by Helen Grant
This self-delivered advice made sense, so I roused myself to prepare for the expedition. There were no more apples and no cheese; the best I could find to take with me was a packet of biscuits. The maps were still in the library. I would have to fetch them. I also thought of the field glasses I had used the day the men came to Langlands; so far as I knew, they were still in the attic, on the boards close to the window, where I had lain on the bearskin and watched Tom through them. So up I went, to the very top of the house, and it was on the way back down, when I was on the staircase that led down to the hallway, that I heard a car approaching.
It was unmistakeable. I could even hear the change in engine pitch as the vehicle struggled up the curving incline to the front of the house. People who have been in great fear say my blood ran cold; for me fear was the tempering that hardens steel. I knew that the confrontation had come. If the men in the black uniforms had returned, it was because this time they meant to get in. If it was someone new, it was as bad, because it meant the outside world was becoming interested in Langlands. I did not panic. Instead I felt a strange and terrible excitement, the compulsion of the cornered animal to fight for its life.
The loaded rifle was on the upstairs landing, leaning against the wall. I ran for it, not bothering to be silent on the stairs; things were past that now.
Outside, the familiar crackle of tyres on the gravel came to an abrupt halt and the purr of the engine died. I picked up the rifle, and heard the sound of a car door slamming; whoever it was wasn’t bothering to hide their presence.
As I descended the staircase, trying to fit the polished stock against my shoulder as though I meant what I was doing, I wondered how badly they wanted to get into the house, what lengths they would go to in order to do it. And it was then I remembered something that gave me a jolt worse than the sound of the approaching car had done. I had been out of the front door that morning, just to get some sunlight on my face for a few minutes.
The door was unlocked.
It’s a while before I do anything about my idea. Snow comes, and for a week it’s a pain going anywhere, let alone Langlands with that steep track. Then there are a few days of heavy rain. It clears the snow all right, but after a day of working outdoors in it, I’m ready for a hot bath, not a drive through dark wet woods. So a bit of time goes by, but the idea doesn’t go away.
Eventually, I get a free afternoon with nothing much else to do and it’s not pissing it down any more, so I borrow Mum’s car and off I go. I tell her I’m going into Perth, then get out the door before she can ask me to bring a load of stuff back from Tesco. I don’t want anyone knowing where I’ve gone.
Why am I even doing this? I guess I’m hoping I can get into the house somehow, now the old lady’s not there. I want to take another look and see if it comes out another way, if I can stand in the same spot on the landing and not see her. That girl. Then maybe I can convince myself I didn’t really see her last time. There’s nothing there now, so there was nothing there before, right?
And what if I do see her? I tell myself that this time I won’t close my eyes. I’ll speak to her. It. Whatever it is, I’ll try to work it out. But that isn’t going to happen, because there isn’t going to be anything to see.
I get to the cattle grid at the edge of the forest and start up the drive. Mum’s car struggles up the hill, bouncing over the ruts. Everything looks the same as ever: dark and gloomy and overgrown. If nobody ever manages to trace old Mrs. McAndrew’s relatives, the forest will probably just close up around Langlands House. A tree will fall right across the road one day and that will be that.
I drive up onto the gravel in front of the house and park the car in front of that big stone porch. I slam the car door closed, and the sound is very loud in the silence hanging over the place.
I stand on the gravel and stare up at it for a moment. There’s no sign of movement anywhere. No creepy dead-girl face at any of the windows.
There’s no point in hanging about; it could take me a while to find a way inside without doing too much damage. The doors are probably locked, of course, but there’s no harm in trying them anyway; it’d be stupid to break a window if old Mrs. McAndrew forgot to lock up properly. So I go into the stone porch, which is full of leaves and stuff that blew in during the bad weather.
Just as I’m reaching out for the door handle, I hear something: little creaks, like someone has run over some of those dusty old floorboards in there.
What was that?
I listen for a moment.
Wind in the trees, I tell myself, and right enough, I can hear a faint creaking from the forest as the branches sway in the breeze. I don’t think the sound I heard just now came from out there though, I think it came from inside.
Rats, I say to myself. Or maybe the old lady had a cat. If so, it will be glad to get out of the house.
I grab the handle and turn it, expecting the door to be locked, and when it opens easily I’m so surprised I just stand there for a moment, with my mouth hanging open like an idiot. Then I pull myself together and go in.
It’s dim in there, so it takes a minute for my eyes to adjust until I can pick out the ugly old bits of furniture and the moth-eaten stag’s head on the wall. And then I hear it.
A long creak on the stairs, as though someone has put down their weight very deliberately.
Slowly I turn my head. There’s a sick feeling in my stomach. She’s there, on the stairs. The girl I saw before. I couldn’t mistake her, not with that long dark hair, that cold, beautiful face. The gaze of those big dark eyes is fixed on me. There is nothing friendly about her expression.
She’s dressed differently from before, in warmer clothes, as it’s February now, and colder, though God knows whether ghosts care about that, if that’s what she is. I don’t really notice that until later, though. What I notice right now is the thing she’s holding in her hands, braced against her shoulder. It’s a rifle, and it’s aimed at me.
I nearly shot him, right then. I was halfway down the stairs, at the point where the staircase turns, when the front door opened. It opened stealthily, and there was a moment before he actually came inside, a moment when I raised the rifle and put it against my shoulder, doing my best to aim although my hands were trembling. I was so nervous that it was a miracle I didn’t just pull the trigger when he came in.
I was expecting the men in the black uniforms, or others like them, so when I saw it was only one person, and then his face turned towards me, still it took a second for me to understand whom I was seeing. Then the shock was so acute that it was like being struck.
It was him. The intruder was Tom, who had hurt me so much by looking at me with horror that other time. Now he was staring at me again, and there was that same expression on his face, as though I was the most appalling thing he had ever seen, as though he couldn’t believe his eyes. And it was worse this time, because I thought I had healed but now it was like carving the wound more deeply.
The rifle felt like a live thing in my hands. Suddenly I was intensely aware of the power within it, craving to be released. The gun wanted to shoot him, it wanted to blast away the pain he had given me – or perhaps it was the trembling of my own hands that made the barrel shudder in eagerness.
I saw him flinch at the sight of the rifle trained on him.
He opened his mouth to speak, and at first nothing at all came out. When he managed it, his voice sounded hoarse, rusty.
“Don’t shoot.”
I stared at him, but I didn’t lower the gun. I couldn’t make sense of this: what was he doing here now?
“Please,” he said. “I’ll go, okay?”
He took a step backwards, slowly and cautiously, as though he were backing away from a dangerous animal.
I found my voice. “Stop.”
I came down a step, the gun still trained on him, and then another, but I took care not to get
too close.
I said, “What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer the question. He looked as if he were finding it hard to breathe. His gaze met mine for a moment and then it darted about, looking for a way to escape. His mouth opened and closed.
At last he did manage to say something, but he didn’t tell me what he was doing at Langlands. He blurted it out.
“Are you Ghost?”
Something seemed to clench painfully inside my chest at the sound of the pet name Grandmother had given me. It cost me a great effort to keep my expression neutral, and to keep the gun barrel level.
“Yes,” I said, as firmly as I could, and saw shock pass across his face. When it became apparent that he was not going to say anything more, I said, “You’re Tom.”
He nodded, swallowing.
“Is the other one here?”
“What other one?”
“Neil McAllister. Is he here too?”
“You mean my dad?” He shook his head. “No. Just me. I came on my own.”
“Why?”
“Because...” He stopped, looking confused.
“Why?” I repeated. “Why did you come here?” I wasn’t feeling inclined to shoot anymore; the longer we stood there, mere yards apart, looking at each other, the less I believed I could fire at him. But I had to understand what was happening.
“I saw you,” he said eventually. “Before, when we were here mending the roof.”
“I know,” I said.
I saw him lick his lips, nervously. “You...Are you really here? I don’t...” His voice trailed off.
“You can see me, can’t you?” I said. “You can hear what I’m saying.”
“Yes, but...” I thought he looked a little sick. “Dad said Mrs. McAndrew lived here on her own. Nobody else, just her. And everybody says Langlands is–” He stopped.
“Haunted,” I supplied. “And you thought I was the ghost.”
Tom said nothing. He didn’t even nod or shake his head. I guessed that he was afraid: afraid that saying it, the ghost, would make it real. Or perhaps he was afraid that it would offend me, and provoke me into using the rifle. He was wrong if he thought that, though. It was almost a relief, knowing that was the reason for his utter horror when he had seen me – he thought I was the Langlands ghost. In fact, he still wasn’t sure I wasn’t. Are you really here? he had asked.
None of this explained what he was doing here now, entering the house like a thief.
“So why did you come back?” I demanded.
“Can you put the gun down?”
I thought about that. Eventually, I took a few steps backwards, so that I could react if he tried anything untoward, and then I held the rifle across my body, the barrel pointing harmlessly at the ceiling.
Tom exhaled slowly.
“Why did you come back?” I asked him again. I wasn’t going to give up.
“I couldn’t understand what I’d seen.” He looked at me pleadingly. “I thought I was – I don’t know – ill. Seeing things. I thought if I came back and looked again and there was nothing there, I’d stop thinking about it. I wasn’t going to take anything, or do any damage. I swear.”
He was looking at me with those blue-green eyes, appealing to me, and it was tempting to accept what he said. It made sense, after all. I knew Grandmother had encouraged the idea that Langlands was haunted, to discourage people from coming up here, and to make them doubt their own eyes and ears if they did come and they saw anything.
All the same, he wasn’t telling the whole truth. He knew my nickname – Ghost – and that was hardly possible unless Grandmother had told him. I could think of no reason why she would do that. She had insisted that things must stay the same, that I must continue to hide, right up until the day she had got into her black Austin and driven out of the Langlands estate and seemingly out of my life. True, she had said that things were going to change, but not yet. I was still not eighteen. And that was not the only thing...
Ugly suspicions crowded in on me.
“You came because you thought the house was empty, didn’t you?” I said. “How did you know Grandmother wouldn’t be here?”
“Mrs. McAndrew?” he said, sounding surprised. “I was in the town when she...” He stopped. “Mrs. McAndrew was your grandmother?”
I didn’t reply to that. I said, “When she what?”
“Look, I don’t think–”
“When she what?” I was nearly shouting now. I was almost unbearably tempted to point the gun at him again, to force him to speak. “What happened to my grandmother?”
He looked at me for a moment in silence, and then he said: “When she died.”
Tom McAllister told me how Grandmother had died. None of the things I had imagined had happened. The country hadn’t been invaded. She hadn’t been attacked by criminals emboldened by the state of war. She had simply had a heart attack in the street, and died, there on the pavement.
I had known, really, that she wasn’t coming back after the first couple of days. Grandmother would never have gone off and left me alone on purpose. Something awful and final had happened to her. But that kind of knowing was different from this one.
Suddenly, I didn’t care that Tom McAllister was there, that he had seen me properly, even spoken to me. He could have walked out of the house and gone into the town and told everyone he met that the Langlands ghost was a real person and that everything in the place was theirs for the taking if they wanted it enough – I didn’t care about any of that, either. All the spirit drained out of me. I sat down on the stairs with the rifle across my lap and grief overwhelmed me, dragging me down into a terrible place inside myself. I don’t know if I even cried. I felt as though I had shrunk into a dense knot of pain.
After a while, he came up the stairs and sat down near me. I thought later that that was brave of him. He didn’t know for sure that I wouldn’t use the gun. He sat a little apart and spoke to me, and I remember he touched me lightly on the shoulder, comforting me or perhaps bracing me up. That was the first time I remember anyone other than Grandmother touching me. My parents must have, when I was tiny, but I had no recollection of that. It surprised me, shocked me even. I looked at him, and I thought I saw kindness in his expression, but I was not an expert reader of faces, having seen so few.
“You shouldn’t be here on your own,” he said. “Is there someone I can call for you?”
“No,” I said immediately. The question brought me back to myself. I did care whether Tom told the outside world about me or not, or at any rate, the things that Grandmother had taught me were too deeply ingrained to be thrown away in an instant, however upset I was. “You mustn’t tell anyone I’m here. You mustn’t!”
“Why not?” asked Tom.
“It’s not safe.” I pushed back my hair from my face and made myself look Tom in the eyes, trying to show him how serious this was. “Please, you mustn’t say anything. Promise me.”
Tom stared back at me. His brows were drawn together, although I couldn’t tell what he was thinking – whether he was irritated at being pressured, or just puzzled. He didn’t promise, but nor did he refuse to promise. After a moment, he said, “But don’t you have some other family? What about your mother?”
“My mother’s dead,” I told him. “In the War.”
I said it matter-of-factly. It was something I was used to, after all. I thought about her sometimes, of course, or rather, I thought about the mother-shaped hole in the fabric of my life. I wondered whether she would have been as strict as Grandmother, or more affectionate, or simply different. But I had no memory of her at all, so I didn’t miss her in the same way I missed Grandmother. Tom couldn’t know that, though.
He said, “I’m sorry,” and I thought he really did sound sorry. Then he said something that shocked me. “Which war was it?”
I
could hardly understand him asking something like that.
“The war that’s on now,” I said.
There was a long pause, and then Tom said, “Sorry, I don’t really keep up with foreign news that much.”
In spite of my grief over Grandmother, I flared up at that. “How can you say that? Men are dying, thousands of them. How can you not care what’s happening?” Something else occurred to me then, a question I had asked myself when Tom first came to Langlands. “And why didn’t you go off to fight yourself?”
“I’m not really the type to become a soldier.” He came out and said it just like that, as though it wasn’t really that important.
“You’re an objector?” Grandmother had told me about those: conscientious objectors, people who refused to fight on their own moral grounds.
Tom just looked at me and shrugged.
After a moment, the anger drained out of me.
“I suppose I’m no better,” I said. “Hiding here, when I could be helping with the war effort.” It was true, of course. I had no right to criticise. Grandmother and I had been so safe at Langlands that sometimes I had found it hard to believe in the War at all.
“War effort?” repeated Tom. My words seemed to strike him in a strange way, as though he hardly understood them. He looked down for a while. It looked as though he was studying his own hands, but I thought he was actually thinking something through. “Look,” he said eventually, raising his head again and looking at me very earnestly, “Just tell me which war this is. I know I should know, but pretend I don’t, and just tell me anyway.”
Was he making fun of me? I didn’t think he was, and it was hard to imagine anyone making a joke of such a serious topic.
“World War Two, of course,” I said, very carefully.
I saw Tom’s eyes widen, and his lips parted as though he had drawn in a breath very sharply. I could not guess what he was thinking. Why had he even asked the question, and in that way? It flashed across my mind that perhaps the War really had ended, as Grandmother had said it might. But Tom would still know about it, wouldn’t he?