Ghost Story

by Toby Litt

  She went back upstairs and got dressed as if for going outside: jumper, jeans, sturdy shoes. These last felt strange on her feet, heavy and unwarranted; she had, she realised, been barefoot for all of the past few weeks. It was like the first day of the school term, after the long summer holidays, exchanging plimsolls for black leather uppers.

  She opened the cellar door and for a while stood there looking down into the dark. The torch was now handy, too handy; on a shelf immediately to her right – placed where it had been before, when she made her previous cellar descent. She picked it up with her right hand, which she saw was trembling, and then, almost immediately, without thinking, reached for the lightswitch and flicked it. The bulb flashed, pinged and went black – but only in her anxious imagination, in reality it lit the cellar stairs not brightly but more than adequately. Paddy had changed it. The step she’d thought was last was actually two from it – at the very bottom, no rat was in sight, no man, either. Bravely, she took the first downward step. The blood-boom in her ears was so loud she doubted she would hear anything over it. As she went down, she thought of Paddy and of the next time they’d have sex – would they ever, she wondered, have sex again? She was fairly distanced from her descending body, as if lying on the ground looking at the sky and letting a balloon float away. To her left were her and Paddy’s Wellington boots, black, and then Max’s, white with red spots – he would be missing them; she almost picked them up and carried them to the top of the stairs so as not to forget to do that. She had ceased to feel terror; now she was impatient for all this to be over, for the revelation – whatever it was – to have taken place. Self-conscious, she did not have to lower her head but could stand upright, now she had reached the bottom step. The cellar floor itself, concrete, was a more terrifying thought to her than the stairs: it was, she feared, more likely to have living things upon it – things she might irk or kill by stepping on them. She took a small step forwards and it was now that the scrape happened again. It came as a sound, she knew that, but so sensitized was she that she’d also felt is as a grating within her chest – as if someone were inside there, rubbing two sheets of sandpaper together. She was surprised she hadn’t screamed and relieved not to have peed herself – she felt between her legs, confirming she hadn’t. Her breathing was too ragged, and she concentrated for a while on slowing it. There were questions to think about: had the scrape been louder down here? She couldn’t tell. It had seemed closer, but that might have been because of the dead dirty walls around her. Within herself, she felt very tender – as if she were a hostage, dreaming of a bed whilst tied to a radiator. The scrape hadn’t seemed to come from down by her feet, along the edge of the wall, or up above her head, in one of the beams: no bats or rats, then; it had been circumambient (long words were comforting to her) – it had seemed to come from all around her at once: the whole house had scraped. If she wanted to, she knew she could at this point panic: it was there, a button to press, as plain as the rubber button on the black rubber torch with the yellow trim and the black grip-rings around its long shaft. The scrapes were coming at roughly equal intervals (or so she thought) – perhaps she could wait for the next one. She looked systematically around the whole cellar-space. The light from the bulb was yellow and left deep blue shadows where it failed to fall – like rags caught on nails. Because they had moved from a flat to a house, they hadn’t needed (yet) all this extra space – they had nothing with which to fill it except, perhaps, their apprehensions. Scared again, she stepped forwards; she would go into the dead centre and turn around on the spot, inspecting everything. This she did, after which – the scrape not having recurred – she felt that perhaps there was nothing more to do than return to the normal, everyday rooms: semi-safe. The air in the cellar was surprisingly warm and dry; all their heat, escaping down through the floorboards. She decided she would wait for the next scrape, after all. Avoided panic became physical discomfort in a very short while – she felt something sweep across her instep. It wasn’t hairy or probing or moving – she knew it wasn’t a rat high-jumping her foot, its tail leaving an aftertaste of touch across the tongue of her toes: pink and with chicken-leg joints in it all along its length. She knew, but didn’t believe. She looked down, and nothing at all was touching her foot; she moved it anyway. Sex with Paddy had been a strange thing to think about when coming down the stairs. This wasn’t the best place to indulge in such sad thoughts. Paddy had been wonderful to her, and still tried to be – without pressuring, or even suggesting. A few minutes passed. Despite the warmth of the cellar the adrenaline going stale inside her made her shiver a couple of times. The scrape didn’t seem to mean any menace; it was probably just something in the drains below the house, something that moved back and forth when someone next door or down the road flushed their toilet or ran a bath. She knew this was a lie, but was working her way towards accepting it. Otherwise, the breathing and the scrape might, she supposed, be related – she couldn’t see how. She turned the torch on and played the light around the beams of the room. Standing directly under the back-to-front room, she imagined the weight of the house pressing down upon her. Reaching up, she put her hands on a couple of the beams and pretended to hold it up. She was becoming playful, and this was enough to prickle her with renewed unease. This time it was almost as if she had anticipated the scrape, was in rhythm with it – she was able to hear more detail in it: it wasn’t just a scrape, it was a number of consecutive sounds. After it had happened, which took less than half a second, she was again aware of the breathing. Wasn’t it, too, louder down here? Or could she just all-around hear it?

  After a final definitely not panicked look around, Agatha began to ascend. She felt as if she had conquered several aspects of the house, and also of herself. The nape of her neck was especially sensitive to the triumph as she went up the first few steps – it was expecting something, suddenly, to touch it: to render remote all her bravery, false and true; the sharp blade of something. What, now, did she do? Houses make noises: she tried to make herself worried that there was some structural problem with the foundations, but this didn’t work. The scrape, like the breathing, came out of the house, was part of it – she knew this. The problem now was Paddy – whether to tell him, how to tell him, what to tell him. She almost wished she hadn’t learnt this (learnt what? that their Victorian house made inexplicable noises – for its own amusement, seemingly), so that she wouldn’t have to have the conversation about it with Paddy that was now inevitable.

  It was only when she got back upstairs into the kitchen that Agatha began to feel truly discomfited, or to recognise the discomfort that had all along been there inside her. The discovery of no cause for the scrape, just as there had been none for the breathing, had been reassuring at first, but now the idea began to reveal its horrors.

  If Paddy had been there, she would have felt better; she wouldn’t necessarily have told him anything, nor sought protection in him, but his physical presence – his dumb body – would, in itself, have been reassurance enough. But for now, Agatha was alone in the house with – with what? she thought – with the house. The scrape, which she had been trying quite hard not to concretize, could quite easily have been the sound of a knife being sharpened – or even, though she hated herself for the melodrama of the idea, a scythe; long, sharp, curved. She didn’t want to die before she had had a chance to see Max again, and to tell Paddy certain important and necessary things regarding Max and how he should be brought up without a mother, or without his birth mother. Agatha began really to panic, and the thing which made her panic most was the memory of her recent bravery in going down into the cellar. How could she have done it? She admired but also blamed herself for being so reckless. She sat down on one of the chairs at the kitchen table, then stood up, then sat down again. What if it were the house? What if the house itself was about to fall down? Or what if the house were an evil thing, warning her off? She laughed – relieved to find some ridiculous superstition in herself; it was amusing, and she
wasn’t going to let herself get away with it. The house was lovely – and felt, if it felt anything towards her, love. The scrape wasn’t the house. The scrape came from within or behind-the-reality-of the house. Even in her head, with no-one to speak it to, she didn’t want to use the phrase ‘from another dimension’, the words seemed too science-fiction. It came from somewhere else, and she didn’t yet know what it meant. The best thing would be to get far away and to have some time to think about it – which would mean going out the front door; which she still, despite her panic, couldn’t do. She looked out into the garden and realised that here at least was somewhere she could get to that was outside the house and, hopefully, away from its unnatural sounds. But she hesitated: even the garden was a risk – a crossing beyond what she felt comfortable with. This time the scrape, no louder, seemed more definite, as if it had responded as dialogue to the point her thoughts had reached. Maybe not a scythe, maybe a spade going down into gravelly earth; it was, the thought hit her, her grave being dug and the sound travelling back through time to reach her. Nonsense. But how far back through time? Agatha fetched the key for the French doors from one of the kitchen drawers and trying not to fumble or drop it, to show no sign of terror to herself, she put it clicking into the lock and twisted it twice anticlockwise. The garden was dark and seemed larger than during daylight. Agatha didn’t think she could just stand in the kitchen waiting for another scrape, but she was equally afraid of stepping outside the house – part of her believed that it would fall down without her inside it to give it a reason for continuing to stand; would simply cease to be there. She pushed the door open and stepped out onto the lawn – the branches of the appletree already above her head, between her and the cloudy night sky. The air after almost a month indoors felt quite deliciously intricate as it moved over her face, almost as if little fairy feet were dancing on her forehead and cheeks. The garden was nowhere near as scary as she had thought it would be, which almost made her go straight to the front door, out into the street and down to the sea – outside, within the confines of the wooden fence, was a different thing, though, just like another room in the house, only without a roof. Agatha looked up, having already forgotten in the remembered novelty of it the reason she was out there: there were many more stars on the ceiling of the back bedroom than were visible through these halogen-brown clouds. What if she had gone out of the house, she thought, would that mean she had left Paddy? The ideas did not follow on, one from the other, but she felt them as connected. As the ground was dry, she sat down with her back against the appletree – immediately wishing for a lit cigarette or perhaps a small joint. She had already got far more out of this night than she had expected. Did I lock the cellar door? She asked herself the question and couldn’t answer; it wasn’t that she was afraid of something escaping, heaving itself up the steps to sniff the air and track her down. It wasn’t that, but in some ways it didn’t make a difference whether it was or wasn’t – the result was the same: fear. The house, her life, seemed capable of delivering a vast, scything blow. She might just be standing in the hall, but in one moment her head could be sliced off and her existence-for-Max ended. This belief was hard for her to accommodate: she didn’t believe that she believed it. She allowed the arguments against it to begin – the of courses, the surelys, the you sillys. They ran in her head a while, and she listened to them being drowned out by a white noise of superstition. It hadn’t been this bad since she was little – since creatures climbed out of bedroom corners and made eyes and claws and fangs of the nightdark. It was because Paddy wasn’t there – and Max; she needed to be the one doing the protecting, finding her own protection in that. Such a beautiful house! She looked up at the tall wall of it, seeing the stickers on the window of the back bedroom. Easily, a child’s face could have appeared there, pale, but it didn’t; easily, she could have convinced herself she heard a scream or a scrape. Tonight was going to be bad, the worst, but when it was over she would be fine – and she would do whatever it took to get through to morning. If necessary, she would wait out here all night. The house could be reconquered in the daytime, and strength built up for tomorrow evening and after. Though cold, Agatha felt warmed. There was a scrape – outside, a scrape. And this time Agatha felt as if her body had just become a completely different substance, not stone but sugarcube – with dryness, toughness but also (facing liquid) weakness. The scrape she had just heard, in the garden with the French doors only slightly ajar, was just as definite, just as loud as those in the cellar: the scrape was in her head – it was, probably, madness. Agatha still felt too practical for that, though. ‘No, it isn’t,’ she thought, and the commonsensicality of her own voicing slightly reassured her. The scrape sounded as if it had come from somewhere definitely outside her, but then she supposed, if she were mad, it would. Perhaps she should wait until the voices started before telling Paddy; there would probably be voices. It was some further reassurance to her that she was still, in her semi-terror, thinking of her absent husband. Whether these were reflexes of mind or not didn’t really matter. It was sad to think of Paddy as a mere resource, but that was one of the things a husband had to be: a fallback, an at least. Compared to the idea of being entirely without him, beyond him, her reaction to the scrape made his approach necessary – or, at least, useful. She thought of Max, that was her reflex, but then she thought of Paddy; not just as Max’s father – she thought of Paddy distinct from the world, then as forming half of it, then as a world in himself. Someone might easily love him again; it was conceivable that someone might be her. The garden seemed less welcoming now – coming out at first had been an escape, but she was trapped just as much here as in the cellar. She waited for another scrape, but didn’t hear one – not for a minute or two or five. It was colder and colder, and she didn’t want to be scared out of her house as well as her wits: better go mad, if anywhere, in the warm. Agatha went inside and made herself a cup of tea, sat with it on the sofa and continued to wait. She kept her mind very empty, so as to be concentrated for the scrape when it came – but it didn’t, not for a long time and then, so it seemed, not at all. Hours passed, and she began for moments to forget exactly what was odd and why she should be afraid of it. She needed to make efforts of thought but was too tired: it was very strange, that was about as far as she progressed. And she knew this wasn’t enough. If she were going to tell Paddy then she needed, at least, to have found a way of describing it to herself. She couldn’t prove what it was or wasn’t – the scrape wasn’t demonstrable. If she mentioned it jokily, but she was too exhausted to track logical paths – if she mentioned it at all, right now, in this state, it would be too much to cope with. Instead, she made a deliberate effort to think something else: Max. But she found that he didn’t come to her as ideas, rather as memories of sensations. The silkness of his skin, particularly when newborn – that was quite clear; she could wear that like a good cashmere jumper. Then the gloopy stickiness of the messes he left around, recalled by the soles of her feet. Max was always sending her messages via the floor, of impatience or anger. His voice in her head was as vivid as a calling-out from the next room, so she diverted from that, too – imaginary sounds were not what was needed, in this situation. She laughed, and the loud crack of it was a shock. What she felt most physically, like a large block, was just the lack of him – his absence was an awkward, bulky presence. It seemed a lot like pure guilt; it had that lead-like density and dullness – though its edges were sharp enough to lacerate. Acutely, she missed the high sparkle of Max, happy Max, Max most-of-the-time. Around five in the morning, so exhausted, she took herself up to bed and fell asleep almost immediately. The next scrape, when it did come, half woke her – but as she was in the middle of a series of nightmares constructed so as to explain and embody the scrape, she didn’t take it for real, or no more real than the others. The rest of her night was undisturbed.

  CHAPTER 17

  AGATHA woke up unafraid and felt, as a result, that it would be affected to start
working herself towards terror again. The scrape was just another fact about the house she must get used to: the line of rationality had already been crossed with believing in the breathing. Hopefully, Paddy would be back that evening, so she wouldn’t be alone with the house – although already she was starting not to care so much. She made breakfast, toast from slightly stale bread; the milk had run out so she had her tea black. There was enough food for a couple of days, were Paddy not to come home, as long as she was prepared to eat tinned. She got the vacuum cleaner out and tried to persuade herself she wasn’t doing noisy housework so as to avoid hearing another scrape. Mid-afternoon, Agatha’s mother arrived unexpectedly with Max; Agatha was glad she’d spent those hours making the house perfect – almost as if it could be placated by her care of it. As the day was dry and warmish, they went and sat in the garden – it would have seemed strange if they hadn’t; and although her mother couldn’t know for certain she still hadn’t been out of the house, Agatha felt she was proving something by entertaining them here. The question of milk was bound to come up as soon as Agatha’s mother said yes to tea. Aggie hoped she would be able to persuade her to go and buy some, leaving her alone with Max. It worked out better than this, though: ‘I want to do some shopping, anyway,’ said her mother. ‘I’ve hardly been able to get anything done, since I had him.’