Eglantine

by Catherine Jinks

  Mum’s smile faded. ‘Didn’t do what?’ she asked.

  I took a deep breath. Bethan and I exchanged a quick glance.

  ‘There’s more writing on his walls,’ I explained, reluctantly, ‘but it’s not his writing.’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you, because of the TV!’ he blurted out. ‘I don’t like it, Mum, really I don’t. Someone’s coming into my bedroom!’ His voice cracked again. ‘It’s my bedroom! No one else should be going in there.’

  Mum laid down her knife. She fixed me with a very grave and serious look.

  ‘Alethea,’ she said, ‘I want the truth, please. Do you know anything about this?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Cross my heart.’

  ‘Bethan? If you’re lying, Bethan, I’m not going to forgive you for a very long time. Do you understand?’

  ‘I didn’t do it!’ he squealed.

  ‘He couldn’t have done it, Mum,’ I said, as something else occurred to me. ‘Some of this stuff is written on the ceiling. How could he have written it on the ceiling? The ceilings in this house are so high.’

  ‘Well . . .’ She was starting to sound uncertain. ‘We do have a ladder . . .’

  ‘But how would Bethan get the ladder up those stairs? All by himself?’

  We stared at him, Mum and I. He growled, ‘Well, don’t ask me.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better have a look,’ said Mum. ‘Bethan, why don’t you go and get Ray? He’s out the back.’ She wiped her hands on a tea towel, followed me down the hall and began to climb the stairs. ‘You don’t suppose this writing might be the old stuff?’ she suggested. ‘Soaking through the paint, for some reason? Maybe it was written in something that’s reacting with the paint, as it dries.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was a reasonable explanation. But when we reached Bethan’s room, and studied the writing, we began to have doubts. Surely, if the words had soaked through the paint, they wouldn’t have been so clear and dark? Surely they would have been blurry?

  ‘You don’t think Bethan’s lying, do you?’ Mum asked me, in a low, worried voice. ‘You don’t think he’s doing it himself?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘Not even to attract attention? I just – oh, dear. I hope this isn’t a symptom of some kind of – I don’t know – emotional problem.’ Then she muttered something about therapy, and I was afraid that she might start mentioning alternative treatments like acupuncture again. (She’s always suggesting that we have acupuncture, which I don’t fancy at all. Injections are bad enough.)

  ‘No, Mum,’ I said firmly. ‘That’s not Bethan’s writing. If only Bethan could write like that. It’s grown-up writing.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she admitted.

  ‘In fact, it’s more than grown-up – it’s old-fashioned. Like Granny’s used to be. Oh!’ And that’s when I realised. ‘You know what it looks like?’ I gasped. ‘It looks like the writing in that book from under the stairs!’

  Mum shot me a quick, startled glance. I could see a hint of alarm in her expression.

  ‘But it’s probably a coincidence,’ I added quickly. I didn’t like what I’d just said any more than Mum did.

  Then Ray appeared, with Bethan. They were slightly out of breath.

  ‘Ray, where did I put that book?’ Mum asked. ‘Do you remember? The old one, from under the stairs?’

  Blinking, Ray thought for a moment. Without Ray, Mum would be losing things all the time. He’s very tidy and logical for an artist. In fact he doesn’t look like an artist at all. He has short hair and glasses, and he irons his shirts (even his T-shirts), and he’s always cleaning the paint from under his fingernails.

  ‘I know I packed it,’ Mum continued, ‘but I can’t remember – did I put it in the bedroom bookcase or in the bookcase downstairs?’

  ‘Neither,’ Ray replied, with decision. ‘It’s in that cupboard in the studio, with the old magazines.’

  So I was sent to fetch the book. Naturally, I studied the writing on its flyleaf all the way back to the bedroom, growing more and more uneasy as I did so. When I finally reached Mum, I couldn’t get rid of the thing fast enough. Suddenly, I didn’t want to be touching that mouldy old book.

  ‘God,’ said Mum, staring at it. ‘God, Ray, would you check this out?’

  ‘Lordy,’ said Ray, adjusting his glasses. Bethan squeezed between them, and all three peered at the inscription on the flyleaf. Then they gazed at the wall. Then they fixed their eyes on the book again.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Bethan. He sounded both anxious and awestruck.

  ‘It can’t be the same,’ Mum said plaintively. ‘Not exactly the same.’

  ‘I can’t see much difference,’ Ray replied. ‘Compare the capital E in Eglantine with the one on the wall. There are a lot of ways you can write a capital E. These have the same loops. The same thickness of line.’

  There was a long, long silence. No one wanted to come right out and say anything stupid. Not at first.

  It was Bethan, of course, who finally couldn’t resist.

  ‘Do you think it’s a ghost?’ he squeaked.

  ‘Oh, Bethan,’ said Ray, and Mum remarked, in hollow tones, that there were no such things as ghosts – just concentrations of negative chi sometimes associated with past misfortune.

  ‘If there’s a ghost in this room,’ Bethan went on, sulkily ignoring her, ‘I don’t want to sleep here.’

  ‘It’s highly unlikely, Bethan,’ said Ray, in his gentlest voice. ‘I’m sure there’s another explanation.’

  ‘Like what?’ said my brother, sharply. He was really nervous, or he wouldn’t have talked like that. Not to Ray. With Ray, he usually mumbles.

  But Ray didn’t take offence. He rarely does.

  ‘Like maybe the squatters found that book,’ he suggested. ‘And maybe one of them was a bit – you know – odd, and copied the writing, and now the writing is soaking through the paint for some reason -’

  ‘I’m still not sleeping in here,’ Bethan said, at which point alarm bells began to ring for me.

  ‘Well, he’s not sleeping in my room!’ I protested.

  ‘A bit of writing isn’t going to hurt you,’ Ray sensibly pointed out, laying a hand on Bethan’s shoulder.

  Mum, however, was beginning to freak. ‘Negative energy, Ray,’ she said. ‘The balance in here can’t be good, surely?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know, but -’

  ‘I won’t sleep in here,’ Bethan declared, looking sick. ‘It’s giving me nightmares.’

  That really made everyone sit up and take notice. Mum hissed through her teeth, and Ray asked, ‘What kind of nightmares?’

  I quickly pointed out that everyone had nightmares, I had them myself, and it didn’t mean I had to move out of my room – but Mum shushed me.

  Ray repeated his question.

  ‘I dream that I’m choking,’ Bethan mumbled. ‘And then I wake up.’

  ‘Just that?’ said Ray. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ my brother replied, vaguely.

  ‘And is that the only dream?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bethan admitted. ‘But I’ve had it every night since we came. And,’ he added, ‘I’ve never had it before.’

  Choking, I thought. Yuk. But I didn’t let my sympathy get the better of me.

  ‘We’re each supposed to have our own bedroom,’ I remarked. ‘That’s why we moved -’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Alethea!’ Mum snapped. She was worried, I guess, but she made me jump. ‘Don’t be so selfish!’

  ‘You can sleep in this room, if you want to,’ Bethan said to me, but Mum informed him that no one would be sleeping in his room that night. He would be sharing my room until the mystery was solved – or until the writing stopped.

  ‘And I don’t want to hear one more word out of you,’ she told me, ‘or you’ll be sleeping on the sofa.’

  Which is how I lost my bedroom, almost before I’d had time to enjoy it. Boy, was
I mad. It was so unfair! But I have to admit that, if I hadn’t been so keen to get Bethan out of my room, the problem might never have been fixed. Because I might never have concentrated so hard on helping to solve it.

  CHAPTER # three

  That night, Mum did three things.

  First of all, she phoned her friend Trish. Trish is a masseur, and even more of a hippy than Mum is. They’re both into tofu, and yoga, and Feng Shui, but Trish has a much wider circle of vegetarian Buddhist astrologer friends. So it didn’t surprise anybody when Trish said that she knew a woman who was a member of a group called PRISM (Paranormal Research Investigation Services and Monitoring). If Mum didn’t mind, Trish said, she would ring this woman and see if they could all get together.

  Mum replied that it was okay by her. The more help we had, the better it would be.

  The second thing that Mum did was ask me to make a note of every word scribbled on Bethan’s wall. She explained that it would help us to determine whether anything was added overnight. She also asked me to underline every word on the wall with a red pen, for the same reason.

  So I got out my journal, and copied down the mysterious script. Ray had to bring a ladder before we could work out what was written on the ceiling: it was more strange stuff about kings and sailors and seaports, and it didn’t make much sense. But I wrote it all down, and underlined it in red, and tried not to think about it again for a while (because I had to finish my homework).

  I thought about it that night, though, when I was lying in bed. I thought about the writing, and about Eglantine Higgins, 1906. If there was a ghost in the house (which there probably wasn’t, but if there was), then it was almost certainly the ghost of Eglantine Higgins. During the daytime, this hadn’t worried me. After all, a bit of ghostly writing never did anyone any harm.

  At night, however, I have to admit that it freaked me out. I didn’t like the idea of Eglantine Higgins drifting around in the next room while Bethan and I were dead to the world. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t sleep very well. I didn’t have bad dreams, but I kept waking up with a start. I think I was half-expecting to find Eglantine Higgins hovering over my bed.

  The third thing that Mum did, that night, was to take a long red hair from her head, stick one end of it to the bottom of Bethan’s bedroom door, and stick the other end onto the base of his doorframe. She didn’t tell us what she had done until the next morning. But she warned us, before we went to bed, that no one was to enter Bethan’s room again before summoning her – and in the morning we found out why.

  ‘Look,’ she said, as we stood around Bethan’s bedroom door in our dressing-gowns. ‘See that hair?’ We didn’t, at first. She had to show it to us. ‘That hair is unbroken. Which means that no one went through the door last night.’

  We gazed at her in admiration.

  ‘Wow, Mum,’ Bethan exclaimed. ‘That’s really smart.’

  ‘Good work, Mum.’

  ‘Clever,’ said Ray.

  ‘So if there’s anything new on the walls,’ Mum went on (pointing out the obvious), ‘whoever put it there didn’t come through this door.’

  ‘Unless you did it yourself,’ I volunteered, and she made a face at me.

  ‘Very funny,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘Come on,’ Ray interrupted. He sounded almost keen, though he doesn’t usually get very excited about anything. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  He pushed at the door. It creaked slowly on its hinges, like something out of a horror movie, revealing Bethan’s light, bright, echoing room.

  We saw the new writing at once. We couldn’t have missed it: there were new lines everywhere – twenty-four, to be exact. (I counted them afterwards.)

  ‘My God,’ Mum breathed.

  ‘This is so unbelievable.’ I was the first one over the threshold. Timidly I advanced, clutching my journal and my blue fountain pen. I am the proudest of my line was new; it was inscribed at eye level, above the chest of drawers. I didn’t recognise I have the wherewithal to defend myself, either. Quickly I opened my journal, and began to copy out these most recent messages.

  Ray went to the window. He rattled it. The catch was firmly in place. ‘No one could have come through here,’ he declared. ‘Not without leaving the catch open when they left.’

  ‘What’s happening, Ray?’ Mum asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible, does it? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense unless – well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s some chemical explanation,’ he replied – but not with any conviction, I thought.

  Bethan asked when ‘that ghost woman’ was coming.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Mum. ‘Trish has to ring me.’

  ‘Well, it had better be soon,’ Bethan grouched, with a wary, sidelong glance at the walls. ‘Because I want my bedroom back.’

  Happily for all of us, Trish called Mum soon afterwards, bearing good news. The PRISM woman (whose name was Sylvia Klineberg) would be visiting us that very evening. Sylvia had suggested half past eight, so if Mum had no objections, Trish would ring Sylvia back and confirm the arrangements.

  Mum had no objections.

  ‘Come to dinner, won’t you?’ she pleaded with Trish. ‘Early, at six. Then we can be finished and cleaned up by the time she appears.’

  I hate it when Trish comes to dinner, because she eats macrobiotic food – which is rice and not much else. It’s a bit bland. It also has a bad influence on Mum, who always starts talking about black bread and herbal teas and grinding her own grain. Personally, I like the food that she cooks for us now (except the risotto). I’d much rather have mashed potato and lamb cutlets than soy-and-birdseed rissoles.

  Fortunately, however, at this particular dinner there were more exciting things to talk about than macrobiotic food.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Trish, after much thought, ‘that your house must be sitting on the intersection of a lot of ley lines.’ When asked what ley lines might be, she explained that they were lines of energy, or life force, flowing over the earth. ‘Ley lines connect all the world’s sacred sites,’ she assured us. ‘And those points where ley energy paths converge are always prone to strange manifestations, because of the energy surges.’

  ‘Too much earth energy,’ Mum interjected, and Trish agreed that there was, indeed, a risk of imbalance.

  ‘What kind of sacred sites are you talking about?’ I asked, whereupon Trish began to reel off a list of them: churches, temples, stone circles, holy wells, burial grounds . . .

  ‘Burial grounds!’ Bethan exclaimed, his mouth full of food. ‘Oh, no. You don’t think this house was built on an Aboriginal burial ground, do you?’

  Bits of rice sprayed all over the table as he spoke. Politely, Trish ignored them – or perhaps she didn’t see them. She’s a vague sort of person when it comes to things like electricity bills and table manners. Though she can be quite sharp about people’s feelings.

  She looks a little like a ghost herself, with her pale, skinny face and floating hair and layers of drifting shawls and scarves and Indian cotton skirts.

  ‘I don’t think it’s likely, Bethan,’ she responded, with the utmost sincerity.

  ‘In America, haunted houses are always sitting on top of Indian burial grounds,’ Bethan went on, in a glum voice. Mum said something about dispersing the negative energy – with wind-chimes, perhaps? At least they would moderate the chi flow where different energies converged.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Trish replied. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t start moderating energy flows until Sylvia takes a look at the place. She’s had a lot to do with manifestations like this. She may help you to identify the problem.’

  ‘How?’ Ray inquired, and Trish said that she wasn’t sure, exactly. She didn’t know Sylvia very well. Sylvia was a naturopath who had treated Trish’s friend, Alice. In her spare time, Sylvia went about investigating reports of paranormal activ
ity for PRISM, which was a large organisation based in Adelaide. Trish had no idea what a paranormal investigator actually did.

  ‘But I’m sure it will be very interesting,’ she added brightly, and I could see that she had high hopes. Perhaps she was expecting that we’d all have to sit in the dark, holding hands and waiting for the spirits of the dear departed to communicate with us. I was expecting much the same thing myself.

  As it turned out, we had the wrong idea entirely. When Sylvia knocked at the door and we went to open it, we were all very surprised at how normal she looked. There was no fluttering black cloak. No crystal ball. She had short grey hair, and neat pearl earrings, and she wore a pale linen jacket over navy-blue trousers. She was carrying a green gym bag.

  After she’d been invited into the kitchen for coffee, she took a notebook and a tape-recorder out of the gym bag before she sat down.

  ‘Trish tells me that you’ve had unexplained writing on the walls of a bedroom,’ she said, once everyone had been introduced to each other and her coffee had been poured. ‘I guess you’d better tell me the story from the beginning. You’ve only just moved in, is that right?’

  Mum said yes. She explained about the squatters. She described her improvements: the new kitchen, the new paint, the new window glass. She showed Sylvia the book from under the stairs, and – with many interjections from me and Bethan – related the strange tale of Bethan’s bedroom. It all took a long time. Sylvia made notes as her tape-recorder whirred quietly away. She didn’t say much. She just listened, and I couldn’t tell from her expression what she was thinking.

  ‘Do you reckon it’s a ghost?’ Bethan finally asked her, and she gave a half-smile.

  ‘That’s what we have to establish,’ she answered.

  ‘If it is a ghost,’ I said, ‘it must be the ghost of Eglantine Higgins. Because it’s got the same handwriting.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sylvia replied. She shut her notebook and turned off the tape-recorder. ‘I suppose I’d better see the room, now,’ she added, rising, whereupon we all trooped upstairs to look at Bethan’s bedroom. The door was shut, of course; it had been shut all day. No one had been in there since nine o’clock that morning. When Ray clicked on the light switch, I couldn’t see any evidence of further unexplained activity. Every word on the wall had been underlined in red, by me, at Mum’s request.