Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  A freight train trundled around the curve and crossed the bridge with a hollow roar, sounding a two-note horn. Tolley glanced up, then took his photograph. The figure, if that’s what it had been, was gone.

  *

  He had another bad moment when he got back to the car, and saw what he thought was a face peeking up at him from the back seat: but it was only the map, lying where he’d tossed it.

  All that talk about ghosts had evidently primed his jet-lagged imagination, he thought, as he drove the scant mile to South Heyston. There was a tumbledown farm, a string of pebble-dash council houses, and then a cluster of picturesque stone cottages around a tiny village green, a church steeple poking against the evening sky behind them. Glebe Cottage was next to the churchyard.

  Gerald Beaumont shook Tolley’s hand at the front door and ushered him into what he called the lounge, turning down, but not quite muting, the sound of a big color television that was showing some old B movie. During the strange conversation that followed, the television flickered and mumbled in its corner like some idiot child.

  Seated in an overstuffed armchair, Tolley felt like a fledgling cuckoo as the Beaumonts fluttered about, plying him with hot, milky tea and cookies and small, buttery cakes.

  He learned that Gerald Beaumont had worked in the Yorkshire coal mines, but had taken early retirement when many of them were closed down in the aftermath of a big strike. The Beaumonts had moved to Oxford to be near their only child and his family when he had been working at the University, but then their son had become another statistic in the Brain Drain, and had moved to America.

  Tolley guessed that they were lonely, like a lot of retired folk who move from where they have lived and worked; it was as if they, not their son, were exiles in a foreign land.

  When Marjorie Beaumont asked him about his impression of Steeple Heyston, Tolley told her that he hadn’t seen all that much; it had gotten dark too quickly. He had forgotten until that moment the glimpse he’d had of that shadowy figure—perhaps it had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination, conjured out of twilight and Marjorie Beaumont’s talk of ghosts, but now he felt a shiver, an undeniable frisson.

  He said, “I guess I’ll have to come back tomorrow. I want to take a look at that church, and take some photographs, too.”

  Gerald Beaumont said, “It’s a good place for photography, all right. Let me show you a few I took of the place.”

  “He won’t want to look at your snaps,” Marjorie Beaumont said, as her husband rooted in the cupboard under the glass-fronted bookcase that held an Encyclopaedia Britannica and what looked like a complete run of Reader’s Digest condensed novels.

  “He can tell me himself if he isn’t interested,” Gerald Beaumont said, and pulled out a spiral-bound album and passed it to Tolley, saying that he would appreciate a professional opinion.

  Tolley wiped his buttery fingers on his sweater before he took the album—he’d eaten all of the little cakes, and most of the cookies (no, they called them biscuits here)—saying, “I work in a photographic library, but I’m no photographer.”

  Large 8 x 10 prints, black-and-white, one to a page. The church stark against a wintry sky. Gravestones leaning this way and that, all sunlight and shadow. The brambly angel Tolley had noticed, shot from an acute angle, the sun making a halo behind it. Grassy hummocks defined by their shadows. Dead weeds bent before a lichenous stone. The ruined chimney standing stark amongst leafless trees. The ruined chimney rising out of a cloud of wild roses.

  Tolley was impressed, and told Gerald Beaumont that he had definitely captured the atmosphere of the place.

  “There are some things photographs can’t capture,” Marjorie Beaumont said. A lavender cardigan was draped over her shoulders like a matador’s cape, pinned at her neck by a big Victorian brooch. The paste jewel flickered in the light of the fire that burned in the brick fireplace. “I expect you saw the railway that runs past. That’s the old Oxford-to-Birmingham line, and it was about a hundred years ago that the tragedy happened.”

  “A hundred and six,” Gerald Beaumont said.

  His wife ignored him. “There was a passenger train on its way to Birmingham, and a goods train going towards Oxford. One of the wagons of the goods train jumped the tracks and pulled others across the line, and the passenger train couldn’t stop in time, and crashed into them. They said that you could hear the shriek of its brakes in Oxford, that the sparks from its wheels set fire to three miles of the embankment. More than forty people died, but it’s said that many of them would have been saved if the squire—I suppose he’d be your great-grandfather, Mr. Tolley—if he hadn’t stopped the villagers of Steeple Heyston from helping the injured.”

  “He hated the railway with a passion,” Gerald Beaumont said. “He’d lost a lot of money fighting and losing a legal battle against the Act of Parliament that gave it the right of way across his land. When the other passengers carried the injured away from the wreck, he told his tenants that anyone who lifted a hand to help would lose their livelihood and their home. ‘Let them use their blasted railway to save themselves,’ he’s supposed to have said. Anyhow, it was more than two hours before a relief train arrived, and by that time many had died who might otherwise have survived.”

  “There’s a monument to them in a corner of the churchyard, raised by public subscription,” Marjorie Beaumont said. “The squire tried to prevent that, too, but the diocese council overruled him. Two bodies, a man and a woman, were never identified, and they’re buried in the churchyard. They say you can see them on the anniversary of the accident, walking along the railway line, as if they’re looking for something they’ve lost or left behind.”

  Tolley smiled. “Have you ever seen these ghosts?”

  Marjorie Beaumont shook her head. “I wouldn’t go near Steeple Heyston on that night or on any other, for that matter. Even on a hot summer’s day, it’s a sad, lonely place.”

  Gerald Beaumont said, “I’m not given to believing in ghosts and such myself, but it’s true that Marjorie fainted there once, and she’s never gone back.”

  “It’s the woman, I expect,” Marjorie Beaumont said softly, as if to herself. “Their ghosts are stronger.”

  Gerald Beaumont pretended to ignore this, saying quickly, “You didn’t know about this story, Mr. Tolley?”

  “Please, call me Dick. No, not a thing. My grandfather never said a word about what happened to the manor house. That he came from Steeple Heyston, I know only because my father saved grandpappy’s naturalization papers. That’s about all he left the family, apart from this signet ring,” Tolley said, showing off the gold ring with the family crest incised into its flat surface.

  His grandfather had been rich—he’d owned a large house on the Upper West Side of New York, and had never needed to work—but had squandered most of his fortune on bad business deals, and what was left had been lost in the Wall Street Crash. After the war, Tolley’s father had built up a real estate business from scratch, but he’d blown every cent on horses and poker, and shot himself as his creditors were closing in. All Tolley had inherited had been the signet ring, a few family papers, and a careless attitude towards money; most of his arguments with Rachel had been about money.

  “Ten years after the accident,” Gerald Beaumont said, “there was a fire in the manor house. The mill burned down at the same time. The manor house and the mill were the only reasons the village existed. They weren’t rebuilt, and the people in the village drifted away.”

  “I guess that was when my family came to the States,” Tolley said.

  Marjorie Beaumont got to her feet. “I’ll make another pot of tea. You’ll have a cup before you go.”

  “Traffic’s bad this time of night,” Gerald Beaumont said as he carefully filed away his photograph album. “If you wait thirty minutes the worst of the rush hour will be over.”

  “I appreciate it. I’m still not used to driving on the wrong side of the road, and your traffic circles scare m
e silly.”

  The collie, which all the while had been dozing under the murmuring television, scrambled up, looked at the door of the lounge and made a low noise that was half-whimper, half-growl. Then there was the sound of crockery smashing. Gerald Beaumont hurried out, and Tolley followed.

  Marjorie Beaumont was standing in the middle of the small, brightly lit kitchen, one hand pressed against her throat. Her husband asked what the matter was, and she pointed at the window. Her hand trembled. Backed by night, the two letters traced in an ornamental script on the steamy glass, a linked O and R, were clearly visible.

  “I saw it happen,” Marjorie Beaumont said in a small voice. Her lavender cardigan had slipped from her shoulders and lay on the floor. Her husband put an arm around her, and she added, “I didn’t ever think it would come here. I’m sorry, Mr. Tolley, but I think you ought to go.”

  *

  Driving back to Oxford, the headlights of homeward-bound commuters flashing by on what still seemed like the wrong side of the road, Tolley began to think that the Beaumonts had set him up: Marjorie Beaumont had told him her ghost story, given herself an excuse to go out of the room and write those the two letters in the steam on the kitchen window, and then deliberately dropped a cup and given that Oscar-worthy performance.

  Maybe they were a couple of crazies who liked to put on a little act for strangers; maybe it was to prepare him for an offer, in exchange for a fat fee, to exorcise the place, or to conjure up the ghosts of his ancestors. In any case, Tolley resolved to have nothing more to do with them.

  First thing the next morning, he found an express photographic developer that promised to process his film in three hours, then walked through a modern shopping arcade to the town’s library and spent a couple of hours browsing in the local history section.

  He read several accounts of the railway accident, all more or less confirming Marjorie Beaumont’s confabulation, and found a book on lost villages that gave a good précis of the history of Steeple Heyston.

  It was mentioned in the Domesday Book and had been a thriving agricultural village until the 16th century, when it had been badly hit by the plague. Tolley’s ancestors had confiscated much of the surrounding land by shrewd use of the enclosure acts, and by the middle of the 19th century, Steeple Heyston had been no more than a hamlet of some forty souls, dependent upon its wool mill. Then there had been the two fires Gerald Beaumont had mentioned, arson suspected but no one arrested, and after that a swift decline. The last cottage had been demolished a few years after World War II, although it seemed that the church was still occasionally used.

  Tolley couldn’t find any mention of ghosts, or of why his grandfather had quit the ancestral home. He’d have to check the archives of the local newspaper, and the county records, he thought, and pocketed his notes and went out to look for some lunch.

  Away from the old buildings of the university, Oxford was much like any other English market town. Laden shoppers moved past long lines waiting for double-decked buses. Street performers strummed guitars or juggled in shop doorways. At the Carfax crossroads, a Salvation Army band was playing carols beneath a huge plastic Santa Claus strung high in the cold air.

  Tolley found a McDonald’s and hungrily devoured a double cheeseburger with all the trimmings and washed it down with a strawberry milkshake. Looking through the plate-glass window towards the tower of Christ Church, poised like a spaceship beyond the gloomy stone pile of the town hall, he decided that he’d done enough work for one day. He spent the rest of the afternoon checking off the minor colleges he’d missed the first time around, then fought his way through the crowds to the photographic shop.

  After the assistant handed him the envelope, Tolley opened it straight away. There were the half-dozen snaps he’d taken before leaving London, several of Oxford, including the picture of the four-poster bed in his hotel room that he intended to mail to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, but none of Steeple Heyston. One of the strips of developed film was cloudily blotched. Tolley showed it to the shop assistant, a teenager with streaks bleached into her hair. “It looks like you’ve made some kind of mistake processing this.”

  “I dunno, it’s all done by computers and stuff. Maybe your camera’s broke.”

  “Let me speak to your manager.”

  “She won’t be in until the day after tomorrow,” the girl said, adding, as if it explained everything, “It’s Christmas, see.”

  After a supper of steak and kidney pie and several pints of bitter in a public house, Tolley returned to his hotel, intending to make an early night of it.

  As soon as he opened the door, a dense smell of burning, thick as molasses, hit him. There was no smoke, no sign of any kind of fire, but his case and its contents, mostly underwear, lay on the floor and the quilt and sheets had been pulled from the four-poster bed.

  His first thought was that the room had been burgled, but his passport and plane ticket were sitting on the night table, next to his Walkman and pile of CDs. And then he noticed the carpet under the window. Scraped into the pile were the letters O and R, linked with the same flourish as the letters in the steam on the Beaumonts’ kitchen window.

  *

  Gerald Beaumont looked genuinely surprised when he opened the door and found Tolley on his doorstep.

  Tolley gave the man his best smile, said, “I want some pictures of Steeple Heyston to show the folks back home, but my camera has broken and it can’t be repaired here. I was passing by, and remembered your wonderful photographs, and wondered if you’d mind giving me a little help…?”

  He’d worked up this plan over a couple of double scotches in the hotel bar last night. Either the Beaumonts were hounding him for some crazy reason, had bribed the photographic shop to ruin his film, had gained access to his hotel room and burnt some kind of stink bomb in the waste bin and traced the interlinked letters in the carpet with the heel of a shoe, all of which was more or less completely unbelievable, or there was something to the story about the ghosts of victims of an old railway accident.

  He didn’t believe that, either, but he wanted to return to Steeple Heyston in daylight to look around the church and satisfy himself that the figure he thought he’d seen was nothing more than a trick of shadows and twilight. It seemed to him that the best way to find out if the Beaumonts really were trying to work some trick or scam on him was to take one or both of them to Steeple Heyston, see if they rose to the bait.

  He said, “I’ll pay whatever it costs, of course.”

  “I’d be delighted,” Gerald Beaumont said.

  Behind him, Marjorie Beaumont came out of the lounge and said, “Surely you’re not thinking of going back to Steeple Heyston, Mr. Tolley? You’ve already disturbed something that’s best left alone.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Gerald Beaumont said amiably, and winked at Tolley. “She still isn’t over her little shock.”

  “If that had anything to do with me,” Tolley said disingenuously, “you must let me know how I can make it up to you.”

  “We invited you here in the first place,” Marjorie Beaumont said stiffly. “I suppose that it isn’t your fault that you brought an unexpected guest with you.”

  As he drove away from the cottage, Tolley said to Gerald Beaumont, “I hope I haven’t upset your wife.”

  “It doesn’t take much sometimes. Last time she went to Steeple Heyston, a couple of years ago it was, she fainted dead away. She’s always been sensitive to what she calls atmospheres.”

  Tolley saw an opportunity to plant his baited hook. “When I was there, I saw what looked like a man, standing in what I guess were the ruins of the old mill. At the time, I thought it was just a trick of the light, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe it was a ghost. If this place was somehow responding to me, could your wife do anything about it?”

  “She’s sensitive to atmospheres,” Gerald Beaumont said, “and that’s all there is to it. She isn’t a medium, she doesn’t channel spirits or any of that nonsense.”

&n
bsp; “You invited me to your home in the first place, Mr. Beaumont, and told me your ghost story. It was never my intention to upset your wife.”

  “Aye, well, like Marjorie said, it wasn’t your fault. But if I may speak plainly, Mr. Tolley, I don’t want her upset again. If you’re looking for some mumbo-jumbo exorcism, I’m sure there are plenty of people who’ll be more than happy to take your money. But don’t think of asking Marjorie. If that’s the only reason you came back to see us, you can let me out right now. I can easily walk home from here.”

  “I really do want some good photographs of the place,” Tolley said.

  Gerald Beaumont smiled. “And I’m sure you could take them yourself, but our story has made you nervous of going there alone, and I’m a daft old man who’s easily flattered into helping you.”

  Tolley smiled too, disarmed by the man’s direct manner, and admitted, “Something like that.”

  Gerald Beaumont said, “Miners are as superstitious as sailors, and like it or not, I suppose a bit of that rubbed off on me. I don’t believe in ghosts, but some places do have an atmosphere to them. Down in the mines, there are galleries you didn’t like to be alone in, old workings with a funny feel to them. Maybe places can be affected by things that have happened in them, if you follow me. That would be your ghosts, you see. That would be what Marjorie picks up.”

  Tolley thought of the initials scrawled in the steam on the kitchen window of the Beaumont’s cottage, in the carpet in his room. It wasn’t a feeling, a sense of place, that had done that. And if it hadn’t been anything to do with the Beaumonts .. .

  Frost lay in the hollows of the rough meadow at Steeple Heyston; a light mist floated above the river. Tolley felt a little frisson of anticipation when he saw the stub of wall amongst the scrubby trees on the far bank, but in the cold flat daylight it seemed quite ordinary.

  He asked Gerald Beaumont to take a couple of photographs of it, waiting patiently as the older man fitted the appropriate lens to his battered old Canon and fussed with a handheld light meter.