Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  There was rice all over the floor. A cup and saucer had been taken from the cupboard and placed on the table. The linen basket on top of the washing machine had been disturbed. Nothing had been moved according to any logical pattern. There was a faint trace of citrus in the still air.

  She called Lewis’s mobile, but it sounded as if she had woken him up. ‘Have you been in my flat?’ she shouted. ‘Have you just been here?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replied sleepily. ‘I’m in bed.’

  ‘What about the time before? Someone tried to push past my landlady. Was that you?’

  ‘I just wanted to see you, babe. She grabbed me. I didn’t mean to clip her. I was a bit pissed.’

  ‘I knew it was you. I found your crucifix on the stairs.’

  ‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Can I have it back?’

  The next morning she spoke to Mrs Hamalki, but decided not to tell her about Lewis. Instead she asked her to write down the name of the previous tenant, a Mr Laschowisch. She searched for him on Facebook, and found him listed as the proprietor of a magazine called Gravestone—Online Journal of the Fantastic. She sent him a note and received an instant reply, as if he had been at his computer night and day, waiting for her. She explained that she was living in his old apartment, and asked him if he ever revisited it. His denial meant little; he was hardly likely to tell her if he had. But he talked to her about ghosts, and about the strange presence he had felt in the kitchen and lounge on certain rainy nights. However, Mr Laschowisch’s experience was not hers; he said he had felt sharp temperature drops, heard the ringing of ghostly bells, and swore he had once seen the ethereal form of a tall woman in a white billowing gown pass through the wall between the bathroom and the hall. Tam decided he was nuts and deleted him from her Facebook contacts.

  When she went to see the locksmith again, he was eating a piece of fried plaice out of the paper. His tiny office reeked of vinegar and pickled onions. ‘I need the London bolt,’ she said. ‘Today, if possible.’

  The locksmith sucked his fingers. He looked ashamed again, and shoveled the fish to one side. ‘A much better choice. Tumbler-locks can be picked. The modern versions have shallower indentations on the keys, which are much harder for thieves to open. But if you want to stop someone dead you need the bolt.’

  She looked at the mess of paper and chips on his counter. ‘Fried food is bad for you. I suppose you know that.’

  ‘Yeah, but I love it. My wife thinks I have salads every day. She doesn’t eat enough to keep a mouse alive.’

  He fitted the anodized steel London bolt, which slammed into place with the finality of an oubliette being closed against a howling prisoner.

  ‘I have a friend,’ Suzi told her. ‘She knows about this kind of manifestation and can get rid of them.’

  ‘I don’t need a pest controller,’ said Tam.

  ‘She’s more of an exorcist,’ Suzi replied.

  ‘No,’ said Tam. ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘Don’t worry, she’s not a Christian, more New Age.’

  ‘I’m not paying for some crazy old bag to come around waving crystals over the furniture.’ Tam was firm on that point. ‘How much is she?’

  ‘Let’s get our terminology straight,’ said the exorcist. ‘I’m a sensitive. I can’t see the future or tell you what you had for breakfast. But I can feel someone’s living here apart from you.’ The woman who turned up was a far cry from Madame Arcati; she looked more like a cross between a Pre-Raphaelite heroine and Kate Bush. She went by the unlikely name of Alicia Carbarendum, and opened a threadbare velvet carpet bag filled with small glass tubes of urine-coloured liquid. ‘I make these myself,’ she explained. ‘I distill the essences from wildflowers. You know every flower has a meaning? The anemone is abandonment.’ She raised a vial and checked it for sediment. ‘Columbine is deserted love. Jonquil is violent sympathy. Lilies and orange blossoms are hatred and disdain, the petunia is resentment. I can tell that all these are present in your flat. We need to counter such disharmonies.’ She unbottled two of the tubes and liberally sprinkled them. ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t stain.’

  ‘Now what happens?’ asked Tam.

  ‘Well, that’s it really. If it’s a vengeful spirit he won’t be able to get back in.’

  ‘What do lemons mean?’

  ‘That’s a fruit,’ said Alicia firmly, ‘not a flower.’ She snapped her bag shut. ‘Can you write me a cheque?’

  One week later, her ghost was back. Tam noticed he had a preference for Saturdays, after midnight. He was becoming more confident—the noises were louder and usually persisted until she reached the stairs. Alicia’s sprinkled fragrances were quickly replaced with the bite of citrus, as if being overpowered by a stronger force. Tam was not so much frightened as made to feel persistently uncomfortable. The haunting forced her to ask questions about herself. What had she done to attract a revenant? Weren’t they mostly drawn to damaged people? Was it trying to forge some kind of connection with her? Could it sense that she was lonely, that she had stopped trusting men, that she was, for all her protestations of independence, slowly becoming lost?

  She asked Mrs Hamalki if she’d heard anything. ‘No, love,’ the landlady admitted. ‘I take two temazepam every night. I’m dead before my head hits the pillow. It’s funny, ’cause I don’t think we’ve ever had a problem with ghosts here before.’ She made them sound like ants or mice.

  Tam knew there was one way to discover the truth, but she was a natural coward and loath to try it. However, after two more visitations she decided that something practical must be done. The following Saturday she armed herself with a carving knife, turned out all the lights in the lounge and dug under a blanket on the sofa. Then she waited for it to make an appearance.

  She tried not to fall asleep, but the rhythmic ticking of rain on the windows and the slushing of cars on the wet street robbed her of consciousness. She drifted, then dozed, then descended into the deepest of untroubled slumbers.

  She was brought back to wakefulness by a click and a scrape, a tinkle of metal and the faint smell of citrus. Something or someone—an amorphous dark shape—was in the room with her. Air passed wheezily through it. The black form wavered, but did not approach. Beneath the blanket Tam groped for the handle of the carving knife, but it had slipped from her grasp, down between the sofa cushions.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said matter-of-factly, sitting up.

  ‘And I’ve been waiting for you,’ came the reply.

  ‘Why do you come here?’

  ‘Because you’re here.’

  ‘Are you good or evil?’

  ‘That’s not for me to decide.’

  ‘Do you mean to harm me?’

  ‘That depends on you.’

  ‘Can you walk through walls?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Why do you only manifest yourself on Saturday nights?’

  ‘That’s when my wife goes to bingo.’

  The locksmith turned on the light. He was sweating heavily, and carrying his pass keys. ‘She stays over at her sister’s.’ He admired her with dark, blank eyes.

  ‘People trust locksmiths because they have to. Imagine if they didn’t. I can get in anywhere.’ He reached over and squeezed a catch on the London bolt. It sprang into place with an oiled click. ‘This one’s custom-built. There’s a trick to it that no-one would ever spot. You can lock and unlock it from either side of the door. There now. You’ll never get that open in a million years.’

  ‘Lemons,’ she said stupidly as he lumbered toward her. ‘You use them to hide the smell of fried food from your wife.’

  His hulking shadow fell over her.

  The next morning, Suzi called at the flat, but there was no answer. She rang Mrs Hamalki’s doorbell.

  ‘I’m supposed to meet up with your tenant today,’ she explained. ‘She’s not answering her doorbell.’

  ‘Probably popped out to get something for breakfast,’
said Mrs Hamalki, unconcerned.

  ‘Can I wait for her?’

  ‘I don’t have keys, love. She changed the locks a couple of times. I think she got a bit paranoid about living alone. Her first time away from home. You can come in and have a cup of tea.’

  By lunchtime, Suzi had worried Mrs Hamalki so much that she called her daughter’s morose husband over to break down the door, but even he couldn’t get it open. ‘It’s been bolted shut,’ he confirmed. ‘I’ve got a ladder on the van. I’ll smash a window.’ He looked as if he relished the idea.

  Mrs Hamalki’s daughter’s husband broke the glass and climbed inside. The apartment was completely empty. There were no clothes in the cupboards, and the only sign of disturbance was a broken cup on the floor. The front door’s London bolt still appeared to be locked from the inside. It had kept its secret well.

  ‘Where did she get the locks changed?’ Suzi asked him. ‘It must have been somewhere nearby.’

  As they were talking, they left the house and walked right past Caledonian Road Bolt & Lock, but the dark and narrow shop was closed up tight, and looked as if it would be for a very long time to come.

  Lantern Jack

  No, please, you were before me. Age before beauty, ha ha. I’m in no rush to be served. The barmaid knows me, she’ll get around to looking after me soon enough. This is my local. I’m always in here on special evenings. Well, there’s never anything on the telly and at least you meet interesting people here. There’s always someone new passing through.

  I don’t come in on a Saturday night because they have a DJ now and the music’s too loud for me. You’d probably enjoy it, being young. I haven’t seen you in here before. This place? Yes, it’s unusual to find a traditional pub like this. The Jack O’Lantern has an interesting history. Well, if you’re sure I’m not boring you. I like your Hallowe’en outfit; sexy witch, very original. This place is a bit of a pet subject of mine.

  We’re on the site of an ancient peat bog. The strange phenomenon of gas flickering over it was called ignis fatuus, from which we get the flickering of the Jack O’Lantern. They built a coaching inn on the marsh in 1720. Not a good idea. Even now, there’s still water seeping through the basement walls. Later it became a gin palace. That burned down, and it was rebuilt as a pub called The Duke of Wellington. Being on the corner of Southwark Street and Leather Lane, the pub was caught between two districts, one of elegant town houses and the other of terrible, reeking slums.

  See this counter? It’s part of the original bar. Solid teak, brass fittings. It was curved in a great horseshoe that took in all three rooms, the public, the snug and the saloon. But the Jack was caught between two worlds. The drunken poor came in on that side in order to drown their miseries in cheap ale, and the fine gentlemen ventured in to swig down their port while visiting the brothels nearby. Oh yes, there were dozens in the backstreets. The area was notorious back then. It’s all gentrified now. Urban professionals. They don’t drink in here. Not posh enough for them. They’ll be the first to scream when it’s gone. Not that the area will ever really change. You don’t change London, London changes you.

  Of course, there was always trouble in here on All Hallows Eve, right from when it first opened. One time, close to midnight, two of the king’s horsemen came in and proceeded to get drunk. They mocked one of the poor ostlers who stood at the other side of the bar, and brought him over for their amusement. They challenged him to prove that he had not been born a bastard. When he couldn’t do so, they told him that if he could win a game of wits, they would give him five gold sovereigns.

  They placed a white swan feather on one of the tables and seated themselves on either side of it. Then they produced a meat cleaver that belonged to the cook, sharpened it and challenged him to drop the feather into his lap before they could bring down the cleaver on his hand.

  The ostler knew that the king’s horsemen were employed for their strength and speed, and feared that they would cut off his fingers even though they were drunk, but once the bet had been made he couldn’t refuse to go through with it. You never went back on a bet in those days.

  They splayed his fingers on the table, six inches from the feather. As one of the men raised the cleaver high above his head, the other counted down on his pocket watch. The ostler held his hand flat and lowered his head to the level of the table, studying the feather. Then, as the countdown ended and the cleaver swooped, the ostler sucked the feather into his mouth and spat it into his lap. He won the bet. Unfortunately, the king’s men were so angered that they took him outside and cut off his nose with their swords. The nose remained on the wall here for, oh, decades.

  During the Second World War no-one was much in the mood to celebrate Hallowe’en. No female could come in alone, because it was considered immoral in those days. Well, so many men were off fighting, and most of the women around here were left behind. If they entered the pub by themselves it meant they were available, see. But there was one attractive married lady, a redhead, Marjorie somebody, who came in regularly and drank alone. None of the accompanied women would talk to her—they cut her dead. This Marjorie took no notice, just sat at the bar enjoying her drink.

  But the whispering campaign took its toll. The other women said she was a tart, sitting there drinking gin and French while her husband was flying on dangerous missions over Germany. The pointed remarks grew louder, until they were directly addressed to her. Finally, Marjorie couldn’t sit there any longer without answering back. She told the others that her husband had been shot down during the first weeks of the war, and that was why she came in alone, because it was his favourite place and she missed him so much.

  The other women were chastened by this and felt sorry for her, but in time they became disapproving again, saying that a young widow should show remorse and respect for the dead. People were very judgemental in those days.

  Then on October 31, 1944, when she’d been at the bar longer than usual, a handsome young airman came into the pub towards the end of the evening and kissed her passionately without even introducing himself. Everyone professed to be shocked. The women said it was disgusting for her to make such a spectacle, but their disapproval turned to outrage because she slid from her stool, put her arm around his waist and went off into the foggy night with him.

  It wasn’t until the barman was cleaning up that night that he found the photograph of Marjorie’s husband lying on the counter. And of course, it was the young airman. He’d come back to find her on All Hallows Eve. Had he survived being shot down after all, or had the power of her love called him back from the other side, to be with her again? They never returned to the pub, so I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.

  In the sixties they changed the name of the pub again. It became The Groove. Psychedelic, it was, very druggy. All crimson-painted walls and rotating oil lights. Let’s see, then it was Swingers, a purple plastic seventies pick-up joint, then in the eighties it was a gay leather bar called The Anvil, then it became The Frog ‘N’ Firkin, then it was a black-light techno club called ZeeQ, then it was a French-themed gastropub, La Petite Maison, and now it’s back to being The Jack O’Lantern again. Always on the same site, always changing identities. But the nature of the place never changed, always the rich rubbing against the poor, the dead disturbing the living, the marsh rising up towards midnight.

  See the pumpkin flickering above the bar? It’s lit all year round, not just tonight. If you look carefully, it looks like you can see a skull behind the smile. It was put there one All Hallows Eve in the sixties. For months a sad-looking young man and his sick father would come and sit in that corner over there. The young man wanted to move in with his girlfriend, but her life was in Sheffield, and being with her meant moving away from his father. I would sit here and listen to the old man complaining about his illnesses, watching as his son got torn up inside about the decision he knew he would soon have to make.

  His father would sit there and cough and complain, and would catalogue the
debilitating diseases from which he was suffering, but the funny thing was that he looked better with each passing week, while his son looked sicker and sicker.

  I could see what was going to happen. The young man had to make a choice, and his decision coincided with his father’s worst attack, although nobody knew what was wrong with him. The old man still managed to make it to the pub every night. The son made up his mind to leave, but he couldn’t desert his father, even though Papa was slowly draining his life away. Finally he broke off with his girlfriend to look after his father, who looked so well in his hour of triumph that even the son became suspicious.

  I heard the girl quickly married someone else. We didn’t see the boy for a while, but when he finally came back in, he sat on that stool alone. It seemed the old man had fallen down the coal cellar steps at midnight on Hallowe’en, and had twisted his head right round. The son put the Jack O’Lantern up there that very night. It even looks like the old man….

  The bar stool didn’t stay empty for long. It was taken by a vivacious young woman who turned the head of every man as she pushed open the crimson curtains into the pub. Everyone loved her, the way she laughed and enjoyed the company of men so openly, without a care in the world. She came in every evening at eight o’clock. She drank a little too much and never had any money, but being in her presence made you feel like you’d won a prize.

  She wanted to fall in love with a man who would bring some order to her chaotic life, and then one day she met such a man at a party. He held a senior post in the American embassy, and gave her everything she ever wanted, a beautiful house, nice clothes, money, stability. She stopped her drinking, bore him a son and became a model wife. His only stipulation was she should never again come into the pub. One evening he came home and found her hanging from a beam in their farmhouse. I think you can guess what night that was.