Ghostly

by Audrey Niffenegger

  ‘How did you come to call that room the schoolroom?’ he asked, as he took the book from her hand.

  ‘It is the schoolroom,’ she insisted, seeking to cover her evasion by laying stress on the verb.

  That was all he could get out of her. As he questioned further the smiles ceased and the pale, plain little face became devoid of any expression. He knew then that it was useless to press her, but his curiosity was aroused. He inquired of Miss Gribbin and the servant, and learned that nobody was in the habit of calling the long, empty apartment the schoolroom.

  Clearly Monica had given it its name. But why? She was so altogether remote from school and schoolrooms. Some germ of imagination was active in her small mind. Everton’s interest was stimulated. He was like a doctor who remarks in a patient some abnormal symptom.

  ‘Monica seems a lot brighter and more alert than she used to be,’ he remarked to Miss Gribbin.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the secretary. ‘I have noticed that. She is learning to play.’

  ‘To play what? The piano?’

  ‘No, no. To play childish games. Haven’t you heard her dancing about and singing?’

  Everton shook his head and looked interested.

  ‘I have not,’ he said. ‘Possibly my presence acts as a check upon her – er – exuberance.’

  ‘I hear her in that empty room which she insists upon calling the schoolroom. She stops when she hears my step. Of course, I have not interfered with her in any way, but I could wish that she would not talk to herself. I don’t like people who do that. It is somehow – uncomfortable.’

  ‘I didn’t know she did,’ said Everton slowly.

  ‘Oh, yes, quite long conversations. I haven’t actually heard what she talks about, but sometimes you would think she was in the midst of a circle of friends.’

  ‘In that same room?’

  ‘Generally,’ said Miss Gribbin, with a nod.

  Everton regarded his secretary with a slow, thoughtful smile.

  ‘Development,’ he said, ‘is always extremely interesting. I am glad the place seems to suit Monica. I think it suits all of us.’

  There was a doubtful note in his voice as he uttered the last words, and Miss Gribbin agreed with him with the same lack of conviction in her tone. As a fact, Everton had been doubtful of late if his health had been benefited by the move from Hampstead. For the first week or two his nerves had been the better for the change of air; but now he was conscious of the beginning of a relapse. His imagination was beginning to play him tricks, filling his mind with vague, distorted fancies. Sometimes when he sat up late, writing – he was given to working at night on strong coffee – he became a victim of the most distressing nervous symptoms, hard to analyse and impossible to combat, which invariably drove him to bed with a sense of defeat.

  That same night he suffered one of the variations of this common experience.

  It was close upon midnight when he felt stealing over him a sense of discomfort which he was compelled to classify as fear. He was working in a small room leading out of the drawing-room which he had selected for his study. At first he was scarcely aware of the sensation. The effect was always cumulative; the burden was laid upon him straw by straw.

  It began with his being oppressed by the silence of the house. He became more and more acutely conscious of it, until it became like a thing tangible, a prison of solid walls growing around him.

  The scratching of his pen at first relieved the tension. He wrote words and erased them again for the sake of that comfortable sound. But presently that comfort was denied him, for it seemed to him that this minute and busy noise was attracting attention to himself. Yes, that was it. He was being watched.

  Everton sat quite still, the pen poised an inch above the half-covered sheet of paper. This was become a familiar sensation. He was being watched. And by what? And from what corner of the room?

  He forced a tremulous smile to his lips. One moment he called himself ridiculous; the next, he asked himself hopelessly how a man could – argue with his nerves. Experience had taught him that the only cure – and that a temporary one – was to go to bed. Yet he sat on, anxious to learn more about himself, to coax his vague imaginings into some definite shape.

  Imagination told him that he was being watched, and although he called it imagination he was afraid. That rapid beating against his ribs was his heart, warning him of fear. But he sat rigid, anxious to learn in what part of the room his fancy would place these imaginary ‘watchers’ – for he was conscious of the gaze of more than one pair of eyes being bent upon him.

  At first the experiment failed. The rigidity of his pose, the hold he was keeping upon himself, acted as a brake upon his mind. Presently he realized this and relaxed the tension, striving to give his mind that perfect freedom which might have been demanded by a hypnotist or one experimenting in telepathy.

  Almost at once he thought of the door. The eyes of his mind veered round in that direction as the needle of a compass veers to the magnetic north. With these eyes of his imagination he saw the door. It was standing half open, and the aperture was thronged with faces. What kind of faces he could not tell. They were just faces; imagination left it at that. But he was aware that these spies were timid; that they were in some ways as fearful of him as he was of them; that to scatter them he had but to turn his head and gaze at them with the eyes of his body.

  The door was at his shoulder. He turned his head suddenly and gave it one swift glance out of the tail of his eye.

  However imagination deceived him, it had not played him false about the door. It was standing half open although he could have sworn that he had closed it on entering the room. The aperture was empty. Only darkness, solid as a pillar, filled the space between floor and lintel. But although he saw nothing as he turned his head, he was dimly conscious of something vanishing, a scurrying noiseless and incredibly swift, like the flitting of trout in clear, shallow water.

  Everton stood up, stretched himself, and brought his knuckles up to his strained eyes. He told himself that he must go to bed. It was bad enough that he must suffer these nervous attacks; to encourage them was madness.

  But as he mounted the stairs he was still conscious of not being alone. Shy, timorous, ready to melt into the shadows of the walls if he turned his head, they were following him, whispering noiselessly, linking hands and arms, watching him with the fearful, awed curiosity of – Children.

  * * *

  The Vicar had called upon Everton. His name was Parslow, and he was a typical country parson of the poorer sort, a tall, rugged, shabby, worried man in the middle forties, obviously embarrassed by the eternal problem of making ends meet on an inadequate stipend.

  Everton received him courteously enough, but with a certain coldness which implied that he had nothing in common with his visitor. Parslow was evidently disappointed because ‘the new people’ were not church-goers nor likely to take much interest in the parish. The two men made half-hearted and vain attempts to find common ground. It was not until he was on the point of leaving that the Vicar mentioned Monica.

  ‘You have, I believe, a little girl?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. My small ward.’

  ‘Ah! I expect she finds it lonely here. I have a little girl of the same age. She is at present away at school, but she will be home soon for the Easter holidays. I know she would be delighted if your little – er – ward would come down to the Vicarage and play with her sometimes.’

  The suggestion was not particularly welcome to Everton, and his thanks were perfunctory. This other small girl, although she was a vicar’s daughter, might carry the contagion of other modern children and infect Monica with the pertness and slanginess which he so detested. Altogether he was determined to have as little to do with the Vicarage as possible.

  Meanwhile the child was becoming to him a study of more and more absorbing interest. The change in her was almost as marked as if she had just returned after having spent a term at school. She astonished a
nd mystified him by using expressions which she could scarcely have learned from any member of the household. It was not the jargon of the smart young people of the day which slipped easily from her lips, but the polite family slang of his own youth. For instance, she remarked one morning that Mead, the gardener, was a whale at pruning vines.

  A whale! The expression took Everton back a very long way down the level road of the spent years; took him, indeed, to a nursery in a solid respectable house in a Belgravian square, where he had heard the word used in that same sense for the first time. His sister Gertrude, aged ten, notorious in those days for picking up loose expressions, announced that she was getting to be a whale at French. Yes, in those days an expert was a ‘whale’ or a ‘don’, not, as he is today, a ‘stout fellow’. But who was a ‘whale’ nowadays? It was years since he had heard the term.

  ‘Where did you learn to say that?’ he demanded in so strange a tone that Monica stared at him anxiously.

  ‘Isn’t it right?’ she asked eagerly. She might have been a child at a new school, fearful of not having acquired the fashionable phraseology of the place.

  ‘It is a slang expression,’ said the purist coldly. ‘It used to mean a person who was proficient in something. How did you come to hear it?’

  She smiled without answering, and her smile was mysterious, even coquettish after a childish fashion. Silence had always been her refuge, but it was no longer a sullen silence. She was changing rapidly, and in a manner to bewilder her guardian. He failed in an effort to cross-examine her, and, later in the day, consulted Miss Gribbin.

  ‘That child,’ he said, ‘is reading something that we know nothing about.’

  ‘Just at present,’ said Miss Gribbin, ‘she is glued to Dickens and Stevenson.’

  ‘Then where on earth does she get her expressions?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the secretary retorted testily, ‘any more than I know how she learned to play Cat’s Cradle.’

  ‘What? That game with string? Does she play that?’

  ‘I found her doing something quite complicated and elaborate the other day. She wouldn’t tell me how she learned to do it. I took the trouble to question the servants, but none of them had shown her.’

  Everton frowned.

  ‘And I know of no book in the library which tells how to perform tricks with string. Do you think she has made a clandestine friendship with any of the village children?’

  Miss Gribbin shook her head.

  ‘She is too fastidious for that. Besides, she seldom goes into the village alone.’

  There, for the time, the discussion ended. Everton, with all the curiosity of the student, watched the child as carefully and closely as he was able without at the same time arousing her suspicions. She was developing fast. He had known that she must develop, but the manner of her doing so amazed and mystified him, and, likely as not, denied some preconceived theory. The untended plant was not only growing but showed signs of pruning. It was as if there were outside influences at work on Monica which could have come neither from him nor from any other member of the household.

  Winter was dying hard, and dark days of rain kept Miss Gribbin, Monica and Everton within doors. He lacked no opportunities of keeping the child under observation, and once, on a gloomy afternoon, passing the room which she had named the schoolroom, he paused and listened until he became suddenly aware that his conduct bore an unpleasant resemblance to eavesdropping. The psychologist and the gentleman engaged in a brief struggle in which the gentleman temporarily got the upper hand. Everton approached the door with a heavy step and flung it open.

  The sensation he received, as he pushed open the door, was vague but slightly disturbing, and it was by no means new to him. Several times of late, but generally after dark, he had entered an empty room with the impression that it had been occupied by others until the very moment of his crossing the threshold. His coming disturbed not merely one or two, but a crowd. He felt rather than heard them scattering, flying swiftly and silently as shadows to incredible hiding-places, where they held breath and watched and waited for him to go. Into the same atmosphere of tension he now walked, and looked about him as if expecting to see more than only the child who held the floor in the middle of the room, or some tell-tale trace of other children in hiding. Had the room been furnished he must have looked involuntarily for shoes protruding from under tables or settees, for ends of garments unconsciously left exposed.

  The long room, however, was empty save for Monica from wainscot to wainscot and from floor to ceiling. Fronting him were the long high windows starred by fine rain. With her back to the white filtered light Monica faced him, looking up to him as he entered. He was just in time to see a smile fading from her lips. He also saw by a slight convulsive movement of her shoulders that she was hiding something from him in the hands clasped behind her back.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said, with a kind of forced geniality, ‘what are you up to?’

  She said: ‘Nothing,’ but not as sullenly as she would once have said it.

  ‘Come,’ said Everton, ‘that is impossible. You were talking to yourself, Monica. You should not do that. It is an idle and very, very foolish habit. You will go mad if you continue to do that.’

  She let her head droop a little.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to myself,’ she said in a low, half playful but very deliberate tone.

  ‘That’s nonsense. I heard you.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking to myself.’

  ‘But you must have been. There is nobody else here.’

  ‘There isn’t – now.’

  ‘What do you mean? Now?’

  ‘They’ve gone. You frightened them, I expect.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he repeated, advancing a step or two towards her. ‘And whom do you call “they”?’

  Next moment he was angry with himself. His tone was so heavy and serious and the child was half laughing at him. It was as if she were triumphant at having inveigled him into taking a serious part in her own game of make-believe.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘I understand this – that you are wasting your time and being a very silly little girl. What’s that you’re hiding behind your back?’

  She held out her right hand at once, unclenched her fingers and disclosed a thimble. He looked at it and then into her face.

  ‘Why did you hide that from me?’ he asked. ‘There was no need.’

  She gave him a faint secretive smile – that new smile of hers – before replying.

  ‘We were playing with it. I didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘You were playing with it, you mean. And why didn’t you want me to know?’

  ‘About them. Because I thought you wouldn’t understand. You don’t understand.’

  He saw that it was useless to affect anger or show impatience. He spoke to her gently, even with an attempt at displaying sympathy.

  ‘Who are “they”?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re just them. Other girls.’

  ‘I see. And they come and play with you, do they? And they run away whenever I’m about, because they don’t like me. Is that it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It isn’t that they don’t like you. I think they like everybody. But they’re so shy. They were shy of me for a long, long time. I knew they were there, but it was weeks and weeks before they’d come and play with me. It was weeks before I even saw them.’

  ‘Yes? Well, what are they like?’

  ‘Oh, they’re just girls. And they’re awfully, awfully nice. Some are a bit older than me and some are a bit younger. And they don’t dress like other girls you see today. They’re in white with longer skirts and they wear sashes.’

  Everton inclined his head gravely. ‘She got that out of the illustrations of books in the library,’ he reflected.

  ‘You don’t happen to know their names, I suppose?’ he asked, hoping that no quizzical note in his voice rang through the casual but sincere
tone which he intended.

  ‘Oh, yes. There’s Mary Hewitt – I think I love her best of all – and Elsie Power and –’

  ‘How many of them altogether?’

  ‘Seven. It’s just a nice number. And this is the schoolroom where we play games. I love games. I wish I’d learned to play games before.’

  ‘And you’ve been playing with the thimble?’

  ‘Yes. Hunt-the-thimble they call it. One of us hides it, and then the rest of us try to find it, and the one who finds it hides it again.’

  ‘You mean you hide it yourself, and then go and find it.’ The smile left her face at once, and the look in her eyes warned him that she was done with confidences.

  ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed. ‘You don’t understand after all. I somehow knew you wouldn’t.’

  Everton, however, thought he did. His face wore a sudden smile of relief.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ he said. ‘But I shouldn’t play too much if I were you.’

  With that he left her. But curiosity tempted him, not in vain, to linger and listen for a moment on the other side of the door which he had closed behind him. He heard Monica whisper:

  ‘Mary! Elsie! Come on. It’s all right. He’s gone now.’

  At an answering whisper, very unlike Monica’s, he started violently and then found himself grinning at his own discomfiture. It was natural that Monica, playing many parts, should try to change her voice with every character. He went downstairs sunk in a brown study which brought him to certain interesting conclusions. A little later he communicated these to Miss Gribbin.

  ‘I’ve discovered the cause of the change in Monica. She’s invented for herself some imaginary friends – other little girls, of course.’

  Miss Gribbin started slightly and looked up from the newspaper which she had been reading.