An English Ghost Story (9 page)

He squirmed around inside the main dug-out, which was shaped like an overturned canoe. Its opening was netted over with strands of ivy he was careful to shift aside but never break. Inside Green Base was more room than anyone would suspect. He looked up inside the hollow trunk and saw green-filtered daylight pouring through holes among the branches.

Making his way upwards, he climbed twice his height before he could go no further. He would have to carve hand- and footholds if he wanted to scale the inside of the tree all the way to the high plateau. He planned to make his command post there. Being small meant he could go where few others could, but a certain amount of hacking with an entrenching tool was needed to make the narrow chimney passable.

A peaty abscess under the roots was just big enough to curl up in. He should enlarge and shore up the space into a burrow for supplies. He had a list: bottled water, dried fruit, chocolate, biscuits, salt tablets, comics, his Swiss army knife, a flannel, toothpaste, sticking plasters, a torch. Already, he had scouted several fall-back positions (in the hayloft, under the bridge). Soon, he would be ready for all eventualities.

From inside the tree, he looked out, green-streaked face fitting a face-sized knothole. His eyes should seem like highlights on leaves.

The MP and the BS had moved the lawn furniture to a spot by the kitchen door, where they were laughing at nothing in particular. He watched them a while, keeping an eye out for hostiles. The women were in no danger presently. It was an all-clear situation.

He took his head out of the hole and slipped silently down to ground level. He could manage that manoeuvre in under five seconds, though it took a full half-minute to ascend to the lookout point.

A new tribute waited for him.

He picked up a Y-shaped forked stick, stripped of bark and sanded smooth. Between the tines was a strip of rubber with a leather patch threaded on it. Tim took the patch and pulled back. The rubber wasn’t perished. A catapult.

Now he knew what the pebbles in the nest were.

That the IP had issued him with such a thing was a sign of trust. The weapon put him on a level with them, as if he had joined the Doomsday Club.

He slipped a pebble into the leather grip and pulled back, feeling the strength of the rubber in his forearm. He sighted upwards, on one of the sky-holes up in the tree-top, and let go. The pebble flew upwards, just clipped the edge of the hole, and shot out into the world beyond.

‘Kewl,’ Tim said to himself.

He was fit to survive.

* * *

‘
H
ow was the Louise looney?’ Steven asked. ‘Surprisingly sweet,’ said Kirsty.

He slipped an arm around his wife’s waist and snogged her, not minding his embarrassed daughter. They were outside, in the early evening. They would share the long summer evening hours before nightfall.

‘The man was brown, Mum,’ said Jordan. ‘Touch of the sun-lamp?’

‘No, not burned. Brown.’

‘He implied that he had spent a lot of his life overseas,’ said Kirsty.

‘Implied?’

‘He didn’t say anything outright, but mentioned he’d spent a time far from home. “Confined”, was his expression.’

‘So he’s an escapee from Devil’s Island? Inherited his collection of Teazle books from a guillotined poisoner, read them over and over in the Hole, between whippings and leprosy outbreaks? Only Sneezy Weezie and her blessed spooks kept him sane.’

‘HH,’ said Jordan, but Kirsty was thoughtful.

‘You might not be that far from the truth. There’s something about the name. Bernard Wing-Godfrey. I’ve come across it before.’

‘I can check him out on the net.’

Steven had spent the day online, doing background checks on an oil-surveying company that seemed dodgy on the surface but might have hidden strengths. The dial-up connection was more reliable here than in London, where his modem often cut out in the middle of a research session. He enjoyed the detail-work, reading between the columns of dense figures scrolling across the screen.

He liked finding out trivial things sometimes, to keep his fingers flexible.

‘Why’ve you moved the lawn furniture?’

Jordan looked archly at Kirsty.

‘If you laugh,’ Kirsty said, ‘I’ll leave you for a bass player.’

That was an old joke between them. It hadn’t come up for ten years or so, and he was surprised – delighted, even – that it didn’t hurt. At times, too recently for comfort, it would not only not have been funny but would have been the height of intramarital cruelty.

‘I’d advise you not to press this point, Dad.’

‘Fair enough, Jordy. I withdraw the question.’

A pebble fell out of nowhere and bounced off the table, flaking a patch of white paint from the filigree. They all looked up at the tower.

‘It’s a mystery,’ Steven said. ‘One for the collection.’

Things happened when he turned his back, or was in the next room, or while he was nodding off. Nothing sinister, but often interesting. It was as if everyone were preparing a huge surprise party for him, though his birthday had been four months ago. Three of their birthdays fell in a two-week cluster. Only Tim had managed a party this year, and that had been a foaming disaster. Steven was torn between wanting to forget things as they were before the Hollow and needing to remember so they never happened ever again.

Before the Hollow, things had been dire. Coming here meant pulling back from the edge.

Somehow, he wasn’t worried any more. He was working on never being worried again.

The mystery collection was growing, though.

First was that girl in the straw hat, as mentioned by the removal men. She hadn’t shown up since, though Steven noted that Louise Teazle heroines always wore straw hats. He would have joked that the sensitive shifters had seen Weezie’s ghost, but fictional characters didn’t leave ghosts. Miss Teazle had lived to be eighty-three, so she should have left an old lady ghost. Unless you could pick which age you were as a phantom.

Kirsty insisted Miss Teazle was gone.

Then there were other things. Feelings, half-heard sounds, fortuitous circumstances, items that came to hand when they were wanted, apples that fell when you were hungry (and were ripe well before the greengrocer’s), phone calls that came just when you needed them.

It was as if the Hollow adjusted to suit them.

At first, he always bumped his head on a lampshade in the secret passage. Now he could walk under it and just barely brush the fringe. The cord didn’t seem to be shorter and the flagstone floor certainly wasn’t lower. As if the passage, and the whole house, changed minutely, to make him comfortable.

There were rules for the mystery collection. Phenomena that two or more of them could bear witness to were admitted. Like the falling pebble. It was a Dad–Jordan thing, though. Tim kept mum about whatever he saw, like a good soldier. Kirsty added her few contributions reluctantly. She shared the way Steven felt, but was wary of speaking out loud about it, as if that would break the magic.

‘Show him your mystery, Mum,’ Jordan said.

Steven raised eyebrows and opened his hands.

‘It’s not a mystery, dear. It’s a circumstance. If you stand just so, you can see a stone circle.’

‘Brown Godfrey showed her, Dad. He got it from Weezie.’

Kirsty manipulated him into a certain position. He saw she had marked it with a heel-mark in the turf.

‘I have to tip-toe,’ she said. ‘You have to scrunch.’

He let his knees sag a little. Kirsty held his head and pointed at the fallen tree.

‘No,’ she said, ‘look
through
the tree.’

There was nothing. No circle of stones.

He didn’t say he didn’t see it.

‘I tried looking from our window,’ Kirsty said. ‘And Tim’s attic room. The top of the tree gets in the way.’

He walked out into the orchard, Kirsty and Jordan trailing him. Kirsty was smiling broadly now.

‘It won’t work,’ she said, ‘only from this spot.’

‘The tree can’t be in the way if the tree is behind you.’

But leaning against the tree-trunk, he still saw nothing.

‘I vote this goes in the collection,’ he said, puzzled.

‘It’s not a mystery,’ insisted Kirsty. ‘It’s just that there’s only one place you can see the circle from. It’s geography.’

‘And your Louise looney knew this from reading a book? A book that’s sixty years old?’

Kirsty shrugged. She looked almost as young as Jordan.

‘So, you’re telling me the tree had fallen down already, back then, when Louise was writing?’

‘I suppose so. It could be hundreds of years old.’

‘It hasn’t grown since, nor any of the other trees? The view hasn’t changed? What about drainage schemes and Dutch elm disease? The moor is a living landscape. It shouldn’t stay exactly the same from one year to the next. This, my darling, is a mystery.’

‘It goes in the collection, Mum. Along with the chairs.’

Kirsty looked at them and agreed. Steven wondered what the mystery of the chairs might be.

‘I’ll bet if we cut down the tree, the circle would vanish,’ Jordan said. ‘You wouldn’t be able to see it from here.’

A small green pixie emerged from the tree-trunk and made them all jump and laugh.

‘Don’t cut down the tree,’ said Tim.

‘That’s not in the big plan, son,’ said Steven.

Tim, relieved, saluted. Steven noticed the boy had a new catapult. His soldier would have to listen to a thorough briefing on the uses and abuses of the device. Some weapons were too terrible ever to be used outside strictly controlled test conditions, especially with the huge panes of the picture windows in shot distance.

‘Reporting for rations, ma’am,’ said Tim.

‘Tea is just coming,’ said Kirsty.

* * *

K
irsty was sparing with her use of the chest of drawers. She had an idea that, like many magical things, it only worked if she was alone with it. She didn’t want to enter it into Steven and Jordan’s collection, not yet. She worried that to label something a mystery was to impose a meaning which was also a limitation. This was not an experiment, this was life. It was too important to risk.

She used the top drawer occasionally, to get rid of make-up smudged tissues or rubber bands, but stayed away from the middle drawer. She was not sure that, at this point in her life, she needed a jumble of surprises. Vron had shown her she had a problem with order and chaos, see-sawing from one extreme to the other. A jumble was too much like real chaos, the stuff that had seemed so much of a threat and a promise and a danger and a delight.

The temptation was the bottom drawer.

She thought of the things she found there as Cinderella gifts. She was scrupulous about using them only for a brief time, disposing of them before dawn by putting them into the top drawer, the drawer that was always empty, the drawer that was always the same, the drawer that made things disappear.

Thus far, apart from the glove, she had found a garter, a single earring (the drawer never gave matched pairs of anything), a hand-mirror without glass, a modern plastic toothbrush that dislodged a tiny string of beef that had been caught between her molars for a day and a half, a china doll whose torn dress she had repaired with a few neat stitches.

Today, she found the last five pages of an Agatha Christie novel she had taken out of the library when she was Jordan’s age. That copy had been missing those pages. The pages had been sliced out cleanly so she hadn’t discovered the vandalism until she reached the end of the penultimate chapter. Reading the solution now, after twenty years, she found the details of the unsolved murder had lingered in her memory more vividly than those of dozens of whodunits she had finished. Knowing the answer satisfied her in a way she would never have imagined. Why hadn’t she just gone into a shop and read the last chapter before now? Had she been waiting for this magic gift?

She posted the pages, one by one, into the top drawer, then pulled it out. They were gone.

Steven came up, curly hair wet from his bath, and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘One mystery solved,’ he said.

She turned, afraid he had noticed something about the chest of drawers.

‘Wing-Godfrey’s all over the net,’ Steven said. ‘I’ve bookmarked all the Louise Magellan Teazle sites for you. There’s one with old photographs of the Hollow, from before the War. Wing-Godfrey’s society has a really crap web designer. You might tell him that.’

‘HH,’ she said, wondering whether to bean Steven with a pillow.

‘After the Louise sites I found more mentions, in newspaper archives. He was a hostage in Lebanon, ten years ago. He was with a textiles company. Some fringe fundamentalist group chained him to a wall, kept him in a cellar for years, threatened to chop his head off. It was a big story. Like Terry Waite and John What’s-His-Name.’

Kirsty was struck with sympathy. ‘The poor man.’

‘The kidnappers gave him the only English books they had. Can you guess?’

She beaned him with the pillow, which he was too slow to dodge.

‘Got it in one,’ he said.

She imagined the brown man in his cell (how had he got so brown indoors? Oughtn’t he to have been pale?) with only Weezie for company. No wonder he had come out of it a bit of a fanatic. The business with the lawn furniture suggested he was something of a fundamentalist himself.

‘Think of it,’ Steven said. ‘All those years without sight of a real woman. He must have worn out those schoolgirl books. Which do you think were his favourite illustrations? Gymslip scenes, probably. Are there any canings at Drearcliff Grange? Rosy third-form buttocks taking six of the best.’

‘HH,’ she said, not thinking him funny.

He crawled back on the bed and waited for her. His fantasy had got him going. A half-erection was rising through his bathrobe.

‘Come into my study, girl,’ he said, in a low, funny voice. ‘You’ve been naughtier than any nymphet it has ever been my unpleasant duty to chastise. Matron will not be the same again since that disgusting affair with the school hamster and the curry powder. And Prefect Jemima reports that you have been smoking crack behind the bicycle sheds with the baker’s boy.’