Jane Austen Made Me Do It

by Laurel Ann Nattress

  “Okay, folks!” Fred clapped his hands together. “Inside! Chop chop! We have a Pictish poltergeist and a specter at Sainsbury’s tomorrow, so let’s get Northanger in the bag tonight, yeah?” He snapped his fingers under Cate’s nose. “Any year now, Cate!”

  Fred turned to Erin, gesturing to Lenny to follow them with the camera, then leaned solicitously forward. “What can you tell us about the abbey, Erin?”

  Erin swept her long red hair over one shoulder, hunching forward in the approved style, with the dual effect of creating dramatic tension and showing off the cleavage displayed by the deep vee of her shirt.

  Tits ’n ghouls, thought Cate glumly. That’s us.

  “Well, Fred, Northanger Abbey was once an abbey, you know, with monks and stuff. We’ve had reports that on stormy nights you can still hear the monks wandering around the place, chanting their monkish chants.” Erin consulted her clipboard, a prop that Fred fondly believed lent them a professional air. “There’s also a White Lady, believed to be the wife of a general who lived here in the late eighteenth century. Was it … murder?”

  “Dark deeds will out,” said Fred sententiously. “What else do you have?”

  Erin rustled importantly through her papers. “There’s an unidentified female ghost who haunts one of the bedrooms. She’s associated with a roll of paper that reappears and disappears in a lacquered chest. Could it be the record of her untimely death?”

  “Cut!” called Fred. He turned to Erin. “Love the White Lady, could do without the paper woman. Probably just a laundry list.”

  Waving Erin away, Fred beckoned to a man bundled into a shabby tweed jacket layered over a sweater vest, layered over a sweater, which, Cate suspected, was layered over yet more sweaters. During her two years with Ghost Trekkers, Cate had learned that the size and age of the house was generally inversely proportionate to the quality of the heating apparatus. This did not bode well for a cozy and comfortable night.

  On the other hand, at least she wouldn’t have to fake the shivers.

  Fred spoke directly into the camera. “We have with us the owner of Northanger Abbey, Mr. Morland Tilney-Tilney. Mr. Tilney-Tilney, your family has lived in Northanger Abbey for how long now?”

  Mr. Tilney-Tilney tucked his nonexistent chin into the opening of his sweater vest. “Well, you see, there was a spot of bother about Henry VIII and the monks a few hundred years back—”

  “Fascinating, Mr. Tilney-Tilney! But what about the paranormal appearances?”

  “The whatsits?”

  Erin oozed into the frame. “Ghosts, Mr. Tilney-Tilney. Specters, ghouls …”

  “The shades of the not-so-departed departed,” contributed Hal, from safely out of range of the camera. He shared a wry smile with Cate.

  What was a bright man like Hal doing in an operation like this? At least Hal had the excuse of filial affection. Whereas Cate was here out of cowardice and habit, too afraid to leave the security of the familiar to actually go after what she wanted. What did that make her?

  She decided she’d rather not think about it. She’d gotten very good at not thinking about it.

  “Ghosts?” Mr. Tilney-Tilney cocked his head in confusion. “Oh, you mean that rubbish by the lady novelist! Frightfully famous, too, can’t think of her name at the moment. Crashing bore, all this dance and that aunt and who’s going to marry whom. Don’t go in for that sort of thing myself.”

  “Who would?” The only thing Fred read was Hello! and, occasionally, OK! If it didn’t have an exclamation mark in the title, he wasn’t interested. “Now, Mr. Tilney-Tilney, what about—”

  “Slept here once, you know,” Tilney-Tilney carried on, oblivious. “More trouble than they’re worth, those writing folk. Frightful cheek, putting all those lies in print. Aged housekeepers, secret passageways, murdered wives. Nonsense!”

  “Nonsense … or truths too terrible to be contemplated?” Fred jumped once more into the breach. “Tell me about the White Lady. Was she the murdered wife of General Tilney? Or yet another lost soul haunting the ancient grounds of Northanger? A novice, perhaps, seduced by a renegade monk and shamed into an early grave, leaving a phantom infant behind?”

  Tilney-Tilney crushed his hopes with a decisive, “Lies, the lot of it! Never had a speck of trouble until she got here.”

  Fred pasted on a big, fake smile. “Excellent, Mr. Tilney-Tilney! Beautifully done!” Leaning towards Lenny, Fred murmured, “We’ll edit that out later.”

  Lenny sketched a brief thumbs-up. They’d played this game before.

  The team trailed along after Fred as he led them into a spacious hall, well furnished in cobwebs but conspicuously lacking in pennants, baronial fireplaces, dark paneling, and the other indicia of a good haunted manor. The room had obviously been remodeled in the eighteenth century. Neoclassicism made for poor haunting grounds.

  “This,” said Fred into the camera, “is the Great Hall.”

  “Er, just call it the hall, actually,” said Mr. Tilney-Tilney, popping into the camera frame.

  Fred shouldered him out. “Thank you, Mr. Tilney-Tilney. Now, if you look here, you’ll see—What’s that, Hal?”

  Hal rubbed the back of his neck. His lips were blue. “Is it just me, or is it colder in here than out?”

  It was one of their standard lines, but this time, Hal actually looked as though he meant it. Cate felt a shiver travel up her spine. Hal was right. It was cold. Not that that was unusual—old building, poor heating, limited sunlight. All logical.

  Even so, she couldn’t help but look uneasily over her shoulder. Crap, this job was beginning to get to her. Next thing you knew, she’d be gibbering on about White Ladies.

  Or just gibbering. “Ouch!”

  Fred had jabbed her in the ribs with an elbow, hard.

  “Did you see that, Cate? Cate! Sod it, Cate!” Fred stamped a foot, grinding mud into the old Turkish carpet. “Now we have to re-tape that. Look alive, will you? We don’t pay you to daydream.”

  “Sorry!” CNN. MSNBC. Even Bloomberg. How had it all gone so wrong? “Shall we do it again?”

  “We’re going to have to, won’t we?” Fred mugged a quick turn towards the door, burlesquing shock and surprise. “Why, what’s—Cate! Did you see that?”

  “See what?” she asked obediently.

  In the final version, it would be rendered in grainy black-and-white, shot in the quick, jerky movements for which Lenny was known. Cate wasn’t entirely sure they were intentional, but the result made Fred happy, and if Fred was happy, her bank account was happy.

  As Lenny prowled the room with the EMI, aka the electromagnetic indicator, making the occasional beeping noise, Erin stepped out into the center of the room, head flung back.

  “Are you there? We can feel your presence.…” Erin wandered in a circle, hands out, palms up, eyes raised soulfully to the ceiling. Cate waited for her to trip over the edge of the carpet, but she traipsed neatly over it in her high-heeled boots. “We know you don’t want to be here. We know you haven’t done anything wrong.…”

  “Of course I haven’t!” said an indignant voice in Cate’s ear.

  Cate slapped a hand to her ear. “What was that?”

  She whirled in a circle, but there was no one there.

  Fred winced. He moved the mike away from his mouth. “Nice try, but a bit much, hot stuff. Bring it down a peg.”

  “But I—never mind.”

  Erin jumped in. “Oooh! Oooh! I’m getting something!”

  An STD at a guess. It was an open secret that Erin was sharing Fred’s bed.

  “What are you feeling, Erin?” Fred asked, in the deep, low voice he used for the camera. It made him sound a bit like Alistair Cooke after a few sleeping pills, but the audience seemed to like it.

  “I feel … I feel …”

  “Not so fresh?” murmured Cate.

  Hal stifled a snicker.

  Erin dropped pose long enough to shoot them both a nasty look. “If you would?” Throwing back he
r head, she returned to trance mode. “I feel … a presence!”

  Outside, lightning crashed. The chandelier overhead sputtered and sparked out. The EMI gave one last despairing beep before it, too, whined into somnolence. Even the red light on the camera had gone out.

  The sounds of the storm seemed closer, clearer. Cate could hear the tap, tap, tap of branches against the windows, the hard patter of rain on the stone sills, the strained breathing of her crewmates as they all stood frozen, listening. There was a strange, whispering noise, like the sound of a long dress sweeping across the wool of the carpet.

  The wind, of course. It had to be the wind. These old houses were riddled with drafts. Cate could feel it trailing across the back of her neck, stirring the painstakingly straightened strands of her hair.

  She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself, cold with a fear she couldn’t even name.

  “Oh, bugger,” said Lenny prosaically. “I’ve stubbed my toe.”

  His words broke the spell. Cate let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Fred cursed. Erin giggled nervously.

  “How long do you think it will take to get the power back?” Hal asked.

  “God knows,” said Fred crossly. “Old house like this—I doubt the old boy has a generator. It’s a fucking nightmare.”

  “Don’t you mean a fucking Northanger?” Erin giggled at her own cleverness.

  Someone let out a sharp gasp of disapproval. “Really!”

  There it was. That voice again. The breeze. The cold. The hairs on the back of Cate’s neck prickled.

  “Let’s tell ghost stories!” Cate could hear the muted thump of Erin’s heels against carpet as she blundered across the room, looking for Fred. “Won’t that be fun?”

  “Er … Erin?” said Hal, in a slightly strangled voice. “Is that you?”

  From the other side of the room, Fred exclaimed, “Christ, Erin! Your hand’s like ice.”

  “Okay,” said Cate, in a low voice, “this is getting seriously weird.”

  “Maybe you’re weird,” said Erin crossly. “Sorry, Ha—Ahhhh!”

  Her voice spiraled into the sort of shriek that generally went with showers and ax murderers as an apparition appeared in the doorway, a hideous, deformed creature glowing with an unnatural orange light.

  Cate’s breath came out with a rush. “Mr. Tilney-Tilney!”

  Their host lowered his torch, returning his features to their normal proportions. In the sudden glare of the flashlight, Cate could see her teammates scattered around the room, looking like something out of Scooby Doo—Erin clinging to Hal, Lenny clinging to his camera, Fred standing with his arms folded across his chest and a scowl on his handsome face.

  Did she look as white and scared as they did? Cate hoped not, but she rather suspected she did.

  “Wanted to let you all know, there’s cold beans on toast in the pantry if anyone is hungry,” Mr. Tilney-Tilney said helpfully. “Might have the odd herring on hand as well.”

  “Red herrings?” blustered Fred.

  Erin tittered, rocking on her rickety heels.

  “Er, no,” said Tilney-Tilney apologetically. “Quite the usual sort, I’m afraid. Sort of a pinky-gray.”

  “I think I’ll pass.” Cate started abruptly towards the door. “If it’s all the same with you guys, I’m going to bed.”

  “Dorothy will show you the way,” said Tilney-Tilney. “M’housekeeper, don’t you know. Dorothy!”

  Dressed in rusty black pants and a tentlike black shirt, Dorothy led Cate up a broad staircase and down a narrow hall flanked on one side by doors, on another by windows, the glass shivering and shimmering in the rain. A musty scent rose from the carpet runner beneath their feet, the smell of slow decay and long-held secrets.

  It’s just an old house, Cate reminded herself. Just like any other. So it was an abbey once. No biggie.

  “Thanks so much for showing me to my room,” she said politely. “I’m sorry to be dragging you out of your way.”

  “You thank me now,” said Dorothy darkly. “But will you be thanking me later?”

  In the narrow beam of the flashlight, portraits leered down at them from the walls.

  Dorothy lowered her voice to a whisper and lifted the torch to just below her chin. “They say that it’s on rainy nights that she comes.”

  “Who?” asked Cate.

  Dorothy paused with her handle on the latch. “There’s some as sees her and there’s some as don’t,” she intoned.

  “I can’t really see much of anything right now,” said Cate apologetically. “It’s kind of dark.”

  Dorothy was determined to channel Mrs. Danvers. Fred should have interviewed her instead of Mr. Tilney-Tilney. “Ah, you’ll be grateful for the dark! Grateful for the shadows that hide … the things that hide in shadows.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Cate with determined cheer, as Dorothy flung open the door. In the feeble rays of the single flashlight, the panes of the windows glittered wetly. “Good night!”

  The words echoed hollowly down the corridor. Dorothy was already gone.

  All righty then.

  Cate ventured into the room, easing the door closed behind her. The ray of the flashlight illuminated the hulking form of a tester bed, mercifully not canopied. Cate wasn’t sure she could take a canopy, not after Dorothy. A cedar chest, curiously and intricately carved, brooded in an alcove by the fireplace. The light glinted off the yellow decoration on an old black lacquer cabinet, now peeling a bit with age. There was a key protruding from the keyhole, hinting at secrets within.

  “What secrets lurk within the chests and cabinets of Northanger?” Cate demanded of the empty air, and flinched a bit at the sound of her own voice, too loud and too American in the waiting silence of the empty room.

  It really was a gloomy old place—and about as haunted as a New Jersey shopping mall, Cate reminded herself resolutely. The only hauntings they ever encountered on Ghost Trekkers were those they produced themselves, via low lighting, suggestive music, and the collaborative imagination of the credulous.

  She really had to find another job.

  A sharp cracking noise made her jump. The wind, only the wind again, which had ripped the ancient casement from its frame and banged it back again. Hurrying to the window, Cate leaned out over the edge and wrestled it shut, jamming the catch closed as, outside, the leafless branches gibbered and shook at her, venting their helpless fury.

  Bedtime. Cate yanked her shirt over her head—and froze, in every sense of the word, as a voice demanded, “What are you doing in my room?”

  Dorothy might have mentioned that there were other guests in the house. Hell, Cate wouldn’t put it past her to have put two people in the same room, just to make trouble. The woman needed a hobby.

  Clutching her shirt to her chest, Cate turned, apologies on her tongue. “I’m so sorry, Dorothy told me they’d put me—Oh.”

  “Dorothy?” said the other woman. She was roughly Cate’s height, and dressed in a long gown made of a pale material, with short puffed sleeves woefully unsuited to the November weather.

  She did not, however, appear to be suffering from the cold.

  “The housekeeper,” said Cate numbly.

  Goose pimples broke out across Cate’s chest, over the incongruously bright pink band of her eco-friendly Fruit of the Loom bra.

  Her visitor was transparent. Cate could see the gold and black of the ebony cabinet quite clearly through the other woman’s white dress.

  Oh no. Oh no no. She was not falling for this.

  “Very funny, Fred,” Cate said loudly. She didn’t know how he’d gotten upstairs to set it up, but this was so his sort of prank. She’d bet Erin was in on it, too. “Fred?”

  The apparition wrinkled its brow. She looked young, younger than Cate, her skin smooth and unlined. Unlined and see-through. “Fred?”

  Discarding the shirt, Cate dropped to her knees and began fumbling around along the carpet. “All right. Where are t
hey?”

  “Miss—Miss—are you quite all right?” The projection followed her progress, drifting along after her as Cate crawled across the room.

  “The wires,” said Cate distractedly. “The wires. There must be wires. Unless … is it a battery-operated projector?”

  “Battery?” repeated the apparition delicately. “A battery of cannon? In a bedchamber? My dear Miss—er, do let me ring for the maid. You are not well.”

  Cate hadn’t thought she could feel any colder, but suddenly she did. She settled back on her haunches, moving joint by joint, her body as sluggish as her brain. “You repeated what I said back to me. You responded.”

  “I could hardly be so rude as to do otherwise,” said the apparition. She was carrying a candle, which she set down on the heavily carved chest. “Even if you have invaded my chamber in a very strange mode of dress.”

  The flickering light of the phantom candle made Cate’s head hurt. Fred might be reasonably technically competent, but he couldn’t—at least, she didn’t think he could—create a program designed to respond coherently to outside stimulus. She wasn’t willing to rule out the possibility that such things existed, but if they did, they were out of Ghost Trekkers’ purview. Even Lenny couldn’t pull that off.

  But if this wasn’t a prank … No. That didn’t even bear considering.

  An unidentified female ghost who haunts one of the bedrooms, Erin had said. Associated with a roll of paper that reappears and disappears in a lacquered chest.

  “Who are you?” asked Cate hoarsely.

  “This is all highly irregular,” the apparition said critically.

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Speaking with people who weren’t there definitely came under Cate’s definition of irregular. “Are you …?”

  She couldn’t make herself say the word “dead.”

  “A guest,” supplied the apparition.

  Guest … ghost … It was just a twist of the tongue away. Cate swallowed a spurt of hysterical laughter.

  This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. She worked on Ghost Trekkers, for the love of God. She, of all people, knew that such things were purely the product of smoke and lenses.