An English Ghost Story (27 page)

She let herself be carried along, through the day.

Later, while rearranging the mess in her room, she found the pages. They were old, but the handwriting was legible, almost like a child’s. She read what was written, not following the fragmentary story or understanding the provenance of the pages. They seemed to be torn from a book. Ruled blue lines had faded away almost completely while the inked words stood out all the more. Was what she read a message, an inside-out retelling of the story of her recent life?

* * *

A
s if scouting enemy territory, Steven searched the Hollow, going over the route he had guided the After Lights-Out Gang through yesterday. Tim stuck close by, not speaking, catapult in hand. Kirsty had decreed Tim could keep the weapon only if he didn’t carry ammunition.

His son had learned the truth about this place before him. The boy had been playing soldiers so long no one noticed when it stopped being a game and became a survival strategy.

He checked every room, not knowing why, and saw nothing. By day, the house was on its best behaviour. Broken glass glittered in the Summer Room. Tim, terrified of a punishment Steven hadn’t yet decided, wouldn’t go near the scatter of shards. Kirsty should sweep that up, before someone got hurt.

In the orchard, the tree still stood, broken branch dangling like a hanged man. Kirsty wanted the tree cut down, but Steven wasn’t sure that was possible. He was wary of attacking anything around here. It might well attack back.

He put the barn-garage off till last.

Inside, was a surprise. They had inherited a car. Next to the hunchback was a brown Volkswagen Beetle, patched with rust. Through the windscreen, Steven saw an Ordnance Survey map spread out on the passenger seat. In the back was a dead little girl.

Tim screamed and pulled back his catapult. Without a stone, the worst he could do was twang someone with the rubber.

The girl wasn’t a corpse but a large doll, dressed in a pinafore and a straw hat. A Weezie doll, with a wide painted smile. The stubby lashes of the round eyes looked like the sun’s rays in a kindergarten picture. The hair was a bunch of blonde ropes, like dreads.

Steven wanted to burn the thing.

For the first time today, the telephone rang in the house. The bell above the kitchen door clanged like a fire alarm.

He knew it would be bad news. It always was.

* * *

I
n the Summer Room, Kirsty looked at the telephone. Louise’s old – antique, now – black rotary dial phone was on the stand. Its woven, threaded cord snaked to the wall-jack. Steven had unplugged their push-button cordless phone yesterday, but she didn’t remember him fixing up the old apparatus. Its ring was piercing as a toothache. The receiver jiggled in its cradle with each jangle.

Other things she’d done to the room were unpicked. The dangerous three-bar heater was back in the fireplace, where she’d cleared a space to burn wood come winter. Pictures she had replaced had returned. Even a hideous scowling Victorian that Louise must have relegated to a junk-room. A dusty old television cabinet replaced their home-entertainment stack.

The telephone didn’t stop ringing.

She dreaded picking it up. Yesterday, Jordan and then Steven had taken calls which shattered them the way Tim’s stone shattered the pane above the French windows. Jewels of glass still lay on the floor. Looking up, she couldn’t find the missing piece in the puzzle. Where was the gap where the pane had been?

It was Sunday. She shouldn’t have to answer.

Spectres appeared at the French windows. Steven and Tim.

Her husband looked at her and at the telephone, understanding. She almost wished Tim would pick up and put the caller off. Then, her son made a motion towards the phone-stand. Steven grabbed his shoulders to stop him.

Kirsty scooped up the receiver to save her son.

Noise reached her ear. Submarines pinging under arctic ice and satellites beeping in deep space. Having stepped off a precipice, she was suspended for a long moment, waiting for gravity to reach up and tug her downwards.

‘Mrs Naremore, it’s Harriet. We met yesterday. Miss Hazzard.’ She remembered. The carer. ‘Sorry to trouble you on a Sunday, especially with your, um, you know,
troubles
… but it’s a bit, well, awkward, odd. The other Society members thought I should phone, because of what happened before, to Bernard. In the Middle East.’

‘He was a hostage,’ she remembered out loud.

‘Yes. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but we all know. He was chained, in the dark. He acts all the time as if he’s over it, as if the past doesn’t bother him but, well, it
does
, doesn’t it? It could hardly not.’

Steven craned to hear what she was being told. He had something to say.

‘We were all in the minibus, except Bernard. We were halfway home before we realised he wasn’t ahead of or behind us. Eleanor thought we’d just lost him on the road.’

Which one was Eleanor?

‘His sister says he hasn’t come home. We were wondering if he’d broken down and made his way back to you? Or got in touch in any way?’

Kirsty didn’t know what to say to the girl.

‘Bernard Wing-Godfrey is missing,’ she told Steven.

‘I think his car’s in our barn,’ he said.

She opened her mouth to pass this on, but he shook his head. She wasn’t to tell an outsider. Not yet.

‘Leave your number, Harriet. We’ll call if we have news.’

The girl gushed a little relief and recited a number twice. Kirsty didn’t have a pen or paper to hand, but repeated the number back as if she were writing it down.

‘Good luck, take care,’ Harriet said, ringing off.

Kirsty listened to the buzzing phone for a moment, then set it down.

Jordan was in the room, having appeared silently, barefoot. Her hair was over her face like a pair of drawn curtains. A long black T-shirt hung on her like rags on a scarecrow, bottom hem just above her knees.

‘I found these,’ she said, holding out some pieces of paper.

Kirsty couldn’t be bothered with her daughter’s scrawling. Probably another of her letters.

‘I think they’re for us,’ Jordan said.

Kirsty took the papers and put them down on the table.

‘There’s a Volkswagen in the barn,’ Steven said, elaborating.

‘And a little girl,’ said Tim, afraid.

‘A doll, in the back seat,’ Steven explained.

‘No, a little girl,’ Tim insisted. ‘A
dark
little girl.’

‘A golliwog?’ Kirsty asked, incredulous.

‘Regular blonde. What’s her name? Weezie.’

Steven knew perfectly well what the girl in Louise Teazle’s books was called. He just didn’t want to admit it out loud. To him, it was embarrassing. Girly.

‘The car’s brown,’ he said. ‘It must be his.’

‘He left, surely. With the others.’

‘I don’t know, Kirst. I wasn’t keeping track. What with everything else.’

She understood. ‘He’s still here.’

‘Not on the property,’ he snapped. ‘He can’t be. I’ve just searched the place, with Tim.’

‘Why? You didn’t know he was missing until now.’

‘I wasn’t searching for him. I was…’

‘What?’

‘Patrolling, checking, making sure we were alone.’

‘We know we’re not alone, Steven.’

He shook his head. ‘I know what it was like last night, after dark. I know what it’s been like. But I’m not buying any more. It’s just not part of the world I understand.’

‘This is where Daddy says “there must be some rational explanation”,’ sneered Jordan.

Like lightning, Steven slapped their daughter.

‘Enough,’ he said.

The slap echoed. Jordan’s cheek was red, strands of hair plastered to it. Her eyes were large with tears and her underlip wobbled.

They never smacked their kids. It wasn’t policy, but they had a horror of that kind of punishment. Steven had been caned at school, for minor offences. He still got angry when the subject came up, fantasising about tracking his now-enfeebled headmaster down and paying him back with extra lumps for interest. When the troubles were at their worst, they had hit each other (twice, shockingly, an unbidden memory, the unforgivable set aside) but they never took it out on Jordan or Tim.

Christ, if Jordan deserved a slap around the face for a snide comment, what punishment did Tim want for nearly blinding a guest?

‘There are no ghosts at the Hollow,’ said Steven. ‘There’s only us.’

‘Isn’t that bad enough?’ Jordan asked.

* * *

E
verything was back on an even keel. Steven had it all stacked up, stowed away and tethered down. The facts were at his fingertips, the figures added up with nothing left over.

It had just been a game.

They had enjoyed pretending that the Hollow was a haunted house. Oooo-ooo-oooh,
spoooky
. But the game had gone too far, stopped being funny, stopped being fun.

It was time to get serious.

‘I need some support around here,’ he said. ‘It’s been sorely lacking. You’re all grown up enough to pull your weight. We have problems. We have to be man enough to accept that, to look beyond that. Only by pulling together and taking direction will we get through this.’

They looked at him as if he were mad. Mouths frozen open and eyes goggle-round, like baby seals waiting for the club.

‘Steven,’ said Kirsty, ‘you’re an idiot.’

Her nose looked like a target. His right hand knotted into a fist.

One punch and it would all be over.

He could
feel
the give of cartilage under his knuckles, see the scarlet blood-spurt. One sharp, swift jab and he’d be undisputed master of the tribe.

He raised his hand, letting her know, giving her a chance to back down, to yield. He didn’t want to hit her, but it was his duty.

Even now, she could avoid this.

The bitch-cow. The stupid bitch-cow.

Kirsty stood up to him, idiotically defiant. Why couldn’t she see? Was it so hard?

It wasn’t the Hollow. It had been like this before. Maybe worse, with the Wild Witch bobbing about behind the scenes feeding his wife demented ideas, with all the hells of the city shifting under their feet. The point was not to let that happen again.

He would do anything.

‘Steven,’ she said, like his mother, like a teacher. ‘Think.’

That was it.

He let fly, putting his whole body into it. This was going to connect hard and lift Kirsty off her feet, flattening her snub nose into her face.

A body slammed into his side, knocking him off balance. His fist passed Kirsty’s head harmlessly. Knees and fingers and feet and teeth sank into his side and arm and neck. He fell badly, drawing his legs up to protect his groin and belly. His already-sprained hip thumped against hard flagstone. Blows came at him.

He glimpsed his daughter, hair flying, as she tried to kill him.

* * *

S
he kicked the monster, stubbing bare toes against the staves of his ribs. She shifted balance and stamped, bringing her calloused heel down on his chest.

No one tried to stop her.

He flattened out, letting his knees and elbows unkink. She squatted on his chest, T-shirt riding up around her waist, and sliced at his face with her fingers, hooking into his cheeks with nails, working towards his eyes.

She spat at him, each hawk racking her whole body.

She focused everything she felt, at him.

It was Judy’s turn to cry! She recited under her breath, emphasising each word with a slash. Judy’s turn. To cry, cry, cry…

When she was finished, so would he be.

* * *

B
lood on the floor, on the carpets. Kirsty worried the stain would never come out of the old weave, then squirted out a giggle at the thought.

Jordan rode Steven like a horsewoman and pounded on his face like a drummer. Her hair whipped like wet rope. Her eyes were huge with anger.

Kirsty didn’t know what to do.

This hadn’t been covered in the meeting. This wasn’t on the agenda. This wasn’t in the user’s manual.

Jordan wasn’t alone. Shadows danced with her, winding around her arms and torso. She was a priestess and an executioner.

Steven might die.

Steven
should
die.

Finally, Kirsty admitted it to herself. The best thing would be to wipe the slate. Get rid of this family and start a new one. There was no hope. She had been pretending since for ever that it could be pulled together, but it couldn’t. If it came to this, she would stand back and let it happen.

Jordan would be taken away.

That just left…

Tim.

(The top drawer. He would fit into the top drawer.)

The boy was on the other side of the room, also watching. He shouldn’t see something like this.

She wanted to go to him.

Instead, Tim came forward and slipped the loop of his catapult over his sister’s head. He pulled back. The rubber went tight across Jordan’s throat. She was bent back. Her hands lifted from Steven’s face. She turned,
growling
…

* * *

I
t was only his sister. Jordan. Not the IP, not the hostiles. It had probably been her all along.

Now, she was distracted from Dad.

He twisted the U-Dub in his hands, noosing the rubber. He had the reins on her, but she was bigger than him, stronger than him, and mad.

Jordan stood, the rubber rope stretching between them. Tim had to keep hold of the U-Dub.

‘What did I ever do to you, Timbo?’ she asked.

‘It’s not me,’ he said. ‘It’s us.’

Jordan had friends among the hostiles. They were with her. As she towered over him, they pressed behind her shoulders, peering over and down. The Smile was among them, and the Ipkick, and the Brown Man.

She took hold of the twisted strand of rubber and yanked. He held fast.

Dad rolled out of the way. He was hurt.

‘Children,’ said Mum, bored. ‘Don’t fight.’

That wasn’t going to help. Mum had long ago resigned any authority. The last battle would be between Tim and Jordan.

And Jordan would win.

She was closest to this place, to the Hollow. He had tried, but she’d found the way.