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

by Marie O'Regan

  He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the Sentinel had first shaken the depths of her security.

  As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring headlines “Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid”, ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table upstairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.

  “I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down—” she heard Parvis continue.

  She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat and ears. Then she gave a cry.

  “This is the man – the man who came for my husband!”

  She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

  “It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!” she cried in a voice that sounded in her own ears like a scream.

  Parvis’s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless, fog-muffled windings.

  “Mrs Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a glass of water?”

  “No, no, no!” She threw herself towards him, her hand frantically clenching the newspaper. “I tell you, it’s the man! I know him! He spoke to me in the garden!”

  Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. “It can’t be, Mrs Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.”

  “Robert Elwell?” Her white stare seemed to travel into space. “Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him.”

  “Came for Boyne? The day he went away?” Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. “Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?”

  Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.

  “Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me – the one you found on his desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.” She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. “Surely you remember that!” he urged her.

  Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words – words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.

  “This was the man who spoke to me,” she repeated.

  She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. “He thinks me mad; but I’m not mad,” she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.

  She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: “Will you answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?”

  “When – when?” Parvis stammered.

  “Yes; the date. Please try to remember.”

  She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. “I have a reason,” she insisted gently.

  “Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should say.”

  “I want the date,” she repeated.

  Parvis picked up the newspaper. “We might see here,” he said, still humouring her. He ran his eyes down the page. “Here it is. Last October – the—”

  She caught the words from him. “The twentieth, wasn’t it?”

  With a sharp look at her, he verified, “Yes, the twentieth. Then you did know?”

  “I know now.” Her white stare continued to travel past him. “Sunday the twentieth – that was the day he came first.”

  Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. “Came here first?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw him twice, then?”

  “Yes, twice.” She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. “He came first on the twentieth of October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.” She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.

  Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.

  “We saw him from the roof,” she went on. “He came down the lime-avenue towards the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.”

  “Elwell had vanished?” Parvis faltered.

  “Yes.” Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. “I couldn’t think what had happened. I see now. He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough – he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months; and then he came back again – and Ned went with him.”

  She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.

  “Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned – I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!” she screamed out.

  She felt the walls of the room rush towards her, like inward-falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch; she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

  “You won’t know till afterward,” it said. “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”

  A Silver Music

  Gaie Sebold

  Inspector Gairden turned up the collar of his coat as a steam velocipede puffed and churned its way past him, filthy water spraying up from beneath its wheels. Its driver hunched under a bowler and greatcoat, rain shedding down his back; its single passenger was no more than a smoky shape behind the yellowed glass. Gairden scowled at the red-glass lantern that marked its retreat.

  He crossed the road, picking his way among the puddles. A dead goblin, about the size of a terrier, swollen-bellied, lay face down in the gutter, its tail wavering in the water. He sighed. The things were a damn nuisance, but he had a lingering fondness for them. Some of the lesser sidhe seemed to be adapting to the city, thriving on its debris; others ended like this.

  Gairden stood in front of the looming bulk of the Rheese Manufactory. The place roared and fumed in the darkness; shadows moved in the high windows, paper silhouette puppets against a brutal white glare. Rain, snagged by the light, plummeted like steel needles. A rhythmic thudding jarred the paving under his feet. He walked past the great gates to the side door.

  Set into the stone surround was the brass opening of a speaking tube supported by two plaster cherubs. Below it, mounted in an elaborately decorated brass surround, a doorbell bore the stern injunction: “Press”.

  Inspector Gairden did so.

  “
Yes?” A muted buzz, stripped of gender, emerged from the tube.

  “Inspector Gairden,” he said, wondering how he sounded to his hidden interlocutor. Less like a machine, he hoped.

  “One moment, please.”

  It was, in fact, a good few moments before someone opened the door, by which point rain was trickling steadily off the brim of the inspector’s hat.

  “Apologies for keeping you, sir. Terrible night.” The man beckoned him in. He was a lean fellow in a workman’s uniform of heavy canvas trousers, woollen waistcoat and plain shirt with the sleeves held back by leather bands. His hands were stained with black and brown on the fingers and palms. “Please follow me. It’s up three flights. Sorry for the climb, but the lift isn’t working.”

  “May I take your name?”

  “Oh, sorry, sir. I’m the foreman. Lassiter. Ben Lassiter.” He shook his head. “Awful thing, it is. Got everyone very shaken. We shall have to be very careful, the next few days, that there aren’t accidents. Nothing like bad nerves for making people careless.”

  “Do you have many accidents?” Gairden raised his voice over the noise.

  “Not so many in the last five years, since poor Jamie joined us. We do get accidents, yes. But when it happens . . . the machines, they’re not malevolent, if you see what I mean.”

  Lassiter glanced through the archway as they passed the factory floor, where the great levers and pistons rose and fell in relentless rhythm, regular as the pumping of a giant heart, the scurrying workers tiny and doll-like. “I suppose so.” Had the machines been malevolent, Gairden would have felt . . . not sympathy, but some capacity for understanding. That was how he worked: by trying to sense something about the hearts, the minds, the spirits of those involved in a case. There was none of that, with a machine.

  “The idea of someone actually—” Lassiter wiped his mouth. “Well, it’s not the same, you see.”

  “No, you’re right, it isn’t. You knew the young man, then?”

  “Oh, everyone knew young Jamie, sir. Not to speak to, so much; he kept himself to himself, you know. But he was a nice lad when you could get him to notice you existed.”

  “Preoccupied, was he?”

  “You could say that, sir, yes. A bear for his work, he was.”

  “An asset to the firm, then.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it would be too much to call him a genius, Inspector. We shall be very sorry to lose him.” There was, the inspector thought, the slightest possible emphasis on the we.

  The iron stairway shuddered to the regular thudding; bright curls of shaved metal and fragments of dirt jumped about their feet as they climbed. Smells of hot metal and steam surrounded them. Glittering dust hung in the air.

  “What was his position here?” Inspector Gairden said.

  “Assistant Deviser, sir.”

  “And who was he assistant to?”

  “That’d be Mr Rheese, sir. The owner.”

  “I see.”

  The noise lessened slightly as they moved higher. They stepped into a corridor; heavy wooden doors, gas lamps hissing in their lily-petal shades. Lassiter hurried his steps; Gairden speeded up to stay with him.

  Lassiter glanced up and down the corridor; pushed open a door. “In here, sir. It’s pretty bad, but I suppose you’ve seen worse, in your line of work.”

  Tiny limbs, their sizes carefully graded, hung on the walls. Jars of eyes stared in all directions. A music box stood with gaping lid, the dancer on top poised forever en pointe. Neatly arrayed in trays, on hooks, in boxes, were levers, wheels, cogs. Brass and copper, glass and steel. A vice gripped the edge of a workbench like a parrot waiting for a snack; against one wall was a bed, narrow as a coffin, the sheets and one rough blanket tucked in with an almost military precision.

  If it had been a burglary, it was an exceptionally neat one. There was nothing out of place, except the body. It – James Wishart, Gairden reminded himself, not just the body, never just the body – lay face down on the floor.

  There wasn’t much left of his head.

  He was dressed much like the foreman. One hand was outflung, as though reaching for something; the other hand lay at his side, with the palm turned up; it had the same staining as he had noticed on Lassiter’s hands. There was something particularly pathetic about it, that strong young hand, darkened and callused with work, lying curled like a sleeping child’s. A watch had slipped from his waistcoat pocket and lay flattened, a ruined mess of cogs and metal and glass.

  Gairden kneeled down. From the mash of brutally shattered bone and the overlapping sprays of red, it seemed he had been hit not just once, but several times. This close, Gairden was enclosed in the raw stench of blood, the sleek smell of machine oil . . . and a faint, junipery trail of gin.

  Something lay in the mess, glittering. Inspector Gairden picked up the tiny brass cog, delicate as a snowflake. Perhaps it was from the watch. “Did he drink?”

  “Jamie? Never saw him with anything stronger than a cup of tea, sir.”

  “Hmm. Is anything missing?”

  “Not that I can see, sir.”

  It was cold; the fire in the grate had long died to ash and cinders. All the fire-irons were in place. It seemed the murderer had both provided his weapon, and taken it away again.

  “Lassiter!”

  Inspector Gairden looked up. A man was standing in the doorway, regarding the scene with his mouth twisted in distaste.

  “Is this the inspector? I thought I told you to bring him to my office?”

  Lassiter straightened his shoulders and stared at the opposite wall. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “Forgot.”

  The man hurried forward. “My dear sir, I do apologize. I’d hoped to have a chance to prepare you.” He was a burly fellow, what Gairden thought of as a beefsteak man; flushed face girdled with expansive mutton-chop whiskers; smelling of tobacco and pomade. He too had black smudges on his fingers. “Ghastly, quite ghastly.”

  Gairden got to his feet. “Yes. This is his workshop?”

  “Indeed. It’s a dreadful business. Lassiter, do get back to the floor; they’re bad enough at the moment. They need your eye on them.”

  “Sir.”

  “I may need to speak to you again,” Gairden said quietly.

  “Of course, sir.” Lassiter disappeared.

  Even as he did so, there was a pause in the thudding, a shiver of silence, then a long metallic screech, and shouting. “Oh, no,” mutton-chop whiskers moaned. “As though things weren’t bad enough.”

  “Problem, sir?” Gairden said.

  “Goblins in the damn machinery, I swear. I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. Tobias Rheese. I’m the owner, for my sins. I say, could we go elsewhere? It’s just that—”

  “Well, sir, I do need to look around a little.”

  “Oh, I suppose you do.” Rheese glanced at the body, then away, swallowing. “When can we get things decently dealt with?”

  “As soon as I’m done.”

  Gairden worked his way along the battered, deep-drawered oak table that stood against the back wall; he took a pencil from his pocket and used it to lift the edges of papers and charts. He brushed his gloved fingers over the teeth of cogwheels stacked in a box; looked at the tools hanging on their hooks, clean and orderly. He opened a drawer to find it full of papers – technical drawings by the look of them – labelled in a neat, small hand. A new method for the construction of a speaking tube. Improvements to the ratchet key. Clockwork mechanism for use in an instructive and educational child’s toy.

  “Do be careful, there’s a good chap. Those papers . . . well, of course, I haven’t had time to go through them, but there may be important things in there,” Rheese said.

  “Of course, sir. Can you tell if anything’s been taken?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  The second drawer refused to open easily; something was jammed in the slide. Gairden worked at it with his fingers until it came free. A scrap of paper. A word, Lalika,
in that same neat hand. A smooth curve, disappearing off the edge of the paper, with an elongated oval within it. That was all. Gairden looked at it, then laid it on the desk.

  Above his head, the mantle of one of the gas lamps suddenly flared up with painful brilliance. Gairden blinked. There was a pop, and the lamp went out.

  He heard Rheese swear under his breath. When he turned, the man seemed to have lost more colour than the dimmer light could account for, and his broad forehead gleamed beneath his pomade-glossed curls. “Could we get out of here? Please?”

  “Just one more moment, sir.”

  Gairden looked around, letting his eyes lose focus. Sometimes, concentrating on the detail hid the story the place had to tell you. Though here, he felt at a distinct disadvantage; it was a place built for machines, not people. Machines did not have stories, or motive, or a past.

  Gairden was a man out of his time, and knew it. He had grown up in a world that still went hand in hand with the mystical, but the cities expanded, the woods diminished, and the grind and roar of machines ate into everything. When Gairden was a child, goblins had stolen eggs from his parents’ hens and shouted rude remarks when he’d chased them from the garden; now, if he saw one, it had died a poisoned death in the gutter or sat sickly and moaning in a cage in some private menagerie. Naiads abandoned the polluted rivers; the fey retreated deep into the heart of the green. Gairden was a man whose job consisted of shining a light on darkness, yet he loathed the idea of a world of mindless mechanism, where there was only glaring light and stark black; where nothing danced and glimmered in the shadows.

  He looked at the gleaming tools of polished wood and brass, the drawers with their shining handles, the neat stacks of books and papers; that narrow, empty bed.

  “Well, sir,” he said, “I think that’s it for the moment. I’ll need to ask you a few questions, if it’s quite convenient.”

  “By all means, come with me.” Rheese closed and locked the door as Lassiter watched.

  “What do I do about—” Rheese gestured to where Jamie Wishart lay, hidden now.