“Well, I can vouch for this house, you know. I’ve lived here for many years, and it came to me from my mother. There’s absolutely no . . . history attached to it.”
I could believe that.
“Until about six years ago I lived alone – a woman came in to clean twice a week. And then . . . I married.” He said this impressively, watching to see that I noted it.
“A strange person, my wife. She was only nineteen when we married, and very . . . unworldly.” He drew a self-conscious breath. “Distant cousin of mine actually, very religious people. That’s her photograph on the mantelpiece.”
I took it down.
I had noticed it when first we entered the room; vignetted in its chromium-plated frame, too striking to be his daughter. It was a face of character, expressive beyond mere beauty: an attractive full-lipped mouth, eyes of exceptional vividness. Surprisingly, her hair was shapeless and her dress dull. I passed the portrait to Joe, who whistled.
“Mr. Hutchinson! Where are you hiding the lady? Come on, let’s get a picture of—”
Then he also guessed. This was not a house with a woman in it. “She passed away seven months ago,” said Hutchinson, and held out his hand for the frame.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Banner nodded and muttered something.
Hutchinson was expressionless. “Yes,” he said, “I’m sorry too.” Which was an odd thing to say, as there was evidently no sarcasm in it. I wondered why she could have married him. There must have been twenty-five years between them, and a world of temperament.
“She was extremely . . . passionate,” Hutchinson said.
He spoke as if he were revealing something indecent. His voice was hushed, and his little moustache bristled over pursed lips. When his eyes dropped to the photograph in his hand, his face was quite blank.
Suddenly he said in an odd, curt way: “She was surprisingly faithful to me. I mean, she was never anything else. Very religious, strictest ideas of her duty.” The flicker of a smile. “Unworldly, as I said.”
I tried to be discreet. “Then you were happy together?”
His fingers were unconsciously worrying at the picture-frame, fidgeting with the strut.
“To be honest, we weren’t. She wanted children.”
Neither Banner nor I moved.
“I told her I couldn’t agree. I had to tell her often, because she worked herself up, and it all became ugly. She used to lose control and say things she didn’t mean, and afterwards she was sorry, but you can’t play fast and loose with people’s finger feelings! I did my best. I’d forgive her and say: ‘I only want you, my dear. You’re all I need in the world,’ to comfort her, you see. And she’d sob loudly and . . . she was unnecessarily emotional.”
His voice was thin, and tight. He rose and replaced the photograph on the mantelpiece. There was a long silence.
Joe fiddled with his camera. “No children, then?” Cruel, that.
Hutchinson turned, and we saw that somehow he had managed to relax. The accomodating smirk was back.
“No, none. I had definite views on the subject. All quite rational. Wide disparity in the prospective parents’ ages, for instance – psychologically dangerous for all parties: I don’t know if you’ve studied the subject? There were other considerations, too – financial, medical: do you wish me to go into those? I have nothing to hide.”
It was blatant exhibitionism now: as if he were proffering a bill on a plate, with himself itemized in it.
“There’s a limit even to journalists’ curiosity,” I said.
Hutchinson was ahead of me, solemnly explaining. “Now! This is my theory! You’ve heard of poltergeist phenomena, of course? Unexplainable knockings, scratchings, minor damage and so on. I’ve studied them in books – and they’re always connected with development, violent emotional development, in young people. A sort of uncontrolled offshoot of the . . . personality. D’you follow?”
“Wait a minute,” Joe said. “That’s taking a lot for granted if you like!”
But I remembered reading such cases. One, investigated by psychical researchers, had involved a fifteen-year-old boy: ornaments had been thrown about by no visible agency. I took a glance at the unchipped gilt dancers on the sideboard before Hutchinson spoke again.
“No, my wife may not have been adolescent, but in some ways . . . she was . . . so to speak, retarded.”
He looked as pleased as if he had just been heavily tipped. If that was pure intellectual triumph, it was not good to see.
“Then . . . the sounds began,” Joe said, “while she was still alive?”
Hutchinson shook his head emphatically.
“Not till three weeks after the funeral! That’s the intriguing part, don’t you see? They were faint and unidentifiable at first – naturally I just put down traps for rats or mice. But by another month, they were taking on the present form.”
Joe gave a back-street sniff and rubbed a hand over his chin. “Hell, you ask us to believe your poltergeist lies low until nearly a month after the – the—”
“After the medium, shall we say, is dead!” His cold-bloodedness was fascinating.
Joe looked across at me and raised his eyebrows.
“Gentlemen, perhaps I’m asking you to accept too much? Well, we shall see. Please remember that I am only too happy that you should form your own – your own—” Hutchinson’s voice dropped to a whisper. He raised his hand. His eyes caught ours as he listened.
My spine chilled.
Somewhere above us in the house were faint sounds. A scuffling.
“That’s it!”
I tiptoed to the door and got it open in time to hear a last scamper overhead. Yes, it could have been a kitten, I thought; but it had come so promptly on cue. I was on the stairs when Hutchinson called out, as if he were the thing’s manager: “No more for the present! You’ll probably get another manifestation in forty minutes or so.”
“Cue for the next performance,” I thought.
I searched the staircase with my torch. At the top ran the little passage Hutchinson had described; open on one side, with banisters, and on the other, a dark papered wall. The linoleum was bare. There was nothing to be seen, nor any open doors. The very dinginess of this narrow place was eerie.
Downstairs I found Joe feverishly unpacking his apparatus. Hutchinson was watching, delighted.
“Anything I can possibly do, Mr. Banner? Threads across the passage – oh, yes? How very ingenious! You’ve your own drawingpins? – excellent! Can I carry that lamp for you?”
And he led the way upstairs.
We searched the shabby bedrooms first. Only one was in use, and we locked all of them and sealed the doors.
In half an hour preparations were complete. Hair-thin threads were stretched across the passage at different levels; adhesive squares lay in patterns on the linoleum. Joe had four high-powered lamps ready to flood the place at the pressure of a silent contact. I took the Leica; he himself now carried an automatic miniature camera.
“Four shots a second with this toy,” he was telling Hutchinson, while I went to check a window outside the bathroom. I still favoured the idea of a cat: they so often make a habitual playground of other people’s houses.
The window was secure. I was just sticking an additional seal across the join when I sniffed scent; for a moment I took it to be from soap in the bathroom. Sickly, warm, strangely familiar. Then it came almost overpoweringly.
I returned as quickly and quietly as I could to the stairhead.
“Smell it?” Joe breathed in the darkness.
“Yes, what d’you suppose—?”
“Ssh!”
There was a sound not four yards away, as I judged it: a tap on the linoleum. Huddled together, we all tensed. It came again, and then a scamper of feet – small and light, but unmistakable – feet in flat shoes. As if something had run across the far end of the passage. A pause – a slithering towards us – then that same shuffle we had heard earlier in the evening, c
lear now: it was the jigging, uneven stamp of an infant’s attempt to dance! In that heavy, sweet darkness, the recognition of it came horribly.
Something brushed against me: Banner’s elbow.
At the very next sound he switched on all his lamps. The narrow place was flung into dazzling brightness – it was completely empty! My head went suddenly numb inside. Joe’s camera clicked and buzzed, cutting across the baby footsteps that came hesitating towards us over the floor. We kept our positions, eyes straining down at nothing but the brown faded pattern of the linoleum. Within inches of us, the footsteps changed their direction in a quick swerve and clattered away to the far corner. We waited. Every vein in my head was banging.
The silence continued. It was over.
Banner drew a thick raucous breath. He lowered the camera, but his sweaty face remained screwed up as if he were still looking through the viewfinder. “Not a sausage!” he whispered, panting. “Not a bloody sausage!”
The threads glistened there unbroken; none of the sticky patches was out of place.
“It was a kiddie,” Joe said. He has two of his own. “Hutchinson!”
“Yes?” The flabby face was white, but he seemed less shaken than we others.
“How the hell did you –?” Banner sagged against the wall and his camera dangled, swinging slowly on its safety strap. “No – it was moving along the floor. I could have reached out and touched – My God, I need a drink!”
We went downstairs.
Hutchinson poured out. Joe drank three whiskies straight off but he still trembled. Desperate to reassure himself, he began to play the sceptic again immediately. As if with a personal grievance, he went for Hutchinson.
“Overdid that sickly smell, you know! Good trick – oh, yes, clever – particularly when we weren’t expecting it!”
The waiter was quick with his denials: it had always accompanied the sounds, but he had wanted us to find out for ourselves; this time it had been stronger than usual.
“Take it easy, Joe – no violence!” I said. He pushed my hand off his arm.
“Oh, clever! That kind of talc, gripe-watery, general baby smell! But listen to this, Mr. Bloody Hutchinson: it should be more delicate, and you only get it quite that way with very tiny babies! Now this one was able to walk, seemingly. And the dancing – that comes at a different stage again. No, you lack experience, Mr. H.! This is no baby that ever was!”
I looked at Hutchinson.
He was nodding, evidently pleased. “My theory exactly,” he said. “Could we call it . . . a poltergeisted maternal impulse?”
Joe stared. The full enormity of the idea struck him.
“Christ . . . Almighty!” he said, and what grip he still had on himself went. He grabbed at his handkerchief just in time, before he was sick.
When he felt better, I set about collecting the gear.
Hutchinson fussed and pleaded the whole time, persuasive as any door-to-door salesman in trying to make us stay for the next incident. He even produced a chart he had made, showing the frequency of the manifestations over the past three months, and began to quote books on the subject.
“Agreed, it’s all most extraordinary,” I said. “A unique case. You’ll be hearing from us.” All I wanted was to be out of that house. “Ready, Joe?”
“Yes, I’m all right now.”
Hutchinson was everywhere, like a dog wanting to be taken for a walk. “I do hope I’ve been of some service! Is there anything more I can possibly –? I suppose you can’t tell me when the publication date is likely to be?”
Nauseating. “Not my department,” I said. “You’ll hear.”
Over his shoulder I could see the girl’s face in her chromium frame. She must have had a very great deal of life in her to look like that on a square of paper.
“Mr. Hutchinson,” I said. “Just one last question.”
He grinned. “Certainly, certainly. As the prosecution wishes.”
“What did your wife die of?”
For the first time he seemed genuinely put out. His voice, when it came, had for the moment lost its careful placing.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “she threw herself under a train.” He recovered himself. “Oh, shocking business, showed how unbalanced the poor girl must have been all along. If you like, I can show you a full press report of the inquest – I’ve nothing to hide – absolutely nothing–”
I reported the assignment as a washout. In any case Banner’s photographs showed nothing – except one which happened to include me, in such an attitude of horror as to be recognisable only by my clothing. I burnt that.
“Our Mr. Hutchinson’s going to be disappointed.”
Joe’s teeth set. “What a mind that type must have! Publicity mania and the chance of a nice touch too, he thinks. So he rigs a spook out of the dirty linen!”
“Sure he rigged it?”
Joe hesitated. “Positive.”
“For argument’s sake, suppose he didn’t: suppose it’s all genuine. He manages to go on living with the thing, so he can’t be afraid of it . . . and gradually . . . ‘new emotional depths’ . . .” The idea suddenly struck me as having a ghastly humour. “Of course, publicity’s the only way he could do it!”
“What?”
“Banner, you ought to be sympathetic! Doesn’t every father want to show off his child?”
Uninvited Ghosts
Penelope Lively
Prospectus
Address:
Norham Gardens, Oxford, England.
Property:
Nineteenth-century family house in the much sought after county of Oxfordshire. Three-storey building with four bedrooms, spacious lounge and dining room, with large garden to the rear.
Viewing Date:
Spring, 1981.
Agent:
Penelope Lively (1933–) was born in Egypt, but settled in England after the Second World War, where she studied history at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She has proved to be a brilliant writer for both adults and children and the supernatural features strongly in her work, especially in The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971) and the award-winning pair, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) and A Stitch in Time (1976). Penelope Lively has written several ghost short stories, including “Black Dog”, “The Ghost of a Flea” and “Uninvited Ghosts”, an amusing tale of some otherworldly residents in the Brown family’s new home and how the children deal with them . . .
Marian and Simon were sent to bed early on the day that the Brown family moved house. By then everyone had lost their temper with everyone else; the cat had been sick on the sitting-room carpet; the dog had run away twice. If you have ever moved you will know what kind of a day it had been. Packing cases and newspaper all over the place . . . sandwiches instead of proper meals . . . the kettle lost and a wardrobe stuck on the stairs and Mrs Brown’s favourite vase broken. There was bread and baked beans for supper, the television wouldn’t work and the water wasn’t hot so when all was said and done the children didn’t object too violently to being packed off to bed. They’d had enough, too. They had one last argument about who was going to sleep by the window, put on their pyjamas, got into bed, switched the lights out . . . and it was at that point that the ghost came out of the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers.
It oozed out, a grey cloudy shape about three feet long smelling faintly of woodsmoke, sat down on a chair and began to hum to itself. It looked like a bundle of bedclothes, except that it was not solid: you could see, quite clearly, the cushion on the chair beneath it.
Marian gave a shriek. “That’s a ghost!”
“Oh, be quiet, dear, do,” said the ghost. “That noise goes right through my head. And it’s not nice to call people names.” It took out a ball of wool and some needles and began to knit.
What would you have done? Well, yes – Simon and Marian did just that and I daresay you can imagine what happened. You try telling your mother that you can’t get to sleep because there’s a ghost sitting in the room clac
king its knitting-needles and humming. Mrs Brown said the kind of things she could be expected to say and the ghost continued sitting there knitting and humming and Mrs Brown went out, banging the door and saying threatening things about if there’s so much as another word from either of you . . .
“She can’t see it,” said Marian to Simon.
“ ’Course not, dear,” said the ghost. “It’s the kiddies I’m here for. Love kiddies, I do. We’re going to be ever such friends.”
“Go away!” yelled Simon. “This is our house now!”
“No it isn’t,” said the ghost smugly. “Always been here, I have. A hundred years and more. Seen plenty of families come and go, I have. Go to bye-byes now, there’s good children.”
The children glared at it and buried themselves under the bedclothes. And, eventually, slept.
The next night it was there again. This time it was smoking a long white pipe and reading a newspaper dated 1842. Beside it was a second grey cloudy shape. “Hello, dearies,” said the ghost. “Say how do you do to my Auntie Edna.”
“She can’t come here too,” wailed Marian.
“Oh yes she can,” said the ghost. “Always comes here in August, does Auntie. She likes a change.”
Auntie Edna was even worse, if possible. She sucked peppermint drops that smelled so strong that Mrs Brown, when she came to kiss the children good night, looked suspiciously under their pillows. She also sang hymns in a loud squeaky voice. The children lay there groaning and the ghosts sang and rustled the newspapers and ate peppermints.
The next night there were three of them. “Meet Uncle Charlie!” said the first ghost. The children groaned.
“And Jip,” said the ghost. “Here, Jip, good dog – come and say hello to the kiddies, then.” A large grey dog that you could see straight through came out from under the bed, wagging its tail. The cat, who had been curled up beside Marian’s feet (it was supposed to sleep in the kitchen, but there are always ways for a resourceful cat to get what it wants), gave a howl and shot on top of the wardrobe, where it sat spitting. The dog lay down in the middle of the rug and set about scratching itself vigorously; evidently it had ghost fleas, too.
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) Page 51