Haunted

by Alma Alexander

  He held my wrap while I shrugged into it, as a true gentleman would, and kept an arm around my shoulders as we went down to the car. I pulled away slowly from the parking spot and then out into the empty street.

  We drove in a cocoon of companionable silence all the way to my flat. As I stopped the car and took the key out of the ignition, Wally sighed and withdrew his hand. I saw with the keys in my lap, staring at them.

  One of those cool, alabaster hands came up to tilt my chin gently, so that I was forced to look at him. The blue eyes were serious and sad.

  “I told you that tonight, I am as human as I ever was,” he whispered. “But only for tonight. Ah, Alex, dear Alex, it’s many years too late for us. I will be back into shadows and darkness before long, but you are still of the real world…

  “I’d have to leave you in the morning more finally than anyone ever left before and it’s better, much better, that I leave you tonight, before things happen that will leave us both even more deeply unhappy the next day.”

  He leaned over and brushed my lips with his and even the kiss was cool, like the touch of a snowflake.

  “Good night, my love,” he said. “Goodbye.”

  And then there was only the empty seat where he had been sitting the instant before.

  I packed and sent off the cigarette case the next morning. Wally’s words had been a farewell – I would not see him again – and although I did wish to keep the cigarette case to remember him by, I sent it.

  For a myriad of different reasons I sent it. One was that only this was would he find true rest; another, that I needed to memento to call to mind Wally’s blue eyes and that lock of fair hair. That was burned in me for ever.

  Wally had given me the address; I suppose I should have checked to see if it was still correct, but I could not bear to have the delay while, via the cigarette case, Wally was so close and yet so far from me.

  I wrote a small explanatory note, which I hoped didn’t sound too ludicrous, and posted off the small parcel with Wally’s spirit, trying to put it from my mind. The fact that I did not quite succeed is neither here nor there.

  However, I had not been thinking of Wally when I went to answer my doorbell some six months later, and opened the door to find Walter Charles Hawke standing there. A Walter Hawke too disturbingly solid to be the dear ghost I had recalled.

  I think I would have passed out if my visitor hadn’t reached over to steady me.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” he said, and even the voice, the words used… “I didn’t mean to startle you. I knew I should have phoned.”

  I got my voice back. “Who are you?” I whispered.

  “I’m Ben Hawke,” said the apparition. “I’m Walter Hawke’s great nephew. And you, from the way you reacted, must be Alex. Great-uncle Wally sent me here, so to speak.”

  “How…? Where did you…?” I swallowed and straightened. “You’d better come in.”

  He did. Then my heart, back in its natural place, gave a queer tug and showed every sign of bolting again. For, almost like an after-image, Wally Hawke stood in the doorway that Ben had vacated. He was very dim and distant, but I knew the smile in those eyes.

  Before he faded away completely Wally gave me a slow, casual salute and finished by blowing me a kiss. It landed, even if only in my imagination, like a long-remembered snowflake.

  And as I looked away from the door towards the real, live Hawke in my living-room, smiling such a Wally smile, the words and the promise of an Old World War II song woke a memory in my mind, something that Wally had sung at our last dance, something that he, against all odds, had meant.

  He did know we’d meet again one sunny day.

  I wrote this one after my one and only trip to Scotland – and yes, I DID go to Skye, and I found it beautiful. And haunting. And I honestly didn’t mean to people it with ghost children until this story came tumbling out some months after I had returned home and all those Skye memories had a chance to gel and re-form and come together in the shape of the sweet little ghost presence which haunts this romantic tale – originally published in a Cape Town magazine called “You” – oh, too many years ago now. But it still has a scent and a sound of Skye and Scotland for me, an amazing haunting feat for something that happened so long ago. So come walk the shores of Skye with me – with me, and with the ghost I brought home with me…

  Skye Child

  He seemed to have the most peculiar ability to slip behind his shadow. Marian saw the urchin hanging precariously over the cliff edge, laughing, reaching for something just underneath – even as she started forward to pull him away by the seat of his pants, she became aware that she could not hear that laughter. And in the time it took her to blink, he was gone.

  She first saw him two days after she and Jamie had arrived on Skye. That had been on the cliff, just next to where the waterfall plunged off Kilt Rock in Trotternish.

  The next time the ghost-boy had been playing hide and seek around the monument on the grave of Flora MacDonald, and that time Marian had gasped and pointed, but Jamie had just stared.

  “What child? Where?” he asked somewhat impatiently. It had not been a good topic to raise. The subject of children hung between them like a sword. There would be none, not if Jamie had anything to do with it. Not after Charlie.

  But the urchin had gone again by the time Marian looked back. And she didn’t insist. His toussled dark curls and laughing peat-water colored eyes etched themselves into her memory, though, and it was as if recognising an old friend that she encountered him again, on their way down into Portree from the northernmost fringes of Trotternish along the road skirting Uig Bay and Loch Snizort.

  He waved at her once from the roadside as they drove past in their rented red VW Golf; Jamie picked that moment to perform one of the grinding gear changes for which the car was rapidly acquiring a reputation, and Marian was distracted – the eyeblink was all it took. The child had cloaked himself in his shadow again. He was gone.

  Jamie was bad-tempered with everything. He almost resented Marian’s obvious enjoyment of the landscape and the late summer sunshine which was a bonus, gliding the spreading, shimmering waters of the Inner Sound and Loch Ainort as they had driven up the coast on their way to Flodigarry.

  “It’s only because you haven’t seen this place with horizontal rain which doesn’t stop for the Lord’s forty days and nights,” Jamie muttered darkly as his wife begged him to stop the car in an impossible place yet again to that she could drink in the beauty of the sea which divided Skye from the mainland.

  “You’re a Sassenach anyway; what’s with you? You’re behaving like Bonnie Prince Charlie is on the threshold of returning, and you the last of the faithful Highlanders waiting to welcome him home.” He snorted. “You’re all the same, you romantic Englishwomen. You fall for the Highlands and conveniently forget that you English destroyed it, for what it was worth.”

  “Oh, stop it,” snapped Marian, annoyed. “You fawned over Devon and Cornwall. Did I say a word?”

  They squabbled over the silliest things of late. Jamie’s first wife Morag and their son Charlie – named after Morag’s father and not after the Bonnie Prince – regularly look a sizeable chunk of Jamie’s monthly income; even with Marian’s salary, things were tight in the MacDonald household, and money always talked.

  Charles MacDonald was an obnoxious little brat of seven, spoiled by his mother beyond exasperation, but it was only of late that Jamie was waking up to the fact that he had lost his son to his embittered wife.

  It was enough to sour him, enough to declare, halfway through the first year of his second marriage, that he wanted to children at all. Marian had been almost forcefed the Pill.

  Not only that, but it seemed that the entire episode of his marriage had turned Jamie anti-Scotland as a whole.

  Marian had begun to suspect not long after her wedding that part of her desirability as a bride was the fact that she hailed from good English yeoman stock form the deep South of England, p
eople who had nothing to do with Scotland for generations.

  She had wanted to come see the island where her husband had been born, but Jamie had steered her to a honeymoon in Italy and if they travelled anywhere in the months that followed it was always south, south into the sun and the Mediterranean. If it hadn’t been for old Duncan MacDonald they would never had come back.

  Jamie’s father was 89, and fading. He had known better than to order his only son to his side so that he could see him once more before he died. Duncan had humbled himself, and pleaded. And Jamie had ranted and raged, but he had come. Marian thought she would be awkward with the old man whom she had never met and to whose deathbed, in effect, she had come.

  But by the time she had reached Duncan’s house she had already been bitten by Skye. It was this that bridged the gap between them, for this love was something thse two strangers shared.

  “Take her up tae Flodigarry,” Duncan had said, sitting bravely up in his armchair, wrapped in a tartan rug. He had been grey in the face when Marian and Jamie had arrived at the house, but the love of Skye had put some of the colour back into his cheeks and his eyes shone with the brightness of excitement, not fever. Even to Marian’s professional eye he looked almost recovered.

  “We came to see you,” said Jamie.

  “Dinna fash yersel w’ a’ auld man,” said Duncan firmly. “I’ll be here when ye coom back.”

  Jamie had acquiesced in the end, but with an ill grace; it said much for Marian’s capability of enjoying herself, and the power of the old man’s blessing on the trip, that she got anything out of it at all. It had been a magical few days. But now they were heading back to Portree, and Duncan. Returning to give back his gift of freedom.

  Mrs MacKinnon, who kept a neighbourly eye on Duncan, was opening the door of his house almost before Jamie had turned off the ignition of the Golf.

  “I think he’s deid,” she greeted Jamie, twisting her fingers. “I spiered him twae times if she was all right, but he’s been gey quiet the last hour or so. He didnae even want his dram when I coom tae gie it him. I cannee see him breathin’.”

  Marian always lost half of these exchanges, because even the bits that were cohered English lost every ounce of their Englishness in the mouths of the older islanders, who appeared to be speaking what they called English only under duress. Certainly these two, Mrs MacKinnon and Jamie’s father, had never used the language amongst themselves; Gaelic was the order of the day.

  Whatever, the import of Mrs MacKinnon’s words appeared to be painfully obvious this time. Marian slammed the Golf’s door behind her and strode over the house, her trainers softly slapping the pavement.

  “Let me in,” she said quickly, “I’m a nurse. Let me see.”

  Mrs MacKinnon stepped back reluctantly, and Marian ran up the stairs into Duncan’s bedroom. He wasn’t dead, but only just not; his breathing was shallow and irregular, his eyes closed, his eyelids flickering only slightly when Marian called his name.

  She took his frail old hand into hers, and it was cold, the wrist blue with the tangled veins of old age. Watching him drift slowly away, with his limp, winkled hand cradled in her own, Marian’s eyes filled with tears. She had only known him for a week, and that was the first time he had laid eyes on his son for almost five years, and yet he had selflessly send them away from a vigil for the dying to a vision of beauty when he saw how much she loved his island.

  He had seemed so much better when they had first come, weak, but spunky, his cheeks flushed with what Marian only now recognised as nothing more than happiness. “If I had known…” Marian whispered guiltily, rubbing his hand with gentle fingers. “I wouldn’t have gone, Duncan, I wouldn’t have taken him. He came because you begged him, because you needed him. And I took him away…”

  “Marian?”

  “He’s going, Jamie. Come here, hold his hand. I’m sure he knows you’re here.”

  Jamie’s eyes were wide and oddly defenceless. He came in slowly; it was almost with reluctance that he took his father’s hand. Marian relinquished it, wiping her eyes with the back of her own, and turned away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m leaving you a bit of time, Jamie. It’s you and him now. It isn’t me he begged to come to him.”

  “But where are you going?” Jamie repeated, almost straining to follow her, with something very like fear in his eyes.

  “I’ll be close,” she said. “Talk to him, for God’s sake, Jamie. I don’t know if he can hear you, but it’s the last chance you’ll get!”

  She walked out, only half-closing the door behind her. Mrs MacKinnon was clattering with something in the kitchen. The parlour was empty and quiet; Marian entered it, crossing creaking floorboards to the window where she stood looking out. It was still light outside, although it was past eight already. She wondered how it was possible for her to miss so much an old man she had hardly known at all.

  “Will ye have a coop o’tea, then?” said Mrs MacKinnon at her elbow suddenly, startling her. The older woman’s hair was coming out in straggles, and her hands were still uneasily lacing her fingers in and out of one another.

  She was unsettled, and far from a calming presence. Besides, she spoke what was only nominally English and really an acutely foreign language. Marian didn’t feel up to deciphering Scotticisms at that moment.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m going out for a breath of air. Will you tell my… will you tell Jamie I’ll be right back? I’ll just walk to the harbour and back.”

  Not waiting for a reply, she turned and almost ran out of the house and into the street. A young woman passing by gave her a sort of half smile; Marian nodded back. Everyone acted as though they had known you all their lives up here. Perfect strangers greeted you heartily in the street; people struck up conversations in pubs with wide and open-hearted friendliness that was none the less pleasing because it was usually more or less completely incomprehensible to Marian.

  But there was nobody else around at this time, the street echoingly empty of people, and Marian struck out alone towards the little fishing harbour of Portree.

  That’s when she saw him again, her little boy. He ducked behind a corner, and then peered back at her mischievously as though he wanted her to follow him. As he was going in her direction, she did. He seemed to appreciate this. He vanished, but reappeared again in a different shadow a moment later, smiled, and was gone. Marian quickened her step, and swiftly rounded the last corner.

  The fishing boats bobbed quietly in the mirror-still harbour, their reflections seemed to them so flawless that they almost looked painted on the ocean. A few gulls hovered in church-like silence in the pale amethyst sky of the long summer twilight, and one paced the narrow beach, across which ropes stretched taut from the motionless boats to the wall which rose at the back of the water-lapped half-moon of pebbly shoreline, with great deliberation, as though he were seeking buried treasure. A pale cream cat startled at Marian’s approach and sloped off into the purplish shadows of a narrow lane between houses.

  On the prow of the closest boat her little boy say, feet dangling over the side. As if aware of her stare, he raised his eyes and laughed, stretching his arms out towards her, almost begging to be picked up and hugged.

  There was something achingly familiar about him, something that constricted Marian’s heart with the nameless pain of it; and then suddenly had it. The eyes. The eyes were old Duncan’s eyes, grown young again. Jamie’s eyes.

  The little boy was not reflected in the still water – there was too much of shadow in him to cast one. That was why she didn’t expect to see him mirrored in the ocean when he suddenly leapt off the ship and skipped, across the top of the water, towards her, his arms still outstretched.

  Marian stood still, transfixed, her arms going out to meet him even without her knowledge or her command. As their hands touched he was gone, vanished into the evening, a curious warmth spreading in her body from somewhere deep in her belly.

>   In the same instant she left another hand, heavy, very much of his world, descend on her shoulder. She whirled with a little cry and stared up into Jamie’s face.

  “He’s gone,” Jamie said quietly.

  Marian hugged him wordlessly and they stood there as the breeze picked at their clothes with impatient fingers.

  “He said…” Jamie’s words seemed to trail away into the silence of the evening.

  “He said?” she prompted after a moment.

  “Yes. He blessed me. Us. And also his grandson. And – this is the strangeness of it – he did not mean Charlie. I know it.”

  Marian suddenly smiled against Jamie’s blue anorak, understanding all too well. That warmth in her belly, waiting only for the seed to make it grow. The child had followed her across Skye, old Duncan’s spirit, his true grandchild, himself.

  Marian turned herself in Jamie’s arms, moulding her back into his body, taking his arms and curling them around her, crossed at her belly. She looked up at the sky where the stars were beginning to wink on, and smiled, entirely at peace.

  “We’ll call him Duncan,” she said softly, the decision made, firm. “He’s going to have Duncan’s eyes.”

  And now for another treat – an unpublished one, never before seen by anyone’s eyes. Romantic ghosts haunted my literary output for some time, it would seem – because as best I recall this story was written some time after the previous two. But by this stage I’d quit writing for the ladies’ magazine romance market as such, and anyway this one was just a little darker, just a little more ‘literary’, than anything before it had been. I love it dearly, for the characters who crowd its pages, but it was a difficult story to find a market for, especially for the young and inexperienced writer that I was, and so after a while I left it to haunt nothing more public than my own collection. I present, for your reading pleasure, the debut of…