by Tim Lebbon
“Maybe,” he said, but there was so much he didn’t know. “But I still want to go.”
“We can if you want. It’s not midnight yet. We can jump in the car and go for a drive, find a hotel. Book in as Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
Scott managed a wan smile. Then he thought of those wraiths standing before the house, and the smile slipped away. “They were there for a reason,” he said. “Only in the garden, not beyond. All looking this way. All of them just—”
“That fucking letter,” Helen said. “It’s all because of that.”
“Yes!” Scott said, but that was not what she meant at all.
“You’ve got Papa on your mind, and you said he was always talking about stuff like this. Ghosts and death and weird stuff.”
“Death’s not weird.”
Helen only shrugged.
“And maybe it is the letter,” Scott said. He sat up straight on the settee and stared at the picture above their fireplace. It was a modern painting of a seascape, blazing colors of sky and sand all converging into a deep, dark, blurry line tipped with a splash of white. A tiny white horse was just rising from the sea, and many nights Scott had sat back with a glass of wine, urging it to grow.
“We should sleep,” Helen said. “Too much wine. And you’ve been dwelling on that letter all day. Just remember, babe, you should have had it when you were sixteen. Not now. You’re an old man now.”
“Thanks.”
“Pleasure.” She smiled and touched his shoulder, squeezing like a friend. Was she so angry with him that her affection now came to this? He leaned back to look at her face, and saw that she was very tired.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said.
She nodded and yawned. “It’ll be better in the morning.”
Sometimes things were. But not this. If Scott went to the window and pulled back the curtains he would see darkness, but those wraiths would still be out there, and perhaps they could see him even though he could not see them.
Could they enter the house? Come upstairs, push through closed doors, avoid all those loose floorboards that gave the building its voice? If in his sleep he muttered those words spoken by Papa in that clearing long ago, would he wake to see those ghosts surrounding his bed?
His heart stuttered in his chest, his breath came fast and shallow, but Scott did his best to hold himself together. Helen deserved that, at least.
He made sure every window and door was locked, all the while avoiding looking outside. He was so afraid that he would see an empty garden and imagine it full.
He dreamed of Papa, coming home from the hospital after thirty years and being cured of suicide. Scott was delighted to see him, and in the dream Scott and Helen had three children, all of whom recognized Papa instantly as their great-grandfather. But there was sadness, too. Scott told him about the ghosts, and Papa was devastated that it had come to this. “It’s just not right,” he said. “I did everything I could, and still . . .”
Scott woke up, opened his eyes, and felt the dregs of his dream filtering back into sleep. He saw shapes in the room, and all of them he recognized: chair, wardrobe, pictures on the wall.
“Papa,” he whispered, but none of the shapes moved.
He remembered that he and Helen did not have children, and he was sad. It felt as though a chunk of his life had been knocked away. Then he recalled that Papa had died thirty years ago, and another slice was taken from his world.
Scott sighed and turned over, taking comfort from the warm shape of Helen beside him.
And now that what he lacked from his dream hit home, those extra things in his life began to pour in. The letter, the odd things it said, the memories of Papa unremembered before now, the broken drawer . . . the ghosts.
The shapes in the garden, crowding his home almost without moving.
Those words he had uttered. Papa’s strange song, which had lifted the veil on his reality and shown him more of what there was to see and know.
Scott sat up and glanced quickly around the room. The familiar shadows were still there, with nothing new. Fear heightened his senses, but there was nothing out of place.
He stood from the bed, careful not to wake Helen, and moved to the window. Shifting the curtain allowed the half-moon access. It caught the hairs on his arm and hand and spilled to the floor behind him, revealing a long-forgotten coffee stain. Moonlight makes everything clear, he thought, though he did not know where that came from.
He looked down into the garden. Everything seemed as it should be. He closed his eyes, sang those guttural words he had remembered Papa saying, and opened his eyes again.
The shadows in the garden changed. Most were still, but some moved like thin trees in the breeze.
He was the center of their attention.
Scott dropped the curtain and stepped away. He nudged against the bed and sat down heavily, creaking the mattress and causing Helen to stir. She rolled over, muttered something, and went back to sleep, snoring softly.
“They’re still out there,” Scott whispered. He looked around the bedroom—empty. “Only out there. Maybe.” Standing, he padded quietly from the room and stood on the landing. It was also empty. He leaned around the corner and glanced downstairs, terrified of what he would see, glad when he saw only shadows that belonged. Across the landing, shifting aside the net curtain that covered the window there, looking down onto their driveway, he saw more of the shadows, and the strange shadows they cast. They seemed semisolid, as though the moonlight could not make up its mind whether or not to pass through them.
He gasped, stepped back from the window, trying to breathe slowly and heavily to still his frantic heart.
“They’ll get in,” he whispered. “Papa, they’ll get in. Unless . . .”
He had seen some of those wraiths moving toward the house, but as yet he was not sure that any of them had actually reached it. He had to go downstairs to find out.
“Look after me, Papa. Your words do this, so you must be with me now. Must be.” Scott hoped for another of those fresh memories of his grandfather—something that would perhaps explain what was happening to him right now—but as he descended into the cooler, darker downstairs, none came.
It was silent, and it felt more still and dead than upstairs. At least up there he had the knowledge of Helen sleeping in their bed, even though she was not a part of what he was doing. Down here there were only the empty rooms, and their familiar shadows, and those other things outside perhaps straining to get in even now.
He stood at the bottom of the staircase for a long time, alternately breathing softly and holding his breath completely in an attempt to hear anything amiss. Other than the usual sounds of the night—the unknown ticks and creaks of the house, a breeze playing around the eaves—there was nothing.
He wished he’d checked the time before leaving the bedroom. It suddenly seemed very important.
“Papa, make me strong.” The blinds beside the front door felt heavy, sodden with darkness. Scott pulled them aside, and a face stared in at him.
Somehow, he did not scream. He dropped the blinds and stepped back quickly, tripping over the bottom stair and falling onto his rump. Moaning softly, hands clasping his face as if to hold in his sanity, Scott stared at the blinds where they had fallen back into place.
It had been a young boy. Something was wrong with his head, his skull, its shape all deformed.
His face had almost been touching the glass. Almost.
“Papa,” Scott whined. “Papa.”
And then a memory, shocking in its suddenness and intensity, equally startling because of its brevity.
Papa is swishing at a hedge with his walking stick. Scott has a stick as well, and he flicks the heads off stinging nettles as though it is a sword. It is a hot day, one of those long-ago summer days that seem to go on forever, still existing and continuing in some childish, forgotten corner of his mind. They have done more than is possible to fit in one day already, and lunchtime has only just passed. It’s a
time full of potential.
“So how far does space go?” Scott asks again.
Papa shrugs. “Who knows? No one’s ever been that far.”
“But somebody must have a clue. Scientists or something.”
“They say it’s forever.”
Scott stands for a few seconds, frowning at the road but not really seeing it. “I don’t understand,” he says.
“You’re not meant to.”
“What?”
Papa is staring at him now, all levity exhaled with his last breath. “If we understand everything, what is there left to look for?”
“Papa?” Scott is only eight years old. His grandfather is scaring him.
Papa leans down toward his grandson. His face is stern; laughter lines are worry lines now, and his whole image has shifted. “Sometimes it’s sensible not to go looking for things you shouldn’t know.”
Scott steps back, trips over his own heel, and falls onto his behind.
Papa laughs. He waves his walking stick at the sky, leans back, and roars, and when he looks back down at Scott he has tears in his eyes. Scott smiles, then laughs as well.
“But that,” Papa says, “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
Later, Papa sits by a stream while Scott dams it, and when it’s time to go home Scott breaks the dam and they watch the water find its natural level once more.
Scott sat on the bottom stair and stared at the blinds across the front door. “I can’t know you,” he said. “I can’t see you. You’re not to be seen or known. Fuck off.” He stood, stumbled into the living room, and picked up the single chair by the fire-place. It just fit through the doorway—he scraped his fingers but barely registered the pain—and he pushed it hard against the front door, wedging it beneath the handle.
He went back to the living room and made sure all the curtains were fully drawn. He could look outside and see them again, he knew, but he had no desire to do that. Perhaps he was imagining things, or maybe he truly was seeing them. It was the latter that seemed more likely to him. He had always believed, because Papa had instilled that belief. He had always known that there was much more to things than he could see or easily understand. But until now, he had been content not knowing.
He reached behind the curtain and tried to make sure the window latch was in the locked position. For a few seconds his arm was in sight of anything outside, but he turned his head away in case he saw beyond the glass. He fiddled for the latch, found it already locked, and withdrew his arm. Out in the hallway he did the same, then into the dining room—checking that the patio doors were shut and locked, the side window latched—and finally the kitchen.
He made another circuit, checking door locks and pinning the dining chairs beneath the door handles. He considered tipping the dining table onto its side and pushing it against the patio doors. It was a heavy table, oak inlaid with ceramic tiles, and he remembered that it usually needed the two of them to shift it. The thought of asking Helen to help dissuaded him from trying.
Certain that the house was locked as tight as it could be, Scott sat at the kitchen table, held his head in his hands, and felt the pressure of the impossible coming to bear.
For a while he lost himself. He cried, shook, shivered as the air in the house seemed to drop below freezing; then he started sweating. He tried to believe that he had seen nothing—that Papa’s letter had inspired strange visions and hallucinations—but he knew in his heart that was wrong. Something had changed, and everything felt different. Something—the letter, the muttering of those strange words Papa had sung in the woods so long ago—had lifted the veil and afforded Scott a glimpse of the greater reality.
And he didn’t want to know. He wanted Helen, and peace. He did not want to believe that there were ghosts, because that implied that everlasting rest was not for everyone.
Is Papa out there somewhere? he thought. He liked to think not, but . . . But someone made that letter come here, and someone tried to open the drawer.
“Papa?” Scott muttered, his voice distorted through the tears.
There was no answer. He was not sure what he would have done if there had been.
He cried some more, crossed his arms on the table, and buried his face in them. His heart thumped. He felt it dancing in his chest, pulsing where he was pressed against the table edge. He heard it, like the sound of a distant wooden barrel being beaten.
The sound came closer. He breathed harder, faster, trying to drown the sound of his heart with his breaths, but it suddenly came from all around him, softly at first, then harsher and more urgent.
Scott sat upright and looked around, and the sound did not stop. It was no longer in rhythm with his heart.
The banging stopped and his heart raced on. He sat there for a while, wondering whether he’d imagined the sound. Perhaps he’d had his ear pressed against his arm in such a way that his heartbeat sounded like an echo. “No,” he said. However much he tried denying all this, he knew what was really happening.
“Back door,” Helen said.
Scott jumped from the chair and turned. His wife was leaning against the kitchen doorjamb, eyes slitted against the harsh light. “What?”
“Door. Back door. Someone’s knocking on it.”
“You heard that?”
Helen nodded, then opened her eyes wider when she heard the stress in his voice. “Was that you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Banging on the table?”
“No. Not me. Why would I?”
“Don’t know,” she said. She ran her hand through her hair, frowning. “I’m tired. Maybe we’re both dreaming this.” Then she went for the back door.
“Don’t.” Scott stood in her way. She stopped before him and he held her shoulders, pulling her close. “Please don’t.”
Helen shook her head and he felt her hair trailing across his face. “I’m so tired,” she said. “Put the kettle on, babe.”
Scott sighed and let her go, turned for the kettle, realizing only as he heard the key turn that Helen had always intended opening the door. Maybe she wanted him to confront the fears she believed Papa’s letter had implanted in him yesterday. Show him there was nothing out there but night. Let him see that maybe the only thing haunting him was Papa, a constant presence in his mind that had been aggravated by reading something he had written thirty years ago.
Or maybe she was so tired, she did not know what she was doing.
Scott felt the cool rush of air entering the house as Helen swung the door open. Darkness heaved in, actually seeming to shove the kitchen light back for the space of an eyeblink before light and dark agreed upon equilibrium.
“Who’s that?” Helen said. And Scott knew that she saw only one shape.
The shadows were still standing across the garden, shimmering now as the effect of his muttered spell wore off. They were obvious to Scott, and not only because he knew they were there. They were visible. Helen could not see them, and it was not only the darkness hiding them from her sight. Scott saw more.
But she could see one of them. The shape that seemed to emerge from the darkness at the edge of the garden, coming into being beneath the moonlight and walking quickly across the lawn.
“Who is that?” she asked again.
Scott moved to the door and went to push it shut.
“Who are you?” Helen said. “What do you want?”
“Helen . . .” Scott pushed, but Helen had moved in front of the door, holding it open with her shoulder. “Let me close it. What are you doing?”
She ignored him. “I’ll call the police,” she said.
“It’s him.” Scott was certain. It had been thirty years, but he could remember the pained gait, the determined swing of the arms, and as the ghost of Papa’s dead friend Lewis drew closer, Scott knew his face.
“Papa?” Helen said.
“Papa.” Lewis stopped three steps away from the door. He looked the same as when he had confronted Scott in the field with t
he shattered tree: old, drawn, his face lined with effort or pain. “That’s a name I’ve not heard spoken for a while.”
“Shut the door,” Scott said, but Helen would not—or could not—move.
“Where is it?” Lewis asked.
“What?”
“The Chord of Souls. Where?”
“I don’t know what—”
“You do know what I’m talking about!” Lewis stepped forward, growled with effort, and grabbed hold of Helen’s dressing gown. He screamed as he pulled hard, his face breaking into a smile of triumph as Scott’s wife stumbled to his side.
“Helen!”
She had turned now, and he saw why she had not been able to move: she was petrified. Her eyes were wide-open, mouth agape, and a line of drool hung from her chin.
“Give me the book or your wife . . .” Lewis trailed off, but his gaze never left Scott’s eyes.
“What?”
“I’ll leave that unsaid,” the ghost said. “You have an imagination, I know. Papa saw to that.”
“You’re not real,” Scott said.
“You told me that last time we met.” Lewis turned to Helen. His movement seemed fluid, not solid, as though his image were ghosted on a bad TV screen. She struggled in his grasp, and the ghost’s lips pressed together as he held her tighter. “You know I’m real, don’t you?” he asked.
“Holding her is an effort, isn’t it?” Scott said.
“Worth the effort.”
Scott glanced past Lewis and out into the garden, searching for shadows. The spell of those strange words had worn off, but now he knew that the ghosts were still there. Always there.
“I don’t know what book you’re talking about,” Scott said. He realized that he had suddenly become very calm. Seeing Lewis again—and seeing Helen’s fear—confirmed that he had not simply been imagining things. Reality crashed in and ebbed around the events of the past day, and, unimaginable as they were, Scott could now view the situation from a point of knowledge. This was a ghost standing before him, and the letter had arrived. The future began at that moment, and it was a very different place.
