The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (40 page)

“What do you want?” she whispered each time, wrenching her hand away and holding it tightly behind her back.

No answer but the sigh of the waters of the loch and the whisper of leaves in the night breeze and a silence that listened hard. There was no one there and she did not know what that no one wanted.

Her last summer visit to Inverash was the time she sleepwalked to the parlour and woke up directly in front of the fireplace. He was smiling from the photograph frame, amused. She tried to turn away but was pinned to the floor where she stood while the colour crept into his face and made him seem alive. His head was tilted enquiringly at her. Rowan never believed that she had seen colour seep into the photo, but she had. He was warming up, gathering strength.

The following summer Kate said she was too busy to visit Rowan. And the next and the next. And soon Inverash and its unsettling experiences became part of childhood lore, a dream half forgotten, a nightmare half remembered.

The hotel was fifty yards down the street from Café Franz on the opposite side. Kate headed into the misty night, fishing her room key from her pocket as she went. She was thinking of Rowan and the old woman’s hurt at her defection, all the phone calls asking when she would come again, her own guilty irritation at having to fend off the gentle urgings to visit, year after year.

Then came the call she could not ignore. Rowan babbled and wept and made no sense at first. She’d had a visit from a man from the War Graves Commission. Patrick had been found. In a garden in Ieper. He was only bones, but his had been the easiest identification they’d ever had: his St Christopher medal had his name scratched on the back; there was a rotted leather pouch with his initials in brass on it, and inside that an oil-cloth parcel of letters safely wrapped, letters to him from Mother and Father, the address at Inverash still clear in Mother’s loopy handwriting. Oh, such a pang she’d felt to see Mother’s handwriting again! It had made her cry. Patrick was to be reburied on the day after Armistice Day, in a place called Ramparts Cemetery. She could not go herself at her age, but someone from the family should be there and that person should be Kate who was somehow closer to Patrick than anyone else. She would go, wouldn’t she?

Closer to Patrick than anyone else? Her heart thudded against her ribs when she heard that, but there had been nothing to do but agree. An hour after the phone call, Rowan called again.

“I forgot to say. The strangest thing. He came to the surface on the anniversary of his disappearance. The seventh of September. He’s come back out of that brown fog. I can hardly bear it – oh, where has he been?”

Gavin had laughed at that. “He was under the earth and had a modern development built over him, and he was lucky not to wind up under the patio or he’d never have surfaced.”

7 September. Two months ago. It was around then that Kate had conceived if the dates were right. Suddenly two members of the family had turned up unexpectedly, wanting to make her acquaintance, and neither of them welcome.

Mother, don’t worry so. I’ll be back, you wait and see. Nothing will keep me from Inverash and you, nothing, especially now that we’ve lost Alex and Charlie. Third one lucky. Don’t fret.

Cheer-ho,

Patrick

6 September 1917

Why did that letter terrify her so? Kate quickened her pace. Perhaps everything would settle once he was properly buried. She went to cross the road and, with a spurt of dismay, realized that she had been so deep in her thoughts that she had overshot the hotel. She glanced back the way she had come. The mist, silvery under streetlamps and a moon thin as a sixpence, was rising, but she could see that she wasn’t even in the right street. She must have turned a corner or gone up a side alley. She stood for a moment, trying to get her bearings. The sky was bitter black and the small moon icily hard. Houses lined the street, their shuttered windows blind and unfriendly. She had no idea where she was. It was not possible to get lost on a fifty yard stretch of road, but lost she was. The sensible thing would be to walk back the way she had come, and yet going back felt wrong somehow. She hesitated. Ahead of her, the mist was sparse and ragged so that she could see patches of building and wall; behind, it was thickening to fog, dense and heavy, dimming the beams from the streetlights to a fuzzy glow. Her insides twisted. The fog was rolling towards her, closing in. It was impossible to stand where she was or go back. She plunged ahead, into the wraiths and wreaths of mist, with a rolling fog at her heels.

Somewhere close by, she could hear a piano playing and singing: “Lili Marlene”.

The re-enactors in full cry. So she wasn’t so very lost after all. The trouble was that, as she sped along, the music came from behind her, and then from her left, and then it was ahead and she thought she was running towards it. And she was running, skimming along past darkened houses, her feet knowing where to go and herself with no idea where she was. Then the singing faded and she was alone in the foggy dark. With a huge effort, she stopped dead in her tracks. A gate beside her, a neat little wrought-iron gate. And overhanging it, a rowan tree, its clumps of berries still scarlet, brushing cool and hard against her face as she put her hand on the gate. Of course she knew where she was now. Mr Westermann’s house. This was the garden where Patrick had been found, where he’d wrenched himself muddy from the clay earth and summoned help with a crooked finger.

She tried to back away but her hand was glued to the gate. Close behind, she heard whispering, an excited buzz, a silvery giggle. She drew closer to the gate to get away from the sound. Her eyes fell on the new flagstones. He had been under there. By the light of the carriage lamp at the door of the house, she could see the neat square of stone, the earthenware pots of plants precisely placed. One held a holly bush, humped in the dim light in the centre of the patio. She looked at it, felt an excitement as the buzzing behind her grew louder. The holly bush darkened and grew bulkier, took shape. A sleeping man, seated, slumped over his knees. A blanket, a coat, something draped over his head. Rifle in hand. She could see it as plain as day, a rifle pointing downward, a hand clasping it loosely.

In spite of herself, she reached for the latch and opened the gate. She stepped forward into the garden; stepped lightly so as not to disturb him; stepped into a mist thick with the scent of summer rowan blossom and the bitterness of autumn chrysanthemums. A sound like a sigh behind her. In front of her a movement, the shoulders of the huddled figure turning slowly towards her, the rifle scraping on stone, the blanket slipping from the head. Except there was no head. Just shoulders and an obscene knot of tendons and bone rising from between them and a thick, sticky darkness all down the front of the tunic where blood had rushed down. The tendons writhed wormlike and in agony as if they had only just been severed. She closed her eyes, nauseated. Rowan’s clean shot. Death must have been instantaneous. Ugly but instant. She clung to that something-to-be-thankful-for. For Patrick there had been no regretful listening to the singing of the wild birds. That was something to be thankful for too. She thought about that rather than the thing before her, then decided it was time to be gone. Eyes still closed, because she couldn’t face the torn wriggling tangles of what was left of him again, she took a step back. There was a buzzing in her ear, the pressure of something soft and determined pushing at her back. The fog billowed round her, carrying her forwards, cradling her coldly, carrying her to the slumped man.

She opened her eyes and recognized him at once. The head was in place, the face intact, the dimple deepening at the end of a smile, the eyes blue and gentle, studying her. Oh, her great-great-uncle was young and he was handsome! And he had the family flick of dark hair that tumbled on to the forehead. Like hers. What a shame it all was, what a shame, the cutting short, the blotting out, the end of things! What an end to humour and courage, to future and plans! A sense of might-have-beens pierced her through and through like a splinter of glass.

He laid his rifle across his knees and extended a hand, touched her midriff lightly.
Oh, Christ, I wish I’d seen that bairn
. . . No, no, that was the Newcastle man’s story, not theirs. The hand lay there, lightly, but with a warmth that seeped through her clothes and the layers of flesh and deep inside where something stirred and leaped, feebly but thrillingly. No, she thought, no, and looked down. It’s too soon. It can’t move yet. But it leaped again. She felt Patrick’s gaze heavy on her and raised her eyes to meet his. But he had disappeared. This time she saw a child’s face, a little boy’s, dark haired and with blue eyes full of rage and tears, the head sunk into the shoulders in despair, the dimple flattened out by a mouth tight with anger and grief. The buzzing at her ear grew more intense and became a hoarse whisper.

“I’ve nowhere else to go.”

She heard the words quite distinctly.

“Nowhere. Nowhere to go. Oh, that bairn . . . that bairn . . . Christ, I wish I’d seen it . . .”

She drew back and the fog parted for her. She was free to go now. She was out of the gate and down the street in seconds, at the steps in front of the hotel in minutes. Across the street the little square windows of Café Franz were golden with light. The piano was still thumping out the songs of war, and the men roaring the choruses the dead men, the nowhere men, used to sing “Keep the Home Fires Burning”. How they yearned for home, and fretted over their dead ones.

She hurried upstairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t surprised really to find it sweet with the scent of rowan blossom. Patrick, it was clear, though young, was determined to make an impression. She sat on the edge of the bed, her mind empty, unable to think or feel, at least not anything she wanted to think or feel. That was what uncertainty meant. Emptiness. Lack of direction or purpose. You sit and listen to an old song about faraway lads and home and then everything you thought or felt before seems trivial in the face of that desolation of endings. Sentimentality is what Gavin would call it, a feeling to be avoided as it rather got in the way of other things, but what those other things were she wasn’t quite sure any more, except that beginnings were more appealing than endings.

She stood up and crossed to the window, breathing in the fragrance of summer blossom and growth Patrick had brought to her all the way from that place of the dead, and the green shoots and the nesting birds. Down the street, the men were gathering outside Franz’s place, loudly calling their good-nights. The men in the anoraks and Aran sweaters mingled with the ones in khaki and puttees, laughing and backslapping and promising to meet tomorrow.

One soldier caught her eye. He was leaning against the wall in the circle of light from a street lamp, smoking a Woodbine. She knew it was a Woodbine because that’s what the family sent the boys. The tin hat was at a rakish angle, the rifle hung loosely from his hand. She knew who it was. He was looking up at her window, head tilted enquiringly. The men walked past him, unseeing. How annoyed they would be if they ever found out that he had been among them and that they had missed him! Gavin was standing near him, self-important, promising to let his companions read all the letters next day. “So moving,” he was saying. “They bring it all to life, make it real.”

Patrick flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and hitched his rifle sling over his shoulder. She waved down at him and he smiled mischief at her from under his tin hat. Something inside her leaped like the sap in spring. As Patrick had written, in both life and death there was nothing to do but go forward, so forward it was. He moved off up the street, going to that somewhere or nowhere which she could not imagine. Gavin passed right by him on the pavement – they almost brushed shoulders. Neither of them looked at the other.

“Cheer-ho, Patrick,” she muttered. “I’ll be seeing you.”

From somewhere far off, she heard a boy’s silvery giggle.

What was she going to say to Gavin?

Lilith Saintcrow

“This will make you see things, Georgie. Take it.”

Moira Staufford pressed the pendant into my cold palm, her fingers slippery with sweat. When she walked quickly away down Hagen Street her hair was a fall of copper-gold in late-autumn sunlight, her strides leggy as always but anxious as they had never been. I remembered braiding that hair on hungover mornings, holding it back while she heaved on drunken nights, and the familiar sharp bite of frustration in my chest made my eyes water.

She got into a long shining black limousine and it pulled away from the curb, inserting itself into the morning traffic with easy grace.

A heavy, antique silver chain held the clawed pendant, its sinuous shape a cross between a lion and a snake. Its eyes looked like chips of diamond, but oddly dark, and the whole thing vibrated in my hand. I stood outside the coffee shop, watching the limo until it vanished. I hadn’t seen Moira since college, and I never saw her again.

At least, not alive.

It was all over the papers the next morning.
Billionaire’s Wife Dead in Car Crash
. Fiery fatality. Police investigating. Husband distraught, rushing back from a European trip. I stood in Harly, Withers & Chagg’s grey fluorescent-lit break room and stared at the newspaper, my throat dry as rock.