The Time of the Ghost (13 page)

Raised like that, Sally could clearly see the trees on the hill ahead, black against the lighter blackness of the sky. Among them was the orange square of a lighted window. Someone was in a bedroom of the farmhouse up there. Almost as Sally saw it, the orange square flicked out, leaving her dazzled. Someone had gone to bed up there. At the same time, softly tolling across the pearly fields, she heard the school clock striking midnight.

Midnight
, Sally said.
Ghost time. I'm legal now. And that's Audrey's house up there. Why don't I go and see if I'm really there?

It was a tempting thought, but an alarming one. Sally knew still—more clearly than she knew anything else—that there had been an accident. Suppose she got to the farm only to look down on her dead body? Because, look at it how you would,
something
must have happened to make her a ghost.

But the obvious thing seemed to be to go and find out. Sally continued to drift between the hedges and on up the hill, where the trees reduced the road to the faintest of glimmers, until she came to the farm gates. Beyond the gates was the hot, dungy smell of farmyard. And it was a little frightening. All the animals seemed to know she was there. Sally wafted aside from the fierce grunt of a big white hunk of angry flesh, which turned out to be a white sow, and then from a spitting kitten, and from the snarl of the sheepdog. Finally, a splitting whinny from Audrey's pony sent her through the farmhouse walls into the safety of the close air indoors. It was fuggy in there and smelled of polish.

Here she was bewildered. She could not remember ever being in this house in her life. She found the stairs, old and dark and covered with new carpet, smelling of newness, and more new carpet lining a crooked corridor upstairs. She stopped, suspended at the head of the stairs, with no idea where to look. A faint idea she had had that her body would naturally draw her to it drizzled away from her. It was obviously not like that.

Then two things happened. First, it was suddenly lighter. Long silver rays fell through a window somewhere off to the right and reached down the crooked corridor. The moon had risen. Its light was not clear. The shapes of the swaying trees outside tumbled within the beams, but it gave enough light to turn the corridor into somewhere Sally remembered faintly. Instead of being fuggy, the smell of new carpet seemed clean and pungent. On the walls and on tables at the sides of the corridor, the white rays were picked up and turned yellow in the surfaces of polished brass ornaments. There were horse brasses, oil lamps, ship's wheels, a stand of bells, and flat shapes of sailing ships. Sally remembered these. She remembered Fenella—why had Fenella been there?—looking at the brass things with admiration.

“Isn't it posh?” Fenella had said. “Fancy having your upstairs as pretty as your downstairs! When I'm a lady, I shall have things like these all over my house.”

Remembering this, Sally had a dim feeling that Audrey's house had inspired the exhibition of paintings in their own bedroom.

Then the second thing happened. Down at the end of the corridor a toilet flushed. The noise was so loud and so sudden that Sally whirled away half downstairs again. There, through the noise of rushing water, she was just able to hear footsteps—footsteps which set the old boards under the new carpet creaking—but not too much or too many. Just four or five light footsteps, followed by the creak of an old door not quite shutting.

Sally was upstairs and along the corridor in a flash. Those footsteps had to belong to someone young. Probably to Audrey. At the end of the corridor the toilet cistern was still gushing and glopping away, and nearly opposite, an old door was still slightly moving. Sally slid through the dark wood into a warm, airy room. She was aware of pretty print curtains fluttering against the dim moonlight of an open window and then of two sets of quiet breathing.

Two people. Definitely.

Sally hung there while she located the breathing and then the warmth and the electric life feeling from two beds, one at the dark end of the room, the other in the moonlight under the window. The one in the dark bed was Audrey. Sally recognized her—though not as someone she knew particularly well. Audrey had a large, warm presence, that of a person comfortable within herself, and a surprising amount of straight black hair spread out on a floral pillow. Looking at the hair and listening to the slight, gentle breathing, Sally recollected why it had been Fenella admiring the brass ornaments. Audrey had been Fenella's friend at first. Fenella had struck up an acquaintance with Audrey because Audrey had a pony. Fenella was mad on horses. Then her sisters had been brought along to be shown the pony and the posh house. Audrey was the same age as Sally, though not in Sally's class at school, and Sally had—to put it crudely—taken Audrey over. From the unfamiliar feel of the sleeping Audrey, Sally thought this could not have been very long ago.

But this meant that the person in the other bed was herself. Well, at least she was alive, Sally thought, hovering up to the humped shape under the covers. For some reason, the bodily Sally had pulled the covers up over her head, just like Imogen earlier, and almost nothing of her showed except a tuft of hair. That hair surprised Sally by being much fairer than she expected. She had had a notion that she was dark, like Fenella.

Perhaps I'm not Sally after all
, she said.

As she said this, she realized that the person in this bed was not asleep. The breathing was too heavy and irregular. And the fizzing of the life feeling coming off her was not gentle, like Audrey's, but fierce and gusty. She was the one who went to the toilet, plainly. But now she was not settling back to sleep; she was—waiting for something.

And that time had arrived. A hand emerged from the bedclothes—a hand which was neither familiar nor unfamiliar—crackling so with life and suspense that Sally was forced to move backward. The hand seized the covers and flung them back, and the bodily Sally got out of bed in one clean, rolling movement.
Cre-eak
went the old floor as she stood up.

Sally hovered away backward from her in total amazement. She was dressed, in jeans and an old sweater, for one thing. She was obviously planning to do something. But Sally's main astonishment was that this girl looked like a normal person. After seeing her three sisters, she had not expected anyone in the family to look normal. This girl was thin, but she was not a witch-insect like Fenella, and she was quite tall, at least as tall as Imogen, but not as large as Cart. Her face, in the moonlight, was quite pretty, though it was not as striking as Imogen's angel beauty, because the girl had dark eyebrows and a slight hawk look inherited from Himself. But Sally found her unexpectedly good-looking, all the same. Her hair indeed seemed to be fair. The less-than-good-looking thing about her was that she had the awkward figure of a thirteen-year-old, when a person's back curves to make way for hips she had not got, and the rest of her is straight up and down, and instead of a bosom she has a chest with lumps on it. Sally found that made her feel sorry for this unexpected girl. But her main feeling was surprise. She had expected something much more peculiar.

The bodily Sally, after standing for a second, put out a cautious foot. The old timbers of the floor responded at once with a gentle groan. The girl froze. But it was too late. The sleeping shape of Audrey fizzed, heaved, rose up. She said, in a high, whining voice, blurred with sleep, “What are you doing
now
, Sally?”

“Only going to the loo,” the bodily Sally answered. The voice surprised Sally as much as the rest. It was a clear, pleasant voice.

“But you've only just
been
!” grumbled Audrey.

“No, that was an hour ago,” the bodily Sally lied, quietly and firmly. “You've been asleep since then. Go back to sleep. I shan't be a moment.”

Audrey seemed to accept this. She gave a groan, not unlike the floorboards, and heaved round to face the wall. She was asleep as soon as she lay down.

The ghostly Sally heard the breath come out of the mouth of the bodily Sally, in a gasp of relief. Then she saw her walk firmly and lightly across the creaking floor and slip round the door she had carefully not shut before. Sally followed, out of the room, along the crooked, brass-glinting corridor and down the creaking stairs.

Where am I going? I mean, what are you doing?
she said. She was now thoroughly perplexed. Not the least of her troubles was that she could not bring herself to think of this girl firmly creeping through Audrey's house as herself. She knew the girl was Sally. There had been no mistake there. Yet she had no sense of identity with her. She had no idea what this Sally thought and felt. She seemed just someone else she was forced to hover and watch, as she had watched Sally's sisters.

The bodily Sally led her through a living room even more lavishly provided with glinting ornaments than the corridor upstairs, and unlatched a long glass door there which led to the farm garden. Sally approved of this. It was sensible not to go through the farmyard and disturb the grunting sow and the uneasy dog. She also saw from the way the girl carefully wedged the glass door with a tissue that she intended to come back from wherever she was going.

But suppose she never came back! Perhaps that was why Sally was a ghost. Sally had a sudden feeling that wherever this girl was going, it was somewhere wrong and dangerous. Alarm and foreboding grew in her as she followed the girl between dewy bushes, down to the end of the garden. Perhaps it was a danger which could be avoided. Perhaps, she thought, mercy had been granted to Sally the ghost, so that she could come back and guide herself clear of whatever the danger was. So she followed the bodily Sally faithfully, out through a gate at the end of the garden and down a path among the trees. Beyond the trees the path went on, over the fields, into the moonlit distance.

Sally knew the path kept on. But the moon, hanging like a coppery gong low in the east, had made such a difference to the landscape that most people would have thought there was no path at all. The pearly look to the fields had been caused by bands of white mist lying low on the grass. With the moon on it, the mist now seemed almost solid. The lower part of the girl Sally vanished in it. You could only tell her legs were there from the rasping of wet grass on her jeans. The ghost Sally found it easier to rise above the milky whiteness. She had a feeling, rather like she had had on the playing field, that she might dissolve to nothing in it.

The bodily Sally began to go faster and faster, and her head began nervously jerking about. The ghost did not blame her. Though the mist mostly lay flat and quiet like bands of milk, there were places, mostly against the dark trees, where it inexplicably rose and bellied up, slow and heavy and thick, into huge, white, moving shapes. Bearlike, grublike, rolling, menacing shapes. And to add to the eeriness, there were cows hidden in the still bands of mist, which only revealed themselves when the bodily Sally was close to them, in a snort of breath, or a huge hidden stamp. The girl Sally put both hands to her face to act like blinkers and broke into a trot, refusing to look right or left.

Owls began hooting, now near, now a long, long way away. Owls, Sally realized, did not say, “Tu-whit-tuwoo,” as one had been taught. Half of them let out a long quavering “
OOOOH,
” like people pretending to be ghosts. The other half went “Tu-whit, tu-whit,” sharply and suddenly, like Himself giving peremptory orders to a boy.

The owls increased the bodily Sally's terror. Her hands, as well as acting like blinkers, were soon trying to cover her ears, too. She broke into a run and fled across the fields, half buried in mist, under a moon which, as it rose, put out a foreboding coppery rainbow ring round itself.

She was panting furiously as she scrambled through fallen barbed wire into the tufty grass under the dead elms. There was no mist here. The empty trees stood bare against the moonlit sky, still decorated with the scruffy black blobs of rooks' nests. The rooks in them were stirring and cawing as if something had disturbed them. But the bodily Sally behaved as if she was now feeling safer. She took her hands from her face and stumbled among the brambles to the clearing in the very center of the dead trees.

A dark figure jumped up from the grass and said, “Aha!”

The girl uttered what struck the ghost as a very silly giggle and said, “Didn't think I'd come, did you? Mind you, I nearly didn't. I was quite sure there was a ghost in Audrey's bedroom.”

“I was sure you wouldn't come,” said Julian Addiman. “I was just going back to bed. After the fuss you made when I killed the hen this morning—”

“Well,” the girl Sally said defensively, “I did know that black hen rather well.”

“It was the blood you minded,” said Julian Addiman. “Ready?”

“Yes,” said Sally, standing bravely straight.

“Right,” said Julian Addiman. “Start invoking Monigan then.”

And the girl, still standing bravely straight, began, much as Fenella had done: “O Monigan, mighty goddess, come forth and show thyself to these thy worshipers….” Except that this, the ghost remembered, was the proper invocation which Cart had composed last summer, full of rolling phrases borrowed from the prayer book. And now she was truly terrified. This was really dangerous. These two had no idea what thing they were invoking. And besides, Julian Addiman had no business to be there. He had not been among the original Worshipers of Monigan. That band had been a select few, led by Cart as high priestess and consisting only of Cart, Sally, Imogen (always unwilling), Fenella, Will Howard, and Ned Jenkins. Sally must have gone on with the Worship of Monigan secretly on her own and taught it to Julian Addiman after that.