Ghosteria Volume 1: The Stories (Ghostgeria) Page 6

  “She’s Mrs Burnley now.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. She said she saw Haine. Said she was amazed he was there. She agreed she sent him an invite, but she meant him to take that as a warning, to let him know she had got hitched, and no hard feelings. Never reckoned he’d show.”

  “Fucking slag,” said the first uniform.

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” agreed his companion. “Shall we hit the road?”

  They had been called to the premises, (Haine’s flat), around midnight of the same evening that Joli Franken and Burnley held their Wedding Party at The Black Lion. And the party, in fact, had still been in full swing on the other side of London. It was a classic clue that alerted the people in the flat below Haine’s (flats – each one room, with a scrawny kitchenette and a shared toilet down the passage). The clue was reminiscent of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles – that was, blood seeping through the ceiling above. The lot downstairs found it on returning from the pub, supposing it red paint at first. But as it kept on spreading they didn’t want it in their take-away. Very wise.

  The corpse was sitting upstairs, in a good suit and a really good white shirt. He hadn’t fallen off his chair, just leaned a bit. He had swallowed half a bottle of a choice red wine, and about twenty-three generally-prescribed sleeping tablets. He had also cut open the vein of his left wrist with a razor blade, very very efficiently, slicing longways not across, which was a pretty infallible method. There were no preliminary hesitant scratches or cuts, either. Matthew Haine had known exactly what he meant to do, and had done it with the adroitness of an actor who had, reasonably often, acted suicide on the stage.

  He was recently bathed, and his hair washed. He was deodorised, shaved, and with a touch of mid-range cologne. The clothes, as stated, were of good quality. And he had somehow managed, even when consciousness departed, to keep the blood off them. He really had been got up for a party. It was just he hadn’t gone to it. Or had he? This was the nagging question, except, of course, you did not want to ask it. He had died. And time of death was now established as being, at the latest, seven o’clock that evening. And so, when he walked into The Black Lion Hotel dining room – he could not have done so. He was already that smart, clean corpse, which had drugged and bled the life out of itself, in the room whose door the police broke down at midnight.

  The ‘copper wrist-band’ spotted at the party was uncomfortable too. Those who subsequently mentioned it soon tried to brush it off their awareness. Because it might, in some sordid supernatural tale, have been an accurate cipher for Haine’s blood-starved, blood-encrusted wrist. A lot of the guests had thought him very pale. “Dishy,” one girl said, “sort of goth-vampire.” Here and there one or two of them had been noting Haine as late as 11.30 p.m. And then – he just hadn’t seemed to be there. He was gone.

  So. If you could credit the idea, even if never, never – ever would you truly credit the idea as a fact – Matthew Haine had killed himself, and then arrived as a stone-dead ghost at the wedding party. The Ultimate Spectre at the Feast.

  He hadn’t left a farewell message. There was just the invitation to the reception tucked in the breast pocket of his jacket – which, when they broke in the door, fell out and landed a few inches clear of the waterfall of spent blood. Very gracious it was, the invite. And almost just like all the other invites sent to all the other three hundred odd guests. His name was spelled out in curlicues, and led to such phrases as: Love to welcome you and Happy celebration, addressing the recipient, at the end, as ‘Our valued Guest’. Yes, that was really the stumbling block, the problem. Matthew Haine – and who else would have done such a thing? – had, before placing the card in his pocket, changed two letters in those last three words. Crossing out the ‘u’ and the ‘e’ in the word Guest, he had rewritten them as an ‘h’ and an ‘o’. Which accordingly left the invitation to read, significantly or not, ‘Our valued Ghost.’

  The Ghost of the Clock

  I don’t believe in ghosts. Assuming there is a soul, why should it hang around here, if there is somewhere else it has to go? Oh, maybe there are recordings of past events that get left behind. Maybe even extreme emotions leave a kind of colour, like a stain. But that’s it.

  So, this isn’t a ghost story. Although it has a ghost.

  My name is Laura. And there came a time when clever Laura found herself in bad financial straits – unable to pay the rent on her so-called flat in London, (one room, and use of a bathroom down the hall), or for anything very much. My parents were long gone – my dad to that Somewhere Else I mentioned; my mother to southern France with her “New Bloke”. She’d used him like camouflage and was virtually unfindable.

  I ended up accepting the offer of a roof from my aunt.

  Jennifer was my father’s only sister. I’d seen her, once or twice, in childhood, but she had disliked my mother devotedly, so it hadn’t been very often. I knew she had a house on the coast – I won’t say where, but it was a good address. I’d been a bit surprised to get her letter.

  It was a long journey, and the train stopped outside some picturesque country halt for about fifty minutes extra. My fellow passengers grumbled, but otherwise just carried on as usual, beetling over their ghastly twittering laptops, honking away into their bloody mobile phones. I went to the buffet and got a double gin and tonic. It was eleven thirty a.m., but what the hell.

  In the afternoon, when I had arrived and was waiting for a taxi, what struck me was the light.

  I’ve heard the light is different – better – in Greece. Having never been there, I don’t know if that is true. But certainly the English light that curtained the seaside town was sheer and crystal clean, as if the sea cast it up fresh-spun. When we drove out of the station and off up the bumping, winding, narrow roads to the hills, I looked at all the May-green woods and fields burning in this light, and the birds darting over like arrows with gold-tipped flights, and then the vast sweep of the sea itself, bluer than the sky.

  This was a beautiful spot. The sort of non-resort the sensitive, England-orientated rich go to, for their holidays. Only I wasn’t on holiday. And decidedly I was not rich.

  Soon, we saw the house.

  “Fair old place, that,” said the driver, who until then had been unchatty.

  I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to say my aunt lived here. I toyed with the idea of telling him I’d applied for the job of scullery maid, but that would be about a century out of date. Secretary, then, or personal assistant?

  Lamely, I said, “Yes, isn’t it.”

  And he and I left it at that.

  We went up a winding drive, and the house, which had appeared so dramatically on a hill-top, now vanished behind broad stands of oak, pine and hornbeam, and clouds of rhododendrons, blazing white and crimson.

  Really, I suppose, it wasn’t so big – not grounds or an estate, more a huge garden.

  We passed under flowery terraces and roses, and then there was the house again, across a blank green oval of lawn.

  It was a flat-fronted building, brown-skinned, with a large porch mounted on a little raised terrace, with a statue. I added up twelve windows along the top storey before I stopped counting.

  All right, it wasn’t a stately home, but it was much more than just a home.

  There was a garden all round, but to one side the land dropped in terraces, and over there, through the boughs of a cedar-tree, the turquoise ocean appeared again, less than half a mile away.

  The driver helped me with my bags, then left me. I watched the cab rattle off, as I stood at the door. I’d expected by now a servant in costume to come out to look down his nose at me. But no one had come, and when I finally jangled the old-fashioned bell, nothing happened either. Then I saw the electric bell hiding under the other one, and tried that.

  Well, I did anticipate an employed door-opener of some sort at least.

  But what eventually came was my Aunt Jennifer.

  She looked at me with all the cont
empt of any imagined butler, before the falsest of false smiles oozed up her wrinkled face.

  “Laura! How lovely. Do come in.”

  This was my aunt’s big secret. She was mean. Wealthy people sometimes are, surprisingly so. It’s how they stay wealthy, possibly. (I don’t know how she was well-off when we hadn’t been. I think it was from some kind of exclusive legacy.)

  Really, if I’d thought, I’d have remembered enough from my childhood. I wasn’t a stupid kid, less stupid probably than I’ve become since growing up. Twenty-five years back, when I was nine or so... That weird thing over the individual ice-cream, for example. “Just eat half, Laura, and save some for later. It will keep in the ice-box...” But my aunt was mean not only in the monetary sense, but in her ways.

  She had hated my mother. And I was, after all, half my mother, even if, as far as I was concerned, I’d really only ever had one parent, and he was dead.

  I loved my father. He was kind and gentle, a dreamer, who liked music, and silence. Death beglamoured him for me even more – after the agony went off. He had had a heart-attack the night before I was twenty.

  Conceivably, I would have liked to get on with Jennifer, who had been his sister and so was, as I was, also partly him.

  My bags got left in the wide walnut-brown hallway. We went into a sunny, rather dusty room, with long windows looking out over another lawn, the cedar and the sea. The windows weren’t very clean. All that – the dust, the windows, startled me. I mean, I’d lived regularly in a tip, but I didn’t expect that here – and definitely not amid this antique furniture and these Persian rugs.

  The gardens too had been very well kept, trees neatly trimmed to proper shapes, and the lawns mowed to within an inch of their lives. So she did have a gardener.

  My aunt told me I must sit down.

  “You must sit down, Laura. You must be quite tired. But a cup of tea will put you right.”

  Then, another little shock. Jennifer crossed to an ornate eighteenth century sideboard and switched on an electric kettle roosting there. Next to this was set a covered tray. Presently, Jennifer brought everything to a coffee-table between the two white brocade sofas.

  Unveiled, the tray held a plate of two dry chicken sandwiches, constructed perhaps in the early morning, two plain biscuits, and a banana past its first flush of youth. This feast was for me.

  As she poured the boiled water on to the tea (bags of course) in the tarnished silver pot, I began to see the light. The garden she had kept up – for ‘appearances’? But she had no help in the house, or very little. No one to dust or clean or shine up the silver, let alone open the door. No one came in to cook meals, either, or even make the poor old girl a cuppa.

  She was sixty-seven by my reckoning. She looked older, having one of those faces that get easily creased.

  “I’ve given you a west-facing room, Laura. It gets the last of the sun.”

  Fine, I thought. Chilly first thing and too hot on a summer’s evening.

  “Well, you must tell me all about yourself.”

  I glanced at her, and she sat there, like a slightly overweight Venus flytrap.

  Shouldn’t I think of her like that? Should I be sorry for her, all on her own, and not even able to afford, or too afraid to afford, despite her house, domestic help or even decent tea-bags? Had she fallen on hard times? Was she lonely? Did she truly want to know me? She must have known my whereabouts at least, because her letter had come straight to me. But before that, I hadn’t seen or heard from her since the funeral.

  “There’s not much to say, Aunt Jennifer.”

  “But you’ve made a bit of a mess of your life, haven’t you?”

  Yes, Venus flytrap.

  “Not really. Companies are folding all the time in London. Everywhere. It’s the economic climate.”

  “I blame these computers,” she said darkly. “This Internet thing.”

  “Works of the Devil,” I heard myself mutter.

  “Always wanting something for nothing,” she concluded, as if I either hadn’t said anything, or simply endorsed her own suspicions. “And this man - Even, was he called?”

  “Eden.”

  I sensed she thought I’d had an affair with my boss.

  “He let you down,” she said.

  “No, actually –”

  “American,” she appended scathingly. “Oh, they did plenty of that, letting girls down, I can tell you, in the last war.”

  I wondered what she’d got up to during the Blitz – to sound so pissed-off. She would have been a bit young, wouldn’t she?

  “Eden was great, and when the sh... when the trouble started, he did everything he could to put things right for all of us. It wasn’t his fault. But if you mean did I sleep with him? No. He was very happily married.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. She managed to look disgusted at my directness, and wisely aware I was lying, both at once. “However, you lost your flat and your job. And I gather you have no savings.”

  This was like an interview – perhaps by the police.

  “I didn’t have very much anyway. Living in London is very expensive.”

  “I’m sure it is. Well, never mind. You’re here now. I’ll take care of you.”

  I felt in that moment like a child – small, thirty-four-year-old orphan. I wanted to say, Stuff it. Get up and stalk out, perhaps throwing the half-dead banana at the dirty windows first. But I didn’t. I had less than five hundred pounds in the bank and less than forty in my wallet. My three bags contained every scrap I owned that I hadn’t sold for next to nothing. Because of my almost freelance status with the company, my tax situation was in a muddle. I wasn’t highly skilled, had no tremendous talents, and for every job I was likely to seek, there would be at least fifteen other eager or desperate applicants. It used to be people over fifty who had difficulty getting work. Then it was forty. I’d begun to believe the age had recently fallen even lower. I’d been stacking shelves in the supermarket when Jennifer wrote to me.

  If I wanted a breathing space, I would have to put up with her.

  After all, it wasn’t so bad, was it? The house was uncared for but lush, the gardens glorious, and the beach and swim-in-able sea just down the hill.

  I said, I’m stupid now.

  “Well, Laura, if you’ve finished your meal, perhaps you’d better take your bags up and settle into your room.”

  Dismissed.

  “Okay. Thanks, I will.” I rose and said, feeling I still had to, “It’s very kind of you –”

  The horrible creeping smile squeezed over her face again. She was all over-powdered and rosy like a girl gone quite wrong, and her hair was thick and old and coarse and too brown, so I knew it was from dye, and not a very good one either. Naturally.

  Oh God, she made me sick. I was allergic to her.

  She said, “That’s all right, Laura. I know you had an unfortunate time with your mother, that can’t have helped you. Anyway, pop upstairs now.” She gave me directions to the room, with no intention of stirring herself to show me. Then: “I usually eat about seven. You’ll find all the things ready for you in the kitchen. It’s easy to find, the back-stair is just along from your room, on the left.”

  I checked.

  “You mean the way to the kitchen?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Hold on, I thought. Am I hearing what I think? She plans for me to go down and fix dinner. Scullery maid, did I say? But no, it isn’t that. She just means there’s some sort of cold stuff ready, and I’m to bring it upstairs to save her aged legs.

  “I’m afraid,” she added, arch and acid, “I don’t have a microwave. You’ll have to manage the cooking without. I’ve never accepted those things are safe.”

  I found my room without problems. It wasn’t a maid’s room – those, if there were any, were up in the attics, I expect. But it could have won a prize for Smallest Guest Bedroom in Britain.

  After I’d propped my bags against the single bed, I edged past a huge, bea
r-like wardrobe, and stared out of the window.

  The view was good – inland, to fields and beech woods honey-spread by a westering sun. It was already almost five.

  I knew that from my watch, not from any clock. The house had clocks – I’d passed one in the narrow side corridor, which led to this very room. But none in my bedroom. She had presumably anticipated I’d bring my own.

  There was a bathroom to the right of the room, down an awkward step. It had bath and lavatory and so on, even a hand-held shower-attachment. There was some soap, (not new), and a couple of towels, and toilet-paper, bright green and rather cheap. The bathroom also had a tear in the lino floor-covering and some loose wall tiles. But the flush worked, and the water ran hot. Why complain? I’d lived with worse.

  But after I’d showered and re-dressed, I sat on my lumpy bed, smouldering in my anger.

  She wanted a skivvy. I knew it. Had I known before I came? No. There had been nothing in the letter to indicate any of this. Or... could I be wrong?

  All right, then. Give it till tomorrow. And then, if necessary, take off. Because it would be better to do almost anything than become maid-of-all-work for my Aunt Jennifer. Oh – I could bloody murder her –

  It was then that the clock clanged in the corridor.

  So we come to the clock.

  I’d barely looked at it on my way to the bedroom, but when I came out again to locate the kitchen stair, I first walked back the short distance down the corridor, and stared at the thing.

  It was the ugliest clock, perhaps the most ugly piece of furniture I have ever seen.

  It was about ten feet tall, made of some black old-looking wood that had a strong odour of must or rot to it, uncarved or decorated, except for a painting on its high-up face. A type of grandfather clock, I deduced, but the oddest thing was that, where in such a clock there’s usually a glass panel to look through, and so observe the swinging pendulum – even a door that can be unlocked in order to adjust the mechanism – in this model there was not, only the closure of unrelieved wood. Nor did the clock make any working sound. None of that deep tugk-tockk you hear so much of in a good atmospheric period radio play. It had only made one noise, the single monstrous clang.