by Kim Newman
For the first time in their lives, they felt perfectly safe. In learning to live in a new place, they learned to live with each other, to appreciate each other’s mysteries.
The Hollow, they decided, was a happy place.
* * *
In the octagonal room, Steven experimented with seven different positions for his desk before realising Louise Teazle had been right all along. He set up his computer in exactly the spot hers had been. Kirsty and Tim were off foraging at the County Stores in Taunton, which left Jordan at home to help arrange his office.
‘Sit in your chair,’ said his daughter. ‘Give it a whirl.’
He pulled his chair close to the desk and sat down, getting the feel of the position. A significant chunk of his life would be spent here. He stretched fingers to touch his keyboard. Jordan adjusted the back of the chair.
‘Comfy?’
He was.
‘You have to watch out for repetitive stress injury,’ Jordan warned.
In London, he had felt the beginnings of back pain and semi-arthritic aches in his finger joints. What with everything else, he’d never even mentioned it to anyone but Tatum. A few twinges didn’t count for anything set beside the rest of the problems.
In the Hollow, it all cleared up. It had probably been psychosomatic.
‘In Computer Studies, we had a whole lesson on setting up a work station,’ said Jordan.
She measured the distance between his chair and the desk with finger-spans, and did mental calculations. She took a ruler and sized him up, as if for a sitting-down suit. When thinking, she looked younger than she was.
‘I’ll tape an X on the floor,’ she said, ‘to show where your chair should be. It’s what we had to do. After a couple of months, you can pull up the mark. By then, you’ll be settled. Where do you keep your masking tape?’
‘It’s in one of those.’
She looked at a stack of cardboard boxes. ‘Shouldn’t they have been unpacked weeks ago?’
She was almost funny, trying to be strict.
(not screaming)
He ummed and ahhed about having been busy. She put hands on her hips and tutted. Her navel winked at him above her jeans’ waistline. Before her Audrey Hepburn craze set in, she had agitated for permission to get her belly button pierced.
Steven saw an opportunity. He tickled her. She screamed (not the old kind of screaming) with laughter, and hauled his chair off its X spot, then spun him around.
He laughed too.
It struck Steven that he couldn’t remember the last time he had been alone with Jordan. He and Tim were together often, doing Dad–son things with tools. When the home front was at its worst, the only cause that united him with Kirsty was worrying about Jordan. As a trio, they had been through several, hideous sessions, more like an encounter group than a family argument.
That was another life.
He stopped spinning.
‘Dad,’ Jordan said, ‘has Mum heard from Veronica?’
The name still turned him cold.
‘Not since we moved,’ he said. (She hadn’t, had she? The new Kirsty would have said something.)
‘Good,’ she replied, kissing his forehead. ‘Veronica used to frighten me.’
‘Me too,’ he confessed. ‘But she was Kirst’s friend. Your Mum needed a friend.’
(Veronica called herself a healer.)
‘She wasn’t anyone’s friend, not really.’
Jordan was sharp about people. It was one of her problems, actually. When she was in her darkest self, she always knew the worst thing to say. The truth.
‘I think you’re right,’ he said.
This bright, sunny, funny girl was a delight and a wonder. One of the great discoveries of the Hollow. He had to think hard to remember the old Jordan.
‘There’s something wrong with Veronica, isn’t there?’
‘Yes, Jord,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know what it is or how she gets her hold over people, but she’s not like us. Not like the way we are now.’
‘Does Mum miss her?’
Steven thought hard. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘Mum has us. It was the choice she made. The choice we all made. To come here, and be a family.’
(What did the witch think about Kirsty’s choice?)
‘I’m glad,’ Jordan said. ‘I can’t imagine how it would have been if we hadn’t found the Hollow.’
‘What makes you think the Hollow didn’t find us?’
He had to say that. It had been in his mind from the first sight of the place.
Jordan sat in a window-nook, sunlight on her hair, and got comfortable. Steven was impressed at how relaxed his daughter was. She had always been intensely self-conscious, but that was gone.
‘Dad, have you noticed?’
She was looking at him, light behind her. He knew what she meant, what she wanted to talk about. He was excited but a little anxious. It was enormous, when he thought about it. He had a sense of privilege that Jordan had chosen to raise it with him, not Kirsty.
‘Little things,’ she said. ‘When you go into a room, it’s as if someone has just stepped out. I keep thinking it’s Mum or you, but it can’t be. There’s a rocking chair in my room. Sometimes, it rocks by itself.’
‘Does it frighten you?’
She shook her head. ‘Not at all. I don’t think it should.’
‘It’s a mystery,’ he said. ‘I’ve come across them too. Things change when you’re not looking, rearrange themselves. Always for the better. I was thinking of opening those boxes, and letting the fairies do the unpacking but I think that’s not in the programme. We have to make an effort, or it doesn’t count. But let’s start a mystery collection. Mum and Tim can join in. In the end, we’ll get to the bottom of it.’
‘I suppose,’ she said, doubtful.
‘The fun of mysteries isn’t the explanation,’ he said, tweaking her nose. ‘It’s the wondering.’
His computer came on, by itself. Startled, he pantomimed fear, with ridiculously exaggerated face-pulling and contorted limbs.
‘Spooo-ooooky,’ he said.
Jordan laughed and launched a cushion at him.
‘One for the collection,’ he said, glancing at his screen.
HH, it flashed at him. HH HH HH, filling the screen. Then his file manager was there, neat as it could be.
‘Did you see that?’ he asked Jordan.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It was for me.’
* * *
After supper, Jordan sat in her rocking chair, examining the book. It was something she had found, or which – to pick up on Dad’s thinking – had found her. Running her fingers along a row of shelved spines, this was where she had stopped. The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange was a hardback with an unfaded jacket. The cover showed a wood-panelled corridor after dark, lit by a single candle. Four alarmed girls in straw hats and school blazers cowered away from a see-through knight in armour who was raising a solid-seeming battle-axe.
The book was yellow and dusty at the top edge, but good as new. If this was Louise Teazle’s own copy it had probably never been read. Having written it, she knew how the story came out. From the flap copy, Jordan learned it was the fifth of the Drearcliff Grange School books. A first edition, from 1944. Had either of her dead grandmothers read it then, during the War? Mum said girls still read Louise Teazle when she was at school.
On the first page, a girl called Gillian Gilchrist (‘Gill-Gil’) was up late at night on a dare, alone in a disused part of the school. To get into a secret club, the After Lights-Out Gang, she had to creep out of her dorm (what did that mean? a shared room? something like a hospital ward?) and spend a whole night in the West Wing. The rest of the gang – Angela the Boss, Catty Korner and Sarah-Suzanne Symmes – had told her the wing was haunted.
Knowing what to expect, Jordan read the rest of the chapter. Phantoms appeared, but Gillian was ready for them. ‘Stow the rot, fillies,’ she sneered. ‘Can’t fool I with a sheet dipped in ch
em-lab phosphor. That bloodstain is most unbecoming, Angela. And try to clank your chain with a little more spirit, Sarah-Suzanne.’ After several more or less alarming apparitions, Gillian was grabbed by a sinister shadow-figure. It turned out to be the new gym mistress, Miss Ilse Haller.
In the next chapter, it transpired that the After Lights-Out Gang had indeed intended to sneak into the West Wing and terrify Gillian, but were detained by a snap air-raid drill. With Gillian missing at head-count, a search was carried out for her. Now, the gang was in hot water with Miss Beeke, the fearsome headmistress. Also, Gill-Gil was worried that the spooks might have been real.
Jordan assumed that the ghosts would be spies or smugglers in disguise. Miss Haller, who was supposed to be a Czech refugee, was most likely a Nazi spy.
Still, she read on.
The old slang was stranger even than the Rat Pack hipster talk she loved and tried to affect, but it had its own appeal. An all-girls boarding school was as bizarre to Jordan as a nunnery, but she recognised character types among the staff and pupils from the schools she had been at. She wasn’t sure how many of the odd turns of phrase were deliberately comical, but got a sense that Louise Teazle sometimes slyly pulled her readers’ legs. Gillian, an evacuee from ‘reduced circumstances’, suffered the other girls’ snobbery, but showed courage (‘spunk’, not a word Jordan had heard with that meaning) and won acceptance. Sarah-Suzanne, surprisingly clearly a femme lesbian, nurtured a terrific crush on Gillian, which the heroine tried to deal with kindly.
Spies did appear, posing as members of a hockey team from a rival school, and plotted to kidnap Miss Haller, whose father was a scientist Hitler hadn’t been able to force to work on a poison-gas rocket. But the ghosts were real, the spirits of Englishmen who had died defending their country in foreign wars, called up by Gillian herself, unconsciously wishing on a potent magic stone (part of the wall in the West Wing), to defend Miss Haller from the Nazis.
In the final chapter, the ghosts saw off the spies and word came through that Miss Haller’s father had been smuggled out of Germany. Gillian said goodbye to the ghosts, who treated her with strange respect since it was subtly implied that she was destined to die for England in a future war when women would be front-line troops. She was finally initiated into the After Lights-Out Gang, with a midnight feast and a masked ritual.
The book didn’t take long to read. Jordan was left with a sense of having understood only the surface. It was a fast adventure, with a lot of comedy and broad social comment, but she suspected depths. The only men in the book were absent fathers or ghosts. Even the Nazi spies were teenage girls. Whenever Gillian argued with Miss Haller or the After Lights-Out Gang, it was as if Louise Teazle were talking to herself.
The world of the book seemed real to her. An evening had slipped away as she read. It was dark outside her window. She looked at the West Tower of the Hollow. The light was on in her parents’ room but Tim’s window was dark – he must be asleep already.
Ghosts, she wondered. Were there ghosts?
* * *
Someone to see you, Mum,’ her daughter announced.
Kirsty looked up at Jordan. She was filling out her simple summer dress a little more. Her bare arms and legs had lost the anatomy-diagram stringiness that had been cause for concern. Her skin was the pale gold of not-yet-ripe eating apples.
A set of white filigree lawn furniture had been discovered in one of the spare rooms. Steven had put the tables and chairs out on the crazy paving where Kirsty liked to sit.
Jordan stepped to one side and let the visitor come through the French windows.
‘You must be Mr Wing-Godfrey?’
‘Bernard, please.’
The president of the Louise Magellan Teazle Society was a middle-aged brown man. Brown hair, eyes, suit, shoes and socks. And brown skin, though he wasn’t Indian or Middle Eastern. He was just a brown Englishman.
‘Would you care for some tea, Mr Wing-Godfrey?’ asked Jordan, a perfect miniature hostess.
‘As for nectar, my dear.’
‘I’ll fetch some, then. Mum?’
Kirsty declined. She had been drinking iced lemon tea all morning.
‘What a lovely girl you have, Mrs Naremore,’ said Bernard. ‘Shows the Drearcliff spirit, I’ll be bound. I see you’ve been doing your homework.’
Books were piled on the lattice table, the Weezie stories and the first of the school series, A New Girl at Drearcliff Grange.
‘I’ve been cataloguing the library.’
Bernard’s eyes gleamed as if Kirsty had mentioned a treasure trove. For him, Louise Teazle’s library must seem a pirate’s cave: first editions of all her books, of course, along with foreign and reprint editions – Kirsty couldn’t recognise all the languages Louise had been published in – and the books she had loved herself. If there were unpublished manuscripts, early drafts or personal journals, they had not shown up so far. Kirsty expected real treasures would be hidden, perhaps guarded. When the Hollow wanted her to find anything, she would be led to it.
‘And I’ve been reading again, refreshing my memory.’
‘You read Teazle as a girl?’ asked Bernard.
Kirsty shrugged. ‘Didn’t everyone?’
‘Most girls, a few boys, until, say, twenty years ago. Even since then, there has been a great deal of interest. She has always been in print. Specialist presses keep her work alive. I have been on television, several times, talking about the Society. Our members are very active.’
Jordan came back with tea and withdrew into the house.
Bernard let out a satisfied ‘Ahhh’ with his first swallow.
‘Didn’t your school friends give you a hard time for liking Louise?’ asked Kirsty. ‘I’d have thought boys even then thought she was soppy.’
‘I came to Teazle late in life, Mrs Naremore. She meant a great deal to me at a trying time. I was confined, against my will, far from home. Her books were, quite literally, my lifeline.’
Kirsty wasn’t fazed by Bernard’s odd admission. She felt she understood this man.
‘Have you been here before?’ she asked. ‘When Louise was alive?’
‘It was not my place to impose on Miss Teazle.’
Even Bernard’s fingernails were brown. Not dirt, not bad health, not even stained. ‘Only now have I, as it were, plucked up the necessary courage.’
‘I hope you’re not disappointed.’
He looked at the orchard. Tim was hidden in there somewhere, as green as Bernard Wing-Godfrey was brown.
‘Our members are most envious that you invited me to the Hollow. It is sacred turf to us, of course. The Avalon of Teazle.’
Kirsty didn’t know how to take that. She ought be made uncomfortable by this odd fellow, but was at her ease. He was reverent of the Hollow. She should extend him a welcome.
‘We were wondering whether you would be averse to opening your home to a select number of us, on a strictly limited basis of course. We would not want to invade or swamp you. We should winnow out the applicants. Only the most presentable would pass. The Society is not without funds. We would, of course, reimburse you any expenses, and indeed be prepared to pay a fee for the privilege of access. I am empowered to gift you with quite a substantial figure. To help with the restoration. We could also provide advice. Some of us have made a deep study of Teazle. We know where everything goes, you see. We know how things should be.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘This table and these four chairs, for instance. You have them at the wrong end of the Puzzle Patio.’
The Puzzle Patio was in Weezie and the Hopscotch Hobgoblin. It was also, Kirsty realised, this crazy-paved stretch outside the French windows.
‘They should be over by the tower, near the kitchen door. So Katie the Cook can hand Weezie apple juice through the sink window. More importantly so, when she stands on a chair, she can see through the tree telescope and over the moor to the standing stones.’
‘I’m not sure
the stones are real. I think Louise made them up. She was probably thinking of Glastonbury Tor. We can see that from the picture window.’
Bernard seemed saddened by Kirsty’s lack of trust in Teazle. He put down his tea and stood, then tugged Kirsty across the lawn towards the kitchen door. She did not resist.
He turned her round and pointed, between the trees, putting a hand on the small of her back to encourage her to stand on tiptoes. She became as tall as a child standing on a chair.
‘The branches of that tree make a fork, a sight-line. The tree telescope. See the mump with the stones.’
‘You’re right.’
Kirsty felt light, as if she might drift upwards. From just this spot, looking through a tunnel-like curl of branches, she saw, miles off across the moor, a hillock with five upright stones around an altar-piece.
She leaned to one side and tried to look around the tree. Another tree was in the way. She leaned to the other and the side of the barn cut off the view. She walked out on the lawn, past the tower, almost to the ditch. The land sloped slightly and a far-off copse blocked view of the stones.
It was remarkable.
‘Here is where the table should be,’ said Bernard.
She went back to the patio and found herself agreeing with him.
‘The full resources of the Society are available, Mrs Naremore – Kirsty, may I call you? We feel you have been chosen by Dame Fortune to be custodians of this place that is so special to us all. We owe you our support, our help, our labour.’
He kissed her on both cheeks and left.
If she didn’t hear the cough of his car leaving the drive or see his empty cup on that wrongly placed table, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he had never been there.
By now, she knew a ghost when she saw – or sensed – one.
* * *
On the long table in the Summer Room, Mum had laid out an array of oddments she had found in the storerooms. Jordan supposed the stuff ought to be called Teazleiana. Mum had brought the collection out to show her visitor. Colouring books and diaries, cuddly Weezie dolls, a spinning top with Weezie’s ghost friends painted on it, Weezie and Drearcliff Grange jigsaws, a Gloomy Ghost money-box, Drearcliff badges and boaters, a Weezie whistle. The playthings of her grandparents’ generation. No game cartridges, action figures, boxer shorts, videos, pogs, graphic novels, collectible cards, temporary tattoos.