An English Ghost Story

by Kim Newman

  She hooked up the shower attachment and let the water run, as hot as it could get. She would need to scald off a layer of dirty skin (that Rick had touched) and start to scrub away some of the subcutaneous fat.

  It would not be enough, but would be a start. She needed to scrape the fluffiness out of her hair, get rid of the conditioner. Later, she might hack it all off. For the moment, she would just pull it back.

  She looked hard into the mirror over the sink, watching herself become ghostly as hot fog swarmed on the reflective surface. Her eyes finally disappeared in the murk.

  That was that. It was over.

  The fake Jordan, the one who had come out in the Hollow, was banished.

  This was the real girl. She might not be as biddable, as beddable. But she was herself and herself alone. She didn’t have to pretend. She didn’t have to fake anything to please other people, to gull those who would gull her.

  A droplet ran down the mirror like a tear, cutting a clear line, showing the reflection of her cheek. The fake Jordan was crying.

  She smiled, savagely.

  Good. It was good that the girl cried. She was the ‘It’s My Party’ girl, the helpless blubberer, the girl who could do nothing but whine and feel sorry for herself.

  Wiping the tear away, she glimpsed bared teeth in the hand-shaped reflecting patch. Fog gathered again, swift and efficient, and grey moisture blotted out her snarly grin.

  She stepped into the tub and let the wet pain fall on her, holding herself rigid under the torrent, broiling her skin lobster-red, scourging the last of the fake Jordan.

  She was the ‘Judy’s Turn to Cry’ girl now.

  * * *

  Steven sat in his study, warm inside from breakfast, mind alert from two cups of fresh-ground coffee. He looked out of the window at his son playing in the orchard. Tim was happy. Kirsty would come round soon, when the penny dropped. Jordan was seventeen: breaking up with a useless boyfriend was part of the process. She’d mope a bit and play misery records. He’d happily lend her his Smiths CDs when she wore out her oldies. In a week or so, she’d snap back and be ready to break hearts when she met a whole new crowd at college in September. It was like the old Kirsty to overreact and treat every minute fluctuation of adolescent mood as a harbinger of apocalypse.

  If anything, he was more concerned about Kirsty.

  He was looking at an e-mail from Tatum. The Oddments debts were more substantial than they’d thought. Tatum was suggesting that someone had been dipping into the account, basically stripping the business before it disappeared entirely, leaving the mess for someone else to tidy up. Tatum didn’t say who she thought that person was, but he assumed her number-one suspect was Kirsty herself. His wife had been buying things for the house but Steven had seen the paperwork on everything – the money had come from his own temporarily flush accounts. No, it could only be one person.

  The Wild Witch. Veronica Gorse. Vron.

  Kirsty was the main signatory for her business account but she had drafted Veronica as an alternate co-signee. She had complained it wasn’t convenient to wait until Steven was there – he had been travelling much more than now – to pay for anything. Veronica had a lot to do with the business as it was, so Kirsty brought her in as a semi-partner, whatever that meant. Things had been going awry before then, but the addition of the Wild Witch to the set-up hadn’t helped at all.

  Steven was sure it was Veronica. Kirsty had once asked him to scribble signatures on a book of blank cheques. His refusal had been the thing that made her bring Veronica in. Had Kirsty been foolish enough to do something like that herself and give the chequebook to Vron?

  He would have to be careful about how he brought it up. In the city, this sort of thing had been like lighting the blue touch paper. At the Hollow, all that was behind them but he remembered only too well what Kirsty had been like.

  It wasn’t so much her business – which she accused him of never treating seriously – as the combination of her business and Veronica. The woman was a menace and everything she touched came apart at the seams. Even now, he wasn’t sure whether she was dangerously inept or actively malign. She was supposed to have trained as a therapist, but her methods seemed closer to New Age voodoo.

  Veronica wasn’t here. The Hollow would never let her near.

  There was only Kirsty. And Kirsty was free of all evil influences. She’d been rescued from the brink, reclaimed for the good. He couldn’t claim the credit. It was down to the house as much as him, down to the establishment of a real home for the family.

  He composed a reply to Tatum. She was to transfer enough funds to settle the Oddments overdraft to the penny, paying all bank charges, then close down the account – ironically, he would need to get Kirsty to co-sign a letter to make it official – so that any cheques still floating around could not be drawn on it. Ideally, he wanted this implemented today, to cut off the wandering witch and her cash-sucking ways.

  The e-mail went off and he thought about how to sell the move to Kirsty. She’d be free of all debts to anyone but him, but the last vestige of her independent business would be gone.

  It shouldn’t bother her, but he would be cautious.

  * * *

  Steven emerged from his sanctum mid-morning with a sheaf of papers. He wanted Kirsty to witness his signature on a batch of contracts and fed them to her one by one, efficiently getting white space under her scribbling hand. Once signed, each document went in an envelope and was sealed with a deft lick and press. He told her what they were about but she didn’t take it in. From experience, she knew his business was endlessly fascinating to Steven but atrociously boring to anyone else. Just now, she was too preoccupied even to fake interest.

  Mission accomplished, Steven gathered his envelopes and announced that he would walk into the village to the postbox. She let him go.

  Jordan hadn’t come down, though noises had been heard. Poltergeist-clattering in her room.

  It struck Kirsty as funny.

  Ghosts lived at the Hollow but Jordan was haunting it. Her daughter was the stick-thin spectre in the black shroud, huge dead eyes accusing, bony fingers reaching out to clutch. The ghosts were more normal, just…

  Just what?

  Feelings, mostly. And objects. Warm winds and invisible caresses. The secure world of a little girl before the War, surviving in a bubble.

  The ghosts would help Jordan, if only Jordan would let them.

  Just as the Hollow would help Kirsty.

  * * *

  As he walked to the village, Steven’s insides unknotted. He’d slipped the letter past Kirsty, avoiding a possibly hairy scene. She need never know, since he suspected she didn’t quite realise he needed her signature to close her account. She had turned it all over to him verbally. He was just taking care of the clearing-up without troubling her. If she knew, she would be grateful for his consideration.

  The further away he got from the Hollow, the surer he was.

  Even in this age of electronic communication, some things had to be sent by snail mail. Legal documents that required physical signatures and matters where confidentiality was a priority.

  Small chores that got him out of his study were good for him. He was working long hours but not seeming to feel tired. The Hollow was a nurturing environment and brought the best out of him, but he had to get away sometimes. Once every few days, he walked the mile or so to Sutton Mallet. It wasn’t much of a village. There wasn’t even a post office, just a red pillar box. There never seemed to be anyone about.

  He popped the letters in the box.

  There. That was done. No going back on it.

  He promised not to beat himself over the head about it. He had done a kind deed, not a cruel one. A certain degree of sneakiness was involved, but subterfuge was a neutral tool. It wasn’t wrong to dissemble – to lie – if you were keeping a surprise party from someone. The outcome was what was important.

  Nothing stirred around the triangular green. Heat haze made t
he air shimmer at knee-height. There was a pub, The Lady, but it never seemed open. There was a church and a graveyard. No signs of life. Maybe the village was like Paris: everyone headed to the seaside in the summer. Some cottages were shut up, the weekend retreats of yuppie city-folk who were abroad on their hols.

  It had been hard to convince Brian Bowker that they planned on living full-time at the Hollow, rather than merely occupying it at two- and three-day stretches. Already, Steven thought of the absentee owners as incomers and city-folk. The Naremores were local, landed.

  He walked back home.

  * * *

  With a Burt Bacharach Collection – ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself’, ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’, ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ – on loud in her room, Jordan sat at Miss Teazle’s antique PC and drafted a letter to Rick. The document was up to twenty-two pages, which she would have to cut down to a manageable size. If there were too much of it, the effect would dissipate. This communication was designed to stick in the mind.

  Simple abuse wouldn’t do. If he had nerved himself up to make the break, he was ready for that. After all, he’d got out of their relationship at the lowest cost by simply not turning up. His cowardice was the weakness she had to home in on, and his susceptibility to outside influence. She laced the letter with disparaging comment on his taste in television and recreational literature. To him, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a sacred text.

  She wrote a memoir of their life together, listing each of his many failings. She stirred a little fiction into the mix and claimed to have slept with three of his friends and a member of his family. Five pages on, still mentioning no names, she said that she had slept with two of his friends. The discrepancy was a stroke of genius. His question wouldn’t be ‘Have you really slept with my friends?’ but ‘How many of my friends have you slept with?’ The other thing would shred his family. Presumably, he’d rule out his twelve-year-old brother – though she had caught Benny looking at her breasts – and home in on his dad, with whom he was always rowing but who’d always played flirty games with her, or start wondering about her and his sister Marilyn, who was just a bit dikey.

  Even if Rick didn’t believe a word of it, he wouldn’t be able to resist digging around for evidence. That sort of suspicion – as she knew only too well from the Veronica Wars – could destroy relationships as easily as any actual trespass.

  By the end of the letter, she believed it herself. She had a physical memory of sex with Walker, with Rick’s dad, with Marilyn. She knew about their birthmarks, their hidden tattoos, the looks on their faces when they came. She heard the little laughs that clogged their throats afterwards as they looked at her lying there naked, and smiled hard at what they’d just done with precious Rick’s precious girlfriend.

  If she was learning anything at the Hollow, it was that wishing makes it so.

  ‘The Look of Love’ came on, one of the lying songs that insinuated everything was all right, but she deftly zapped with the remote, skipping to ‘Blue on Blue’. Even that didn’t quite do it for her. She was beginning to resent all the whining in these songs. Why couldn’t there be more like ‘Judy’s Turn to Cry’?

  She laced in choice quotations from Rick’s friends, telling him what they really thought about him. She had twigged at once to the resentment Walker and his mates had around Rick. He was going to college and university while they were just going to kick around nowhere being bullied onto training schemes that never led to jobs. Rick might be clever, but that didn’t make him smart. It was true: Rick’s mates wanted him to fall on his face. Persuading him not to come to the West Country was probably a part of it. When he read her version, he would be sure Walker – she knew he had to have been the one who kept nagging at him about it, calling for one more drink and upping him from beer to spirits – had worked a trick on his head so he could himself have a chance at her.

  Maybe she wasn’t making it up? Walker was nineteen and had had a succession of skanky thirteen-year-old girlfriends. He had a streak of Rick’s cleverness but had been chucked out of school for vandalism and now spent most of his time at other peoples’ flats, stealing their paperbacks to sell down the market so he could buy club drugs. Maybe Walker really did have a thing for her.

  It was credible.

  She put in several mentions of Walker, noting (truthfully) that his favourite sentence opening when talking to Rick was ‘The trouble with you is…’

  This was a letter bomb. It would go off and destroy the bastard.

  Her knuckles ached from typing. Her shoulders were knotted from hunching over the keyboard. She was cultivating a hump.

  Cold fingers brushed her hackles, like the first touch of a masseur. An electric shiver ran up her spine and she writhed in black pleasure.

  Thumb-like ice spots worked against her shoulders, numbing the knots.

  She felt her hair rise around her in static tendrils.

  The friends she had made at the Hollow were with her. She understood they were her real friends now, her family.

  * * *

  He hated it, but there was only one conclusion. They had a traitor in the outfit. The IP disavowed any knowledge of the attack on Green Base. They were in a lather about it too.

  Tim worked to secure the violated facility. Strictly, he should abandon the position and relocate to the Fall Back Point under the bridge, but he had put too much into his HQ. A line had to be drawn and here it was.

  In the dark hollow of the tree, he met with the IP rep. She looked like a little girl in a straw hat. Earlier, she’d shown herself in light. Now, she kept to shadow. The incursion had spooked her people. He couldn’t blame them.

  The U-Dub was loaded and ready.

  He held at DefCon 4.

  Over and again, he ran through the possibilities. Mum, Dad, Jordan. Each possible betrayal was a kick in the guts. He couldn’t afford to be queasy or sentimental. The IP assured him the perimeter had not been breached. The attack had come from within, from someone at the Hollow.

  Mum, Dad, Jordan.

  Tim thought back to before, to the trying times. He’d had to train himself up sharpish to stay out of the fire, when the flat turned into a combat zone and battle raged all around.

  They had seemed different people in London. Or was it here that they seemed different?

  Had the city been the truth?

  It could have been any of them. They’d have had to get up before him and carry out the attack, then sneak back. The MP and the PP were in the kitchen afterwards, having breakfast or pretending to. The BS was still in her room.

  Could they be working together?

  In London, the three had formed shifting alliances, one out and two in, unstable enough to collapse within hours. He had always been under pressure to compromise his neutrality by pitching in with one or other of the factions.

  This felt like a solo attack, a rogue mission.

  That usually meant the BS.

  But he wasn’t ruling anyone out.

  He had no choice. He had to escalate, to show he could not be intimidated. He shifted up to DefCon 3.

  * * *

  She had crept up the tower stairs and lingered outside Jordan’s room, several times. Music leaked from inside, not the muffled tinkle that came from earphones but bone-shaking full-blast stereo easy listening. For about the thousandth time, Kirsty wondered how her daughter had come by her musical tastes. It was like a mutant throwback, the most repressed aspects of the past surging up again.

  Steven was probably right: Jordan was better off without the wretched Rick. But Kirsty knew all too well what it was to live through this sort of trivial despair, either at ground zero or within the blast area. That it was a teenage-magazine problem-page cliché didn’t make it hurt any less. Jordan was an extraordinary girl; to have such an ordinary heartbreak made it all the worse.

  Kirsty hovered in the passage for the fourth or fifth time, looking at the door, taking comfort from the light around the
jamb. At least Jordan hadn’t sealed herself inside with black masking tape (she had done once). That time, she had taped around the window as well and blocked up a ventilation panel, presumably intending to breathe herself to death. With the old Jordan, the Jordan Kirsty was afraid would come back, it was hard to distinguish between a suicide attempt and a performance art piece.

  A floorboard creaked under her. Had Jordan heard that? Unlikely, through the lounge aria.

  She rapped a knuckle to the door. ‘Some tea, dear,’ she offered, the Englishwoman’s cure-all.

  A groan communicated a negative.

  ‘Will you be down later?’ she asked, hating the high landlady’s wheedle that crept into her voice, fake cheerful but horribly nagging. ‘You haven’t eaten.’

  ‘Not hungry,’ came a reply, perfectly enunciated.

  ‘Darling?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Crystal.’

  ‘I can bring you something on a tray, leave it outside.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Kirsty was pricked by things unsaid. If she forced her way in and imposed care and attention on her daughter, she wouldn’t be thanked. At least, not this week. Maybe later, when they were both more grown up and Jordan had children of her own, they would smile, thinking back, and hug, remembering their closeness at this moment.

  She put her hand against the door.

  Other possibilities flashed at her. Facing the cold fury of her daughter, watching her carve patterns in her forearms or hack off all her hair with a breadknife. Kirsty might be that last element in the compound, the one that created the volatile substance. It’d be like watching Jordan go out the window.

  That was a possibility, too.

  ‘All right dear,’ she said. ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Thank you, Mother.’

  On the stairs, Kirsty was seized by the chills. The further away she was from Jordan’s room, the more wrong things seemed. It wasn’t the Hollow, could never be that. She worried her daughter was cutting herself off from the magic, detaching from the glow the family shared here, throwing herself back into a dreary world of disorders and disappointments.