Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  “Lots of people don’t dream, and go back a second. What do you mean, made a spirit?”

  He swallows as if his mouth is dry, then he says, “What do you know about ghosts?”

  “Oh, this is a ghost story now?”

  “No, Mrs Newton, it is a story about many ghosts. When you died you made a ghost. It calls itself Louise.”

  “I am still alive. How can I have a ghost?”

  “Oh, I see. You think a person has to be dead for them to have a ghost. That’s okay; most people think they’re psychic residue, after-images of a life, but that’s not true. We coexist with a number of entities, some of whom we can’t see. Others can be seen, but they hide or camouflage, but we won’t bother about those. Some of these entities follow humans around unseen, taking on all our attributes. When the human dies those attributes stick to the entity, and it appears to the human’s relatives or wreaks havoc when it’s angry at something. This is what we talk about when we speak of ghosts, but that’s not what should bother you.”

  “What should bother me?”

  “That almost every ghost story is a murder mystery.”

  15.

  THIS IS A simple matter. It is a straight line from the sofa to the door, and Harry has been trying to leave the room for fifteen minutes now. He is in a state of controlled panic, inner turmoil, outward stillness. He walks, but the door seems farther away than when he started. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. He imagines the room as he agreed on it with the architect. Rectangular space, bay windows, bright off-white walls, curve-screen TV on west wall, hidden speaker system, hub for music programming, soft carpet for horsing around, ornamental bookshelves. He opens his eyes and sees this, except the long sides of the rectangle are longer than he could imagine, about half a mile, which is ridiculous because the house isn’t that long or deep.

  Not only is the room longer, it is now wider. The carpet has grown with it and the art on the wall—splashes of paint framed, makes no sense – is disappearing from view. The sofa is impossibly deep, but it is not necessarily moving. The laptop is in the same position. As the room gets larger, it seems darker, as if there is not enough light to illuminate the rapidly changing dimensions.

  Harry tries to reach the laptop, or rather his phone, which is under it. He cannot. It is always just out of reach.

  “I’m dreaming.”

  This sort of thing only happens in dreams. The knowledge relaxes Harry somewhat. When vague shapes form in the darkened four corners of the room he is not perturbed.

  16.

  “THE HOUSE YOUR husband bought has an extensive history,” says the man. “It used to be a foster home for girls. The lady who ran it was an occultist called...” He pauses to attend to whispers from behind the screen. “Madame Welther. She used the foster kids for rituals, especially possession rituals. She liked to call up demons for her patrons so that they would divulge secrets. It never worked, but one of her techniques was to starve the children to exhaustion, at which point she assumed they would be more receptive to an alien consciousness.”

  “Aliens?” Tara cannot keep the disbelief from her voice.

  “Not extraterrestrials, Mrs Newton. Just consciousnesses that did not belong to the children. She did this for some years, gained some minor celebrity status until seven of her girls died. It was hushed up, but the story was the children starved to death.”

  Tara starts to think of Adrienne’s stint of starving and vomiting.

  “A year later she died in a mysterious accident. There were horrific burns, although the house was fine. Since her death there have been alternating untimely deaths at the property or happening to people who live there, one year children, another year adults. You have to look carefully to see the pattern, but it is there.”

  “And this is happening why?”

  “Because, Mrs Newton, there are two factions of spirits in that house, one from Madame Welther and her descendants, the other from the seven children she starved to death. One year Madame Welther uses her influence to kill a child, the next the children find cat’s paws to do an adult in. This has been going on since the 1800s and it is very reliable. The last Welther to reside in the property was called Adam, and he lived in the 1970s. He was killed by a bunch of drug-crazed kids who beat him nearly to death, set fire to the property, took him into the woods and hanged him. They did not rob him. When questioned they said their minds were not their own, something the press related to LSD.”

  That stupid Alan Tew song, the Hanged Man, all that nonsense was from Adam Welther. But –

  “Who’s dying this year?” asks Tara.

  17.

  IN THE GROUND floor windows of the house, faces appear. Starving girls.

  Adrienne hears them singing.

  This is the end

  Our bodies are used up

  Our minds no longer make thoughts

  We will not win.

  There is no spit in our mouths

  No breath in our chests

  No light in our eyes

  No life in our hope.

  This is not the end

  If we must go, so must others

  She who did this

  Will feel the hangman’s noose

  For the loves we will not know

  For the children we will not suckle

  For the lips we will not kiss

  For the hunger that gnaws.

  They repeat it over and over.

  “Why are they hungry?” asks Cory. “There’s food in the house.”

  Why do they not eat, thinks Adrienne, then she shouts, “Gini la mu umm?”

  Adrienne stares at one who has brown hair and sores on one half of her face. Her eyes are big and black and seem to grow larger. Adrienne is standing outside the house, but she is also swallowed up by the pupils.

  Then she sees.

  They are afraid, cold, hungry. They shiver in the dark, for the room has no lamp or heating, and the window is boarded up. None of the girls has the strength to prise the wood free. They have tried.

  Sometimes they latch onto the frame and stare out of the cracks to see people walking by. When they see a handsome man they take turns, and they carry him into their fragmentary dreams. There are four cracks, and they stand on tiptoes on the skirting, and on each other’s shoulders to see. One of them waves, even though they know they are not seen.

  They lick the floor and the walls. This is not easy as the room is full of their shed hairs, the floor looking like the balding pate of a giant. Madame Welther feeds them once a day. She opens the door and in her right hand is a bowl of porridge. She knows they are faint with hunger, but she waits, allows the smell of the food to reach their nostrils and the warmth of it to reach their skin. Then she swings back and pours it all over the floor. Sometimes she will just splash it on the walls. The girls will then rush forward and scoop what they can into their cupped hands. Over time the wall and the floor has become sweet with residue, and they lap at it even when it isn’t feeding time. They gnaw at the bed legs where there may have been some spatter. They chew off the wallpaper in no time, and the floor is shiny with their cleansing tongues.

  Every other day she brings a jug of water. Most times she will pour this on the floor as well, but on special occasions she splashes it on the ceiling with a quick jerking motion, and makes it rain. The girls open their mouths to drink, while others lap on their hands and knees. They have learned to take their nightgowns off so it does not soak up some of the water.

  The Madame throws crawling things into their room to frighten them. They would cry if they could, but there is no room for that. The slow worms, the beetles, the spiders, scuttling things that dart across the floor in silence and walk across their faces and legs with chitin, cold blood, and uncertain intent. At times she just stands there and tells them that the porridge is full of spidermilk, ground up spiders mixed with dairy.

  They make one attempt at escape.

  They plan it almost in complete silence, in near-te
lepathy. For one week they keep the porridge and water in their mouths while Madame Welther is in the room, and as soon as she slams the door shut they feed it to the strongest two of them. Every day, every meal, they all gather for this kiss of life. They form a queue, spit into first one, then the other mouth, then the next girl in line does the same. It tastes foul, but at this level of desperation it does not matter. By the sixth day both volunteers are stronger and hydrated enough to need to piss.

  Day seven. The door opens, Madame Welther stands with a bowl of porridge in one hand.

  The first girl is on her left and grabs Madame Welther’s ankle, while the second girl shoves from the right. The other girls are so dizzy with hunger they can do little but watch as their tormentor falls to the floor. The second girl grabs the pewter bowl and smashes it again and again against Madame Welther’s head. When the bowl is dented, they toss it aside and lift Madame’s head, then smash it against the floor. There is blood-stained porridge everywhere. The other girls lick this anyway. Some of them leave the room.

  Someone returns with a lit lamp. Madame Welther’s body lies prone and they douse it in oil and set fire to it. Which is when they find she is not dead and she launches herself at the girls –

  Adrienne comes to herself.

  “This house used to have a portico,” says Madame Welther. “If it were still here I would be standing under it now.” She twitches, her head jerks sideways and one of her eyes blinks. Her pupils seem so large, even in the dying light. She backs towards the house, although she does not seem to be walking. She flits, like a movie with jumps.

  Louise seems to make up her mind. “Children, stay here.”

  “You can’t leave us out in the dark,” says Adrienne.

  “Mummy says we can’t be out at this time,” says Cory.

  Up in the dormer windows, scraggly-haired children stare down at them.

  “I have bugs,” says Cory. “They don’t like bugs.”

  “Yes,” says Madame Welther. “Bring the bugs. It weakens the little bastards.”

  “Stay close to me,” says Louise. She grabs hold of Cory on one side, and Adrienne on the other. As soon as they cross the threshold, Madame Welther disappears.

  18.

  “I’M SORRY, MRS Newton, but I can’t tell you who will die this year because I do not know.”

  “I have to get home,” says Tara.

  “Irongrove Lodge isn’t your home, but you already know that. Georgian homes have the worst spirit infestations. Get your family out of there, is my advice. Good luck to you, Mrs Newton, but you must leave now. I have other matters to attend to.”

  She turns to leave.

  “One more thing,” says the man. “They are in balance. If you weaken one side, the other gets stronger. If you weaken the children spirits, Welther gets stronger. If you weaken Welther, the children get stronger.”

  “Can’t I kill them?” asks Tara.

  “You can’t kill a ghost. You can trap them, drive them out, or convince them to move on, but there’s no way to destroy them. Go in peace, Mrs Newton.”

  Go in peace. What the fuck does that mean?

  Tara makes as if to go, then she whirls, sprints towards the man.

  “Wait, what are you –?”

  She pushes him squarely in the chest, hearing the satisfying rip of the diaphanous linen that holds him in the middle of the room.

  “No, don’t...”

  It is too late. His weight brings the whole construct down, first from the ceiling, then the walls. Tara hears gasps, and she does not at first understand what she sees. The man himself becomes entangled in the excess fabric on the floor, but that’s not what confuses Tara. The room split by the screen is much more cavernous on the other side, like a hangar, or wind-tunnel. It fans outwards and loses the angles.

  It is full of people.

  Every square inch of space is occupied with men, women, and children of all descriptions. They appear to view gravity with contempt, because many stick to the ceiling. Some rotate in midair. A few view her with hostility and some remove the cloth from the man. Tara hears a rushing like a hurricane and her feet leave the ground. She screams as she is slammed against the far wall. The back of her head, her shoulder blades, her arse, her heels, all smack the hard surface hard. In her face are three rather angry... spirits?

  “Stop! Leave her,” says the man. “Right now.”

  The spirits withdraw and Tara falls to the ground. The man is standing again, and behind him, a roiling mass of entities, every single one staring at her. She feels like prey.

  “You should not have done that, Mrs Newton, but I understand your curiosity. Go away. Do not speak of this or ever return.”

  “I –”

  “Mrs Newton this place is full of spirits who want to kill you for touching me. My control over them is a carefully negotiated truce. Go away before the balance is tipped by your stupidity.”

  Tara opens the door and runs.

  19.

  HARRY STARTS TO run again. He imagines himself reaching the door and opening it. How hard can it be? His heart has that sensation of being independent of the rest of his body, like towards the end of a marathon. The blood it pumps appears to have a different consistency. How long has he been here?

  He looks to the corners of the vast room. The dark shapes that coalesced are still there, but they are becoming more defined each minute. He does not like what they are turning into and he runs yet faster than before. They are hooded, they are malignant, and they have weapons. He has nothing with which to fight back even if he was not outnumbered.

  Why can he not reach the door? It’s just over there.

  He hears noises downstairs and in that moment the room snaps back to its normal dimensions, dark shapes dissipating. The door clicks ajar, nobody on the other side, as if the wind blows it open. He falls to the carpet briefly, dripping with sweat and disbelief. Some kind of dream? A seizure? He claws himself forward, dragging himself out of the room before whatever the fuck it is starts again. Out in the corridor he kicks the door shut. He rolls onto his back, still breathing heavy. He takes a moment. Respite.

  Tara is right. Get the fuck out of this house, once and for all. Big mistake to move here. Cursed place bought with cursed money. Compensation for a crime he did not commit, but he could have. He could have. It’s not like he did not lust after Loretta. It’s not like waiting for Tara he never thought of slipping across the corridor into Loretta’s room. He didn’t do it, but he thought about it. He would never have forced her, of course. But. And then Wormwood Scrubs, a year of hell, absolute punishment, humiliations he still cannot bring himself to remember, even now. Then the reprieve, and Tara’s pity. Harry knows it is pity, but he’ll take it. Being with a woman like Tara is its own reward. Except that she seems empty when with him. With the children she is alive and vibrant, but her husband she tolerates. If she were any other woman he would have thought her in love with someone else, but that’s not it. Harry is simply not the one who quickens her heartbeat.

  I pay court to her.

  So be it. I love her.

  Harry rises. Enough fucking about. Get the children, car keys, and jet. Phone Tara on the way.

  “Harry...”

  He hears a voice, coming from upstairs. The master bedroom. The house seems poorly lit somehow. The lights are on, but they seem less bright, even though there is no dimmer (Tara thinks there is nothing tackier than dimmers and will not countenance them). He mounts the stairs with difficulty. He has pain in his heels, his calves, his thighs.

  “Harry...”

  It is a whisper, but familiar.

  He drags himself with his hands as well as pushing with his legs, and he imagines he looks like a sullen child ordered to go to bed. He is so tired.

  The lights in the bedroom are off, but he can see with the corridor illumination.

  “Harry...”

  It is Tara. She is in bed, lying in wait.

  “Harry...” she whispers, a
sound coming from her throat that inflames him.

  “I thought... weren’t you out with Betty?”

  “I want us to have the house to ourselves,” says Tara. Her face is in shadow, but he can see her legs poking out of the duvet, and her hair is a blonde waterfall cascading down her shoulders onto her breasts. His desire is immediate, and he wants her so much he can feel tears at the back of his eyes, which is an odd feeling.

  “Come to me,” she says.

  He sinks into the softness. Everything is fresh and good. Something floral. He closes his eyes. There. His clothes are gone. When did he take them off? He lays his head in the centre of her chest and her arms come around him. Strong. Always has been strong. God, he is tired. He could die here right now. She adjusts to him and he enters her. No thoughts, just warmth. This is sick. Why did he think that? How is it sick?

  He is not going to be able to pleasure her because he can already feel himself erupting. He apologises, but she shushes him, finger on his lips. Smell. Rot. Rot on the finger. Then it is gone. So tired. Sleep, right?

  “Sleep, my darling,” she says.

  Harry cannot keep his eyes open much longer and he feels himself going to Nod, but he feels the weight shift on the bed. She is getting up. He wants to see her before he drops off. He likes seeing Tara walk, and he loves seeing her walk naked.

  He opens his eyes just as she turns her back on him. At that moment the narrow shaft of light from the corridor is just in the right position for him to see her.

  His mouth goes dry and he is fully awake in seconds.

  Her back.

  There is no skin. What muscle there is hangs off her backbone, ribs and hips in tattered rags. He can see the blackness of her lungs, the vermiform pulses of her intestines, the pockmarked kidneys, the sluggish beat of a withered heart. He sees the rot and can smell it. Pus streams out and drips to the floor in off-white puddles that soak into the carpet. There are creatures too. Every bit of flesh teems with maggots, centipedes crawl in and out of her thorax, ants are busy taking her apart one tiny bite at a time, cockroaches frolic. He can hear the buzzing of insects, the brief encounters of predators eating prey within. The scaly, iridescent tail of a lizard appears briefly, but disappears inside.