by Phil Rickman
How, then, people would ask, did she know that the spirit so sensitive to any form of domestic upset was indeed the Lady Bluefoot?
Well ... because it had a perceptible air of femininity, the shade, and would sometimes leave a distinctive scent behind, slightly musty like pot-pourri. And when she broke a plate - an expression of her distress at, say, Martin losing his temper over a business hiccup - she'd delicately drop the thing from the dresser, not fling it with any violence. Sometimes this was accompanied by a sharp tap on the floor, as if Her Ladyship was petulantly stamping her foot.
Tonight, Meryl had made a point of seating Sir Wilfrid and Lady Tulley at the foot of the table, either side of the place laid for Lady Bluefoot. For while he was hardly aristocracy - no more, indeed, than a snivelling little civil servant collecting his expected reward - they were likely to be less disruptive than Tom Storey, if what Meryl had heard had any truth in it.
And she'd heard quite a bit because her brother played darts in the Swan with that scruffy little chap Beasley, who, according to Ted, told you more about life with the Storeys with all the things he didn't say.
She positioned the last mousse on the large oak trolley and stood back.
'Now then, m'lady. Will it do, do you think?'
Nothing fell off. Meryl smiled in delight. 'Well, good! Thank you so much.'
She gave a gracious semi-curtsey and strode briskly across to the half-length mirror next to the larder door to inspect herself before taking in the sweets.
The mirror was in a wide frame of American oak to match the fitted kitchen which Martin had allowed her to install - she couldn't abide the dingy Victoriana it had replaced.
Meryl patted her lustrous hair, liking what she saw: a tall woman who was forty-eight and probably, she would admit, looked it. But her age would be expressed chiefly by the wisdom lines around her eyes, which was no bad thing, not so long as her carriage was still good, her waist still slim, her breasts still proud, her neck long and unlined. She was looking, in fact, every bit a lady and rather more of one than Angela Tulley.
'Right,' Meryl said to the other lady. 'Let's see if Martin's managed to soothe the ruined feelings.'
As soon as the dreadful Sir Wilfrid had made his thoughtlessly insulting remark about Tom Storey's night-time guitar playing reminding him of a horse having a tooth pulled, Meryl had seen a gleam spring into Martin's eyes and his fingers begin to make little twiddling movements on the table, a sure sign of rising adrenalin.
He was much admired for his charm and aplomb, was Martin, especially in the village, where Meryl's appointment as his cook/housekeeper had, she knew, aroused gossip only of the most envious kind - while Martin was well aware that the role of cook/housekeeper, as it were, suited Meryl as well as it suited him (and who was she to object if he was lusting after Mrs Storey's spectacular bosom?).
Their arrangement was one giving, you might say, satisfaction to both parties.
Meryl smiled at herself in the mirror. She'd leave the sweet-trolley in the hall and take in the smaller one for the dirty dishes
As she turned, two hands gripped her waist.
It was the way he was staring, and the way his breathing had become harder and faster. She'd seen it before, and Shelley had had a mental preview of Tom thrusting back his chair and shambling gorilla-like to the bottom of the table, there to snatch Sir Wilfrid out of his seat and throw the old man through the leaded casement.
The straight line of candle flames had leaned towards Sir Wilfrid's end of the table, as if propelled by Tom's staccato breath.
And then, like a thoroughbred engine slipping into higher gear, Martin Broadbank had gone smoothly into diplomatic action.
'... ever want to sell your place, Sir Wilfrid, you'll find a few hundred wealthy rock fans happy to pay well over the odds just for the sheer privilege of being awoken in the night by the golden er ... licks ... of the great Tom Storey, wouldn't you agree, Steve?'
God bless you, Martin, Shelley thought.
Stephen Case was nodding expertly. 'What was it we used to say? Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Storey.'
'But not necessarily in that order, eh?' said Broadbank. 'If I were you, Sir Wilfrid, I'd be out in my garden with a tape recorder. Make a fortune. Bootleg tapes. Isn't that what they call them?'
'Steady on, Martin.' Stephen Case flashed his host a warning glance.
But Shelley saw that Tom hadn't even heard. He was staring down along the line of candles towards the other end of the long table.
'Get out,' Tom was whispering with each rapid breath. 'Get out.'
And she realized he wasn't looking at Sir Wilfrid at all but at the empty place where a chair had been pulled out and where, she noticed for the first time, a full place-setting of cutlery had been laid for no one.
Oh no.
'But talking of tapes,' Case said, turning casually to Tom. 'Some old ones of yours have sort of come into our possession. Really terrific stuff, Tom, which you recorded for Epidemic some years ago and ...'
Oh!
Shelley became aware that Martin Broadbank had placed his warm hand between her shoulder-blades. She was wearing a cream dress which was high at the front but backless, and Broadbank's touch was not entirely unpleasant.
'Shelley,' he said warmly.
'I'm sorry?'
'My dear, we were going to talk about your wholesale business. As Angela's already pointed out, much of the appeal lies in the presentation. Am I right?'
'Lovely shop.' Lady Tulley's enthusiasm was doubtless more fulsome in the uncomfortable aftermath of Sir Wilfrid's regrettable outburst. The moving candlelight rippled across her large and too-perfect teeth.
'Precisely,' Broadbank said. Shelley thought, damn the man. He's trying to draw my attention away from Tom, leaving him exposed to this bloody Case.
'… conscientious,' Case was saying. 'We're a company which likes to do the right thing. And as it's obviously incomplete, we'd love it if you could listen to it again, see if there's any changes you feel you'd like to make.'
Tom was still staring at the empty place; his left hand was trembling - Shelley could see his gold ring vibrating in the shivery light. She fell a slow thickening of the air, and if nobody was smoking, why was there a blue haze?
'I make no bones about it,' Broadbank said. 'I think my outlets could benefit enormously from your input.'
Some of the candles had melted down into gnarled and curly stubs and were issuing more smoke than you'd expect.
Tom spoke. 'I don't know nuffink about no tapes '
He didn't move his head. Shelley wanted to bury hers somewhere.
'Tom,' Case said caringly, 'nineteen-eighty, as we all know, was a bloody awful year for you, and it's hardly surprising if anything you recorded around the end of the year, especially at the Abbey, was ... disregarded ... abandoned ... forgotten about ...'
'But I think we have to do more than simply stock the products on the shelves, Shelley ... What I'd really like to see ...'
'I never done no album.' Tom was talking tonelessly to the air ahead of him. 'Anybody says otherwise is a bleeding liar.'
'... an entire display unit set apart in each of the stores, arranged with a distinctive …'
'Tom, we have those tapes.'
'... in the inimitable Love-Storey fashion, perhaps with an attendant to explain ...'
To Shelley, the room seemed much larger but the table smaller and further away, the voices too, as if she was watching it all on a cinema screen from the back circle. As if she was not involved. Drink could do this, but she'd had less than a glass of wine, and with food.
Tom said, 'You ain't got shit, mister.' His left hand closed around a sharp little knife provided for cutting into bread rolls.
The air, to Shelley, was suddenly almost black with tension. She began to cough.
'... and with perhaps a market-stall effect or continental blinds in the famous blue and white Love-Storey livery, it would all look really quite terrific - what
do you think, Shelley?'
'I ...' Shelley watched - as though from fifty yards away, seeing the table as if from above so that it was like a runway with the twisted candles as landing lights for something coming down - as her husband rose to his feet, gripping the little bread knife like a dagger.
'That would be wonderful,' she said faintly.
Angela, Lady Tulley screamed as, one by one, the candles went out.
There was a rush of movement.
'Oooh!'
Martin did this occasionally, so Meryl was not unduly perturbed - until she saw that the door was still closed and there was no one else in the long kitchen.
She gasped in genuine shock. 'Oh, my lady!'
This was not like her at all. The Lady Bluefoot did not touch.
Meryl's hips tingled where the hard, lascivious hands had slid. A strong smell wafted across the kitchen, and it was not raspberry mousse and not pot-pourri.
'Who's there?' she called out sharply, wrinkling her nose in distaste, her fingertips moving to her velvet choker.
The smell was oil, engine oil, reminding her immediately of the decrepit cabin cruiser her ex-husband used to keep at Minchead. It certainly wasn't a smell you wanted in your kitchen.
'Oh, m'lady,' Meryl called out in dismay. The stench would offend her terribly.
Meryl was concerning herself with the Lady Bluefoot and how such an intrusion might offend her, because she was not prepared even to contemplate anything else in here. Lady Bluefoot was the ghost of Hall Farm; she was fragrant, sad, graceful and considerate, and Meryl loved her.
And believed in her.
Yes.
And knew the truth of her.
Knew that she was not 'condemned for all eternity' to walk this house, as it said in the flimsy Cotswold guidebooks, a shoddy misinterpretation of the role of the earth bound spirit.
The truth was that a spiritual aspect of the Lady Bluefoot, fine as a veil of muslin, lingered in the atmosphere of this place as evidence of the survival beyond the grave of a loving and beautiful grief.
She was not here to frighten people but to offer comfort ... just as comfort should be extended to her. Which was why Meryl (who had accepted many years ago that she would never experience a great and profound love with another human being) attended the spiritualist church in Gloucester every other week: to learn how she might help.
And so she spoke regularly to the Lady Bluefoot, with sympathy and humility and respect ... and the hope that one day she would be granted a manifestation.
Now the air had gone stiff and somehow gritty around her, the concealed lights grown dim and greenish, draining the kitchen of its glamour, reducing the opulent sheen of American oak to the stained drabness of the old Victorian fittings which had been here before but were still too recent to be a part of Lady Bluefoot's world.
'Go away!' Meryl snapped, not yet afraid. 'This is not your house. You don't belong here.'
It had not touched her again, but it was spreading over the room, an aura of damp and dust, a dreary atmosphere reeking of low-life depression.
And then, for a frigid instant, she saw it, over by the door, haloed in dusty sepia, like an old photograph. And - almost - just like a real person, except that she could still make out the door panels behind it and it was so tall that it would have had to bend its head to get under the great oak cross-beam.
Its head! She could see the cross-beam through its gaseous head!
Meryl - who had once prayed to see a ghost, who attended the spiritualist church every other Friday to commune in comfort with the dead, who chatted gaily to the spectral Lady Bluefoot - felt her lungs fill up with dread.
No one, none of the genial mediums in Gloucester, none of the authors in her Theosophical library, had ever said it would be like this.
She saw it for barely a second and then it was gone, leaving the smell of engine oil stronger, darker, corrosive on her nostrils.
Meryl couldn't move and she couldn't dismiss the dirty, swarthy face from her mind, a face which, she knew, would always be with her, wherever there was darkness. When had hope last burned in those sunken, black, pebble-eyes? When had the mouth ever known a normal smile? When had it been able to smile?
'M'lady ... Oh ...' Meryl sank to her knees, fighting for breath, tearing the velvet diamante choker from her throat.
'Help me!'
The face - and she could see its image still, vibrating in the dust-motes of a dingy kitchen she didn't know - had been deformed into a perpetually twisted, grinning thing, the skin dragged up at one corner until it almost met the hole where there ought to have been a cheek.
The ragged hole, with puckered skin and scabs of black blood. The hole like a second mouth.
Meryl was flinging herself around the room, throwing herself at the walls. She didn't scream, she wasn't a screaming woman; she made little whimpering, buzzing noises like a fly in a jam-jar. She was desperate for a way out, suffocating, and she couldn't find the door.
He was here, still. She couldn't see him, but she knew he was here. Every time she thrust herself back from a wall or a cupboard she expected to arrive in his sorrowful, life-draining embrace.
Meryl prayed silently to Lady Bluefoot and to God, one to send him away, whoever he was, the other to accept his soul, oh Lord ...
Then she saw him again.
This time only a shadow, a shadow on the wall, a shadow receding into the wall, a light burning dully beyond him and it was a light she recognized - the pineapple-shaped wrought iron lantern in the inner hall.
The kitchen door had opened.
Oh, thank you, thank you, Lady Bluefoot.
Her instinct was to go down on her knees, but when Meryl put out her hands to balance herself she found familiar warm wood, the handles of the serving-trolley. She took a breath, made herself expel it slowly. Then she steadied herself, held her head high and walked quickly through the doorway, leaving the door open behind her, not looking back. Pushing the trolley before her with its cargo of raspberry mousse.
In the hall, in the pineapple light, it was very still and quiet, not even a buzz of conversation from the dining-room - as if everyone had gone silent on hearing her footsteps approaching.
Meryl tried to compose herself.
You have seen a ghost. Many people have seen ghosts. You always wanted to. Ghosts cannot harm you. Ghosts are here for a purpose ... reassurance for the living.
She took two long breaths and pushed open the dining-room door. 'Sorry I've been so ...'
Meryl entered the dining room to find not candlelight, but the same greenish glow as in the old kitchen, the spirit kitchen.
Too late to turn back now; the trolley was already in the dining-room.
And what she saw here was far worse than anything she could have imagined.
There was a deep, yawning silence like when you pushed open a door and found you had unexpectedly entered a theatre or a concert hall.
There was a slow, throbbing stillness.
And there was a smell.
It was a warm smell, a smell from Meryl's childhood on the farm, from the top shed where the pigs went one by one, usually on a Friday morning, and did not return to the sties.
Meryl said, 'Martin?'
All the candles on the table were dead, except for the one closest to her at the bottom of the table which was greenly, greasily alight, dark smoke spiralling from its frizzling wick.
This candle's sallow glow lit the face of Sir Wilfrid Tulley. He was sitting in his chair, his head thrown back. As if laughing.
Laughing fit to burst, Meryl thought.
Like cheese straws dipped in tomato ketchup, yellowish tubes poked out of Sir Wilfrid's throat. There was a glint of white bone, a bib of blood on his shirt-from. The head of Angela, Lady Tulley, hair still frizzed and formal, lay amid the shards of a broken side-plate. Lady Tulley's body was humped across the table, its neck still bubbling black blood.
Another candle came to life, this one near the top
of the table, under the Jacobean panelling. Stephen Case lay across the table in an attitude of sleep, except that one eye was wide open and looking across at Meryl in surprise and the other was hanging out on a blood-licked sliver of membrane ...
Meryl did not move.
She heard her own echo. 'Martin?'
Two more candles sprouted flames.
Martin was also in his seat, midway along the table.
Meryl began to laugh shrilly. Hadn't exactly talked his way out of this one, had he?
Martin's face was buried in an exposed and bloodied breast. The blood river, in spate, had its source either in her chest or his face. Or both.
Neither of them moved.
Meryl felt light-headed. The rich, acrid aroma of spilled blood was strangely intoxicating.
She felt her legs turning to liquid and closed her eyes before she fell.
When she opened them, no more than a few seconds later, she saw the brown beams of the ceiling and felt the boarded floor beneath her head. Her mind refused to remember.
But the smell remained.
Supplemented by sweat.
Between two ceiling beams, the big, red face of the rock musician, Tom Storey, swam into view. Raw meat shrinkwrapped in sweat.
Meryl tried to speak. Tom's legs in black jeans were astride her body. His arms were by his sides, at the end of one a steely gleaming.
'Don't mind me, darlin',' Tom said hoarsely.
XIII
Dakota Blues
The coffee swirling round, the cream making pretty circles in Prof's cup. He wished he could dive into it, go round and round with the cream, not thinking about anything. He'd be warm and safe in the coffee, the round walls of the cup protecting him.
He looked up at the bloke sitting opposite. The wafer glasses gone, the blue eyes sparkling. But Prof could tell it was anxiety, not merriment.
'I looked you up in Time Out: Prof poured in more sugar. 'Wasn't what I expected.'