An English Ghost Story

by Kim Newman

  ‘Tea,’ he creaked.

  ‘Just about now that would be most welcome. What say we, girls?’

  The After Lights-Out Gang chirruped enthusiasm.

  Steven tried not to fall off the steps on the way down. He dashed out of the garage, not caring what these loonies thought, and filled his lungs with fresh air.

  ‘Are you overcome by the closeness?’ Miss Hazzard asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ he said.

  ‘I quite understand.’

  The young woman laid a hand on the crook of his elbow and squeezed, like a very old relative.

  ‘You should wear a crystal to earth the power, or it’ll build. In the end, something will go pop! and there’ll be tears before bedtime.’

  He felt better already. It had just been the hayloft. Something in the hayloft.

  It took engineering to get Mrs Bullitt down the ladder. One of the Japanese women asked if she could spend a penny. He gave her the choice between the outside loo and the ground floor inside toilet.

  ‘It’s glands,’ Mrs Twomey said, nodding at Mrs Bullitt. ‘She’s a martyr to her glands.’

  Jordan appeared from the kitchen, wearing a straw boater with a tartan band.

  Tea things were set out on the garden table. Jordan had made a pile of sandwiches and arranged biscuit selections into mandala mosaics on three large plates.

  Dare he let these people eat or drink anything Jordan prepared? She could have laced the tea with weed-killer or spread drain-cleaner on the sandwiches. He didn’t pretend to know what went on inside her head and this had been such a day of disasters he almost expected another explosion.

  Jordan picked up the large tea-pot – it looked like an oversized Alice prop – and posed, like a giant tea-pot herself, arm crooked like a handle, pot held like a spout.

  ‘Shall I be mother?’ said his daughter.

  * * *

  They survived tea. Kirsty would never again underestimate Jordan. She’d acted as if this whole farce was expected and planned. Had Jordan known about the surprise visit in advance? And kept quiet to bring about just this situation? A disaster which made her look better than her parents? Kirsty hadn’t expected a challenge from that direction, but behind her daughter’s retro timidity was dangerous steel.

  Kirsty sat, gripping her tea-cup like a fetish, as Jordan talked knowledgeably and amusingly about living in Weezie’s room. The Society were won over by the girl in school uniform. Kirsty didn’t realise her daughter had read so much Louise Teazle.

  Jordan looked younger, yet more poised.

  The crises were not over. Once Wing-Godfrey’s crowd were persuaded to depart, the family still had a great sorting-out to go through. Kirsty didn’t expect all of them to be still standing when it was over.

  Whatever else, the After Lights-Out Gang had saved them from a titanic row. That was a mercy. Steven hadn’t exploded, so he must have been forced to cool down. Jordan had proved by her actions that she was not a pushover.

  A settlement would be reached, a division of power. Nothing permanent. Something workable until the next quake. Kirsty was not going to let the others get away with this. If it looked unliveable for her, she’d call Vron.

  She smiled at the thought. No matter what they had found in themselves at the Hollow, Steven and Jordan were no match for Vron. Beside her, they were amateurs. Vron played with people’s heads the way most folk played patience, to pass the time and keep her hand in. There were Vron stories Steven didn’t know.

  Kirsty forced herself to pay attention to the chatter.

  Jordan was coaxing personal, human things out of Miss Hazzard – Harriet Hazzard, she turned out to be, which made her sound like the heroine of a girls’ story. She had an open place at an Oxford college, but couldn’t take it up at the moment because she was carer for her brother, who had AIDS.

  It had never occurred to Kirsty before, but Jordan didn’t have visible friends. Not even – or especially not – Rick. Seeing her chatting with a girl more or less her own age was odd.

  Steven was stuck between Mrs Twomey and Mrs Bullitt, who gave the lie to his male master of the universe act of an hour or so ago. She saw how sad and funny her husband was, if pushed, and remembered she loved him. There was a chance the family would come through this afternoon without blowing to bits.

  ‘Now,’ announced Bernard Wing-Godfrey, whom she would find hard to trust again, ‘this fine repast consumed, shall we repair to the interior of the Hollow, to ferret out its secrets and savour its scents?’

  He stood and the tour was on again.

  * * *

  Tim knew this was it. The balloon was up. The French windows shut, almost by themselves. His family was trapped in a killing box, along with unknown non-combatants. There must be a fifth columnist or two in the crowd. Typical of the hostiles to send spies or saboteurs.

  The smiling pane showed its fangs.

  At long last, the moment came. Tim let go of the elastic. The U-Dub unloosed its payload.

  He scored a direct hit.

  * * *

  One of the windows burst. A shower of sparkly fragments fell on them.

  Jordan’s whole body went taut. She wanted to curl up in a rioter’s protective position.

  The sound, like a gunshot, reverberated in the Summer Room. Other windows rattled. She was seized with a panic that more attacks would come. A blast-wave would roll through the orchard, against the side of the house, smashing the big windows. The room would become a blizzard of razor-fragments to shred them all.

  ‘Something is in my eye,’ said Mrs Twomey, evenly. ‘I don’t want to touch it.’

  A missile pinged off the ceiling and fell to the floor.

  Jordan’s ears rang. A final diamond of glass fell and broke on the flagstones. She was still on her feet.

  Harriet, tentatively in charge, held Mrs Twomey’s head and looked professionally into her eye. The stooped girl had a lot of strength. Jordan liked her.

  ‘I see it,’ Harriet said.

  The injured woman winced.

  ‘Can I help?’ Jordan asked.

  Harriet told her to fetch water.

  Mrs Twomey screamed as Harriet’s spit-wet finger neared her eye. She screwed up her face, which made her pain – real or imagined – worse, and screamed again. Her screech was high, shrill, girly – not at all what Jordan expected from such a solid barrel of a woman.

  She nipped to the kitchen and came back with a shallow bowl of water and a sheet of quilted paper.

  ‘Wash it out,’ Harriet said. ‘Here, let me.’

  The girl dripped water into Mrs Twomey’s eye.

  ‘All gone, Mrs T.,’ she said. ‘You were brave.’

  Quieted, Mrs Twomey blinked a lot, panic over and the shard gone.

  ‘It was a window,’ said one of the Kanaoka sisters, picking up a piece. ‘Smashed.’

  This was not an accident. There had been a missile. She had heard it fall.

  She rooted around and found what she was looking for. Gripping the object, she approached the others. Opening her fist, she showed them a pebble.

  She knew who had fired the shot, knew (in a flash of insight) who had left the shrews outside her door, who had been campaigning against her.

  ‘Someone’s playing silly buggers,’ she said.

  * * *

  It was not an expression he’d ever heard his daughter use. It sounded strange, though he had to agree with the sentiment.

  ‘What happened?’ someone asked.

  He didn’t know. He was acutely embarrassed by that. He was supposed to be on top of things. This was his house and he should have an answer for every question. It was about confidence. Even if you didn’t know, you weren’t supposed to say so. There were ways of waffling with conviction which usually worked with his clients. Just now, he had lost the knack.

  Steven stepped towards the French windows, determined to act.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ said Kirsty.

  He igno
red her and went into the orchard.

  No one around. He hadn’t expected there to be. He made out a sightline from the smashed window to the fallen tree.

  Tim’s fallen tree.

  * * *

  After firing, he felt an exhilaration, a freedom. The tension in his shoulder, elbow and wrist was gone. The missile was in the air. This was unknown territory.

  Now, with the PP on the warpath, he was afraid.

  Something had gone wrong. The window-pane was gone, the gap as black as a missing tooth, but the smile still hung there, like a twitching cobweb.

  Screaming had come from inside the house. Collateral damage. It happened in wartime, innocents falling to friendly fire.

  ‘Tim, come down,’ the PP shouted.

  He squirmed inside the tree, squirrelling back away from the knothole, compressing his body into a small space, willing himself to become part of the wood.

  ‘I know you’re there.’

  He had another pebble. The U-Dub was ready for reloading. The situation was desperate. He slipped the missile into the thong and pulled back.

  He sighted through the hole, on the lawn.

  The PP came into view and looked up. The U-Dub targeted on his forehead.

  Tim listened out, for suggestions from the Ipkick. Comms were down. He was on his own, here. It would be his snap decision.

  Was his father a threat? A covert hostile?

  ‘Come on down, Tim,’ the PP said.

  Tim’s fingers wavered. He remembered the freedom of letting go.

  Caught, he wished he had a hollow tooth full of cyanide. At the back of his mind, it had always worried him that Green Base, while defensible, had only one safe entrance and egress. It took only one man to besiege him. He could hold the position indefinitely – he was provisioned and the space was too small for anyone larger than him – but there was no easy escape.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ Dad lied.

  Tim knew the PP’s moods. This calm, loud one meant he was very angry indeed, close to losing control. That had happened only a few times, but was terrifying, a betrayal of the non-aggression pact between them. Up until the last, Dad would be rational, cool and insistent, then it would all fly apart and he would lash out with everything he had.

  Could Tim take the PP out with one shot?

  No. That was not an acceptable loss. He relaxed the U-Dub and slipped it into its holster-pocket Tim climbed, up past the knothole. The tree was hollow, open at top and bottom. If he couldn’t get out at the bottom, he would have to try the top.

  He worked his way up. The interior contours of the tree seemed to change from moment to moment. He saw a patch of leaf-shaded daylight above. Previously, he had only been able to poke his head out. Now, he would have to get his whole body through.

  The IP lined the ridges of the inside of the tree. Tim felt hands grasping his wrists, helping him heft up higher, clearing obstacles. This much they would do. His knees were rubbed raw. Something twiggy lashed across his face.

  ‘Tim,’ the PP shouted.

  He reached the egress and slipped through. His head, shoulders and arms made it, but his hips caught. He could cry with frustration. But crying was for babies, for kids. He wasn’t going to cry again.

  It was the U-Dub, sticking out. He let himself go limp, reached back with one hand and took the catapult, then slipped it out of the tree. Now, armed, he could escape easily.

  He stood on one branch and grabbed a higher one. Both sagged, creaking under his weight, but didn’t break.

  Apples came loose and bombed the ground.

  Tim looked down through leaves and branches. Dad hopped out of the way, a ripe apple splitting at his feet. Other apples fell. The PP dodged comically, getting out from under the tree.

  ‘Tim, I see you,’ he shouted.

  Tim had expected that. His plan was to clamber along the sturdiest of the branches and make it to another tree, then the ground, then dash for the perimeter and the fording place at the corner of the property.

  Once off the Hollow, he would be safe.

  (Why? What would stop Dad making an incursion into neutral territory to bring him back?)

  The sturdiest branch wasn’t as sturdy as he had thought. It normally brushed against the finger-like outlying branches of the nearest tree, but with his weight, it bowed out of reach and towards the ground.

  Tim had nowhere to go.

  * * *

  ‘Your son?’ asked Wing-Godfrey, mildly. ‘Some boyish jape?’

  Kirsty was knotted inside.

  Steven was capering like a slapstick fool. Tim dangled from a branch like an overripe fruit, twenty feet above unforgiving ground.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the Society.

  She seemed to wade through broken glass to get to the French windows. Surely one small pane couldn’t make so much debris? The glass had been shattered as if by a bullet. If the pebble had been aimed at a person, there might have been a fatality. It was a mercy Mrs Twomey, whose shrieks had let the school down, was not blinded in one eye.

  No one had consulted her about whether a killer catapult was a suitable toy for a young boy. Now, the answer was only too obvious. It wasn’t as if a written constitution decreed all male children had the right to own and operate projectile weapons. Steven indulged the boy, delighted his son had the man-skills to make and use such a horrible instrument of harm.

  If they lived through today, her foot was coming down.

  No matter what the catapult lobby argued, there was going to be a confiscation.

  ‘Tim,’ she said, ‘don’t move.’

  Her son heard her and went slack. With one hand, he held a branch that yawed alarmingly; in the other, he clutched his catapult.

  ‘Drop that bloody thing and hang on with both hands,’ she said.

  Tim shook his head, imperceptibly. He would rather fall to his death than be disarmed.

  Where had he learned such values?

  ‘Tell him,’ she told Steven.

  Her husband was no use here. He didn’t listen to her.

  ‘Come down,’ he shouted.

  Tim was frightened. His legs shook. His footing was unsure.

  Did Steven want their son to fall? Was he so angry with Tim that he had forgotten to be frightened for him?

  One of Tim’s soles slipped off green bark and his leg dangled in space. The trainer came off and took an eternity to fall. Her heart and breath stopped until the shoe bounced on the grass, then she melted inside.

  She could not cope with this any longer.

  She wanted to tell Tim to go back, to climb down safely, to run up to his mum for a hug and promise never to endanger himself like this again. She wanted a long, sensible family talk about the dangers of the catapult. She wanted everyone – Steven as much as Tim – to say sorry and promise to do better in the future.

  But wanting didn’t mean moving. She was frozen.

  Bernard Wing-Godfrey and his Society stood on the crazy paving outside the French windows, a goggling audience for this tragic stupidity. Despite his inconvenient arrival, she still thought he might be important to her plans for the Hollow.

  She knew she should be thinking only of her family, but couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. Every time she had something going on her own, Steven or Jordan or Tim would barge in demanding attention. That was why her projects fell by the wayside. The worst thing was that the others wrote off the failures as her fault. It was her woolly-headedness, her ineptitude, her impracticality, her lack of commitment. Not their interfering, their jealousy, their nagging need to be at the centre of her world every moment of the day.

  A sound came from the back of her throat. She had no idea what the word she was trying to get out might be. Her vocal cords were dry sandpaper.

  Tim dangled like a monkey, from one hand, by one foot.

  Someone was going to die.

  * * *

  He had gone as far as he could. The branches swayed as if in a strong wind.

  Tim was
n’t the only weight in the tree.

  He clung to his branch, feeling it bend. The IP were with him but he needed them to back off. He couldn’t see them but knew they were there.

  They were filing out, one by one, humping along the branch.

  The tree creaked and cracked. It wouldn’t have fallen in the first place if it were healthy.

  Branches bent. Tim’s fingers were greased by sweat. One of his trainers was gone. His socked foot kept slipping off a bark-skinned patch of wet wood.

  People shouted from below, but he couldn’t make out their words.

  The Ipkick squatted safely, a few branches up. Tim saw her position. A faded school tie was knotted around the branch, greened with moss to blend in. Her marker.

  ‘What now, soldier?’

  Tim wondered if it would be best if he stopped playing soldiers.

  The branch he was standing on came away from the tree-trunk. Though still connected by pulpy strands, the bone of the wood was broken. It scythed downwards in a rush of leaves, snapping off twigs, thumping against the hollow bole. Someone – Mum? – screamed, but was shut up halfway. He hadn’t fallen with the branch. He heard the thumping impacts of a dozen apples.

  Hand clamped around the surviving branch, he hung on. His wrist burned. His shoulder, strained from holding the firing position, yanked painfully.

  He tried to let go of the U-Dub, to bring his left hand into play, but the catapult was holding him rather than the other way round. The smile came up in his mind, mocking him.

  He reached up, ignoring the hot pain in his shoulder, and hooked his left arm over the springy branch. If he pulled himself up, he’d have a secure perch up by the Ipkick.

  His ally gave him no encouragement.

  Was the Ipkick his ally? Had it all been a trick? Had he unknowingly given everything away to the commander of the hostiles?

  With that thought, he lost his hold.

  * * *

  Adeadweight fell out of the sky. Steven had no time to cradle his arms. His son landed on him like a sack of horseshoes. Knocked off his feet, he thumped against the ground. A tooth went and salt blood leaked onto his tongue. The fingers of his left hand bent the wrong way.

  Kirsty was screaming. And so was he.

  Tim was still moving. He tried to get away. Steven made a grab with his injured hand. As he made a fist around a fold of Tim’s T-shirt, liquid agony jolted his whole arm.