Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Mark had inherited Uncle Andrew’s easygoing attitude. Recently he had spent more time than usual with the old man in London, for his uncle had been undergoing sporadic treatment for lung cancer at the Harley Street Clinic. Uncle Andrew was wealthy and knew how to enjoy himself, which made the rest of his serious-minded family regard him as a wastrel. Two years earlier he had retired to his grand country manse with his second much younger wife, a woman who had appeared on his arm after a trip to Boston, where he had been attending some kind of collectors’ convention.

  But what had he been doing in the South of France when he died? Nobody seemed to know, not even his wife.

  Mark and his family attended the cremation service, which was held in Monte Carlo. Uncle Andrew had a brother and a sister of similar ages, a daughter from his first wife, and the aforementioned much younger second wife. The family was therefore split into three separate interested parties, and at any time at least one of these was arguing with the other two. Their loyalties shifted and switched like warring states in an Eastern European nation.

  All in all, it was not the best recipe for a happy send-off.

  The much younger second wife turned up in a tight-fitting Dior trouser suit and a white hat better suited to Ladies Day at Ascot. She outraged Mark’s family, who were looking for any excuse to take umbrage.

  During the service, a vicious argument escalated between Andrew’s first and second wives, during which the first wife, whose name was Cheryl, questioned the second wife, whose name was Catherine, about her motives for marrying a wealthy man who was almost twice her age. Catherine replied that she had fallen in love with men like Andrew before. “Tell me,” spat Cheryl, “at precisely what moment do you usually fall in love with your elderly millionaires?”

  The family members quickly became embroiled and lined up on either side, carping across the divide. At a drinks party afterwards there was another fight when Mark’s father, who was paying for the wake, had his credit cards humiliatingly rejected by the venue’s management. Money and inheritance were openly discussed—subjects Mark’s mother regarded as vulgar in the extreme. The English, she remarked pointedly, did not expose their financial affairs in public. This last remark was clearly aimed at Uncle Andrew’s second wife, who was American and regarded the entire Bayer family as a bunch of bitter limey snobs with very little, as far as she could see, to be snobbish about. The wake ended on a very sour note indeed.

  A few days later in London, the entire family attended the reading of Andrew’s will at Lycus Gerolstein’s office. Here, seated around the lawyer’s boardroom table, they heard that Uncle Andrew’s possessions, including another classic car, a boat, a country house, jewelry, a London apartment and bequests of cash, were to be divided up between various family members. It seemed that everyone’s wishes had been catered for. Only one of the children had been deliberately and notably excluded from the will—Mark.

  The young designer was surprised by the fact that he had been left nothing, as it contradicted what Uncle Andrew told him when they’d last met. In fact, Andrew had gone out of his way to promise that he was leaving something very special to his favorite nephew. “You were always the one I liked the best,” Andrew had confided. “I know you’ll make something of yourself. I want to ensure that you’ll be truly happy in your life, so I’m leaving you the greatest of the gifts in my possession.”

  But he had left nothing. There was not even a mention of the boy in the will.

  Mark was upset at first. He thought the old man had loved, trusted, and confided in him. Perhaps he had caused some offence over their final lunch and hurt his uncle’s feelings? Even Mark’s younger brother Ben had been bequeathed some money. Mark thought back over their last meeting, breaking it down into moments, but could think of nothing he had done to upset Uncle Andrew.

  The family was very sorry to lose their patriarch. The amiably disreputable old fellow had been a touchstone for them, someone they could go to for advice and help, always kindly, always fair, a calm center to the frequently bitter whirlwind of Bayer family spats, recriminations and alliances. Now that he had suddenly been taken from them, they felt as if they had been cast adrift. There was no one to whom they could turn. Gabriel, Andrew’s younger brother, was flaky and neurotic. Joan, his sister, was a melancholia-prone hysteric. Life without their mentor would be very different indeed.

  At first the Bayers sought to pursue proceedings against the estate agent driving the other car, but she was in a Nice hospital with a broken neck, and Lycus, the family lawyer, advised them not to start an action against her in a French court of law. The process, he warned, would be protracted and constricted by red tape, and would probably last, Jarndyce-style, until there was no money left, but that was the French for you.

  With conflicting emotions, Mark listened to his family’s growing grievances. The complaints were petty; why had Uncle Andrew left Mark’s parents jewelry but little money? Why had he only bequeathed his brother a classic car? Nothing quite made sense. Soon, a poisonous pall began to creep over the formerly happy family, and the things Uncle Andrew had left behind began to be evaluated, coveted and compared.

  Mark looked on in discomfort as his parents pored over their copy of Uncle Andrew’s will, endlessly reinterpreting every word. He had never thought of them as greedy people, but now it seemed they were becoming obsessed with the amounts they had been left. He had heard that this was the common result of losing a senior family member, but the process still disturbed him. Worse, it traduced his memory of the avuncular old man and made him think more harshly of the surviving Bayers. Assuming that these ill humors would be short-lived, he returned to work and family life, albeit diminished, continued as before.

  *

  GABRIEL BAYER

  Exactly one month after his uncle had died, Mark received a phone-call just as he was starting to fall asleep at the keyboard of his computer. He had been putting in long hours, trying to drum up business for his ailing design practice.

  “Mark, is that you?” asked a familiar voice.

  “Uncle Gabriel?” Mark liked his other uncle, even though Gabriel struck him as emotionally unstable. Gabriel was forty-seven and twice divorced, and had a difficult relationship with his two unruly children, but his heart was in the right place.

  “I’m sorry to call you at this time of night, Mark. I know you always keep late hours.”

  “Are you okay?” It was unusual for Gabriel to call.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Look, I know how close you were to my brother. You were always his favorite. I thought you might understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “I just saw Andrew.”

  “Yeah, I keep thinking I see him too.”

  “No, I mean I really saw him, alive.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I was driving back from the office this evening and passed him standing on the side of the road. He was waving at me.”

  “Uncle Gabriel, you know that’s impossible.”

  “I know, but I swear to you it was definitely him. He was wearing the clothes he died in, that awful shiny blue suit he always wore in France and that awful straw hat—you know, the one the English always think they need to put on in the Riviera.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “God, no, of course not. They’d think—well, you know.” Gabriel had suffered a nervous breakdown soon after his second divorce.

  “I think maybe it’s delayed shock,” was all Mark could say. “I imagine it’s a common phenomenon.”

  “I know. It just felt so weird, what with me driving his old car and everything. I looked in the rearview mirror and there he was. I looked again a moment later, and he’d vanished.” Gabriel had been left his brother’s other car, another classic Mercedes, his favorite, a plum-colored 1970 saloon with white leather seats and whitewall tires. There were only fifteen of the left-hand-drive m
odels remaining in the world.

  “I don’t suppose there’s been any word on what he was doing in Monaco that day?”

  “I’ve asked around. Nobody has a clue. He told Catherine he’d be away for a few days. She was used to him going on his collecting trips.” As far as Mark could discern, Uncle Andrew visited private antique sales, but nobody knew if he ever bought anything. Apart from the few bits and pieces he’d left his family, he seemed to own no special collections. There was nothing but ordinary furniture in his country house.

  They talked for a while, and Gabriel rang off, a little happier. But it wasn’t the end of the matter.

  The following morning, Gabriel Bayer said goodbye to his nineteen-year-old son, Jake, who still lived at home with him, and headed into work earlier than usual. The flat, straight roads that ran through the Norfolk Fens were obscured by patches of thick mist. Gabriel tuned to Radio 4 and listened to a heated discussion about the future of the Anglican church. He had just passed Melton Constable when the radio fazed and faded. On either side of him, misted patches of marsh water glowed softly in the early morning light. He fiddled with the radio’s tuner, trying to relocate his program, when the dark man loomed at him.

  The figure was standing stock-still in the center of the road. Its arms were raised in warning. Gabriel swung the wheel just enough to avoid hitting him, and glimpsed his brother Andrew’s alarmed face peering out from under his white straw hat as he passed. The vehicle’s wheels had lost their purchase on the mist-slick road, and no matter how hard Gabriel tried to correct the drift of the car it slid farther in the opposite direction.

  A classic Mercedes has a solid tempered steel chassis. As the two front wheels spun free of the tarmac and slipped over the verge, they hung above the velvet green surface of the marsh for what felt like an age. Slowly, inexorably, the vehicle tilted and dropped into the dark, still water of the fen. Gabriel fought to unclasp his belt, but found himself in the same situation as his brother. The blinding weed-green liquid began pushing at the seals of the windows. It sprayed in through the radio, the steering column, the radiators. Gabriel was hysterical now, unable to do anything except twist about in panic. He could have escaped if he had only retained his presence of mind, for the fen was not deep. But the water was muddy and impenetrable, the embodiment of icy death. As the Mercedes settled, it rolled over and filled, and there was nothing Gabriel could do about it.

  Nobody thought to check up on his whereabouts until darkness had already fallen. It took another day for the police to dredge the fen and locate his corpse in the weed-camouflaged car.

  *

  CHERYL BAYER

  Mark was in his favorite Wardour Street café, an independent coffee shop with permanently steamed-up windows, when he bumped into Uncle Andrew’s lawyer, Lycus Gerolstein. He had a pale oval face and thinning grey hair that added to his air of reticence. A stern but seemingly fair-minded man, he was greatly trusted by his loyal clients.

  “May I?” he asked, joining Mark at his table. “I thought I might find you here. There was something I wanted to talk to you about. You know you were always your uncle’s favorite.”

  “Yes,” said Mark, “it’s funny he decided not to show it. Not that I mind, I just don’t understand what happened.”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to explain. Your uncle made some big changes to his will in a series of handwritten codicils before his death.”

  “What kind of changes?”

  “Switching bequests from one side of the family to the other, that sort of thing. I tried to talk him out of them, because I felt the original will was fine as it stood. Hell, it had taken us many months to plan and refine it, to make sure that everyone in the family was treated with equanimity.”

  “You don’t think he was coerced into making the alterations, do your

  “I wasn’t there when he made them, but I can tell you the signatures on the codicils are definitely Andrew’s, although they’re pretty shaky. Lately I’ve had my suspicions.”

  “When did he make these alterations?”

  “Well, as you know, your uncle was in hospital quite a few times.”

  “He was having blackouts. At first he just told me it was high blood pressure. But I spoke to the doctor and discovered he was due to have chemotherapy for lung cancer. After a while, he admitted the truth and his treatments began.”

  “Obviously, I knew your uncle was unwell,” said Lycus. “And when people become sick, families tend to gather in preparation for the worst. I checked with the hospital, and was told that several relatives visited him while he was there. I have a feeling the codicils appeared around then. As I say, I can’t be sure until I’ve done some more checking. I just thought you should know.”

  Lycus rose to go, but placed a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “At times like this, family members you know and love can behave strangely. This is just a friendly word of warning. I’d keep an eye on them if I were you.”

  As Mark headed back to the office he rented, a dank attic with an alarmingly sloped floor in one of the last unrestored properties in Soho, he mentally drew up a list of suspects. Who might have manipulated the old man for his money? The idea revolted him. He looked around the office, at his obsolete computer, and the walls that were wet from the leaking ceiling. He was painfully short of cash. Projects had been hard to come by lately, and although he felt a little envious of his brother and his cousins, he could not bring himself to ask them for a loan. It just didn’t feel right. Surely his uncle would have left him money if he had wanted him to have it.

  Pushing the thought to the back of his mind, he settled down to the morning’s work.

  Some time later on the other side of the city, Cheryl Bayer wrote out her name on a piece of paper and studied it with a critical eye. She had kept her former husband’s name after the divorce but now, for the first time, the forty-six-year-old retail manager was thinking of ditching it. Andrew had left her his four-room flat in Stratton Street, Mayfair, choosing to bequeath his huge Buckinghamshire house to his younger second wife, Catherine. Why, she wondered, did the first wives always get the raw deals?

  Okay, the flat was worth a small fortune, but it still didn’t seem fair when you looked at what everyone else had got. Cheryl was trying to sell the place privately, and decided she would continue to live in it until she found a purchaser. The property had hardly been touched since the 1950s and probably needed rewiring, but she resented the idea of paying out hard-earned money to fix it before the sale.

  She studied the signature once more. That was it then. She would change back to her given name and finally put her marriage to Andrew behind her. She balled up the paper and tossed it into the bin.

  Finishing her second bottle of red wine—she would have to watch the drinking if she was going to find another husband—she went to bed, and lay listening to the taxis sloshing along the wet street outside. She thought about Andrew, trying to remember how he had looked in their happier times, but already those memories were growing dim. What were the chances of contesting his will—could she even do it now that it had been implemented? The whole thing was so unfair. Why should the second wife get so much?

  It was no use. She couldn’t sleep. Getting back out of bed she walked through the half-emptied flat without turning on the lights. As she approached the kitchen mirror, she looked at her reflection and instinctively knew that something was wrong. Her shaded figure shimmered and buzzed apart as if it was made of flies, and reshaped itself into Andrew. He was leaning against the kitchen wall behind her, with his hands raised in a friendly gesture. He was smiling at her benignly. With a gasp, she span around, but found nothing there. She hoped Andrew had not been able to read her unkind thoughts. When she looked back at the mirror he was gone, and she realized her sleep had overlapped into her drunken wakeful state, and he had never been there at all.

  No more red wine. She decided to make some tea.

  There was something wrong with the electric kettle. It
was making a funny noise. Perhaps she had overfilled it. She honestly couldn’t remember what she had done. She tentatively touched the side, but it didn’t feel as if it was heating. She tapped the plug, tried the wall switch. The kitchen lights weren’t working for some reason.

  She wiggled the kettle plug more violently.

  She saw the spark, and watched as it jumped with a sharp crack from the plug to the wall, vanishing under the wallpaper. It seemed to have actually gone behind the outlet. She could see it glowing red, burrowing through the paper. Suddenly it surfaced, burning upwards in a fierce crimson line. She knew she had drunk far too much, but she had never actually hallucinated before. She slapped her hands over the progressing spark, trying to stop it, but it continued to burn a path, searing and blistering the flesh of her palms. Now it was rising fast and branching into other patterns, burning channels across the kitchen wall, stopping once to flare and hiss, burning onwards again.

  She stepped back and studied the wall, incredulous, trying to understand what was happening. Some kind of pattern was forming. It looked almost like handwriting. She wondered if she should try to call someone, or whether the fault would simply burn itself out. She knew she should have had the electrics checked.

  The realization of what she was looking at hit her. The burning ziggurat appeared to be her ex-husband’s signature. God knows she had seen it enough times when he had signed money over to her. The thought was so silly she started to giggle. At precisely this moment the lines all flared, and the entire kitchen wall burst into a singe fierce sheet of flame.

  *

  JAKE BAYER

  It seemed as if the rain would never let up. Mark Bayer had attended few funerals in his life, but in one month his presence had been required at three. He watched the gathered family guiltily smoking under the eaves of the crematorium like schoolchildren, and almost felt sorry for them. During the service, everyone had talked about how much Cheryl had doted on her husband, but Mark was beginning to wonder. After the divorce she had become an angry drunk. Nobody mentioned that.