by Phil Rickman
Helen leans her head back against the stone.
‘When Ozzy Ahmed was talking about an abused woman, I felt… that women have been abused here. I keep thinking about that, Cindy.’
‘Abused women… or Ozzy.’
‘Ozzy. The performance of his life? I don’t think so. When he was talking to me, that wasn’t a performance. Yes, he was being careful – when you’ve done as many news interviews as me, you know when people are watching their words – but it wasn’t entirely made-up. Something was… burning inside him. I didn’t expect that.’
‘Mr Sebold thought he was approaching a breakdown.’
‘Such concern.’ Helen smiles. ‘Usually commensurate with the level of fame. TV and radio presenters, while pretending to be above all that, love to collect celebs. They’re just part of the celebrity support mechanism, but they like to think they’re far more important than that. I wonder what they’re saying to one another now. Are you allowed to socialize when you’re evicted?’
‘I think we all have to come back at the end of the week to share our feelings, so perhaps not. Can’t see how they could stop it, mind. Any more than they could stop us gossiping about executives of Hunter-Gatherer Television. Just rely on us, they do, to be decent human beings.’
Helen turns to face him. So clear-eyed, she is.
‘Is this a haunted house?’
‘All houses are haunted. I’m sorry…’ He wiggles his hands. ‘I know what you’re asking. I think, despite some rather baffling developments over the past day or two, most viewers would think not. Human fireworks, but little else.’
‘It feels haunted now,’ Helen says. ‘If you weren’t here I’m not sure I could stand it.’
‘Well, that’s been the problem, see. Too many of us, filling the place with our baggage and our back-stories. Our electric emotions. When Eloise came in alone, she reacted alarmingly quickly to something she, personally, perceived as horrifically wrong – the elder wood on the fire.’
‘And the viewers at home, most of whom wouldn’t recognize an elder branch from a cactus, thought she was bonkers and threw her out. But was she?’
‘No. The elder was a personal conduit to something deeper.’
‘So the intention,’ Helen says, ‘is that, at the end of the week, one person – the viewers’ chosen one – will be left alone here for one night. Should it be Roger, do you think?’
‘Roger would want it to be Roger. Personally, I would not.’
‘All right.’ Helen takes his left hand. ‘What do you think?’
‘What?’
‘What is it? What do you think it is?’
Cindy looks down at his silly skirt. What an old phoney he must seem. And yet isn’t that the point of all this… that the hard line sceptics like Richard Dawkins and Ashley Palk should regard him with ridicule rather than hatred, thus allowing him to walk amongst them?
He looks down at the jagged red seam of fire under patient old oak logs which rarely flare. Remembers that momentary glimpse he had yesterday, as the planchette trembled between worlds, of the dead hearth, the pale-brown walls, the rude and empty chair and the rotting hangings. Visions from the vapour.
Doesn’t do individuals any more, only essences, which is why he was no use to Trinity, who wanted her house to be haunted by Katherine Parr. No Katherine Parr here, that bright January day when he first visited. Only the vapours from the sludge.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘that there is something here – something blocked here – that is incompatible with civilized behaviour. Something very old, as old as… as Stonehenge.’ Dear God, he almost said Belas Knap. ‘There are some places from which energy can be drawn, for either good or ill. At one time, you suspect, there was little to separate good and evil, the primary desire was for survival, continuity, in the face of heartless nature. Ask the drug addict who beats and robs some old widow to pay for his heroin… ask him if he is evil. No, he’ll tell you, I am a victim of circumstance. But the evil is there, see, and all we can hope is to grow away from it.’
‘Evil is here?’
‘Evil…’ Her hand feels warm, animated on his. How to express this… ‘Evil grows here. A seedbed for it. So thick, so concentrated like a rich, dark compost. I don’t know how it can be removed. Or if.’
Beyond the house, Grayle breathes in the fog, harsh and peppery. Things tend to disappear in the fog and are broken down and absorbed and lost for ever.
Like the interview with Ashley, the rehearsal. Which only existed for Grayle, momentarily, in such a translucent form. When they finally recorded, with two cameras, nothing was the same. The mood had gone. However she phrased her questions, the words came out different, like myriad autumn leaves turning back into drab green.
The luminous word ‘malevolence’ had congealed into ‘angry’.
She can still see Roger Herridge, some time before that moment, looking down at the trashed ouija board, words coming out of him whose significance is already passing him by.
You didn’t say goodbye to it, Ozzy. Got to say goodbye or the spirit doesn’t go away.
Grayle walks away into the fog, woollen hat down over ears that haven’t known cold like this since she was a kid.
This is all so unreal now. Down by the main gate, a security van is parked out of sight under coniferous trees and someone’s walking up. She thinks at first it’s going to be Ozzy Ahmed, returning, shuffling out his phoney-bashful little smile. But it’s a woman in a dark poncho with her arms inside it and thigh boots which allow her to move through the undergrowth like she’s floating.
‘You looking for Ahmed?’ Eloise says.
Grayle shrugs.
‘He’s gone, hasn’t he? He’s pissed off.’
‘Uh, so it seems.’
‘I hope he’s walked into the river. But his sort never do. Unless somebody’s pushed them.’
‘You saw what happened. I mean, they let you watch TV?’
‘Yeah, like in prison. I did hear what he called me. Mental?’
‘I don’t think he knew what day it was.’
‘Not a good enough excuse. I won’t forget.’ Eloise looks back over her shoulder. ‘Funny… you go about twenty paces through the gate, and it’s clear. It’s not a nice day, but there’s no fog.’
‘Just hill fog, huh?’
‘You know what I think?’ Eloise parts the knotty fronds of her black hair to expose a mouth-twist that starts out mischievous and then isn’t. ‘I think it comes from the house.’
She keeps on walking towards the village and Grayle towards the main gate. Eloise wasn’t exaggerating. From the other side of it, you can see middle-distant hills. The outside world will get another hour’s daylight while Knap Hall is embracing night.
Up in the TV village, where the air is all the colours of frogspawn, Kate Lyons spots her, calls her over to Defford’s cabin.
‘One more here for you, Grayle.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Interesting message from a viewer. Not quite sure what to do about it.’
Kate’s hair is unusually mussed. Odd, too, that she seems to be seeking advice from Grayle.
‘Rhys Sebold’s phone.’
‘You still have his phone in the safe?’
‘Nobody gets their phone back until the week’s over.’
‘You checked Ozzy’s?’
‘Of course. No clues, unfortunately. But Mr Sebold has received a message from a woman called Rhiannon Littlewood, who’s the sister of his late—’
‘I know.’
‘She’s also emailed our viewers’ line, as you saw, so I specifically checked that. It merely says, as so many others do, that yesterday’s seance was not the fraud Ashley claimed it was, and that the woman who began to spell her name is a real – if dead – person. On Sebold’s phone she’s demanding, rather hysterically, I thought, that he call her back about the seance. Which, of course, as it relates directly to the programme, rather than a personal matter, is something we wouldn
’t want a resident, even an evicted resident, discussing with someone on the outside. They know the rules, they’ve had months to inform friends and relatives.’
‘He doesn’t get to call her?’
‘I don’t think he should, do you?’
‘Kate, how about I call her?’
‘I did wonder whether you might want to do that.’
‘Do I get to read the message?’
‘I think you should. I’ll leave Sebold’s phone on my desk.
‘I’ll take good care of it.’
‘Grayle…’ Kate Lyons is peering at her. ‘Are you all right? You look… unsteady.’
‘It’s the fog. Makes everybody look…’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘Is it lunchtime?’
‘It’s nearly four o’clock.’
‘Short days, huh?’
‘And long nights. You might like to grab some rest. Leo has some plans for tonight.’
‘Kind of plans?’
‘Well, as he said, to move on from the Ahmed upset, change the tenor of the programme. Leo always likes to be…’
‘I know.’
Rhys Sebold’s iPhone lives in a monogrammed leather case. Figures. Grayle takes it into the restaurant, orders a pot of filter coffee, collects a salad sandwich and finds a table in a corner.
There’s a text and an email from Rhiannon. The text, short and splattered with exclamation marks, is appealing to Sebold to call her back, while the email is quite formal.
Rhys,
I know and respect your reservations about these matters and I know I am the very last person you would want to hear from but I feel I have to tell you how dismayed I was when you chose to ignore those very obvious initials when the ‘spirit’ was asked to spell out her first name.
I actually don’t consider myself gullible but equally I would not sleep easily if I’d ignored something as obvious as this. I think that one day you might come to regret it. Please at least call me.
Rhiannon Littlewood.
OK, some unanswered questions here.
The restaurant’s almost empty. TV people don’t seem to do afternoon tea. Grayle gets out her own phone.
No answer. Her coffee pot comes, served by Lisa Muir in her neat, not quite Tudor apron. Well, OK. Good a time as any.
‘You wanna get another cup, Lisa? Have a seat?’
‘Sorry.’ Lisa bares her baby teeth. ‘I have other people to…’
The only other people in the restaurant are three techies who, even as Grayle watches, are pushing back their chairs, gathering together morning papers and stuff.
Grayle stands up.
‘Tell you what, Lisa. Have my cup. I’ve had so much coffee today my bloodstream’s like the M5.’
‘And what can be done about it?’ Helen asks.
Cindy drinks his tea slowly.
‘Now, there’s a question. In the film, when I am played by George Clooney in his first sexually ambivalent role, there will have to be mystical runes.’
‘Runes.’
‘Always runes, it is. Which George, as me, will read out in the original Runic, scattering dry ice before him. And lo, the air will sweeten, and there will be tranquillity, and little children and kittens and puppies will play here again.’
‘After everything you’ve said, you’re taking this with a pinch of salt?’
‘Salt, yes, I forgot the salt. George would use lots of…’ Cindy places his cup and saucer on the chess table. ‘What I’m doing, lovely, is giving you a chance to take it with whatever mineral you find least offensive.’
‘That’s patronizing.’
‘So it is.’
Two old pros, they are, hamming it up for the cameras.
‘What I’m also trying to say is that it could be that absolutely nothing will happen. On Sunday we’ll all assemble in here, crack a couple of bottles of Dom Pérignon or whatever fizz the producer thinks we’re worth, and then Ashley and Rhys will proclaim a victory for common sense.’
‘And then?’
‘Then lives go on. Someone, presumably, will have to live here or supervise its opening to the public. And every so often there will be events of inexplicable misfortune, and people will mumble and move on. And Roger will write a chapter on it in his next book and tourists will point at the entrance, and say, isn’t that the house where…?’
‘So the runes don’t work,’ Helen says.
‘In the films they do. Isn’t that enough?’
He looks into the hearth, feels the vapours rising and wonders, worried now, how he can arrange for Helen to be evicted before the arrival of what his senses, all six of them, tell him is coming.
63
Borrowing a ghost
‘SO WHAT ARE you doing here, Lisa?’ Grayle says.
No more mystery. She’s had it with mystery. She wants lights switched on, holes patched, grimy corners swept out. She pours coffee for Lisa, pushes brown sugar at her.
‘Last winter, if you recall, you told me you couldn’t even bring yourself to drive past the place.’
Lisa looks at her like she actually can’t remember saying this.
‘I talked to Poppy Stringer,’ Grayle says.
‘Mrs Stringer talked to you?’
‘Yes, I think you can assume that if I talked to her, she talked to me also.’
‘Oh.’
‘Which means I’m now a little wiser. About what went on here. With the Ansells.’
Lisa looks down at the table.
‘Oh… my… God.’
Grayle waits. Two Jamies and an Emily wander in from the fog, but there are people around to serve them. No pressure, Lisa. ’Cept from me.
‘Broke up with my boyfriend,’ Lisa says.
Grayle says nothing. These things happen.
‘Well, he dumped me, to be honest. I was too… old-fashioned. That wasn’t what he said, but you get the idea. I suppose I bored him, talking about Trinity and the times at Knap Hall. We had a big row, he’s like, why don’t you go and fucking squat there?’
‘So when you told me you couldn’t bear even to drive past…’
‘I just couldn’t bear not being here any more. Apart from the celebrities and parties, it was like where I really grew up. I was only a year or so out of school. Trinity, I think she thought I was more mature than maybe I was. We didn’t all have her kind of life. I don’t think she realized that.’
Lisa sits tinking a spoon on the rim of her coffee cup.
‘My parents… they’d known Harry Ansell for years. The Ansells had stayed with us a couple of times, when they were looking for a house and they wanted to avoid the photographers. You wouldn’t believe what some of these paparazzi guys are like.’
‘Yeah, I would. So you got to know Trinity before she was your employer. Before they found Knap Hall.’
‘Harry Ansell didn’t like this place. Tried very hard to put her off. He said there were lots of stories about it being haunted and unlucky. Which he didn’t believe, but he got my dad to tell Trinity what a bad reputation it had. My dad didn’t know any of that. He’d barely heard of Knap Hall. Harry just wanted it to come from somebody else, somebody they trusted. Well, he got that wrong. Trinity didn’t particularly connect with my parents. Harry’s generation, not hers. When they were staying here she spent more time with me.’
‘And what did you tell her?’
Lisa’s suddenly close to tears.
‘Couldn’t tell her my dad was lying, could I? Cause a row between her and Harry? But like… naturally, I wanted them to buy it. I wanted a job with her. I wanted to be part of it. I mean, who wouldn’t?’
She sniffs.
‘When they had the re-enactment of Katherine Parr’s funeral? At Sudeley? Trinity wasn’t involved or anything, not in the funeral. We were just watching. But some scenes for The King’s Evening had been shot there, so she felt quite at home, in a way.’
‘Nobody recognized her?’
‘Oh yeah, I’m sure everybod
y did, even if they didn’t remember the movie, but nobody said anything. It was Sudeley’s show, not hers. Moving, but a bit weird. Like Trinity was going to her own funeral.’
‘I never thought of it like that.’
‘When she walked away, it was like Katherine was walking away from her own tomb.’ Lisa looks down into her coffee. ‘And that was when I told her.’
‘Told her what exactly?’
‘I said maybe Katherine Parr was there already. I said the Knap Hall ghost was her.’ Lisa squirms a little. ‘I didn’t make it up. There were stories… sort of. People saying Katherine had actually spent time at Knap Hall not long before she died. And there was maybe a romantic kind of…’
‘A romantic aspect to Knap Hall? For Katherine Parr, former Queen of England? Are you kidding?’
‘It didn’t seem such an awful thing, at the time. Borrowing a ghost.’
The phone rings; Grayle ignores it.
Ashley’s back in the house.
‘You don’t get rid of us sceptics that easily, folks.’
Her smile, once condescending, has been rendered endearingly lopsided by her injuries, Cindy notes. She looks tired. He’s also detecting disquiet in the way she’s looking around, at the dim panelling, the knobbly oak screen and the old, flaking fire. Sensing her subliminal response to an alteration in atmosphere, like a diver’s reaction to the deep. If she’s even conscious of it, how will she begin to explain it to herself?
‘If you’re feeling isolated, Ashley,’ he says. ‘I shall be happy to join you in questioning everything in the most brutally scientific fashion.’
‘Brutal, Cindy?’
‘I keep a pair of leather trousers in my room.’
Dear God, all this whimsy. He must be more nervous than he imagined.
Roger Herridge says, ‘Your venture into the Outside, Ashley… has that given any indication where we might be? Soil colour or anything?’
‘All I know, Roger, is that we’re in a much bigger house than this seems, and some parts of it are more modern. And more comfortable. And no, I didn’t meet either Ozzy or Rhys.’
‘Did you observe the weather?’ Cindy asks.
‘It’s not weather you can see. Fog. And dark now. Someone said it might freeze tonight. Never expected to feel I was in a better place than out there. Have I missed anything?’