by Helen Grant
We eat side by side at the kitchen table. The food’s not great, and Ghost picks at it. I don’t eat much either. I keep thinking: What am I going to do? Am I really going to leave her here on her own tonight? The place has never seemed so grim. Cold, dark, dusty-smelling. I’ve never been here at night before and the thought of it gives me the creeps. Then I think about the thing we found in the mausoleum and get a cold feeling at the base of my spine, thinking of it out there in the dark and the rain. We didn’t even padlock the door shut again.
It’s dead, I remind myself. The dead don’t get up and walk except in crappy horror films.
Maybe some of these thoughts are occurring to Ghost too, because she shivers. I put out my hand to pull her close to me and when I touch the skin of her face and neck she’s so cold.
“You’re freezing.” I put my arms around her, trying to warm her up.
“I’m so tired, Tom.” It’s the first thing she’s said in ages.
I think of the things that would be good right now: a hot bath, an electric blanket, a heater. None of those things are at Langlands. There isn’t even an electric kettle, for fuck’s sake.
“What can I do?” I ask her.
“I’ll light a fire in my room,” she says. “You could bring some firewood up.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“It’s how we heat the bedrooms all the time in the winter,” she says. “Only not normally in April, because Grandmother says–”
And then she stops, because it doesn’t matter what her gran thinks about it anymore.
“Okay,” I say quickly. “We’ll make a fire.”
She takes the lamp, and I pick up the basket of firewood that’s by the stove. I follow her along the passage and up the stairs, past the stuffed bear at the top, and along the landing to her room.
I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve seen most of Langlands, I know what it’s like: a museum. But still, it’s strange, seeing Ghost’s room. No IKEA furniture, no posters or mobiles or strings of fairy lights or any of the other stuff I’ve seen in girls’ rooms. No laptop of course, no phone, no sound system – not even an iPod. There’s an iron bedstead and an old-fashioned washstand with a jug and basin on it.
I head over to the fireplace, put down the basket and squat down. I’m relieved to find matches; I was half-expecting to have to rub two sticks together or something. There’s some paper to start the fire with, too, only it’s not newspaper; it’s thicker, in smaller sheets. It looks like it’s been torn out of a book – not a printed book, one with blank pages to write on.
It’s harder to make a fire than you’d think. After a while Ghost kneels beside me and gently takes the matchbox out of my hand. Then she does something with the grate and the trickle of smoke rising from my efforts is drawn up the flue. Pretty soon she has the fire going, though I’m not convinced it’s ever going to warm the whole room up properly.
Then she sits back with a sigh, gazing into the heart of the fire. The light of the flames gilds her face and makes her dark eyes shine. She looks as though she is hypnotised by the tongues of fire that flicker in and out of the wood.
If I left now, would she just sit here for hours, perhaps even all night, staring into the flames until the fire burnt down and went out and the room turned cold around her? I think maybe she would.
I make myself get up, though it means moving away from the pitiful heat from the fireplace. There are blankets on the bed, so I strip two of them off it; one each. I drape one of them around her shoulders, and then I wrap myself in the other one and sit beside her.
It seems to me that living at Langlands must like being on some kind of survival course, only it never stops, you never get to go home and stick a ready meal in the microwave or put your feet up and watch TV. It just goes on and on being gloomy and cold, and everything takes three times as long as normal. It has to change. Nobody can go on like this, especially not when they’re on their own most of the time. Even if we hadn’t found that thing in the old mausoleum, even if Ghost didn’t care about what happened to her gran, she would still need to get away from here. It’s a creepy old dump. If you ask me, it even smells of death.
I put an arm around Ghost and pull her close. I hate this place. And you know what? I think it hates me too. The way the cold and the dark and the damp press in on us, like it wants to keep Ghost all for itself. But that just makes me more determined to get her out of here. I’m dreading tomorrow, but it has to be done, like a bloody and painful operation you have to go through.
Between then and now though, are hours and hours of darkness, and even though the trouble I’m already in is going to get even worse if I don’t go home tonight, I don’t want to leave her. I have this feeling that if I leave her alone here this one last time, the house is going to do something to get at her. Crazy? Maybe. But so much crazy shit has happened here already that anything seems possible.
And maybe Ghost can tell somehow that this is what’s on my mind, whether to stay here or go home, because she stirs and looks at me. Her face is only centimetres from mine and I see the reflection of the dancing flames in her dark eyes, and her lips part and she says, “Don’t go, Tom. Please. Stay here with me. Stay with me, Tom.”
Stay with me, Tom, I said, meaning Stay with me forever, live my life with me, love me but mostly Stay now. Don’t leave because I can’t bear it.
I had never dared say it before. Now I couldn’t not say it. It felt like survival.
That day was like being in a great fire. I can’t describe it better. It felt like everything I had known, everything I had ever believed, had gone up in one huge raging conflagration, and when it was all seared away and I was crouching in the blackened ruins, there was nothing left of me at all but the blind need not to bear it alone.
Stay with me, Tom.
And Tom said, “Yes.”
We sat for a long time, not speaking, watching the flames dance on the hearth. I leaned against Tom and felt his arm around my shoulders, and that was real, the warmth of his body and the pressure of his hand. Everything else was a nightmare I wanted to forget.
I kissed Tom first. I turned and kissed him softly on the mouth, letting my lips linger on his. I felt him hesitate before he kissed me back very gently, as though he thought he might hurt me, as though the wounds I had received that day made me too fragile to handle. But what hurt me was remembering. I wanted to blot it all out.
I put my arms around Tom and kissed him again. I curled my fingers in the fabric of his shirt and I could feel the tension of his body underneath. I kissed him because talking and thinking were no use anymore; it was like having to leap from a great height to save myself from fire or murder – there was no way to do it except simply to close my eyes and jump.
For a moment it was like embracing a statue. Then cold marble became warm and living; Tom dipped his head and kissed me back, kissed me properly.
I could feel the hunger in his kiss now. It was startling and exhilarating; it was the vertigo in the leap. His arms tightened around me, pulling me closer. He was holding me now, really holding me, and the energy shuddering through him was like a trap waiting to spring shut on us.
Then he broke the kiss, and I heard him gasp. He held me a little apart from him, his hands on my shoulders, his own head down; I felt the chill air flow in between us.
Last chance to stop. I sensed that as clearly as if it had been a sign that we had sped past on the motorcycle, a warning glimpsed briefly before it was far behind us.
I didn’t want to stop. The desire to feel this and only this was savage in its intensity. I put up my hand and clasped Tom’s fingers. My heart was racing and there was a strange tight feeling inside my chest. One afternoon long ago I had lain on the bed in this same room, imagining that Tom was there with me, imagining his hand on my face, my shoulder, then tracing the line of my collarbone. I swallowed. I moved his hand
very deliberately, over my collarbone and down. Then I looked up, into his eyes.
For one breathless moment – nothing. The possibility hung between us, suspended like a sparkling drop about to fall.
Then we fell upon each other. My lips parted under his; I felt his hands on me and pulled him closer, recklessly. My fingers were in Tom’s hair; his lips were on my face, my neck, my shoulder. The longing was unbearable; I shook with the agony of it.
Boards are too hard to lie on for any length of time. Tom stood up, pulling me with him, and walked me backwards to the bed. I felt the edge of it at the back of my legs and then we fell onto the mattress. The cold of the sheets was as brisk as a slap, but I was past caring.
I had never undressed anyone else in my life before; I struggled at first with the buttons on Tom’s shirt. Then Tom helped me and we shed all the things that made us belong to 1945 or 2017, so that we were just ourselves, together.
It didn’t hurt, like I half thought it would, though it was strange at first, to feel part of him inside me. I didn’t look down. I kept my gaze on his face above me, half of it lit by the flickering fire, the other in shadow. His blue-green eyes.
Stay with me, Tom.
I pulled him down to me, my mouth under his, my fingers tangled in his hair. We moved together, tightly together, holding each other, and it was good, it was beautiful, it blotted out everything else, now and forever.
I open my eyes and for the first few moments I see nothing. It’s dark. Then my eyes begin to adjust to the faint glow of the firelight and the room takes form around me. I’m not at home, in my own room. I’m in one of the high-ceilinged rooms at Langlands House. I’m lying on my side in bed under a sheet and a blanket I don’t remember spreading over myself. Under the sheet and blanket I’m naked.
I blink, remembering.
Ghost–
I roll over, propping myself up on one elbow, my mouth opening to say something though I have no idea what, and–
I nearly jump out of my skin. She’s kneeling on the other side of the bed, hands clasped in her lap, perfectly still and silent. There is a blanket wrapped around her but her shoulders are bare, tendrils of hair falling over them. Her eyes gleam in the firelight like dark jewels. She watches me, calmly.
I stop myself swearing just in time, but my heart is thumping.
“You made me jump,” I say, flopping back onto the mattress. “What are you doing? I thought you’d be asleep.”
“Thinking,” she says.
“Thinking,” I repeat. I put my hands over my face and try to rub some sense into my brain. I’m groggy with sleep. “What are you thinking about?”
“About you. About everything. We’ll be happy, won’t we, Tom?”
“Yeah.” I put out a hand, wanting to pull her back down with me again, but she’s just out of reach. Instead, I touch the sheet under us, and it’s cool under my fingers. She hasn’t been lying beside me for a while.
She’s speaking again. “There are so many things I couldn’t do by myself. It takes me ages just to do the things I already do, like chopping firewood and looking after the chickens. And there are things I don’t know, which you’d know about. Do you think we could ever have electric lights at Langlands, Tom? Maybe not all over the house, but in some of the rooms? Could you do that?”
I can’t keep up with this, but Ghost doesn’t seem to notice.
“There’s the water, too,” she says. “It has to be pumped and then you have to heat it up on the kitchen stove if you want to have a bath or wash things. Could we have a water heater?”
“I guess so,” I manage to say. “You’d need power first though, and Langlands isn’t connected to the grid. But Ghost–” I pause, struggling for the right words. “I don’t think you should be worrying about those things right now.”
She looks at me doubtfully.
“You...we...have other stuff to deal with. What happened today and...what we have to do in the morning.”
Silence. Ghost’s dark gaze is fixed on me. I can feel my conscience poking me with sharp sticks.
“Look, I’m really sorry about today. You shouldn’t have had to see that. I shouldn’t have insisted on going and looking in that place, and I feel like a shit for doing it.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Tom,” says Ghost, quite calmly.
I shake my head. “Yes, I do. It was wrong. We should have waited, and got the police to do it. Whoever it was in there, you didn’t need to see it.”
“It’s all right now though,” she says, and something about the way she says it sends a prickle down my spine. She’s looking at me but there’s a faraway look in her eyes, as though she isn’t really seeing me or the room around us.
She says, “It was a terrible shock when I read Grandmother’s letter. I killed her, she said. I remembered that thing in the stone coffin, and I thought: Grandmother did that. And I felt as though something inside me, not my body but the inside me, was being torn apart. Do you understand that? Grandmother, who loved me, and brought me up and cared for me for nearly eighteen years, did that. I saw it written in her own handwriting. It was like there were two Grandmothers, the loving one and the killing one, and I couldn’t make them into one person, Tom. I thought I would go mad trying.”
She smiles, and the smile is stranger than the calmness was. “You remember, Tom, the day you brought me all those magazines with the coloured pictures? The world out there seemed such a beautiful, wonderful place, with all its bright colourful things and all the machines that make life so much easier. I was really shocked that Grandmother had shut me away from it, and furious too, so furious that I hacked off my hair. I felt like I hated Langlands, and my whole life here. But now I can see that was all wrong. It’s the world out there that’s bad and rotten.
“The bad thing we saw today, it was the Outside that did it. Grandmother knew that, don’t you see? She wanted to go back to the time before everything was poisoned by it, and she wanted to take me with her. Back to Langlands in 1940, before the War took her father, before she was widowed, before my mother met my father. Before the Outside made everything bad. And when she and my mother came back to Langlands, it was the Outside that crept in after them and ruined everything. It was the Outside that tried to call my mother away, and caused the row that made her die. The Outside killed her, Tom.”
My mouth is dry. “Ghost...you can’t think like that. There are people out there who are going to help you. I know it’s going to be tough, but when we tell them...”
Ghost is shaking her head. “We aren’t going to tell them, Tom. Why would we tell them? They’ll come here and ask thousands of questions, and they won’t leave my mother in peace, they’ll want to look.”
I sit right up in bed and stare at her. I was dreading tomorrow myself, and the shitstorm that was going to break over both our heads, but it never occurred to me not to do it, not to tell anyone. There’s a dead body out there in the grounds. I don’t think you can just ignore that.
“Shit,” I say before I can stop myself. “Look, you can’t go on living here pretending nothing happened.”
“Why not?” she says, calmly. “When Grandmother was here, she used to go out and get things when we needed them, and I used to stay here, at Langlands. We can do that. If we run out of anything, you can go into the town and I’ll stay here. It’s worked so far,” she adds, sounding a little defiant.
“But–” I’m actually lost for words for a moment. Does she really think it could go on like that, forever? “What about when I go away to uni?” I say.
Ghost is very still, her expression neutral. The expression of someone who has to deliver bad news without losing her cool. “You won’t go,” she says.
It takes a moment for what she just said to sink in. Is she joking? But I can see she isn’t. She’s deadly serious.
“Hold on a minute,” I say. My
throat is suddenly dry and I’m struggling to sound calm and reasonable when inside I’m sliding up the panic scale, from nought to sixty in about two seconds. “I can’t not go to uni. It’s all planned. I’ve got my place.”
I see the look on her face when I tell her this, and it isn’t disappointment as you might expect. She looks shocked, as though I’ve just said something outrageous.
“You have to,” she says.
“No, I don’t,” I say, horribly aware that we suddenly sound like two little kids fighting. “Look,” I say, “I’ll come back whenever I can. It’s not impossible. And in the holidays, I’ll be here a lot. But I can’t just give it up. I need a degree for the job I want to do afterwards. I don’t want to work with Dad forever. I hate it.”
“You could do something else,” she says stubbornly.
“I won’t get a well-paid job without a degree. And anyway–”
“I have money,” she says. “There’s a whole safe full of it downstairs.”
“That’s not the point,” I say, desperately. “And however much there is of it, it won’t last forever. You must see that.”
Her face crumples. I can see she’s holding back tears, and I feel like a total bastard. Whatever I do or say, I make things worse for her. But I have to stand firm. I can’t give up my whole future.
“You said you’d stay,” she says. “You said you’d stay here with me. You gave your word.”