The Ghost Writer

by John Harwood

  To: Alice.Jesseli@hotmail.com

  Subject: None

  Date: Fri, 13 August 1999 11:54:03 +0100 (BST)

  I've just made the most appalling discovery in the Family Records Centre…

  'Gerard.' A slow, insinuating whisper at my back. From the shadows at the far end of the room, an indistinct figure, shrouded in flowing white, detached itself from the wall and glided to the door. Draperies swirled; the door closed; a key turned in the lock. As the figure moved towards the circle of light I saw that she was tall and statuesque and veiled like a bride; a long white veil, floating above a great cascading cloud of chestnut hair that flowed on down over her shoulders exactly as it had in so many dreams of Alice. Her arms were entirely concealed by long white gloves, and her gown, too, was white, gathered high at the waist. Small flowers showed beneath the fringes of the veil, between coiling strands of hair; small purple flowers, embroidered across the bodice of her gown.

  'My questing knight,' she whispered. 'Now you can claim your prize.'

  'W HO ARE YOU?'

  'I'm Alice, of course. Aren't you going to kiss me?' It was the voice I had heard from the gallery, intimate, lingering, with an icy hiss on the sibilant, and an eerie after-echo, as if two-or several-voices were whispering in unison.

  The figure moved towards me. I retreated around the desk until it halted a few paces away. No trace of features showed through the veil.

  'You don't seem very pleased to see me, Gerard. Is it because I'm dead?'

  I made an incoherent sound.

  'I died, you see-perhaps I forgot to mention that. In the accident with my parents. But I still want you, Gerard. Body and soul. For ever and ever.'

  The floor dipped and swayed. I gripped the edge of the desk and tried to will myself awake, but the veiled figure refused to dissolve. This isn't real.

  'Oh but it is.' I did not think I had spoken aloud. I wanted to run for the curtains behind me, but I knew I would fall if I let go of the desk.

  'You're not thinking of leaving, Gerard? That would be so rude. We haven't even made love yet. And you've always said you wanted me so much.'

  She moved a little closer.

  'Shall I take off my veil, Gerard? Or don't you like dead women? No? Would you rather run away? There's a balcony behind you: you can throw yourself over.'

  The veiled figure began to circle around the desk towards me. As it came closer still, I saw that it moved with a strange, jerky rhythm-glide and halt, glide and halt-as if it had stepped from the screen of a silent film.

  I backed away, keeping the desk between us until I bumped against the open drawer containing Viola's manuscript. For an instant I saw my mother's Medusa face in the bedroom doorway, contorted with fear and fury. The formless suspicions of the past four days flared like the papers I had burned in the cellar.

  'You're-you're Miss Havi-Hamish,' I blurted. 'You found Anne's body in the cellar and then-' went mad.

  We had come full circle around the desk. The veiled figure halted.

  'It's you that's mad, Gerard. You've been mad for years. That's why you can see me.'

  'No! You loved her-Anne-you wanted revenge. You traced my mother to Mawson, posted the story-the pages you found in the cellar-and then-why didn't you go to the police?'

  For the first time, I heard the hiss of breathing.

  'It's your story, Gerard. Your bedtime story: you finish it. And then we'll play here comes a candle to light you to bed.'

  She was at least as tall as I was. The veil rustled and stirred: cliches about maniacs having the strength of ten came horribly to mind.

  'But I never hurt Anne,' I said desperately. 'I didn't even know she existed until you wrote to me.'

  'We all have to pay, Gerard. Unto the third generation. You know that.'

  'Then why did you spare my mother? Why didn't you go to the police?'

  You know what they say, Gerard, about a dish best eaten cold. There you both were, rotting away in Mawson, wasting your lives… and what would poor Alice have done, without her lover?'

  The room lurched and spun. She must have been insane from the start: had she dragged Anne's body out of the cellar and buried her in the back garden instead of dialling 999?

  'How did you know where to look for Anne's body?'

  Silence. She was no more than six feet away, almost near enough to lunge across the top of the monitor.

  'Anne didn't die in the cellar,' she said at last. 'That was for your benefit.' The voice had taken on a deep, rasping note. 'She had nine operations and seven years of radiation treatment. Radiation, for radiation burns. Therapy, they called it. Worse than the torments of hell. You saw where your mother hid the machine. She left it on all night, six inches from Anne's head. They skinned her alive, trying to stop the cancer. And then she died.'

  'But-but you said in your letter,' I began, and stopped dead. Most of what I thought I knew had come from that letter. All false, all fake; all bait for the trap she had set. Like that last desperate message in the cellar. Like Alice.

  'All fake,' I said numbly. 'Everything I found here.'

  'No, Gerard; only the message in the cellar. Everything else is real.'

  'You stole my life,' I said.

  'Your mother stole mine. But at least the baby died-his baby, the one she really loved-

  'Died-how?'

  'Pneumonia. Alice would have given you that certificate, if you'd asked her nicely. And remember, Gerard, you enslaved yourself. I didn't force you. Think of the life-all the girls you could have had. Instead you chose to be my eyes and ears, my puppet. My adoring puppet.'

  I shuddered, swallowing a wave of nausea.

  'Why did you let me out?'

  'You set fire to my house; one has to improvise. And now it's time to put the puppet back in his box. The machine still works, you see.'

  'You can't mean… you can't make me-'

  'Can't I?'

  She made as if to circle the desk again. My knees shook wildly; I realised I was gripping the desk with both hands. Through the shrouded layers of material, I caught the outline of something dark and formless: it did not look like a face.

  'You really don't like dead women, do you, Gerard? Shall I take off my veil now?'

  'NO!' The word echoed around the room.

  'That's not very flattering, Gerard. I think I'd better see you off to bed now. In Anne's room. You can crawl, if you like. And then in the morning, I might even let you go.'

  I became aware of a low, muffled keening. It sounded like wind in the trees outside. Somewhere a small, distant voice was saying that beneath the veil was an elderly woman called Abigail Hamish who, however crazed, could not actually stop me if I could find the strength to run. But I knew that my legs would not carry me; and that if the veiled figure caught me, I would die of terror.

  And if I obeyed her, I would die as slowly and hideously as Anne Hatherley had done. I thought of the fluoroscope waiting in its lair below, and in that instant-as in the instant before a car crash, when time stalls and you seem to slide ever so slowly toward the point of impact-I saw the tangle of cords hidden beneath the bed in my mother's old room, the ragged edges where the pages had been torn from Anne's diary, and understood at last how I had been led, every step of the way. I had assumed that my mother had torn out those pages, carefully preserving the evidence of her affair with Hugh Montfort, and then restored the diary to its hiding-place. I had seen, without understanding, that whenever my mother switched on her bedside lamp, the fluoroscope would have come on too. Flooding both sides of the partition with X-rays from the unshielded tube…

  But the lightbulb was blown. The thought hovered for an instant, but made no sense. Just as I had stared at the advertisement for Hugh Montfort, late of Endsleigh Gardens, without once considering that my mother, alone and pregnant, might have asked the solicitor to place it. Thinking that Hugh had abandoned her when he too was already dead. Under the cellar floor, perhaps.

  And no record of Anne's dea
th, and not one mention of Abigail Hamish in Anne's diary.

  I tried to keep you safe.

  'You killed Hugh Montfort.'

  I could hear my pulse ticking like a demented clock.

  The veiled figure stirred.

  'He came crawling back here,' she whispered, whining for forgiveness. And then he was in such a hurry to get away, he fell down the stairs…' I couldn't catch the rest, only something that might have been 'accident'.

  'And Anne,' I said. 'You killed her too.'

  'In a way,' she said, and raised her gloved hands to her veil.

  'Filly slept in the attic that night. Where she slept with him.'

  And then, almost inaudibly, 'There was no light under her door, you see. I thought I was safe.'

  The veil floated free; the cloud of chestnut hair slipped from her shoulders and fell at her feet with a soft thud. Lamplight gleamed upon a bald, mummified head, skin stretched like crackling over the dome of the skull, with two black holes for nostrils and a single eye burning in a leprous mass of tissue, fixing me, half a life too late, with the enormity of my delusion as I saw that Alice Jessell and Anne Hatherley and Abigail Hamish were one and the same person.

  FOR A MOMENT NEITHER OF US MOVED. THE WIND HAD grown distinctly louder. The sound seemed to be coming from beneath the floor. A rushing, crackling sound. She swirled around, glided to the door, and unlocked it. I saw, as I came up behind her, an orange glow in the doorway at the foot of the attic stairs. The air was shimmering with heat.

  She stood for a moment with one hand on the doorknob, then moved calmly on to the landing. I thought she spoke, but the words were lost in the noise of the fire. Then she took hold of the banister and started down the stairs. I felt the heat on my face, and could not move. She had almost reached the landing below when a great gust of smoke came boiling up the staircase. I heard myself cry 'Alice!' and fell to my knees, choking. A blast of hot air followed; the smoke cleared, and I saw through streaming eyes that there was no one on the stair.

  Then the smoke boiled up again, and I was forced back into the room, slamming the door as I went. The desk lamp shone blue through the smoke; blind instinct sent me crawling towards the curtains behind the desk. I dragged them apart and saw French windows, a narrow terrace, the night sky; and beyond a low parapet, a faint flickering gleam on the nearest treetops. I threw open the doors, breathed fresh air. The trapped smoke began to clear.

  But where was the fire brigade? All I could hear was the muffled rumbling of the fire: no sirens, no voices, no alarms. Vertigo seized me; I crawled across to the parapet, a plain brick wall barely two feet high. Even lying almost prone behind it, I found myself gripping the top of the wall with all my strength. Gravity seemed to have altered; I felt the outward pull, the impending headlong plunge to the glass roof of the conservatory far below. Lit by the pulsing glare of the flames in the stairwell and the four great windows of the library, the encircling wall of vegetation looked more than ever like jungle. Despite the ferocity of the blaze, it was evidently still concealed from the neighbouring houses and the Heath. None of the glass appeared to have broken yet, but it could not be long now.

  And there was no fire escape. The terrace ran the width of the house, bounded at both ends by the steep descending angle of the roof. The only possibility would be a wild leap from the corner to my left, where the jungle along the edge of the courtyard came nearest to the house, into the crown of the nearest tree. I tried to imagine myself doing it, and the terrace seemed to slide from under me.

  Still no sound of sirens. The fire must still be confined to the back of the house; it would have raced up the rear stairwell and spread outwards from there. Perhaps there was another way. I retreated from the parapet, managed to stand, stumbled back into the room. The air was hotter, the roar and crackle of the flames much closer; a line of orange light was flickering beneath the door to the landing.

  The desk lamp still shone. I looked at my letters to Alice, my wasted life; thought of Violas library blazing below. There was one thing I wanted to save. I seized Viola's typescript and thrust it inside the front of my shirt, thinking, this is what Anne did, and then, but that never happened either.

  Which way? Oily black smoke was seeping under the landing door. I had no idea what lay beyond the other door, in the darkness at the far end of the room. Better to fall than burn. I ran back through the French windows on to the terrace, to the brink of that dreadful plunge. I saw the wreck of the pavilion, bathed in flickering light. I thought of Alice, Miss Hamish, Staplefield, everything I thought I'd known: all phantoms, all gone. With nothing to hold me to the earth, and no life to relive, what was there left to fear? I could simply close my eyes and dive, and vanish in a flash of light.

  Then the world breathed fire and my feet carried me, not over the edge but along the terrace and up and over into a dark confusion of tearing branches and a jolt that left me winded and sprawled backwards, but somehow attached to the tree. Through the hole smashed by my fall, I saw flames rising above the parapet. Small tongues of flame began to detach themselves and soar above the main fire, more and more of them, like flocks of fiery birds, flaring and rising and vanishing into the night sky. I felt the weight of the manuscript tugging at my shirt, and began precariously to descend.

  ***

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