Ghost

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by Helen Grant


  The feeling of constriction in my chest was so intense that I thought my heart was bursting, that I was dying. I didn’t care; there was nothing for it now but to die. I had broken my secret, Grandmother’s secret, all our safety, all of it gone, for something I had hoped would be one way and which turned out to be something entirely other, something terrible.

  Because he wasn’t looking at me the way I’d hoped and imagined he would if we ever properly met – with friendly interest, or even with neutrality. He looked horror-struck. The colour drained out of his face. He stared and stared at me, and the eyes which I was now close enough to see were a pale blue-green, fringed with dark lashes, were round with shock.

  Abruptly he put his hands over his face and I understood that the sight of me was something he could hardly bear. I terrified him.

  I should have turned and left then, and there might perhaps have been some tiny chance that he would think he had dreamed me, that he had seen a trick of the light or a reflection or nothing at all. I didn’t do it, though. I had not meant to do this, but now I had thrown myself into the situation anyway. There was no way back.

  I kept my voice low, so low that Grandmother, down in the hallway below, could not hear it.

  “Say something,” I whispered. “Speak to me.”

  But he said nothing. My words seemed to strike him like a slap; he shuddered back from them.

  As the silence drew out it became like a gulf widening between us. At last I turned away. I had just enough self-control left not to run from him down the passage. Instead, I went into the nearest room and stood behind the door, where I was invisible from outside. I held my hands over my mouth to stifle the tiniest sound, the smallest sob.

  Tom did not come after me. For a time, I think he did nothing at all. I didn’t hear him go along the landing. He didn’t call out, to me or to anyone below. At last, I heard a series of creaks that meant he had started back down the stairs, but with none of the energy that had propelled him up them. He trod slowly and heavily, as though descending with reluctance.

  Would he tell the others what he had just seen? I had no idea, but I thought he would find it hard not to let the shock show in his face. Whatever he did or didn’t do, I dared not be caught out of the attic by Grandmother. Before the sound of the heavy front door closing had reverberated through the house, I was already at the attic door. I drew it closed behind me. A few moments later I had reached the top of the stairs.

  I threw myself down on the dusty boards. I couldn’t even cry. The pent-up tears had vanished. Instead, I felt a pain so crushing that it was like imploding. I lay on my side and curled myself into a ball, my hands into tight fists. I squeezed my eyes shut, but it was no use. I knew that even if I plucked them out altogether I would never be able to stop seeing the look of horror on Tom’s face.

  What just happened??

  I walk back down the stairs, going slowly so I have time to pull myself together, so they won’t see it on my face. The shock.

  Did I really see a ghost?

  Maybe there’s some other explanation for what I just saw, but I can’t think of it right now. I’m stunned. I ran up the stairs and when I got to the top, there she was. A girl. She was wearing a long dress that was so old-fashioned I’ve only ever seen anything like it in films, and she had very long dark hair: it went right down past her waist. Her eyes were dark, too, and very large, and her skin was very pale, so she looked sort of faded, like an old photograph. She was beautiful, but in a strange way, like she belonged to a different time.

  1944. The thought just popped into my head.

  I stared at her and I blinked hard, twice, but she was still there, I was still looking at her, and she – she was looking at me. You can tell when someone is looking at you, really looking. And she was as stunned as I was. I saw her mouth open, forming a silent O of shock.

  I cannot be seeing this.

  I put my hands over my face and blotted her out. I said to myself: When I take my hands away, she’ll have gone.

  And then something happened that made my blood run cold. I heard her whisper: Say something. Speak to me.

  I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. It creeped me out too badly, hearing her whispering to me like that, like she was trying to crawl into my brain. I stood there with my hands over my eyes until I realised there was nothing but silence. Then I looked and she had gone. Another shock, finding myself alone.

  So now I’m going back down the stairs and Dad and old Mrs. McAndrew are looking up at me. Dad looks like he’s waiting for an answer, and the old lady just looks pissed off. She’d have stopped me going up there if I hadn’t been so quick.

  “Find it?” says Dad.

  I shake my head. The truth is, I didn’t even look for his spirit level. It’s probably up there all right, in the bedroom where we did the work, but I’m not going back again. Anyway, how can I explain what I was doing up there all that time if I admit I haven’t already looked?

  Mrs. McAndrew gives me a hard stare as I go past. She can’t wait for the pair of us to be out of the house. When the front door shuts behind us, I can hear the scraping noise as she puts the bolt across.

  Dad keeps complaining about his spirit level as we get back into the van. I don’t say anything at all. I’m concentrating on doing what I have to do: open door, slide inside, fasten seatbelt. I do all of it like I’m in a dream. I feel strange, maybe a bit sick. Disconnected.

  As we’re bumping down the track away from Langlands House, Dad glances at me.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “You look–”

  “Tired,” I say. “Just tired.”

  I look back over my shoulder as we follow the curve of the track and see the house vanishing behind the trees. Mrs. McAndrew wrote Dad a cheque for the full amount while we were packing up. I won’t be seeing that place again.

  I put my head back against the rest and close my eyes. What just happened? The question nags at me, but I can’t answer it. One thing I do know. I’m never going to tell anyone about this.

  “Ghost?”

  Grandmother was calling me from the foot of the attic stairs. I stood up, rubbing at my face with my fingertips. I hadn’t been crying, but I knew she would see from my expression that something was wrong. I couldn’t hide it; the pain had been etched into me. I dragged myself reluctantly to the head of the stairs and looked down.

  “Come down, Ghost.”

  Grandmother was looking up, but her face was hidden in the shadows. I could not tell whether she was angry or even suspicious. I went slowly downstairs. When I was nearly at the bottom, she said, “This door was not locked.”

  “Wasn’t it?” I said. Even to my own ears, my tone was dull. Perhaps Grandmother took my apparent lack of interest for innocence. Then the light slanting in showed her my face.

  “Good heavens, child, whatever is the matter?”

  “I have a headache.” This was not entirely untrue. I had a heavy feeling in my temples, like the pressure before a storm. I could well believe that it would have developed into a full blown sick headache by evening.

  “You seemed perfectly all right just now,” said Grandmother, but it was concern I heard in her voice, not suspicion.

  “It started suddenly.” I turned my head, not wanting to look into her eyes. “I think I’d like to lie down.”

  Grandmother touched my hand. “Goodness, you’re half-frozen. Come down to the kitchen first, and warm up.”

  I didn’t have the energy to argue. I let her lead me down to the kitchen, where she made me sit close to the stove. Then she made me a cup of sweet tea, which I liked, and a cold compress for my forehead, which I didn’t like, but submitted to anyway. It was easier to let her fuss over me than to resist.

  I suspected that she felt guilty about locking me into the attic, especiall
y that last time, when she had pushed me back inside and shut me in so peremptorily. Grandmother was strict but she was not cruel. And clearly she had absolutely no idea what had just happened with me and Tom. She thought I was simply chilled and low in spirits after being confined in the attic so much.

  As I sat cradling my cup of tea and watching Grandmother bustling about, it began to occur to me that I had done something very bad, even if I hadn’t meant to. Someone had really seen me now, someone from outside Langlands. Clearly Tom hadn’t said anything to Grandmother, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t tell other people. And then...

  All the things with which Grandmother had terrified me over the years came crowding around me like leering demons. The worst of this torment was, I couldn’t talk to Grandmother about my fears, not without admitting what I had done. And since I couldn’t undo it, there seemed no benefit in confessing. Instead, I would have to live with knowing that our safety was dependent on the actions of a stranger. Would he tell or not? I had no idea.

  The compulsion I had had to communicate with Tom seemed pitiable now. Whatever I thought I had seen in him based on mere appearances, he hadn’t seen the same in me. He had seemed utterly horrified by the sight of me; he wasn’t interested or sympathetic. It was never going to be like the books in the library, the novels in which the hero was strangely taken with the heroine the very first time he saw her. It wasn’t even going to be like the ones in which he wasn’t impressed by his first sight of the heroine but later came to realise how interesting she was, because the work was done; Tom wasn’t coming back. And for this mirage I had endangered our life here at Langlands.

  That night I lay for a long time staring wide-eyed and sleepless into the dark. It was a very quiet night, windless and dry, not at all like the night of the storm, when the chimney had come down through the roof and caused the damage that had led to all this trouble. Now the roof had been repaired, and the weather had become so calm that you would hardly believe such a thing could have happened. The only thing that had really changed was me. Before that night, I had longed for contact with the world outside Langlands; now I was sickened at the idea of it, and judging by the way it had reacted to the sight of me, I was just as repellent to it. Things felt hopeless. Perhaps I slept in the end, but long before the light came I was lying awake again, and I was not aware of having been unconscious at all.

  In the morning, Grandmother took me up to see the bedroom where the work had been done. You could tell where the ceiling had been repaired if you looked. It was the same with the chimney stack when we went outside to look at that; it had been repaired enough that rain wouldn’t come down the chimney, but it looked lop-sided because the stack hadn’t been rebuilt properly. That would have taken a lot longer, and cost more, and Grandmother would have tolerated neither.

  “Not terribly pretty, is it?” said Grandmother.

  I still felt wretched and couldn’t bring myself to care very much either way, but I didn’t want Grandmother to notice that and ask me what the matter was. So I said, “I suppose it’s difficult, with the War on.”

  I wasn’t looking directly at her, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her head turn towards me. It seemed important to keep the conversation going, to make things normal, so I added, “It gave me such a shock when the chimney came down. I really thought we were being bombed.”

  Grandmother said nothing to this, which was unusual. I would have expected a short instructive homily about not panicking when something alarming happened, or some such thing. Instead, she was silent.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The events of the previous day were pressing in on me like a miserable fog, but in spite of this, I couldn’t help seeing that Grandmother was preoccupied. She didn’t appear to have taken in what I had just said; she had something else on her mind. After another minute or two of silently following the byways of her own thoughts, she seemed to come to herself. She looked at me and said, “I am so sorry you have to be shut up here, Ghost, with only an old woman for company.”

  So had I been, until yesterday’s catastrophe. Now I simply said, “I know it’s for the best, Grandmother.”

  “For the best,” she repeated, more to herself than to me. “Yes, I’ve tried to do whatever was for the best.”

  She turned her back on the view of the ill-repaired chimney and began to lead the way back into the house. I was not sorry; it was a bright dry morning, but the air was bitterly cold. Soon winter would properly sink its fangs into Langlands; only the kitchen, with its ancient range, would be warm enough to tolerate, and our routine would shrink to the span of its four walls for most of the day.

  “Grandmother,” I said, “Do you think there’s any chance at all that the War will end soon?”

  We were entering the shadow of the stone porch at the front of the house; now Grandmother paused for a moment, looking at me.

  “The War will end?” she repeated, and again she sounded preoccupied. She didn’t answer the question. She seemed lost in thought for a few moments and then she replied with another question of her own.

  “When will you be eighteen, Ghost?”

  “April 12th,” I said promptly, although the question surprised me a little. Grandmother knew perfectly well when my birthday was. It wasn’t as though either of us had a whole range of anniversaries to remember, just one each: mine in April and hers on 15th July.

  “Less than half a year,” she said thoughtfully. We resumed our walk into the house and made our way down the passage to the kitchen, where Grandmother set the kettle on the range to make tea. Then she came over to where I was standing. I hadn’t sat down; instead I was over by the window, gazing out. There was a patch of bright sunlight on a grey corner of wall that jutted out from the house. That patch of light would move up and over the house as the day passed, shortening in the middle of the day and lengthening as evening approached. Then darkness would come, I would have been at Langlands another day, and nothing would have changed, at least, not for the better. The days seemed to stretch out in front of me, and I no longer knew what to wish for.

  Grandmother glanced out of the window too, and then she said, “Ghost,” so that I turned my head to look at her. I had to force myself to meet her gaze; I was still afraid she would see in my eyes that I had something on my conscience. But she noticed nothing, and it was not until much later that it occurred to me that perhaps she had something on hers.

  She put out her hands and touched my shoulders, and said, “I want you to remember, whatever happens in the future, however things may seem, that I have always, always, had your best interests at heart.”

  “Yes, Grandmother,” I said, though I was mystified by her words. Did she think she had been too severe, making me hide in the attic? I could not think what else she could have done.

  Then she kissed me lightly on the forehead and went back to whatever she had been doing, perhaps embarrassed by this unusual display of sentiment. I turned my gaze back to the window, and when I sighed, it was too low for Grandmother to hear.

  The winter was very harsh that year. We had snow before Christmas, and much more of it afterwards. Once, we ran really low on supplies and had to wait a week before Grandmother could take the car into town, because the track was so thickly blanketed with snow. Many times, I had to go out in the early morning to clear away the snow in front of the chicken coop and replace their water that had frozen solid; carting in firewood for the range meant a nipped nose and chilblains on the hands.

  During those months there were no repercussions from the day when I had seen and been seen by an outsider. No visitor came to Langlands – not that there was any need, since we had no more accidents – nor was there any other sign to indicate that the outside world had noticed my existence. The guilt and anxiety that had gripped me after the incident occurred began to slacken off, although I was still sore about Tom’s reaction to seeing me. As though he had
seen a ghost, I thought. Well, perhaps he thought he had.

  The odd thing was, that Grandmother seemed to have been affected by the storm damage and the presence of the men at Langlands, even though she knew nothing of what had happened to me. I couldn’t account for this. We couldn’t have fixed the roof by ourselves, so she had had to call them in; they had done the work and gone, and our life had resumed as before. There was no reason for her to dwell on any of it, and yet it seemed that she did.

  More than once she made some apologetic reference to my having had to hide in the attic, as though it were a much greater hardship than it had really been.

  Every time, I made the same reply: “It wasn’t really that bad, Grandmother,” but I sensed that this wasn’t easing her mind. Those days in the autumn really bothered her, and I couldn’t understand why.

  I remember one morning in February I found that the first snowdrops had come through and called her outside to see. It was freezing outdoors but bright all the same, and I was grateful to feel sunshine and fresh air on my face after spending so much time inside. I suppose it was that that made me chatter on so cheerfully; after the monotony of winter days, any new thing was interesting, including the appearance of a cluster of tiny flowers. Even the misery and disappointment I had felt after the disastrous encounter with Tom had faded to a dull ache rather than pain. I found myself almost happy again, at last.

  My enthusiasm did not infect Grandmother. She came outside all right, and looked at the snowdrops, pulling her winter coat close around her, and she listened to me talking, but she said very little herself. If anything, my happy mood seemed to depress her.

  Eventually we went back inside, to the kitchen. I had some studying to do, so I sat down at the table in front of my books, and was rather surprised when she came and sat with me. Then she actually took my hand in hers, and I was really mystified; evidently, she had something serious to say, but what?

 

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