An English Ghost Story (36 page)

His left hand whizzed out of the air and took hold of Kirsty’s chin, forcing her to look up. His face was beyond the corona of the light, but his eyes shone brown, liquid with contempt.

The right hand shot across and slapped her.

She felt the impact in her teeth. Her vision filmed over red.

The hand circled her head, looping a garrotte string about her neck. The noose went tight. She gasped, but couldn’t take a breath. Trapped blood pounded in her temples. The thin strand was strong as steel wire, and ratcheted like a cheese-cutter.

Kirsty did not fight.

She had offered herself. It was a fair exchange. If she joined the ghosts, Tim and Steven would be given back. She would have to stay, become one of the haunters of the Hollow.

Fair enough. She deserved it.

She was lifted into the air, ghost-strings about her wrists and ankles.

Wing-Godfrey’s head bumped against the ceiling, like a neon-eyed balloon. She was raised close to its expanded face, as if he were drawing her to him for a kiss.

Jordan was shouting.

Kirsty had said her goodbyes.

The closer she got to the head, the less it looked like the brown man. The mouth was six inches wide. The teeth shone as brightly as the eyes. The ears were bat-wings.

It didn’t matter.

At the last, with all the arguments over, she thought only of Steven, Jordan and Tim. No one and nothing else had ever come close, not Vron, not any of the projects or problems or distractions. All she would leave behind of value was family.

Ten minutes ago, she wasn’t sure she even liked her husband and children, now she knew with iron certainty that she loved them. She was prepared to die for them.

She was fuzzy from the loss of blood to her head.

It would not even hurt.

A burst of light came into her mind and she was floating gently, released from her bonds.

* * *

S
uppressing any thought about what the girl’s nod might mean to Tim, Steven grasped his son under the arms and picked him up, hugging him. Too surprised to struggle, the boy adjusted his weight, pressing his face to Steven’s neck. His son’s teeth were like ice against his throat.

The blow-pipes fired, puffs of light in the night.

Steven saw the bale-door up close, in a flashbulb instant. He threw himself against it, trusting it to be unlatched.

(The estate agent had suggested they keep it bolted, to prevent accidents; had they ever acted on his advice?)

His shoulder jarred but the door gave way. He realised too late that he was throwing himself and Tim carelessly over a twenty-foot drop.

Below the bale-door was gravel drive. He needed to leap outwards. To land on the soft grass. Roll into a ball around Tim.

He was wrong.

They didn’t fall far, just collided with floor where there should have been air.

It was dark again and the orchard wasn’t beyond the bale-door.

Beneath them, a carpet slid in wrinkles over polished floorboards. Steven staggered onwards, finding his feet, reaching for Tim’s hand.

He didn’t know which side his son was on, but wasn’t leaving Tim to the After Lights-Out Gang.

He ran, pulling the boy.

They were in a corridor, somewhere in the house, having passed through an impossible secret passageway. The darkness was not complete. Thin light seeped under shut doors.

He slammed against a wall, coming to a dead end.

Turning, his back to the wall, he hugged his son. Coming down the passage were four solid silhouettes, taller and more powerfully built than schoolgirls.

These were the creatures his son had made friends with, had perhaps joined. They all saw the ghosts – the After Lights-Out Gang – differently, Steven realised. These were unlike the spectres of his own dark; these were Tim’s playmates, Tim’s ghosts, Tim’s death squad.

‘Tim,’ he said. ‘It’s time to stop playing.’

* * *

H
is squaddies would rescue him and put the Enemy out of the game with a shot to the head. Then, time for a well-earned leave.

The girls were close. Tim saw them, awaiting his order. The Enemy held him tight. If he kept his head low, the girls would all have clear head shots.

All he had to do was give the order, the universally recognised nod.

‘The game’s over,’ the Enemy said.

Tim felt the words like bullets.

Something had changed in the combat zone. A peace treaty, signed in another country thousands of miles distant, meant this was not right. Killing the Enemy would not be heroism, but a crime.

Still, to let him free would invalidate the mission, toss away the hundreds of man-hours that had brought them to this final confrontation. Because of words on paper, this would never be settled.

Tim would never know which of them was best.

No one would ever know. Or he could just finish the war in his own fashion, with clean victory.

He was ready to give the nod.

But no. There was no enemy here. No victory was ever really clean.

‘Dad,’ he said, tears welling up.

He was more tired than he’d ever been in his life. He turned away from his squaddies and jammed his face against Dad’s chest.

‘Good job, son, good job, Tim,’ Dad said, hugging him close.

* * *

‘
M
um,’ Jordan shouted.

She was terrified that her mother couldn’t hear her, that she was too wrapped up in the embrace of the brown man.

‘Don’t go,’ she said, trying to project meaning. ‘Don’t.’

There was no need for this sacrifice. Another ghost wasn’t what the Hollow really wanted. It would only taint the place more.

Jordan understood her family was not a good influence.

Her mother was floating, face discoloured, in Wing-Godfrey’s coils.

Jordan could easily reach out and grasp Mum by the ankles, perhaps pull her out of the ghostly, murdering hug, haul her back down to the ground. But it wouldn’t be enough.

Like everything in the Hollow, it was in the heart.

Mum had to want to come back… to the ground, to her family.

She had stopped struggling, looked almost peaceful.

Jordan tried to cast her mind back, think of something she shared with her mother, some private experience, some taste, some interest, some insight. She needed to fix the connection between them that had been broken too early.

From Jordan’s early childhood, Mum had been strange. Not like the mothers in the films she liked, but off on her own bizarre enthusiasms, touchy when Dad voiced even the mildest doubts about her latest craze, too eager to scurry off to the witch Veronica. She grew to resent the way Mum’s preoccupations squeezed out everything else. Jordan had become who she was as a way of making a space for herself, even in starvation, in the family. She realised now why she fixed on heroines whose style was so at odds with anything Mum liked, because at heart they were all saying, ‘You don’t own me’, ‘Is that all there is?’, ‘Whatever will be will be’ – the things her mother believed but found such a struggle to live out.

Mum’s arms floated outwards, as if she were drowned, or ascending.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jordan said. ‘I should have helped.’

She could have, she knew. For the last few years, she had been clever enough, skilled enough. She could have taken an interest in Oddments or the other crazes. If she had supported her mother, then Mum wouldn’t have had to run to a sociopathic crone to be believed in.

‘I love you, Mum.’

Simple. Direct. True?

God, yes. True. How could it not be?

‘
We
love you.’

That was true too. Jordan knew it, with a growing calm.

If the family had a collective heart, it started to beat again.

The Summer Room changed. Through the windows, she saw real night, not utter blackness. Stars faded with the first pinkish wash of impending dawn. The lamp stands were just left-over furniture.

And the brown man, the strung-out thing Wing-Godfrey had become, collapsed like a puppet.

Mum fell.

Jordan pushed through the lamp stands, knocking them over, and was there, directly under her mother.

Mum landed heavily, knocking the breath out of them both. Coolie hats rolled free and lightbulbs popped. Jordan’s knees gave way and she was driven onto the sofa, all her mother’s weight on her.

They would both be bruised like losing heavyweights.

But they were alive.

Mum shifted, trying to escape Jordan’s embrace.

They wound up on the sofa, hugging each other ferociously, looking beyond the felled circle of lamp stands, seeing Wing-Godfrey scattered on the carpet.

The brown man pulled himself together slowly.

The fear Jordan was used to was subsiding.

She sensed Mum had changed, come through the worst of it. That gave her the strength not to be scared. Or rather, not as scared as before.

The brown man stood by the French windows, head and limbs pulled back into place. Dawn light outlined him and came through him. He was a bubble inside a slack suit.

The windows were open. There was noise in the orchard. Someone was coming.

Mum cringed.

‘Don’t, Mum,’ Jordan whispered. ‘Not this time. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Don’t be scared.’

She stroked her mother’s spiky hair.

* * *

T
hey were by the rhyne, beyond the orchard. Not inside the house. No After Lights-Out Gang in sight. In the moment of their embrace, of their mutual recognition, the girls were sent back to their dorm, stripped of the rank his son had given them.

Steven put Tim down and looked out over the moor. He saw no standing stones from here, but the horizon was picked out by light.

‘In the water, Dad,’ said Tim.

Something was bundled up in the pondweed, like an island with four peninsulas.

‘Don’t look,’ Steven said.

A dead man lay in the ditch, head hanging under the water, puffy layer of air trapped inside the back of his soaked jacket.

Bernard Wing-Godfrey. He must have been at the bottom of the ditch since yesterday and just floated to the surface.

‘Come away,’ he said, leading his son by the hand.

Tim was upset, he knew. A boy shouldn’t have to see such a thing. Steven was grateful for the twilight time, which concealed the details.

He would call the police when the sun was up.

They walked past the hollow tree, Tim’s abandoned camp. The boy shrank against him, as if expecting an attack, but it was just an old tree, nothing that could hurt anyone. Steven rapped on the wood, barking his knuckles. The tree sounded like a drum.

‘No one home,’ he said.

Tim darted out from under his wing and kicked the tree.

‘See,’ Steven said.

Tim thought about it and nodded. ‘Shall we see how the womenfolk are?’ Steven asked. ‘Yes, Dad.’

From here, they could see the French windows. Lights were on in the Summer Room.

Steven squeezed his son’s hand.

* * *

T
he French windows were pulled open, wider. Jordan tensed, was ready for whatever was coming through. Then Dad and Tim, battered but unhurt, stepped into the Summer Room. Jordan unclenched, giddy with relief. The Naremores were together again, safe. They shouldn’t have split up and hared off in all directions.

Tim looked at the brown man and shrank against Dad.

Dad was wary of Wing-Godfrey, though he hadn’t been in the room when he came apart.

‘He’s in the ditch,’ Dad said, nodding at the brown man. ‘Drowned.’

The brown man was transparent, a man-shaped cloud.

‘This is a ghost,’ Dad said.

The word was like an exorcism. The shape moved back, into the fireplace, and came apart again, decoalescing into the shadows and the soot-falls.

‘That was a ghost,’ Dad said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

She understood Bernard Wing-Godfrey had made the Hollow his home, permanently. He had fixed on the place for years, from his stifling prison through all the time with the Teazle Society. He had read his Weezie closely and sensed a welcome here for a certain type of spirit. Jordan wanted to weep for the poor, sad man. She pictured him slipping away from the tour, weighting his pockets with stones, sliding into the rhyne as if it were a deep bath. It took willpower to drown in three feet of water, to resist the urges of the body to stand up and strike for the air. Like Jordan, the brown man had willpower to spare. The strength which had enabled him to survive carried him through the sacrifice of his body, to buy his way into the Hollow’s company of ghosts.

She thought they’d seen the last of Wing-Godfrey, but he’d always be here, playing for ever with Weezie and the Wiggy-Wigs. He had marked out the boundaries of his heaven and stepped there.

Her father and brother tramped across the carpet and flopped down on the sofa, next to her mother and her. Arms slipped around backs.

They were together again, a family.

‘What are ghosts?’ Tim asked.

Dad tried to shrug, but his arms were occupied, holding them all.

‘Pests,’ Mum said.

‘Not just,’ Jordan contradicted. ‘Not worse than us. The same.’

She saw it, completely. How the Hollow worked. How they fitted in with the ghosts.

‘They’re not real,’ Dad said. ‘Just a nuisance, like a lingering smell or bad weather.’

He was wrong.

‘They have minds,’ she said. ‘Some of them.’

In the fireplace, where Wing-Godfrey had faded, another figure, smaller and slighter, came together.

The Old Girl.

She stepped out, into the room. The beginnings of dawn didn’t bother her. She was an old woman with a pinafore and a straw hat, not a child with a withered face. She looked more natural now Jordan had a firmer idea of this place.

Tim pressed his face against Jordan’s tummy, spreading himself across his parents’ laps. Mum hissed, like a cat before a fight.

The hostility gave the Old Girl pause. She began to snarl back.

How could she expect anything else? After this long night.

Only Jordan understood, was without real fear.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hello, Louise.’