An English Ghost Story (25 page)

The distant phones stopped ringing. He let out a breath. Then they started jangling again.

Curse the man.

No. He tried to take back the thought, but it was out of his head. He looked up at the beams, and imagined ultraviolet energy swarms passing up through the plaster ceiling into the space under the thatched roof. His casual impulses were a whirlpool of power, gathering force to strike again.

He sucked in mentally, trying to pull in every thought he’d ever let leak from his skull. He clenched his hands, ignoring screaming pain, and begged the Hollow not to kill again. He had no idea whether he had any control.

The phones stopped ringing.

His heart skipped.

He imagined the man lying dead, shut off like a phone bell, another victim.

A dreadful compulsion came to him. He should plug the phone back in and use the call-back facility. Just to make sure he was wrong, that Rick’s father was still alive, that this whole thing was nothing to do with him. The precious stupid bastard had pranged himself, a drunken teenage-accident statistic. Steven’s brain was not hooked up via this house to some orbiting spiritual laser weapon that could zap anyone on the face of the globe dead in their boots.

He looked at the white phone cord, lying like a thin worm on the carpet.

Clattering came from the East Tower. Kirsty was taking the tour group up to Weezie’s bedroom. Jordan’s room. It would be easy to sit down on the sofa and wait for the screams. It had been a truly horrible day and the evening was shading into nightmare.

He couldn’t.

At a run, he left the room and dashed for the stairs.

* * *

T
hey had to go up the stairs in single file. Mrs Bullitt found the steps a trial and needed a rest halfway. Her wide hips plumped against the rails on both sides. Kirsty was worried the woman would get stuck, like Winnie-the-Pooh. She had the idea Mrs Bullitt was extremely strong inside her bulk, but needed constant moments to recoup. The other After Lights-Out Gangers were used to such pauses. How had Mrs Bullitt made it up the hayloft ladder? The trick must have been managed without too much fuss or Kirsty would have noticed.

Jordan had darted up to her room after taking the phone call. She must be carrying out an emergency tidy-up procedure to make the place suitable for show. The After Lights-Out Gang would have to go into Weezie’s room – Jordan’s room – in twos and threes. It was cosy rather than spacious.

Tim still held her hand. He was a deadweight. Kirsty was tired of dragging him around. After today, he would have to grow up.

The day had been a trial, but would be over soon. These nice people would leave, then…

She would think about things.

She drew out the tour – to give Jordan time to get her underwear off the floor or whatever – by showing the view across the moor from a slit window. It was dusk, which meant it must be past eight in the evening. Where had the hours gone?

The Japanese women shot more photographs. Their cameras seemed to be fixed to their faces like cyber-attachments. They must see everything through viewfinders and only get to look at places they visited when the film was developed.

When Tim was falling from the tree, one of the sisters had taken photographs, clicking four or five times as the boy was plunging, presumably adjusting focus all the way.

These people, the lot of them, were aliens. Their lives and loves were beyond her comprehension. What was it they shared? What was it about Louise?

She rapped a knuckle on Jordan’s door.

‘Darling, the Society would like to see Weezie’s room.’

She heard a mumble and opened the door.

The cameras clicked again and again. Her daughter, surprised halfway into a dress, screamed. Kirsty shut the door, swiftly.

She opened her mouth but couldn’t get an apology out. The After Lights-Out Gang looked at her, all smiling, eager, infuriatingly bland. Wing-Godfrey hemmed and hawed like an imbecile.

Jordan’s face was scarlet, not from embarrassment but because the choker collar of the child’s lilac dress she was putting on was sizes too small.

No one made a move to troop downstairs. They’d come all this way to see Weezie’s nook and would bloody well get to poke around inside. Or else, as Miss Hazzard said, there would be tears before bedtime. Their eyes were like the blank lenses of the sisters’ cameras.

Kirsty had the door at her back. She barred their way. They were uncomfortably close to her.

The door opened and she stumbled in, taking Tim with her. Jordan shut the door again, against the After Lights-Out Gang.

Kirsty looked at her daughter.

How had she managed to get into the dress? Apart from the floppy strangling bow at her neck, the short sleeves were cinches which made her upper arms look like bloated sausages. The hem, only a few inches below her waist, barely covered the top of her knickers. The bodice shrunk onto her torso like some wet leather torture device. Fastened at the back by an interlacing set of hooks and eyes, it was strait-jacket tight, squashing her breasts flat.

Jordan passed a hand over her hair, prettying herself. She had put clownish red lipstick circles on her cheekbones. Brown freckles made with an eyebrow pencil dotted her face.

Tim was keening, almost too high-pitched to hear, terrified still.

‘Do you like it?’ Jordan asked.

Kirsty choked.

* * *

T
he landing was crowded. Steven made it up the stairs three at a time and blundered into the After Lights-Out Gang.

‘Kirst,’ he said.

His wife wasn’t there.

‘Mrs Naremore is with your daughter,’ Mrs Twomey told him.

‘She was not decent,’ said one of the Kanaoka sisters, politely.

‘We’ve been minutes waiting here,’ said Mrs Bullitt, in one of those Brummie accents which makes every casual comment sound like a whined complaint. ‘My ankles will punish me for this.’

‘You’ve done very well so far, Head Prefect,’ her husband told her. ‘Gold star in your report book.’

Mrs Bullitt simpered, tiny mouth almost disappearing into her chins.

Steven shoved his way decorously through to the door. He knocked.

‘Kirsty? Kirst?’

She was with Jordan. Did she know about Rick yet?

What about all these people?

He found himself doing what he had done in the hayloft, counting heads, always getting a different figure. Seven, excluding himself. So, eight.

No: seven, including himself.

A Society member had gone astray.

He put his ear to the door and heard nothing. That was probably to the good. He couldn’t take another screaming fit from anyone.

He turned to the After Lights-Out Gang.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to cut short your visit.’

There were moans of disappointment and ‘Come-comes’ of disbelief. No one made any motion to back off and leave the house. An explanation was needed, to make them go away. He plumbed his mind for the appropriate phrase, then hit on it.

‘There’s been a family emergency,’ he said.

That was it. A family emergency.

Only one?

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Twomey. ‘I am so sorry.’

Steven tried a reassuring smile, but took it back. If reassured, they might stay. He needed to go against his instinct to keep his business to himself, to let them know that this was beyond an emergency.

‘A family catastrophe,’ he elaborated.

‘Can I do anything to help?’ asked Harriet Hazzard, keen to show off her Guides’ badge for first aid.

He shook his head.

‘We just need some space. You might telephone in a –’

(week? No.)

‘month or so, to reschedule.’

(Never. He would
never
let these people back. If it meant sending Kirsty to a deprogrammer, the Louise Magellan Teazle Society – of which he was now an honorary lifetime member, he remembered – would never get back on the property. The Hollow was out of bounds.)

‘Some of us have come a long way,’ complained Mrs Bullitt, not needing the accent to emphasise the whine.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said.

(Not sorry, never sorry, don’t use the word.)

‘It can’t be helped,’ he settled for.

No one moved. He stood between the After Lights-Out Gang and the door, protecting his family – Tim must be inside with Kirsty and Jordan – from these afternoon-tea fanatics. His whole body was tense, even his agonised left fist, as if he expected them to charge him.

With enough momentum behind her, Mrs Bullitt could splatter him and smash the door in. The Kanaoka sisters would get it all on film, click-click-click.

‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave.’

How often had he heard that said? In pubs and bars after drinking-up time. In films where the dissolute relation has disgraced himself in the gentleman’s club and the senior member expresses ultimate disapproval. It always struck him as false. What ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave’ meant was ‘bugger off out of here’. It was always used when politeness was an absurd pretence.

He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t sorry; he was delighted. Before the (family) emergency, he would have welcomed any opportunity to get shot of the lot of them. He would have wished for any excuse, idly assuming the imaginary emergency would be something that could be settled in a few minutes with enough of the evening left over for a film on telly and a late supper. Not this, not these: not Tim and Kirsty and Rick and Jordan. Not broken dolls which could never be glued back together.

‘Please,’ he added, a last resort.

The After Lights-Out Gang communed among itself, wordlessly. Again, he was sure they would jump him, some pinning him to the floorboards while the others forced the door open.

‘Very well,’ said Mrs Twomey, ‘but I hope you understand what a disappointment this is. It’s not the done thing to treat the Society in such cavalier fashion.’

There was a cavalier in those bloody Weezie books, wasn’t there? And a roundhead.

‘Not done at all,’ emphasised the tiny Mr Bullitt, stern with knitted brows.

‘Custodianship of the Hollow involves responsibilities,’ Mrs Twomey continued. ‘You’d do well to remind yourself of them constantly.’

He wanted to cry, to show shocking weakness, to frighten them out of the house. People were hurt, people were dead. That was more serious than whatever it was the After Lights-Out Gang wanted. He had to take care of his family first.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, despising the word.

Miraculously, one by one, they withdrew. Harriet and the Japanese women first, then – with a strain – the Bullitts. Finally, he was left trading fixed glares with the vice-president. Mrs Twomey saw him as a wrong ‘un, unworthy of the trust he’d unwittingly taken up by moving into this place.

‘Good evening,’ she said, devastatingly, and left.

Alone in the passage, there was more light. The sun was almost down, but red poured in.

He tried the door again.

‘It’s just me,’ he said. ‘They’ve gone. We’re rid of them.’

No answer.

He tried to rattle the handle. No give. It was as if handle and door and wall were cast from the same piece of iron.

Inside the room, what could he do or say to make it better? It wasn’t as if he could reverse his earlier wish and bring Rick back to life. Or was it? If the Hollow could kill at his orders, couldn’t it take back what it had done? It was merely another step into the impossible. There were ways it could be done.

Maybe Rick wasn’t dead? He only had a voice on a line to go by. He remembered the word ‘careful’ scrolling across his screen. That had come from the Hollow, from the haunt. In this house were presences and faces and sounds. There could be voices too.

The Hollow might have lied to them.

That was what he must wish for. Not a ‘Monkey’s Paw’ return as a mangled living corpse, but a false report, later retracted. The body burned beyond recognition would be someone else – a no-good who’d stolen Rick’s car and trashed it. Rick would be off somewhere drunk and useless, not realising what had happened. That would explain his no-show at the Hollow, too.

He thought hard, trying to make it so.

The door handle gave and Kirsty let him in. She was white, even her lips. In bed, covers tucked up around her neck, Jordan looked like a five-year-old.

Tim sat in the rocking chair, with his catapult. When this was over, Steven would be decommissioning that little implement of death. He would brook no resistance.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked Kirsty, to find out what she knew rather than to learn anything. ‘How’s Jord?’

Kirsty shook her head, furious. ‘Don’t listen to her, she’s full of rubbish.’

‘It doesn’t like us any more,’ said Jordan, quietly but firmly. ‘
They
don’t like us any more.’

‘You’re telling me. I’ve just had that Mrs Twomey shooting death rays out of her eyes at me. We’re not having them back in a hurry, I can tell you.’

‘Not them,’ said his daughter, disgusted with him. ‘
Them
. Those who were here before us.’

‘The ghosts,’ said Tim.

‘Them. It. The ghosts. The Hollow. They were all right before we came, but we drove them mad. No surprise, really. We’ve been driving each other mad all along.’

Steven looked at Jordan, understanding but wishing he didn’t. It was his fault. He had done a terrible thing, made a terrible thing happen. He’d got his wish and found no joy in it. Now, the family were paying for what they had got, paying with pain and fear and worse.

They weren’t charmed any more. They were haunted.

* * *

T
he family spent the night together, in Weezie’s room (it could not be said to be Jordan’s any longer). Kirsty and Jordan lay cramped on the bed; Tim curled up in the rocking chair, eyes fixed on the black beyond the uncurtained window; Steven huddled by the door, duvet tented around his shoulders. They warded off sleep for as long as possible, but each in turn succumbed to exhaustion, numbness and the dark.

They all dreamed. They were in the house, at the Hollow, looking for the little girl, who was always in the next room, on the next landing, just outside the door, just beyond the window. She led them a solemn chase, leaving doors to swing slowly closed and curtains to shift like ivy in the wind.