An English Ghost Story

by Kim Newman

  Later

  The Hollow has cheated me! As the storm smote the countryside, I sat at table and informed the Mama of my decision about the tree. I was prepared for anger on a level of the storm, but knew she was too feeble to lash in a way that would hurt. I am mistress here, not her. But the Mama smiled, cunningly, and said I had not the power to overrule her. She laughed, cruelly. At that moment, an arc of lightning lanced down and struck at the base of the very tree I had sought to protect. In a white moment, I saw everything. Flames, instantly extinguished by the torrent. The earth that bound the tree’s roots seemed blasted out of existence. For a heart-smiting moment, I was afraid the tree would fall towards the house, smashing through the wall and the windows, an apple-pimpled fist coming down on us. But no, it fell outwards, away from the house. It took a long time, I think. Other lightning strikes seared my eyes with lingering images of the great living thing tottering, branches shaking and snapping, fruit raining and rolling. I dare not go out to see what damage the felled titan has caused. The Mama laughs still, not alone.

  3 August

  The tree has smashed a copse of smaller trees, at the edge of the property. Adam Cobb’s labourers are at work, hauling away the ruins, costing money I cannot spare. Girls pick up the shiny, wet apples. Each must be accounted for and sold. If so much as one is eaten, it shall come out of their wages. I must be strict, for we are desperate and only I can cope. The miracle is that the tall tree still lives. It is on its side, but enough of its roots are in the earth for it to survive. Adam says it will adjust to its new position and continue to fruit for a hundred years or more. The Mama called down the lightning, but has not won. She is talking with Adam now, insisting he bring axes and saws. She will not be stopped. I write in the Summer Room, surrounded by ghosts who dare not venture out into the sunshine. Everything is clean and dripping. Insects buzz and swarm. Insects have stings, too. Some of the insects are not living things. Generation upon generation has lived and died here. They all remain. The Mama has just clapped her hand to the back of her neck.

  7 August

  It is over. The Mama is not here. I was afraid she would linger. The others remain, silent, at attention. I am uneasy around them. They have grown used to the habit of cruelty. It is hard to break.

  10 August

  She tried to kill the tree; I did kill her. That is how I see it. Everyone knows. I should hang for it, but I will not. She was old, bodies grow weak, wasps sting, people must die. We must wish what we must and cannot be held accountable for it. If Bannerman’s God answers a parishioner’s prayer, He, not the supplicant, is given the credit; therefore, I cannot be blamed. And yet, a voice of doubt.

  13 August

  The ghosts are hooded, like wigged judges or hangmen. A black rope of slimy stuff hangs from the chandelier in the Summer Room. A verdict has been passed, which I must agree with. It will come soon.

  14 August

  The fallen tree, which thrives, is a bridge over the rhyne. That part is dead, and will be cut away soon. But now it is a way out of the Hollow. Tonight, I will escape justice, crawl across the tree bridge. This will stay behind, with the ghosts. The Mama is murdered, and I can be free. I shall be stung no more.

  Towards Autumn

  Dawn came, August early, to the Hollow, creeping across the moors like a poacher. Long black shadows dwindled, going underground for the day. No birdsong, no wind. A summer Sunday: no commuter’s car growled on the road, no insect moved on the glassy rhynes. Fruit lay where it had fallen. The topmost leaves had gone from green to red overnight.

  The family awoke in the East Tower, wrung out by dreams and unrefreshed by sleep, nagged by aches and pains and memories.

  They were all alone, together.

  Loose pages, covered with faded ink, lay at the foot of the bed. They got underfoot.

  * * *

  Jordan drifted through the hours. Voices were faint and buzzing. Making out the words wasn’t worth the trouble. Her only sensations, heartache and the bloat of her belly and limbs, were inside. Her skin was nerveless – thick, unfeeling cloth. She saw in sharp focus, as if through Weezie’s stereoscope. Figures were flattened and dark-rimmed, separate and distinct, each on their own plane. A sourceless ozone tang persisted high in her nose, like the beginning of a sneeze, clean but shocking. She felt like a condemned murderess in the electric chair, living an eternity in the split second between the switch being thrown and the juice hitting her spine.

  Someone was dead. A long time ago, she thought. She was guilty, though not too sure of the details. Perhaps she had been murdered herself and was now a ghost.

  No. They were the ghosts.

  She was pestered by apparitions. A stern, old-fashioned couple and their silent, big-eyed child.

  And others.

  A terrible hunger clawed inside. She must not eat, for she was full to bursting, but she wasn’t satisfied. She thought of stripping paint off her furniture and eating that.

  How had she come to this house?

  What had gone before?

  If she concentrated so much that it hurt, she knew. Her name was Jordan Naremore; her Mum and Dad were Kirsty and Steven; her brother was Tim, the pest. Her boyfriend was Rick. No, Rick was out of the picture.

  The first jolt hit her, through the eyes.

  Rick was dead. It was Rick who was dead. His dad had told her, just as everything was slipping away, just as the ghosts were taking over the house.

  She remembered the ghosts. A brown man. Twin oriental imps. A crooked girl. A giantess and her dwarf. A woman-man. They wanted to haunt this house. They had tried to drive Jordan and her family from their home. But the ghosts were gone, and she was still here.

  Had she won or lost?

  She could not tell. It hurt to remember, made her eyes like hot coals in her skull. She held the family picture in her mind, like the dozen tiny pieces in the right depressions in the hand-held Drearcliff Grange game. Eyes in sockets and smiles on mouths. Then, she let the game drop and the picture fell to pieces, features falling from faces to leave only blank dimples.

  She let herself be carried along, through the day.

  Later, while rearranging the mess in her room, she found the pages. They were old, but the handwriting was legible, almost like a child’s. She read what was written, not following the fragmentary story or understanding the provenance of the pages. They seemed to be torn from a book. Ruled blue lines had faded away almost completely while the inked words stood out all the more. Was what she read a message, an inside-out retelling of the story of her recent life?

  * * *

  As if scouting enemy territory, Steven searched the Hollow, going over the route he had guided the After Lights-Out Gang through yesterday. Tim stuck close by, not speaking, catapult in hand. Kirsty had decreed Tim could keep the weapon only if he didn’t carry ammunition.

  His son had learned the truth about this place before him. The boy had been playing soldiers so long no one noticed when it stopped being a game and became a survival strategy.

  He checked every room, not knowing why, and saw nothing. By day, the house was on its best behaviour. Broken glass glittered in the Summer Room. Tim, terrified of a punishment Steven hadn’t yet decided, wouldn’t go near the scatter of shards. Kirsty should sweep that up, before someone got hurt.

  In the orchard, the tree still stood, broken branch dangling like a hanged man. Kirsty wanted the tree cut down, but Steven wasn’t sure that was possible. He was wary of attacking anything around here. It might well attack back.

  He put the barn-garage off till last.

  Inside, was a surprise. They had inherited a car. Next to the hunchback was a brown Volkswagen Beetle, patched with rust. Through the windscreen, Steven saw an Ordnance Survey map spread out on the passenger seat. In the back was a dead little girl.

  Tim screamed and pulled back his catapult. Without a stone, the worst he could do was twang someone with the rubber.

  The girl wasn’t a corpse but a la
rge doll, dressed in a pinafore and a straw hat. A Weezie doll, with a wide painted smile. The stubby lashes of the round eyes looked like the sun’s rays in a kindergarten picture. The hair was a bunch of blonde ropes, like dreads.

  Steven wanted to burn the thing.

  For the first time today, the telephone rang in the house. The bell above the kitchen door clanged like a fire alarm.

  He knew it would be bad news. It always was.

  * * *

  In the Summer Room, Kirsty looked at the telephone. Louise’s old – antique, now – black rotary dial phone was on the stand. Its woven, threaded cord snaked to the wall-jack. Steven had unplugged their push-button cordless phone yesterday, but she didn’t remember him fixing up the old apparatus. Its ring was piercing as a toothache. The receiver jiggled in its cradle with each jangle.

  Other things she’d done to the room were unpicked. The dangerous three-bar heater was back in the fireplace, where she’d cleared a space to burn wood come winter. Pictures she had replaced had returned. Even a hideous scowling Victorian that Louise must have relegated to a junk-room. A dusty old television cabinet replaced their home-entertainment stack.

  The telephone didn’t stop ringing.

  She dreaded picking it up. Yesterday, Jordan and then Steven had taken calls which shattered them the way Tim’s stone shattered the pane above the French windows. Jewels of glass still lay on the floor. Looking up, she couldn’t find the missing piece in the puzzle. Where was the gap where the pane had been?

  It was Sunday. She shouldn’t have to answer.

  Spectres appeared at the French windows. Steven and Tim.

  Her husband looked at her and at the telephone, understanding. She almost wished Tim would pick up and put the caller off. Then, her son made a motion towards the phone-stand. Steven grabbed his shoulders to stop him.

  Kirsty scooped up the receiver to save her son.

  Noise reached her ear. Submarines pinging under arctic ice and satellites beeping in deep space. Having stepped off a precipice, she was suspended for a long moment, waiting for gravity to reach up and tug her downwards.

  ‘Mrs Naremore, it’s Harriet. We met yesterday. Miss Hazzard.’ She remembered. The carer. ‘Sorry to trouble you on a Sunday, especially with your, um, you know, troubles… but it’s a bit, well, awkward, odd. The other Society members thought I should phone, because of what happened before, to Bernard. In the Middle East.’

  ‘He was a hostage,’ she remembered out loud.

  ‘Yes. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but we all know. He was chained, in the dark. He acts all the time as if he’s over it, as if the past doesn’t bother him but, well, it does, doesn’t it? It could hardly not.’

  Steven craned to hear what she was being told. He had something to say.

  ‘We were all in the minibus, except Bernard. We were halfway home before we realised he wasn’t ahead of or behind us. Eleanor thought we’d just lost him on the road.’

  Which one was Eleanor?

  ‘His sister says he hasn’t come home. We were wondering if he’d broken down and made his way back to you? Or got in touch in any way?’

  Kirsty didn’t know what to say to the girl.

  ‘Bernard Wing-Godfrey is missing,’ she told Steven.

  ‘I think his car’s in our barn,’ he said.

  She opened her mouth to pass this on, but he shook his head. She wasn’t to tell an outsider. Not yet.

  ‘Leave your number, Harriet. We’ll call if we have news.’

  The girl gushed a little relief and recited a number twice. Kirsty didn’t have a pen or paper to hand, but repeated the number back as if she were writing it down.

  ‘Good luck, take care,’ Harriet said, ringing off.

  Kirsty listened to the buzzing phone for a moment, then set it down.

  Jordan was in the room, having appeared silently, barefoot. Her hair was over her face like a pair of drawn curtains. A long black T-shirt hung on her like rags on a scarecrow, bottom hem just above her knees.

  ‘I found these,’ she said, holding out some pieces of paper.

  Kirsty couldn’t be bothered with her daughter’s scrawling. Probably another of her letters.

  ‘I think they’re for us,’ Jordan said.

  Kirsty took the papers and put them down on the table.

  ‘There’s a Volkswagen in the barn,’ Steven said, elaborating.

  ‘And a little girl,’ said Tim, afraid.

  ‘A doll, in the back seat,’ Steven explained.

  ‘No, a little girl,’ Tim insisted. ‘A dark little girl.’

  ‘A golliwog?’ Kirsty asked, incredulous.

  ‘Regular blonde. What’s her name? Weezie.’

  Steven knew perfectly well what the girl in Louise Teazle’s books was called. He just didn’t want to admit it out loud. To him, it was embarrassing. Girly.

  ‘The car’s brown,’ he said. ‘It must be his.’

  ‘He left, surely. With the others.’

  ‘I don’t know, Kirst. I wasn’t keeping track. What with everything else.’

  She understood. ‘He’s still here.’

  ‘Not on the property,’ he snapped. ‘He can’t be. I’ve just searched the place, with Tim.’

  ‘Why? You didn’t know he was missing until now.’

  ‘I wasn’t searching for him. I was…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Patrolling, checking, making sure we were alone.’

  ‘We know we’re not alone, Steven.’

  He shook his head. ‘I know what it was like last night, after dark. I know what it’s been like. But I’m not buying any more. It’s just not part of the world I understand.’

  ‘This is where Daddy says “there must be some rational explanation”,’ sneered Jordan.

  Like lightning, Steven slapped their daughter.

  ‘Enough,’ he said.

  The slap echoed. Jordan’s cheek was red, strands of hair plastered to it. Her eyes were large with tears and her underlip wobbled.

  They never smacked their kids. It wasn’t policy, but they had a horror of that kind of punishment. Steven had been caned at school, for minor offences. He still got angry when the subject came up, fantasising about tracking his now-enfeebled headmaster down and paying him back with extra lumps for interest. When the troubles were at their worst, they had hit each other (twice, shockingly, an unbidden memory, the unforgivable set aside) but they never took it out on Jordan or Tim.

  Christ, if Jordan deserved a slap around the face for a snide comment, what punishment did Tim want for nearly blinding a guest?

  ‘There are no ghosts at the Hollow,’ said Steven. ‘There’s only us.’

  ‘Isn’t that bad enough?’ Jordan asked.

  * * *

  Everything was back on an even keel. Steven had it all stacked up, stowed away and tethered down. The facts were at his fingertips, the figures added up with nothing left over.

  It had just been a game.

  They had enjoyed pretending that the Hollow was a haunted house. Oooo-ooo-oooh, spoooky. But the game had gone too far, stopped being funny, stopped being fun.

  It was time to get serious.

  ‘I need some support around here,’ he said. ‘It’s been sorely lacking. You’re all grown up enough to pull your weight. We have problems. We have to be man enough to accept that, to look beyond that. Only by pulling together and taking direction will we get through this.’

  They looked at him as if he were mad. Mouths frozen open and eyes goggle-round, like baby seals waiting for the club.

  ‘Steven,’ said Kirsty, ‘you’re an idiot.’

  Her nose looked like a target. His right hand knotted into a fist.

  One punch and it would all be over.

  He could feel the give of cartilage under his knuckles, see the scarlet blood-spurt. One sharp, swift jab and he’d be undisputed master of the tribe.

  He raised his hand, letting her know, giving her a chance to back down, to yield.
He didn’t want to hit her, but it was his duty.

  Even now, she could avoid this.

  The bitch-cow. The stupid bitch-cow.

  Kirsty stood up to him, idiotically defiant. Why couldn’t she see? Was it so hard?

  It wasn’t the Hollow. It had been like this before. Maybe worse, with the Wild Witch bobbing about behind the scenes feeding his wife demented ideas, with all the hells of the city shifting under their feet. The point was not to let that happen again.

  He would do anything.

  ‘Steven,’ she said, like his mother, like a teacher. ‘Think.’

  That was it.

  He let fly, putting his whole body into it. This was going to connect hard and lift Kirsty off her feet, flattening her snub nose into her face.

  A body slammed into his side, knocking him off balance. His fist passed Kirsty’s head harmlessly. Knees and fingers and feet and teeth sank into his side and arm and neck. He fell badly, drawing his legs up to protect his groin and belly. His already-sprained hip thumped against hard flagstone. Blows came at him.

  He glimpsed his daughter, hair flying, as she tried to kill him.

  * * *

  She kicked the monster, stubbing bare toes against the staves of his ribs. She shifted balance and stamped, bringing her calloused heel down on his chest.

  No one tried to stop her.

  He flattened out, letting his knees and elbows unkink. She squatted on his chest, T-shirt riding up around her waist, and sliced at his face with her fingers, hooking into his cheeks with nails, working towards his eyes.

  She spat at him, each hawk racking her whole body.

  She focused everything she felt, at him.

  It was Judy’s turn to cry! She recited under her breath, emphasising each word with a slash. Judy’s turn. To cry, cry, cry…

  When she was finished, so would he be.

  * * *

  Blood on the floor, on the carpets. Kirsty worried the stain would never come out of the old weave, then squirted out a giggle at the thought.

  Jordan rode Steven like a horsewoman and pounded on his face like a drummer. Her hair whipped like wet rope. Her eyes were huge with anger.