The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  Was she criticizing us? We got on so well together. Yet there was always the edge of wondrous difference, as if Alice came from . . . elsewhere, outside of our ken.

  “You could only have been a little girl in the sixties,” protested Charlotte.

  “Could I?” Alice craned her lovely neck to look at the Xtractall. “I suppose that’s a piece of the sixties. Soon it’ll be replaced by some silent faceless box controlled by a microchip . . .”

  “High time too,” said Martin. “Can’t imagine why Chalmers hangs on to the thing.”

  “He doesn’t know why,” said Alice. “He’s one of the most neutral people I’ve ever seen. Till the usual restaurant crowd turn up, prattling about barn conversions and BMWs, this place is limbo. Imagine if the past could grow angry – bitter, like a disillusioned parent . . . yet still somehow hopeful and radiant too. In a schizophrenic way! Trying to keep the old faiths alive . . . And what if earlier epochs feel the same way about, say, the whole twentieth century? If those epochs still try to intrude and guide their offspring who have changed out of recognition? To keep the old flames alive. Smilingly, yet bitterly too.”

  “Er, how can the past keep watch on the present?” Martin asked with a grin. He thought a joke was due, but Alice stared at him quite seriously.

  “The collective unconscious, which is timeless. The imprint of memory on material objects. Don’t you think this is what angels and devils may be all about? Affirmative vibrations from the past – and negative, angry, twisted ones?”

  “Beats me,” said Martin. He laughed. “I always design vibrations out of buildings, mount ’em on shock absorbers, that sort of thing. Make sure there are no resonances likely to set people’s teeth on edge.”

  My teeth were on edge. I felt that Alice was on the brink of revealing herself ... to us, the chosen few. She was the joyous, positive spirit of an older world – and I wondered how old she really was. She liked us. She hoped for us. Yet for the most part the old world hated us?

  She said to Charlotte, “I suppose Webster-Freeman’s wisdom books must basically be about power, a power that has grown weak but still lingers on.” I had the momentary weird impression that Alice herself had only leafed through those volumes, as casually as Charlotte had. “Power today is money, property, investments, plastic. Empty, dead power. Zombie power. Yet so vigorous. The world’s soul is dying . . . of hunger. The plastic body thrives. That fan,” she added, “may well be a creature of the sixties.”

  “Time to replace it,” Martin said stoutly.

  “And what did it replace? An ancient stone, a hungry old stone. Well,” and she smiled sweetly, “must dash home in a few minutes and microwave some goodies. Mustn’t we all?”

  Was that what she would really do at home, wherever home was?

  Before departing, Alice told a ridiculous joke about how to circumcise a whale. How? You use four skin divers. After booking a table in the restaurant for the following Friday, to sample the oysters and partridge, we left contented.

  “Alice was in an odd mood tonight,” Jenny remarked after we got home. “She was just kidding, don’t you think?”

  “I think that was the real Alice. But I don’t know if Alice is real, the way we are.”

  Jenny giggled. “Do we imagine her every Friday? Is she the soul that’s missing from our lives?”

  “Not exactly. We’re her hope . . . for something. Some . . . rekindling.” I thought of flames, and a naked woman dancing, leaping the fire, singeing her public hair. “And yet . . . we don’t matter too much to her. That place matters more. Chalmers’s pub. The limbo pub, at that empty hour. That’s what binds us together.”

  “You aren’t hoping for something from her, are you?” she asked archly.

  “No, You know that would ruin—” I had been about to say “the magic.” I said instead, “The happy hour. Maybe,” I added, “without us it’s difficult for her to make contact with the modern world.”

  “Come off it! Charlotte met her on the train from Euston. Alice is in publishing. In business.”

  Is she? I wondered. Alice spoke as if she had been at home in the sixties . . . not just a little girl back then, but herself as now. And I suspected, crazily, that she had existed in earlier times too.

  Charlotte had met Alice on the train, Had any of us bumped into Alice again, either on the London-bound train or the return one? I knew I hadn’t. I had glimpsed Alice coming out of MK Station, and also cruising for parking in her Saab; yet I had never seen her anywhere on the platform at Euston. Given the rush and the crowding, that wasn’t totally odd in itself – unless none of us had ever coincided with Alice after that first occasion. Certainly Jenny had never mentioned doing so.

  I refrained from asking. We microwaved duck à l’orange, went to bed, and made love the same way we usually made love on a Friday night. When Jen and I were making love, I never thought about Alice, never visualized her – as if I were forbidden to, as if Alice could reach out and control me. Only afterwards did I lie awake wondering about angels and demons – contrasting values in the same equation – as messages, vibrations from the past intent on charming or savaging the present day, but not widely so, only marginally, except where a magical intersection of persons and places occurred.

  On Monday I had some hard talking to do to some visiting Hungarians, though I mustn’t be too stringent. I enjoyed the hospitality in Hungary.

  Next Friday, in the Roebuck, we had already scrutinized the menu through in the bar, and ordered. Jenny and Charlotte went off together to the ladies’ room. I myself was overcome by an urgent need to piss. So, apparently, was Martin. Martin and I both apologized simultaneously to Alice and fled to relieve ourselves, leaving her alone. Until then the fan had remained tight-lipped. Clunk-clack, I heard as we retreated.

  It was a long, strong piss for both of us. Martin and I left one urinal basin untenanted between us: a kind of ceramic sword laid not between knight and lady but between squire and squire, both of us being chaste, faithful squires of Alice. Let us get up to no monkey business together. It’s odd that women can waltz off together to the ladies’ as a sort of social event, whereas chaps should do no such thing, as if mutual urination is a queer sign. Have the boys gone off together to compare their organs? In this case, need dictated.

  As we were walking back, bladders emptied out, I heard the fan shut off and close itself. The bar proved to be deserted. We assumed that Alice had followed our wives to the powder room. We chatted about the innovative design of a new office block currently soaring near Euston Station. People were christening it “the totem pole.” Then our ladies returned without sight of Alice.

  In case Chalmers had summoned us and Alice had gone ahead to the restaurant, I checked there, in vain. Chalmers’s wife ducked out from the kitchen to remark that I was a little early. I checked the car park, where Alice’s Saab sat in darkness.

  “Can’t find her anywhere, folks!” I spotted Alice’s silvery purse lying on the carpet. Before I could go to retrieve it, Martin hurried to my side and gripped my arm.

  “Look at the fan,” he whispered fiercely.

  The slats of the Xtractall were moving in and out gently one by one, top to bottom, in an undulating fashion. I thought of someone sucking their teeth. The edge of each slat was streaked crimson, thin lines that faded, even as I watched, as if being absorbed or licked away atom by atom.

  “Are my eyes playing tricks?”

  “What do you think, Derrick?”

  “You aren’t suggesting—?”

  “I bloody well am. I’ve been doing some stiff thinking about Alice since her spiel last week—”

  “Stiff thinking?”

  He looked exasperated. “I never get a hard-on thinking about her. Fact is, I can’t seem to, whatever Charlotte may imagine.”

  “Me neither.”

  “She’s an enchantress. Supernatural. I mean it, old son. Haven’t you suspected?”

  I nodded cautiously. This wasn’t quite
the thing to admit to one another.

  “I thought she might be a modern-day witch,” I said. “Despite commuting to Euston and driving a Saab. Type of books she publishes, you know?” I was only telling him a quarter of the truth. Since last weekend I had thought ever more about “angels” and “devils” – for want of better names! – about benign and angry vibrations from a past that had been disenfranchised, in a kind of time-crossed disinheritance: the plastic children forsaking the memory of the parent. Alice was more than any latter-day witch – and less, because she wasn’t of our time at all, in spite of her modern gear and jokes.

  “Not a witch, Derrick. A lamia. As in Keats’s poem. Had to read that at school. A female spirit who preys on travelers.”

  “She never preyed on us.”

  “Just so. She was being a good girl with us. Friday evening was her leisure time, her friendly hour. She stopped us from feeling, well, lustful.”

  “What are you two arguing about?” asked Charlotte. She and Jenny couldn’t see the fan without turning. “Did one of you say something to Alice that you shouldn’t? Something to offend her?”

  “No, damn it,” swore Martin.

  “But something did go wrong,” I insisted, “and she melted away.”

  “No!” He grabbed and shook me. Jenny started up, fearing that we were about to have a brawl – about Alice, right in front of our wives. “You don’t get it, do you?” His face leered into mine. “The fan ate her. It fell in love with her just like you said – and it consumed her. It sucked her into itself.”

  “It—?”

  “The bloody fan!”

  By now the slats of the Xtractall were quite clean, and no longer made that munching motion.

  Charlotte also leapt up. “You’re mad!”

  “Get away from under that fan, love,” begged Martin. “Remember the cat that went missing? Remember how Alice hated cats? The fan ate the cat up for her – we found that scrap of bloody fur up there, right? – and Alice knew; she knew.”

  I recalled Alice’s smile, directed at the fan.

  “One night last week the fan extracted poor old Tiger,” he went on. “Remember what Alice said about how the fan replaced a hungry old stone? Something up there is kin to her.”

  A demon, I thought – to her angel. But both of them aspects of the past, still wooing the present weakly, in friendly or venomous guise.

  “That thing’s much more powerful than Alice guessed,” insisted Martin. “When we all went off to the toilets – and who sent us, her or the fan? – it sucked her in because it wanted her.”

  What Charlotte did next was either quite stupid or remarkably brave. Of course, she did not see Alice the way we fellows saw her. Maybe women couldn’t. She kicked off her shoes, burrowed in her own bag for a neglected pack of cigarettes, lit one, and mounted a chair.

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “Physically impossible – leaving aside the wild idea of an extractor fan falling in love.” Charlotte puffed smoke at the blank face of the fan.

  “The cat fur,” Martin protested.

  Clunk-clack: The fan opened up. The mechanism whirred. Smoke disappeared. Charlotte never flinched. She flicked her lighter for illumination. Daringly she teased two long fingernails between the slats and tugged. Several strong black strands of hair came free.

  “Oh,” she said, and jumped down. “Is this some joke the two of you cooked up with Alice? Is she waiting outside the door stifling her giggles?”

  Martin crossed his heart like a child. And Charlotte faltered. I was wrong: Each in our way we must have been thinking along similar lines about Alice. Our ladies had both been resisting such conclusions.

  “It’s still impossible,” Charlotte said, “unless the fan leads somewhere else than just to the ordinary outside. And unless it changes what it takes. Unless it etherializes stuff instead of merely making mincemeat! Maybe it does. What was the landlord saying about never finding any mice? How can that be a magic fan? How?”

  By now Jenny was caught up in our conviction. “We can’t call the police. They would think we were insane. We don’t even know Alice’s surname, let alone where she—”

  I had remembered the purse and swooped. I emptied it on a table over the beer mats. Car keys. Cosmetics. Tiny bottle of perfume. Ten- and twenty-pound notes, but no loose change. A tarnished old medallion. No driver’s license, no cheque book, no hint of her full name or where she lived.

  “At least we have the car keys,” said Martin.

  “There’ll be no clues in her car,” I told him. “She isn’t any ordinary human being.”

  “Oh, we know that already, Derrick darling.” My wife’s tone was somewhat spiced with irony.

  “She’s a supernatural being. Didn’t we know it all along?” I was echoing Martin, but those had been my sentiments anyway.

  Charlotte didn’t disagree with my assessment, however sceptical she may have seemed before. “And she’s our friend,” she reminded me. “Was, at any rate! So two supernatural forces have collided here—”

  “Or come together. Like the poles of a magnet, like anode and cathode.”

  “What do you suppose our landlord knows about that fan?”

  I laughed. “Our Mr. Chalmers doesn’t realize the fan’s possessed. He thinks Tiger was a demon mouser. I doubt he knows much about the stone that was drilled to dust to make space for the fan. The ancient stone, the sacrifice stone.” A hard pain in my left hand alerted me to the fact that I was clutching that medallion from Alice’s purse. As I opened my palm, the pain numbed to a cold tingling.

  “Carry on.” Charlotte eyed the metal disc intently, an amulet from some ancient time.

  Words struggled to the surface like flotsam from a shipwreck. Don’t hold them down. Relax. Let them bob up.

  “The vibrations of the sacred stone imbued that space up there. When the stone was destroyed, the force possessed the fan that replaced it. At least a fan could do something, unlike a block of stone. It could open up a channel – to somewhere – a feeding channel. No one had fed the stone for centuries. It lay neglected, inert. Some Elizabethan builder picked it up and used it as part of the pub wall. It stayed inert. It was hungry, weak. It was the demon side of . . . the angry past. But it was kin to Alice.”

  I was holding Alice’s medallion out blatantly, like a compass. The disc was so worn that its face was almost smooth; I could barely make out faint symbols unknown to me. A coin from the realm of magic, I thought, from the domain of lamias and hungry spirits. The inscription was well-nigh erased. How had Alice kept her vitality so long? By connecting with people such as us? Preying on some, befriending others?

  Jenny touched the piece of metal and recoiled as if stung. “It’s freezing.”

  “That space up there is dangerous,” said Charlotte, who had so boldly shone a light into it. “Still, it didn’t bite my fingers off. It only reacts to some stimuli – Alice being the biggest stimulus of all, eh, fellows?”

  “It took her by surprise,” I said. “It was playing possum till we went to the toilet; till the vibrations tickled our bladders. Or maybe that was Alice’s doing. She wanted to be alone with it. It overwhelmed her.”

  She had been well aware of it, must have sensed its true nature when we first brought her here. She was flesh; it was an object – her malign counterpart, which nevertheless yearned for her. She wanted to commune with a kindred force, but imagined she was stronger.

  “We want her back, don’t we?” Charlotte went on. “This is the machine age, right? We know machines. That thing’s out of synch with the age.”

  “What are you driving at?” Martin asked his wife.

  “You’re a dab hand at fixing things, aren’t you?” She jerked a thumb at the leaded window behind the bar counter. A NO VACANCIES sign hung facing us. Consequently anyone approaching from outside would read the alternative invitation, VACANCIES. “We’ll spend the night here. You have a tool box in the car. When all’s completely quiet, we’ll sneak down,
do a spot of dismantling, and reverse those damned fan blades so that the air blows into this room, not out. Air, and whatever else.”

  “Cigarette and cigar smoke is like foul incense to it,” I found myself saying.

  “She’ll come back minced,” muttered Jenny. “Spread all over the floor, sticking to the walls.”

  “Why should she? If it can take her apart, it can put her back together! We must try,” insisted Charlotte.

  We were blunderers. We were the opposite of stone-age man placed cold before the instrument panel of a Saab or Jaguar. We were techno-man faced with the stone and blood controls of some old, alternative world of spirit forces.

  Chalmers appeared, and announced, “Your table’s ready. If you’d like to come through?”

  “I’m afraid there’ll only be four of us,” said Martin.

  “Did the other lady leave? This is the time you booked for.”

  “I know. She was called away. A friend came for her. She had to leave her car. We’ll see to that tomorrow.”

  Chalmers raised an eyebrow.

  “Fact is,” blustered Martin, “we’d like to enjoy a bit of a celebration. Special occasion! Do you have two double rooms free for the night? Don’t want the police stopping us afterward. Breathalyzing us. Can’t risk that.”

  The landlord brightened. “We do, as it happens.”

  “We’ll take them.”

  “Mr. Chalmers,” said Charlotte, “out of curiosity, why did you mount that fan in that particular position?”

  “Had to put it somewhere didn’t we? That was the first year we came here, oh . . . a long while ago. As I recall, the plaster up there was prone to staining. Dark damp stains. The stone behind was . . .” He wrinkled his nose. “Oozy.” Changing the subject, he waved at the counter. “If you get thirsty during the night,” he joked, “help yourselves. You’re regulars. Guests can drink anytime. Just leave a note for me to tot up.”

  Charlotte beamed at him. “Thank you very much, Mr. Chalmers.”

  Yes, I thought, we’re all raving insomniacs. We’ll certainly be holding a quiet party down here at two in the morning.