The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  “When we’re rich!” He yearned for it.

  “Of course we’ll be rich. You’ll write a bestseller; you’re far better than anyone else. Genius will out!”

  If he felt she misunderstood the nature of genius, or was insensitive to what he knew by instinct, that popularity and art are at odds, he said nothing. He indulged her. He kissed her. He loved her.

  “What are those shadows on the wall?” she asked.

  “We always get those in here,” he said. “It’s the tree against the window.”

  “We’ll have to get it lopped,” she said.

  “It seems a pity,” he said. “Such a wonderful old tree.”

  He trimmed another length of paper.

  “How can the tree be casting shadows?” she asked. “The sun isn’t out.”

  “Some trick of reflected light,” said Maurice. The knife in his hand slipped, and he swore.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Vanessa, looking at the torn paper, “it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s only Wendy’s room. And then only for weekends. It’s not as if she was going to be here all the time.”

  “Perhaps you and I should have this room,” said Maurice, “and Wendy could have the one next door. It overlooks the crescent. It has a view, and a balcony. She’ll love it.”

  “So would I,” said Vanessa.

  “I don’t want Wendy to feel second-best,” said Maurice. “Not after all we’ve put her through.”

  “All that’s happened to her,” corrected Vanessa, tight lipped.

  “And don’t say ‘only Wendy’,” he rebuked her. “She is my child, after all.”

  “It isn’t fair! Why couldn’t you be like other people? Why do you have to have a past?”

  They worked in silence for a little, and the ghost writhed palely in the anger in the air, and then Vanessa relented and smiled and said. “Don’t let’s quarrel,” and he said, “you know I love you,” and the fine front room was Wendy’s and the small back room was to house their marriage bed.

  “I’m sure I closed the door,” said Vanessa presently, “but now it’s open.”

  “The catch is weak,” said Maurice. “I’ll mend it when I can. There’s just so much to do in a home this size,” and he sighed and the sigh exhaled out of the open window into the street.

  “Goodbye,” said Vanessa.

  “Why did you say goodbye?” asked Maurice.

  “Because the net curtains flapped and whoever came in through the door was clearly going out by the window,” said Vanessa, thinking she was joking, too young and beautiful and far from death to mind an unseen visitor or so. The ghost whirled away on the remnant of Maurice’s sigh, over the roof-tops and the brow of the hill, and down into Upton Park, where it was winter, no longer summer, and little Wendy was six, and getting out of bed, bare cold toes on chilly lino.

  The ghost’s observations were now from outside time. So a man might stand on a station overpass and watch a train go through beneath. Such a man could see, if he chose, any point along the train – in front of him the future, behind him the past, directly beneath him, changing always from past to future, his main rumbling, noisy perception of the present. The ghost keeps his gaze steadily forward.

  The clock says five to nine; Anne is asleep in bed. Wendy shakes her awake.

  “My feet are cold,” says the little girl.

  “Then put on your slippers,” mourns the mother, out of sleep. It has been an uneasy, unsatisfying slumber. Once she lay next to Maurice and fancied she drew her strength out of his slumbering body, hot beside her, like some spiritual water-bottle. She clings to the fancy in her mind: she refuses to sleep as she did when a child, composed and decent in solitude, providing her own warmth well enough.

  “Won’t I be late for school?” asks Wendy.

  “No,” says Anne, in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

  “It is ever so cold,” says Wendy. “Can I light the gas-fire?”

  “No you can’t,” says Anne. “We can’t afford it.”

  “Daddy will pay the bill,” says Wendy, hopefully. But her mother just laughs.

  “I’m frightened,” says Wendy, all else having failed. “The curtains are waving about and the window isn’t even open. Can I get into your bed?”

  Anne moves over and the child gets in.

  An egg teeters on the edge of the table, amidst the remnants of last night’s chips and tomato sauce, and falls and smashes. Anne sits up in bed, startled into reaction. “How did that happen?” she asks, aloud. But there is no one to reply, for Wendy has fallen asleep, and the ghost is spinning and spinning, nothing but a whirl of air in the corner of the eye, and no one listens to him, anyway.

  Further forward still, and there’s Vanessa, sitting up in bed, bouncy brown-nippled breasts half covered by fawn lace. It is a brass bed, finely filigreed. Maurice wears black silk pyjamas. He sits on the edge of the bed, while Vanessa sips fresh orange juice, and opens his letters.

  “Any cheques?” asks Vanessa.

  “Not today,” he says. Maurice is a writer. Cheques bounce through the letter box with erratic energy: bills come in with a calm, steady beat. It is a tortoise and hare situation, and the tortoise always wins.

  “Perhaps you should change your profession,” she suggests. “Be an engineer or go into advertising. I hate all this worry about money.”

  A mirror slips upon its string on the wall, hangs sidewise. Neither notice.

  “Is that a letter from Anne?” asks Vanessa. “What does she want now?”

  “It’s her electricity bill,” he says.

  “She’s supposed to pay that out of her monthly cheque. She only sends you these demands to make you feel unhappy and guilty. She’s jealous of us. How I despise jealousy! What a bitch she is!”

  “She has a child to look after,” says Maurice. “My child.”

  “If I had your child, would you treat me better?” she asks.

  “I treat you perfectly well,” he says, pulling the bedclothes back, rubbing black silk against beige lace, and the mirror falls off the wall altogether, startling them, stopping them. “This whole room will have to be stripped out,” complains Vanessa. “The plaster is rotten. I’ll get arthritis from the damp.” Vanessa notices, sometimes, as she walks up and down the stairs, that her knees ache.

  Wendy is ten. Anne’s room has been painted white, and there are cushions on the chairs, and dirty washing is put in the basket, not left on the floor, and times are a little better. A little. There is passion in the air.

  “Vanessa says I can stay all week not just weekends, and go to school from Aldermans Drive!” says Wendy. “Live with Dad, and not with you.”

  “What did you say?” asks Anne, trying to sound casual.

  “I said no thank you,” says Wendy. “There’s no peace over there. They always have the builders in. Bang, bang, bang! And Dad’s always shut away in a room, writing. I prefer it here, in spite of everything. Damp and draughts and all.”

  The damp on the wall between the barred windows is worse. It makes a strange shape on the wall; it seems to change from day to day. The house belongs to Maurice. He will not have the roof over their heads mended. He says he cannot afford to. In the rooms above live tenants, protected by law, who pay next to nothing in rent. How can he spare the money needed to keep the house in good order – and why, according to Vanessa, should he?

  “We’re just the rejects of the world,” says Anne to Wendy, and Wendy believes her, and her mouth grows tight and pouty instead of firm and generous, as it could have been, and her looks are spoiled. Anne is right, that’s the trouble of it. Rejects!

  “How my shoulder hurts,” say Anne. She should have stayed at home, never crossed the city to stand beneath the plane-tree in the alley behind Aldermans Drive, allowed herself her paroxysms of jealousy, grief, and solitary sexual frenzy. She has had fibrositis ever since. But she felt what she felt. You can help what you do, but not what you feel.

  The ghost looks furt
her forward to Aldermans Drive and finds the bed gone in the small back room, and a dining table in its place, and candles lit, and guests, and smooth mushroom soup being served. The candles throw shadows on to the wall: this way, that way. One of the guests tries to make sense of them, but can’t. She has wild blonde hair and a fair skin and a laughing mouth, unlike Maurice’s other women. Her name is Audrey. She is an actress. Maurice’s hair is falling out. His temples are quite bare, and he has a moustache now instead of a beard, and he seems distinguished, rather than aspiring. His hand smoothes Audrey’s little one, and Vanessa sees. Maurice defies her jealousy: he smiles blandly, cruelly, at his wife.

  He turns to Audrey’s husband, who is eighteen years older than Audrey, and says, “Ah youth, youth!” and offers back Audrey’s hand, closing the husband’s fingers over the wife’s so that nobody could possibly take offence, and Vanessa feels puzzled at her own distress, and her glass of red wine tips over on its own account.

  “Vanessa! Clumsy!” reproaches Maurice.

  “But I didn’t!” she says. No one believes her. Why should they? They pour white wine on the stain to neutralize the red, and it works, and looking at the tablecloth, presently, no one would have known anything untoward had happened at all.

  “We must have security,” Vanessa weeps from time to time.

  “I can’t stand the uncertainty of it all! You must stop being a writer. Or write something different. Stop writing novels. Write for television instead.”

  “No, you must stop spending the money,” he shouts. “Stop doing up this house. Changing this, changing that.”

  “But I want it to be nice. We must have a nursery. I can’t keep the baby in a drawer.”

  Vanessa is pregnant.

  “Why not? It’s what Anne had to do, thanks to you.”

  “Anne! Can’t you ever forget Anne?” she shrieks. “Does she have to be on our backs for ever? She has ruined our lives.”

  But their lives aren’t ruined. The small back room becomes a nursery. The baby sleeps there. He is a boy, his name is Jonathan. he sleeps badly and cries a lot and is hard to love. His eyes follow the shadows on the wall, this way, that way.

  “There’s nothing wrong with his eyes,” says the doctor, visiting, puzzled at the mother’s fears. “But his chest is bad.”

  Vanessa sits by the cot and rocks her feverish child.

  “For you and I—” she sings, as she sings when she is nervous, driving away fear with melody –

  “–have a guardian angel – on high with nothing to do –

  –but to give to you and to give – to me –

  –love for ever – true—”.

  Maurice is in the room. Vanessa is crying.

  “But why won’t you go back to work?” he demands. “It would take the pressure off me. I could write what I want to write, not what I have to write.”

  “I want to look after my baby myself,” she weeps. “It’s a man’s job to support his family. And you’re not exactly William Shakespeare. Why don’t you write films? That’s where the money is.”

  The baby coughs. The doctor says the room is too damp for its good. “I never liked this room,” says Vanessa, as she and Maurice carry out the cot. “And you and I always quarrel in it. The quarrelling room. I hate it. But I love you.”

  “I love you,” he says, crossing his fingers.

  The ghost looks forward. Aldermans Drive has become one of the most desirable streets in Bristol, all new paint and French kitchenware and Welsh dressers seen through lighted windows. The property is in Maurice’s name, as seems reasonable, since he earns the money. He writes films, for Hollywood.

  Anne’s bed turns into a foam settee by day: she has a cooker instead of a gas ring: the window bars have gone: the panes are made of reinforced glass. She has had a telephone installed. Wendy has platform heels and puts cream on her spots.

  The ghost looks further forward, and Anne has a boyfriend. A man sits opposite her in a freshly covered armchair. Broken springs have been taped flat. Sometimes she lets him into her bed, but his flesh is cool and none too firm, and she remembers Maurice’s body, hot-water bottle in her bed, and won’t forget. Won’t. Can’t.

  “Is it wrong to hate people?” asks Anne. “I hate Vanessa, and with reason. She is a thief. Why do people ask her into their houses? Is it that they don’t realize, or just that they don’t care? She stole my husband: she tried to steal my child. Maurice has never been happy with her. He never wanted to leave me. She seduced him. She thought he’d be famous one day; how wrong she was! He’s sold out, you know! One day he’ll come back to me, what’s left of him, and I’ll be expected to pick up the bits.”

  “But he’s married to her. They have a child. How can he come back to you?” He is a nice man, a salesman, thoughtful and kind.

  “So was I married to him. So do I have his child.”

  How stubborn she is!

  “You’re obsessive.” He is beginning to be angry. Well, he has been angry often enough before, and still stayed around for more. “While you take Maurice’s money,” he says, “you will never be free of him.”

  “Those few miserable pennies! What difference can they make? I live in penury, while she lives in style. He is Wendy’s father; he has an obligation to support us. He was the guilty party, after all.”

  “The law no longer says guilty or not guilty, in matter of divorce.”

  “Well, it should!” She is passionate. “He should pay for what he did to me and Wendy. He destroyed our lives.”

  The ghost is lulled by the turning wheel of her thoughts, so steady on its axis: he drowses; responds to a spasm of despair, an act of decision on the man’s part, one morning, as he leaves Anne’s unsatisfactory bed. He dresses silently: he means to go: never to come back. He looks in the mirror to straighten his tie and sees Anne’s face instead of his own.

  He cries out and Anne wakes.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Don’t go.”

  But he does, and he doesn’t come back.

  The gap between what could be, and what is, defeats him.

  Anne has a job as a waitress. It is a humiliation. Maurice does not know she is earning. Anne keeps it a secret, for Vanessa would surely love an excuse to reduce Anne’s alimony, already whittled away by inflation.

  The decorators are back in Aldermans Drive. The smell of fresh plaster has the ghost alert. Paper is being stripped from walls: doors driven through here: walls dismantled there. The cat runs before the ghost, like a leaf before wind, looking for escape; finding none, cornered in the small back room, where animals never go if they can help it, and the shadows swing to and fro, and the tiny crossed bones from a dead sparrow are lodged beneath the wainscot.

  “Get out of here, cat!” cries Vanessa. “I hate cats, don’t you? Maurice loves them. But they don’t like me: for ever trying to trip me on the stairs, when I had to go to the baby, in the night.”

  “I expect they were jealous,” says the man with her. He is young and handsome, with shrewd, insincere eyes and a lecher’s mouth. He is a decorator. He looks at the room with dislike, and at Vanessa, speculatively.

  “The worst room in the house,” she laments. “It’s been bedroom, dining room, nursery. It never works! I hope it’s better as a bathroom.”

  He moves his hand to the back of her neck but she laughs and sidesteps.

  “The plaster’s shockingly damp,” he says, and as if to prove his opinion the curtain rail falls off the wall altogether, making a terrible clatter and clash, and the cat yowls and Vanessa shrieks, and Maurice strides up the stairs to see what is happening, and what was in the air between Vanessa and Toby evaporates. The ghost is on Anne’s side – if ghosts take sides.

  How grand and boring the house is now! There is a faint scent of chlorine in the air; it comes from the swimming pool in the basement. The stair walls are mirrored: a maid polishes away at the first landing but it’s always a little misery. She marvels at how long the flowers last, when pla
ced on the little Georgian stair-table brought by Vanessa for Maurice on his fifty-second birthday. The maid is in love with Maurice, but Maurice has other fish to fry.

  Further forward still: something’s happening in the bathroom! The bath is deep blue and the taps are gold, and the wallpaper rose, but still the shadows swing to and fro, against the wall.

  Audrey has spilt red wine upon her dress. She is more beautiful than she was. She is intelligent. She is no longer married or an actress: she is a solicitor. Maurice admires that very much. He thinks women should be useful, not like Vanessa. He is tired of girls who have young flesh and liquid eyes and love his bed but despise him in their hearts. Audrey does not despise him. Vanessa has forgotten how.

  Maurice is helping Audrey sponge down her dress. His hand strays here and there. She is accustomed to it: she does not mind.

  “What are those shadows on the wall?” she asks.

  “Some trick of the light,” he says.

  “Perhaps we should use white wine to remove the red,” she says. “Remember that night so long ago? It was in this room, wasn’t it! Vanessa had it as a dining room, then. I think I fell in love with you that night.”

  “And I with you,” he says.

  Is it true? – He can hardly remember.

  “What a lot of time we’ve wasted,” he laments, and this for both of them is true enough. They love each other.

  “Dear Maurice,” she says, “I can’t bear to see you so unhappy. It’s all Vanessa’s doing. She stopped you writing. You would be a great writer if it wasn’t for her, not just a Hollywood hack! You still could be!”