by Tanith Lee
So then. This fairly-well-orientated child who, presumably, despite a sad premature bereavement, and the re-wedding of her mother, grew up into a confident adult. How did this kid finish by killing herself at exactly the same age her father had been when Death broke him in two over one cruel skeletal knee?
Well I was happy in my twenties, too, and in my early thirties I sort of took wing. I was young enough, and attractive, and I had lovers when I wanted them. And my work, the painting and sculpture, were getting some recognition, and also earning quite well. I was never snobby. I was happy to do book-jackets too, album covers and posters, and a few portraits. I had several quite successful exhibitions in Cardiff and Manchester, and eventually two in London. My statue of Daphne turning into a shrub, (to escape from the lustful god Apollo), was put up in Greenwich Park, near the Meridian. Although unfortunately, there was a fault with something in the plinth and in the hurricane of 1987 Daphne, part verdure or not, was blown right off and smashed in chunks. Of course, I’d been smashed off my plinth a few years myself, by then. I saw it on TV here, about the statue, and thought I didn’t care. But later – can ghosts cry? This one can. It just seemed so mean, somehow. Mean of something. A stupid way to think.
Anyway, I was thirty-seven when I met Steven. He was thirty-six, tall and strong, with a lion’s mane of thick, pale brown hair down to his shapely bum. I used to love that, you know. Not bums, necessarily. The way the men had been enabled to grow their hair long, and wear lace shirts and stuff like that. It seemed an age of grace but it didn’t last. Not much does.
Steven and I got together at once. As I said I’d had plenty of lovers by then, no strings, a terrific time had by all, and very few harsh partings. But with Steven it was different. He moved in with me at my little pad at Blackheath.
One wonderful summer. I won’t describe it. If you’ve ever had a summer like that, you’ll know. And if you haven’t, well that’s a shame, and I’m not going to upset you. Don’t be jealous. After summer the gold leaves fell and the nights drew in like vultures, and my latest exhibition was cancelled due to ‘Lack of Interest’. And Steven, who had charmingly and appreciatively and extravagantly lived off me, turned sullen and unpleasant and next met somebody else. He and the autumn left Blackheath together. I think he and his new lover went to live in Paris. I hope the fucking Eiffel Tower fell on the pair of them. (Though it probably didn’t. Even dead, I’d maybe have heard.)
Oh, you say, so you went into a Gothic decline over lost love and pined away for three or four years and then ended it all. It wasn’t that straightforward. It wasn’t just love and summer that ended. The exhibition was the first, and then the book illustration contract, that was also cancelled, and the burglar broke in and wrecked the place, and the mess-up with my allowance ‘happened’, so I ceased to get it, and my mother was shrieking down the phone from her house in Spain that I was a parasite and she couldn’t afford to keep me any more. And the money Steven had stolen out of my account, that too, around seven thousand pounds. And the leak in the kitchen roof I couldn’t afford to fix. And breaking two of my fingers, (index, middle), on my right hand when a piece of metal resisted the electric tool I was using and erupted, crushing them, and they didn’t mend straight, and it wasn’t the awful way they looked, I didn’t care too much about that – just that I couldn’t work properly any more. Not that, by then, anybody seemed to want my work.
My fortieth birthday arrived, and it was just as if those three bridging years had all been one. One long winter of short hopeless days and frozen nights. My ‘friends’ had all gone too, flown off like migrating birds who avoid the initial contaminating touch of frost. No friends. No lovers. No family. There were four or five bad paintings I did, that looked as if a demented and talentless child had made them. I’d left my flat by then. Had to. Just a room. That sort of thing. Over a main road that roared and screamed and provided violent accidents – as my neighbours said, from four a.m. until four the next morning.
On my birthday I took myself, all alone – I couldn’t budget for anyone else, nor was there anyone, to a beautiful restaurant I’d sometimes formerly gone to in Putney. The meal was delicious, wine fine. Everyone was happy. Everyone else. Those strangers at other tables. But I did my best, and then went home quite early, on the racketing train smelling of other people’s inebriation, excited hope, and utter exhaustion.
I got another job that year. I worked in a big store that sold everything and nothing, in the novelties department. No, I’m not even going to talk about it.
You do what you can, if you can, when and how you can. Somewhere, as forty ticked away towards forty-one, a man picked me up in a cafe, and when I realised I really was expected to sleep with him, couldn’t, and wouldn’t, I escaped in a cab. The driver was mad and kept on telling me the world was going to end soon, and I said, “Good”. But that meant nothing to him, and his prophecy nothing to me. (It was almost fifty years ahead of its time any way.)
I didn’t celebrate my forty-first birthday.
But I dreamed about my father as by then I hadn’t for years. He looked old and frail and unhappy. He said I had betrayed him, I was a bitch, a monster. I had caused his heart attack by my unspeakable (and unspecified) crimes and nastinesses.
This dream was so unjust, so hideous, I couldn’t shake it. I was forty-one, and he had been forty-one. Had anything about his death been my fault? What? How? When? Perhaps he had mistaken me for my mother, who had changed so much she had become unknown to me, and with whom, since the ‘parasite’ business, I had had no contact. But I wasn’t like her. I was like Dad. My dad. My dad.
I don’t know how long it went on. I’ve heard about it since, that sort of weakening and inertia. Decline and fall. I killed myself with sleeping tablets and gin in the spring of 1970-something. Can’t remember quite the year – ‘73? ‘4? ‘5? But I was forty-one. Was I? Yes, I was forty-one.
It didn’t hurt. I wasn’t afraid. I thought I’d sleep forever. But I woke up here.
And why here, this place part castle, part old mansion, part past and part present? Like a glowing sunny yellow submarine floating in a murky subterranean sea, far down below the margins of life and the world.
It was when I was about fifteen, (thirteen?), around then. My mother had read about the house and semi-attached ruined fort in some book, and said we might go and see it. My father liked old houses too, and so we went. That is, we came here, and saw.
I can remember it in the sunshine, a spring afternoon. There had been rain, but that stopped. Now rain drops only sparkled in the trees and on the grass and shrubs as we approached, uphill, and the sun was fully out. Frankly, easy-going and pleased teenager that I was, I liked travelling anywhere. Especially with them, my pretty, elegant mother and handsome father who, though ‘something in the city’, looked more like an actor from the Old Vic, or (a later era still to come) Olivier’s theatre on the South Bank.
I don’t remember all of it, the house. I know I liked it back then.
It seemed, we were told, from the 1600’s until Victorian times, the house had been owned by a single continuing family. Holland, I think, was their name.
We went round the big rooms with their recreated semi-souls, the occasional anachronisms, or other things not quite right – none of which, then, I took in or criticised; my father I suspect did see and note them, but did not spoil the adventure by pontificating. My mother probably did not notice anything amiss. Her yardstick would be Hollywood movie-sets. Brilliant pianist, but a bit of a soppy date, my mother, frankly. (And I only began to see that plainly in my twenties, though other things rather earlier.) There were too however, extraordinary moments at the house, of the ancient, even the eldritch. A portrait-hung corridor, for example, (posed Holland on Holland), that began around 16-something, and then wound down into the castle end, changing, galvanised, into pure blank stone, and a round room at the end, with arrow-slits filled by aquamarine shards of sky. Below, the tumble of the far side of the hi
ll. And woods beyond. From here they had fired out the bladed shafts to kill and maim any enemy approaching. The room impressed me. Some memory seemed caught in it. Anger and determination... God knew. But there had been feuds and to spare in the castle’s past.
Later, when we’d done the indoor tour, we thought, before ‘doing’ the gardens, we’d have one of the cream teas in the tearooms – not to be missed – there was still post-war rationing, and real local cream and jam would be a treat indeed.
My father went ahead and my mother and I stopped at a discreet ‘Ladies’ to one side, just off the main house hall. (Later, before I – came back, as it were – these buildings, loos and orangery and café, were closed and turned into offices for the admin and recreation of the restored house.)
I wanted to comb my hair, which I’d started to wear rather long. My mother, bored and thirsty, left me to it. When I came out, I paused a moment in the hall, and glanced up the great sturdy flex of the stairway. Oddly, or maybe not, no one else was there right then. And then, someone was.
She was standing about halfway up the stair, and I noticed that where she stood, somehow, was a dark crimson runner or carpet, with ornate goldeny edges, which had not, and still was not, apparent anywhere else on the stair. But this sort of melted out, and then there was only the girl, standing, looking at me in a quietly bemused way.
I thought she was about my age – thirteen, fifteen, something like that. But she was dressed in the sort of clothes I now know belonged some thirty years before. A deep blue costume, long straight skirt just clear of her ankles, a little, waisted jacket and a white blouse. Her rich brown hair, unlike mine, was firmly pinned up on her head. Her grey eyes were sober, and sad.
“Hello,” I said. But I was rather uneasy. I thought there might be a party going on, fancy-dress, and therefore I was certainly out of bounds, and intruding. She didn’t answer. She shook her head, very gently, as if to say, I’m sorry, but I don’t speak your language. And she turned, and went up the stair – or she began to. After I think three steps, she vanished. It wasn’t like the carpet, that soft melt-away. One second she was visible, quite real, human. And then... nobody was there.
I was a bit quiet over our tea. And when we went out to see the gardens, I wasn’t concentrating entirely, though I remember the fruit trees, all pruned (hacked) back, as if they should never be allowed to properly produce blossom, or leaves, let alone fruit, again. (Of course, they would. Some of them are still here, wild now, and very active.)
Next it began to rain again. We beat it to the car, and drove off, only stopping once at a pub, (adults were allowed to drink and drive then), for a couple of gins for my parents and some lemonade concoction for me.
It was in the evening, two or three hours after we had got home. The night was turning chill, but the woman who ‘helped out’ had laid a fire in the sitting room. My father had lit it, and my mother had drunk a sherry on top of the two gins, and gone prettily to sleep on the sofa.
My father said to me, “Are you all right, Lizzie? You’ve been a bit quiet, haven’t you?”
I sat, and looked at him, and then I said, “I think I saw a ghost.”
Unlike Mum, who would have, in friendly amusement, mocked me and laughed, he only widened his beautiful dark eyes and said, “Really? You lucky girl. I suppose this was in the house?”
“Yes.” I told him, without adornment, or shyness, about the girl in the long blue skirt, the melting runner, the vanishment.
He listened, watching me closely and attentively in a way he had, not – never – as if trying to fault or catch me out, but as if not to miss a single nuance of my emotion and reaction.
When I’d finished, he sighed, He looked down at his hands, lying quietly together. “As I said, lucky. What a wonderful thing to have seen – to have been able to see. Not everybody can see ghosts, you know. I never have. I’m jealous – no, I’m not. I admire you. Well done, Lizbeth. You make me proud.”
A couple of days I think after, I asked him what he thought a ghost really was. He said it might be a variety of things. Some were recordings on the air, a sort of photograph taken and sometimes stored, due to enormous passion, or horror, or even love, on the lens of time, and kept for a long while, or even forever perhaps, in that area where the powerful moment had occurred. But other types of ghosts truly did seem to be the personalities – if not the actual spirits – of people who had died there, or even elsewhere, he had heard of this too – but they came back to that spot – that particular hill or street or house, because it had for them some special meaning. And then again it seemed some ghosts really were the life force, the soul or spirit, that had lingered. Either it didn’t credit its physical life was done, and so went on acting it out until, eventually one hoped, it got the message and moved on. Or else it had simply been so happy there it insisted on remaining a few years, or centuries, longer. And if it had been traumatised, the same thing might happen too. It was unable to escape – which was where some form of exorcism might be helpful.
How gracious and how magical he was, that man. My father. How I loved him. I don’t think I ever, while I lived, loved anyone, even Steven – when I did love him – so well, so deeply. But he died, my dad. And if he haunted anywhere, I never found it. Perhaps, even though he’d loved me, he was just glad to get completely free of it all, and us, me too, in the end.
Yet obviously that’s why I came back here after I died: my father and the visit to the house. What he said. His sweetness .
I hadn’t meant to do anything like this. Nothing was further from my plans. Or – nearer. I wanted Nothingness. A bit of peace.
But there was a kind of gliding, as if, half asleep, my bed, or the train carriage I was seemingly snoozing in, was skating calmly through the depths of night. And in a while I ‘woke up’, there is no other way I can describe it. And here I was.
I wandered a while through the house and into the ruins and around the gardens and the hill. And when the sun rose I went indoors and sat on a chair, which naturally I didn’t at all do, since we pass through furniture and everything else; it takes an act of will, even unconsciously, to keep us even standing or walking on the floors or the ground. Not difficult, only peculiar...
I wasn’t frightened. I knew what had happened. And in a while more I met the others, or at least the two girls; Laurel, who I’d seen before in my teens when she had stood on the staircase, then turned, gone up three stairs and vanished. And Coral, who had died some time before Laurel, as Laurel had died some fifty-plus years before me. I met the Knight last of all, though he was the first here. And we all met our Scholarly librarian almost forty years after, when the book killed him in the library.
And then, of course, the other thing started.
2020. Year of the Apocalypse.
Progress Report
You’ll doubt this, but when I first saw them I laughed. Oh, not absolutely at first. That was on the TV news bulletin before the signal failed, and then all electric power went. But when they began to turn up here...
Well, I had nothing to fear, presumably, unlike any live human in a living flesh-and-blood body, who has every physical reason to fear them utterly.
And they do look so incongruous.
Clumsy and wilful and repulsive and useless.
Staggering along in the woods or through the amok fields, or about on the road. They keep falling over, or crashing into things. Now and then bits of them fall off. They aren’t all rotting exactly, though some have gone farther than others before the zomboid force, or whatever one calls it, got them going again
But they have no coordination, no mental power – how could they have? These are the dead without any soul or spirit at all.
Mostly, then, they came and went, floundering about, sometimes even getting into the rampant orchard and flailing through the boughs, fruit raining – and ignored. They rarely caught any animals – or if they did, nine times out of ten they let them go out of sheer discoordination. There was so
metimes a single casualty. I try not to think about that. It goes without saying where they got hold of people they tore them up, biting off bits, and left them dead. (Glad to say I only saw examples of that on TV.) But the killed corpses, empty but contaminated with this ridiculous and illogically motivating plague, would presently get up too and start crashing and sprawling about like the originals that had killed them.
They seem to have no real goal. Well, they wouldn’t have, would they? No heart, no soul, no brain – just random left-over mental impulses. Of all the deaths that have been visited on the human race, this has to be the most pointless. Grossly disgusting yet utterly inane.
No ghosts seem to have resulted either. No one like the five of us.
Maybe a good thing, that.
There are now a few of them anyway, that seem to hang around – whereas mostly, before, they came and went, moving in and then on, in random, lumbering surges.
There are three I’ve seen a lot of in the past two months. Indescribably repellent, but with odd characteristics. I’ve given them names. Yes, I’m perverse. I always was, alive or dead.
There’s Ugg – he looks to me somehow like a caveman in some old (bad) film. Or Dug – he’s always digging at tree roots with what’s left of his hands. And Jug, who has jug ears – or only one, now. He appears to have lost the other since I christened him.
So far, they – none of them – have actually properly entered the house. I don’t know why not. I suppose it’s only a matter of time?
Something to look forward to. (Ha.)
Ha.
3
Laurel
It is rather silly, perhaps, for me to write about myself, even as I was, before I stopped being a physical person. I don’t like the word died. I never did, nor any of the odd ways other people employ, as perhaps they still do, to veil over the fact of death. For example, I hate the expression ‘passed away’, and, much worse, the terms ‘gone to God’, or ‘taken by the angels’, as though they had been kidnapped. In a strange fashion it’s as if I partly knew that would never happen for me. I was nothing, when living, only an ignorant and unnecessary extra female in our household, where my mother had already borne a daughter and a son for my father. I was a nuisance, then, requiring extra education and extra clothing, and sometimes doctor’s visits, and food. I was an expense which, although quite well off, my parents could certainly have done without. While, in other ways, even as I grew, plainly I was never going to be an asset. I was neither clever nor pretty, as, on both counts, my elder sister, Constance, was. I had no talent for singing or the piano, could not efficiently embroider or sew as both my mother and sister could. At my ordinary lessons I was slow. I could not even read passably well until my tenth birthday, and never well aloud. In company I was tongue-tied, as I think they say. I’d blush and stammer, and sometimes, anticipating some party, at Christmas, say, held here in the old house, I would be sick with nervous agitation beforehand. Once I fainted quite away, and in falling broke a flower vase, a favourite of my mother’s, quite irreplaceable.