An English Ghost Story (13 page)

Rick would understand. He’d read all that science fiction and fantasy, watched all those episodes of
Star Trek
and
Babylon 5
. Terry Pratchett and Jean-Luc Picard had prepared him for the Hollow.

Still, she was looking forward to his face when she told him and he thought she was mad, and then again when the first
thing
happened, when the Hollow revealed a secret to him, taking him in too.

It would be delicious.

Maybe tonight, in her room, snuggled together afterwards, candles melting and hissing out around them, she would drop the first hints.

‘Lunch, darling?’ asked her mother.

Mum had come to the front door. Jordan looked down at her watch. Half-past twelve.

‘Couldn’t we wait for Rick?’

‘It’s soup and salad. You can have it when you want, but Dad wants to take Tim out this afternoon to look for the stone circle.’

Rick must have set off later than expected. He had been out last night. It was just like him to oversleep or get a skull-cracking hangover. He might be only just on the outskirts of London, looking for the motorway west. Her best bet was to get lunch over with quickly. When Rick turned up, in early or mid-afternoon, she could show off her growing kitchen skills by whipping up something for him, all the while dropping arch remarks, raising an eyebrow as he was overwhelmed by the Hollow.

She got through her soup and salad in under three minutes.

‘You
have
changed,’ Dad commented.

She had gone through a not-eating thing last year. She wasn’t Ana or Mia. If anything, she had been decidedly chubby. She’d just lost her appetite. Mealtimes stretched into Spanish Inquisition ordeals, hardly helped by the bad ozone crackling between Mum and Dad and – God help them – the Wild Witch.

‘No Rick?’ said Mum. ‘Has he called?’

Jordan shrugged. ‘He’s on a long lead, Mum.’

A lump of unsquashed chickpea soured in her mouth. She scraped it out on a napkin.

Dad and Tim hurried off on their expedition of discovery. She slipped out to resume her post, leaving Mum to clear away and wash up.

Jordan finished her crochet tassels and couldn’t listen to the Fun Lovin’ Criminals for a third time. She darted indoors to have a pee and lingered in the Summer Room, by the telephone. Mum was on the big sofa, reading a Drearcliff Grange book.

‘No calls, darling,’ she said.

There was a knot in her throat. Did she detect just the trace of a gloat in Mum’s tone? In the city, her parents had been too mired in their own problems to pay much attention to Rick. They liked him more than Phil, her original semi-boyfriend, but there was still a reserve. That was understandable. They didn’t see him alone, as she did. They only saw the Rick of Rick-and-His-Mates, not the real boy. Dad sometimes called him ‘Precious Rick’, with a feral grin that gave bite to the joshing. Jordan had once called Rick ‘Precious’, a private name. When it got out, she dropped it. To be fair, Dad had only used the expression a few times. He liked Rick, really. They had conversations, utterly mysterious to her, about comics, which she hadn’t realised Dad once had a craze for. When Dad told the story of how his mother gave all his Marvels to a jumble sale, Rick won major points for cringing sympathy. Dad’s tatty Hulk and X-Men comics, bought for old pennies, could have been sold today for enough to give Jordan a car.

She considered going up to her room and calling Rick’s father’s flat to find out when he’d left. But Rick’s father would be at work, not at the flat. He wouldn’t know the exact time Rick set out anyway. Unless he’d left a note, and there was no reason for that.

Settling on the lawn, she read the opening page of the novel seventeen times without quite catching what was going on. Someone seemed to be floating in a septic tank. She put the book down and flicked through her portable CD wallet, fingers lingering on Patsy Cline before she came up with Connie Francis.

Heat built inside her. Her skin tingled from the sun. Was she getting a burn? Rick would probably arrive just as she completed her transformation into a red-faced alien with Klingon forehead ridges.

Rick’s mates must have taken him on a real bender, like a stag night. She knew he wasn’t as comfortable with them as with her. His alleged best friend Walker – whom Jordan thought of as Veronica incarnated as a teenage boy – called him ‘Spockears’. When he was ten, he’d entered a fancy-dress contest got up as a Vulcan. He stuck with Walker’s lot because they’d been a gang since infants’ school. Most of them hadn’t gone on to college. They sniped at him because he was on his way to uni while they were driving vans or bouncing from one government scheme to the next. None of them, without exception, liked her. Their girlfriends were even worse.

Here, at the Hollow, where it would be just Jordan and Rick, things would be better.

A car turned into the drive and her heart leaped. She screwed her eyes shut and thanked invisible presences. She cleared her throat, adjusted her hat to unstick it from her radiator-warm forehead, settled her dress about her lap, and reached for the cast-aside book.

‘We got lost,’ shouted Tim.

Her heart went cold, as if she’d been shot with a snowball bullet.

Tim ran up from the car and through the house, to tell Mum about the search for the stones.

Dad parked the car in the garage – she had reminded him to leave a space for Rick’s banger – and strolled across, smiling wisely.

‘No Precious?’

She wanted to spit venom into his face.

It had all been an act, a bland, seductive, calculatedly cruel act. A long set-up for a quick, nasty pay-off.

‘Summer holidays,’ he said. ‘Motorway is probably clogged. And it’s a tricky navigating exercise. Remember how much trouble we had finding Sutton Mallet that first time. Almost like it’s trying to get away from you. Maps are useless. I just found that out again.’

Every word was calm and barbed. ‘Would you believe it? We drove around for hours but couldn’t find those blessed stones.’

Dad stood on tiptoe in the spot and shrugged.

‘Well, there they are,’ he said.

Suddenly, oddly, she knew he was lying. He had never seen the stones, not even from the spot. He probably didn’t believe in them.

‘It’s another blooming mystery. I half-think it’s an optical illusion.’

She was in control. Every fibre of her body was knotted, but she would not give anything away.

‘I sent Rick a map.’

‘There you are, then,’ he said, cracking a smile. ‘He’s doomed to wander.’

He went indoors.

Her face was burning now. Not just her forehead, imprinted with the weave of the hat, but her cheeks and chin. Her forearms looked orange through her sunglasses. Grass stuck to her legs like green veins.

Rick must have stayed in London for lunch.

Could they have done anything to delay him? His mates, her parents, his dad? Walker, slipping him an E? The Wild Witch? Rick said he’d seen Veronica. Could she still be stalking the family, working on Rick now she had given up on Mum?

Jordan would be strong, determined. If it came to a fight, she was a far more dangerous opponent than Dad. She wasn’t tied down by strings of emotion, by inner weaknesses. There was no money involved. She was free to inflict untold punishments. She was a seventeen-year-old girl, a saint in the eyes of society. She could play any game Veronica chose, and win.

She thought about Tim’s catapult. You could have someone’s eye out with that, if you weren’t careful. You could have someone’s eye out with that, if you
were
careful. The Wild Witch could do with a black eyepatch, on a string that wound through her nest of hair.

Was Mum in on this? The Wild Witch had been puppet-mastering her for years. Even Dad had danced to Veronica’s whim more often than he’d like to admit.

It made a horrible sort of sense.

Connie Francis sang ‘Where the Boys Are’. The high, clear voice reached into the murk of Jordan’s mind and tugged, pulling the real her free.

She was being silly.

Her boyfriend was a few hours late. That didn’t mean there was a vast conspiracy against her. Let’s face it, his car was off the road more often than it was on. He’d been worried about the trip from the first time she mentioned it. London to Somerset was a longer haul than the rattletrap really liked.

(Rick had a mobile. He would call.)

His phone was probably still programmed with the number of the old flat, two on the autodial after his home number. He might not have the new number entered.

(There was an automatic redirect on the old number.)

Conditions here were strange. Everything worked at the Hollow, but not necessarily on the moors or in the village. Dad was right about the weird ways of the West Country. Rick might be driving in circles around Sutton Mallet, her map upside down, stabbing redial over and over, getting only a dead-air whine out of the phone.

(No.)

It was likely. More likely than anything else.

‘Dinner’s on the table in ten minutes,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve set an extra place. I expect Rick’ll have a story to tell.’

(He’s not coming.)

‘Not hungry,’ she said, to herself.

‘Jordan?’ asked Mum.

Mum stood in the doorway, wearing an apron with a busy-bee design over a short summer dress. She’d hidden her city spikiness behind this housewife act, but it was still there. If you looked closely, there were holes in her cheeks. Once, long before Jordan was born, she had pierced herself with safety-pins. Also, the dark holes in her eyes, which she shared with the Wild Witch, were still there.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Jordan said, clearly, loudly.

Mum looked distressed.

‘Darling,’ she began.

‘Don’t, Mummy. Just don’t.’

Jordan sat outside until it was dark.

* * *

H
e noticed a blip on the radar. It could be left for the moment. Jordan’s precious boyfriend hadn’t appeared. Not exactly a crushing disappointment. However, Steven knew all too well how much store she set by the carrot-headed clod and was dutifully concerned some harm might have come to him. From his unblinkered experience, it was much more likely Rick had just plain forgotten. Not only was he capable of that, he was capable of not feeling guilty about it.

If Rick never showed up, it might even be for the best.

The Hollow had accepted the family, but Steven still wasn’t sure how inclusive its welcome was. Explaining the place to anyone outside the circle would be hard. If they hadn’t all found out together, the family would have ripped each other’s stories apart. What if a logical Vulcan gaze killed the magic dead?

Jordan had come in and gone to bed hungry.

Kirsty said it was best not to press their daughter, and he went along with his wife. He wanted to do some work after supper. While Kirsty read Tim a slightly too babyish bedtime story (
Weezie and the Spooky Something
), he went into the study and fired up the computer.

He looked at the ceiling, imagining Jordan in her room, in the dark, headphones on. When things were bad, she didn’t sob but became this frozen, glum, glowering thing. No, that had been back in the city. Here, things would be different. Jordan was not alone. None of them were alone.

The family had found a strength he hadn’t fathomed yet.

The modem shrilled and burbled. He opened his e-mail and scanned a dense message from Tatum, with an attached file of figures and facts. She was pressing him gently, because a client wanted to meet in person rather than deal with an intermediary. He was glad to be indispensable but knew the chauvinism must grate with Tatum. The client should be over thinking of her as just a PA with great legs. But he could do with a cash injection to cover the outlay on Oddments debts and home improvement expenses. He wanted to have the thatch looked over before autumn rains gave them a nasty surprise; that would take some sort of country crafts specialist (i.e. it would not be cheap).

Kirsty knew he had taken care of her debts. She didn’t much regret the loss of her business. In the past, she too often mistook crazes for careers. Now, she was in the grip of a mercifully practical enthusiasm. He hadn’t given up the mystery collection, and her Louise Teazle researches might turn up answers.

He replied to Tatum, telling her to bring the client to shore and call him in for a lightning deal-clinch when she had landed him. Should he ask her to check on Precious Rick? No, that was well beyond her remit.

Ten minutes later, as he was marking up an investment prospectus he distrusted more with each glossy fold-out, his screensaver cut in. A single green word slid across the black.

CAREFUL.

He looked again and the word was just a software logo.

It might have been in his mind, but was good advice nevertheless.

* * *

T
he MP had been reading him the little books by the lady who had lived at the Hollow before them. They had seemed nonessential at first, but Tim now recognised vital intel. The stories, which were about a creepy little girl called Weezie, contained a wealth of coded reference points.

It was strange to hear something from an old book and know the exact tree it came from. Weezie had a hidey-hole in Green Base, too, and also received tributes from the IP, whom she called ghosts. Features of the land and the house turned up in the stories. Almost every piece of furniture or corner of the Hollow had been fitted into the books somehow, as if the lady were leaving messages for him.

Had the Weezie woman given him the U-Dub?

He listened carefully to each story, sensitive to coded orders. The MP didn’t understand half of what she was passing on, but that was the point of cipher.

The story finished and Mum shut the book.

He gathered the MP had read to Jordan when she was littler than he was now. But she’d never read to him until the Hollow. This was part of their lives now. Routine, SOP – a comfort.

‘Is Jordan going to London?’

‘No, Tim,’ said the MP. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘She had her London face on tonight.’

The MP thought a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose she did. It’s just a mood. We all have them in this family. More than most people, I should say.’