by Tanith Lee
“Oh, I don’t sleep, Laura. I never sleep well.”
“Just in case,” Laura cheerily declared.
As I cleared the lunch things and went out, she was smiling to herself, a crafty slug smile. But this had gone far enough, and I meant to be out of this appalling house before nightfall. Even if I did have to walk all the way with my bags gripped in my teeth, and sleep on the beach when I got there.
Accordingly, all that afternoon I searched, mainly on the upper floor. I even got up into the attics by another narrow back stair – but they were such a shambles, and draped so thickly with cobwebs, I thought perhaps she hadn’t herself gone up there in a decade. I didn’t find a phone. I began to feel she had lied when she said she had another, just to get me running in circles. (Somehow, during all this circle-running, I’d managed to avoid going anywhere near the clock. I’d even used the other bathroom.)
The hot afternoon light was abruptly slanting. It was nearly five.
There she was, standing in the lower hall, glaring up at me.
“Why ever are you up there? I expected tea an hour ago.”
“Sorry, I’ll get it now,” I heard myself say, still with vague self-amazement.
“I told you not to clean upstairs yet.”
“I haven’t. Sorry,” I said again, “I took a nap.”
Firmly I added, “I didn’t have a great night.”
She shrugged – placated? “Very well. We’ll let it go. See to the tea now.”
So I saw to the tea.
Inside me at last was a mindless – almost bestial – rising panic. I couldn’t seem to pull myself around. I couldn’t seem to confront her any more, or make up my mind what it was best for me to do. And in about three hours, the sun was going down, down into the land, leaving behind a darkness that would smother even that coal-blue sea, which looked as if it belonged in Africa, but had somehow washed up here. As had I, who might also – be smothered?
In the end what I did was drag all my bags down to the kitchen, (having found another way on to the back stair from the ground floor; I wouldn’t return to my ‘room’ – or just wouldn’t go by the clock.) In the kitchen, I sorted through them in the mode of life-boat intendees in movies. I was going to have to leave a lot behind; it would be too heavy to carry all that way.
At the finish, I had it all down to one single very heavy bag. This I then picked up, and walked upstairs again, as I hadn’t been able to open the kitchen door to the outside, it was stuck – or locked.
In the lower hall, once more, I met her. She’d known, she must have done, all of it, even to my breaking point.
But “What are you doing, Laura?” she asked. She had put on lipstick, as if for a celebration.
I moved across, and paused facing her, at the foot of the main stair. She was between me and the front door. I put down my bag. I felt reckless.
“Sorry,” I said again, “I just remembered I left the kettle on in London.”
“You’re leaving after all,” she brilliantly fathomed.
“Sure am. I don’t suppose you’ll allow me to use the secret telephone to call a cab?”
“Certainly not, at this time of night,” (it was about seven). “They wouldn’t come out. Not all the way up here. If you really insist on going, then you must do it in the morning.”
“No. I’m not spending another night here. Not with you, or your speciality ghosts.”
She smiled. What a giveaway.
“Don’t tell me a grown-up woman, even you, is frightened by a ghost story.”
“I don’t give a toss about ghost stories. I just don’t like you, Aunt Jennifer, or your behaviour.”
“It’s mutual, then,” she said. We stood there in the cup of the brown hall, dusted by me, and the tiled floor wiped to a gleam, as sunlight speared by in its death-throes. “Oh, don’t think I ever could forget the way you used to behave to me. You, a child. I used to think she put you up to it, that slut of a mother of yours. But I don’t think she would have bothered. She’d got him where she wanted him. And she was busy making a fool of him. She killed him with her goings-on.”
“Shut up,” I said, but almost listlessly, because I half agreed at least on that. She didn’t take any notice anyway.
“But you were a dreadful little girl. I always saw you sneering at me behind my back, laughing at me. Always trying to get me to buy you things –”
“For God’s sake I was a child –”
“She’d told you I was well-off, I suppose. And so it was: Can I have an ice-cream, can I go to the pictures, can I have that book on tigers –?”
“Well I didn’t get them off you, did I? Oh, excuse me, I did get half an ice-cream once.”
She shamed me. Had I been a whining, gift-grabbing kid? We hadn’t had much, and Jennifer, then, used to flash her money. And she used to promise me things, too, presents, and at first I’d believed her, but I never got them. In me now, the panic was boiling into rage. The hall was stifling and turning red with it. Like her furious self-righteous face.
“Then the funeral,” she announced. “My own brother, and your father, and there you were, and you couldn’t say a word to me, just ‘Hallo, Aunt’. And later I think you said good-bye. Both of us standing there over his grave, and you wouldn’t say a word. You couldn’t even spare me a drop of kindness.”
“My father was dead,” I said bitterly.
“My brother was dead,” she cried. Her eyes flamed like slices of razor, and then they went up over my head, up to the top of the stairs, and she let out – not a scream – a sort of yelp.
At once the blood-red light in the hall seemed to darken. Something out there had got hold of the sun. Instantly, the nature of my turmoil changed. My back, my neck, my scalp, were covered by freezing ants.
I stared at her. “What is it?”
She didn’t speak. She simply went on gazing up the stairway, and, still gazing, she began to back away, back through the door of the drawing-room, and now her lipstick mouth was hanging open.
I’ve no notion how, but I understood this was not part of the game.
As for me, for a moment I didn’t think I could move. Then I knew I had to, because otherwise, if I just stayed there at the foot of the stairs, whatever – whatever was on them, coming down them, whatever that was – would soon be right where I was – and I didn’t – no I didn’t – want that –
So I somehow moved forward, to run after Jennifer through the drawing-room door, and at the same time, like Lot’s misguided wife, I looked behind me –
And was turned, as she was, to an immovable pillar of volcanic salt.
Because what was standing still at the head of the stairs was the wooden clock, and what was coming down the stairs was Sabia Trente, not still at all, the skirts of her gown blowing round her, and her arms held up from the elbows, and her hands pointing with their grown-long finger-nails…
You see such things on a screen, a book-jacket, on the bloody Internet for God’s sake, such images of gothic horror, these evocations of dynamic terror. It doesn’t prepare you for the actual thing.
There she was. And she was worse than anything anyone could ever physically mock up, or imagine.
Her face was white, blue-white, and marked by the fringe of blood that was still unravelling down her right cheek, and yet never reached her already blood-stained gown or the stairs. Her forehead was red and also bruised black, and quills of bone stood out of her hair, (like a Spanish comb), which was otherwise clotted scarlet with blood. Her face had features, all sunken in and withered. It was a fallen monkey’s face, yet too, like a mask – and in the place where her eyes had once been – were only two bruised black sockets of nothing, each secured in her head by a shining silver pin –
All I wanted was to run. It was the sum of my ambitions. And I couldn’t do it. Could not move.
And so Sabia Trente came down the stair, and right up to me, and I smelled her stink worse than dead rats or rotting bananas, and then she passed d
irectly through me, like a dank, dust-laden wind.
Perhaps I died for a split second when that happened. Perhaps my heart stopped. I don’t know, can’t remember.
It was just that suddenly she was past me, and I was still rooted there, watching her glide, as if she moved on ice-skates over a rink, through the drawing-room door.
Darkness had come, premature night. Once before I’d seen this creature move across the room, seen her in the window. Now I saw her from the back. Saw her so clearly, solidly, even the creases of her dress and the bones of her corset under it.
And I saw my Aunt Jennifer too, sprawled on a brocade sofa, screaming now, shrieking, and trying to bury her head in the cushions.
On which cue, Sabia Trente was raising up high a kind of stick, an iron thing like a wand with a strange glowing tip – she hadn’t had it a moment ago – and I knew it was the poker from a fire that had been out for more than a century.
She was going to return the compliment of the cloven brain-case, not on her murderous, no longer available Aunt Eugenia, but on the skull of Jennifer.
I told you from the start, I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t. I flatly refuse to. If I did, I think I would lose my mind for sure and for real and for good. And so, in those moments that lingered between Jennifer and me and the gates of Hell, I saw it all, what had truly happened, and why this thing was here, and what it was and what to do about it.
I was numb, had no feeling in my body, didn’t really seem to be in it, except perhaps sitting tiny and high up behind my own eyes, like a lone passenger left on a train hurtling driverless to destruction.
For the train – me, driverless – was all at once rushing forward. It crashed headlong into the back of the stationary Sabia – I felt her – and I tore her apart with my hands, screaming myself now, over and over, “Go away – get lost – piss off – you don’t exist –”
And she didn’t exist. She was only air, and then she and her poker were gone. And at the head of the stairs the clock became a black cloud and then was gone too, back to its place in reality along the corridor.
I stood over Jennifer and I bawled at her now, “You made it up, didn’t you, you fucking old bitch – didn’t you?”
She whimpered. I struck her across the head. Not so hard. It was much better than a poker would have been. Then I pulled her to a sitting position and shouted abuse at her until she spoke. “I didn’t – it was true – or at least in the book. Only not – not –”
“Not what, you cow?”
“Not that clock. Not that one.”
She had wanted to pay me out for all my seven, nine and twenty-year-old transgressions against her. So she never quite lost track of me, and when the company folded, she was ready.
Yes, I was to have been her skivvy. For I must be punished. And, muddled as Jennifer had become, she had invested in the invented memory of me as a sensitive, nervy girl, ready to be dominated and scared witless by a contrived ghost story.
Although, as she’d said, the story was true – at least in a bona fide book, which carried the tale of the Trente murder and the haunted French clock. Even the piece about Shelley Terrence, though he had never lived in Jennifer’s house – all these events had gone on somewhere else. For that reason she had had to copy out all the passages. To photocopy the printed text would have revealed too much and given the game away.
She had read the story one idle afternoon. And become obsessed enough to weave it into her retribution for me. And so mad, mad Aunt Jennifer, who wouldn’t even pay to have her downstairs telephone repaired, forked out quite a sum to gain a rather poor reproduction of the Trente clock. This copy it was which was then placed – unnailed – in the corridor by my elected bedroom. She had even arranged for its random striking.
Well, she was off her head. And her loathing insanity and my allergic anger seem to have been enough. For yes, I take part of the blame. Without my side of it, I don’t think it would have happened; she couldn’t have done it on her own.
And what did happen?
Neither Jennifer nor I had ever had a child – in my case from choice, in hers I don’t know. But we made a type of child between us, an offspring in that word’s purest and most dreadful sense. For we fashioned the ghost of Sabia Trente between us, brought it to its unlife, and made it run.
If simply that, our projected hating energy, would have been sufficient to make the vengeful poker and its blow fatal – I’ve got no idea. Maybe. After all, I stopped it. I must have thought so then.
But, too, perhaps Jennifer and I merely hallucinated – visions of similar aspect experienced by more than one person at once, aren’t uncommon in the annals either of the supernatural or science.
Whatever, as I said, this wasn’t a ghost story, although it has a ghost.
And what happened afterwards? Soon told. She did a lot of cringing and crying her dry hard tears. But now I managed to make it clear I wouldn’t stay another hour in her house.
I waited outside for the taxi, which took me away fast, so I just caught the nine-thirty-five train to London. The phone? I hardly believe it myself – she, the arch-reviler of modernity, had a weeny little mobile tucked in her handbag.
As I was going out of her door she came scurrying at me from the now thick-lit shadows of the house, and pushed a paper bag into my hand. I thought it probably contained some stale sandwiches to give me indigestion, or some already half-eaten sweets. I wanted to slap it to the ground, but something made me take it. Otherwise we parted without a touch, or another word. I didn’t look at the paper bag until the train was drawing into London and I was going to throw it away.
Inside was a hundred pounds in tens, and a cheque for three thousand pounds. This was so obscene I felt nauseous. Or maybe that was only hunger, and the shock from everything else. I didn’t throw up. I did cash and spend the money. And what does that make me?
I’m wondering though, if you wonder... if, despite the clock’s being only a copy – yet somehow it did draw back the vengeance-seeking Sabia’s dead remnant – and only my vaunted stupidity drove her off. No. However, your choice. Somebody said, it wasn’t the dead you need to fear, but the living. Too damn right.
Since that night, I’ve heard nothing more from Jennifer. Years have elapsed. Now and then I ask myself what she does, alone, when it gets dark in that house.
The Ghost of the Clock
Chosen by Storm Constantine
I have so many favourite stories by Tanith Lee, it was a difficult task to pick one for this collection. To aid me, I decided to choose a tale from my favourite genre – ghost stories. Tanith wrote a lot of these, some of them with extremely unusual ghosts, and ‘The Ghost of the Clock’ has to be one of them.
The prose style of Tanith’s fantasy tales was often exotic and voluptuous, but when she delved into contemporary supernatural stories she generally employed a different, more economical style – which was no less evocative of place and whatever spirits might be inhabiting it. This piece does what the best of traditional ghost stories used to do – captures a landscape and sets the scene for mystery. Not in an obvious or crude way, but as in the deft strokes of an artist’s brush. In the classic ghost stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the landscapes and buildings – quite often big old houses – were as much characters in the story as those who were haunted. The setting itself added to the haunting.
In this story, Tanith plays with the familiar tropes of the genre. Very near the beginning, Laura, the narrator, states that she doesn’t believe in ghosts. Many traditional ghost stories began that way, with the story-teller then going on to relate how their minds were changed. This story is different. As Laura says: “So this isn’t a ghost story. Although it has a ghost.”
Laura is in the position of having to throw herself upon the mercy of an aunt who lives in a big old house by the sea. Even Laura seems to think she might be in a story. She imagines that when she knocks upon the door, it will be opened by a servant
from the last century, but of course there are no servants, and only her Aunt Jennifer to answer the door. The house she finds beyond the threshold is mysterious – and I won’t go into detail here, so as not to spoil the plot – and Laura’s life there becomes ever more peculiar.
Tanith clearly enjoyed playing with the genre and coming up with a tale so refreshing and intriguing. It’s written in a beautiful, crisp style that matches the wit of the main character. A most delicious read.
– Storm Constantine
Storm Constantine is an author, editor, and publisher, founder of the independent imprint Immanion Press. The author of more than thirty books, her writing crosses many genres. She is best known for the ground-breaking Wraeththu series.
Cold Fire
From an idea by John Kaiine
We was ten mile out from Chalsapila, and it’s a raw night. The sea mist brewing thick as wool. Then little tramp ship come alongside. I on the bridge with Cap’n. He my brother. Kinda. Jehosalee Corgen. Well. But sudden the tramper puts up her lights. She’s got a lot of sail on for what she’s at, maybee tracking tobaccer or hard liquor up and down. They take a need of that, in the little ports along Great Whale Sound.
– Fuckendam, say Corgen. – What this bitch go to want?
I shrug, don’t I. How the hell I know. I amn’t no sailor, I. Drunken, he picks me up at Chalsa, tooken me aboard. I can trim bit of sails, take a watch, that kinda stuff.
Now the tramper swim in close, making signal.
Across the black night water, Corgen and her cap’n speak.
Sounds threat-like ta me.
– What he say? ask Beau, the mate.
Afore I can offer, he goes up ter see.
Then so does I.
We stand there on the poop, with the great wing of foresails over, and lanterns flash, and I hear other cap’n tells Corgen – Hey, this good for ye and yor crew. Make lotta dolla.
– Don’t need no more cargo, say Corgen.