The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

by Peter Haining

  “It’s started,” said Gerald intensely. Clytie saw his fine, thin, almost black lips spread in a crooked line. “How can a man live in the house with women? How can he?”

  He jumped up, and tore his napkin exactly in two. He walked out of the dining-room without eating the first bite of his breakfast. She heard him going back upstairs into his room.

  “My thimble!” screamed Octavia.

  She waited one moment. Crouching eagerly, rather like a little squirrel, Clytie ate part of her breakfast over the stove before going up the stairs.

  At nine Mr Bobo, the barber, knocked at the front door.

  Without waiting, for they never answered the knock, he let himself in and advanced like a small general down the hall. There was the old organ that was never uncovered or played except for funerals, and then nobody was invited. He went ahead, under the arm of the tiptoed male statue and up the dark stairway. There they were, lined up at the head of the stairs, and they all looked at him with repulsion. Mr Bobo was convinced that they were every one mad. Gerald, even, had already been drinking, at nine o’clock in the morning.

  Mr Bobo was short and had never been anything but proud of it, until he had started coming to this house once a week. But he did not enjoy looking up from below at the soft, long throats, the cold, repelled, high-reliefed faces of those Farrs. He could only imagine what one of those sisters would do to him if he made one move. (As if he would!) As soon as he arrived upstairs, they all went off and left him. He pushed out his chin and stood with his round legs wide apart, just looking around. The upstairs hall was absolutely bare. There was not even a chair to sit down in.

  “Either they sell away their furniture in the dead of night,” said Mr Bobo to the people of Farr’s Gin, “or else they’re just too plumb mean to use it.”

  Mr Bobo stood and waited to be summoned, and wished he had never started coming to this house to shave old Mr Farr. But he had been so surprised to get a letter in the mail. The letter was on such old, yellowed paper that at first he thought it must have been written a thousand years ago and never delivered. It was signed “Octavia Farr,” and began without even calling him “Dear Mr Bobo.” What it said was: “Come to this residence at nine o’clock each Friday morning until further notice, where you will shave Mr James Farr.”

  He thought he would go one time. And each time after that he thought he would never go back – especially when he never knew when they would pay him anything. Of course, it was something to be the only person in Farr’s Gin allowed inside the house (except for the undertaker, who had gone there when young Henry shot himself, but had never to that day spoken of it). It was not easy to shave a man as bad off as Mr Farr, either – not anything like as easy as to shave a corpse or even a fighting-drunk field hand. Suppose you were like this, Mr Bobo would say: you couldn’t move your face; you couldn’t hold up your chin, or tighten your jaw, or even bat your eyes when the razor came close. The trouble with Mr Farr was his face made no resistance to the razor. His face didn’t hold.

  “I’ll never go back,” Mr Bobo always ended to his customers. “Not even if they paid me. I’ve seen enough.”

  Yet here he was again, waiting before the sick-room door.

  “This is the last time,” he said. “By God!”

  And he wondered why the old man did not die.

  Just then Miss Clytie came out of the room. There she came in her funny, sideways walk, and the closer she got to him the more slowly she moved.

  “Now?” asked Mr Bobo nervously.

  Clytie looked at his small, doubtful face. What fear raced through his little green eyes! His pitiful, greedy, small face – how very mournful it was, like a stray kitten’s. What was it that this greedy little thing was so desperately needing?

  Clytie came up to the barber and stopped. Instead of telling him that he might go in and shave her father, she put out her hand and with breath-taking gentleness touched the side of his face.

  For an instant afterward, she stood looking at him inquiringly, and he stood like a statue, like the statue of Hermes.

  Then both of them uttered a despairing cry. Mr Bobo turned and fled, waving his razor around in a circle, down the stairs and out the front door; and Clytie, pale as a ghost, stumbled against the railing. The terrible scent of bay rum, of hair tonic, the horrible moist scratch of an invisible beard, the dense, popping green eyes – what had she got hold of with her hand! She could hardly bear it – the thought of that face.

  From the closed door to the sick-room came Octavia’s shouting voice.

  “Clytie! Clytie! You haven’t brought Papa the rain-water! Where in the devil is the rain-water to shave Papa?”

  Clytie moved obediently down the stairs.

  Her brother Gerald threw open the door of his room and called after her, “What now? This is a madhouse! Somebody was running past my room, I heard it. Where do you keep your men? Do you have to bring them home?” He slammed the door again, and she heard the barricade going up.

  Clytie went through the lower hall and out the back door. She stood beside the old rain barrel and suddenly felt that this object, now, was her friend, just in time, and her arms almost circled it with impatient gratitude. The rain barrel was full. It bore a dark, heavy, penetrating fragrance, like ice and flowers and the dew of night.

  Clytie swayed a little and looked into the slightly moving water. She thought she saw a face there.

  Of course. It was the face she had been looking for, and from which she had been separated. As if to give a sign, the index-finger of a hand lifted to touch the dark cheek.

  Clytie leaned closer, as she had leaned down to touch the face of the barber.

  It was a wavering, inscrutable face. The brows were drawn together as if in pain. The eyes were large, intent, almost avid, the nose ugly and discoloured as if from weeping, the mouth old and closed from any speech. On either side of the head dark hair hung down in a disreputable and wild fashion. Everything about the face frightened and shocked her with its signs of waiting, of suffering.

  For the second time that morning, Clytie recoiled, and as she did so, the other recoiled in the same way.

  Too late, she recognized the face. She stood there completely sick at heart, as though the poor, half-remembered vision had finally betrayed her.

  “Clytie! Clytie! The water! The water!” came Octavia’s monumental voice.

  Clytie did the only thing she could think of to do. She bent her angular body further, and thrust her head into the barrel, under the water, through its glittering surface into the kind, featureless depth, and held it there.

  When Old Lethy found her, she had fallen forward into the barrel, with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs.

  The Pool

  Daphne du Maurier

  Location: Par, Cornwall.

  Time: July, 1959.

  Eyewitness Description: “Suddenly the lightning forked again, and standing there, alive yet immobile, was the woman by the turnstile. She stared up at the windows of the house and Deborah recognised her. The turnstile was there, inviting entry and already the phantom figures, passing through it, crowded towards the trees beyond the lawn. The secret world was waiting . . .”

  Author: Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) has been credited with shifting the Gothic mode towards romantic fiction with her novel, Rebecca (1938) which built on the work of the Brontes and inspired a genre that has flourished ever since. For many years, du Maurier was one of the most popular novelists in the English-speaking world with her tales full of atmosphere, suspense and melodramatic situations, a trait she may well have developed as the granddaughter of George du Maurier, author of Trilby (1894), and daughter of the great English actor-manager, Sir Gerald du Maurier. She grew up in the world of theatrical excess, yet found her own way in the rugged isolation and mystery of Cornwall where she wrote a series of hugely successful novels, especially the “Gothics” that followed Rebecca: Frenchman’s Creek (1941)
, Hungry Hill (1943) and Mary Anne (1954). Her short stories were equally impressive, notably “The Birds” (1952) and “Don’t Look Now” (1966), which were both brilliantly filmed, and “The Pool” in which a typical du Maurier heroine, the pretty, sensitive young Deborah, on the verge of puberty, finds herself in a secret world of feelings and enchantment.

  I

  The children ran out on to the lawn. There was space all around them, and light, and air, with the trees indeterminate beyond. The gardener had cut the grass. The lawn was crisp and firm now, because of the hot sun through the day; but near the summer-house where the tall grass stood there were dew-drops like frost clinging to the narrow stems.

  The children said nothing. The first moment always took them by surprise. The fact that it waited, thought Deborah, all the time they were away; that day after day while they were at school, or in the Easter holidays with the aunts at Hunstanton being blown to bits, or in the Christmas holidays with their father in London riding on buses and going to theatres – the fact that the garden waited for them was a miracle known only to herself. A year was so long. How did the garden endure the snows clamping down upon it, or the chilly rain that fell in November? Surely sometimes it must mock the slow steps of Grandpapa pacing up and down the terrace in front of the windows, or Grandmama calling to Patch? The garden had to endure month after month of silence, while the children were gone. Even the spring and the days of May and June were wasted, all those mornings of butterflies and darting birds, with no one to watch but Patch gasping for breath on a cool stone slab. So wasted was the garden, so lost.

  “You must never think we forget,” said Deborah in the silent voice she used to her own possessions. “I remember, even at school, in the middle of French” – but the ache then was unbearable, that it should be the hard grain of a desk under her hands, and not the grass she bent to touch now. The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand, because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people’s gardens in America. It would be taller than trees and it would move like corn in a wind.

  They had run in to ask somebody adult, “What is there most of in the world, grass or sand?”, both children hot and passionate from the argument. But Grandpapa stood there in his old panama hat looking for clippers to trim the hedge – he was rummaging in the drawer full of screws – and he said, “What? What?” impatiently.

  The boy turned red – perhaps it was a stupid question – but the girl thought, he doesn’t know, they never know, and she made a face at her brother to show that she was on his side. Later they asked their grandmother, and she, being practical said briskly, “I should think sand. Think of all the grains,” and Roger turned in triumph. “I told you so!” The grains. Deborah had not considered the grains. The magic of millions and millions of grains clinging together in the world and under the oceans made her sick. Let Roger win, it did not matter. It was better to be in the minority of the waving grass.

  Now, on this first evening of summer holiday, she knelt and then lay full-length on the lawn, and stretched her hands out on either side like Jesus on the Cross, only face downwards, and murmured over and over again the words she had memorized from Confirmation preparation. “A full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice . . . a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice . . . satisfaction, and oblation, for the sins of the whole world.” To offer herself to the earth, to the garden, the garden that had waited patiently all these months since last summer, surely this must be her first gesture.

  “Come on,” said Roger, rousing himself from his appreciation of how Willis the gardener had mown the lawn to just the right closeness for cricket, and without waiting for his sister’s answer he ran to the summer-house and made a dive at the long box in the corner where the stumps were kept. He smiled as he lifted the lid. The familiarity of the smell was satisfying. Old varnish and chipped paint, and surely that must be the same spider and the same cobweb? He drew out the stumps one by one, and the bails, and there was the ball – it had not been lost after all, as he had feared. It was worn, though, a greyish red – he smelt it and bit it, to taste the shabby leather. Then he gathered the things in his arms and went out to set up the stumps.

  “Come and help me measure the pitch,” he called to his sister, and looking at her, squatting in the grass with her face hidden, his heart sank, because it meant that she was in one of her absent moods and would not concentrate on the cricket.

  “Deb?” he called anxiously. “You are going to play?”

  Deborah heard his voice through the multitude of earth sounds, the heartbeat and the pulse. If she listened with her ear to the ground there was a humming much deeper than anything that bees did, or the sea at Hunstanton. The nearest to it was the wind, but the wind was reckless. The humming of the earth was patient. Deborah sat up, and her heart sank just as her brother’s had done, for the same reason in reverse. The monotony of the game ahead would be like a great chunk torn out of privacy.

  “How long shall we have to be?” she called.

  The lack of enthusiasm damped the boy. It was not going to be any fun at all if she made a favour of it. He must be firm, though. Any concession on his part she snatched and turned to her advantage.

  “Half-an-hour,” he said, and then, for encouragement’s sake, “You can bat first.”

  Deborah smelt her knees. They had not yet got the country smell, but if she rubbed them in the grass, and in the earth too, the white London look would go.

  “All right,” she said, “but no longer than half-an-hour.”

  He nodded quickly, and so as not to lose time measured out the pitch and then began ramming the stumps in the ground. Deborah went into the summer-house to get the bats. The familiarity of the little wooden hut pleased her as it had her brother. It was a long time now, many years, since they had played in the summer-house, making yet another house inside this one with the help of broken deckchairs; but, just as the garden waited for them a whole year, so did the summer-house, the windows on either side, cobweb-wrapped and stained, gazing out like eyes. Deborah did her ritual of bowing twice. If she should forget this, on her first entrance, it spelt ill-luck.

  She picked out the two bats from the corner, where they were stacked with old croquet-hoops, and she knew at once that Roger would choose the one with the rubber handle, even though they could not bat at the same time, and for the whole of the holidays she must make do with the smaller one, that had half the whipping off. There was a croquet clip lying on the floor. She picked it up and put it on her nose and stood a moment, wondering how it would be if for evermore she had to live thus, nostrils pinched, making her voice like Punch. Would people pity her?

  “Hurry,” shouted Roger, and she threw the clip into the corner, then quickly returned when she was halfway to the pitch, because she knew the clip was lying apart from its fellows, and she might wake in the night and remember it. The clip would turn malevolent, and haunt her. She replaced him on the floor with two others, and now she was absolved and the summer-house at peace.

  “Don’t get out too soon,” warned Roger as she stood in the crease he had marked for her, and with a tremendous effort of concentration Deborah forced her eyes to his retreating figure and watched him roll up his sleeves and pace the required length for his run-up. Down came the ball and she lunged out, smacking it in the air in an easy catch. The impact of ball on bat stung her hands. Roger missed the catch on purpose. Neither of them said anything.

  “Who shall I be?” called Deborah.

  The game could only be endured, and concentration kept, if Roger gave her a part to play. Not an individual, but a country.

  “You’re India,” he said, and Debor
ah felt herself grow dark and lean. Part of her was tiger, part of her was sacred cow, the long grass fringing the lawn was jungle, the roof of the summer-house a minaret.

  Even so, the half-hour dragged, and, when her turn came to bowl, the ball she threw fell wider every time, so that Roger, flushed and self-conscious because their grandfather had come out on to the terrace and was watching them, called angrily, “Do try.”

  Once again the effort at concentration, the figure of their grandfather – a source of apprehension to the boy, for he might criticize them – acting as a spur to his sister. Grandpapa was an Indian god, and tribute must be paid to him, a golden apple. The apple must be flung to slay his enemies. Deborah muttered a prayer, and the ball she bowled came fast and true and hit Roger’s off-stump. In the moment of delivery their grandfather had turned away and pottered back again through the French windows of the drawing-room.

  Roger looked round swiftly. His disgrace had not been seen. “Jolly good ball,” he said. “It’s your turn to bat again.”

  But his time was up. The stable clock chimed six. Solemnly Roger drew stumps.

  “What shall we do now?” he asked.

  Deborah wanted to be alone, but if she said so, on this first evening of the holiday, he would be offended.

  “Go to the orchard and see how the apples are coming on,” she suggested, “and then round by the kitchen garden in case the raspberries haven’t all been picked. But you have to do it all without meeting anyone. If you see Willis or anyone, even the cat, you lose a mark.”

  It was these sudden inventions that saved her. She knew her brother would be stimulated at the thought of outwitting the gardener. The aimless wander round the orchard would turn into a stalking exercise.

  “Will you come too?” he asked.