Aunt Maria

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “I’ll be fine. I shall do some gardening while she has her meeting,” Mum said.

  We went out into the street. “She’s martyring herself,” I said. “I wish she wouldn’t.”

  Chris said, “She needs to work off her guilt about Dad. Let her be, Mig.” He smiled in his normal understanding way. He seemed to go back to his old self as soon as we were in the street. “Shall I tell you something I noticed about this street yesterday? See that house opposite?”

  He pointed, and I said, “Yes,” and looked. And the lace curtains in the front window of the house twitched as somebody hastily got back from them. Otherwise it was a little cream-colored house as gloomy as the rest of the street, with a large twelve on its front door.

  “Number twelve,” said Chris as we walked on up the street. “The only house in this street with a number, Mig, apart from twenty-two down the other end on the same side. That means odd numbers on Aunt Maria’s side, doesn’t it? And that makes Aunt Maria’s house number thirteen whichever way you count the houses.”

  Chris is always thinking about numbers, normally. This proved he was back to normal. I said it would be number thirteen, and we laughed as we walked down to the seafront. It was very windy and quite deserted there, but very respectable somehow. Chris shouted that even the concrete sheds were tasteful. They were. We went past the kiddies’ bathing pool and the tame little place with swings, and along the front. The tide was in. Waves came spouting up against the seawall, gray and violent, sending water bashing across the path. Our feet got wet and the noise was so huge that we talked in shouts and licked salt off our mouths afterward. There was only one other person out that we saw, the whole length of the bay, and he was right at the beginning—an elderly gent huddled in a tweed coat, who tried to raise his tweed hat politely to us; but he only put a hand to it, in case it got blown away.

  “Morning!” we shouted. He shouted, “Afternoon!” Very correct. It was after midday. Only I always think afternoon begins when you’ve had lunch, and we hadn’t yet.

  When we were near the pier, I shouted to Chris, “The ghost in your room—is it a he or a she?” It was a bad place to ask important things. The sea was crashing and sucking round the iron girders, and the buildings on the pier kept cutting the wind off, so that we were in a nest of quiet one moment, all warm with our ears ringing, and then out again into icy noise.

  “A man!” yelled Chris. “And it’s not Dad,” he said, as we went into a nest of quiet. “I saw you thinking it might be and it’s not. It’s ever such a strange-looking fellow, like a cross between a court jester and a parrot.”

  The wind howled and I didn’t hear straight. “A pirate?” I shouted.

  “Parrot!” Chris screamed. And I think what he shouted after that was “Pretty Polly! Long John Silver! I am the ghost of Able Mable! Parrot cage on table!”

  Shouting in the wind makes you shout silly things anyway, and I think Chris was shouting in order not to be scared. Anyway, I got in a real muddle and I thought he was trying to tell me the ghost’s name. “Neighbor?” I yelled. “John?”

  “What do you mean, Neighbor John?” howled Chris.

  “The ghost’s name. Is it Neighbor John?” I screeched.

  By the time we got into a pocket of quiet again and sorted out what we both thought we were saying, we were in fits of laughter and Neighbor John seemed a good name for the ghost. So we call him that now. I keep thinking of Chris seeing a large red pirate parrot, and then I remember he said, “court jester,” too, so I correct the red parrot into one of those white ones with a yellow crest that are really cockatoos. I think their crests look like jester’s caps, and ghosts should be white. But I just can’t imagine a man looking like that. Chris told me more about the ghost at intervals all through the day. I think he was glad to have someone to tell. But I know there were things he didn’t tell, and I keep wondering why, and what they were.

  He said he woke up suddenly the first night, thinking he’d forgotten to blow out the candle. But then he realized it was light coming in from a streetlight somewhere. He could see a man outlined against the window, bent over with his back to Chris. The man seemed to be hunting for something in one of the bookcases.

  “So I called out to him,” said Chris.

  “Weren’t you scared?” I said. My heart seemed to be beating in my throat at just the idea. “Yes, but I thought he was a burglar then,” Chris said. “I sat up and thought about people getting killed for surprising burglars and decided I’d pretend I was sleeping with a gun under my pillow. So I said, ‘Put your hands up and turn round.’ And he whirled round and stared at me. He looked absolutely astonished—as if he hadn’t realized there was anyone else there—and we sort of stared at each other for a while. By that time I knew he wasn’t a burglar, somehow. He had the wrong look on his face. I mean, I know he was odd-looking, but it wasn’t a burglar look. I even almost knew he had lost something that belonged to him and he was looking for it because he thought it was in that room. So I said, ‘What have you lost?’ and he didn’t answer. There was a look on his face as if he was going to speak, but he didn’t.”

  Chris said he still didn’t realize the man was a ghost, even then. At first he said he only realized next morning when he snapped at me there was a ghost in his room. Then he said, no, he must have known the moment the man turned round. The room was full of an odd feeling, he said. Then he corrected himself again. I think ghosts must be muddling things to meet. He said he began to be puzzled when he noticed the man was wearing a peculiar dark green robe, all torn and covered with mud.

  By the time Chris had told me that far, we had got right along the seafront, past all the little boats pulled up on a concrete slope, almost to Cranbury Head. We looked up the great tall pinkish cliff. It looked almost like a house, because creepers grow up it. We could just see the gap in the creepers and a glimpse of the new fence. And we both went very matter-of-fact, somehow.

  Chris said, “You can see some of the rocks at the bottom, even with the tide in.”

  “Yes, but it was at night,” I said. “They didn’t see the car till morning.”

  Then Chris wondered how they got the car cleared away. He thought they winched it up the cliffs. I said it was easier to put it on a raft and float it to the concrete slope. “Or drag it round the sands at low tide,” Chris agreed. “Poor old car.”

  We turned and went back through the town then. I kept thinking of the car. I know it so well. It was our family car until six months ago, when Dad took a lady called Verena Bland to France in it and phoned to say he wasn’t coming back. I wondered if the car still had the messy place on the backseat where I knelt on an egg while I was fighting with Chris. Does seawater wash out egg? And I remembered again that I’d left the story I was writing in that hiding hole under the dashboard. All washed out with seawater. I hated to think of that car smelling of sea and rust. It used to have a smell of its own. Dad once got into the wrong car by accident and knew it was wrong by the smell. Chris didn’t get on with Dad. I did, a lot of the time, unless Dad was in a really foul mood.

  “When did you know it was a ghost then?” I said.

  “Right at the end, I suppose,” Chris said. “He didn’t speak, but he gave a great mischievous sort of smile. And while I was wondering what was so funny, I realized I could see books in the shelf through him and he was sort of fading out.”

  That makes four different versions, I thought. “Weren’t you frightened?”

  “Not so much as I expected,” Chris said. “I quite liked him.”

  “And has he come every night?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Chris. “I keep asking him what he wants, and he always seems to be just going to tell me, but he never does.”

  It was windy among the houses, too, cream houses, pink houses, tall gray houses with boards saying bed and breakfast creaking in the wind, and sand racing across the roads like running water. The place had been deserted up to then, but after that we kept meeting Mrs.
Urs. We saw Benita Wallins first, puffily shaking a rug out of the front door of a B-and-B house. She shouted, “Hello, dears.” Then there was Corinne West, coming round a corner with a shopping basket, Selma Tidmarsh in the next street with a scarf over her head, and Ann Haversham walking a dog round the corner from that. It was, “Hello, how are you? Is your aunt well?” each time.

  “Aunt Maria will be able to plot our course exactly at this rate,” I said. “Or Elaine will. How many more of them?”

  “Nine,” said Chris. “She talks about thirteen Mrs. Urs. I read a book and counted while she was talking yesterday.”

  “Only if you count Miss Phelps and Lavinia, too,” I said. “What did Miss Phelps say to upset her? Did she tell you?”

  “No. Unless it was, ‘Stop that boring yakking,’” Chris said. “Let’s get on a bus and get out of this place.”

  But the buses don’t start until next month. We went to the railway station and asked. A porter in big rubber boots told us it was out of season, but we could get a train to Aytham Junction, and it turned out that we hadn’t got enough money for that. So we walked out along the path that started by the station car park, through brown plowed fields to the woods.

  “I think it was the day after that I noticed mud on his robes,” Chris said, looking at the plowed earth. He kept talking about the ghost like that, in snatches. “And the light seems to come with him. I experimented. I went to bed without a candle last night and I could hardly see to find the bed.”

  “Do you wake up each time?” I said.

  “The first two nights. Last night I stayed awake to see if I could catch him appearing.” Chris yawned. “I heard the clock strike three and then I must have dropped off. He was just there suddenly, and I heard four strike around the time he faded out.”

  We had lunch in the woods. They were good, lots of little trees all bent the same way by the sea wind. Their trunks grow in twists from all the bending they get. It gives the wood a goblin sort of look, but as soon as you are among the goblin trees you can’t see any open land outside. We nearly got lost later because of that.

  “But what’s the ghost looking for?” I said. I know that was during lunch because I could hear the twisted trees creaking while I said it, and I remember dead leaves under my knees, clean and cold as an animal’s nose.

  “I’d love to know,” Chris said. “I’ve looked all along the books in that wall. I took them out and looked behind them, in case the ghost hadn’t the strength to move them, but it’s just wall behind them.”

  “Perhaps it’s a book?” I suggested. “Are any of them A History of Hauntings, or maybe Dead Men of Cranbury to give you a clue who he is?”

  “No way!” said Chris. “The Works of Balzac, The Works of Scott, Ruskin’s Writings, and Collected Works of Joseph Conrad.” He thought a bit and the trees creaked a bit, and then he said, “I think the ghost brings rather awful dreams, but I can’t remember what they are.”

  “How can you like him then?” I cried out, shuddering.

  “Because the dreams are not his fault,” Chris said. “You’d know if you saw him. You’d be sorry for him. You’re the soft-hearted one, not me.”

  I do feel quite sorry for the ghost, anyway, not being able to lie quiet because he’d lost something and having to get up out of his grave every night to hunt for it. I wondered how long he’d been doing it. I asked Chris if he could tell from the ghost’s clothes how long ago he died, but Chris said he never saw them clearly enough.

  The creaking of the trees was making me shudder by then. I couldn’t finish my lunch—Mum always gives you far too much, anyway. Chris said he was blowed if he was going to cart a bag full of half-eaten pork pie about and I hate carrying bags. So Chris put some of the cake in his pocket for later and we pushed the bag under the twisted roots of the nearest tree. Litter fiends, we are. The wood was wonderfully clear and airy, with a fresh mossy smell to it. It made it seem cleaner still that there were no leaves on the bent branches—barely even buds. We both felt ashamed of leaving the bag and made jokes about it. Chris said a passing badger would be grateful for the pork pie.

  It was after that that we got lost. The wood went steeply up and steeply down. We never saw the fields, or even the sea, and we didn’t know where we were until I realized that the wind always comes in from the sea. So in order to find Cranbury again we had to face into the wind. We might have been wandering all night if we hadn’t done that. I said it was a witch-wood and trying to keep us forever. Chris said, “Don’t be silly!” But I think he was quite scared, too: it was all so empty and so twisted. Anyway, I think what we must have done was to go right up the valley behind Cranbury and then along the hill on the other side. When we finally came steeply down and saw Cranbury below us, we were right on the opposite hill from Cranbury Head, and Cranbury was looking like half-circles of dollhouses arranged round a gray misty nothing that was the sea.

  I thought it looked quite pretty from there. Chris said, “How on earth did we cross the railway? It comes right through the valley.”

  I don’t know how we did, but we had. We could see the railway below us, too. The last big house in Cranbury was half hidden by the hill we were on, quite near the railway. We took it as a landmark and went down straight toward it. By this time it was just beginning to be evening, not dark yet, but sort of quietly dimming so that everything was pale and chilly. I kept telling myself this was why everything felt so strange. There was a steep field first of very wet grass. The wind had dropped. The big house was all among trees, but we thought there must be a road beyond it, so we climbed a sort of mound thing at the bottom of the field to see where the road was. The mound was all grown over with whippy little bushes that were budding big pale buds and there were little trampled paths leading in and out all over. I remember thinking that it looked a good place to play in. Children obviously played here. Then we got to the top of the hill and we could see the children.

  They were in the garden of the big house. It was a boring red brick house that looked as if it might be a school. The garden, which we could look down into across a wall, was a boring school-type garden, too, just grass and round beds with evergreens in them. The children were all playing in it, very quietly and sedately. It was unnatural. I mean, how can forty kids make almost no noise at all? The ones who were playing never shouted once. Most of them were just walking about, in rows of four or five. If they were girls, they walked arm in arm. The boys just strolled in a line. And they all looked alike. They weren’t alike. All the girls had different little plaid dresses on, and all the boys had different colored sweaters. Some had fair hair, some brown hair, and four or five of the kids were black. Their faces weren’t the same. But they were, if you see what I mean. They all moved the same way and had the same expressions on their different faces. We stared. We were both amazed.

  “They’re clones,” said Chris. “They have to be.”

  “But wouldn’t clones be like twins?” I said.

  “They’re part of a secret experiment to make clones look different,” Chris said. “They’ve managed to make their bodies not look alike, but their minds are still the same. You can see they are.”

  It was one of those jokes you almost mean. I wished Chris hadn’t said it. I didn’t think the children would hear me from where we were, but a man came up beside me from the bushes while Chris was talking, and I knew the man could hear. Luckily at that moment, a lady dressed a bit like a nurse came out into the garden.

  “Come along, children,” she called. “It’s getting cold and dark. Inside, all of you.”

  The lady was one of the Mrs. Urs. As the children all obediently walked toward her, I remembered she was Phyllis Forbes. I was going to tell Chris, but I looked at the man first because it was embarrassing with him standing there. He seemed to have gone. So I looked at Chris to tell him, and Chris’s face was a white staring blur, gazing at me.

  “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” I said.

  “I have,�
�� he said. “The ghost from my room. He was standing right beside you a second ago.”

  I ran then. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I went tearing my way through the bushes all across and down the little hill and then out into a field of some kind and then into another field after that. I remember a wire fence twanging and a hedge which scraped me all over, and a huge black and white beast suddenly looming at me out of the twilight. It was a cow, I think. I did a mad sideways swerve round it and ran on. I wanted to scream, but I was so frightened that all I could make was a little whimpering sound. After a while I could hear Chris pelting after me, calling out, “Cool it, Mig! Wait! He’s not frightening at all, really!” I wanted to shout back “Then why did you look so scared?” but I could still only make that stupid mewing noise. “Hm-hm-hm!” I said to Chris, and rushed on. I don’t know where all I went, with Chris rushing after me telling me to stop. It was getting darker all the time. But I think some of where I ran must have been the vegetable plots along the back of Cranbury, because it was all cold and cloggy and I kept treading on big clammy plants that went crunch and gave out a fierce smell of cabbage. My feet got heavier and heavier like they do in nightmares. I could see town lights twinkling to one side and orange streetlight shining steadily ahead, and I raced for the orange light with my huge heavy feet, and my chest hurt and I kept going, “Hm-hm-hm!” until Chris caught me up and I suddenly ran out of breath.

  “Honestly!” he said. He was disgusted.

  We were beside an iron fence just outside the station car park, with dew hanging off it and glittering on all the cars in the orange light. A train was just coming rattling into the station. I had a stitch in my side and I could hardly breathe. I lifted first one foot then the other into the light. They were both giant-sized with earth and smelled of cabbage. We looked at them and we laughed. Chris leaned on the fence and squealed with laughter. I hiccuped and panted and my eyes watered.

  “It wasn’t really the ghost,” I said when I could speak. “Was it?”