by Ellen Datlow
“This is going to be fun,” he said. “Not even got started yet, and already he’s seeing ghosts.”
I saw Geordie looking back again as we filed out of the door to go back to the foyer. I was last out, and I lingered.
Maybe I saw what he saw, I don’t know. But I saw something. A dark shape in the deep end, like a big fish making a fast turn. But only the turn, and then there was nothing.
Which only made sense when you considered that the main drain was down in the deepest part of the pool and that as the sluice opened and the pump started, it would create eddies right down at the bottom. All right, so for a moment it had looked like something black and muscular, limbless and featureless and turning on itself like an eel, vanishing as quickly as it had been called into creation. But an eddy in any great weight of still water would bend the light in exactly such a way.
And if anybody ought to know a ghost when they saw one, it was me.
When I was thirteen, I had a bad fall. I hit my head and they tell me that my brain swelled up and it almost killed me, and I suppose that’s the reason I started to see things. It ended when I finally got better. But while it lasted, it was quite something.
It happened when I was playing with some friends in the ruins of Fenis-cowles Hall. It was a building that had been around as a ruin for almost as long as it had stood as a house. Pollution from the river had driven the family out of it, and for the same reason no one had done anything with the land since. Back in the ’thirties they’d ripped all the timbers out and left the walls to fall in on themselves. Everything had become overgrown, the formal gardens had turned to jungle, and the surrounding woodland had grown dense and blocked off any access. The estate was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, but no one seemed to maintain it. It was a great and secret place to play. But the worst possible place to have an accident.
When I came to I was lying on my back and in pain, and my friends had all disappeared. I imagined that they’d gone to get help, but I later found that they’d all run home and quickly tried to establish alibis.
But I wasn’t alone, that was the thing. When I managed to sit up I could see people moving through rooms and doorways that weren’t even there. And I knew they had to be ghosts because there were too many of them in the same place at the same time—they were overlapping and passing through each other, as if I was seeing events that had been separated by years but were now replaying themselves all at once. The entire building was like a transparent shell before me, the broken walls of the ruin merging seamlessly up into the frozen smoke of the original lines.
I watched for a while, convinced that if I tried to rise then the spell would be broken. And then I tried to rise, and it wasn’t. Everything lurched and changed a bit but the basic picture stayed the same. Maybe there were fewer of the layers now, but that was all.
I didn’t know what to do. I knew that I’d been hurt, but your thirteen-year-old self doesn’t think in terms of damage—you just want it to stop, and then you’ll be back as you were. I just stood there with this great silent doll’s house of activity going on before me, in a kind of stupor. After a while I saw someone coming out toward me.
She was a couple of years older than me. I don’t remember what she was wearing. She was quite pretty but her teeth were bad. She looked straight at me and then she started to walk away. Not back to the house, but toward the woodland beyond it. I watched her go, and when she’d covered a few yards she came back and stood looking at me again. The way a dog does. It was then that I realized that, like Lassie, she meant for me to follow her.
She took me to a cobbled track ascending through the woods. It led up from some kind of a yard at the back of the house and I imagine it was the way they would have brought goods and supplies in. It was so overgrown that in places you’d hardly know it was there, and there were whole stretches where it had disintegrated into a rockery.
Despite the pain, it didn’t seem to be taking me much effort to climb. I’d a sense that there were other figures amongst the trees, watching as I passed, but all my attention was on my guide. I don’t think she looked back at me once.
I know it sounds strange as I’m telling you this. You’re probably thinking that I was delirious or having a dream. All I can say is that it’s what I saw. If I close my eyes I can see it almost as clearly now.
At the top end of the old driveway was a farm gate with a KEEP OUT notice that I was on the wrong side of. The gateway led into a posh close of big houses; nothing as grand as the ruined hall down in the wooded valley, but big enough for driveways and tennis courts and all that Agatha Christie stuff. The gate was chained and padlocked and I don’t know how I got over it, but I did.
The next thing I recall was walking up one of the driveways with my ghost guide no longer in sight. A teenaged girl in riding gear came out of the house looking as if she was about to order me off the property, and I saw hostility turn to horror when she got a good look at me. She fled back into the house and I sank down to the gravel. It bit into my knees and then into my hands and finally into my cheek as I laid my face on the ground.
The earth seemed to hum, as if I was hearing its entire secret machinery for the first time.
I slept, then.
When we got back to the foyer, it was to find that the two regular building company employees had stacked the ladders, sheets, paint, and all the other equipment in the middle of the space and then gone. It was unlikely that we’d be seeing them again. They’d get a cut of the money but it would be us, the casuals, who did all the work.
That was the arrangement. On paper it was a full-price company job, but in practice they were fielding a second team of cut-rate unskilled labor at a fraction of the cost. We took cash, we paid no tax, we got no benefits. No insurance, no security, no rights of any kind. I’d done two years of a college course that I didn’t finish and three in the army, and now this was all I could get. In principle I was doing it until something better came along but in truth, I’d stopped looking.
I won’t say I was happy with the station I’d reached in life, but I didn’t openly resent it the way that Geordie and Jacko obviously did. Jacko more than Geordie, if I read them right. As we laid the dust sheets and put up ladders in the squash court corridor, Peter told me about them.
“A right pair of wheeler-dealers,” he called them, “in their dreams.”
They’d gone into business together but it wasn’t a real business, more of a franchise deal where they interposed themselves as middlemen between some company with an overpriced product and a group of buyers spending someone else’s money.
Peter said, “You know there’s got to be something wrong with the world when a box of office widgets that cost pennies to make comes all the way from America and gets hand-delivered out of the boot of a BMW with a gimmick number plate. Blokes like them dream big but it’s always on the never-never. It never lasts and they never see the end coming.”
The end came when the supplying company stopped taking calls and the latest widget shipment failed to materialize. Geordie and Jacko had mortgaged their houses to buy the franchise, and now lost their shirts. They tried to get into the air-conditioning business and attended a couple of recruitment seminars for the pyramid-selling of kitchen products, but the end was already written. First the cars with the personalized plates had gone, and then the suits. Geordie had grown surly and sarcastic. Jacko had grown a beard.
It was at this point that the Sheriff came by to check on our progress. He saw us talking as he came down the corridor.
“Come on, lads,” he said. “What’s the hold-up?”
And Peter looked at me with one eyebrow raised.
“Nothing, boss,” he said.
Then the Sheriff said to Peter, “I’ll give a hand with this. You nip down and straighten that Jacko out. He won’t go in the steam room. Find out what he’s moaning about and get him sorted.”
“I’m not the foreman,” Peter said. “Why aren’t you doing it?”
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br /> “’Cause I’m so sick of his fucking whining,” he said. “I’m seriously worried that if he starts it up again, I’ll deck him.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Well, it was nothing to me, so down I went.
I followed signs marked HYDROUS, through the empty restaurant and down to the pool area. There wasn’t just the pool and a steam room, there was the sauna and the cancer beds and both sets of changing rooms. I cut through the women’s, just because I could.
Jacko and Geordie were arguing at the poolside when I got there. There was a whirlpool over the drain in the deep end and the water level had already begun to drop.
“What’s the problem?” I said, and Jacko fell silent.
“He says he saw someone in there,” Geordie said, and Jacko flared up again.
“I didn’t say anything about that,” he said. “I didn’t say anything about anything.”
“Well,” I said, “let’s have a look.”
The steam room’s door was a single sheet of toughened frosted glass, and the steam room itself was about eight feet by twelve with a tiled bench around three of its walls. The steam had been off for ages now but the starlight effect in the ceiling was on, tiny points of light that changed pattern every few seconds.
I came out and looked at the two of them.
“There’s no one in there and nowhere to hide,” I said. “So what exactly was it you didn’t see?”
Neither spoke, and then Geordie said, “Tell him, you daft get.”
“Nothing,” Jacko said.
“Someone through the glass, just standing inside?”
The way his eyes widened was answer enough.
“This is what’s probably doing it,” I said, and I stuck my hand in through the open doorway and showed the effect when the lights played on it. It looked nothing like a person standing there, and he didn’t seem impressed.
I said, “There’s not enough light in there to work by, anyway. Nip up to the foyer and get a lamp with an extension lead. Nobody’s going to get paid for arguing about it.”
Jacko went off. As well as the beard he’d let his hair grow, and it made him look like a bony hermit type. When he was gone, Geordie said, “That’s not what he told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said he could see a little lad in there.”
“A little lad?” I said. “Can’t you see when someone’s trying to wind you up?”
When I came to in the hospital, I was in a room on my own just off the medical assessment ward. My head was bandaged and I was on a drip to reduce the swelling, and loads of painkillers as well. I’m not saying I felt good, but I suppose I was mostly insulated from my injuries.
My parents came, and my aunts came, and in amongst the relief and concern there was dark talk of the police turning up as well. But I don’t think anybody had the heart to give me a hard time. Back in those days they wouldn’t let parents stay in hospital with a child, so I spent that night in the side ward on my own.
I don’t know what hour it would have been, but I woke in the night with the certainty that there was someone in the room with me. What little light there was seemed gray and grainy and my eyes were almost gummed shut with sleep crystals, so it was hard to get a focus. But he was there. I could see him against the Venetian blind. Sitting. Half-turned away. Gray like a stone, or like some kind of a golem. A jaw like a shovel and, when he turned toward me, eyes that were just fissures.
I closed my eyes to make him go away and, when I felt as if I’d waited long enough, cautiously opened them again. It was then that I found that he’d crossed the room and was inspecting me closely. I quickly screwed my eyes shut and I didn’t open them again, or relax or find sleep, until dawn came a couple of hours later. They had to change my sheets that morning.
In the course of the day my best friend Malcolm was brought in for a visit and my memory is of him holding onto his mother’s hand at the end of my bed looking green and unsteady, a state which she put down to empathy but which I knew was terror at the prospect of being challenged or exposed. Malcolm was the one that I’d have least expected to run off and leave me there, but he had. We’d continue as friends, but I’d never forgive him. I hadn’t thought it all the way through at that stage, but it seems to me that it was only the dead who’d shown any concern for me. The living had thought only of themselves, and left me to struggle.
Everyone seemed pleased with my progress that day and I was told that in the morning I’d be moved onto an open ward with all the other children, as if that was something I ought to look forward to.
I was feeling stronger, and I spent most of the day sitting up. So when the shovel-jawed figure came again that night I found the strength to get out of bed and flee.
I hadn’t seen outside the room before, so I’d no idea where I was or which way to go. I ran blindly, convinced that he’d be right behind me. I just wasn’t ready for the hospital. It was like the haunted doll’s house all over again, but this time it went on and on.
Hundreds of them. More than a thousand, maybe.
Everywhere I looked, there were more of them. Many were very old, and most were just standing. The entire building, which had been on this spot for more than a hundred years, was like a refugee station filled with the lingering images of those who’d died there. I saw people with terrible injuries, and those wasted by their suffering. I saw children, bald and bloated with drugs. Babies the size of my fist floated like bubbles through the air before me, trailing their bloody cords like the tails of kites.
When a hand fell on my shoulder from behind, I screamed out loud.
But it was only someone from the nursing staff, catching up with me to take me back to my room.
Jacko never came back. Geordie said he’d go to look for him and he didn’t come back, either. It seemed to me that for men without options, they scared off far too easily.
But they were also men in a low state, and I had a theory that it took a troubled mind to see what they might have seen. I went and stood at the poolside and looked into the vortex that swirled over the drain pump. All I saw was water, twisting around and looking like something alive. I turned and looked toward the steam room, but nothing moved behind the frosted glass. Once I might have seen more, but these days I was healed. I saw no more than most other people.
When I told the Sheriff that we appeared to have a couple of deserters, he put his hands to his head and cursed them loud and long, and then got out his phone and disappeared for a while in search of a signal. Peter and I carried on with the preparation work until he returned.
“We’re on our own for tonight,” he said. “We need to get as much done as we can.”
Over the next few hours the three of us pitched in and got as many of the jobs started as we could manage. Tomorrow there’d be some new faces brought in, but on our tight schedule we needed to grab all the ground we were able. Peter carried on with his preparation, the Sheriff started breaking tiles out with a cold chisel, and I got a bucket of filler and a ladder and started patching the cracks where plaster had shrunk away from joints.
A couple of odd things happened. Like when I threw the wrong switch in the cardio suite and all the empty running machines started up together, and Peter nearly crapped himself on the spot. I found a couple of excuses to visit the pool area again, but the Sheriff started looking at me suspiciously and so I just went back to my work.
I might not be able to see my ghosts anymore, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. So I took an interest when others did.
They kept me on the open ward for a couple of days and then they let me go home, with strict instructions that I was to stay in bed and take no exercise. Little did they know that they were setting a lifestyle choice that was to see me all the way through my teenaged years.
My bedroom was at the top of the stairs and my grandmother’s was across the landing. She’d lived with us for two years and she’d died there the previous summer
while I was away on a school trip. She’d been a widow for almost as long as I could remember, but toward the end she’d grown vague and forgetful and developed some odd ideas that meant she couldn’t be trusted to look after herself. She couldn’t be trusted not to empty the occasional pot of her pee into our kitchen sink, either.
For three days and nights after the ambulance brought me home, I saw nothing unusual. I had books from the library and the radio in my room, but the hours were endless and if there had been anything there to see, there’s no way I would have missed it. I wondered if my so-called gift had been a short-lived one, and then after a while I began to wonder whether I’d really experienced it at all. What’s memory, after all? Just certainty in retrospect. And mere certainty’s no actual proof of anything.
On the fourth day, when my mother went out for an hour, I went and took a look in Grandma’s old room.
The bed was still in there but the mattress was gone and the carpet had been taken up, and now it was mainly used to store empty suitcases and broken furniture that my father had ideas of someday repairing. My dad could never pass up a useful-looking piece of wood. He might never be quite sure what he wanted it for, but he always knew it had to be handy for something. He held onto one piece of driftwood for at least twenty years, moving house three times and taking it with him. After he died and I had to clear everything out, I put it in with other stuff from the garage and took it all to the local recycling point. Three or four old guys watched me dropping it into the skip, and before I left I saw one of them carrying it back to his car.
Grandma was by the bed. I’d half-expected her. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the massive blow to the heart it gave me to see her again. All the other ghosts had been strangers and, naïvely, I’d expected this one to feel the same. I don’t know if she saw me or if she knew me. I don’t think she did. She moved about the room, her hand outstretched, touching for things that were no longer there. For some time afterwards I tried to think what her action reminded me of, until it struck me. She was like a lone fish in a bowl, circling, the days all the same and the scenery never changing.