by Penny Thomas
Contents
Title Page
Other short fiction anthologies
“Is there anybody there?”
Chrissy Derbyshire – Sovay, Sovay
Maria Donovan – The Wish Dog
Eileen Dewhurst – Broad Beach
Sue Moules – Making Ghosts
Elizabeth Baines – A Matter of Light
Melanie Fritz – I, King
Eileen Dewhurst – Shade
Jo Mazelis – Caretakers
Carly Holmes – The View from up Here
Sian Preece – Harvest
Suzy Ceulan Hughes – Mad Maisy Sad
Jacqueline Harrett – A Soldier’s Tale
Rona Laycock – The Pull of the North
Gillian Drake – Seashells
Nic Herriot – Convention is the Mother
Pam Clatworthy – Ghosts
Caroline Clark – Girl in the Grass
Alice Baynton – Ants
Author Biographies
Copyright
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The Wish Dog
Haunting Tales
from Welsh Women Writers
Edited by Penny Thomas
and Stephanie Tillotson
HONNO MODERN FICTION
Other short fiction anthologies available from www.honno.co.uk
All Shall Be Well
Coming Up Roses
Cut on the Bias
Laughing Not Laughing
My Cheating Heart
My Heart on My Sleeve
Safe World Gone
Written in Blood
“Is there anybody there?”
What makes a good ghost story? When we first discussed publishing a new anthology of ghost stories by women from Wales, we had no idea what would come to haunt us. We hoped that others would share our fascination with the ‘evocative and the eerie’, with ‘the shiver induced by the thunder of a black, stormy night’, could imagine being held spell-bound by a mysterious and, perhaps, macabre tale as the clock strikes midnight: the hour when all light has been extinguished and we poor mortals are most acutely aware of our human limitations. Might not the dead come back to glide silently across our paths, or to scream out of the walls, demanding justice or revenge?
‘Is there anybody there?’ is a question that most of us have asked at some point or another. The question lies at the kernel of all good ghost stories – and in this collection the unknown answers back! All the tales raise the possibility that we do not finish in eternal silence, that there may be a mysterious purpose to life’s arbitrary unfairnesses and disappointments. That there may even be the chance of reunions with those we have loved and lost – or the possibility that we are not to blame for our failings, that there are indeed powerful, sometimes malignant forces that shape our destinies.
So we keep on being fascinated, drawn to poke into our imagination’s darkest corners, where we keep thoughts that have no place in our daylight worlds. Let such fears surface and we might struggle to function. Yet, when repressed, our imaginations bubble and boil and another world rises through the floorboards of our daily lives. And so writers continue to question their darker instincts: ‘Is there anybody there?’
You may be of a more sceptical nature. Perhaps for you ghost stories are all flapping sheets and Scooby Doo. Fun and occasionally scary but holding nothing of any allure. Maybe you prefer the supernatural setting of fairy tales peopled by snow queens and wild swans. Remember though that you can’t have such fascinating creatures without the wicked witches and dangerous beasts that come along with them, lurking at the edge of the seductive dream.
What then turns a bunch of clichés into truths that touch the core of our deepest hopes and fears? What makes a good ghost story? We offer just one suggestion – pick up this book and read on.
We hope you will discover intriguing stories of the weird and wonderful. They are all surprising, thrilling, full of suspense and very different each from the other. We think there will be something here to satisfy all tastes: from the beautiful, poignant and tender to the downright horrific. These are stories that will take you to somewhere else, maybe just a stone’s throw away. Here are crumbling old houses, gothic to their core, such as the mansion of I, King, with its Miss Havisham-style rotting fruit, its elusive but open door, appearing suddenly when least expected, always beckoning at the end of a line of trees. Here is the atmospheric: the oppression of heat as beautifully created in Ants and Shade, the eerie cold of The Pull of the North, the significance of Seashells. Every slight flicker in the ambience takes on a new import as you read, offers glimpses that may tempt you to look over your shoulder, just for a moment… Here are stories that present, to quote Henry James (a past master of the form), ‘The strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.’
Many, inevitably, work around loss, facing life’s tragedies, as in Broad Beach and The View From Up Here. Here the voices of the dead yearn to teach the living lessons about life, the mystery that is The Girl in the Grass, the call for humanity and justice in The Soldier’s Tale and a Matter of Light. There are also the outrageously funny – the bawdy melodrama of Sovay, Sovay and the downright naughtiness of Ghosts. And, yes, there are even flapping sheets in Making Ghosts, a tightly wound tale that subverts conventions, reminding us that we are as numerous as the blades of grass on the great plains; like the one grain of sand on a broad beach that even so cannot exist without its singularity.
A word of warning though: watch your step, much may not be as it seems in this anthology. There are unreliable narrators, apparently friendly guides, who may take you by the hand and lead you onto treacherous ground. Should we trust the narrators of the gloriously crafted The Wish Dog and Caretakers? And it is only ever a short distance to what we may call madness, touchingly and hauntingly evoked in stories such as Mad Maisy Sad and Convention is the Mother of Reality.
Preparing this book, what mattered most was not which secret of the otherworldly our authors chose to conjure for us, but the dexterity (even sleight of hand) with which they exposed it. Whether your taste is for fireside shivers or for the exploitation of the ‘other side’, a few words perfectly placed, a theatrical incantation, or a glut of gothic adornment, this collection offers so much that is wonderfully and entrancingly told. In Harvest there is even a haunting, primordial myth promising a terrifying end for those who live for language, stories and the telling of them.
But I think we may have said too much; it will be light soon and you’ve not begun to read yet…
Penny Thomas and Stephanie Tillotson
Sovay, Sovay
Chrissy Derbyshire
You seem surprised to see me sitting in your chair. I suppose that’s why you’re brandishing a poker. And may I say how dashing you look, haloed in firelight, all black and flaming red? Why ruin the tableau by doing anything so boorish as bashing my head in?
Quite right. A gentleman never brains a lady with a poker. Besides, it would hardly work. I’m a ghost, you see. Hence, breaking and entering without the breaking. I turned my body into smoke and snaked through your keyhole to haunt you, beautiful. Because I want you. No, not like that. And by the way an incubus is a male demon. I suspect you mean, succubus.
I want you for an audience. I want you for an eager ear. My name was Sovay, and I have such stories. You’d never believe them if I told them a thousand times, and that’s fine with me because I can’t say they’re all entirely true. Some are. Most are. Most of what I say is almost entirely true, minus embellishments and outright lies. You look confused. Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
I am an aesthete, and a sensualist. Where you see the fire, I see blazing colours of sheer, hot light, breaking and sparking against a deeper black.
I see welcome warmth against glowing, goosebumped skin. I see demons and salamanders. That is what I see. Perhaps I’m shallow. It’s been said, and no doubt if I am remembered it will be said again. And yet I think I can see deeper than most, when I want to, when I can be bothered. The best I can say for you, whoever you are, is that I love you as I love my favourite book. And like my favourite book, it is the little details of you that excite me – deftly written turns of being that titillate and challenge.
Even the love of study is aesthetic, if not carnal. When I read bold or wise ideas that fit so beautifully into place in my mind, it is a secret thrill. The thrill is silent, wispy as a cobweb, caught between the pages of a secondhand book. All my knowledge of the world, I am sorry to say, is aesthetic, fragmentary and insubstantial – a series of imagined sights, smells or touches lingering around my tremulous body and gaspingly sensual mind.
So. You have been warned. I’m not an amoral Dorian Gray or a solipsistic Humbert Humbert (yes, while I was haunting you I also read your books – I hope you don’t mind) but I’m still waist-deep in my senses and my imagination when you think I’m listening. And, though I only ever committed one act of violence in my short life, I fear I may somehow still be a little dangerous.
My mother was an actress with the Grand Guignol. She was beheaded every night. A consummate professional, she never missed a performance. I was born on stage to a headless woman, and the audience applauded. She paid me little attention but once, in a fit of drunken motherly affection, passed me her wealthy dead grandmother’s locket. I never took it off. I wasn’t schooled – not in the commonplace sense – but I grew up in the wings and dusty backrooms of the theatre in Pigalle, and I saw enough. The myths about that place are true. The boxes had the air of a confessional. It had been quite a different place of worship before it was transformed into a shrine to bloody violence. Two great angels still presided over the scenes of rape and murder on the stage, blessing every assassination with impassive grace. Luckily they never peeked, as I did, into the boxes. There, respectable folk would re-create the actors’ poses in various states of sweaty undress. I never saw anyone beheaded there, but I did see many a gentleman with his head quite hidden under a lady’s skirts. When I wasn’t snooping and exploring and pilfering pretty things from ladies’ bags, I was reading. This and that, novels, playbills, anything I could find. They called me la gosse Grand Guignol – the Grand Guignol brat – and I spent my nursery years climbing round the gothic architecture like a dirty-faced spider.
So I grew, half-feral but indiscriminately well-read, until one day it became clear that under the dirt I had grown into an attractive young woman. Not beautiful. Gap-toothed and a little coarse, but with the brightest eyes… Of course…you can see. I was given a play script and measured for a costume – just a simple inmate’s gown, coarse on my naked skin. I was to be a young lunatic, mostly cured and soon to leave the asylum. I was pale, red-lipped, cheeks modestly rouged. Every bit the innocent who might be made a victim. My role was not a profound one. I was to talk meekly to the nuns and to the doctors, making my eyes round and sweet like marbles. Then I was to be accosted by two grotesque shrews – fellow madwomen, but not so near curing and with faces like storybook witches – who put out my marble eyes with scissors as punishment for my beauty. The blood-rigged scissors fascinated me. I was scolded time and again for stabbing dolls and apples just to watch the inanimate things gush blood.
Really, none of this is important. History hasn’t remembered me. Not even when I changed my given name – Anne-Laure – to Sovay. I named myself for the heroine of that strange English folk song.
Sovay, Sovay, all on a day,
She dressed herself in man’s array.
With a brace of pistols at her side,
To see her true love away she’d ride.
The romance of it! She dressed as a highwayman and challenged her lover to stand and deliver. When he refused to give up the ring she’d given him as a love token, she knew she had no need to shoot him stone dead. I always kept a small gun on my person in those days. When you’re a pretty young thing who makes eyes at the audience and then bleeds from those eyes all over the stage, people tend to think they own you. A gun in the back is a fair deterrent. ‘Those days…’ I say, as if I ever passed twenty.
So how would I characterise the genre of this piece? Let us call it a gothic romance. Even better, a ‘penny dreadful’ with a romantic bent. I’m trying to define it in a way you’d understand. If you were there… Oh, if you were there, in my little palace of violence, all I’d need to say would be that it is pure Grand Guignol. Picture the scene: a young actress, still in costume and make-up, steps out into the cold Paris air. It is a strange, smoky night in November. She is bored. The thrills of the night’s entertainments have paled, and all at once she must feel the chill pavement under her feet and the gritty walls under her hands. The sky is touched with light, fool’s gold of stars and a milk-pale moon swathed in cloud. Somewhere there is music, an owlish mezzo-soprano from a high bedroom. And she steps, and she steps, on and on, and it’s like a scene from Perrault – or a dream.
That was the quality of light and sound, and those were the textures of the night that night. I nodded my head to a woman even more painted than I, lounging in a doorway. This was the right side of town for painted ladies. The wrong side of town for everything else. I was contemplating climbing the walls as I had as a child, itching for any kind of adventure, when I saw him.
He was a gentleman. Like you, but where you are still curled in on yourself like a startled anemone – honestly, you’d think you were the first man ever to be haunted – he lounged in the window of the Café de la Paix like he’d never been frightened in his life. Like the lad who couldn’t shiver, he reclined in his chair with a glass of something golden and surveyed the thronging post-opera crowd with mild, ironic fascination. He was alone. It was impossible to imagine him any other way. His hair was lush and dark but, in the yellow light of the café, it shone like flax spun to gold. No, really, it did. Of all the things I’ve told you, that is what you question?
All this time I stood barefoot on the cold ground outside the café. To enter would be unthinkable, even with all my actor’s nerve. These were opera-goers. They shouldn’t even have been in Pigalle otherwise. The entrance of a white-faced ragamuffin in a hospital gown would have caused a panic. So I watched, my breath steaming the glass like a child’s who stands gazing at richer children’s toys. I watched him watching them. Then his head inclined just a little towards me. His eyes grew wide for a moment – I still had a little blood around mine – and then he smiled broadly, amused and approving, with a little quirk of his eyebrow. He rose and left the café, still holding his glass. Nobody stopped him.
A change of backdrop, then, for the figure suddenly stealing my mind’s stage. Against the fantastic gold of the café he had been careless and debonair. Now, against the night, he was a beast. Smiling like one who’d already won the game six moves ahead, he put his glass to my lips and poured the wine down my throat. It tasted like pictures I’d seen of the world beyond Pigalle, beyond Paris. I was in love. When he took me in an alley, both of us still mostly clothed, it was the nearest I’d ever come to romance. Held in his panting, post-coital embrace, I said, ‘My name’s Sovay.’
‘Sophie?’
‘Sovay.’
‘Well, and why not?’ He smiled a droll smile. ‘If a courtesan can’t choose her name, what can she choose?’
‘I’m not a whore. I’m an actress.’
‘Of course you are. And may I say, your act has quite enchanted me.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Patrice Follet.’
‘I love you, Patrice Follet.’
‘And I would love you again tomorrow, Sovay the actress.’
I smiled. It was enough. You see, despite all I’d seen, I’d barely lived. Impulsively I unfastened my locket and pressed it into his sweaty hand. Twelve days later it would be
returned to me by a dead man. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We had many trysts. I introduced him to my theatre. I put out his eyes with the stage-blood scissors and he laughed till he cried, his tears mingling with the red. Bloody nuisance brat, scowled my mother, long since relegated to unofficial accountant and understudy hag. Patrice’s fearlessness charmed me. Love is a man who can handle horror with a smile.
I can’t say whether there was a catalyst, a particular sight, sound, scent or emotion that caused me to take up the mantle of my namesake. All I can say is that, once the idea took hold, it wouldn’t let go.
Patrice was a creature of habit. I knew his movements. It would be easy, so easy, to catch him unawares somewhere quiet. Our very romance testified to his talent for finding shady spots with no witnesses. The clothes were no problem – I pilfered them from the theatre. I bound my breasts with cloth and donned the clothing of a rake. Damned attractive, too. I very much admired myself as a man. My hair I hid under a hat, and a mask obscured the top half of my face. My lips – he’d never seen them unpainted. I loaded my gun for authenticity’s sake, and went to find my love.
The moment I stepped out in front of him, I knew something was wrong. The careless smile was gone. Patrice was trembling. Patrice was frightened. I watched with distaste as, his face a picture of pathetic dread, he emptied his pockets of gold. It spilled to the ground, a little puddle around his feet. Righteous disappointment flooded me, painting my cheeks, narrowing my eyes. ‘Anything else?’ I demanded, making my voice coarse. ‘That’s not all. Any tokens from your sweetheart?’
With depressing swiftness he put a hand inside his jacket and pulled out the locket. It dangled flimsily from his white-knuckled fist. ‘Yes, forgive me,’ he said, ‘I forgot.’
Oh, I hated him now. My lad who couldn’t shiver was a yellow coward when faced with what he perceived to be real danger. Pitiful. Still, I had to give him this one chance. ‘Or perhaps,’ I said, slowly, significantly, as one might to a foolish child, ‘this trinket is too dear to part with.’