An English Ghost Story (33 page)

She looked into the dark. In the distance, she saw lights.

Suddenly, she was afraid again. Not for herself.

* * *

S
he pulled out the top drawer. Empty. Tim had been a good boy and not screamed or made a fuss.

Kirsty was a little light-headed.

So this was freedom.

She experimented with it, thinking of a life she now had to herself. No meals to cook, no clothes to wash and iron, no mess to tidy, no warm bodies to work around, no schedules to fit into. Now she could do what she wanted.

Nothing would get in the way.

Her first impulse was to call Vron, but that would bring someone else in. Vron was on her side, but was still another person, with opinions and enthusiasms of her own. Kirsty wanted to start out by herself, to get her ideas in working order and her business in shape before letting
anyone
else in. This time, she had to follow the advice she had devoured from her motivational magazines and be captain of her own ship.

She looked into the empty drawer and had no regrets. She slid it shut.

Wherever Steven, Jordan and Tim were, she hoped they were happy. They might even be together. She had no malice for them, not anymore. They were solved problems, part of her long-gone past. Without them hanging around nagging her with their complicated bundles of trouble, she had no need to resent them any more.

If they hadn’t gone, she might have wound up killing them.

Her eyes were drawn to the brown hand on top of the chest of drawers. A perfectly crafted piece of work, of some material she didn’t recognise. The nails were glassy, the skin dull. She saw veins across the knuckles.

A strange present.

She stroked the back of the hand. It had a give, a plasticity not like flesh but not stone either. Maybe soft wood.

To celebrate her liberation, she decided she deserved another present. Maybe another hand would give her a matched pair, for the mantelpiece.

She knelt down before the chest as if it were an altar, wished for something nice, and pulled out the bottom drawer. Heavier than usual, it rasped on its runners.

Bernard Wing-Godfrey, folded up neatly, fitted into the drawer. He held his right wrist in his left hand, fingers a tourniquet. The brown man’s hand was missing. His stump was clean, not leaking.

She thought he might be dead, but he expanded and contracted with breath. His clothes were creased from the folding. His legs bent the wrong way, like a crash test dummy. His eyes fluttered under closed lids, as if he were having a bad dream.

Kirsty stood up and looked from the neat stump to the hand.

She indeed had a full set now, though not the way she had imagined.

She took a blow to the heart. A curtain lifted and she saw everything with hideous clarity.

This was no fair exchange. A child for a stranger, a family for someone she thought sinister, her life for a perhaps-malicious intruder.

How had she ever thought it would be worth it?

After an investment of eighteen years, she couldn’t just walk away from a loss. Her family might have been thorny and frustrating – they had ground her down by increments – but she couldn’t blame them turning her into a monster. She had managed that by herself, without even Vron or a whisper from Weezie. She was worse than a murderess. She had thrown her children away, let her family go without fighting. How had she thought she could change her life by stripping people out of it like old wallpaper?

She wanted to scream.

She spun around and caught sight of her face in a mirror. She was pale and haggard, an apparition, a madwoman.

She pulled out the top drawer. It was heart-breakingly empty.

‘Tim,’ she said, ‘come back.’

She shut the drawer and yanked it open.

Stray hair stuck to her cheeks, glued by tears.

‘Tim,’ she shouted, ‘Mum didn’t mean it. Come out, from wherever you’re hiding, come out. I’m not angry. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry, so so so sorry.’

Words didn’t do it.

She worked the drawer back and forward, handling it roughly, splintering the runners.

Wing-Godfrey’s eyes flicked open.

Why didn’t the magic work in reverse? She wanted it undone, but the chest just lay there like a dead thing.

She kicked the bottom drawer, which was solid with Wing-Godfrey’s weight, and jammed her toes painfully.

Nothing had ever come back.

She had put many things in the top drawer, the drawer that was always the same, the drawer that was always empty. Presents she’d tired of, messes she’d wanted out of the way, experimental objects like early capsules tossed into space to see what would happen.

But none of those things had been alive. Except the jumbled rat, and that hadn’t had a mind.

They went somewhere, didn’t they? Somewhere in the Hollow was a space where everything wound up. A storehouse where exchanges were made. Thrown-away things were piled next to the presents ready to go into the bottom drawer.

Wherever Tim was, he could still hear and think.

She called his name, loudly. It came back at her from the corners of the room.

Wing-Godfrey had vanished into the Hollow and returned. It could happen.

Of course, he hadn’t gone into the top drawer. Or had he? She couldn’t imagine why he would slip away from the After Lights-Out Gang and go into her bedroom, then hide in the top drawer of Weezie’s magic chest of drawers. He had vanished some other way, like Steven or Jordan, walked through a door that wasn’t usually there, and rattled around – a hostage again – inside the walls or under the grounds.

She took Wing-Godfrey by the lapels and hauled him out of the drawer. He didn’t resist. He seemed to be somewhere between asleep and awake, pliable but unconscious. He kept his hand around his chopped-through wrist.

He was too heavy for her to manhandle easily. Stood up, he put a weight on the bottom of the drawer that strained the wood and threatened to pop it out of its joists. She had to work his knees for him to get him to step out of the drawer.

Wing-Godfrey was easy to move across the room and dump in a chair. She got him turned around and sat up straight. It was like dealing with a sleepy child… Tim (agonising heart pain) when he was so tired from playing soldiers all day and well into the evening that he couldn’t unbutton his buttons (or would pretend so Mum would undress him and put him to bed) or lift his eyelids.

She turned from Wing-Godfrey to the chest and tried to slide the bottom drawer shut with her foot. It wouldn’t go. The weight had buckled the drawer. She knelt and tried to force the drawer in with both hands. No use. She saw that the bottom of the drawer was detached, popped from its grooves, square-head nails pulled and bent. She’d have to get Steven to fix it, with a hammer and maybe a plane.

Would tampering with it affect the magic?

And there was currently no Steven.

Vron nagged her for letting Steven play Hairy Tool-Using Man Master whenever a shelf needed putting up or a door re-hanging, insisting a menstrual cycle did not rob women of opposable thumbs. It was usually easier to get Steven to do it. His smug superiority was more acceptable next to a well-put-up shelf than poured on her after her feeble effort had collapsed and he had to do the job properly.

She upended the drawer and bashed it, then tried again. It still wouldn’t fit.

Was the magic broken?

She pulled out the middle drawer. An interesting jumble, but not organic this time. Nothing useful. A shifting sea of what looked like disassembled watch and clock parts.

This was no good. She got back to Wing-Godfrey.

She didn’t think he could see her. His mind was back in captivity, in the dark. Had he held his wrist like that when he was chained by it? Did he think of severing his own hand to get free, like a trapped fox chewing off its own leg?

‘Wing-Godfrey,’ she said.

He might have recognised his name.

‘Bernard.’

His head moved, a little.

‘What happened? Where were you?’

The questions sounded useless, as soon as they came out of her mouth.

His eyes flickered to the chest. No, to the top of the chest. His hand. She had an idea he wanted it, though it could hardly be any use to him.

She picked the thing up and fancied he gave a croak of approval, of excitement.

It was limp now, less like a manufactured item than a body part. She didn’t like holding it. She stepped quickly across the room and dropped it in Wing-Godfrey’s lap. She rubbed her fingers, afraid they were coated with invisible oil, and had an urge to dash to a sink and scrub her hands.

Wing-Godfrey looked into his lap. Still on automatic pilot, but with purpose. He fitted the hand onto his wrist. It took, at once. He didn’t even stretch and wiggle his fingers to test. He gripped the chair arms with both hands and pushed himself upright.

His eyes were alert now, alight. The whites were stained as brown as the rest of him.

He looked at her, intelligence directed, expression giving nothing away. She remembered what she looked like. A madwoman. She should explain, but didn’t know where to start.

How could she say what had happened to her family?

Slowly, with a dignity and strength she had not noticed before, Wing-Godfrey moved around the room. He was comfortable – in the room, in the house, in the Hollow – in a way she could never be, though she was the owner (the sole owner) and mistress. He was more than comfortable. He was part of the furnishings that had passed from Louise Magellan Teazle to the Naremores, which the authoress must have got from her family and they from people lost to history. His colour, that strange uniform brown, was the exact stain of the panelling in the secret passage, the desk in Louise’s study, the posts of the bed and the magic chest of drawers.

Before Louise, who? Those terrified people in the ghost story book, Apple Annie and the Maitland-Middletons.

‘I’ve lost my Tim,’ she said, pathetically. ‘I’ve given him away, by mistake. A terrible mistake.’

‘Wiggy-wig,’ said Wing-Godfrey.

Was that something from the Weezie books? It sounded like baby-talk.

‘Wyg-i-Wyg,’ he insisted.

A name? A place?

Click. She realised. Not baby-talk, not a name, not a place. An acronym.

‘What you give,’ Wing-Godfrey said, ‘is what you get.’

The statement made her weak at the knees with relief. He meant Tim would come back, that he wasn’t given away. He was just hidden and could be found.

‘What you
give
,’ he repeated.

The relief was stripped away.

What he said did not mean what she’d wanted it to mean. What it meant was the worst thing she could think of.

‘…is what you
get
.’

Now, she screamed. Not just in terror.

* * *

S
he couldn’t tell how far away the lights were, or even if the source was the house. The ground underfoot was treacherous. The path disappeared as if by whim. Jordan waded through bramble and found herself sinking into marsh. She wished she’d worn shoes. Her feet were scratched and muddy. It was the hour of the night when – even in August – it is colder than comfortable, and she was out here in just a tatty T-shirt.

The ghosts left her alone.

It was useless. The light never got nearer and she had a terrible feeling it was moving. She was being misled, dragged through every thorn bush and mud patch on the moor, to be left empty for the rising sun.

She had no idea of time. The night was still pitch, moonless and starless (though it hadn’t been a cloudy day) and without a red rind of approaching dawn.

She had no idea of direction. The easiest thing would be to sit down and wait for the ghosts. She had no doubt that if she stopped struggling, stopped moving, they’d come back and finish the job. Maybe that would satisfy them, satisfy this place? Her family would be saved by her sacrifice. She doubted that. It was too neat, too convenient. At the Hollow, everything had to be earned. They had to save themselves individually before they could be saved as a family. She had to do her bit, come through this weirdzone walkabout, before anything else.

Any number of shapes in the distance could be the house.

She had an idea that this was all still the Hollow, that she had passed through the tree telescope to the standing stones but not crossed the moat. By night, the land was elastic.

From the first, she’d noticed the Hollow was larger on the ground than on an Ordnance Survey map. She had just not realised how vast, how extensive. The property was a continent, with lost tribes and ruined cities and fallen civilisations and trackless wastes. The house was a many-roomed mansion, a folded-up city disguised as a single-family dwelling.

The Naremores had never had a chance of owning the place.

Jordan thought of the ghosts she had met here: the Old Girl, the Rick stone, the Witchy Woman. They seemed like people, with personalities, faces, voices. But she still wasn’t sure of them. Even after her conversation with the Old Girl on the nature of ghosts, she thought it might be something like a clever interactive program. Was everything they said or did a set reaction to something she had said or done first? The Old Girl came from her reading of Louise’s books… the Witchy Woman was the Vron she’d been afraid of when she was little… and Dead Rick?

With her Letter back, she wasn’t even sure Rick was dead. It seemed to her now that the voice on the phone – supposedly Rick’s dad – had been slightly buzzy, slightly
off
. He said he was looking at the Letter, but that wasn’t possible, was it?

It could be that, in daylight, she would get through to Rick’s dad and learn her worthless ex-boyfriend was sleeping off a dusk-till-dawn
Deep Space 9
marathon. If he were called to the phone, there’d be an embarrassed, halting exchange as she got over her relief and remembered to be furious with him, unable to let loose as she wanted to for fear of jarring the world back onto the track in which he was shockingly dead.

Daylight?

Might never happen.

Dad and Tim had spent an afternoon driving around, off the property, looking for but not finding the standing stones. Now, she kept coming back to them.