Read An English Ghost Story Online
Authors: Kim Newman
* * *
T
he ghost smiled, weakly.
Steven looked at the apparition. She was more solid than the brown man, like a real person in the room. She’d had more practice, living at the Hollow for so long before becoming one of the ghosts.
If this was Louise Teazle, she didn’t frighten him. Why hadn’t she shown up before? She reminded him of the way the Hollow had felt when they moved in, as if she’d left herself about the place, only to be shredded, twisted and torn by…
What?
‘Why did it change?’ he asked.
‘Because of us,’ said Jordan.
The ghost nodded, reacting. It was not a psychic hologram, a recording of a person who was gone; it was a presence, with an intellect and a personality.
‘It’s why this place is called the Hollow, Dad,’ said his daughter. ‘You said it yourself, it’s an island not a hollow. This spot, the house and grounds, contains a power, a presence. It’s been here for thousands of years, as long as feeling, thinking people have lived on top of it. Its natural state is neutral, formless. It has to be shaped by us, the living. When we came here, it was what Louise made it…’
‘She cheered up the Gloomy Ghost,’ said Kirsty, understanding.
‘Yes, exactly. Before her, cold, frightened and lonely folk lived here, They were haunted because they made the ghosts cold, frightened and lonely. We should have known, from the books, Louise’s and the ghost-story paperback. Remember the sad girl who ate the ghost fruit and was lost to the world, and the women terrorised after the man fell from the tower. You should have read those pages I found. There, on the table. It’s Primrose’s story. I thought it was ours, but it isn’t. It doesn’t have to be. Even the army officer who saw nothing was a clue, because of the kind of person he was. Every time people live here, they change the ghosts. In the end, it needed a child to change the ghosts for the better. And we ruined them again.’
‘It’s like a mirror,’ he said.
‘Wiggy-wig. WYGYWG. What you give is what you get. If the ghosts hurt us, it is because we hurt each other. This place catches how we feel, what we are, and shapes itself to suit. All they are is us. We made them. They have the shape they have because of Louise – all those straw hats and little girls – but we’re changing them, driving them mad. You can see how our ideas – Tim’s soldiers, my R-Rick – are starting to reshape them, to make them
our
ghosts. They come back at us and we blow up at them. It makes us monsters, but only if we are the beginnings of monsters already…’
He was too tired to be frightened all over again. But the concept was terrifying. Every resentment, every failing, every malicious thought that passed out of him – out of
them
– went into some vast swelling sponge. When it hurt them, they felt worse and fed it more, a cycle that could never be broken.
Except by a child, by a girl from a book.
‘We have to stop tearing ourselves apart,’ said Jordan. ‘We have to be a family.’
Steven held his wife and children and hoped first of all that he could trust himself, control himself. Only then could he hope for his family to gather around him, to take strength from him rather than be sapped by him.
The Old Girl was still smiling.
* * *
T
he family were a family again.
The Hollow was inhabited. There was a new ghost, a brown presence who was without form. His shape would be determined by the living, would join with the others who made up the spirit of the place.
The sun rose over the moor and flooded into the Summer Room. As light hit, the Old Girl did not disappear but became an arrangement of sparks, an intricate constellation which would always be there if looked at sideways.
After dawn, one by one, the family fell asleep.
T
he evening before Jordan’s first day at college, the family ate together on the kitchen lawn. A spell of late-in-the-year warm weather made up for the storms of the past fortnight, which had soaked the thatch and revealed a few drips that needed fixing. The last of the apples had been picked, stored for the winter or sacrificed in a day-long pie-production line that filled the freezer and occupied the entire family. Drifts of leaves gathered in the orchard, and Dad had held the first ceremonial bonfire. The sweet smoke of burning, crackling foliage wafted across the Hollow and out onto the moor.
Tim had been at school for a week; already, he was making new friends and picking up a burr that was on its way to being a local accent. Jordan noted instances of ‘youm’, ‘not I’ and even ‘gurt’ in his vocabulary. How long would it be until he sounded like a compleat wurzel?
The walking on eggshells was almost over.
Still, it was like living in a former battlefield with a heavily armed UN peace-keeping force. Every time the impulse to snap at her brother or parents came, she had to hold anger in, reminding herself what might happen if she vented. The others were like that too, even Tim.
Mum and Dad disagreed about the wine to have with dinner. Each got a few words into their argument, then halted, eyes straying from each other, skittering towards the dark corners of the kitchen. Then, almost comically, each backed down so fast there was almost a real row over who would give way.
Always, Jordan knew the others were there. Mostly, it was a comfort.
After they had worked equally in the kitchen, dividing up the tasks with the minimum of fuss, they doled out their meals – she had decided to go vegetarian, which meant she had to take responsibility for an alternate main course at most family meals – and carried the food through in a procession and sat around the garden table.
The evening
smelled
wonderful. The bonfire of the afternoon was embers and ash, but the scent lingered.
The mood lasted, until it broke.
‘A ghost,’ said Tim, pointing, afraid.
They all smiled but Jordan’s smile froze.
Beyond the orchard, beyond the rhyne, beyond the boundaries of the property, stood a scarecrow with long, tangled hair – midnight black, with a white lightning jag – and bare, red-nailed feet. She leaned at an angle to the ground, holding a tree branch that overhung the ditch, hair adrift on the breeze. She wore a velvet skirt so purple it was almost black, and had new blue tattoos up and down her bare white arms.
‘Good God,’ said Mum.
‘It really is a ghost,’ said Dad.
It was the Wild Witch, Veronica.
‘Vron,’ Mum breathed, yearning in her eyes. Then, suddenly, cold caution.
‘Do you suppose she walked all the way?’ asked Dad.
Mum stood up, pushing her chair away from the table.
‘Kirst-eeee,’ sang Veronica, bell-clear voice sailing across the water.
Mum didn’t know what to do.
Jordan remembered to hate Veronica. Even after they’d moved to the Hollow, the witch had worked her black magic. The family were beyond her reach, but she’d got to Rick. Finally, Jordan got through to Rick’s father on the phone, an embarrassed and embarrassing conversation. Now she knew the full sordid story of the Wild Witch and Rick the Not-Dead.
Just because they were alive and elsewhere didn’t mean their ghosts hadn’t numbered among the legions of the Hollow.
‘What does
she
want?’ Tim said, harshly.
Jordan, like Mum and Dad, knew exactly what Veronica wanted. Mum and the family, the Naremores, back. They had been her toys, an interactive soap opera.
No, that was harsh. This wasn’t an evil mastermind, but a sad woman who’d messed up her own life so badly that she needed to infect someone else’s.
‘Kirsty,’ she said, ‘I can’t cross.’
She let go of the branch and leaned forwards, over the ditch. Jordan was sure she’d overbalance and fall into the water (witches float, that’s the test) but she was halted in the air.
She hung, leaning against something invisible.
Jordan knew this place was barred to the woman, and was grateful. The family were settled enough in the Hollow to be protected.
Mum left the table and walked down the gentle slope through the orchard to the rhyne, moving between the trees without urgency. Dad got up and followed her.
‘Come on, Tim,’ said Jordan, taking her brother’s hand.
The reddish sunset spread above. Their shadows were long as they passed through the orchard.
Up close, Veronica looked older than Jordan remembered. The white streak spread silvery filaments through her wild hair. Her long skirts were tatty.
Where was her power?
She smiled at them.
‘You need me,’ she said. ‘So I came.’
Mum shrank against Dad. Jordan felt the others, all around. They were more than a family. They were a crowd.
‘I know about this place,’ Veronica said. ‘Even from here, I can feel it. We can make something of it, Kirsty. You and me. There’s enormous potential.’
Mum shook her head.
Jordan saw, for the first time, the loss in Veronica’s eyes.
‘Hi, Jord,’ she said, directly to her, smile twitching. ‘I’ve brought Richard with me. He’s in the car. There are explanations. A lot of healing to be done. We all have to learn to share.’
She didn’t want to see the boy. Along with everything else, she had outgrown him.
‘Steven, you’ve never understood really, that it’s not about owning Kirsty. It’s about what we have between us. There’s enough to go around, enough to share. If you listen, you can learn so much from the feminine, from the other half of life. Tim, little soldier, it’s your Auntie Vron. Remember the talks we used to have, about tactics and strategy? I understand what you’ve found here, in the Hollow. I’ve found more out about the place, stories going back and back into the ages. I have so much wisdom to share, to give. This is my place, I’m certain, as much as it is yours. We’ve always been wound up together, even at the bad times, we’ve needed all of us, pulling every which way, to keep the show on the road. Without me, you’ve been through trying times, warping experiences. This shut-out, this barrier, is a tragic malformation of the energies of the Hollow. If only you’ll let me in, everything will be perfect again. Perfect love, perfect chaos, perfect life.’
Veronica’s hair started blowing away from her head. Her skin was pressed against her skull. Jordan saw ripples as the pressure grew. She was tilted upright and pushed back a few steps.
‘Are you doing this?’ she asked, trembling.
No one answered her.
‘Goodbye, Vron,’ said Mum. ‘I miss you, but we’ve changed. We’ve all changed.’
Veronica’s face darkened, a flash of the old malice.
‘No one ever really changes,’ she said, and stalked away, under blood-red sky.
They watched her go. The shadows grew softer. Knots inside Jordan loosened.
What would the rest of Veronica’s life be like? She had other toys to play with, but none so cherished as Mum. She was the one who had always believed in magic, but the Naremores had found the real thing, shutting her out.
Jordan would not be sorry for her, would not not
not
.
What the woman had done with Rick, a shiny new toy, was beyond contempt. She knew Rick would be punished, that the journey back to the city would be torture. He and Veronica would lock claws, sinking venomous fangs into each other’s hearts.
Never again would Jordan be tormented like that.
‘I saw the Brown Man today,’ said Tim. ‘Near here. He likes the tree I used to have.’
‘I hope he’s happy,’ said Mum.
The coroner had brought in a suicide verdict. Bernard Wing-Godfrey left a note in his inside pocket, sealed in a plastic bag. The investigation was uncomfortable, though. Everyone was on tenterhooks, thinking that the ghosts would show themselves and attract more attention to the Hollow.
Getting on as a family was hard enough. If anyone else found out about the Hollow, there was a risk that the balance would be upset. Already, Mum and Dad were unsure whether Tim should be allowed to have his friends over to play, though they were relenting.
Jordan worried that Veronica would be vengeful. She had sent Mum the book of ghost stories – Mum admitted that now – and could make a fuss with the papers and television. It would be tiresome denying everything, especially with Wing-Godfrey still so much in the local news.
No, the Wild Witch was beaten. Even she knew that.
She was gone now. She stalked across the field until she found a path, and slipped along it, out of sight.
‘I’m proud of you, Kirst,’ said Dad, hugging Mum.
She was quiet. Jordan understood it was hard for her. Dad, she thought, didn’t. Yet. Under the new family regime, things changed more slowly than they seemed. They had been acting like a family since midsummer, but only now – as habits were setting – were they really feeling like one.
‘She’s mad, isn’t she?’ said Mum, wondering.
‘No,’ said Jordan. ‘She’s not mad. That was why she was dangerous.’
Veronica would be back in Rick’s car. Good luck to the both of them.
Mum and Dad were closer to the place and each other. They were better together, though Jordan recognised moments every day when each had to bite back words. But not fighting was habit-forming, and the Hollow was supportive.
Dad’s business, as far as anyone understood it, was doing fine. There was a crisis-ette when he learned that Tatum, his assistant, was setting up on her own and poaching several of his clients. That was smoothed over, now. It might be that Dad didn’t want to work so hard. Local interests might take up more of his time. Mum was writing sketches and stories, and had picked up an agent if not a publisher; the Hollow library was still growing, still changing. Tim didn’t play soldiers any more. He was interested in animals and had got an
Encyclopaedia of British Birds
on CD-ROM for his back-to-school present. Jordan tried to spend time with her brother, not butting in but sharing his interests, giving him something of herself.
They all had the ghosts. Not seen so much, but constantly present. Rarely did an individual personality, like the Brown Man or the Old Girl, make itself known, but there was a kind of a light, even in the evening, a late summer warmth, a comfortable smell. There were fewer magic tricks, since the Hollow didn’t need to impress them any more. But if there was any danger of spirits sagging, something came along to surprise them.