An English Ghost Story

by Kim Newman

  Jordan’s face was scarlet, not from embarrassment but because the choker collar of the child’s lilac dress she was putting on was sizes too small.

  No one made a move to troop downstairs. They’d come all this way to see Weezie’s nook and would bloody well get to poke around inside. Or else, as Miss Hazzard said, there would be tears before bedtime. Their eyes were like the blank lenses of the sisters’ cameras.

  Kirsty had the door at her back. She barred their way. They were uncomfortably close to her.

  The door opened and she stumbled in, taking Tim with her. Jordan shut the door again, against the After Lights-Out Gang.

  Kirsty looked at her daughter.

  How had she managed to get into the dress? Apart from the floppy strangling bow at her neck, the short sleeves were cinches which made her upper arms look like bloated sausages. The hem, only a few inches below her waist, barely covered the top of her knickers. The bodice shrunk onto her torso like some wet leather torture device. Fastened at the back by an interlacing set of hooks and eyes, it was strait-jacket tight, squashing her breasts flat.

  Jordan passed a hand over her hair, prettying herself. She had put clownish red lipstick circles on her cheekbones. Brown freckles made with an eyebrow pencil dotted her face.

  Tim was keening, almost too high-pitched to hear, terrified still.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Jordan asked.

  Kirsty choked.

  * * *

  The landing was crowded. Steven made it up the stairs three at a time and blundered into the After Lights-Out Gang.

  ‘Kirst,’ he said.

  His wife wasn’t there.

  ‘Mrs Naremore is with your daughter,’ Mrs Twomey told him.

  ‘She was not decent,’ said one of the Kanaoka sisters, politely.

  ‘We’ve been minutes waiting here,’ said Mrs Bullitt, in one of those Brummie accents which makes every casual comment sound like a whined complaint. ‘My ankles will punish me for this.’

  ‘You’ve done very well so far, Head Prefect,’ her husband told her. ‘Gold star in your report book.’

  Mrs Bullitt simpered, tiny mouth almost disappearing into her chins.

  Steven shoved his way decorously through to the door. He knocked.

  ‘Kirsty? Kirst?’

  She was with Jordan. Did she know about Rick yet?

  What about all these people?

  He found himself doing what he had done in the hayloft, counting heads, always getting a different figure. Seven, excluding himself. So, eight.

  No: seven, including himself.

  A Society member had gone astray.

  He put his ear to the door and heard nothing. That was probably to the good. He couldn’t take another screaming fit from anyone.

  He turned to the After Lights-Out Gang.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to cut short your visit.’

  There were moans of disappointment and ‘Come-comes’ of disbelief. No one made any motion to back off and leave the house. An explanation was needed, to make them go away. He plumbed his mind for the appropriate phrase, then hit on it.

  ‘There’s been a family emergency,’ he said.

  That was it. A family emergency.

  Only one?

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Twomey. ‘I am so sorry.’

  Steven tried a reassuring smile, but took it back. If reassured, they might stay. He needed to go against his instinct to keep his business to himself, to let them know that this was beyond an emergency.

  ‘A family catastrophe,’ he elaborated.

  ‘Can I do anything to help?’ asked Harriet Hazzard, keen to show off her Guides’ badge for first aid.

  He shook his head.

  ‘We just need some space. You might telephone in a –’

  (week? No.)

  ‘month or so, to reschedule.’

  (Never. He would never let these people back. If it meant sending Kirsty to a deprogrammer, the Louise Magellan Teazle Society – of which he was now an honorary lifetime member, he remembered – would never get back on the property. The Hollow was out of bounds.)

  ‘Some of us have come a long way,’ complained Mrs Bullitt, not needing the accent to emphasise the whine.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said.

  (Not sorry, never sorry, don’t use the word.)

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ he settled for.

  No one moved. He stood between the After Lights-Out Gang and the door, protecting his family – Tim must be inside with Kirsty and Jordan – from these afternoon-tea fanatics. His whole body was tense, even his agonised left fist, as if he expected them to charge him.

  With enough momentum behind her, Mrs Bullitt could splatter him and smash the door in. The Kanaoka sisters would get it all on film, click-click-click.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave.’

  How often had he heard that said? In pubs and bars after drinking-up time. In films where the dissolute relation has disgraced himself in the gentleman’s club and the senior member expresses ultimate disapproval. It always struck him as false. What ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave’ meant was ‘bugger off out of here’. It was always used when politeness was an absurd pretence.

  He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t sorry; he was delighted. Before the (family) emergency, he would have welcomed any opportunity to get shot of the lot of them. He would have wished for any excuse, idly assuming the imaginary emergency would be something that could be settled in a few minutes with enough of the evening left over for a film on telly and a late supper. Not this, not these: not Tim and Kirsty and Rick and Jordan. Not broken dolls which could never be glued back together.

  ‘Please,’ he added, a last resort.

  The After Lights-Out Gang communed among itself, wordlessly. Again, he was sure they would jump him, some pinning him to the floorboards while the others forced the door open.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mrs Twomey, ‘but I hope you understand what a disappointment this is. It’s not the done thing to treat the Society in such cavalier fashion.’

  There was a cavalier in those bloody Weezie books, wasn’t there? And a roundhead.

  ‘Not done at all,’ emphasised the tiny Mr Bullitt, stern with knitted brows.

  ‘Custodianship of the Hollow involves responsibilities,’ Mrs Twomey continued. ‘You’d do well to remind yourself of them constantly.’

  He wanted to cry, to show shocking weakness, to frighten them out of the house. People were hurt, people were dead. That was more serious than whatever it was the After Lights-Out Gang wanted. He had to take care of his family first.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, despising the word.

  Miraculously, one by one, they withdrew. Harriet and the Japanese women first, then – with a strain – the Bullitts. Finally, he was left trading fixed glares with the vice-president. Mrs Twomey saw him as a wrong ‘un, unworthy of the trust he’d unwittingly taken up by moving into this place.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said, devastatingly, and left.

  Alone in the passage, there was more light. The sun was almost down, but red poured in.

  He tried the door again.

  ‘It’s just me,’ he said. ‘They’ve gone. We’re rid of them.’

  No answer.

  He tried to rattle the handle. No give. It was as if handle and door and wall were cast from the same piece of iron.

  Inside the room, what could he do or say to make it better? It wasn’t as if he could reverse his earlier wish and bring Rick back to life. Or was it? If the Hollow could kill at his orders, couldn’t it take back what it had done? It was merely another step into the impossible. There were ways it could be done.

  Maybe Rick wasn’t dead? He only had a voice on a line to go by. He remembered the word ‘careful’ scrolling across his screen. That had come from the Hollow, from the haunt. In this house were presences and faces and sounds. There could be voices too.

  The Hollow might have lie
d to them.

  That was what he must wish for. Not a ‘Monkey’s Paw’ return as a mangled living corpse, but a false report, later retracted. The body burned beyond recognition would be someone else – a no-good who’d stolen Rick’s car and trashed it. Rick would be off somewhere drunk and useless, not realising what had happened. That would explain his no-show at the Hollow, too.

  He thought hard, trying to make it so.

  The door handle gave and Kirsty let him in. She was white, even her lips. In bed, covers tucked up around her neck, Jordan looked like a five-year-old.

  Tim sat in the rocking chair, with his catapult. When this was over, Steven would be decommissioning that little implement of death. He would brook no resistance.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked Kirsty, to find out what she knew rather than to learn anything. ‘How’s Jord?’

  Kirsty shook her head, furious. ‘Don’t listen to her, she’s full of rubbish.’

  ‘It doesn’t like us any more,’ said Jordan, quietly but firmly. ‘They don’t like us any more.’

  ‘You’re telling me. I’ve just had that Mrs Twomey shooting death rays out of her eyes at me. We’re not having them back in a hurry, I can tell you.’

  ‘Not them,’ said his daughter, disgusted with him. ‘Them. Those who were here before us.’

  ‘The ghosts,’ said Tim.

  ‘Them. It. The ghosts. The Hollow. They were all right before we came, but we drove them mad. No surprise, really. We’ve been driving each other mad all along.’

  Steven looked at Jordan, understanding but wishing he didn’t. It was his fault. He had done a terrible thing, made a terrible thing happen. He’d got his wish and found no joy in it. Now, the family were paying for what they had got, paying with pain and fear and worse.

  They weren’t charmed any more. They were haunted.

  * * *

  The family spent the night together, in Weezie’s room (it could not be said to be Jordan’s any longer). Kirsty and Jordan lay cramped on the bed; Tim curled up in the rocking chair, eyes fixed on the black beyond the uncurtained window; Steven huddled by the door, duvet tented around his shoulders. They warded off sleep for as long as possible, but each in turn succumbed to exhaustion, numbness and the dark.

  They all dreamed. They were in the house, at the Hollow, looking for the little girl, who was always in the next room, on the next landing, just outside the door, just beyond the window. She led them a solemn chase, leaving doors to swing slowly closed and curtains to shift like ivy in the wind.

  Each, in their dream, was alone, terrified.

  From the

  JOURNAL

  of a

  VICTORIAN

  GENTLEWOMAN

  8 February

  The Reverend Mr Bannerman is blind. He does not – cannot – understand the Hollow. No one who has not spent night after night after night under its roof can hope to fathom this place. The Mama understands, only too well. But not half so well as I.

  13 February

  I barely remember Father, yet I am certain the portrait which hangs in the Summer Room, painted from his death mask, is not a good likeness. I have read every word he ever set down, but still he is a stranger. The Mama has devoted her life – and mine! – to his sacred memory, but she despises him. His first great sin was dying so carelessly. His second, more unforgivable lapse was not to manifest thereafter. The parade of mediums and sensitives and psychics and charlatans who have passed through the Hollow bear witness to the Mama’s desperate need that Father linger here as a ghost. These people, without fail, commence by stating that they sense his presence, that they are sure they can coax him out of his shadows of concealment with their especial – expensive – services. Then, after a period of various mumbo-jumbo, they take fright. Even arrant frauds swiftly realise that the Hollow is capable of trumping their manufactured illusions. Some flee in panic, some swear to quit their professions, a few even return monies given over to them. Father is not here, not any more, but others are… earthbound spirits and goblins damned!

  20 February

  The Mama is a worse monster than the others. She is petitioning Bannerman to perform a rite of exorcism. She wishes to be alone in the Hollow, with Father. I am never mentioned. She half-believes an exorcism will cast me out too, I think. She cannot tell the difference between her own living daughter and Apple Annie. That song, heard all too often hereabouts, has stuck in her mind. None of the ghosts we have seen or heard – ghosts are not all people, some are things or sensations or transformations – resembles in the least the wailing girl of the song, but the Mama has taken it into her head that Father has deserted her for this chit of a spirit and dallies with her in the orchard. She has fixed upon the tallest of the trees as their amorous nest and loiters by it, tutting and fretting. If Bannerman doesn’t allow bell, book and candle, she will have sawmen in and bring down the tree. The prospect horrifies and saddens me, though I know her beliefs about the tree are baseless. It is a living thing and spirits do cling to it. Apple Annie is a creature from a song and Father is gone. The Mama cannot accept this. Bannerman, no less than her charlatans, is not helping her, or me.

  28 March

  Bannerman will not come back. The Hollow took against him as soon as he started to believe in it. I have seen it do that before, to the worst of the sensitives. The wonderment of levitating crockery passes rapidly when a heavy tureen smashes against a man’s face. The Hollow can mark those it deems enemies. It can kill. It killed Father, I am sure. Then it cast him out. I wish it would kill again. Truly, I do.

  2 April

  The Mama is worse in spring, as apple blossom thickens the air. She wavers between decreeing an execution order for the tall tree and having the whole orchard destroyed. The ‘school’ attracts fewer and fewer pupils as the fad for Father’s works passes from the public memory. Our only real income is from the apples. ‘Apple Annie’s, they call them. It is believed that the fruit has bewitching properties. Girls who set their caps at lads make them gifts of Apple Annie’s. It falls to me every year to arrange the picking and sale of the fruit. The Mama sometimes takes to calling me ‘the farm girl’. I have caught her out several times in her claim that ‘her Primrose’ died soon after Father, and that I am a jumped-up pupil who has become a servant. When the mood takes her, she threatens me with dismissal, accuses me of stealing items (in truth, I have had to resort to the pawnshop in Taunton to pay for household necessities) and upbraids me for my many mismanagements. Her Primrose would never be so ungrateful, she shrieks. She carries with her a riding-crop, though she has not set herself on a horse these past twenty-five years. She lashes out, inflicting what she calls her ‘sting’. My hands, as I write, are striped with repeated stings. Some who I employed last year to bring in the apples will not return because of her habit of doling out instant punishments for ‘liberties’.

  24 April

  I dread death, not as most do. I have no terror of the great unknown. For I know only too well what is to come. Bannerman’s heaven and hell are comforting lies, just as Apple Annie’s enchanted orchard or the Spiritualists’ ‘other side’ are fairy tales. What comes after is eternal torment, here on earth. When the Mama sits at her place at the end of the long table, I see the rows of shades in all the empty places along either side. As she is in this life, so are they in the life to come. Cold, dark, damp, alone, spiteful. Each carries their own miasmic hell, like a shroud or one of Mr Dickens’s chains. A Christmas Carol is a lie. People, like ghosts, cannot change. All are trapped, as in aspic or amber. I have stripes on my back and shoulders. This last week, since her stroke, the Mama’s right arm is frozen. Her fingers cannot hold her sting, but still the lash falls on me when she is near and angry. It is as if her arm is dead but its ghost extends from her shoulder, invisible but supple and with a sting – a flint-studded length of ghost leather – as an extension of the phantom fist. The pain will last, will extend into the twilight beyond death. The Mama will be there first,
awaiting me. I should leave this place, but have known nowhere else. Sometimes, I find it impossible to step over the boundary of the Hollow. The world outside is haunted and tormented too. At least here, I…

  3 May

  The orchard has blossom and apple-buds. Soon, fruit will swell. I can hardly walk for the whipping I have taken. Since the Mama has had to use a stick, the lashes have always been at my legs. It is if I were being stroked with stinging nettles. I have angry red blotches. Tonight, we had the full company at dinner. The Mama talks to them, lectures on Father’s greatness, with outrageous outbursts of abuse at him, myself and the assembly. It seems the seated figures grow less shadowy. I can make out faces, all as twisted and shut as the Mama’s. They nod at her whim, humouring her. They have stings, too. Mother does not want to join them before me. I fear for my life.

  31 July

  The tree is to come down. In a week’s time. The anticipated victory has given the Mama strength. She has left her bed and hobbles about, lashing with her tongue and sting. She quibbled with Adam Cobb on the price, but finally settled the matter. We cannot afford the loss of the tree, can barely afford the price of its murder. It is no use talking with the Mama. I cannot sleep. Fingers like twigs rake at me. I fear for the Hollow. Without the tree, it will change again.

  2 August

  I have done it! I have talked with Adam Cobb and told him the Mama has changed her mind. He would have argued, but – though it pains me to let the matter go – I allowed him to keep the portion of the fee he was gifted. I, Primrose, am true mistress of the Hollow. My decision is that the tree should remain. Returning from the village, with angry sky boiling overhead and the heat crackling, I felt straighter than in months. The stings do not bother me. They seem to change quality, almost to become caresses. Almost. In the evening, the first drops of rain spattered against the windows, pellets the size of thumbs. Penny-sized dark splashes marked the bleached stones of the orchard paths. A summer storm, long predicted, is upon us. Thatch lets in trickles of water. The house fills with a damp straw smell that is a ghost in itself, a presence which only makes itself known in heavy rain.