Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  *

  He dreamed he was with Violet on the train to Hastings. He wished he were not, was bored and irritable. Until she suddenly vanished into thin air. Delighted, he took no issue with her disappearance. Next instant, others in the carriage were pointing out of the window at a burning edifice up on a tall hill.

  All of them seemed frightened, and Edwin also grew afraid. Indeed, they were all well advised to be, for gradually, as the train ploughed on, the burning house came swelling down the hill after them, and, netted about with woods on fire and glass bursting like fireworks, ran on the track at their side.

  All the other passengers then fled the carriage, but Edwin could not move, though the train windows grew ever hotter and melted like wax.

  *

  In the first of the most terrible earlier dreams Edwin had woken, or thought he had. That time, he thought he had tried to reach the window, but fainted. He certainly found himself next day lying by the bed.

  Now, erupting from the dream of the train running neck and neck with the burning house, Edwin flung upright. Where was he? Tenmouth Street? No, no, he was shot of that place. Nevertheless, after all, even into Lambeth the nightmares had hunted him and pulled him down.

  Edwin moaned. How impenetrably dark the room was. Of course, he had new curtains, very thick. No light could enter from the street.

  He reached for matches, but had forgotten to put them by. He must get up and cross the room, turn on the gas above the mantelpiece… or draw the curtain back an inch, perhaps.

  A single unwary notion came to him as he swung his feet towards the floor. Was it Violet? Was it actually possible that Violet… haunted him? Don’t be a fool.

  The floor, lino rather than carpet, was cool to his feet. Thank God. And the blackness was without any smell, neither any sound. Oh, he would light a lamp, have a brandy, play a game of Patience. All would be well; he could not expect to slough all his trouble in a single evening.

  As his hand touched the curtain, like the trick of a cheap but cunning magician, a thousand little golden embers winked on all over it. They twinkled and fluttered, scrambling up the folds. His eyes, it was only that; it would pass in a moment… Ignoring the illusion, even though it burned his hand, he dragged the heavy material aside. And there, directly below, instead of a street and a small garden, Edwin beheld the side of a craggy wildwood hill, sloping downwards into sheer darkness, under a starless sky. But even so, the stars were waking up. They were in the trees. They were red and gold. They glittered and jostled, and long threads of purple vapor spiraled up from them. There came a sound like the hissing of snakes.

  “No,” Edwin said, with a nonsensical firmness, to the room, the night. But it was much too late for No.

  The swarm of sparks came out from every direction, whirling at him, covering him, and by their solar flare, he saw his own hands beating at them, and in the round mirror opposite to him was the face of a madman shrieking…

  Such a mirror had never been his. It was another mirror, that maybe he remembered. It had hung in that house.

  By the naked flicker of sparks, of hurrying flames that skittered now everywhere, Edwin saw the cramped room had expanded to several times its size. Its ceiling had risen and was graced by cornices, and over there a solid beam—it was not the room in Lambeth, let alone in Tenmouth Street.

  “A dream—!” shrilled Edwin.

  The heat came in a torrent, a towering shout. For a scintillant second he could look straight through every wall. He saw the architecture of the huge old house, its narrow upright structure, the struts of stone or wood that pinned its brickwork, the tessellations of its roofs, the castle-shapes of chimneys, ziggurats of stairs, the weaving web of corridors and annexes, halls, and antechambers, the furniture that clad it, the drapes and papers and carpets that dressed it. He saw all this by the fiery torch of regnant flame, for the fire already gouged and conquered every avenue. The smell of smoke now was so acrid it had transmuted his lungs also to fire. He rushed from side to side, and slender vestiges of things floated or slammed towards him, gilded with their bright soprano pain.

  Violet—he thought—Violet. But here, too, he was quite wrong. It was not Violet—poor, pathetic, tear-sodden ninny—not she he had brought inadvertently away with him from those two nights of homicide and arson. All about him now, crackling and cracking, timbers breaking, atoms raining down in lava showers, all about him screaming with its own speechless fury and despair, all about him was the vengeful ghost of what he, Edwin Marsh Onslowe, had also slain. Built on a site of blessing, constructed with care and talent from all that was benign, a healer, a protector. Replaying for him its endless dying agony. Of course, it was not any human psyche that had pursued him. It was the ghost of the murdered house.

  The bedroom door, as Edwin wrenched it wide, burned the flesh from his hands. Howling, vomiting, he blundered through the ghastly radiance of passages, between the black bones of walls, and down its volcano-glass of blazing stairs. But there was no way out. Even had he found one, beyond the door, the gate, the land was burning too, its ancient trees, the very sky.

  A hundred shattered mirrors showed him also how he had become. He was burned black, his facial bones a slate of scoria. He was so scalded that he shivered as if with icy cold. He, like the house, was quite dead, yet did not die. From his own mouth his unbreath issued out more flames. His boiled eyes bulged and glared. He did not know his name, he did not know himself.

  Only what he had done. And that this, this would never end.

  *

  Edwin was discovered the next morning lying in an alleyway some five streets from his new apartment. He wore only his nightshirt, was both bruised and dirty, and some of his hair had been torn out.

  The constable, who subsequently escorted him back to his lodging, confirmed that Edwin seemed to have received some dreadful shock, but he was by then subdued and decorous. He agreed to all the constable’s requirements with a look of “almost relief.” At the flat Edwin tidied himself and dressed. The two men then went by cab to the nearest police station.

  Regardless of the fact that Edwin Onslowe’s reason for admitting to the murder of Violet North, perhaps understandably, was never credited, his concise outline of his acts and motives convinced the arbitrators of the law. Guilt, meanwhile, as is well known, may assume varied aspects. Onslowe himself is said to have stated that, since his arrest, the remorseless haunt, or as others took it to be, nightmare, had donned a less awful if still persistent form, which involved mostly his watching, from outside, the house burn down. To Mrs. North herself, Onslowe never referred with any interest, let alone display of regret.

  One further anecdote, conceivably, is worth noting.

  Prior to his execution, Onslowe spoke with the priest, then customary. But Onslowe is reported to have told this gentleman immediately: “I neither hope for, nor fear, anything in any life after death. Following death there is nothing at all. For if there were another life, why do ghosts remain to trouble us in this one? My Hell I’ve suffered. Once dead, my dear sir, I expect-—confound it—to get some peace.”

  —Derwent’s Legal Mysteries

  <>

  *

  Party Talk

  JOHN GASKIN

  JOHN GASKIN was educated at the City of Oxford High School and Oxford University. In his early years, Gaskin worked on British Railways and as a banker before taking a lectureship at Trinity College, Dublin, where he became a Fellow and held a professional chair in philosophy.

  Since 1997 he has mainly written fiction, including a volume of poems and two collections of short stories, The Long Retreating Day: Tales of Twilight and Borderlands and The Dark Companion. He is also the author of the nonfiction study A Traveller’s Guide to Classical Philosophy and a full-length tale of murder and haunting, A Doubt of Death.

  Gaskin lives in a remote part of Northumberland, UK, and doubts that he will ever be connected to the Internet.

  “A year or two ago I was p
lanting roses against the wall of a village church, and found strange things,” he recalls. “A little later I was at a lunch in one of the larger houses overlooking a deserted railway, and a river…”

  The guests are met, the feast is set:

  May’st hear the merry din.

  – Coleridge

  SHE HAD THE SWEET SMELL of faded roses that I associate with polite mortality in decay. I would have preferred talking to someone else at the Selwoods’ lunch party – after all, buffets are designed to shuffle sheep and goats – but she held me with deep-set eyes that might almost have been blind, or perhaps they were focused upon something beyond me or the house. I could not politely escape.

  “You write ghost stories,” she stated in a gravelly whisper that seemed to require no movement in the mask-like tightness of her face.

  “I have published a few – not real ghost stories – mere tales of the uncanny – the boundaries between chance and significance, agency and accident, eidetic imagery and actual perceptions.”

  “But you do not believe in ghosts, ‘real’ or otherwise.”

  “No. I have to confess I don’t. At least not as the intention of dead persons bringing about new events in the world. But I believe in the power of the living brain to influence directly other physical things in the world with results it does not expect or always understand – like the poltergeist effect.”

  My analysis elicited no comment.

  She was sitting at the high-backed end of an expensive Victorian chaise longue, somewhat over-clothed (as I thought) for a well-heated house, even if it was January in the Cheviots. I was aware of a large and vague wrap of material round her shoulders, a grey headscarf of dusty silk drawn tightly over her head, a garment that might have been a jacket or a coat, and a long dark skirt. I could not see her feet, but there were smears of mud on the carpet near her that appeared to have been carried in from the garden, not from the gravelled forecourt of the house where I had entered. There were black gloves over her evidently thin fingers. She gestured towards the far end of the chaise longue.

  “Sit down.”

  For a moment I had sight of her open mouth. “I have a tale you must hear,” she said.

  I mumbled something about not wishing to keep her from the rest of the company. But the rest of the company was receding from us, intent upon itself or upon food in the adjacent dining room, and there was no one at hand to offer rescue. I settled at the far end of our chair in a position that made it easy not to look at her too intently. I must have grimaced.

  “Yes, you’ll find it as hard as stone – horsehair and leather under silk tapestry. They always preferred show to comfort, even in Gosforth. It wouldn’t have been tolerated in my day. Everything was for comfort then - except for the bedrooms and the plumbing. I remember the chill of the bedrooms. I was eighteen. I’m accustomed to it now.”

  She paused, as if looking back into a place to which I was not admitted. Then to my embarrassment I heard her say:

  “You do not wish to hear me, Dr Smyth. But you have no choice now your glass is all but empty. Be still and I shall take you deeper than its emptiness.”

  It was a ridiculous style of speaking, and I should have braced myself for a period of the sleepy half-attention in which one hopes to be able to say “yes”, “no”, “how nice” and “what a pity” in the right places – except that I was uncomfortable, it was cold near the window, and for some reason I was acutely wide awake. She was speaking again.

  “I left school that spring and was supposed to be filling in time learning German before wintering at a finishing school in Switzerland where they only spoke French. I believe my father thought German might encourage me to listen to more Bach cantatas. German was not in fashion at the time and cantatas are some of the drearier manifestations of religion. I rebelled. The rebellion took the form of Thomas, the gardener’s boy who, unlike German irregular verbs, was beautiful and tempting. It was beyond my mother’s ability to come to terms with what she found us doing uncomfortably behind a hedge one afternoon.

  “Tom was mercifully called up almost immediately afterwards. I was banished to the care of my mother’s aunt, a robust-minded woman of considerable experience of the world who had never married and lived in a lonely house several hundred miles away. My love was warm and strong. Home, as I discovered too late, was comfortable and safe.

  ‘‘Todburn Hall, as it was called before they rediscovered the old religious connection, was large and untenanted by youth or laughter. It seemed to me that my great aunt lived in a plush cocoon of velvet and chilly comfort. She tried to receive me well and be kind in the practical ways she understood, but I was vexed with life and gave her little help.”

  The voice ceased, and I glanced sideways against the pale light of the window. The sun had disappeared behind winter clouds and the ribbon of river lay grey and cold a field or two away below the house. I could see only her vague silhouette against the blank glass. The spreading web of her clothes filled the end of our chair like a shadow.

  But the voice had resumed – a penetrating whisper that was both clear and quiet, like listening inside the private world of some exquisitely engineered earphones.

  “I was lonely, but it was not loneliness for people or company in general. It was the raw, torn-off space beside me that had been the fresh animal smell of Tom, the soft bloom of his skin, his talk, his touch, his strength. I walked by the river. I painted pictures in dark and fervent colours. I cried out in my heart. I was morose and withdrawn when my aunt tried to draw me out of myself. She knew more of life than I could then recognize or would ever know, but there were no words she could find to bridge the gap between us. Every generation thinks its own pain is unique. That is the glory and the pity of life.

  “Her solution was to divert my attention with hearty activity. Having already drawn the garden and made a catalogue of its contents for her, checked the silver inventory, painted the view of the river in several unsuitable versions, and read to her a number of Oscar Wilde’s stories – the longest was missing from her collection. She later told me it was lost when she was in charge of the British Expeditionary Force’s hospital in Alexandria.

  ‘‘As I was saying, having completed all these tasks, I found myself one afternoon – about a month after my banishment – tidying a strip of garden against the south wall of the village church.

  “A number of disused grave stones had been set close against the wall of the transept. They were old stones, much defaced, but they were close and I felt watched as I worked on my knees below them. A foolish fancy! It is the keeper of the gate that watches, not the gate.

  “I was to prepare the ground and plant a dozen roses donated by my aunt – Rosa Mundi they were called. Yes, Rose of the Earth. Beauty from the dust. None survive now. Some did not survive my planting, particularly at the eastern end of the wall where the soil was mostly sand and fragments, like the ground at Xanthos. You do not know it …” Her voice faded away as if in exhaustion, and for a moment I hoped to see her fall asleep, but she resumed more strongly.

  “Roses have deep roots, and I did not at first recognize what I was finding. The earth was dry, and in one area seamed with brown fibrous material like peat. It was in this that I dug up part of a bone. I was at the corner of the transept, where the wall turned back to join the chancel a few yards away. At the corner and just past it, one of the old headstones had been positioned leaving a few inches of dark space between its back and the church wall.

  ‘‘I threw the thing down there out of sight – and other bits that left no doubt at all concerning my finds. It was as I was disposing – with some distaste – of part of a broken bone with discoloured teeth still in place that a shadow moved on the wall in front of me. My back was to the path through the graveyard, and I turned sharply. I had heard no one approaching, and was feeling uneasy about concealing my finds behind someone else’s memorial. It was only a young clergyman who was watching me – probably the curate I thought. Thos
e were the days when country livings were properly staffed.

  ‘‘ ‘What are you doing with those?’ he asked.

  ‘Planting them. My aunt, Miss Addison, is a member of the Select Vestry, and she has given them to the church. I’m doing it for her.’

  ‘‘ ‘No, I mean with the bones.’

  ‘‘ ‘I … well they’re only bits and pieces. I suppose they have been brought to the surface as other graves have been dug. I presumed that behind a gravestone would be a suitable place.’

  ‘‘ ‘Yes indeed,’ he said, before bending down to look, closer to me than appeared to be necessary. ‘You’ve finished planting?’

  ‘‘ ‘Yes. I’m tidying up.’

  ‘‘ ‘And this … brown stuff – it’s not like the rest of the earth.’

  ‘‘ ‘No. It’s a layer, about eighteen inches down. I hope the roots will reach it and gain some nourishment. Do you think I’ve gone too deep?’

  ‘‘ ‘I don’t know. Earth like that should not be near the surface. But your roses will certainly draw life from it.’

  “He stood up and looked at the gravestone where I had concealed the bones. I had not been able to see the name earlier. The lettering was much eroded and it was the angle of the sun, now flush with the face of the stone, that showed up the antique lettering as shadows. The name was Elenor Ward. There was no mention of family or husband, merely the year of her birth and that she had died at the age of sixteen. She was commended to the mercy of God. I sensed before I was told the mercy she might have needed from men, and almost certainly did not get.

  ‘‘ ‘An old parishioner learnt her story when she was a child, and told me about her one day when I was standing here,’ he said. ‘She was …’ he hesitated, ‘to have a child by one of the village labourers, an unrepentant sinner. She wasn’t the first he’d got into trouble, but she was the last – at least in this place. He went away before the child was born. That’s her grave, not just a moved stone like the rest. She’s under there. But I’m sorry. This is morbid talk and I haven’t even introduced myself. My name is Thornton, Peter Thornton. I’m assisting here for the summer.’