“Wait a moment!” Cart exclaimed. “Who did push the panic button? It couldn’t have been me, because I was hanging on to the rope.”
“So was I,” said Fenella. “So.”
“And I was strangling,” husked Imogen.
“That’s just what I mean!” shouted Cart. “But the bell rang because Phyllis heard it. So who did push it? There’s only one person I know who’d do a stupid thing like that.”
Sally’s sisters stared at one another, frightened, annoyed, and astonished. “Sally!” they all said together.
CHAPTER
7
“Do you mean the ghost was really Sally after all?” Imogen quavered. She gripped the edge of her bedclothes, ready to pull them over her head.
“No,” Cart said thoughtfully. “We know Sally’s with Audrey, so it can’t be really Sally. But what’s to stop it being a poor lost spirit that thinks it’s Sally?”
Fenella chuckled, the deep, dirty chuckle which she called her Evil Laugh. “And what’s more, it’s here at the moment, listening to every word we say!”
Imogen uttered a husky scream and slid under her bedclothes.
“What did you want to say that for?” Cart said to Fenella. “Imogen’s had an awful day, one way and another. Keep your big mouth shut, or I won’t let you help me get rid of it.”
“Do you know how to get rid of it?” Fenella said.
“Yes,” Cart said tightly. She got off Imogen’s bed and lumbered over to the chest of drawers again. This time she opened her own tidy, nearly empty drawer and took out a small red leather book. Sally, fluttering by her shoulder, saw that it was a prayer book and felt suddenly peculiar. “Fenella,” said Cart, “I’ll need your cowbell.”
Fenella’s mouth came open, showing two large, gappy front teeth. And well might Fenella be astonished, Sally thought, remembering that cowbell. Fenella had gone about clanking it for a whole fortnight and intoning, “Unclean! Unclean!” at the top of her large, booming voice. Fenella had intoned and clanked until all three of her sisters, driven to three different distractions, had threatened Fenella with three different dreadful fates if that bell was ever seen or heard again. And how, Sally thought, suddenly indignant, could a person remember that bell and not be Sally? Of course she was Sally, ghost or not!
“And we’ll need your Monigan candle, too,” Cart said to the quaking heap that was Imogen.
A cautious flap of sheet peeled back. Imogen’s face appeared, looking—maybe because it was flushed from being under the bedclothes—rather healthier than before. “You’re going to exorcise it,” she said, “with bell, book, and candle, aren’t you? I think it’s an extremely intelligent idea.”
No, it isn’t! Sally said, angry and unheard. I refuse to be exorcised! I’ve as much right to be here as you have!
As she said it, Cart’s drawer and Sally’s own were being pushed heavily in, releasing a further cloud of black feathers, and Fenella was rather helplessly turning over wads of music in Imogen’s drawer.
“It’s down the left-hand side,” Imogen said, sitting up warily.
Fenella found the candle. Sally remembered the candle as well as the cowbell, which Fenella next dug out from among the dolls in her own drawer. Cart had made the candle a year ago, when she invented the Worship of Monigan, out of stumps of other candles and the lace of a gym shoe. She had tried to dye it blue by melting poster paint in the wax, and she had tried to scent it by pouring in some perfume Imogen had bought at Woolworth’s. The result was a gray, knobby thing, like a monster fungus, with a most peculiar smell.
“Where are the matches?” said Fenella.
There was a short silence. “Downstairs,” said Imogen. “And,” she added in a gabbling shriek, “I’m not going. There’s a ghost down there! I’m scared!” Upon which she vanished under the bedclothes again.
“Bags I not either,” Cart said hastily.
Fenella stood up with scornful grandeur. “I sometimes think,” she said, “that I do all the dirty work round here. Of course I’ll go.” She marched to the door and then turned, so that only her nose and her gray nylon stomach showed beyond the door frame. “Stupids,” she said. “The ghost was what Oliver was growling at all day. And he’s not growling now, so the ghost is up here.” The nose and the stomach vanished. Fenella’s bony feet went thudding downstairs.
Sally had half a mind to go after Fenella so that Oliver would growl. On the other hand, she had two people to scare up here. The lump in Imogen’s bed was quivering and uttering low, howling sounds. Cart’s face was pale and her fingers shook as she turned over the little thin pages of the prayer book.
“Oh, dear,” Cart said, trying to sound natural. “The Order of Baptism for Those of Riper Years, The Catechism, The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony. They don’t seem to give exorcism. Do you think the Litany would do? Or should we use The Order for the Burial of the Dead?”
“Ooh-ow! Ooh-ow!” went the lump that was Imogen.
“The Thanksgiving of Women After Childbirth,” said Cart. “No, that won’t do. A Commination—what’s that?—or Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgments Against Sinners. That looks more like it. I think we’d better use that. The rest is all Prayers at Sea and ordaining bishops.”
Sally made a gesture she hoped was folding her nonexistent arms and stayed hovering among the feathers on the Rude Rug. Nothing they could do would induce her to leave. She was their sister, for goodness’ sake!
Nevertheless, when Fenella thumped upstairs with the matches, and Imogen was induced—by means of a very unkind prod from Cart—to sit up shakily holding the smoking, flickering fungoid candle, Sally had a sudden feeling of uneasiness. It was not serious. It was as if she had lost something just a little important, like a book or a pen. But it was definite. When Fenella took up the fat cup-shaped cowbell and began to clank it backward and forward, the feeling increased. Sally felt frightened and lost and somehow desperate.
“Will it work without a priest?” Fenella said through the clanks.
“We have to will it to,” said Cart. She began to read in a pompous, priestly voice. “‘Cursed is the man that maketh any carved or molten image to worship it. And the people shall answer and say, Amen.’”
“Amen,” said Imogen and Fenella obediently.
“‘Cursed is he that curseth his father or mother. Cursed is he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark.’”
“Are you sure that’s right?” said Imogen.
“That’s what it says,” said Cart. “Perhaps I’d better skip that and get on to the solid stuff. Here we are. ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God: he shall pour down rain upon the sinners, snares, fire and brimstone, storm and tempest; this shall be their portion to drink. For lo, the Lord is come out of his place to visit the wickedness of such as dwell upon the earth.’”
The now-familiar panic began to grow in Sally. She looked from face to face. Cart’s was set and concentrated, so that the big features were no longer blurred, but clear and implacable. Fenella’s face, as she swung her bell, looked older, intense and beaky and ferocious. Imogen stared at her wavering candle with a little clear crease in her brow. She looked worried, as she always did when she was exercising her willpower. Sally knew they were all willing, willing mightily, the ghost to go away. The panic went on rising in her, and with it a sense of loss and desolation.
Cart intoned, “‘But who may abide the day of his coming? Who shall be able to endure when he appeareth? His fan is in his hand, and he will purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the barn; but he will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. The day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night.’”
And suddenly, as it had before the séance, Sally found the scene was splitting apart. Shreds of Cart, of Fenella, of Imogen and the candle swung this way and that.
“‘But let us,’” intoned Cart, “‘while we have the light, believe in the light, and walk as the children of light; that we be not cast into utter da
rkness, where is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Let us not abuse the goodness of God, who calleth us mercifully to amendment.’”
Now, with every word Cart intoned, with every clank of the cowbell, the splits in the scene grew wider. And behind the splits—Sally screamed, a soundless scream. There was a fat, shapeless gray thing there, in the darkness behind, like a cocoon, or a mummy, or a beetle grub. It was huge, and it was trying to draw her in, through the widening splits, into itself.
No! Sally shrieked. Anything rather than be drawn in by that fat gray grub. She let herself be whirled by her panic, out, along, away, through the night, she had no idea where, whirling and tumbling, until at last the panic faded. She found herself out in the dark countryside, going up the road she had first come down.
Perhaps I shall just go away again, the way I came, back into nothing, she said miserably. But there seemed no reason in that. Maybe her sisters did not want her, but there were still so many things she did not understand. She still had no idea why she was a ghost like this. She wanted to know. And while she was considering how she might find out, she was drifting steadily—almost purposefully—up the road. It was a still, mild night, scented with hay and indistinct flowers. Sally felt soothed by it. But it was so dark that she was scared at first.
Silly! she told herself. Ghosts aren’t scared of ghosts!
Besides, she soon realized, it was not utterly dark. The road glimmered, a faint grayish white between the jetty black, rustling hedges. The stars blazed overhead, like diamonds strewn on blue-black velvet, so bright that some were clearly green, or orange, or faintly blue—not the twinkly silver things Sally had always supposed they were. Some were pearly in places where small wisps of cloud hung in front of them. And when Sally raised herself above the hedges, the fields beyond were pearly, too, silvered with damp, scented mist, with black trees standing expectantly about in it.
Raised like that, Sally could clearly see the trees on the hill ahead, black against the lighter blackness of the sky. Among them was the orange square of a lighted window. Someone was in a bedroom of the farmhouse up there. Almost as Sally saw it, the orange square flicked out, leaving her dazzled. Someone had gone to bed up there. At the same time, softly tolling across the pearly fields, she heard the school clock striking midnight.
Midnight, Sally said. Ghost time. I’m legal now. And that’s Audrey’s house up there. Why don’t I go and see if I’m really there?
It was a tempting thought, but an alarming one. Sally knew still—more clearly than she knew anything else—that there had been an accident. Suppose she got to the farm only to look down on her dead body? Because, look at it how you would, something must have happened to make her a ghost.
But the obvious thing seemed to be to go and find out. Sally continued to drift between the hedges and on up the hill, where the trees reduced the road to the faintest of glimmers, until she came to the farm gates. Beyond the gates was the hot, dungy smell of farmyard. And it was a little frightening. All the animals seemed to know she was there. Sally wafted aside from the fierce grunt of a big white hunk of angry flesh, which turned out to be a white sow, and then from a spitting kitten, and from the snarl of the sheepdog. Finally, a splitting whinny from Audrey’s pony sent her through the farmhouse walls into the safety of the close air indoors. It was fuggy in there and smelled of polish.
Here she was bewildered. She could not remember ever being in this house in her life. She found the stairs, old and dark and covered with new carpet, smelling of newness, and more new carpet lining a crooked corridor upstairs. She stopped, suspended at the head of the stairs, with no idea where to look. A faint idea she had had that her body would naturally draw her to it drizzled away from her. It was obviously not like that.
Then two things happened. First, it was suddenly lighter. Long silver rays fell through a window somewhere off to the right and reached down the crooked corridor. The moon had risen. Its light was not clear. The shapes of the swaying trees outside tumbled within the beams, but it gave enough light to turn the corridor into somewhere Sally remembered faintly. Instead of being fuggy, the smell of new carpet seemed clean and pungent. On the walls and on tables at the sides of the corridor, the white rays were picked up and turned yellow in the surfaces of polished brass ornaments. There were horse brasses, oil lamps, ship’s wheels, a stand of bells, and flat shapes of sailing ships. Sally remembered these. She remembered Fenella—why had Fenella been there?—looking at the brass things with admiration.
“Isn’t it posh?” Fenella had said. “Fancy having your upstairs as pretty as your downstairs! When I’m a lady, I shall have things like these all over my house.”
Remembering this, Sally had a dim feeling that Audrey’s house had inspired the exhibition of paintings in their own bedroom.
Then the second thing happened. Down at the end of the corridor a toilet flushed. The noise was so loud and so sudden that Sally whirled away half downstairs again. There, through the noise of rushing water, she was just able to hear footsteps—footsteps which set the old boards under the new carpet creaking—but not too much or too many. Just four or five light footsteps, followed by the creak of an old door not quite shutting.
Sally was upstairs and along the corridor in a flash. Those footsteps had to belong to someone young. Probably to Audrey. At the end of the corridor the toilet cistern was still gushing and glopping away, and nearly opposite, an old door was still slightly moving. Sally slid through the dark wood into a warm, airy room. She was aware of pretty print curtains fluttering against the dim moonlight of an open window and then of two sets of quiet breathing.
Two people. Definitely.
Sally hung there while she located the breathing and then the warmth and the electric life feeling from two beds, one at the dark end of the room, the other in the moonlight under the window. The one in the dark bed was Audrey. Sally recognized her—though not as someone she knew particularly well. Audrey had a large, warm presence, that of a person comfortable within herself, and a surprising amount of straight black hair spread out on a floral pillow. Looking at the hair and listening to the slight, gentle breathing, Sally recollected why it had been Fenella admiring the brass ornaments. Audrey had been Fenella’s friend at first. Fenella had struck up an acquaintance with Audrey because Audrey had a pony. Fenella was mad on horses. Then her sisters had been brought along to be shown the pony and the posh house. Audrey was the same age as Sally, though not in Sally’s class at school, and Sally had—to put it crudely—taken Audrey over. From the unfamiliar feel of the sleeping Audrey, Sally thought this could not have been very long ago.
But this meant that the person in the other bed was herself. Well, at least she was alive, Sally thought, hovering up to the humped shape under the covers. For some reason, the bodily Sally had pulled the covers up over her head, just like Imogen earlier, and almost nothing of her showed except a tuft of hair. That hair surprised Sally by being much fairer than she expected. She had had a notion that she was dark, like Fenella.
Perhaps I’m not Sally after all, she said.
As she said this, she realized that the person in this bed was not asleep. The breathing was too heavy and irregular. And the fizzing of the life feeling coming off her was not gentle, like Audrey’s, but fierce and gusty. She was the one who went to the toilet, plainly. But now she was not settling back to sleep; she was—waiting for something.
And that time had arrived. A hand emerged from the bedclothes—a hand which was neither familiar nor unfamiliar—crackling so with life and suspense that Sally was forced to move backward. The hand seized the covers and flung them back, and the bodily Sally got out of bed in one clean, rolling movement. Cre-eak went the old floor as she stood up.
Sally hovered away backward from her in total amazement. She was dressed, in jeans and an old sweater, for one thing. She was obviously planning to do something. But Sally’s main astonishment was that this girl looked like a normal person. After seeing her three sisters, she had
not expected anyone in the family to look normal. This girl was thin, but she was not a witch-insect like Fenella, and she was quite tall, at least as tall as Imogen, but not as large as Cart. Her face, in the moonlight, was quite pretty, though it was not as striking as Imogen’s angel beauty, because the girl had dark eyebrows and a slight hawk look inherited from Himself. But Sally found her unexpectedly good-looking, all the same. Her hair indeed seemed to be fair. The less-than-good-looking thing about her was that she had the awkward figure of a thirteen-year-old, when a person’s back curves to make way for hips she had not got, and the rest of her is straight up and down, and instead of a bosom she has a chest with lumps on it. Sally found that made her feel sorry for this unexpected girl. But her main feeling was surprise. She had expected something much more peculiar.
The bodily Sally, after standing for a second, put out a cautious foot. The old timbers of the floor responded at once with a gentle groan. The girl froze. But it was too late. The sleeping shape of Audrey fizzed, heaved, rose up. She said, in a high, whining voice, blurred with sleep, “What are you doing now, Sally?”
“Only going to the loo,” the bodily Sally answered. The voice surprised Sally as much as the rest. It was a clear, pleasant voice.
“But you’ve only just been!” grumbled Audrey.
“No, that was an hour ago,” the bodily Sally lied, quietly and firmly. “You’ve been asleep since then. Go back to sleep. I shan’t be a moment.”
Audrey seemed to accept this. She gave a groan, not unlike the floorboards, and heaved round to face the wall. She was asleep as soon as she lay down.
The ghostly Sally heard the breath come out of the mouth of the bodily Sally, in a gasp of relief. Then she saw her walk firmly and lightly across the creaking floor and slip round the door she had carefully not shut before. Sally followed, out of the room, along the crooked, brass-glinting corridor and down the creaking stairs.
Where am I going? I mean, what are you doing? she said. She was now thoroughly perplexed. Not the least of her troubles was that she could not bring herself to think of this girl firmly creeping through Audrey’s house as herself. She knew the girl was Sally. There had been no mistake there. Yet she had no sense of identity with her. She had no idea what this Sally thought and felt. She seemed just someone else she was forced to hover and watch, as she had watched Sally’s sisters.
The Time of the Ghost Page 9