An Inquiry Into Love and Death (7 page)

I smiled to reassure him. “I’m used to history lectures. I’m a student at Oxford.”

“Are you, then?” He looked at me, raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“If you’re going to say something about educated women, I’ve heard it ad nauseam, I assure you. I already feel like a bit of a circus sideshow here.”

“Ah. No,” he said gently. “Not quite a sideshow. More like a unicorn, perhaps—something we’ve heard of, but never quite believed existed.”

If it was a compliment, it had a bit of a sting to it, and yet I found I was strangely pleased. He hadn’t lectured me about traveling alone or finding a husband, at least.

“It looks like a storm is blowing up,” he said now. “Shall we head back?”

“I liked it,” I said as he looped Poseidon’s leash around his wrist, and we turned back to the woods. “The story, that is. It was rather good. Did you tell it to my uncle?”

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “He already knew it. Someone told it to him the last time he was here.”

I stopped walking and stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

He stopped and turned as well. “Toby was here before, years ago. Hunting Walking John. He said he’d come back a second time, this time because he’d left unfinished business.”

“What was it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Your uncle wasn’t very talkative.”

I stared for another moment, then started walking again. “This makes less and less sense the more I learn of it,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It was probably nothing. We’ll say good night, then, shall we?”

I thanked him and wished him good night. As he turned away, I hugged myself, the wind flapping my coat about my legs. Night was falling, and I turned to go inside. William was right, and a storm was coming.

T
here was no sign of the cat, though it must still have been in the house. I tried calling it—“Kitty, kitty”—but there was no response. It was likely hidden somewhere, still terrified by its encounter with Poseidon.

I started a pot of tea as the sky darkened outside the kitchen window and the wind began to moan in the eaves. A few spatters of rain pelted the glass. When my tea was ready I took a cup, a tin of biscuits, and a piece of the sausage I’d bought at Rachel Moorcock’s store with me into the library.

The library was just off the front parlor, through a pair of French doors. It featured a battered desk and a few bookshelves, mostly empty. A window looked out the back garden and toward the woods. I had noticed this room before, and it seemed perfect now for what I wanted to do, for the desk had a large surface and the rest of the room was rather empty. I lit the lamps, built a fire in the fireplace, and put a few pieces of sausage on the floor in front of the flames. Then I went upstairs.

The two cases were where Inspector Merriken and I had left them, in Toby’s bedroom. I carried them, one at a time, down to the library. I was ready to take a closer look at Toby Leigh’s ghost-hunting kit.

I pulled the pieces from the first kit and laid them out on the desk. Clock, stopwatch, thermometer, two torches, measuring tape, film canisters, a spool of string and another of wire, a small metal box with a needle. This last seemed to measure sound; I snapped my fingers and watched the needle move.

A sound came behind me and for a second I froze, my blood chilled; then the sound came again, a soft padding, and I turned.

The cat had come out of hiding to get at the sausage. It was black, orange, and white, thin and ragged, its fur muddy. It crouched on the floor and looked up at me with suspicious brown eyes. Curled around its back legs was a disproportionately long tail blooming with thick fur, matted down with something apparently sticky. As I watched, the cat inched closer to the bites of meat, never taking its eyes from me.

I crouched on my haunches and hugged my knees, watching the cat’s progress. It looked female, in my opinion; no self-respecting male cat would have such exquisite features or such a flagrantly pretty tail. As I watched her devour the sausage I couldn’t help but feel a childish thrill, the excitement of a girl who had always wished for a kitten but never was given one because it would interfere with her studies.

“Do you have a name?” I asked her. The cat’s ears swiveled, but she didn’t stop eating.

“I can give you a name,” I said conversationally, liking the way her ears followed my voice. On the desk, I could see the needle move on the sound monitor.

I knew what her name should be. It was the name I had always picked for my imaginary kitten. A foolish, dramatic name, but I would give it to her anyway. “Sultana,” I said.

The cat had finished eating and was licking her paws. She gave only the barest indication she had heard me. I smiled to myself and went back to my work.

I wasn’t sure, entirely, what I was after by going through Toby’s equipment. I only knew that the mismatched parts of the end of Toby’s life were like pieces from different puzzles put side by side, revealing little. I touched each item and turned it over, hoping it could tell me something.

I pulled the galvanoscope from the second case. It was heavy. I had no idea how it was to be set up; I put the main unit on the table and pulled out the battery next, wondering how it attached. Finally I figured out how the wires wrapped around the battery’s nodes and connected them.

The needle moved at first as I connected the battery, then was still. Outside, the storm had blown to a feverish pitch, the eaves beginning to groan over my head, rain spattering the window. Sultana, finished with her bath, dozed by the fire, one half-opened eye watching me. “You should be grateful you’re indoors,” I chided her.

My eye caught something else in the galvanoscope’s case, and I pulled it out: A small notebook, well-worn. I sat at the desk and opened it:

23 January 1919
. Third night, Cotters’ house, Shepham. Location, attic—

10:00 p.m
. Temperature stable, no noises heard.

11:00 p.m
. All gauges stable, nothing heard or seen.

11:37 p.m
. Cold felt briefly, possible draft—no fluctuation noted on thermometer.

12:00 a.m., 24 January 1919
. Still nothing seen . . .

It was a logbook—a ghost-hunter’s logbook. I was fascinated. Many of the nights were spent like the night on the first page. I imagined hundreds of such nights over a span of years—for this was obviously just the latest of many notebooks—my uncle sitting hour after hour, noting the time going by with dutiful entries.

But not all of the vigils went so. Several pages later, I read:

2 August 1920
. First night, Bakers’ house, York. Location, copse of trees, from which the children claim they have seen translucent figures from the house.

8:00 p.m
. Sunset. Nothing seen.

9:00 p.m
. Many sounds; difficult to track properly. I watch the meter but nothing seems extraordinary.

9:11 p.m
. Fluctuation on the galvanoscope. Needle moved three degrees, possibly four. Now returned to base position. No other readings.

9:13 p.m
. Galvanoscope fluctuation again.

9:14 p.m
. Again. The feeling has come to me. Something certainly here.

9:30 p.m
. It has retreated; no readings. But it has not gone away.

9:41 p.m
. Galvanoscope fluctuating to a much greater degree; continuous, without stopping. Something very certainly here. Temperature has lowered by 2.5 degrees. Sound meter shows no difference.

9:42 p.m
. It is a woman.

9:49 p.m
. Woman again, very near.

9:51 p.m
. Galvanoscope very volatile—

9:53 p.m
. She looks like—

10:17 p.m
. I have seen it and spoken to it. A woman, twenty to twenty-five years old, hair cropped, in a dress of homespun. She saw me and made such sounds. She would not or could not give her name.

Her baby is buried here, in these trees. I will tell the Bakers. Perhaps the sexton will help.

I stared at the page before me, disbelieving. The language was so simple, the words so devastating.
She saw me and made such sounds. Her baby is buried here, in these trees
. Impossible, and yet what had Toby seen?

And, drawing my eye again:
The feeling has come to me.
Something certainly here
.

Had Toby had—or believed he had—a sixth sense? An ability to see and speak with the dead? Was that even possible?

I looked around me. I was sitting at the desk, the various instruments around me, the notebook in front of me. It was night. I was sitting exactly as Toby would have sat, I realized, on one of his expeditions. Suddenly I could picture him very clearly in my mind, sitting at a table much like this one in a stranger’s house at some ungodly hour of the morning, wearing one of his worn-out suits and scratching quietly with his pen. Check the time; check the instruments; make a note. I could almost see the faint glow of the moonlight on his face, the way his body would stiffen and his eyes raise as he suddenly felt something—something. . . .

Something crashed.

I jumped. The fire wavered, as if a cold breath had blown over it. The lamps went out. Sultana bolted from the room, leaving me alone in the firelight.

Another crash. I jumped again, my blood skittering in my veins. The sound came from the window—heavy and sharp, as if something were being slammed with great force. The wind gusted outside. Through the gap in the curtains I could see the trees bowing and flashing in the force of it, the tall grasses past the garden wall bending flat in ripples that gleamed silvery in the dark.

I pushed the chair back and got up, feeling my way. I could see little in the firelight, yet something about the window made me feel suddenly exposed. I had the same strange feeling as if I’d been jolted with electricity, the hair on the back of my neck standing nearly on end, my hands unsteady. I moved stealthily to the library door, and when I stopped I noticed that I had silently slipped my feet out of my shoes.

I had just begun to take a breath when the crash sounded again, followed quickly by another. This time I saw movement at the window, a shape looming across it, then gone again. I stared stupidly for a moment before my brain recognized the shape of a shutter. A shutter had come loose in the wind and was banging on the window frame.

Fix the shutter, then. I should have been relieved, but instead I wished fiercely for Inspector Merriken, for my father, for anyone. Even Sultana would do. The shutter banged again.

I swallowed, left the library, and moved down the hall. I could hear every noise the old house made in the wind: the howling eaves, the rattling windows, the creak of old wood, the harsh gusts of rain.
Just a windstorm
.

The kitchen was still and dark. The crash came again, and I couldn’t help a mad, shuddering jump. If I went out the back door here and to my left along the house, I’d be at the library window in a few long steps. All I had to do was open the door.

Quickly, then.

I opened the door and a gust of wind hit me, cold and startling, spitting with rain. The hem of my dress flapped against my legs. In the wild whorls of air my hair flew almost upward, and I pressed my hands to my head, pushing strands from my eyes. The black vista behind the house was alive with movement, the grasses and weeds shaking with hissing wind, and the line of trees violently tossing their treetops. The clay flowerpot, containing only brown flower stems this time of year, was overturned, the earth in it scattered. I had the feeling, almost as a physical touch up my spine, that something had just left as I opened the door, and for a cowardly second I wanted to retreat, close the door again, and never look out for the rest of the night.

The shutter dangled from a single broken hinge. As I watched, the wind caught it and waved it heavily, irregularly, and threw it back to crash against the side of the house.

This, then, was the noise, as I had thought. All I had to do was step outside, pull the shutters closed, and latch them together. In the morning I’d look more closely at fixing the hinge.

Step outside. Latch the shutters. Step back in. Eight steps, perhaps ten. In the dark.

Cold needles of rain hit me, and the wind pressed my dress to my body. I plunged out into the darkness. The ground was damp and icy—I had completely forgotten that I had removed my shoes. I dashed to the window, grasped the shutter, wrestled with it. It bucked in my hands as the wind gusted again, and I lost my grip; I stretched and grasped it again before it could land a blow to my forehead. I closed it, then had to let it go to collect the other shutter; the first one dangled, then blew away again.

Behind me came another bang: the kitchen door, taking its turn in the wind. With my back to the garden, grasping first one shutter and then the other, my back tingled. Something—whatever it was that had just left—could be returning. It could, in fact, be directly behind me, and I could turn around and see—

The kitchen door banged again. I had hold of both shutters now, and I fumbled with the latch with numb fingers, stretching up on my toes in the relentless wind.

The rain plastered a lock of hair over my eye, but I could not release a hand to brush it away. I had nearly gotten the latch fastened when my hand slipped and the metal sliced under my thumbnail, sending a shock of pain up my arm. Still, I did not let go. I fastened the latch, feeling the warm wetness of blood under my fingers, and ran back to the house. My blood spattering in red drops on the cobblestones, I grasped for the door.

From behind me came a sound, and I turned to see the garden gate fly open as if thrown by an unseen hand. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. There was no mistaking it for the wind; the gate, somehow unlatched, moved as if someone strong had pushed it in fury. I could see nothing, but I was overcome, in slick certainty, with sheer terror.

I slammed and bolted the kitchen door behind me as I flung myself into the safety of the house. I gasped for air, my back to the closed door, and tried to come back to myself. My thumb throbbed and bled. I cradled it in my other hand. My hair was tangled, my feet chilled and dirty; my wet dress stuck to my freezing skin. In a rush of weakness, I sank to the floor, my knees up, my back against the door.

Something moved in the kitchen with a soft sound, and from my seat on the floor I saw the cat, Sultana, crouched under the wooden dish cabinet. Her ears were flattened to her skull, and she looked at me with large, fear-wild eyes, her pupils dark slits of angry wariness. She was frozen still.

Instinct made me hold my breath: the thought of that gate bursting open, perhaps, or the utter stillness and watchful eyes of Sultana. Without thinking I sat unmoving, trying for silence, like a small creature who hopes not to be noticed by a predator.

Something thumped against the door.

My hands flew to my mouth, clamping down the sound in my throat. That had not been the wild, sharp sound of something unmoored in the wind. It had not been the bony rapping of knuckles, of a human asking to come in. It had been a softer sound, more muffled. A single thump, inquisitive, almost exploratory. The sound of something testing to see whether the door, so recently open, would open again.

I felt as if someone had put an electric wire through me; I was unable to move, my arms and legs rigid, my breath frozen, like a body in the throes of shock. I stared at Sultana, whose tail had blossomed out, her body lowered to the ground, ears back, lips drawn up in a rictus of instinctive fear. I tried to stay silent as I waited for the sound to come again.

The terror I felt in that moment was something I had never thought possible. The thing outside the door was not human, I knew; it was a thing that had come through the garden gate—
toward me
—and was now only inches away, through the wood of the door, pressing where my backbone was. Looking for me. The world in that moment was not the place I had lived in all my life; it was as if a door had opened and I glimpsed how large reality was. I was a very small, very vulnerable creature in that second, unguarded flesh, my hubris the purest idiocy. Because if it found me, it could come. And I would not be able to stop it.