An English Ghost Story

by Kim Newman

  This, however, was the whole family’s nightmare.

  Jordan resolved to wade back into the fray, to get through the encircling lamps, the layers of hurt and shock, and reach her mother.

  The lights fizzed.

  * * *

  When Tim flashed the torch, Steven knew where he was. The upper level of the barn, in the hayloft. Even when the light was off again, he smelled straw and dry wood and remembered this place as uncomfortable.

  His instinctive dislike of this corner of the Hollow wasn’t because of anything that had happened in the distant past, but because of what was to happen in the near future. He’d never liked the hayloft because it was where he would die. Ever since the barn was built, hundreds of years ago, it had been assembling the props for his death scene.

  How could he fight against his murderers?

  Tim was just a child, his son. No matter what, Steven couldn’t turn and fight Tim, as he could if someone else – Mr Precious Rick, the Wild Witch, even Kirsty – were coming at him. He wanted to save his own skin, but not at the expense of hurting his son. Even before she flew at him, he had learned from slapping Jordan. There were wrongnesses which couldn’t be lived with.

  If Tim won and left him dead, would he learn from that too?

  Tim was with the After Lights-Out Gang. Of them all, he’d grown closest to the Hollow, found it easiest to go over to the others, to join the ghosts.

  Was Tim even alive? Didn’t you have to die to become a ghost?

  No, Tim hadn’t died. There was a tie between father and son, a two-way wordless communication. If his son were dead, Steven would have known.

  However this turned out, the survivor would carry a load of pain and guilt that might be worse than losing the struggle.

  Perhaps the best would be to turn around, walk up to Tim and toss him through the ladder-hatch? Then, he would take on himself the pain to come, the torment and the agony.

  (Do that.)

  If only for a moment. Physically, he could cope with Tim. He was not sure about the After Lights-Out Gang. Those savagely painted girlish ghosts would burn him at the stake and be back in their dorms in time for breakfast.

  He stopped running. Surely, he must have crossed the space? No: distances were greater in absolute dark. When you weren’t looking, when you couldn’t see, the Hollow was as big as you could imagine.

  ‘Turn on the torch, Tim,’ he shouted.

  No light came. But he heard footsteps, getting nearer.

  ‘Tim, it’s Dad,’ he appealed.

  The After Lights-Out Gang had their inner glow, dark violet. Steven made out their shapes, or their shadows. Big girls, taller and broader than him, they were still proportionally children.

  They stood in a circle, like the dancing stones. In their centre, where the altar-piece should be, was his son. Steven was more afraid for Tim than of him.

  ‘They’re not our friends,’ he said, biting down on the crack in his voice. ‘Come to me. I’ll look after you.’

  He was not convinced by his own promises.

  The After Lights-Out Gang just stood, menacing blocks of dark. They held hooks. Twisted coat hangers gleaming at the sharpened points, old agricultural implements with fresh edges.

  ‘Go home, girls,’ he shouted. ‘This is our house now.’

  The whistles began again. Slow, drawn-out, shrill, mocking, like wolf-whistles.

  One of the gang lifted a long, thin shape to her lips. A recorder? A schoolgirl instrument, a flute for weeds and babies. She aimed it at him. A sharp report came, and a muzzle-flash. A dart stung in his shoulder.

  Not a recorder. Some kind of blow-pipe gun.

  The stinging was mostly shock. Touching his wound, he felt cold wetness. The girl had shot him with an icicle. A silly weapon, but still a killing thing.

  The After Lights-Out Gang stood between him and the ladder-hatch. He was trapped.

  No. There was another way out of the hayloft.

  In the wall, somewhere behind him, was the bale-door. That opened out twenty feet above the ground. The crane-arm jutted above the door, but there was no chain or rope. Still, if he leaped outwards and landed on the soft grass, rolling properly, he could take a twenty foot drop.

  In his panic, he had no idea which direction he was facing, no sense of the nearness or farness of the walls. Or the ladder, or the door. He could be inches away from falling through the ladder-hatch. A dead drop to solid concrete or the roofs of the cars in the garage space.

  All the gang had blow-pipes ready.

  He stood up, blood buzzing in his head.

  ‘Tim,’ he said, loudly but evenly.

  A flash. A shot. Close enough to startle badly. He felt the icicle whoosh past him. This time, he had been missed.

  But he had what he needed. A sense of where he was.

  The bale-door was ten feet or so away, exactly to his left.

  He turned and judged that he was facing the door.

  In the dark, he heard the jiggle of a pipe being pumped or reloaded or locked or whatever. He took three precise steps and reached out. He did not touch the bale-door.

  For that, he needed light.

  He put his hands up and said, ‘I surrender.’

  No reply.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a fix.’

  He began to whistle.

  He heard the steps behind him. Not the After Lights-Out Gang, but Tim.

  He looked down, still in utter dark. He made out the top of his son’s head.

  ‘Tim,’ he whispered.

  He didn’t know if he was getting through.

  One of the girls nodded, a kill-him-and-get-it-over-with nod, justification for a massacre.

  That nod hit him worse than the ice dart.

  * * *

  She had been wrong. Her daughter hadn’t been faking it, wasn’t the threat in this room. By pulling Jordan’s hair, Kirsty had lost a chance, squandered an opportunity to make things right. She had thrown away both her children.

  Awful despair gaped inside her.

  The Hollow.

  It might as well snuff her out like the lights. She would be saved from more mistakes.

  She was numbed beyond fear.

  After all, she was on her sofa in her front room. How could that not be normal?

  The lights wavered, casting spider-armed shadows on the ceiling and walls.

  Jordan stood, hurt, outside the circle of lamp stands.

  Kirsty breathed slowly, becoming calm. If she let herself be taken, perhaps it’d all be over. She had thought it best her husband and children go, but it was simpler to remove herself from the situation, to throw herself away.

  If she gave in, the others might be saved. That was the sacrifice of this circle.

  ‘Goodbye, love,’ she said.

  ‘Mum, no,’ Jordan shouted, understanding.

  Kirsty looked at the brown man, who had already been away and come back. Bernard Wing-Godfrey held out his hand and she took it. In her grip, his hand came off again, at the wrist. Then his forearm came loose at the elbow and slithered out of his cuff, and his upper arm detached at the shoulder and hung loose in his baggy sleeve. His head lolled to one side. Kirsty saw the join around his neck, skin stretching as the bones unlocked.

  The president of the After-Lights-Out-Gang came to pieces inside his suit.

  Then he stood up.

  None of his pieces were completely free, just let out on a long lead, loosely strung on cobwebby matter. His torso bobbed eight feet in the air, wrapped in his jacket. His head hovered on a yard-long ectoplasmic snake neck. His limbs jittered in the air, hips trapped in trousers. His independent calves and feet, arms and hands strained for the points of the compass. Strands glistened between his component pieces.

  His left hand whizzed out of the air and took hold of Kirsty’s chin, forcing her to look up. His face was beyond the corona of the light, but his eyes shone brown, liquid with contempt.

  The right hand shot across a
nd slapped her.

  She felt the impact in her teeth. Her vision filmed over red.

  The hand circled her head, looping a garrotte string about her neck. The noose went tight. She gasped, but couldn’t take a breath. Trapped blood pounded in her temples. The thin strand was strong as steel wire, and ratcheted like a cheese-cutter.

  Kirsty did not fight.

  She had offered herself. It was a fair exchange. If she joined the ghosts, Tim and Steven would be given back. She would have to stay, become one of the haunters of the Hollow.

  Fair enough. She deserved it.

  She was lifted into the air, ghost-strings about her wrists and ankles.

  Wing-Godfrey’s head bumped against the ceiling, like a neon-eyed balloon. She was raised close to its expanded face, as if he were drawing her to him for a kiss.

  Jordan was shouting.

  Kirsty had said her goodbyes.

  The closer she got to the head, the less it looked like the brown man. The mouth was six inches wide. The teeth shone as brightly as the eyes. The ears were bat-wings.

  It didn’t matter.

  At the last, with all the arguments over, she thought only of Steven, Jordan and Tim. No one and nothing else had ever come close, not Vron, not any of the projects or problems or distractions. All she would leave behind of value was family.

  Ten minutes ago, she wasn’t sure she even liked her husband and children, now she knew with iron certainty that she loved them. She was prepared to die for them.

  She was fuzzy from the loss of blood to her head.

  It would not even hurt.

  A burst of light came into her mind and she was floating gently, released from her bonds.

  * * *

  Suppressing any thought about what the girl’s nod might mean to Tim, Steven grasped his son under the arms and picked him up, hugging him. Too surprised to struggle, the boy adjusted his weight, pressing his face to Steven’s neck. His son’s teeth were like ice against his throat.

  The blow-pipes fired, puffs of light in the night.

  Steven saw the bale-door up close, in a flashbulb instant. He threw himself against it, trusting it to be unlatched.

  (The estate agent had suggested they keep it bolted, to prevent accidents; had they ever acted on his advice?)

  His shoulder jarred but the door gave way. He realised too late that he was throwing himself and Tim carelessly over a twenty-foot drop.

  Below the bale-door was gravel drive. He needed to leap outwards. To land on the soft grass. Roll into a ball around Tim.

  He was wrong.

  They didn’t fall far, just collided with floor where there should have been air.

  It was dark again and the orchard wasn’t beyond the bale-door.

  Beneath them, a carpet slid in wrinkles over polished floorboards. Steven staggered onwards, finding his feet, reaching for Tim’s hand.

  He didn’t know which side his son was on, but wasn’t leaving Tim to the After Lights-Out Gang.

  He ran, pulling the boy.

  They were in a corridor, somewhere in the house, having passed through an impossible secret passageway. The darkness was not complete. Thin light seeped under shut doors.

  He slammed against a wall, coming to a dead end.

  Turning, his back to the wall, he hugged his son. Coming down the passage were four solid silhouettes, taller and more powerfully built than schoolgirls.

  These were the creatures his son had made friends with, had perhaps joined. They all saw the ghosts – the After Lights-Out Gang – differently, Steven realised. These were unlike the spectres of his own dark; these were Tim’s playmates, Tim’s ghosts, Tim’s death squad.

  ‘Tim,’ he said. ‘It’s time to stop playing.’

  * * *

  His squaddies would rescue him and put the Enemy out of the game with a shot to the head. Then, time for a well-earned leave.

  The girls were close. Tim saw them, awaiting his order. The Enemy held him tight. If he kept his head low, the girls would all have clear head shots.

  All he had to do was give the order, the universally recognised nod.

  ‘The game’s over,’ the Enemy said.

  Tim felt the words like bullets.

  Something had changed in the combat zone. A peace treaty, signed in another country thousands of miles distant, meant this was not right. Killing the Enemy would not be heroism, but a crime.

  Still, to let him free would invalidate the mission, toss away the hundreds of man-hours that had brought them to this final confrontation. Because of words on paper, this would never be settled.

  Tim would never know which of them was best.

  No one would ever know. Or he could just finish the war in his own fashion, with clean victory.

  He was ready to give the nod.

  But no. There was no enemy here. No victory was ever really clean.

  ‘Dad,’ he said, tears welling up.

  He was more tired than he’d ever been in his life. He turned away from his squaddies and jammed his face against Dad’s chest.

  ‘Good job, son, good job, Tim,’ Dad said, hugging him close.

  * * *

  ‘Mum,’ Jordan shouted.

  She was terrified that her mother couldn’t hear her, that she was too wrapped up in the embrace of the brown man.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said, trying to project meaning. ‘Don’t.’

  There was no need for this sacrifice. Another ghost wasn’t what the Hollow really wanted. It would only taint the place more.

  Jordan understood her family was not a good influence.

  Her mother was floating, face discoloured, in Wing-Godfrey’s coils.

  Jordan could easily reach out and grasp Mum by the ankles, perhaps pull her out of the ghostly, murdering hug, haul her back down to the ground. But it wouldn’t be enough.

  Like everything in the Hollow, it was in the heart.

  Mum had to want to come back… to the ground, to her family.

  She had stopped struggling, looked almost peaceful.

  Jordan tried to cast her mind back, think of something she shared with her mother, some private experience, some taste, some interest, some insight. She needed to fix the connection between them that had been broken too early.

  From Jordan’s early childhood, Mum had been strange. Not like the mothers in the films she liked, but off on her own bizarre enthusiasms, touchy when Dad voiced even the mildest doubts about her latest craze, too eager to scurry off to the witch Veronica. She grew to resent the way Mum’s preoccupations squeezed out everything else. Jordan had become who she was as a way of making a space for herself, even in starvation, in the family. She realised now why she fixed on heroines whose style was so at odds with anything Mum liked, because at heart they were all saying, ‘You don’t own me’, ‘Is that all there is?’, ‘Whatever will be will be’ – the things her mother believed but found such a struggle to live out.

  Mum’s arms floated outwards, as if she were drowned, or ascending.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jordan said. ‘I should have helped.’

  She could have, she knew. For the last few years, she had been clever enough, skilled enough. She could have taken an interest in Oddments or the other crazes. If she had supported her mother, then Mum wouldn’t have had to run to a sociopathic crone to be believed in.

  ‘I love you, Mum.’

  Simple. Direct. True?

  God, yes. True. How could it not be?

  ‘We love you.’

  That was true too. Jordan knew it, with a growing calm.

  If the family had a collective heart, it started to beat again.

  The Summer Room changed. Through the windows, she saw real night, not utter blackness. Stars faded with the first pinkish wash of impending dawn. The lamp stands were just left-over furniture.

  And the brown man, the strung-out thing Wing-Godfrey had become, collapsed like a puppet.

  Mum fell.

  Jordan pushed through the lamp stands,
knocking them over, and was there, directly under her mother.

  Mum landed heavily, knocking the breath out of them both. Coolie hats rolled free and lightbulbs popped. Jordan’s knees gave way and she was driven onto the sofa, all her mother’s weight on her.

  They would both be bruised like losing heavyweights.

  But they were alive.

  Mum shifted, trying to escape Jordan’s embrace.

  They wound up on the sofa, hugging each other ferociously, looking beyond the felled circle of lamp stands, seeing Wing-Godfrey scattered on the carpet.

  The brown man pulled himself together slowly.

  The fear Jordan was used to was subsiding.

  She sensed Mum had changed, come through the worst of it. That gave her the strength not to be scared. Or rather, not as scared as before.

  The brown man stood by the French windows, head and limbs pulled back into place. Dawn light outlined him and came through him. He was a bubble inside a slack suit.

  The windows were open. There was noise in the orchard. Someone was coming.

  Mum cringed.

  ‘Don’t, Mum,’ Jordan whispered. ‘Not this time. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Don’t be scared.’

  She stroked her mother’s spiky hair.

  * * *

  They were by the rhyne, beyond the orchard. Not inside the house. No After Lights-Out Gang in sight. In the moment of their embrace, of their mutual recognition, the girls were sent back to their dorm, stripped of the rank his son had given them.

  Steven put Tim down and looked out over the moor. He saw no standing stones from here, but the horizon was picked out by light.

  ‘In the water, Dad,’ said Tim.

  Something was bundled up in the pondweed, like an island with four peninsulas.

  ‘Don’t look,’ Steven said.

  A dead man lay in the ditch, head hanging under the water, puffy layer of air trapped inside the back of his soaked jacket.

  Bernard Wing-Godfrey. He must have been at the bottom of the ditch since yesterday and just floated to the surface.

  ‘Come away,’ he said, leading his son by the hand.

  Tim was upset, he knew. A boy shouldn’t have to see such a thing. Steven was grateful for the twilight time, which concealed the details.

  He would call the police when the sun was up.