An English Ghost Story (35 page)

It helped to focus on that.

The Enemy had scurried up to the next level, leaving blood on the ladder. Tim stood back while one of the IP checked the ladder for loosened crossbars or wire-traps. It was clear. Good. The Enemy was sloppy, thinking too much of getting away and not enough of stalling his pursuer.

There was a silent discussion. Tim was point. His squaddies fell back in a half-circle as he mounted the ladder, but were behind him all the way.

He climbed to the next level. Hanging just under the top of the fixed ladder, he poked his head up over the edge. The quality of the dark was different, as if the sky were lower, and there was a woodier smell, more enclosed.

The Enemy was in the distance, retreating.

Tim pulled himself up onto the next level and stood up straight. His squaddies made it over the edge too and regrouped. He was part of a fighting unit, a cog in a well-oiled killing machine. He took a silent breath and recalculated.

He turned on the torch he’d requisitioned and cast its beam across the wooden plain. The Enemy froze in the light, then picked up his feet and ran into the dark.

One of the IP, a blonde girl with a tiger-striped face, pointed, snarling.

Tim turned off the torch, course fixed in his mind, and began to run.

* * *

J
ordan found her mother in the Summer Room with the brown man, spotlit by lamps which burned with unholy fire. Neither were in a fit state to have a conversation. Mum had panda-eyes from crying hard. Mr Wing-Godfrey was pliable but unresponsive, a sleepwalker.

Through the French windows, she could see the patio and the barn and as far as the orchard. It was still dead of night. All the clocks and watches she’d checked were stopped somewhere between midnight and two.

She was too exhausted to stay awake but too wired to sleep.

They were not alone and they were not safe.

A wind rattled the window-panes and disturbed the curtains. Mum and the brown man were on the sofa, surrounded by Louise’s things. The television set and the standing lamps had advanced by inches, rucking up the rugs with wooden paws. Jordan picked up one light, an old-fashioned pole with a cream coolie hat shade, and carried it back to a corner where it wasn’t in the way. As she moved it further from the sofa, its bulb dimmed and fizzed but did not die or burst. From the corner, it cast little light.

‘Mum, where’s Tim? Where’s Dad?’

Her mother didn’t say anything, but reacted to the mentions of her son and husband as if they were darts thrown at her. Her face grew paler and brighter as if under an interrogation light.

Jordan turned and saw the coolie light was out of its corner.

As long as she kept it in sight, the thing stayed put. When she looked away, it was on the move, growing brighter. It had hopped forward a yard. She looked at Mum and then back and it was a yard nearer and five candles brighter. She wanted to snap it over her leg and throw it away. Instead, she picked it up and put it firmly back in its corner.

‘You,’ she said to Wing-Godfrey, ‘keep watching this lamp.’

The brown man’s head moved slowly but his eyes were open.

Jordan patted the coolie hat and felt a smug sense of victory.

There were four other standing lamps, identically shaded but a few inches shorter. She had dealt with the general, and now must take care of the privates. There were nooks and alcoves for them all. She shifted the lamps, damping down the painful, bleaching light which made the Summer Room into an overexposed moonscape.

Wing-Godfrey couldn’t look in five directions at once.

Except he could. Jordan shifted his head and pointed at the big window. Five fixed lights reflected there.

‘If one of them moves, call out,’ she said.

The television set was on a trolley with rebellious castors. Trundling it was a job, but she managed. She humped the big box over the fireguard and put it in the fireplace. It should be happy there.

Knee-high occasional tables piled with vintage magazines and high-backed armchairs with lace antimacassars had occupied spaces they had been banished from earlier, but Jordan left them alone. Anything that couldn’t cast light was less likely to be a discipline problem.

She drew up a stool and sat down, by the sofa.

Mum had stopped sniffling. She was at least responding to her.

‘I put Tim in the top drawer,’ Mum said, and sobbed.

Jordan had no idea what that meant, but it was evidently a terrible thing.

‘He’s lost,’ Mum went on.

Jordan found a tissue in her pocket and wiped her mother’s face, cooing that she would find Tim soon, that Dad would come back, that it would all be all right in the end.

Did she believe it? Was she was just feeding back the speech Mum used on Jordan when she woke up from a bad dream.

(The good old days? When all they had to fear was each other?)

Mum tried to smile and laid a shaking hand on her hair.

‘We have to be strong, Mum,’ said Jordan.

Mum began to stroke, then grabbed a fistful of hair and yanked hard. A patch of Jordan’s scalp hurt, badly. She yelped. Tugged off the stool, she landed hard on her knees.

All the lights flared, turning Mum’s face into a snarling skull with deep black eye-pits. Then the room went dark. Light-ghosts swarmed in Jordan’s eyes and aftershocks of pain shot through her.

Mum was still pulling her hair.

The lights came back and Mum stopped pulling. Jordan looked up and around. The five lamps were in a tight circle around the sofa, towering overhead, hats angled forward in threat, cords stretched across the floor.

She stood, knocking over two of the lamp stands. They tumbled like tall trees and lost their shades. Their filaments still burned.

Jordan was outside the circle. Mum and Wing-Godfrey were trapped.

She put her hand to her head and found wetness.

The mad bitch had pulled out a chunk of hair by the roots.

After all she had done! Ungrateful cow!

She should leave her here to stew but knew she couldn’t. Striking out on her own had been a mistake. And Mum’s attack hadn’t been as bad as other things. Jordan remembered she had seriously assaulted Dad after he hit her. Out in the night, the ghosts had almost killed her.

Mum wasn’t herself.

Though, God knew, Mum’s own self wasn’t always a comfortable person to be around. She’d never been one for smoothing things over. That bad-dream speech Jordan remembered
wasn’t
from Mum, but a film. It was something a 1950s movie mother might say. Mum didn’t notice nightmares, unless they were her own.

This, however, was the whole family’s nightmare.

Jordan resolved to wade back into the fray, to get through the encircling lamps, the layers of hurt and shock, and reach her mother.

The lights fizzed.

* * *

W
hen Tim flashed the torch, Steven knew where he was. The upper level of the barn, in the hayloft. Even when the light was off again, he smelled straw and dry wood and remembered this place as uncomfortable.

His instinctive dislike of this corner of the Hollow wasn’t because of anything that had happened in the distant past, but because of what was to happen in the near future. He’d never liked the hayloft because it was where he would die. Ever since the barn was built, hundreds of years ago, it had been assembling the props for his death scene.

How could he fight against his murderers?

Tim was just a child, his son. No matter what, Steven couldn’t turn and fight Tim, as he could if someone else – Mr Precious Rick, the Wild Witch, even Kirsty – were coming at him. He wanted to save his own skin, but not at the expense of hurting his son. Even before she flew at him, he had learned from slapping Jordan. There were wrongnesses which couldn’t be lived with.

If Tim won and left him dead, would he learn from that too?

Tim was with the After Lights-Out Gang. Of them all, he’d grown closest to the Hollow, found it easiest to go over to the others, to join the ghosts.

Was Tim even alive? Didn’t you have to die to become a ghost?

No, Tim hadn’t died. There was a tie between father and son, a two-way wordless communication. If his son were dead, Steven would have known.

However this turned out, the survivor would carry a load of pain and guilt that might be worse than losing the struggle.

Perhaps the best would be to turn around, walk up to Tim and toss him through the ladder-hatch? Then, he would take on himself the pain to come, the torment and the agony.

(Do that.)

If only for a moment. Physically, he could cope with Tim. He was not sure about the After Lights-Out Gang. Those savagely painted girlish ghosts would burn him at the stake and be back in their dorms in time for breakfast.

He stopped running. Surely, he must have crossed the space? No: distances were greater in absolute dark. When you weren’t looking, when you couldn’t see, the Hollow was as big as you could imagine.

‘Turn on the torch, Tim,’ he shouted.

No light came. But he heard footsteps, getting nearer.

‘Tim, it’s Dad,’ he appealed.

The After Lights-Out Gang had their inner glow, dark violet. Steven made out their shapes, or their shadows. Big girls, taller and broader than him, they were still proportionally children.

They stood in a circle, like the dancing stones. In their centre, where the altar-piece should be, was his son. Steven was more afraid for Tim than of him.

‘They’re not our friends,’ he said, biting down on the crack in his voice. ‘Come to me. I’ll look after you.’

He was not convinced by his own promises.

The After Lights-Out Gang just stood, menacing blocks of dark. They held hooks. Twisted coat hangers gleaming at the sharpened points, old agricultural implements with fresh edges.

‘Go home, girls,’ he shouted. ‘This is our house now.’

The whistles began again. Slow, drawn-out, shrill, mocking, like wolf-whistles.

One of the gang lifted a long, thin shape to her lips. A recorder? A schoolgirl instrument, a flute for weeds and babies. She aimed it at him. A sharp report came, and a muzzle-flash. A dart stung in his shoulder.

Not a recorder. Some kind of blow-pipe gun.

The stinging was mostly shock. Touching his wound, he felt cold wetness. The girl had shot him with an icicle. A silly weapon, but still a killing thing.

The After Lights-Out Gang stood between him and the ladder-hatch. He was trapped.

No. There was another way out of the hayloft.

In the wall, somewhere behind him, was the bale-door. That opened out twenty feet above the ground. The crane-arm jutted above the door, but there was no chain or rope. Still, if he leaped outwards and landed on the soft grass, rolling properly, he could take a twenty foot drop.

In his panic, he had no idea which direction he was facing, no sense of the nearness or farness of the walls. Or the ladder, or the door. He could be inches away from falling through the ladder-hatch. A dead drop to solid concrete or the roofs of the cars in the garage space.

All the gang had blow-pipes ready.

He stood up, blood buzzing in his head.

‘Tim,’ he said, loudly but evenly.

A flash. A shot. Close enough to startle badly. He felt the icicle whoosh past him. This time, he had been missed.

But he had what he needed. A sense of where he was.

The bale-door was ten feet or so away, exactly to his left.

He turned and judged that he was facing the door.

In the dark, he heard the jiggle of a pipe being pumped or reloaded or locked or whatever. He took three precise steps and reached out. He did not touch the bale-door.

For that, he needed light.

He put his hands up and said, ‘I surrender.’

No reply.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a fix.’

He began to whistle.

He heard the steps behind him. Not the After Lights-Out Gang, but Tim.

He looked down, still in utter dark. He made out the top of his son’s head.

‘Tim,’ he whispered.

He didn’t know if he was getting through.

One of the girls nodded, a kill-him-and-get-it-over-with nod, justification for a massacre.

That nod hit him worse than the ice dart.

* * *

S
he had been wrong. Her daughter hadn’t been faking it, wasn’t the threat in this room. By pulling Jordan’s hair, Kirsty had lost a chance, squandered an opportunity to make things right. She had thrown away both her children.

Awful despair gaped inside her.

The Hollow.

It might as well snuff her out like the lights. She would be saved from more mistakes.

She was numbed beyond fear.

After all, she was on her sofa in her front room. How could that not be normal?

The lights wavered, casting spider-armed shadows on the ceiling and walls.

Jordan stood, hurt, outside the circle of lamp stands.

Kirsty breathed slowly, becoming calm. If she let herself be taken, perhaps it’d all be over. She had thought it best her husband and children go, but it was simpler to remove herself from the situation, to throw
herself
away.

If she gave in, the others might be saved. That was the sacrifice of this circle.

‘Goodbye, love,’ she said.

‘Mum, no,’ Jordan shouted, understanding.

Kirsty looked at the brown man, who had already been away and come back. Bernard Wing-Godfrey held out his hand and she took it. In her grip, his hand came off again, at the wrist. Then his forearm came loose at the elbow and slithered out of his cuff, and his upper arm detached at the shoulder and hung loose in his baggy sleeve. His head lolled to one side. Kirsty saw the join around his neck, skin stretching as the bones unlocked.

The president of the After-Lights-Out-Gang came to pieces inside his suit.

Then he stood up.

None of his pieces were completely free, just let out on a long lead, loosely strung on cobwebby matter. His torso bobbed eight feet in the air, wrapped in his jacket. His head hovered on a yard-long ectoplasmic snake neck. His limbs jittered in the air, hips trapped in trousers. His independent calves and feet, arms and hands strained for the points of the compass. Strands glistened between his component pieces.