Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  The frost made the contours of the ground easy to read; Tolley could make out the long strips of an ancient field system beyond the ruins of the mill. Everything was quiet and still, the solitude emphasized when a long goods train trundled past.

  “It’s always a lonely place,” Gerald Beaumont remarked, echoing Tolley’s thoughts. “But it’s not as bleak as this in summer. There are wild flowers all over the place, boats on the river… People will punt all the way up from Oxford to picnic here.”

  They walked across the meadow to the line of trees and the scattered remnants of the manor house. Gerald Beaumont leaned on his walking stick every other step (he had a touch of arthritis, he said, because of the damp weather) and laboriously took several photographs while Tolley huddled inside his Burberry and stamped his frozen feet.

  In the churchyard, Gerald Beaumont showed Tolley the stone pyramid that commemorated the railway accident, led him under a dark green yew where two gravestones stood apart from the others, their brief inscriptions blotted by lichen.

  “Those are the buggers that are causing the trouble, according to local legend. Doesn’t look like much by daylight, does it?”

  “Your wife said something about a woman,” Tolley said.

  “There’s a man and a woman buried here. Two strangers who were killed in the accident, who were buried here because no one could identify them, no one would claim their bodies. And that’s all there is to it, Mr. Tolley.”

  While Gerald Beaumont photographed from every angle the memorial’s pyramid, Tolley tried the door of the little church. The iron handle was so stiff he thought for a moment the place was locked; then it gave, and the door creaked open.

  It was colder inside the church than outside. Tolley shivered inside his Burberry, taking in the pews either side of the aisle, the plain pulpit and the draped altar beyond. Tablets were set in the rough stone walls. One listed the names of those killed in the Great War, another mentioned a Victorian incumbent of the parish, the next was marked with the same crest that was incised in Tolley’s signet ring and memorialized Alfred Tolley, squire of this parish, and his wife Evangeline, both dead in the same year, 1886. The year the manor house and the paper mill had burned down.

  There were other memorials to members of Tolley’s family amongst the uneven flagstones of the floor; as he studied them, he thought he heard the door creak open and said, “How about a few photos of these, Mr. Beaumont?”

  There was no reply. Tolley looked around, saw that he was alone, the door was closed, heard a distant, drawn-out metallic screech, smelt the same, gritty, sulphurous stench he’d encountered in his hotel room, suddenly so thick he couldn’t catch his breath. His first step turned into a stagger, and then he ran, wrenching the door open, bursting out into the bleak daylight.

  Gerald Beaumont was squatting on his heels near the gate in the hedgerow, preparing to photograph a headstone. Tolley walked up to him and said, as casually as he could manage, “Did you hear something just then?”

  Click. Gerald Beaumont looked up from his camera, asked what he meant.

  “I don’t know. Like… no, forget it. Maybe we should quit. It’s so cold I can’t feel my feet.”

  Tolley’s hands were shaking. He couldn’t stop them shaking, and jammed them into the pockets of his Burberry. He thought of a tape recorder, a hidden speaker…

  Gerald Beaumont said, “Did you see the memorials to your family in the church? I’ve a good flash attachment, I could take some nice pictures of them if you want.”

  The last thing Tolley wanted to do was to go back inside the church. “It was good of you to come all the way out here,” he said, “but I have a touch of jet-lag. I should get back to my hotel, catch up on my sleep.”

  As he and Gerald Beaumont walked through the line of trees and crossed the wide space of rough grass beyond, Tolley felt something huge and implacable looming behind him, as in one of those dreams from which you wake bathed in cold sweat. It was all he could do not to break into a run, and as he drove off, he startled Gerald Beaumont by popping the clutch and spinning the wheels of the Volkswagen, as if he were a teenager again, burning rubber in the drive of his girlfriend’s house.

  As they drove back to South Heyston, Tolley thanked Gerald Beaumont for his trouble, refused the ritual offer of a cup of tea, and said that he should head straight back for Oxford.

  “You’d better give me your address, Mr. Tolley. I’ll make some contact prints and send them to you, and you can choose which ones you’d like done properly.”

  “That’s very kind, Mr. Beaumont, but if you give me the film, I can get it developed in town. I’ll pay you for it, of course.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, Mr. Tolley. It’s only a roll of film. I’ll just pop in my darkroom and unload it. Are you sure you won’t come in and have a cup of tea? Marjorie baked another batch of those butter cakes you liked so much the last time.”

  “If it’s all the same, I think I should head straight back.” Tolley felt a little calmer now. He’d take the film and take off, he thought, and never come back.

  When Tolley pulled up outside the cottage, the collie dog was barking behind the gate to its small front garden. Gerald Beaumont climbed out of the car, calling to it, then suddenly pushed through the gate and gimped quickly up the path to where his wife sat on the step of the front door, knelt beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

  Tolley climbed out, walked slowly towards them, dread thumping in his heart, hardly noticing the dog that danced about in a frenzy of excitement.

  Marjorie Beaumont’s glossy black hair was tumbled around her face. Her hands were covered in what look like drying blood and there were white handprints on her black slacks and cardigan. She looked up at Tolley through her shroud of hair and said, “I saw him.”

  Gerald Beaumont, his face stiff and pinched, said “Let it lie, Mr. Tolley. Let it lie and leave us be.”

  “Orlando Richards,” Marjorie Beaumont said, and turned into her husband’s embrace and began to sob.

  *

  It was past two o’clock when Tolley arrived back in Oxford. He left the Volkswagen in the hotel’s car park, found a public house in nearby Broad Street, and bought a cheese roll mummified in cling film and a pint of bitter.

  He was scared and angry. Something had torn up his hotel room, had let him know its name through Marjorie Beaumont… what would it do next? More importantly, why did it have anything to do with him in the first place? He hadn’t chosen his ancestors—why should he be blamed for what one of them did more than a hundred years ago? And besides, Marjorie Beaumont was the one who believed in ghosts, atmospheres, and all the rest of that nonsense.

  Maybe she’d brought all this upon herself, Tolley thought, knowing that it was uncharitable. Maybe she’d woken whatever it was that was persecuting them both. The ghost of a man. O.R. Orlando Richards.

  He finished his pint and the cheese roll, which sat in his stomach like a cannonball, found a taxi at the rank near the hotel, and asked the driver to take him to the newspaper offices.

  “Mail or Times, mate?”

  “Whichever is the oldest.”

  That turned out to be the Oxford Times, which occupied a seedy office block in a seedy industrial estate beyond the railroad station. Tolley’s business card got him past the receptionist to a young, friendly reporter, who listened to his story about researching family history, and showed him the cubby hole where the microfilm reader was kept and introduced him to the secretary in charge of the newspaper’s archives.

  Finding articles about the train wreck was easy enough because Tolley knew the exact date. The news reports were prolix and soberly sensational, and those about the train wreck took up most of the next day’s edition of the newspaper; but Tolley quickly spotted a reference to the body of an unknown gentleman burnt alive in the first carriage of the wrecked passenger train, a silver snuff box bearing the initials O.R. the only surviving form of identification. The police had ‘belie
ved him to be a man of some thirty years, some five feet six inches in height and of average build’, and asked anyone who might know who he was to report in person to the coroner’s court in Oxford, or their nearest police station.

  Farther down there was a briefer mention of an unknown woman, no more than twenty years old, who had died like several others at the scene of the tragedy, her purse “containing no more than the stub for a third-class railway ticket from London to Birmingham, and eighteen pence in small coins.”

  Tolley had to scan a whole year’s worth of microfilmed back issues to find the report about the TRAGIC FIRE AT STEEPLE HEYSTON, which had killed his great-grandfather and great-grandmother. The first fire had started in the kitchen of the manor house, and when that was burning well and when “the attention of everyone in the vicinity was occupied upon saving its inhabitants,” a second fire had been set in the mill.

  Tolley followed the story through succeeding editions of the newspaper. There were the death notices of Tolley’s great-grandparents, from which Tolley learned that his great-grandfather had fought and won several cases brought against him by relatives of those who had died in the “railway tragedy” at Steeple Heyston. A maid claimed that the manor house had been troubled by small fires caused by falling candles, or candles flaring up unexpectedly, or fires collapsing from their grates. More prosaically, a man was arrested for setting the fires, the son of a woman who had died in the train wreck; two days later, he was found hanged in his cell.

  Tolley borrowed a phone and a telephone directory. When Gerald Beaumont answered, Tolley started to tell him what he’d found, but Gerald Beaumont said, “I don’t want to hear anything more about it, Mr. Tolley. Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble?”

  “It isn’t me, it’s this dead guy. Orlando Richards. He was killed in the train wreck, he was never properly buried. Maybe he possessed the guy who set those fires, but I don’t think so. I don’t think he wants revenge. I think he was trying to tell your wife—”

  “I think you should leave Marjorie out of this, Mr. Tolley.”

  “I’m sorry. I forgot to ask how she was.”

  “Sleeping now. Our GP came round and gave her something to help her sleep.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “She thought she glimpsed someone through the kitchen window, but she can’t remember anything after that.” Gerald Beaumont paused, then said, “She left the kitchen in a bit of a state. Wrote those two letters everywhere in tomato sauce, in flour… But I cleaned it all up, and she’s resting now, she doesn’t want to be disturbed. It’s all very well for you—you can just run away back to America. We have to live with whatever it is you’ve disturbed.”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything but come here.”

  “Aye, well,” the man said truculently.

  “I don’t suppose by any chance you’re Catholic, or you know someone who is Catholic?”

  “I’m Church of England, Mr. Tolley, which in this country means you can believe in God and all the rest, or you go to church once a year for the carols, like I do. If you’re thinking of arranging an exorcism, or any other kind of mumbo-jumbo, forget about it.”

  “Orlando Richards was never properly buried, but he made his name known to us. Perhaps all he wants—”

  “Let it lie, Mr. Tolley. Maybe, when you’re gone, things will calm down,” Gerald Beaumont said, and cut the connection.

  *

  Tolley decided to change his room, just in case, but the desk clerk politely but firmly told him that it was impossible, the hotel was fully booked.

  “Don’t tell me,” Tolley said. “It’s Christmas.”

  “If you’re unhappy here, sir, I could try to book you into another hotel. Or perhaps a bed-and-breakfast would suit.”

  “I guess I’ll have to manage,” Tolley said.

  He had just one more night here, and then he was due to travel to London—surely he would not be followed there. Maybe Gerald Beaumont was right, maybe things would calm down after he left. If they didn’t, well, it was no longer Tolley’s problem. He’d tried his best, it wasn’t his fault the old guy wouldn’t listen.

  Tolley ate a solitary dinner in the reassuringly expensive restaurant, treating himself to a bottle of Chablis that cost twice as much as the food, and a glass of fifty-year-old Cognac that cost more than the wine.

  Then he moved on to the bar, where he drank several double scotches and smoked a Cuban cigar and fell into conversation with a married couple from Idaho—she had majored in architectural history, and was in her element, showing Tolley every photograph of Oxford she had taken with her brand new camera. Her husband grumbled about the six-hour journey from London to Oxford on a train that was unheated and made long unscheduled stops in the middle of nowhere; grumbled about shop assistants who were either surly or obsequious but never helpful, dribbling plumbing, the litter and graffiti in town centers … in short, the lack of all the comforts of any truly civilized country.

  He was the living caricature of a Yank abroad, appalled by his discovery that foreign countries aren’t anything at all like the good old US of A, but Tolley cheerfully agreed with everything he said and added a few stories of his own, including the anecdote about his ruined film and a tale about a crazy old couple that grew more and more difficult to tell without mentioning ghosts.

  “The point is,” Tolley said, when he realized that he had lost the thread, “people like to think that all Americans are stupid and rich, and I’m neither.” He meant it as a joke, but it left him feeling sorry for himself, and led him to talk about the way his family had selfishly squandered its wealth and left him with nothing, and about the way he was making sure that he spent as much as possible on this trip so that all his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her lawyer would get out of him was half of an enormous credit-card bill.

  His new friends, suddenly restless, declared that they had to turn in because they were headed for Stratford-upon-Avon tomorrow, and Tolley was left alone with the barman, who made a point, after he served one more double scotch, of rattling down the security grille at the other end of the bar.

  It was after midnight. The noise of the key turning in the lock of the door to Tolley’s room was loud in the deserted corridor, and despite the warm blanket of booze that muffled his thoughts, he had a nasty moment groping for the light switch, remembering an account, surely the world’s shortest ghost story, of how someone had awoken with a start and groped for matches to light a candle—and felt something place them in his hand.

  The light came on, revealing his suitcase on its stand, the four-poster bed tightly made, one corner turned back and a chocolate wrapped like a gold medallion on the plumped pillow. Even the initials scraped into the carpet pile had been erased when the maid had vacuumed the room.

  Tolley looked inside the wardrobe in case a spook was hiding there, checked the lock on the window, dropped his clothes in a heap and crawled into the cool shelter of the bed. Reckless with Dutch courage, he even switched off the light.

  *

  He was woken by the shrill ring of the phone beside his bed. He groped for it without turning on the light, pressed the handset to his ear without raising his head from his pillow. Gerald Beaumont’s voice said, “Tolley?”

  “What’s up?” The digital clock in the bedside radio told him that it was half-past-six in the morning. His teeth and tongue felt as if they had been rubbed in ashes and he knew that he was still drunk, and that he was going to pay for it pretty soon.

  “I didn’t want to ring you, but there’s no one else I can turn to,” Gerald Beaumont said. “You’re involved. You understand. It’s Marjorie. She left.”

  “Left?”

  “Left the cottage. She was sleeping in the spare bedroom. I got up just now, and she isn’t there.”

  Tolley sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. He was wide-awake, and his heart was beating quickly and lightly. “Call the police, Mr. Beaumont. I’m sure they’ll help you find her.”
<
br />   “I know where she’s gone, and so do you. And if I have to go to the police for help, I’ll have to tell them about you, and Steeple Heyston.”

  “If that’s a threat, Mr. Beaumont, it isn’t much of one. I’ll help look for her, but we need to call the police too.”

  “No,” Gerald Beaumont said firmly. “We don’t. She had … a problem a few years ago. She thought there was going to be an accident at the mine. She said she saw dead people who told her that one of the drifts was going to collapse. She was very badly affected by it, and she had to be put in a place where she could rest for a little while.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s partly why we came here, to get away from all that. That’s why I’m not going to the police, why I’ll deal with it myself if I have to.”

  “And the mine… did it collapse?”

  “As a matter of fact it did, but it was during the strike and no one was down there at the time. This new thing, it started after you went to Steeple Heyston, Mr. Tolley. If something … if Marjorie is hurt, do you think it will stop with her? I’m going over there now. I expect to see you.”

  *

  A small hatchback car was parked in the space at the end of the track to Steeple Heyston, and the gate in the hedge stood open.

  Tolley left the headlights of his Volkswagen on and climbed out and called to Gerald Beaumont. The darkness swallowed his voice. It was bitterly cold, dawn a curdled grey buried deep in the clouds beyond the railway embankment.

  He stepped up to the gate, frosty grass crackling under his shoes, and scanned the hummocky meadow where the village had once stood, but there was no sign of anyone.

  Tolley went back to the car and sounded the horn, went back to the gate and called Gerald Beaumont’s name again. As he reluctantly started across rough ground towards the line of trees around the ruins of the manor house he saw something small run out of the darkness there, run straight towards him.

  He froze, his blood knocking heavily in his chest: but it was only the Beaumonts’ collie. It stopped halfway and started to bark, and Tolley went towards it, saying, “Good boy, good boy. Where’s your owner? Where is that son of a bitch?”