Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  Three-quarters of the way down the track, she thought she heard another sound – the sound of somebody singing. She stopped and listened, but all she could hear was the wind in the branches and the crackling of dead leaves. She turned back and looked towards the house. It looked very large and dilapidated from here, almost abandoned. She thought of the photograph album with all of those images of the Peggy-girl in it, and she thought for a chilling split second that she could see the Peggy-girl standing beside the front of the house, but then she realized that it was nothing but the white-painted garage door, framed into a shifting, irregular shape by the leafless bushes that grew beside it.

  She carried on walking – through the gate and past the pigsties. The Patricks didn’t keep pigs any longer, but they still smelled of pig. She went up the steps of the front verandah and pressed the doorbell.

  While she waited, she listened to the night. She could hear a train rattling very far away; and the sound of branches creaking. She was sure she could hear someone singing, someone very high and clear. At first she thought it was the Patricks’ television, but it had such clarity that it didn’t sound like television, and apart from that the words were very strung out, with long silences in between, as if somebody was walking and singing at the same time, and sometimes forgetting to sing.

  She almost caught it, but then the front door opened, and the screen door squeaked. It was Dan Philips. Mrs Patrick’s younger brother, who mostly ran the farm these days, him and his wife Bridget. His fiery red hair was mostly grey these days, but he was just as ruddy and bulbous as the rest of the family, and he looked just like Mrs Patrick dressed up as a man.

  ‘Why Lizzie Buchanan, is that you?’

  ‘Hallo, Mr Philips. Has Mrs Patrick gone to bed yet?’

  ‘She’s not here. Seamus had one of his turns about an hour ago, worst one so far. The doctor came and they’ve taken him down across to New Milford, so that they can keep their eye on him.’

  Oh, I’m so sorry. He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?’

  Dan Philips shrugged. ‘We’re all saying our prayers, Lizzie.’

  Elizabeth hesitated for a moment, and then she said, ‘I know this is a terrible imposition, Mr Philips, but do you think you could spare just five minutes to look at something?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I’m supposed to be waiting on the telephone.’

  ‘It won’t even take five minutes, I promise you. It’s something in the garden, back at the house. It’s kind of a phenomenon, and I need a witness.’

  ‘It’s a what?’

  ‘A phenomenon. Something really strange. The trouble is, it’s not going to last, and I don’t think anybody is going to believe me, unless somebody else takes a look at it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie, I’m not sure. If my sister calls – ’

  ‘It really won’t take a moment, Mr Philips. I promise you.’

  He gave her an odd, questioning look. ‘It wouldn’t be a flying saucer, would it? I was reading about them flying saucers in the paper. Some guy from Wyoming got himself kidnapped.’

  ‘Nothing like that. Please.’

  He thought hard for a moment. Then he said, ‘All right, then. I’ll take the phone off the hook so they’ll know that I’m still here.’

  He went back into the farmhouse and returned a few moments later, shucking on his green raglan overcoat.

  ‘I really appreciate this,’ Elizabeth told him, and meant it.

  They walked up the track together. The wind had died away, but the temperature had dropped dramatically, two or three degrees below freezing, and they found themselves walking unusually quickly, not because they were pushed for time, but to keep themselves warm. Their breath fumed; and all around them they could hear the soft crackling of hoar frost, as it froze the branches and the fallen leaves.

  ‘Snappy night,’ Dan remarked, pushing his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. ‘Never knew it so cold as this, this time of year.’

  Elizabeth said nothing, but hurried on.

  They reached the house, and walked around the darkened conservatory towards the tennis court. The grass was thick with frost now, and they left glittering footprints behind them.

  ‘What is it you want me to see?’ asked Dan, puffing.

  Elizabeth crossed the tennis court. The snow-angel had gone. She looked around everywhere. She stared at the ground to see if there were any trace of shovel marks, or scattered snow. But there was nothing, only the hard sparkling frost. No snow-angel, no beret, no coat, no kilt. No sacking face with poker-burned holes for eyes.

  ‘It was here,’ she said, in frustration.

  ‘Maybe if you tell me what I was, I might be able to help you look for it,’ Dan suggested.

  ‘I don’t think you’d believe me. That was why I wanted you to see it for yourself.’

  ‘Well, if it’s gone, I don’t see that it makes too much difference.’

  Elizabeth peered into the darkness, and gave an involuntary shiver. She felt that there was something concealed in the night, some cold and heartless presence, something that was more than just a white-faced manifestation of her drowned sister. Something that was huge.

  Dan looked at his wristwatch. ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie, I’m going to have to get back.’

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you what it was. It was a figure made of snow.’

  There was a long pause, and then Dan Philips said, ‘We haven’t had any snow.’

  ‘That was why I wanted you to see it.’

  ‘When you say “a figure”?’

  ‘It was a little girl, all made out of snow. She wore a beret and a coat and she had a sack for her face.’

  Dan slowly surveyed the garden, his hands on his hips, sucking in his lips. Then he said, ‘Nope. If it was here before, it surely aint here now.’

  He was just about to turn to go when Elizabeth thought she glimpsed a small white shape on the very far side of the garden, underneath the overhanging trees.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that somebody there?’

  Dan peered at it with his eyes slitted. ‘Could be. You want to take a quick look?’

  They walked down the sloping garden. It was very dark now, and Elizabeth stumbled twice. The second time Dan caught her elbow, and said, ‘Have a care, now. You don’t want to go breaking your ankle. Even a phenomenon aint worth that.’

  They reached the trees; but the small white shape had vanished, if it had really been here at all.

  ‘I’m sorry to have dragged you all the way up here for nothing,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I just hope you don’t think that I’m going out of my mind.’

  ‘Don’t believe that’s for me to say, Lizzie,’ Dan Philips replied.

  He turned to go; but as he turned there was an ear-splitting fusillade of crackling noises from the trees. He said, ‘What the hell?’ and Elizabeth couldn’t stop herself from gasping.

  The crackling went on and on. Right in front of their eyes, branch by branch, twig by twig, the oaks turned frosty white. They looked as if they were being sprayed by a firehose on an icy day, building up fantastic lumps and columns and sparkling stalactites. In fact, the temperature had plummeted so low that they were being coated in frozen moisture out of the air.

  Soon the trees scarcely looked like trees at all, but extraordinary twisted temples, glistening with cold, with gargoyles and balustrades and spires. Whole branches splintered and came lurching off, overburdened with ice. Trunks split in half. And all the time the temperature dropped and dropped and kept on dropping. The lawns all around them were thickly encrusted with frost, and the grass was so intensely frozen that it snapped when they stepped on it.

  ‘What is it?’ Elizabeth screamed. ‘Why is it getting so cold?’

  ‘Don’t ask me!’ Dan shouted back at her. ‘But I think it’s time you and me beat the retreat!’

  They started to run back up the lawn. But they hadn’t gone more than six or seven paces when Elizabeth looked back over her shoulder and
saw the white-faced Peggy-girl standing just in front of the frozen trees. Both of her arms were raised, as if she were hailing them, or calling them to come back. Elizabeth snatched at Dan’s sleeve. Both of them stopped running.

  ‘She’s here,’ said Elizabeth, her voice white with panic.

  ‘That’s no snowman,’ he protested. ‘That’s only a girl.’

  ‘I know it is. But they’re one and the same.’

  ‘One and the same? Lizzie, I’m sure I don’t know what the two-toned tonkert you’re talking about. But I think your best course of what to do next is to put as much distance between you and this house as you possibly can.’

  He started to run again, but Elizabeth didn’t follow him. The Peggy-girl was gliding across the grass towards her, leaving no footprints whatsoever. Her hair was rimed with ice, her dress was stiff as frozen washing, her eyes were horrifyingly dark. Elizabeth took one half-staggering step away from her, but she couldn’t make her legs work properly. All she could do was stare back at this apparition and pray that it wouldn’t touch her.

  The Peggy-girl came close, almost close enough to touch. ‘You remember the night you made the snow-angel?’ she said, although her lips didn’t appear to be moving.

  ‘I remember,’ said Elizabeth, still aghast.

  ‘That was the night you kept me here for ever.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You’ll have to tell me what you want. I can’t help you if I don’t know what you want.’

  ‘You can’t help .me anyway,’ said the Peggy-girl. Elizabeth could scarcely hear her over the crackling and snapping of the trees. They sounded like a rifle-range.

  Dan stopped halfway back to the tennis court. ‘Lizzie! Who is that, Lizzie? Come on, honey, I think it’s best if I get back to Green Pond, and you get back in the house.’

  Elizabeth ignored him. She didn’t want to turn her back on the Peggy-girl. She had the strongest feeling that if she did, the Peggy-girl would jump onto her back and cling oh tight and freeze her to death. She didn’t want to die the same way that the Reverend Bracewaite had died.

  ‘Come on, Lizzie!’ Dan shouted.

  But Elizabeth gave him nothing but a quick backhand wave, indicating that he should wait for a moment. ‘I have to know what you’re doing,’ she said to the Peggy-girl. ‘Why are you following me? Why are you here?’

  ‘Don’t you want me to be here?’

  ‘Of course I do. But I have to face up to the fact that Peggy’s dead. That you’re dead. I’ve grieved, I’ve done my grieving, I’ve come to terms with it. And now you’re here; and everwhere else.’

  ‘I’m here to protect you.’

  ‘I don’t need your protection. I don’t want your protection.’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’ said the Peggy-girl. ‘You don’t know what you did.’

  ‘Lizzie!’ Dan repeated. ‘I really gotta go!’

  He came jogging back down the slope. His face was red but his eyelashes were white with frost, and there were icicles hanging from his cap.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

  Elizabeth said, without taking her eyes off her. ‘I call her Peggy.’

  Dan looked uncomfortable, but then he took hold of Elizabeth’s arm, and tried to pull her away. ‘Come on Lizzie, I don’t know what’s happening here, but you’d be better off out of it.’

  The Peggy-girl turned to stare at him with those smudgy eyes of her. ‘You mustn’t touch her,’ she warned him.

  ‘And who’s going to stop me, missy?’

  The Peggy-girl looked back at Elizabeth. ‘You don’t know what you did,’ she whispered, almost hissed it.

  At that instant, the oaks splintered even more loudly. Dan lifted his head, and frowned, his hand still clutching Elizabeth’s wrist. ‘Something coming,’ he said, in the softest of voices. ‘Something very big.’

  ‘Yes, said the Peggy-girl, and her dead-white lips slowly pursed into a humourless, self-satisfied smirk. ‘Something very big.’

  Even Elizabeth could hear it now: the steady crunching of footsteps through the frozen forest. It could have been a man, or a large predatory animal. Whatever it was, it was approaching them fast, very fast, and its progress through the trees was frighteningly noisy. It was breaking all the ice-petrified branches that stood in its way. Even saplings were cracking in half, and silver birches, and as it neared the treeline Elizabeth could see the branches shaking, and undergrowth exploding in bursts of ice.

  ‘For God’s sake what is it?’ whispered Dan.

  But the second it burst out of the trees, a screaming wind started up, with such abruptness that Elizabeth thought at first that it was Dan who had screamed. The whole garden was instantly filled with thick, driving snow, thick whirling flakes of it, and Elizabeth had to raise her hand to protect her face. She saw the Peggy-girl’s face for a few moments, with her smudgy eyes and her mean little smile, and then the blizzard whited her out completely. White face, white dress – both were obliterated in seconds by a furious curtain of white.

  Dan pulled violently at Elizabeth’s sleeve and shouted, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’

  She resisted for a moment, trying to see where the Peggy-girl might have gone. She was desperate to find out what it was that the Peggy-girl wanted, why she kept on appearing so persistently.

  But then a vast black shape appeared through the snow – so black that it was only visible because of the way in which the snowflakes flew around it. It was black as velvet, black as a casket with the lid closed. Night black: eye-shut black. And it was huge. It towered over them, fourteen or fifteen feet tall, shaped like a woman in a hooded cape, but a cape which was hunched up at the back.

  Dan stood staring at it for a moment, his mouth open, his eyes blinking against the blizzard. The shape came closer and closer, and the only sound it made was the felted squeaking of feet on thick snow. The shape brought with it an aura of even more intense cold. Elizabeth saw Dan’s eyebrows spangle with ice. His breath turned to dry crystals, and blew out of his nostrils like Christmas glitter. She felt her own hair crackle, and her forehead felt as if she had been pressing it against a cold metal door.

  Dan released his grip on her sleeve and started, heavily, to run. Elizabeth tried to run, too, in the opposite direction, but almost at once she caught her foot on the bricks that edged the pathway, and fell onto her knees. She turned around. It was too cold to cry out. Every breath that dropped into her lungs was agony. She saw Dan stumbling back uphill through the knee-deep drifts, and close behind him, the huge black hunched-up shape. Dan didn’t turn around. He kept on stumbling through the snow, his head bent in concentration, his arms stiffly swinging to give him balance. He had almost reached the steps that led around the side of the house, but the shape was very close behind him – so close that it momentarily blocked out Elizabeth’s view of him.

  She couldn’t think what it was. Bears could grow as big as this; but bears hadn’t been seen in these woods for over a hundred years; and what bear brought its own blizzard with it? It was more like some grotesque kind of pantomime-horse; or the shadow of a pantomime-horse, black as the fabric of the night.

  Dan Patrick managed to reach the foot of the steps; but here he stopped. The temperature around him was so low that the bricks in the steps split with a sound like pistol shots, and the rose bushes splintered into shards of desiccated twig. Dan managed to lift one arm. His hand was as white as a statue’s hand, and just as rigid. Right in front of his eyes, his fingers cracked off, and dropped into the snow. Then his whole palm split apart, skin and blood and bone all frozen into lumps of human salts. He didn’t cry out. His lungs were frozen solid. His coat broke, as stiff as a board, and then his dark blue sweater and his shirt.

  The black shape circled around him in a fluid, threatening lope, the snow flying off it in all directions. Elizabeth knelt in the snow and watched in horror as Dan Philips broke into pieces – his ribcage splitting, his stomach dropping out like a big red stone, his lungs crushed i
nto heaps of sugar-pink frost. His skull split with a terrible resonant crack, and his head broke into halves. One half dropped onto the steps and lay in the snow, staring at Elizabeth with one frozen, milk-white eye.

  The black shape flowed around the remains of his broken-off stump of a body, which was frozen upright. Around and around it flowed, stirring the snow into whorls and eddies. There was a creaking, straining sound, like a shop window about to shatter. There was a single second of absolute frozen tension. Then the remains of Dan’s body exploded into thousands of fragments of ice. All that was left to show that he had been standing there was a few scattered fingers, a divided face, and a mauvish glittering stain on the snow.

  Gasping, Elizabeth tried to climb to her feet. She was terrified that the black shape was going to come after her now. She was sure it would: it was so cold, so heartless, so predatory. She staggered six or seven steps across the lawns, but she was so cold that she could hardly bend her knees or her elbows, and her lungs felt as if they had been hosed out with seawater. She coughed, and choked, and had to stop, her hand cupped over her mouth. She was sure that she could hear the shape squeaking across the garden towards her, but she didn’t want to look behind her to see how near it was. She knew that she was far too cold to get away from it. She was so cold that she almost didn’t care.

  She heard the air splintering all around her. Oxygen and hydrogen, actually freezing. She felt as if her brain were being clenched. She thought, God help me.

  It was then that she saw something white moving towards her through the snow. It came closer and closer, and soon it was close enough for her to see that it was the Peggy-girl, in her white summer dress, with thick white burrs of snow clinging to her hair.

  ‘You’re quite safe,’ she said. ‘I said I was here to protect you.’

  Elizabeth stared at her, and then wildly turned around. The black shape had vanished, the snowy garden was deserted, and already the blizzard was easing off.