the faces of Rufus and the Prophet when she took them to task back in Gloryville.

Alex Bell

Meet Chloe Benn – a bitter, bitter divorcee at the tender age of twenty-two, with no qualifications, no job, no interests, no passions, no dreams and no hopes. She’d had most of those things once but they had been stripped and stolen from her, with her permission and with her blessing. She had wasted five years of her life, and she knew it. Made all the wrong choices, and trusted all the wrong people. She’d known – deep down – for at least a year that her husband no longer loved her, and yet she had fought viciously against herself to deny that wicked truth, even though she was not happy any more, even though that internal struggle almost tore her apart.

Perhaps there had never been anything real between them at all. She had enjoyed the lifestyle he had given her very much: the champagne bubbles and the designer underwear and the private yachts and the exclusive parties. And he had loved her beauty – worshipped it, almost. He had loved the fact that every man who saw him with her would envy him; loved the way that every man’s eyes would go to Chloe as soon as she walked into a room; loved to feel that she was the best and that she was his. She was petite and graceful with a delicate, almost ethereal beauty. Like a bare-footed fairy who had danced straight out of a fairy tale. She had creamy white skin and huge, huge eyes the colour of dark chocolate. Sweet and shy and scared – like a gazelle. That was what he used to call her. A beautiful, fragile gazelle. But beauty fades and dies. A delicate thing that can so easily shatter into a hundred heartbroken pieces. And when that happens, love – or what passes for love – dies too. Dies and rots into something twisted and ugly and bitter.

Chloe’s looks had been stolen from her prematurely by the car accident. That drunken bastard had even snatched those from her before he chewed her up and spat her out – ruined and broken, to be abandoned at the side of the road like an unwanted puppy. Although the right-hand side of her face remained flawless and lovely, the left-hand side was scarred and burned – creating a horrible contrast between what she was now and what she once had been. If she stood in just the right way in front of the mirror, at precisely the right angle, all she could see was the untouched side of her face. A strange optical illusion – like a fantasy that the accident had never happened at all. Skilled doctors and expensive plastic surgeons had managed to fix some of the damage, but they could not eradicate it completely – they could not get rid of all the scars or fix her drooping eyelid. They could not give her back the perfection she had lost.

In truth, it was not as bad as Chloe believed it to be. But the fact remained that she was now utterly unable to see any beauty whatsoever in her own reflection. All she saw was the disfigurement, and the lines already starting to form around her eyes and mouth – the mental and emotional scars from five long years of pain and heartache and disappointment and disillusionment. Clear evidence stamped across her skin of all those times the world had hurt her – written across her scarred face in permanent ink for everyone to see, and to point at, and to laugh at.

From the age of ten Chloe had been a striking beauty who only seemed to become more and more beautiful with every passing year. But then she made the fateful choice of getting into the car when her husband told her to, even though she knew he was drunk, even though she knew that she shouldn’t. But she was an obedient wife and she always did as she was told. And after that, for the first time in her life, Chloe felt what it was like to be something less than startlingly stunning. She felt what it was like barely even to be beautiful at all. She felt the cold hard bite of self-conscious inferiority and inadequacy when she saw another woman in the room who was clearly more attractive than she was. And the realization hit her hard and hit her fast: her delicate, lovely beauty was gone. It was gone and it was never coming back. Her career was over, too – she would never model again.

She soon realized that her husband was no longer attracted to her. He recoiled at the thought of touching that ruined flesh. It was only a matter of time before he sought out a replacement. The divorce had been finalized for over a year now and yet, still, all Chloe could do was brood and agonize over how much time she had wasted. And in doing so she only wasted more. Her life had always seemed such a full one back in London but her husband had been the one underpinning it all. The places that she went, the things that she did – sometimes even the clothes that she wore and the words that she said – were all formed by him. Like she was his doll. His dancing puppet on invisible strings. Even her friends were his friends. His friends first, and hers second. How could she continue to move in those circles when he might be there with
her
? With that new one. The younger model. The unruined one. The teenager who looked almost as pretty as Chloe had been before the accident.

So, finally, she made a decision – an actual decision that she took for herself and by herself, for the first time in her life. She would leave London. Money was not a problem. Aside from all the earnings she had saved back when her supermodel career was still going strong, she had received a handsome settlement in the divorce. Her ex-husband had made no attempt to deny or to hide his infidelity. He did not want a disfigured wife, and he was quite willing to pay through the nose to be rid of her. Chloe could live wherever she liked.

But what
did
she like? She had grown so used to thinking and saying that she liked something just because she knew it was what he liked. She had lived with him from the age of seventeen, and been married to him from the age of eighteen. She had been a weak-willed girl – impressionable and eager to please and afraid to disappoint. So she had moulded herself to him as well as she was able, and now she was no longer sure how much of herself was really her, and how much of it was him. Now that it was her choice – and only hers – where did she want to live? Not a modern, brand new loft apartment like she had shared with him, she knew that. But then where?

It had taken her a long time but she had finally found the place. As soon as she saw the photos on her computer screen, she knew it was the one. A red-brick Georgian house that had been standing empty for almost two years since the owner had moved abroad. No doubt the prohibitive cost had put people off but Chloe had to have something to spend her money on. She liked the thought of all those elegant, airy, empty rooms, waiting to be filled with her choice of décor and her taste in furnishings. While the purchase had been going through, Chloe had scoured Christie’s and Sotheby’s looking for appropriate period furniture by Hepplewhite or Chippendale – all via their websites, of course; she never left the house now if she could help it because she didn’t want people staring at her ruined face.

But she enjoyed acquiring the furniture. Here, at last, was something to do with her time, to take an interest in, and to work towards. The house was a promise – her promise to herself – of a new beginning and a new Chloe and a new attempt actually to
live
instead of allowing other people to live for her. Or, at least, that was the promise she made to herself in a rare burst of optimism on one of her good days – before she sank back down into bitterness and self-loathing and that brooding hatred towards
him
that she derived a perverse sort of pleasure out of fostering and nurturing. A pointless sort of promise made with the best of intentions but which Chloe would never be able to keep. Even if her life depended on it.

She arrived at Arietta House on a cold, drizzly morning in mid-February. As she drove down the drive, the elegant, redbrick façade slowly materialized out of the mist that drifted in shredded ribbons about the house’s square, symmetrical lines and tiled, sloping roof, almost hiding the paired chimneys from view. The sash windows with their small eight-by-eight panes were neatly lined up in rows across the front of the house, dark and cold and unwelcoming. She parked and got out of the car. The slam of the door closing seemed to echo strangely in the silence as she stared up at the empty house. Her house. A big place for a small person to hide away from the world.