The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

by Marie O'Regan

  “Is Loomis still alive? She’d be old now.”

  “She died eight years into her sentence. Allegedly of natural causes, although there was a story about one of the other inmates managing to sneak some arsenic into her food.”

  I realized that I liked Steven Rand. I admired the way he had managed to hang on to himself in spite of his tragedy. Also I liked the way he told stories. Sitting in the café listening to him tell me about Lorna Loomis made me realize that the events as they had happened made a more compelling narrative than anything I could invent, and in spite of the horror of the thing I was tense with excitement.

  Later, once I was home, a strange thing happened. I was in the bedroom, changing the sheets, when suddenly and out of nowhere I was overcome with desire for him. I wanted to know what it felt like, to be with him here in this room, to perform the sexual act in a place that still resonated with the terrible things that had happened there. I imagined Rand’s sinewy arms, the long lean rake of his body. He had told me there had been no one else in his life since Allison and I wondered with a tremor inside if that would bring an extra urgency to his lovemaking.

  I shuddered and sat down on the bed. I was disgusted by my thoughts, yet still aroused by them. The house was still and silent as it always was, and yet I sensed something hovering on the outer edge of my perception: the haunted, broken laughter of Lorna Loomis.

  Allison Rand had told me the house was not safe for children. Could it be that it was not safe for lovers, either? Roy and I had been so happy when we bought the place. I had blamed our problems since on his war experiences, but what if the house itself was the cause of our breakdown? The house working on us and through us, the same as it had with the Rands.

  I dismissed the idea as so much rubbish and tried to put it from my mind but I went to bed still thinking about it and that night I had a horrible dream. I was in the study drawing the curtains, but each time I looked away they would open again. It was dark outside, and I was afraid to look out of the window. I became increasingly agitated, because I knew Roy was waiting for me downstairs, only I was scared it would not be him I found when I went down there. I went to the wardrobe to fetch my evening dress, and found the girl from the allotments curled up inside. She lay quite still, her bony knees drawn up to her chest. She was staring right at me, but I knew she was not really seeing me, and when I shook her by the shoulder I discovered she was not the real girl at all but some kind of copy, papery and weightless and balloon-like, reminding me of the pleated orange fruits of the Physalis francheti that grew in my parents’ front garden, years and years ago when we lived in Birmingham. Chinese lanterns, they were called. I hadn’t thought of them in ages.

  I closed the wardrobe door and then woke up. I was breathing heavily, and I had the feeling I might have called out in my sleep although there was nothing to prove this either way. I turned on the bedside lamp and got out of bed. It was still dark, still early. I tiptoed out on to the landing. There were shadows bunched in every corner but no human presence, at least none that was visible to me.

  I used the toilet then returned to the bedroom. The girl was lying on the bed, looking right at me as she had in my dream, only this time she was seeing me, I was sure of it. She had on the same grey school skirt and green cardigan she’d been wearing on the day she disappeared.

  In the yellow light from the lamp her eyes gleamed like glass marbles.

  I began to shiver, my teeth chattering in my head as if it were November and freezing. Yet it was warm in the room, warm enough to sleep naked, although this was something I rarely did when Roy was away.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Nancy,” I said. “It’s time you went home.”

  If you’re thinking it was brave of me to say that, you don’t know how scared I was. I spoke mostly to see if I still could speak. I said the first thing that came into my head.

  “I don’t want to,” said the child. “I like it here. You’ve got lots of books. The soldier said I could read them, if I wanted.”

  She rolled on her side, drawing her knees up to her chest the same way she had when she was in the cupboard. I felt my back muscles stiffen.

  “What do you mean, the soldier?” I said. “There are no soldiers here.”

  “He was crying,” Nancy said. “He thinks it’s all his fault that the other man died.” She smiled a secretive little smile that reminded me unpleasantly of Allison Rand. “The other man was going to die, though, anyway. So it wasn’t the soldier’s fault at all, really. The soldier was just trying to help.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “I have to go now.” She unfurled her legs and slipped down from the bed. When her feet hit the floor they made no noise. “We can look at the books soon though, can’t we? I like the books with trains in. And animals.”

  “If you like,” I said. There was a ringing in my ears, and I felt overcome with a feeling of faintness, the same feeling I experienced if I happened to cut my finger while chopping vegetables. It’s the sight of blood that does it. Roy always thought that so funny, a crime writer who can’t stand the sight of the red stuff.

  She flowed past me and out through the door. The moment she was out of sight I felt certain she had never been there, that the whole thing had been in my head, an after-effect of my nightmare. I got back into the bed and pulled up the duvet. You will think I kept the light on, but I didn’t. I wanted darkness around me, the deep kind of darkness that makes it impossible to see anything.

  The call came the following morning. For a moment I thought the man on the other end of the line was Steven Rand, and felt a sharp, sweet lurch of the heart, that he wanted to phone me. Then I realized it wasn’t Rand at all. The man asked me if I was alone in the house and if I had any friends or neighbours that I could call. I remember thinking: what the hell business is it of yours? Then he told me that Roy was dead.

  I thought he was going to say it was one of Roy’s bombs that had done it. He was a brave man, but his number finally came up. What he actually said was that Roy had shot himself.

  “We’re not sure yet what led to this tragedy,” he said. “But you can rest assured there’ll be a full enquiry.”

  I could tell he was embarrassed, that making a phone call like this was a job he dreaded. Absurdly, I told him not to worry.

  Three months later one of the men from Roy’s unit drove over to see me. He brought some things of Roy’s: the folder of photographs he was always looking at, the wallet made of dark green leather I had given him for his birthday the year before. The wallet’s silk lining was torn. There was a photo inside, a picture of the two of us on holiday in the Lake District. We’d stopped a passer-by and asked her to take it. Both of us were grinning like fools.

  I asked Roy’s comrade if he would like a cup of tea. He said no at first but then changed his mind. “I’d love one,” he said. “But only if you’re sure it’s no trouble.”

  He told me Roy had shot a man, a young soldier who had been caught in an ambush and injured so badly that all they could do was move him to the side of the road and wait for him to die.

  “His face was mostly gone,” he said. “He was screaming like a man on fire. Roy had real guts to do what he did. It was like none of the rest of us could move, and only he was able to do what needed doing.”

  I was starting to show by then, and the man kept darting worried glances at my belly. I leaned back against the kitchen cabinets, gripping the edge of the worktop in both hands. My limbs sometimes felt heavy and throbbing during those later months of my pregnancy. My blood pressure was up slightly, but my doctor said that so long as it didn’t get any worse it was nothing to worry about.

  I could tell that Roy’s comrade was wondering whose child it was.

  “Don’t you think you should sit down?” he said. He jumped up from his own chair and shoved it towards me, almost knocking over his mug of tea.

  “I will in just a moment,” I said. “It’s good for me to kee
p moving, though. It stops my ankles swelling.”

  I wanted to reassure him that the baby was Roy’s, that she had been conceived the night we made love during Roy’s last leave. To tell him that in a sense Roy was still alive in me and always would be. In the end though it was not his business, and I knew he would be embarrassed if I tried to explain.

  Thank God I had stopped taking the pill. I don’t think I believe in God actually, but you know what I mean.

  I glanced at Nancy. She was sitting quietly at the kitchen table, cutting pictures out of a magazine to stick in her scrapbook. Her tongue poked from the corner of her mouth as it often did when she was concentrating on something. I could smell the glue she was using, Gloy gum from a plastic tube.

  “Will you stay for supper?” I asked the officer. “You’ve had a long drive.”

  “It’s good of you to offer, but I won’t,” he said. “I promised the lads I’d be back before ten. We’ve got this card thing going.”

  He flushed scarlet then, as if the mention of a card game might make him guilty of some particularly heinous brand of callousness. He seemed nice enough, but I was glad he was leaving. Nancy wasn’t keen on people who couldn’t see her. They made her nervous.

  Aside from that I wanted to keep the evening free to work on the book. With any luck I could still deliver the manuscript before the baby was born.

  The Third Person

  Lisa Tuttle

  When she got Rachel’s text suggesting lunch, Imogen was thrilled into immediate agreement, although the short notice, and her friend’s choice of venue, meant a rush, and her colleagues’ displeasure that she was taking the full hour for the second time that week.

  For once, Rachel wasn’t late; eye-catching as ever with her long, red hair and dramatic style, she waved from a booth at the back and announced that she’d already ordered for them both.

  “You’re going to love the cauliflower cheese soup. And it gives us more time to talk if we don’t have to faff around with menus.” She was glowing, radiant, bubbling in a way Imogen had not seen in months. It reminded her of the old days, when they’d shared a flat, before Rachel married Andrew.

  Marriage changed everything. Everybody knew how it was: married couples had different priorities, and when they weren’t alone together, liked to be with other marrieds. Add to their new status a starter house in a distant suburb and two demanding jobs, and there wasn’t much left for their singleton friends. Imogen had thought she might be the exception: after all, the three of them had lived together for nearly a year, so comfortable a threesome that they joked about their Mormon marriage, if too conventional to go farther than flirting with the idea of a sexual ménage à trois. Andy’s undemanding yet undeniably masculine presence had added a bit of spice to Imogen’s life, which she missed. She recalled the pleasures of lazy Sunday morning fry-ups over three different newspapers, late-night take-aways and horror movies viewed from the sagging, second-hand couch – even a boring, stupid thing like doing the laundry was almost fun as a threesome. But maybe that was only her. Maybe they would always have been happier without a third person in their life.

  She looked at her friend through the steam of soup too hot to touch. “What’s up? I can see you’re dying to tell me something.”

  Rachel compressed her lips. “I need you to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

  She was stung by this distrust. “Who would I tell?”

  “Not anyone. If it ever got back to Andrew—”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Promise?”

  Imogen scowled. “Asking me to promise now is a bit stable-doors. You’re having an affair?”

  Rachel grimaced. She could not deny it, only quibbled over the wording. It was nothing so definite as an “affair”. Love didn’t enter into it. It was just sex.

  “But . . . why? Why take the risk?”

  “Oh, Immy.” She shook her head and looked chiding. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t go looking for this. It just happened.”

  “Yeah? Where, on the bus to work? Oh, I’m sorry, sir, it’s so crowded, I seem to have impaled myself upon your manly tool. As we’ve started, may as well continue.”

  Rachel nearly choked on her soup, giggling. “OK, OK. I am a weak and horny woman who cannot resist temptation. I was feeling frustrated and half-dead – Andrew, bless him, is just not up for it that often. He’s less . . . driven by sexual needs than I am. I always knew it might be a problem someday; I just didn’t expect it to be so soon. But when Mr Hotbody came along and woke me up—” She gave a fatalistic shrug.

  “Who is this Mr Hotbody?”

  “You don’t know him,” she said quickly. “Nobody does.”

  “That sounds spooky.”

  “Nobody we know. There’s no reason Andrew would ever hear anything. He’s a total stranger I met in a pub.”

  Imogen shivered, and took a careful sip of her soup.

  “It wasn’t a pub I’d ever been in, either. A client had suggested it, and after she left, he came over and offered to buy me a drink. I’d noticed him watching me, and gave him the look . . . it was just like the old days, picking out the sexiest guy in the room, to see if I could pull.”

  “So you can still pull. Amazing. Did you tell him you were married?”

  “After he put his hand on my leg. He just smiled and said he liked married women the best, because they didn’t confuse sex with love, and he sort of walked his hand up my leg, right up to my crotch, and started to rub me there, through my pants, looking me in the eye the whole time while he brought me off.”

  It was not the heat of the soup that brought Imogen out in a sweat as Rachel continued to describe what followed. “Sex in the toilet! I don’t know what possessed me – I hadn’t done anything like that since I was eighteen. And this was much, much dirtier.”

  “And that wasn’t the end of it?”

  She shook her head, eyes glazed over. “I didn’t even know his name. I told Andrew I had to go away overnight, on business, and booked a room in a Travelodge. He met me there. We were at it all night. Never slept. I did things I’d never done before. He made me do things—”

  Imogen pushed her bowl to one side, her appetite gone. “That does not sound good.”

  “Are you kidding? It was the best I’ve ever had.”

  “Not good for your marriage.”

  “Oh, no, there you’re wrong, my friend. Sometimes a bit of danger, the risk of another lover, is just what a couple needs. I went home and bonked the living daylights out of Andrew. He loved it! For a little while, I had my Randy Andy back. Plus, I’m so much nicer when I’m not feeling frustrated. I’ve stopped being such a bitch at home. What’s good for me is good for him.”

  “Good for you. You’ve saved your marriage. End of story.”

  “It’s not the end.”

  “You can’t go on sleeping with this guy.”

  “I have no intention of sleeping with him, or going out to dinner with him, or knitting little booties, or falling in love. This is just sex. So much spicier than I can get at home. A bit on the side. That’s all I want from him.”

  “So what do you want from me? A seal of approval?”

  “We need a place to go.”

  “Oh, no.” Imogen’s stomach clenched. “You can’t go to his?”

  “He lives with someone. And anyway, I don’t want to get involved with his life.”

  “So rent a room . . . Travelodge was good enough before.”

  “It would be good enough again, if I could afford it . . . or if he could. Please? It won’t be very often, I’m sure. Just a few more times, ’til I get him out of my system.”

  “Or out of your pubic hair. Where am I supposed to go while this . . . delousing . . . is taking place?”

  Rachel’s face tightened. “Don’t be nasty.”

  “You’re the one talking about how wonderfully dirty it is.” Before Rachel’s hurt, angry glare, she caved. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand why you need to d
o this thing.”

  Imogen’s hand was seized and held in a warm, strong grip. “Of course you don’t, my sweetheart, because you’re normal. This is some kind of madness, but I can’t get over it without going through it. And you are the one and only person who can help me, who I can talk to. I don’t want to put you out. But you go to the gym and out for a meal with your friends from work every Thursday, am I right? What time do you get home?”

  “About nine-thirty,” she said, although ten was closer to the mark.

  “I’d want to be on the nine-forty-seven for home anyway,” said Rachel. “We’d be out by nine-thirty. I promise you, Imogen, you won’t know we were there. One evening a week, a time when you wouldn’t be there anyway – is that really too much to ask?”

  She understood she could not refuse; not unless she was prepared to lose their friendship.

  Rachel came by that evening to pick up the spare key, and Imogen was a little stiff with her at first, feeling she had been bullied into abetting a crime, but instead of hurrying away like a guilty thing, Rachel hung around, diffident and awkward, until Imogen thawed and suggested she stay for dinner.

  “There’s a kebab shop just around the corner. I could run down for something—”

  Rachel checked the contents of the fridge. “I’ll cook,” she said. “Spaghetti carbonara sound all right?”

  “I don’t have any cream.”

  “We never did, and I don’t recall any complaints in the past, so long as there was plenty of this.” With a wicked grin, she produced a bottle of wine from her capacious shoulder-bag.

  Every remnant of ill-feeling vanished as she whipped up a quick supper. It was like old times again. She phoned Andrew to warn him she’d be home late, and put him on speaker so Imogen could hear and join in a joking, friendly, three-way conversation. When they were doing the washing-up, Imogen said wistfully, “We should do this more often.”

  “I don’t know about you, sweetheart, but I wash up after every meal.”