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

by Marie O'Regan

  A man who isn’t there.

  The first time she saw him after returning home was like a miracle. It was the best time. Close to joy. Stole her breath away. Oxford Street. A Saturday. His face, unmistakable in the crowd. He looked haggard, world weary, but it was him all right. Her heart in her mouth she ran, and waved, and ran again, but he’d gone. And, oh, the thrill of that moment of recognition. The excitement of that chance sighting. An opportunity to thank him. Who knows? Maybe more than that. A coffee? A reminisce? A laugh? Would he remember her? Did he buy the photo too? Is she somewhere in his life? Maybe not on his bedside table, but dare she hope perhaps on his office desk, or propped up on some shelf full of books? All over the world people cherish their roller-coaster photos taken with strangers they will never see again. Faces glimpsed once then preserved forever. Why not hers? There she would be, the stranger he rode the front row with. She had never wanted anything so much in her life than to catch up with him and put her hand on his arm. But he was gone. His curls lost in the bobbing sea of heads that flowed along the street. She stood for a long time, alone again. Then she went home.

  The second time. In the cinema. Too good to be true. Another chance. It must be fate. He left before she could reach him. Then the third. He was on a boat on the Thames. She was on a bridge. When was it? The twentieth time? The fiftieth? The hundredth? When did she wake up and realize that not only can he not see her or hear her when she shouts, screams sometimes, but that maybe, actually, genuinely, he isn’t really there at all? Too frightened to call up the theme park, to try and find witnesses to that day, to maybe track down the digital trail of the photo. Too scared in case what she fears turns out to be true. What is he? A spirit? A demon? Worse. A figment of her imagination? She has been beaten. There is no part of her left now that wants to see an alternative photo of her front row ride. A photo in which she is sitting next to an empty seat. So she lives with it. Deals with it.

  But tonight she feels different. Tension has been building in her like the close summer air outside. This must come to a conclusion. The burden on her heart is too heavy and tomorrow it will end. She will make it end. She is going to face him, whatever the consequences. She walks back to her bed and curls into her roller-coaster sleep.

  Come morning, she waits outside a shop, staring into its dusty window displaying foreign newspapers and bottles of sweet drinks, still and passive, knowing he is coming. No need to look. She keeps her back to the street, and shudders against the cold as she feels him pass by.

  A deep breath. This time he won’t get away. It’s now or never. She walks quickly, weaving in and out of the rush hour crowd folding over his wake. He can’t outrun her today. Today her feet have wings. He turns and enters Kings Cross Station. She breaks into a half-run. He’s through the turnstile. She has no ticket. She jumps the barrier. Back behind her, maybe someone shouts. Maybe not. She’s not sure. She carries on. He’s on the escalator. She pushes forward, lightly tripping down the metal stairs, commuters twitching away in dreamy irritation as she brushes by. He turns into the tunnel for the Circle Line. A train is just leaving. The set of his body registers exasperation. He’s missed it.

  It’s the moment. It’s now. There’s nowhere to run. In just a few moments this will be over. She closes her eyes and sighs. Deep, satisfied. Her eyes open and she calms herself as she walks slowly and deliberately towards him, her breath cooling in the hot, stifling underground air. Everything around her has slowed. The movement of the crowd has been quieted as though caught in treacle. The platform is an eddy in this sluggish human stream, the passengers at rest, self-absorbed, patient, waiting. His back is to her as he faces the rails, his body tightly flanked on the left by an expressionless man with a rucksack, and on the right by a bespectacled woman, laden with parcels yet attempting to read a book. A train is screeching from the tunnel, its lights beginning to bathe the rails. The crowd shifts and pushes behind her in anticipation and she glides forward.

  She takes a deep breath, turning it to icy vapour on the exhale, as her heart beats calmly and steadily now. The train stops and the doors open. He shuffles forward, penned between the man and the woman. She moves towards him. Her hand comes slowly, slowly, gently, up from her side. She lays it on his shoulder and the touch is like an electric shock. He halts, his head turns and he looks her straight in the eye.

  He’s trying to piece together what’s happening, but his breath has been punched from his body and he’s gasping like a beached fish. Everything has slowed. The noise of the train, the people pushing past him, even the hot, brisk wind of the underground has turned to sluggish, still cold air around his head. The noises of the station sound like a clockwork music box that’s wound down.

  He’s not ill any more. He knows he’s not ill. Dr Sutton has told him he’s not ill. Today is a big day. The interview is at ten. He’s left himself enough time to get there and he’s calm, prepared. There’s no reason for a panic attack. Especially not today. In fact, there’s no reason for an attack at all. He’s worked hard, he’s focused and he’s not anxious. He tries to breathe. Breathe like Dr Sutton showed him how. But he can’t. He feels faint.

  It’s not her. It’s impossible. He knows it’s impossible, and yet the icy chill of terror is spreading through him like black ink poured into a beaker of water. He wants to look away from those eyes, to tear this freezing hand from his shoulder. But he’s solid with fear, immobilized and breathless.

  His brain works feverishly to rationalize. It’s his fault. This is his fault entirely. He should never have accepted, let alone kept, the photo they sent. It’s the familiarity of her face that’s making him recreate her so perfectly now in this madness. It has to be. He might have forgotten how she looked if he’d just binned it. It was nearly two years ago. But they meant well, the family. It was loving, not ghoulish, hunting down and retrieving the photo from the theme park after what had happened. They wanted to honour her last great thrill. To remember her. Remember her not as the fat, lonely, quiet girl they’d raised, but as a risk taker. Someone who lived large. A front row rider.

  And they wanted to thank him for all he did. What did he do? How did that go again? What order did Dr Sutton say he should remember it in? Her screaming. His laughing. Her screaming again, and again, too much, too shrill, too long, too gurgled for an outburst of joyful abandonment. Then her jerking, and gasping, and slumping. His screaming for help as the ride stopped, and no one coming. Screaming more and more as the harness didn’t lift, then, when it finally loosened, grunting and heaving to get the bulk of her sweat-slicked body out of the chair and on to the hard concrete. Still screaming for a doctor, with everyone standing watching as though it were an act. Then putting his mouth to hers, and blowing, and pumping her chest with his palms, and crying, and still shouting for help.

  And then slumping himself, realizing she was gone, and he hadn’t helped, hadn’t saved her. This poor, frightened, lonely stranger. His was the last face she saw. The last hand she held. And now he was here, recreating it all in his crazy brain, just as he was about to start afresh. Sabotaging himself. That’s what Dr Sutton calls it.

  His anxiety has won. He blinks as he watches his guilty creation lower her hand and listens, numb with horror, as she speaks. She is stern. Almost angry.

  “If you follow me on to this train, it won’t be fine. It won’t be fine at all.”

  He stays perfectly still. She holds his horrified gaze for a beat then walks past him, steps on to the train, and sits herself gracefully and serenely next to the man with the rucksack. The doors close. The train begins to move away, and as he watches her though the glass she smiles, an expression of release playing in her darkened eyes. She turns her head away from him, lifts a hand and lays it gently over that of the woman with parcels. She disappears with the train into the darkness of the tunnel.

  His chill is gone now. He’s sweating. His fevered imagination has made him miss the train that today, at 8.50 a.m., could have taken him to a new job
and a new chance and a new life. He has no stomach to wait for another.

  He weaves slowly and shakily off the platform and heads for the stairs.

  He should feel defeated. He should feel insane, a failure, a casualty. But right now as he jostles through the crowds pushing in the opposite direction, he feels strangely elated, light of heart, released and invigorated. Baffled, he takes a breath and gives himself over to the emotion. In the months and years to come he will recall that this instant, these precious few moments of confused elation were to savour and not to fear.

  In four and a half minutes’ time the man with the rucksack in the train will detonate his bomb.

  God Grant That She Lye Still

  Cynthia Asquith

  It was not until three weeks after I came to live at Mosstone that I first saw her. But most of my new patients had talked to me of Margaret Clewer, the youthful owner of the Manor House. Many shook kindly heads because she was so alone in the world. “Only twenty-two, and without a single near relation!” – but they also spoke of her beauty and charm, and it was with agreeable curiosity that I set out to pay my professional call at what the Mosstone villagers called “the great house”.

  As I passed through the gateway that I had so often admired from outside, into a large, grey-walled court, the muffled atmosphere of the place seemed to envelop me like a cloak. The very air seemed thicker and more still. It was as though I had stepped out of the everyday world into something cloistered and self-sufficing.

  Pigeons fluttered and crooned and plumes of blue smoke rose into the golden air. Absorbing its beauty like a long, lovely draught, I gazed at the exquisite gabled house, with its great mullioned windows and queer twisted chimneys, round which the swallows skimmed.

  It struck me then, I remember, that more than any other building I had ever seen, this house appeared to have a face, an actual countenance that might vary like that of a beautiful woman. Yet could any building look more remote, more strikingly aloof?

  Time had deposited so much on those mellowed walls; for so many centuries a deep reservoir of life, the house now looked withdrawn from any further participation, as though with gentle repudiation disassociating itself from the present and the future.

  My watch told me I had returned from my walk twenty minutes before I was due. Ever since my boyhood I had loved poring over old epitaphs, so I turned into the churchyard, which was only a few yards from the front windows of the house.

  Like most village churchyards it was very overcrowded, but the dark red-fruited yew trees shed an air of sombre peace over the clustered graves. Most of these graves were mere uncommemorated grass mounds, but there were also a number of grey lichen-clad tombstones lying and leaning at all angles, and on many of these the name of Clewer was engraved. Evidently innumerable generations of my future patient’s family had lived and died here. Most of these long-dead Clewers seemed to have been mourned by appreciative and verbose relations. Nothing that uncouth rhyme and shapeless sculpture could do to preserve the memory of the departed had been omitted. The scriptures had been ransacked for consoling texts, and prose and verse not only lavishly set down the virtues, talents and deeds of those described as “not lost but gone before”, but also assiduously struggled to describe the emotions of the bereaved. Only once in all those generations had a strange reticence descended on the Clewer family.

  In the corner of the churchyard nearest to the house, directly beneath a darkly presiding yew tree, was a worn, flat stone. Here nothing implored the passing tribute of a sigh. There was only the bare inscription:

  Here lyes the body of Elspeth Clewer. Born 1550 – dyed 1572.

  And beneath in different lettering the words:

  God grante that she lye stille.

  This inscription struck me as laconic and queerly worded, so like, and yet so different from, the familiar – Requiescat in pace. Could those who buried the dead girl find nothing to praise? Was it too great a strain on their capacity for hope to associate her with peace? Or was the rather piteous supplication “God grante that she lye stille” more for themselves than for her they consigned to the grave?

  Idly I wondered whether I should ever know Margaret Clewer well enough to question her about this undesignated ancestress.

  It was now time to run from the dead to the living, so I moved towards the home of the Clewers. As I approached the iron-studded door, the air was heavily sweet with the scent of the magnolias. These, as well as wisteria and clematis, clustered thickly over the front of the building, but to my fancy the great house seemed to wear them with, as it were, a shrug of indifference, as though it knew nothing could really enhance its own beauty. The gentle austerity of that beauty humbled me again, and it was with a sense of intrusion that I pulled the bell and heard the responding clang and the bark of an aroused dog.

  I don’t know what I had subconsciously expected, but the smiling beribboned parlour maid who opened the door seemed incongruous.

  “Dr Stone?” she asked. “Miss Clewer is expecting you.”

  Obedient to her “Come this way, please”, I followed her through a large hall in which young people were playing ping-pong and noisy games of cards; the blare of a gramophone triumphing over the confusion of sounds. A heavy door through which we passed cut us off into complete cool silence, and a short flight of shiny black oak stairs, splendidly solid to the tread, led us to the door of my patient’s room. The strong evening sun streamed in and it was through a dance of dazzling motes that I first saw her.

  She lay on a low wide bed drawn close up to the window, and a Golden Retriever luxuriously sprawled over the flower-embroidered coverlet that was spread across her feet.

  I cannot remember how much I took in at first sight: I know the window-shelf and the tables were then, as always, crowded with flowers and great branches cut from trees, and the bed strewn with books, writing materials and needlework.

  The shock with which I saw her was not without an element of recognition. Vaguely I had always expected that one day I should see a woman far more lovely than all others. Her hair gleamed in the sunshine, and her translucent face smiled up at me. I thought I should never see anything more beautiful, but I did the next time I saw her, for the variety of her beauty was unending. Changing as the sea changes with the sky, her colouring had its special response to every tone of light, just as her expression varied with every shade of feeling. It was a fluid, unset loveliness, suggesting far more than it asserted.

  After this first sight of her, I was often to wonder how I should describe her, supposing I had to reduce my impressions to the scope of words. What, for instance, should I set down if I were asked to fill in her passport? Would she be allowed across frontiers if I described her mouth as normal? Normal! When it was never the same for two consecutive seconds. As for her eyes. I should not even have known what colour to call them. ‘‘Eyes too mysterious to be blue, Too lovely to be grey,’’ would not help. Many more than two colours met in those pools of light.

  As I entered the room I was to know so well, two canaries in a large golden cage were singing loudly, and l could scarcely hear Margaret Clewer’s welcoming words. In her lovely, lilting, but, to my professional ear, definitely nervous voice, before she began to speak of herself, she asked me many questions as to the comfort of my house and my impressions of my new practice. I had almost forgotten in what capacity I was there when she said:

  “I’ve been very silly and strained my heart, I think, over-rowing myself. I’ve got a craze for very violent exercise. Anyhow, I feel distinctly queer, and my heart seems to beat everywhere where it shouldn’t be. And so,” she added in her way – how well I was to know that way – of speaking in inverted commas, “my friends insist on my taking medical advice, so perhaps you had better see if my heart is in the right place.”

  It did not take me long to discover that her heart was severely strained. There was also a very considerable degree of anaemia, and I prescribed three weeks’ rest in bed.

&nb
sp; My verdict was received with equanimity.

  “If I can’t row or ride, I’d just as soon remain in the horizontal,” she answered gaily. “I shall be quite happy with books and food and friends, and with my beautiful Sheen. Isn’t he lovely?” she added, turning the Retriever’s golden head towards me.

  After paying homage, I asked if there were anyone to whom she would like me to speak about her health.

  “Oh, no! I haven’t any relations. I haven’t anyone to edit me. I’m quite alone.”

  “But there seem so many people in the house.”

  “Oh, yes, but they’re just visitors. When I said alone, I meant independent. I couldn’t bear to be literally alone.”

  The last words were said with a vehemence that rather surprised me. Her room, with its multitude of books, a violin and several unfinished sketches, seemed to bear evidence of such varied resources, and I had already diagnosed her as a person who would be very good company to herself.

  As I shook hands with her, saying I would return the day after tomorrow, I noticed that, for all their brightness, the responsive eyes held a slightly, not exactly hurt, but shall I say initiated expression. In spite of the nervous voice, my first impression had been that here, if anywhere, was one who had not felt the touch of earthly years. This superficial impression was already modified. Had life already bared its teeth at this lovely girl?

  “I saw you groping about among the graves,” she said, as I reluctantly turned towards the door. “Are you interested in the rude forefathers, in worms and graves and epitaphs?”

  “Well, at any rate, I love epitaphs,” I replied, “and this is a peculiarly picturesque churchyard. You, yourself, must surely have a weakness for it, as you occupy a room so immediately overlooking it.”

  “Yes, I am close, aren’t I?” She laughed. “No rude forefather could turn in his grave without my hearing him. But this happens to be the room I like best in the house. There isn’t any harm in being so close, is there?”