‘How’d you know how I take my tea?’ I called after her. ‘Hang on a minute! You there! This is not funny anymore, and you can’t just go wandering about my place as if you own it!’
I was really getting annoyed with her now. I barged though the kitchen door into the tiny room.
You guessed it.
The kitchen was empty.
7
The Beautiful Mouth
Let’s get one thing straight. For all that I’m a bit of a dreamer – I wouldn’t have been flogging a failing second-hand bookshop for all it’s worth if not – I like to think I’m a level-headed, rational man – which is why I also recognise that I’m flogging a failing second-hand bookshop. Are you with me so far? What I’m trying to say is that I don’t believe in ghosts.
Scratch that. I didn’t believe in ghosts.
But as I stood in that empty kitchen listening to the scratchy hum of the refrigerator, feeling the room begin to warm up as if someone had switched on a heater, I had to face the fact that either I’d been seeing something that originated in my head, or I was being haunted by a ghost.
As my long-held belief in an afterlife, or the existence of a soul, came down on the side of mindless superstitions used as crutches to support people who couldn’t face up to their own mortality, I had to concede I was suffering hallucinations brought on by stress, or loneliness, or an aversion to getting married to Trisha, or any number of subconscious factors working like insidious worms in my addled brain. Because there definitely wasn’t, most assuredly, without doubt, such a thing as a ghost.
So why did I go around the shop turning on all the lights so that it was lit up like Blackpool illuminations? Why did I check every corner of the shop armed with an umbrella from the stand by the door? And why did I avoid going back into the kitchen to turn off the light? I even went up to my flat above the shop and left the kitchen light burning, something I never do, having an innate fear of fire that forces me to turn everything electrical off at their sockets at the end of each day.
I admit I crawled into bed feeling very shook up. I couldn’t drop off to sleep for ages. And I left the light on. I scanned the tiny bedroom, thinking I saw something moving in the shadows and promising myself I’d invest in higher-wattage bulbs instead of trying to save energy and money.
The entire thing had freaked me out.
I awoke in the morning feeling a lot better about things. The daylight washing through the paper-thin curtains drove away my dark, and quite frankly preposterous, thoughts. I’d been overwrought that’s all, a state of mind that could have been brought on by all manner of things. I needed to take things easy for a while, not get so stressed. Chill.
Chill.
The air was unduly cold, I thought. I sat upright in bed, drawing the covers over me. I could see my breath coming out in vaporous clouds. I became aware of someone standing by my bed.
I would have screamed, but the scream just wouldn’t come.
She was standing there, dressed as she always was, looking as beautiful as she always did. My very own ghost.
‘What do you want?’ I said, my words vaguely intelligible, and I couldn’t help thinking of that scene in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Marley. Then I shook my head and screwed up my eyes. This wasn’t real. I was giving in to my out-of-control emotions. I then entered the Cowardly Lion phase, repeating in my head, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts…’
‘I want to know if you’re ever going to get out of that bed,’ she said. ‘It’s getting late, and it’s a glorious day. You shouldn’t waste it lying in bed.’
‘Go away,’ I said, pulling the blanket up to my chin.
‘You really are a grumpy old bear at times, do you know that, Toby?’ she said with a smile.
‘You’re not really here. You’re a product of my imagination.’
‘You are silly, Toby,’ she chastised lightly. ‘That’s why I love you, I suppose.’
Love? This was getting worse! I was being haunted by a ghost who thought it was in love with me. It was weird before, but now it was just plain bonkers.
‘I’m going to make breakfast,’ she said, gliding silently across the room. It was the first time I noticed, apart from her (beautiful) voice, that she didn’t make the faintest of sounds; no rustling of fabric, no light footfall on the carpet. ‘Do you want some?’ she said, stopping and turning to me. She raised a brow expecting an answer. ‘Or are you going to lie there like a stranded and smelly porpoise all day?’
I nodded dumbly. ‘Yeah, breakfast sounds good,’ I said, nodding quickly.
She drifted through the open bedroom door. The door that I’d definitely closed the night before.
‘Christ!’ I said.
I couldn’t stop my shivering. I was terrified.
But strangely my shivering began to calm down, and I wasn’t so scared anymore. I threw back my covers, slid my arms into a dressing gown and passed through my small living room to the doorway to the kitchen-cum-dining room. The door was closed. I put my ear against it, but I couldn’t hear anything.
So what was I expecting, the clattering of pans and the smell of frying bacon?
I slowly pushed open the door. The room was empty.
What I can’t figure out, when I look back at it now, is why, instead of feeling relief that my personal spectre wasn’t there, I felt a wave of disappointment creep through me.
I spent the rest of the day looking out for her. A few customers came into the shop, and I actually sold a few books. Each time the door opened I looked up intently, and with some degree of expectation, to see if the woman had reappeared. Again I experienced the same disappointment at her non-appearance as I did on discovering she wasn’t really making breakfast in my flat.
A woman, pushing fifty, I would say, and wrapped up snug in her coat, hat and gloves against the weather, plonked a book down on my desk. It was a battered hardback copy of the collected stories of M. R. James.
‘You’re the man who discovered that woman’s bones aren’t you?’ she said. The cold had caused her cheeks to burn red like there was a furnace beneath her skin. She stared at me intently.
I nodded, taking her money and putting the book into a brown paper bag. ‘Two pounds and fifty pence, please,’ I said.
‘A real-life murder-mystery,’ she said. ‘Right here on our doorstep. Makes you shudder, doesn’t it?’
‘I guess so,’ I said.
‘That part of the beach is no longer cordoned off, thank goodness’ she observed. ‘They must have everything they need now.’
‘I suppose they must,’ I said.
‘But they had to work fast because the winter storms would have forced them away.’
‘That was a possibility.’
‘Do you reckon that will mean Monmouth Beach is going to be haunted now?’
I blinked stupidly, looked into her unblinking eyes. ‘I doubt it. I don’t think there are…’ I trailed off. At one time, to say I didn’t think there were such things as ghosts would have spilled out of my lips all too easily. Now the words felt wrong, improper.
‘It could be, you know,’ she continued, handing me the money and clutching the paper bag to her ample bosom. ‘I’ve heard about all manner of strange things, sightings and the like.’
‘Really? What kind of sightings?’ I was intrigued.
‘I don’t know the details exactly,’ she said, ‘but there’s been sightings of a figure.’
‘A figure? What kind of figure?’
‘I don’t know the details exactly,’ she said, sounding like a record with its needle stuck in the groove (for those of you who can remember records, needles and grooves), ‘but down at the Lyme Spiritualist Club we heard from someone who said they’d spoken to someone whose father-in-law had seen something.’
‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. ‘I didn’t know there was such a club.’
‘We’ve been going years!’ she said. ‘Anyhow, where there’s
a murder there’s probably a ghost.’
‘You reckon?’
‘It’s always been the case. The one goes with the other. Take it from one who knows about these things, that poor woman, taken from this life in such a brutal fashion, will be wandering this earth in spirit form until her murder is solved and her soul can move on. Until then she’s trapped here.’ She smiled, said thank you for the book and left the shop.
That’s when it hit me. If the woman I was seeing really was a ghost – and at that point I hadn’t made up my mind fully that I was seeing a ghost, but something simply triggered by a light touch of mental breakdown, if you can even have such a thing – then it had to be the woman from the Blue Lias. I’d been the one to discover her. I’d been the one who first touched her bones thirty-five years after her death. As a result, her spirit had attached itself to me.
The worst part of it, for me, was that she didn’t know she was dead. And that strange thought saddened me more than I can ever explain.
That evening there was another news bulletin, an update by the police on proceedings. They’d found the remains of an orange plastic raincoat near the body. There was no doubt in their minds that it belonged to the dead woman. In one of the pockets, partially preserved because of the plastic, they found part of a ticket stub. It had been used at the Reading Festival in summer 1978, and from this they surmised the ticket stub belonged to her, that she’d been to the music festival that year, and that this was probably the year she was murdered. Whether she was a local Dorset woman or came from elsewhere in the UK, or even further away, no one could determine at present. Tests were still being carried out on the remains which would help place her origins, but in the meantime the police were widening their investigations and chasing up the Reading Festival lead.
So she liked music. I got to wondering what kind. I Googled the Reading Rock Festival of 1978 to see who’d headlined that year.
It ran from the 25th August through to the 27th. It was an eclectic mix. Punk had just arrived on the scene, represented by the likes of Sham 69 and the Jam; there was Ultravox, Patti Smith, Status Quo, the Tom Robinson Band, Squeeze and Lindisfarne, among many others. Apparently the Sham Army got into a fight with other acts, and Paul Weller moaned all the way through about bad sound and smashed some of his equipment on stage. The usual stuff, then.
I couldn’t help but place her there among the crowd of people with their denims and long hair, clutching bad food and the cans of beer that weren’t allowed into the festival grounds. I scanned the many photos I found of those three days long ago, wondering if I could spot her in them. Was she drawn to the folkish Lindisfarne, or to the Jam? Ultravox? Not Status Quo!
Just by doing this I felt I knew her all the more, almost as if I’d been there with her at Richfield Avenue, Reading in 1978. Crazy, really, as I hadn’t even been born then and she was already a mature young woman going about her everyday life. Until some bastard took it away from her.
As the gloom of the evening started to close in, I waited for her to appear. Surely this is the traditional time when ghosts come out, I thought. In the dark and damp. I wasn’t afraid. In fact I was getting quite excited by the prospect of seeing her again.
She said she loved me.
Something inside me squirmed when I thought about what she’d said that morning. She said she loved me. Loved me. Why would she say that? Can a ghost actually love someone? Was it possibly for me to fall for a ghost?
Yes, I admit it, I had fallen for her. I had from the moment I first clapped eyes on her looking at my travel books. And somehow it didn’t matter that she was dead, which I know sounds weird, but that feeling didn’t go away like you would expect it to. I mean, there’s no future in it, is there? One of you alive, the other very much dead. But I swear, though I tried to tell myself this was a (mild) form of necrophilia, the feelings didn’t diminish in the least, they only intensified.
I just had to be near her, so I grabbed my coat and set off down the hill to the front. The esplanade was deserted, the light fading fast. I almost ran all the way to Monmouth Beach. The woman was right; the cordon and the police had disappeared. It had taken them a while, I thought, in what must have been trying circumstances.
I went to the spot where I found her bones, the land much mauled by the police, and I looked up to the top of the black cliff. It looked menacing in the poor light.
That’s where she was buried nearly forty years ago. On that night someone brought her here. Was she beaten unconscious after they brought her, or before? I imagined her pitiful screams as she was hit on the head, pictured in my mind the blow that caused her to fall unconscious. At least the pain stopped for her. But then that horrible moment she was tipped into the makeshift grave, still breathing, to have the black earth piled on top of her, gradually covering her face, forcing its way into her mouth and choking her. Did she regain consciousness, try to cry out, and in doing so sucked the mud deep into her throat and lungs?
The beautiful mouth that had cried out a cheer at the Reading Rock Festival of 1978, the beautiful mouth that sang along to the songs, now filled with foul choking soil; the beautiful mouth that was never again to sing, to cheer.
I cried. Uncontrollably. Huge globs of tears rolling down my cheeks. I couldn’t stop myself.
8
Madeline
I was ready for her the next time she appeared. I wasn’t afraid anymore.
I was pricing books up in the shop. There was nobody there but me. I sensed her presence behind me before I heard her. I guess I was becoming attuned to it, like a radio tunes into weak signals.
‘Thomas Hardy needs to be near the door,’ she said.
I turned around slowly, fearful she’d disappear like a puff of smoke. ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.
She was standing by the shelf where I kept a collection of his works, looking at their spines. She cocked her head, trying to read them. I liked the way she did that, the way she arched her slender neck.
‘Because he’s Dorset’s literary god, you great lump!’ she said with a touch of humour. ‘It’s what a lot of people come to Dorset for, to walk in his characters’ footsteps, see what inspired him, and when they walk into a bookshop they expect to see Thomas Hardy placed in a prominent position.’
‘So now you’re a marketing expert?’ I said. I tried to see if she might be transparent, you know, ghost-like. But she appeared as solid as the bookshelves.
‘More expert than you are, apparently,’ she returned. She moved down the line of shelves to the ones that faced the door. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Put him here.’
‘And move the crime books?’
Her face clouded over. ‘Yes, move the crime books,’ she said hollowly.
‘But crime is my best seller,’ I defended.
‘Only because you give it prominence. Hardy needs to go in its place. Trust me.’
I had to smile and shake my head. I was talking to a dead woman about where my books should go.
‘And crime, where should that go?’ I asked.
Her eyes narrowed, as if her mind worked over disquieting thoughts. Then she moved silently to the rear of the shop. ‘Somewhere appropriate,’ she said. ‘This dark spot against this wall. It has atmosphere. People like atmosphere. Crime comes from a dark place in the human psyche, the enjoyment of it comes from a similar place, so it needs to occupy a dark place in your shop. Put it here and people will buy it.’
‘What’s your name?’ I said.
She froze, her head slowly turning to face me. ‘Don’t be silly, Toby. You know my name.’
I stared into those ethereal eyes, the eyes that weren’t really there, the eyes that belonged to a dead woman who looked very much alive. ‘I do?’
The door opened and a blast of wind gushed in. It was the woman who bought the M. R. James book, the woman from the Lyme Regis Spiritualist Club, or whatever it was called. She brushed rain from her coat as she looked at me and smiled. Then her smile fell and she stared beyond
me.
But when I turned around to follow her gaze the woman from the Blue Lias had disappeared.
‘Hello again,’ I said to the customer, feeling the sting of disappointment at having my connection with my spirit friend so rudely severed.
She cleared her throat. ‘I saw a book called Fifty True Tales of Terror when I was in the other day. I used to have a copy back in 1977, and I thought I’d come back and treat myself to it, just for the memory of it. It’s nothing highbrow, but sometimes when you give a book away it’s like losing an old friend, and I have regretted doing that so many times over the years.’
I said I knew which one she meant and went across to the shelf, pulling it down for her. ‘It’s only a book club version, I’m afraid. Thin dust jacket, cheap paper. I’ll let you have it for two pounds, is that OK?’
She said yes and handed me the money. I bagged it up for her.
‘She’s very pretty,’ she said unexpectedly as she went to the door.
‘Who?’ I asked.
She smiled at me. ‘You know who I mean,’ she said, nodding to the back of the shop.
‘You saw her?’
She rubbed her arm. ‘Rather cold in here, don’t you think? Strange, because it’s not so cold outside. My name is Gabrielle Elizabeth Norton, if you should ever need to speak to me. I chair the Lyme Regis Spiritualist Club, or you can find me in the phone book.’
She left the shop and I stood staring at the door trying to make out what that was all about.
I found I could not concentrate the rest of the day. Again. I was willing the woman from the Blue Lias to come back to see me, but no amount of willing it made it happen.
What was happening to me? Was I going mad? I was like a lovelorn teenager, so thoroughly desperate to see her again that I felt my life depended upon it. I couldn’t care less whether I sold any books or not, and with the few customers that came in I wasn’t at all pleasant, which is so unlike me. I realised that I wanted the shop empty, cleared of people so that I could be alone with her. In the end I decided to lock up the shop early, and I waited quietly at my desk as the short day slipped into dusk. I had such an aching in my chest that it was like a physical pain that just wouldn’t go away.
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill Page 26
