“Find him?”
“Yeah; yeah, everything’s fine,” Mark said. But he was lying, and he knew it. He did not know what lay behind the door, but whatever it was it was not fine, it was light years from being fine, and although he did not want to go in there he knew that he had no choice.
Back at the doors of the bar, Mark inserted the key and felt the heavy bolt slide back. He pulled one of the doors open as quietly as possible and slipped into the gloom inside. He was on the wrong side of the door for the lights, and had to cross to the other side of the entrance to reach them, and in that brief moment his eyes swept the bar and saw Raymond in the far corner, amongst the darkest shadows, huddled on the floor. He was turned away from the door, looking up, his arms reaching out as if in supplication, a stream of words Mark could not make out issuing from his lips. A moment later the room was flooded with light and Raymond screamed; but not before Mark saw what was surrounding him, the three figures with pale faces and burning eyes and an air of terrible anger mixed with profound sadness.
He hurried over to Raymond—it took all the courage he could summon to force his feet across the intervening distance—and knelt down beside him. The auditor turned to Mark and grasped at the lapels of his jacket.
“Did you see them? Did you?” he begged. His eyes were huge and staring, and looked over Mark’s shoulder rather than directly at him. Mark moved so that his own back was against the wall, and there could be nothing behind him.
“What’s going on, Raymond?” he asked, as quietly as he could. Raymond had twisted so he could look up into the corner. Mark refused to follow his gaze.
“You saw them, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” he demanded. Then, more quietly, as if exhausted, “I can tell that you did. I can see it in your eyes. And you only saw them for a moment. I used to see them all the time. Then I found a way for them to leave me, so I could have some peace. They like it here; it’s dark and quiet, and near where they used to live. So now they stay here, but when I don’t come and see them they . . . they get angry. So angry. I try to tell them if I won’t be here . . . warn them . . . but I couldn’t this time. . . . ”
“Raymond, I . . . I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know if I saw anything.”
“You did. I can tell.” Raymond’s head sank down on his chest, and Mark thought that he had fainted. Then he heard the auditor say, in a voice that was barely audible, “I was young and stupid . . . drunk . . . thought it was just a joke. I don’t know why I . . . ” Raymond stopped, and took a deep breath. “It was so long ago. I thought I could make them happy, but I can’t. No matter what I do. And I try so hard.” Then he began to cry, low, choked, rasping sobs, and Mark could think of nothing to say.
Mark was not surprised, when he returned to work two days later, to find that Raymond was off on sick leave for an indeterminate period. The doctor’s note was vague, merely stating that Mr. Young would be unable to return to work for some weeks due to illness; at Mark’s urging the matter was not pressed. Three weeks later Raymond sent in a letter of resignation; his two weeks’ notice would be taken as sick leave. He asked that his final paycheck be mailed to his home address. It was highly irregular, but after Mark had a quiet word with the personnel manager, the matter was dropped.
While he was in the personnel office, he took the opportunity of looking through Raymond’s file. He had worked at another hotel in the chain, in Victoria, and previous to that had worked at a hotel in Kelowna. Both gave good, although not glowing, references, commending him for his work habits but indicating that his inter-personal skills were, perhaps, lacking. A note on his application form, presumably scribbled by whoever had interviewed him for the job at The Palace, read, in a section titled Comments on Applicant: “Steady, quiet, polite, good with numbers. Has worked graveyard shift; says he likes the hours, wants to work in downtown Vancouver.” Beside this, a small notation in the margin read “Drink problem (?).”
With Raymond gone, Sylvia took over as night auditor five nights a week. She reported to Mark that the shadows in The King’s Arms were gone, a change which she attributed to new light fixtures. She still does not like going in there, however; she can’t say why, precisely.
Mark has never tried to explain. Occasionally, though, when he goes outside to smoke a quiet cigarette in the middle of the night, he finds himself looking in through the window of The King’s Arms, searching the far corner where the shadows are darkest. Sometimes he thinks, just for a moment, that he sees movement there, and hears laughter which does not contain the faintest trace of warmth or humor. He shivers then, and tells himself it is only the night wind, and hurries back inside The Palace, and tries not to think about what the wind is saying.
The room’s cold air curdled, hostile, its space become a little theatre where only unpleasant things might play out. Then she rustled at him
out of the darkness . . .
The Proving of Smollett Standforth
Margo Lanagan
Always she sprang from the same dark corner. Smoll could never anticipate the moment she would appear, though night after night she came in the same way, and performed the same actions in the same order. He fixed his attention on the place, all terrified expectation, but each night her appearance startled him as greatly as it had the first time. She seemed to wait, indeed, before she leapt forth, for approaching sleep to lower his guard by a fraction, to loosen his joints and sinews, to slow his heartbeat to a pace no more urgent than would be expected of an organ going to its rest upon a day’s gainful industry.
The corner from which she rushed was not the corner with the door. Or at least, not the door Smoll used himself—and Mrs. Gallon used it too, he supposed, for she swept and grumbled everywhere about the house, so it was likely she swept and grumbled here too—and which a casual observer would maintain was the only door to the attic room. No, there had once been a door in the other corner. By day, seams in the wall showed where boards had been used to seal it, and in Pinkney’s room below, short, staggered lines in the wall boards showed where steps so steep as to be almost a ladder had once angled up. Not only was the night-lady a phantom herself, she also emerged from a phantom house. Eyeing the rectangle of the no-longer-existent doorway, Smoll wondered about the person—a grown man, stronger and more practical and authoritative than Smoll was—who had tried to shut her out, the tilting woman, her beads, her voice. And when all the sawing and hammering and painting-over had failed, the man, sensibly, had gathered up his household and left. Smoll wished heartily that he could pursue them. Please, oh please! he wished he could say. Let me come with you, to whatever safe place you found!
It was not that Mr. Beecham’s house was not perfectly safe in the daytime, and full of distractions—even, on occasion, amusements, even for a boy so timid and easily mortified as Smoll. But night time always loomed again. Always the glad morning (the darkness easing, the clop of the passing milk-horse giving him heart) was followed—no, rushed upon, hurried out of mind, pounced on and briskly swept aside as of no account—by oncoming evening. However much Smoll lingered over the boots in the evening (See your face in ’em yet? Ridley would say, passing behind him with the last slop-pail from the kitchen), there would come a point where they were done, when they were placed each pair outside the doors: Mister’s and Missus’s, Miss Edwina’s, Miss Pargeter’s, Miss Annabelle’s, Master Howard’s, Mr. Pinkney’s—and sometimes Mr. Rossiter the coachman’s as well, those wonderful long boots with all their mud that Smoll was always so grateful for. And Smoll having placed them must proceed up his flight of tiny stairs, through the hole in his floor, through the door not much larger than a coalhole cover. He must shut himself away behind that door, shake off his clothes and shrug on his chilled nightshirt and leap abed, blow out the candle and wrap himself tightly in the clean patched sheet and the blanket—as if tonight of all nights that wrapping, that tightness, might be effective against her, when every previous night, since first Smoll had been elevated from country scamp to
Beechams’ boot boy, it had utterly failed to protect him.
“Smoll, are you well?”
“Quite well, thank you, Mr. Pinkney.”
“It is only that you have . . . well, rather a burdened look about you.”
Smoll felt it, and unrounded his shoulders. “Oh no, sir. I am nothing like so burdened as I was at home, carrying water and wood.”
“That is better, Smoll. It behoves a young man to maintain a good posture, whether he be in the public gaze or no, do you not think?”
“Yes, sir.”
She was neither old nor young, the dream-lady; she was neither beautiful nor monstrous to look upon. She was difficult to look upon; though her presence was so sudden and so strong in the sensations it produced, her actual shape was indistinct against the surrounding darkness, except in the middle, where it resembled an hourglass. Above and below the narrow waist, she was corseted into a shape that even Smoll, whose eyes were so often cast down in the presence of ladies, or indeed of anyone taller or more important than himself, recognised as old-fashioned. Below this shape she gave to skirts that faded to nothingness, although their rustlings pressed most forcefully upon his ear. Above it, her flat-bound bosom and hunched shoulders supported a head all the more terrible for being entirely without features, except for the impression of a wealth of hair, pulled and piled and pinned into place with the same energy of compression that had been exerted on the body below. Tightness, tightness was all, about this body and about the personage that was borne about in it—tightness and a little madness, which the tightness held in check.
She carried her faceless head with an intent tilt, and it was in this tiltedness that Smoll’s fear formed, for she was intent on him; she tilted her head at him. He would scramble upright in the bed, his back pressed to the wall, the back of his head hard against the frame of the little uncurtained window, which, admitting as it might the fullest moonlight or the strongest effusions of a clear night’s stars, never showed him what he needed to see of the woman, never illuminated her brightly enough to convince him that he had seen all the evil there was to see of her, that he now knew what she was, that he could begin to bring some measure of rationality to his encounters with her. Instead he only underwent yet again this deep abjection, this wholesale shrinking of body and being from whatever she was, whatever she wanted.
For she did want something; she made the same demand of him night after night. She rattled the beads in her hands and pushed them at Smoll, pushed them into him sometimes. Did her touch itself, her thrusting at his middle, produce those pond-ripples of horror up and down him, or was only the idea of her touch, in his appalled mind, sufficient to generate them?
The beads themselves were grotesque, bulbous; her handfuls of them reminded him of Arthur Cleal at Hobson’s farm, gathering up innards after the butchering, the slippery tubes and organs overflowing the bowl of his hands.
Take it, she hissed, and shook the thing, and pushed it at him again. Take it; I don’t want it. Her voice was muddied—from having crossed time to reach him, perhaps, or from the invisibility of her mouth. She was hurried, and guilty; she crouched at him. ’Tis not as if I can ever wear it. Take it!
He might say No. He might say I don’t want it either. He might ask her who she was, and why she plagued him. Whatever he said, fear crawled and shook in his voice. And she always answered the same, angrily: Take it! bobbing at him, bobbing into him a little, bobbing back. There might be the flash of an eye, fixing on him with horrible inexactitude, as if she were blind; there might be something of a mouth, a ghost of teeth, momentarily, against the hollow attic room behind her, which resounded with the muddied sounds of ghost-steps. What would I do with it, for heaven’s sake? Take it! Take it, before Mistress comes!
At first he felt only faint pains, here and there about his neck, a slight heat in the skin of his chest where the locket lay. Sometimes these were itches and no more, and if he lifted the neck of his shirt to search for signs of them, he saw no mark—the first few times, the pains themselves eased utterly, he was so reassured by the sight of his clear skin.
Then a redness began to grow and to glow in the flesh there, visible in the light of a bright day outdoors but not by candlelight or lamp. The reddened skin was sensitive to the touch of a finger, or the rubbing of shirt cloth; if he scratched it absent-mindedly it would sting and burn, and the pain of that would linger.
There rose blisters, then, pepperings of them where each bead had lain in the night, and a flowering on his breast from the locket’s weight. They burst and itched and wept, and the skin stayed raw; sometimes by nightfall it had healed dry, but the dream-lady’s visit would inflame it again, when she forced the unnatural burden of the ghost-beads on him.
The wounds never quite bled; at worst they leaked a watery fluid that stained Smoll’s shirt and nightshirt yellow. “What have you spilt on yourself?” Cook might scold him, but it was less a question than a lament at the general carelessness of boys, and she did not pursue him for an explanation.
The dream-lady would thrust the beads one last nervous time at Smoll, her shining, rattling handfuls of them. His own hands would turn palm-up to take them. He was an obedient boy, and before he had left to live here his mother had kissed him and instructed him to do exactly as he was told by all at Mr. Beecham’s house. Also, he was afraid that the beads, if he did not catch them, would slither and crash to the floor. The noise they would make terrified him enough; the consequences of such a concussion, he could not begin to imagine.
And once she had poured the beads into his hands, their weight and coldness compelled him; he understood himself to have made some kind of pledge in accepting them. There was no handing the necklace back, however much it pained him to hold it, the weight like a load of polished river stones. They chilled his hands, and the dragging of the over-spilt ones made his whole arms shake. She had pushed them out of her time into his, and by taking them he had taken them on, somehow; he had become responsible for them. That’s right—you have it! she now exulted, and she had an eye again, a jagged gleam on the darkness as she nodded. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
He might say Yes. He might creak out the truth: It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. He might gather the spills of beads or leave them depending from the fat gold locket for which the whole embarrassment of ivory, amber, and jet had been assembled. No matter what he chose to do—if choice, indeed, played any part in it—she would nod and gleam in the same way; the same impression of her tight smile would hang there in the night before him. Put it on, she now said; they were only partway through whatever bewitchment she was working. Her voice issued not from her tensed lips but from the fearful air all around; it rose at Smoll from inside him, from the marrow of his own small bones.
Always he put the necklace on, although it was cold, and painfully heavy. The sooner he put it on, the sooner this trial would end.
You see? The woman melted into relief. Her head tilted more. Her smile flickered, then became more distinct; for an appalling moment it was too large for her face, the next instant it shrank too small, then the mouth was extinguished altogether. It suits you, she said unctuously, mouthlessly. Then she leaned forward and hissed, Hide it under your clothes, before Mistress comes and sees.
He did as she bid him, covering the noose of beads and locket with his nightshirt. Each time, they made him gasp, the cold striking through his breastbone, the sudden weight straining at his neck.
Yes, that’s right, the lady would say—she was not a lady, of course; she was a servant like himself. She leaned at him; she had eyes and teeth. Her words caught up with her mouth, and some nights he would feel not only the ice-burden of the beads but also feathers of her historical breath against his face and front. By now he was fixed and imprisoned, by the beads and by his fear, by her face tilted forward, her forehead white and broad, the eyes wide and drinking up the sight of the hidden necklace.
Then she would be gone. But the necklace would stay, coldly b
urning. And the horror of her presence stayed too, the boxed-in attic air crawling with it as a street-dog’s coat crawls with vermin. All Smoll’s skin crawled too, and his ears still heard her hisses, and his spine still jolted with the ghost noises behind her, the ghost-steps climbing the nonexistent stairs.
When the steps ceased, and the fear loosened its hold on him sufficiently, he lay back down, crushed to his little bed by the beads and locket, collared and chained down. To breathe, to lift the locket-weight on his chest and let in air underneath, he must summon some force and determination. He lay entirely imprisoned, hauling himself from breath to breath, and whether he failed in that effort for want of air, or the task of breathing exhausted him, eventually he would sleep.
“Why, look here! A letter has come for a Master Smollett Standforth.”
Smoll looked up from his porridge. Mr. Pinkney placed the note before him. “Posture, boy!” Smoll straightened, and the raw skin of the sores crinkled and burned beneath his shirt.
“That’s a nice hand,” said Cook, passing behind him with her own bowl.
“The priest will have written it,” he said, “for my Ma.”
Cook sat all bustle across the table corner from him. “Shall I read it to you?”
“Please, if you would.” He pushed it towards her. He did not want it near. It promised nothing but complications, and he had not the energy to accommodate them.
“I hope it is not bad news.” Cook gave him a kind and serious look through her porridge-steam. She examined the glossy seal with approval before breaking it, then she laboured through some of the writing within. “She hopes you are well,” she said, “and she sends you her love. They are all well there—no bad news, then.” Cook patted Smoll’s hand before toiling on. “Only Biss has been laid low with a fever. That has broken. All is well. She is coming good. Biss is your sister?”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 14