Ghosteria Volume 1: The Stories (Ghostgeria) Read online

  “My father was dead,” I said bitterly.

  “My brother was dead,” she cried. Her eyes flamed like slices of razor, and then they went up over my head, up to the top of the stairs, and she let out – not a scream – a sort of yelp.

  At once the blood-red light in the hall seemed to darken. Something out there had got hold of the sun. Instantly, the nature of my turmoil changed. My back, my neck, my scalp, were covered by freezing ants.

  I stared at her. “What is it?”

  She didn’t speak. She simply went on gazing up the stairway, and, still gazing, she began to back away, back through the door of the drawing-room, and now her lipstick mouth was hanging open.

  I’ve no notion how, but I understood this was not part of the game.

  As for me, for a moment I didn’t think I could move. Then I knew I had to, because otherwise, if I just stayed there at the foot of the stairs, whatever – whatever was on them, coming down them, whatever that was – would soon be right where I was – and I didn’t – no I didn’t – want that –

  So I somehow moved forward, to run after Jennifer through the drawing-room door, and at the same time, like Lot’s misguided wife, I looked behind me –

  And was turned, as she was, to an immovable pillar of volcanic salt.

  Because what was standing still at the head of the stairs was the wooden clock, and what was coming down the stairs was Sabia Trente, not still at all, the skirts of her gown blowing round her, and her arms held up from the elbows, and her hands pointing with their grown-long finger-nails –

  You see such things on a screen, a book-jacket, on the bloody Internet for God’s sake, such images of gothic horror, these evocations of dynamic terror. It doesn’t prepare you for the actual thing.

  There she was. And she was worse than anything anyone could ever physically mock up, or imagine.

  Her face was white, blue-white, and marked by the fringe of blood that was still unravelling down her right cheek, and yet never reached her already blood-stained gown or the stairs. Her forehead was red and also bruised black, and quills of bone stood out of her hair, (like a Spanish comb), which was otherwise clotted scarlet with blood. Her face had features, all sunken in and withered. It was a fallen monkey’s face, yet too, like a mask – and in the place where her eyes had once been – were only two bruised black sockets of nothing, each secured in her head by a shining silver pin –

  All I wanted was to run. It was the sum of my ambitions. And I couldn’t do it. Could not move.

  And so Sabia Trente came down the stair, and right up to me, and I smelled her stink worse than dead rats or rotting bananas, and then she passed directly through me, like a dank, dust-laden wind.

  Perhaps I died for a split second when that happened. Perhaps my heart stopped. I don’t know, can’t remember.

  It was just that suddenly she was past me, and I was still rooted there, watching her glide, as if she moved on ice-skates over a rink, through the drawing-room door.

  Darkness had come, premature night. Once before I’d seen this creature move across the room, seen her in the window. Now I saw her from the back. Saw her so clearly, solidly, even the creases of her dress and the bones of her corset under it.

  And I saw my Aunt Jennifer too, sprawled on a brocade sofa, screaming now, shrieking, and trying to bury her head in the cushions.

  On which cue, Sabia Trente was raising up high a kind of stick, an iron thing like a wand with a strange glowing tip – she hadn’t had it a moment ago – and I knew it was the poker from a fire that had been out for more than a century.

  She was going to return the compliment of the cloven brain-case, not on her murderous, no longer available Aunt Eugenia, but on the skull of Jennifer.

  I told you from the start, I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t. I flatly refuse to. If I did, I think I would lose my mind for sure and for real and for good. And so, in those moments that lingered between Jennifer and me and the gates of Hell, I saw it all, what had truly happened, and why this thing was here, and what it was and what to do about it.

  I was numb, had no feeling in my body, didn’t really seem to be in it, except perhaps sitting tiny and high up behind my own eyes, like a lone passenger left on a train hurtling driverless to destruction.

  For the train – me, driverless – was all at once rushing forward. It crashed headlong into the back of the stationary Sabia - I felt her – and I tore her apart with my hands, screaming myself now, over and over, “Go away – get lost – piss off – you don’t exist –”

  And she didn’t exist. She was only air, and then she and her poker were gone. And at the head of the stairs the clock became a black cloud and then was gone too, back to its place in reality along the corridor.

  I stood over Jennifer and I bawled at her now, “You made it up, didn’t you, you fucking old bitch – didn’t you?”

  She whimpered. I struck her across the head. Not so hard. It was much better than a poker would have been. Then I pulled her to a sitting position and shouted abuse at her until she spoke. “I didn’t – it was true – or at least in the book. Only not – not –”

  “Not what, you cow?”

  “Not that clock. Not that one.”

  She had wanted to pay me out for all my seven, nine and twenty-year-old transgressions against her. So she never quite lost track of me, and when the company folded, she was ready.

  Yes, I was to have been her skivvy. For I must be punished. And, muddled as Jennifer had become, she had invested in the invented memory of me as a sensitive, nervy girl, ready to be dominated and scared witless by a contrived ghost story.

  Although, as she’d said, the story was true – at least in a bona fide book, which carried the tale of the Trente murder and the haunted French clock. Even the piece about Shelley Terrence, though he had never lived in Jennifer’s house – all these events had gone on somewhere else. For that reason she had had to copy out all the passages. To photocopy the printed text would have revealed too much and given the game away.

  She had read the story one idle afternoon. And become obsessed enough to weave it into her retribution for me. And so mad, mad Aunt Jennifer, who wouldn’t even pay to have her downstairs telephone repaired, forked out quite a sum to gain a rather poor reproduction of the Trente clock. This copy it was which was then placed – unnailed – in the corridor by my elected bedroom. She had even arranged for its random striking.

  Well, she was off her head. And her loathing insanity and my allergic anger seem to have been enough. For yes, I take part of the blame. Without my side of it, I don’t think it would have happened; she couldn’t have done it on her own.

  And what did happen?

  Neither Jennifer nor I had ever had a child – in my case from choice, in hers I don’t know. But we made a type of child between us, an offspring in that word’s purest and most dreadful sense. For we fashioned the ghost of Sabia Trente between us, brought it to its unlife, and made it run.

  If simply that, our projected hating energy, would have been sufficient to make the vengeful poker and its blow fatal – I’ve got no idea. Maybe. After all, I stopped it. I must have thought so then.

  But, too, perhaps Jennifer and I merely hallucinated – visions of similar aspect experienced by more than one person at once, aren’t uncommon in the annals either of the supernatural or science.

  Whatever, as I said, this wasn’t a ghost story, although it has a ghost.

  And what happened afterwards? Soon told. She did a lot of cringing and crying her dry hard tears. But now I managed to make it clear I wouldn’t stay another hour in her house.

  I waited outside for the taxi, which took me away fast, so I just caught the nine-thirty-five train to London. The phone? I hardly believe it myself – she, the arch-reviler of modernity, had a weeny little mobile tucked in her handbag.

  As I was going out of her door she came scurrying at me from the now thick-lit shadows of the house, and pushed a paper bag into my hand. I
thought it probably contained some stale sandwiches to give me indigestion, or some already half-eaten sweets. I wanted to slap it to the ground, but something made me take it. Otherwise we parted without a touch, or another word. I didn’t look at the paper bag until the train was drawing into London and I was going to throw it away.

  Inside was a hundred pounds in tens, and a cheque for three thousand pounds. This was so obscene I felt nauseous. Or maybe that was only hunger, and the shock from everything else. I didn’t throw up. I did cash and spend the money. And what does that make me?

  I’m wondering though, if you wonder... if, despite the clock’s being only a copy - yet somehow it did draw back the vengeance-seeking Sabia’s dead remnant – and only my vaunted stupidity drove her off. No. However, your choice. Somebody said, it wasn’t the dead you need to fear, but the living. Too damn right.

  Since that night, I’ve heard nothing more from Jennifer. Years have elapsed. Now and then I ask myself what she does, alone, when it gets dark in that house.

  The Lady-of-Shalott House

  A river like black glass ran by the place. Above, bone pale, stood the old house with its dark, sloped roofs. It had one of those towers, too, where a pair of windows face each other, so the light of the sky through one, shines out through the other, and this other window, looking down to the road, seemed even by day to have a lamp in it. All around went the hills, also pale and bleached by the sun. Trees grew on some with sombre leaves. And by the river grew strange huge marigolds – if they were – the colour of orange curd.

  Carey Pearce, who had not yet become a well-known painter, paused on the road, staring across the river, up at the house, and the hills behind. He began memorising the scene for a canvas, especially the marigolds, which looked primal and nearly carnivorous.

  It was late afternoon, and he was on his way to the home of distant cousins he had never met. The train ran only to the station he had left an hour before, and here the horse he had been promised was out on other business. Carrying his bag, therefore, he had started to walk. He found this a haphazard country, all told, but one he liked. He did not think he would reach the house of his cousins until evening.

  Down in the valley to the south, he could see the black trail of the railway, and along it another toy train was just now puffing, its smoke-stack sending up a plume into the westering sun-ambered sky.

  When Carey glanced back at the pale house, he saw a woman was seated on the veranda. And she had hair, he afterwards said, definitely the exact shade of the marigolds by the river.

  He thought she had not been there before, but now she was. She looked at the road, or maybe at the train below. In any case, he raised his hat.

  Her dress was dark, caught with a silver brooch at the throat. She was of that slim small type, and her face seemed an unusual one under the pile of remarkable hair.

  Carey moved off the road, went over the river by a narrow bridge, brushed through the marigolds, and came up to a white-painted picket fence. Here he stood and gazed up, and the woman looked back at him.

  “Can you tell me, am I on the right road for the Hannifer house?”

  He realised then she had not been looking at him, or not truly, for now her eyes seemed to change. It was, he thought, as if a cloudy liquid grew suddenly clear.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. She had a sweet voice. He decided she might be able to sing well.

  “I hope it’s near. I’ve walked from the station, and it’s a hot day.”

  All this was blatant deception. He knew perfectly well he was on the right road, and knew too he had another hour’s walk at least before him. He was fit, his bag was light enough, and he was used to walking; he had climbed fells in England, and small Alps in France, from dawn to dusk, in search of images to paint.

  What he wanted was that the woman with marigold hair would invite him to step up and sit with her. She was beautiful, and in an almost classical way. Just as he knew when he had found the view he wanted, so he knew he had found in her a portrait. No doubt there was a husband, even children, and probably servants, in the pale house. He must charm them all, and be asked back.

  She did not speak at first, then she said, “It’s a long way, I fear.” She sounded remote, like a well-schooled infant that does not know the precise meaning of the lesson it has learned.

  “Very long?” inquired Carey, putting a querulous note into his tone. “Oh, I was on that train for thirteen hours, cooked alive. They said I’d find a horse to ride at the station, but no such luck.”

  In the garden that climbed to the house, bushes of fiery flowers had run wild. A parrot tree stooped almost to the ground with unpicked fruit.

  She said, “You must be tired.”

  But nothing else.

  Then he looked more attentively at the house. The sun was on it, burning on the windows, just as the bright north sky burned through the window of the tower. But he seemed to see curtains drawn, or absent. The veranda was in want of repair. There was an old rocker in which she sat, and one other chair, a notable one with carved back and arms. A cane table had been set between, and he noticed now all at once it had a decanter on it and a crystal jug, and two tall glasses and two glasses for wine. But in the decanter and the jug and the glasses was nothing, nothing at all but a thick smoke of dust shining in the low sun.

  Carey Pearce said, “I wonder if I might come up and sit with you for a few minutes. Forgive my boldness. Perhaps your husband –”

  She said, “My brother has gone away. But come up if you want. I have nothing to offer you –” this struck him oddly, she did not say it in a churlish way – “but the river is very pure, if you wish to drink.”

  Carey took her at her word. He went down the bank, knelt, and cupped up in his hand a couple of mouthfuls of the black, bright, transparent water. It was clean and pleasant. But he had wanted to show her he was accepting her hospitality, such as it was.

  Something must have happened here, some family matter. The brother gone away, the servants vanished.

  He opened a little white gate in the picket fence, and went through. He went up the garden path under the parrot tree, and so the steps to the veranda. As he stood over her, she lifted her pale quiet face to his. His heart stopped a moment. She had that kind of loveliness which makes its subject seem known, as if we half recall something very beautiful from another time and place, for here is its reminder.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said.

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “My name is Carey Pearce,” he said. “My cousins are the Hannifers, but we’ve never met. May I sit down?”

  She looked at the other chair, and then back at him, and all at once she laughed. It was a soft melodious laugh, not exactly mocking – more playful. “Please do, Mr Pearce.”

  He sat. And there was another odd thing. The chair, though such a good one, felt extremely uncomfortable. He thought at first he was more travel-worn than he had believed; and serve him right for pretending to be so. Then he concluded that it was simply a badly-made chair, all show and no substance.

  But he opened his bag and took out a bottle of fruit cordial.

  “May I offer you some of this?”

  “Oh no. Nothing, thank you.”

  “Then, do you object if I drink it alone?”

  She said then, without the least sign or nuance of rudeness, “Don’t use the glasses, Mr Pearce.”

  He supposed she was sensible of their dirtiness, so he nodded, and drank the cordial from the bottle.

  Then she folded her hands in her lap and rested her wonderful head back on her chair, and she began gently to rock. She said not a word, yet it was not from shyness, he thought, nor coldness. It was as if she knew him well, and might be silent with him without offence.

  He was used to silence himself, and unlike most people often alone, he rather liked it.

  So he sat in the uncomfortable chair as comfortably as he could, which was not very, and looked down the hills to the valley and
the snake coils of the train track, looked at the exotic sombre-leafed trees and the flames of the flowers. He listened to the hush of that wide, scorched land, broken only now and then by a daytime cricket, and once at the whistle of an unseen bird.

  The sun slanted more and more to the west, and a line of clouds, a herd of them, tumbled slowly before it.

  At intervals, he turned and studied the woman very carefully. She did not seem to mind this, if she was aware of it at all. Throughout his life Carey had had the knack of making a mental sketch, for he had begun early to want sometimes to create pictures of things and spots where sketching on paper was either inadvisable or frankly impossible. But he drew the lines of the woman’s face over and over in his mind, cautiously etched in the translucent first shadows, and the dilute clear amber of the light – and the wash of hair that would be so easy to paint with some splash of colour direct from a tube, which meant he must be more subtle and try to capture it another way.

  She was about twenty-five, he thought, not quite young, but not turned either, as women often did in this climate, to that dryness and toughness of skin the critic termed leathering. Her eyes were grey-azure, opaque yet glimmering as moonstones. If he could reproduce that, and the angle of her brows, the lilt of her throat with the small winking brooch at its nadir, he would have something very fine.

  The sun was now into the clouds, herding them down beyond the valley. A certain alteration of blueness was at the core of the sky. The day was working toward sunset.

  He said, rather low, not to break her reverie harshly, “It’s late. I’d better be getting on. Thank you for your oasis.”

  She did not look at him now. Her eyes were back on the road. She said, “Go safely.”

  “You’re kind. I will. And you.”

  “Oh, I am safe enough,” she said.