Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  She shivered. She knew without a doubt that the Peggy-girl was out in the garden somewhere, standing in the snow, watching the house, waiting, impervious to cold, but her toes and fingers almost black with frostbite.

  She turned back to Human Imagination. She began reading another case history, about a woman in Bethlehem, Connecticut, who had reappeared to her family in the shape of Jo, from Little Women, and who protected them so thoroughly from anybody who threatened to take advantage of them that her widower was unable to remarry, because any prospective partner was unexpectedly drenched with ice-water or showered with broken glass, and her children were ostracized at school because any other pupil who said so much as ‘damn!’ in their presence found that their ears were viciously boxed by empty air.

  Elizabeth thought: this is too much like the Peggy-girl to be true. The violence, the over-protection, the mysterious cold snaps, the strange appearances. Father had been visited by the Peggy-girl and had discovered what she was; and she was this. Peggy’s imagination had outlived her. She had no substance now, apart from her bones. But what she did have was presence, and her presence was Gerda, from The Snow Queen. Who is the more real? thought Elizabeth. Gerda or me? Gerda or Margo Rossi? Gerda or Peggy Buchanan, that poor little girl who had fallen through the ice while she was playing dancers. Sleep the dancing maidens? No, they’re dead. Dead and cold and never likely to breathe again. But the story lives on, Gerda lives on.

  Not only Gerda, but the Queen of the white bees, who flies yonder where they swarm so thickly.

  She squashed out her cigarette and immediately took another one. At that instant the front doorbell rang, and she jumped. She went to answer it, and it rang again, and she called out, ‘All right, all right! I’m coming!’

  Standing on the snow-whirling doorstep was Laura, wearing a huge fur hat and a huge fur coat, her face orangey-tanned in the winter light. Behind her a red taxi burbled in the snow, and Jack the taxi-driver from New Milford was lifting her bags out of the trunk.

  ‘Oh, Lizzie,’ said Laura, and hugged her. Her fur coat was chilly and prickled with wet. Oh, Lizzie, poor father, this is all so sad.’

  Elizabeth cooked them a supper of rib chops with celery stuffing, which they ate in the kitchen. Laura said, ‘I’d almost forgotten what home food tasted like, I’ve been living off avocados and alfalfa.’

  ‘You’re looking well on it.’

  ‘Thanks. But sometimes I could kill for a plateful of Mrs Patrick’s ham and red-eye gravy. With dumplings, of course. And chocolate chiffon pie to follow.’

  Elizabeth sat back and looked at her and smiled. ‘Oh, come on, Laura. You’re a Hollywood girl. I think you always were. How did that screen test work out?’

  ‘Camera test, actually. “I want to see if the lens loves you, baby,” But good, I think. If I get it, it’ll be the biggest part I’ve had so far. I’ll actually get to say some sensible dialogue, instead of “Dry martini, sir?” or “Ooooh, thank you, Mr Frobisher”, which was the sum total of my first two speaking-parts.’

  Elizabeth laughed. ‘Do you want some more wine? I don’t have any chocolate chiffon pie, I’m afraid. I should have bought some apple turnovers, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Not for me. I never eat dessert. I only dream about it. You should see some of those girls who hang around at Schwab’s. Thin, you’d never believe it.’

  They poured another glass of red wine and sat back and smoked and enjoyed the silence of each other’s company for a while. Elizabeth felt that Laura’s arrival had already made her father’s funeral much more bearable. She had realized, thinking about Laura, that she had been intensely jealous of her, when she was younger, but very protective, too. She still felt protective, because she was older; but she wasn’t jealous any longer, and that was surprisingly liberating, and good for the soul.

  Laura said, out of the blue, ‘I’m not really sure, but I think I’ve seen Peggy again.’

  Elizabeth stared at her. Laura thought that Elizabeth was looking rather too thin. ‘When was that?’ she asked, cigarette smoke trailing.

  ‘The day before my camera test. Well, the night before, actually. I heard somebody whispering in the courtyard outside my bedroom. I looked out of the window and I was sure that it was Peggy – I mean, the girl who looks like Peggy, but isn’t. The only thing was, when I walked towards her, she wasn’t Peggy at all, or even the girl who looks like Peggy, she was nothing more than a shape.’ ‘A shape? What do you mean?’

  ‘She was just the shape between the palms and the creepers and the wall; there was nothing actually there. It was like, what do you call it, an optical illusion. Except that it wasn’t, because I heard her whispering.’ ’

  Elizabeth was silent and thoughtful for a very long time. ‘I told you what happened to Mr Philips.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there’s something more. Father saw the Peggy-girl too. He saw her several times. I don’t know what he thought about her. He wasn’t able to tell me. But he did put me on to a book that he published, Human Imagination, and this book says that our imagination lives on after we’re dead. Everything else dies, but imagination’s different, because it’s something that never was, made real; and so it stays real. Like Oz, and Narnia.’

  Laura swallowed a large mouthful of wine. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said.

  Elizabeth looked embarrassed. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t, either. Not exactly. But father said that I should talk to the author, and the author’s local. Maybe we should go to see him, now you’re here.’

  Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Laura. ‘I just want to be quiet, and sorrowful, and think of father.’

  ‘Wait up,’ said Elizabeth. She went through to the library, and came back with Miles Moreton’s book, which she opened at the flyleaf, to show Laura the author’s photograph.

  ‘Heyy . . .’ said Laura, raising her eyebrows. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  Later, as they sat by the fire in the sun-room, Elizabeth told Laura everything that had happened on the night that Dan Philips had been killed. Laura sat and listened without interruption and when she had finished, Elizabeth was quite sure that she believed her.

  ‘It’s a force, isn’t it?’ said Laura. ‘It’s something supernatural. But Mr Bunzum was all frozen, Mr Bunzum broke into pieces. Whatever happened to Dan, that must have been the same thing.’

  ‘Dick Bracewaite, too,’ Elizabeth put in, as gently as she could.

  Laura gave her a small, unfocused smile. ‘Yes . . . poor old Dick Bracewaite.’

  ‘You never told me about that.’

  ‘There was nothing to tell. You want to know the truth? He was a pervert and I was a show-off.’

  ‘He really did it to you?’

  Laura nodded. ‘Oh, yes, he did it to me. He did everything you can think of, and a few other things besides. The trouble was, I liked it, at the time. It made me feel naughty and special and excited. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, but the naughtier it was, the more I liked it.’

  She paused, and looked at the fire. Twin flames sparkled in her eyes. ‘The terrible thing was, I didn’t feel sorry when they told me he was dead. I didn’t feel anything at all. Maybe I should have felt angry. Maybe I should have gone to spit on his grave. But, I don’t know. He took advantage of me. He took my innocence. But, in a funny way, I think I took far more from him than he ever took from me. You’re like that, at that age. You expect everything. You expect the world. And just for a while you get it.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘This frightens me, all of this.’

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘These cold snaps . . . Dick Bracewaite dying, the way he did. Frostbitten, in June! Then Dan Philips. I can’t really believe that it’s Peggy, yet it must be Peggy, mustn’t it? She’s guarding us, protecting us, and anybody she doesn’t like, she freezes.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ asked Laura, leaning back against the cushions.

  ‘I don’t know. But who could freeze people, ju
st by kissing them?’

  ‘You don’t mean the Snow Queen?’

  ‘ “Her kiss was colder than ice. It went to his heart, although that was half-frozen already; he thought he should die.” ’

  ‘But, really, that was just a fairy story.’

  ‘I know. But that’s the point. It was Peggy’s favourite, and if Peggy’s imagination lived on after she was drowned – everything would live on, Gerda, Kay, the Lapland woman, the Finland woman, the snowflakes, the Dreams.’

  Laura said nothing, but watched the fire.

  Outside the window, the snow fell thicker and thicker, as if the sky were determined to silence them, no matter what. And a figure stood in the tennis court, in a white summer dress, with a truimphant smile on her face that would have chilled Elizabeth and Laura right down to their feet, if they could have seen it.

  They took a left past Marble Dale and up a sloping tack between the snow-laden trees. The car slid sideways on the ice, but Elizabeth changed down into second gear, and gradually the tyres took a slithering grip and they climbed slowly up the hill.

  Today was unexpectedly bright and sunny, so bright that Elizabeth had to wear sunglasses to drive. She had borrowed Mr Twomey’s old Studebaker Champion, repainted by hand in a terrible grass green. The car’s heater didn’t work, so both girls wore gloves and coats and woolly hats.

  They took a sharp right turn at the top of the hill, down a snowy incline and up another hill. Here, set above the road behind a natural-stone retaining wall, was a small chalet-style house with a fretwork-decorated verandah, and fretwork decorated shutters. The sign on the mailbox said Moreton. A black Labrador appeared around the side of the house and barked at them monotonously as they climbed the path to the front door. ‘Shut up, dog,’ said Laura, and the dog stopped barking, turned around and disappeared around the side of the house again.

  ‘I always knew you had a way with animals,’ said Elizabeth.

  The dog had obviously alerted his owner, because the front door opened immediately and there was Miles Moreton, much older than he had appeared on his book jacket, his curly hair wired with grey, his eyes pouchy, his fingers stained dark with nicotine. He wore baggy green corduroy trousers and a green checkered lumberjack shirt.

  ‘Come on in,’ he called them. ‘I didn’t know whether you’d be able to make it up the hill.’

  The house was grossly untidy, with books and papers stacked in the hall, and not one of the pictures hanging straight, but at least it was warm, with a huge fire crackling, and by the smell of it Miles Moreton had just brewed up some coffee.

  Elizabeth and Laura hung up their coats and shifted stacks of paper so that they could sit on the old brown velour couch. Miles distractedly moved books from one side of the room to the other, and then back again. ‘I guess you can tell that I’m not used to having visitors. Would you like some coffee? It comes from Basel, in Switzerland. It’s the same coffee that Carl Jung used to drink.’

  Elizabeth said, ‘You’re coming to the funeral?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d be honoured. Your father was a man in a million. He was intelligent, he was sensitive. I never met anybody with such diverse interests.’

  ‘He was interested in everything,’ Elizabeth agreed. ‘I guess that’s why he never made much money. He never published the same kind of book twice. One month it was fly-fishing; the next it was Greek poetry; or obstetrics; or cheese-making.’

  Miles found a crumpled pack of Camels on the table and offered them around. ‘I wrote that book on human imagination over ten years ago. I’m surprised that your father even remembered it.’

  ‘He had a reason to remember it. He was beginning to have experiences that convinced him that what you were writing about was true.’

  ‘Experiences?’

  ‘Visits,’ said Laura.

  ‘You mean – ?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He was visited on more than one occasion by our sister Peggy. She drowned in the family swimming pool when she was five.’

  ‘Did she appear as herself?’ asked Miles. He was quite breathless with fascination.

  Elizabeth shook her head. ‘We think that she appeared as Gerda, from The Snow Queen. She was always saying that she would like to travel to Lapland, and visit the Snow Queen’s palace.’

  ‘Do you have any proof of these manifestations? Any photographs? Any lost artefacts?’

  ‘We’ve seen her for ourselves. Not just once, but dozens of times.’

  Elizabeth told him about the Reverend Bracewaite and Dan Philips, and Laura described her experiences in Santa Monica and Hollywood. He sat and listened and smoked his cigarette right down to the butt, so that it burned his lips.

  ‘There’s no question that your sister’s manifestations are very similar to other sightings,’ he said. One of the most common characteristics is this ability to leave the scene of the sighting by changing shape, by becoming something else. The visitors don’t simply vanish into thin air, they change into a scarf or a sheet of paper and disappear that way. It’s also interesting that she appears to be slightly unfocused. We never imagine fictional characters exactly, down to every last mole on their chins; and this is how your Peggy-stroke-Gerda seems to look. She also seems to appear less vividly in California than she does locally. This is because she imagines that the Snow Queen story is centred on the house where she was brought up; and this is where her imagination is at its strongest.’

  ‘What makes her appear?’ asked Laura. ‘What do you think she wants?’

  Miles shrugged. ‘I don’t think she actually wants anything, in the sense that people want money or love or forgiveness. It sounds as if she’s being very protective towards you both – in fact, over-protective. Wasn’t that a characteristic of Gerda in The Snow Queen?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. The whole story is about her travelling to Finland and Lapland to rescue her brother.’

  ‘Quite. And in that case, you’re going to have to get accustomed to the idea of being guarded for the rest of your lives.’

  ‘I can understand if she attacked the Reverend Bracewaite,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But why would she kill Dan Philips? He was there to help me, not to hurt me.’

  ‘I can’t say. It might depend on what was going on in his mind.’ She looked puzzled. ‘Let me put it this way: imaginary characters are apparently able to “see” other imaginary characters, even if they’re created by people who are still living. Dan may have imagined himself to be doing something with you of which your sister didn’t approve, and so she killed him.’

  ‘Doing what, for instance?’ Laura demanded.

  ‘Use your imagination,’ said Miles, rather archly.

  Elizabeth sat back. ‘I never thought of that. But that means

  . . . well, any man who finds me attractive could be at risk.’

  ‘That’s right. You could be very dangerous to know.’

  ‘But I’ve never had any trouble before now.’

  ‘You’ve been out with men before?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Maybe their intentions were all honourable; or at least benign. Maybe Dan imagined doing something violent. It’s impossible to say.’

  ‘What exactly is this Peggy-girl?’ asked Laura. ‘You say she’s not a ghost. Does she exist on her own, or do Lizzie and I have to be there to see her? What I mean is, when Lizzie and I die, will she die, too? Is she real, or are we imagining her?’

  Miles said, ‘I don’t know for sure. But so far, all the evidence seems to suggest that these spirits have their own independent existence. They survived the death of their own material brains; I’m sure that they can survive the death of the people who knew them when they were alive. As to what that actually are . . . my theory is that they are creations of the collective unconscious, that great shared pool of human thought which all of us are tapped into. If you go back in human history, to the time when men first became capable of articulating the things they thought about, you can find dozens of exam
ples of fictional and mythological creations which took on flesh.

  ‘For instance, there was a thing that Viking sailors used to call Shony. It was a manlike creature that used to appear in the North Sea, with shaggy hair and spines. It was supposed to devour seamen who fell overboard; or else it would mimic the screams of a drowning man, and when somebody dived into the water to rescue him it would tear them to pieces. Viking shipbuilders used to redden the keels of their ships by tying a victim to the logs on which they rolled their boats into the water – kind of a sacrifice, so that Shony wouldn’t attack them. There was no real evidence that Shony existed, but then something very interesting happened. Sir Walter Scott the Scottish novelist wrote about Shony, calling him by his local name of Shellycoat. Here . . .’

  He stood up and sorted through a tilting stack of notebooks until he found the one he was looking for. ‘This is what Scott wrote. “When Shellycoat appeared on the shore, he seemed to be decked with marine productions and, in particular, with shells whose clattering announced his approach.” ’

  ‘About two years after this was published, a young man was found on the beach near St Andrews, in Fife, with no legs and half of his torso missing. It looked as if he had been attacked by a shark – although there are no sharks in the North Sea. A month or so later, a young woman was found mutilated, and then two dogs. A young anthropologist from Cupar decided to keep watch on the beach. He camped out there day and night for three weeks until one morning he saw a woman coming in his direction, walking her dog. There was a dense hoar, or sea-mist, so it was difficult for him to see very much. But when the woman was only about two hundred feet away from him, he heard a clattering sound, and behind her “some huge, hunched Thing came out of the ocean shallows, covered with dripping brown weed and mussel-shells.”

  ‘The young man shouted a warning, the woman turned around, saw what it was and ran. The thing was quick, though. It caught her dog and literally tore it in half, devouring one half and throwing the rest on the beach. Then it disappeared back into the mist.’