The Ephemera

by Neil Williamson

  "Trust me," Grieve said. "They're here." He named some titles. I recognised two. These were not books in general circulation and I doubted there was even one copy of either in the country.

  "Well, if you say so, I'm sure we'll find them," I sighed. Getting rid of Grieve could be difficult. Asking him straight out to leave would make him more determined to stay. If he had nothing better to do, I decided, he could hang around until the work was done and he was satisfied that his information was wrong. Following him inside I added, "If by occult you mean shipping records."

  ~

  "What's missing from this picture?" Grieve's voice surprised me. I had become so absorbed in my work that I'd almost managed to forget his presence. Entering the library's nautical room I found him bending over the table, reading lamps illuminating the heap of maps strewn across it. I held my annoyance and looked over his shoulder.

  He tapped the uppermost map with a forefinger. The chart was a black and white, laminated affair showing the physical geography of a southern part of the Lake District. Dense finger-print whorls represented the profusion of peaks. Towards the foot of the map I recognised a pattern of hills, the way the road snaked down and then curled around, and there, marked by name, was the house.

  I shook my head. "What are you on about, Grieve?"

  He shot me a look, a little smile. Then he flipped the map up and revealed a modern colour OS map of more or less the same area.

  I still didn't see. I said so.

  He laid down the first map again and lifted it. Laid it, lifted it. Eventually he said, "The Lake!"

  He was right. The older rendering omitted the lake outside the house.

  "Nineteen forty seven," he said, pointing. Then the newer map, "Nineteen seventy."

  "You're saying the lake suddenly appeared on the map sometime between forty seven and seventy," I said, feeling as stupid as I sounded.

  "I don't think geology works that fast," he said pointedly.

  I shrugged. I wasn't sure he was right, but decided to let it ride. Sure enough though, on the earlier map the area at the side of the house currently occupied by the lake was clearly marked as an area of open land. Harrow Field.

  "Cartographical error?" I ventured.

  He produced two more maps, slapping them down a little dramatically. "Not unless they missed it in thirty one and oh-nine as well."

  "Perhaps they just copied the old maps and repeated an old error," I suggested. I realised that he was trying to imply something—God knew what—mysterious in all this and I was suddenly determined not to encourage him with it, adding, "or maybe it was a natural disaster?"

  He frowned at me then grinned. "Who knows? Shouldn't be too hard to find out though, should it?"

  ~

  When Grieve returned about forty minutes later I tried to ignore him, but was peripherally aware of him inspecting the shelves in a casual, almost bored, fashion. He didn't mention the lake.

  "So where do you reckon the magic books are," he said.

  I paused in my note-taking, pen poised above the ledger. "Have you tried under M?"

  "Very funny."

  "Well how about that old favourite, the secret room? That's the traditional place for a forbidden library, isn't it?" I looked over to see a grin illuminating his face, like that of a child that has just tricked an adult into giving him his own way. He seemed to take my suggestion, flippant as it was, as permission to probe around the shelves and began to pull books out at random.

  My concentration broken, I watched this performance for a full minute before my patience ran out. "So what about the lake?" I said.

  Grieve stopped what he was doing. His impish smile confirmed that he'd been waiting for me to ask.

  "It's just a lake," he said. "Except that it appears to have no tributaries." He returned to the reading table and sat down, spreading his hands flat in front of him and stretching his legs underneath. "Oh," he added, "and it's salt water. Aha!"

  There was a click followed by a smooth rumbling noise. To my astonishment a square section rose out of the centre of the table. The section was shelved and had the capacity to hold a number of large volumes, but the shelves were empty.

  Grieve ran a finger along a shelf, looked thoughtful. "No dust," he said.

  "Bravo, Grieve." I laughed. "You've discovered a forbidden library with no books."

  Then I stopped laughing as I was suddenly gripped by the conviction that someone else had entered the room. But when I turned I found the doorway empty.

  "Charlie?" I heard Grieve say behind me.

  Ignoring him, I stepped out into the hall. It was empty too, but there was something unusual. A smell. Fresh, with a sharp tang to it, familiar but out of place against the waxy odour of the house.

  "Mrs Caldwell?" I called, thinking it had been the lawyer I had sensed, but she did not reply. The light in the hall had a sullen quality, filtering through the frosted panels around the front door to cast a moiré pattern the colour of beaten copper on the polished wooden floor. I was reminded of the sea at sunset. Then a shadow passed across the glass and the sound of the doorbell made me jump.

  Since the bell still did not immediately bring the lawyer, I opened the door myself. Two men stood there in identical blue overalls. The digging tools in the truck parked behind them completed the picture. I led them around the house to the little chapel perched up the hillside. The family plot lay behind it. There was now a biting edge to the breeze coming off the lake, heavy cloud having gathered during the course of the afternoon. The chapel doors were ajar and we found Caldwell inside. While she took the diggers off to the grave site I lingered, intent on a moment more's respite from the wind. A deep chill had settled inside me.

  The chapel was a sombre affair, solidly constructed from grey sandstone. Isolated electric lights shed a little warm illumination which only emphasised the shadows. The building was barely large enough for three narrow ranks of pews and the open coffin at the front. From my vantage at the door I could see little of the contents—a supine form in a black suit, pale face at the top, white gloves clasped at waist level.

  "Douglas Randall, I presume," said Grieve mordantly as he pushed past me for a better look. I hovered by the door. "Funny how you can tell they were rich even when they're dead," he said. "The gloves are a bit much though. Makes him look like a snooker referee on a rest break. When did he die?"

  "Saturday," replied the lawyer, re-entering the chapel having discharged instructions to the diggers. "The family was notified, but is spread pretty far afield, I'm afraid. There are cousins and such in the USA and New Zealand. None, that we could trace here in the UK, however. It'll be a quick interment tomorrow if there are no mourners."

  "How did he die?" said Grieve.

  Caldwell peered at him, as if registering him for the first time. "I'm sorry, but who are you?"

  Feeling stupid for not having introduced him immediately, I did so now. It was no more than a vague introduction but Caldwell seemed to accept it. She nodded, pushed a stray strand of greying, blonde hair away from her pinched face.

  "Mr Randall fell down the stairs—the coroner believed on his way to bed. He was on a course of medication for his heart," she said unhelpfully. "Now gentlemen, it's getting late. If it's okay with you I have to get back to the office, so I'll have to ask you to pack up for the night." She looked as if she was glad to be leaving. I couldn't say why, but at that moment I felt exactly the same way.

  ~

  I had a room in the village hotel. It came as no surprise to find that Grieve had discovered this and booked himself into the same place. We ate in the little dining room. Half a dozen tables squeezed into disturbingly floral surroundings. The food was bland, but hot and filling, and I felt the inner chill recede at last.

  While Grieve ordered coffees, I excused myself. On my return I discovered that the few other diners had departed and that Grieve had opened up his silver case on our cleared table. Inside the case was the smallest, meanest looking lapto
p computer I'd ever seen. A loose black coil connected it to his mobile phone. Grieve was tapping delicately at the keyboard.

  "Just doing a wee search on Randall," he said as I sat down. "Obits from the New York Times in the late forties came up with something interesting."

  The waitress arrived with a stainless steel pot, steam curling from the spout. She tried to find a space on the table but gave up and set it on the adjoining table along with the milk jug and bowl of sugar sachets. When she was gone I slipped around to see what Grieve had found. The uppermost of the windows on the screen contained a transcript of a 1949 New York Times obituary which reported that Jayne Randall had died on January 22nd when the passenger ship, Galatea, part of the Randall Empire line, had sunk in the North Atlantic. One hundred and seventy two others had drowned that day. This was followed by a report of the extravagant memorial service, a picture of a long line of black cars.

  "Well," said Grieve, "that perhaps explains why there are no direct heirs—but it does add to the mystery, doesn't it?"

  "What mystery?" I was immediately irritated. "Grieve, there is no mystery here. Randall is just a dead old man with a tragedy in his past. Leave it at that."

  Of course, he couldn't. He waited me out with that knowing expression until I had to try again.

  "He lost her fifty years ago," I said. "How do you know he didn't marry again? Or take a mistress."

  "The only beneficiaries were distant cousins. Your Mrs Caldwell told us that," Grieve stressed with laboured patience. "Since he was a widower there was no reason to prevent him marrying another lover. Even if he hadn't married again, the mistress and any kids would surely have been named in the will."

  "So, he didn't marry again," I said.

  "Exactly," Grieve replied.

  "It's not exactly a mystery."

  "On its own, no. But then there's the lake."

  "Oh give it up, Grieve." I felt my voice tense in annoyance.

  He looked at me levelly, then asked, "What did you see—back there in the library?"

  The switch of subject confused me for a moment. I'd almost forgotten. "Nothing," I said.

  Grieve raised an eyebrow.

  "Really," I insisted. "I saw nothing. It was just a feeling, an impression that someone was standing in the doorway. A woman..."

  "You saw a woman?"

  "No. I told you. There was no-one there. It was just a feeling, that's all. I thought it was Mrs Caldwell." Grieve was paying close attention and I was acutely uncomfortable with the direction of his train of thought. "It was just my imagination," I said. "What else could it have been?"

  Whatever reply he may have had for that question was derailed by the irritating cartoon melody of my mobile. It was Christine. She told me that the new shipment of stock for our antiquarian bookshop had at last arrived from Holland. One of the bibles had been sold, but apart from that trade was slow. Nothing new. Business news updated, there was a pause, a heartbeat which I was not inclined at that moment to fill. Then she rang off cheerfully. Guiltily I suppressed a wish that she hadn't phoned.

  "Married?" Grieve asked as I pocketed the phone. I nodded, suddenly feeling as if I'd scored a secret point in the game for managing to keep information from the man who knew everything.

  "How's it going?" he said.

  "Fine," I said. Then added, "great."

  Grieve nodded. I didn't know whether in acceptance of what I said or in confirmation of some hidden thought of his own.

  ~

  Sleep came uneasily. The room was unbelievably small and the radiators appeared to be stuck at their highest setting. I lay tossing my thoughts around in the dark and realised that I had been on edge since arriving at Harrowfield. I wanted to put it down to Grieve's usual unsettling effect on me but it felt like there was more to it than that. I pushed Grieve from my mind, and thought instead about Christine. I wondered if she was asleep yet, or lying awake like me. I tried to picture her face. I tried very hard.

  When I did manage to drop off it was with the help of the hypnotic rattle of the rain against the window.

  I dreamt of rain too. It was raining inside the room, water falling silently through a wedge of sodium light from the street. I could see the distinct drops clearly, and as they passed through the amber light they slowed, descending like glittering beads on threads. Then a hand appeared. The fingers were slender, the wrist fine and articulate, and where the hand intersected the light I could see that it consisted of sparkling, fizzing vapour. A hand made of bright rain.

  It reached towards me and where it touched my chest I felt such a shocking cold that I woke at once. I was not surprised to find the sheets damp, my body drenched. As I became properly awake I realised that this, and the faint tang of salt I still detected in the air, were due to a sweaty night in a hot room, and nothing more.

  ~

  I felt a churlish pleasure that Grieve did not appear at breakfast. This ill slept, I really wasn't in the mood for him. I half hoped he'd given up and gone home, so my humour worsened when I drove to the house to find his car there before mine. The sky was bruised with ugly clouds and the wind was cold, bullying me across the drive towards the front door. Grieve's voice stopped me.

  "Charlie!"

  I couldn't see him at first, but when he called again I spotted him, absurdly hanging out of a second floor window along the side of the house that faced over the lake. I walked around.

  "What the hell are you doing?" I shouted, not disguising my disapproval.

  "Look." He seemed excitable, good-naturedly ignoring my own mood. He was wedged half out of the left-most of three identical windows. With a struggle he extricated himself and vanished. I waited and, feeling the edge of the wind at my back, pulled my collar up and stepped into the lea of the house. My feet were suddenly cold too. Looking down I discovered that I was standing in a puddle around an overflowing drain. Cursing, I stepped back. The drainpipe spewed dirty looking water. I followed it up and saw that it exited the house below the middle of the three windows. Grieve reappeared at the right hand of these.

  "There's no door," he shouted gleefully, then, seeing that I wasn't following him, "come up and I'll show you."

  I didn't believe him at first, but eventually he proved to me that whatever room the middle window belonged to had no door—at least not one that we could find. There were two doors on the east second floor landing. Both opened onto rather non-descript guest bedrooms: bare, functional rooms that, although clean enough, had a look of disuse about them. Considering Randall's reclusive tendencies, this was hardly surprising.

  Rather desperately I suggested that the window between the two rooms may have been purely decorative, that there was no third room. A certain amount of unproductive tapping and listening at walls hinted otherwise but an inspection of the dimensions of the bedrooms suggested that any room that might exist would have to be pretty narrow. I couldn't imagine that anyone would build such a room. Grieve though was convinced.

  "So where is it, Charlie?" he exclaimed. "Where's the door?"

  I shrugged. A flurry of rain pattered against the window, spattering the windowsill, and I pulled the sash down. It was sticky, requiring some effort before it closed with a thump.

  "Grieve, it's an old house," I said, and a solution suggested itself. "One large room got knocked into two and instead of splitting a window they built either side of it. Simple explanation. End of story. I'm going to get back to my work."

  I meant it. Whatever mystery his brain was concocting to tie together these otherwise unnoteworthy elements was an attempt to justify his belief that Randall had a secret collection, and it existed purely in Grieve's imagination. Randall had been no more than a tragic widower, the lake a curious natural phenomenon, and the supposed library had never existed. I'd had enough. The morning was wearing on and there was a lot to be done before the lawyer returned at five. It appeared that she'd stuck only long enough for one of us to arrive. It seemed she didn't care to spend much time at Harrowfield H
ouse.

  I left the room and was about to descend the stair when my body was seized by a cramp of cold. I clutched the banister for a few seconds and then the spasms of painful shivers left me as suddenly as they had come. It felt as though whatever had gripped me had flown from me, rushed out of my chest and my extremities to the other end of the landing. Looking in that direction, I saw that there was another flight at the far end, leading upwards and ending at a single door. Since the second floor was nominally the top of the house, I guessed the door led to an attic space.

  "Grieve," I said, climbing the stairs. "Look at this." I stopped short of the door. My heart clenched. The air up this one flight of stairs was noticeably colder; it smelled fresh, tainted with a saline edge. I laid my hand on the brass door handle and snatched it back. "Jesus!"

  "Cold?" Grieve said.

  I nodded. I could see now that what I had taken to be a film of dust on the handle was in fact a rime of frost.

  Grieve moved past me. His shoes squelched. Along the bottom of the door the carpet was soaked. He crouched, sank his fingers into the weave and then lifted them to his nose, sniffed them, licked them. "Salt water," he said. Then turning to me, "Like the hall yesterday?"

  That was the smell. Salt water. My mind raced for an explanation that did not involve whatever Grieve was thinking right now. Anything that wasn't mysterious. Supernatural. I couldn't think of one. The words slipped out, "And I had a dream last night."

  He stood and wiped his hand on his trousers. In the face of his expectation I briefly described my dream. Grieve subjected me to a look of appraisal which I could not easily interpret, but in parts it bore resemblance to comprehension, suspicion and envy. Then he stepped past me and used the cuff of his coat to turn the handle.

  The door opened onto darkness. Grieve reached into his coat and pulled out a penlight. He flicked it on. "It's a boy scout thing," he said, stepping through the doorway.

  Even as I followed him I wondered what the hell I was doing. This was not a rational activity for two adults to be pursuing in a dead man's house—but the salty air prickling my skin and the sudden deep cold returning to fill my bones were not rational either. I allowed myself to be led.