Hauntings

by Ian Whates (ed)

  “Beth wouldn’t,” I said, appalled. “She couldn’t… Not Beth. Not Beth.”

  “I want to bury her,” Annabel said. “Before Neil comes down. I don’t want him to see her… Will you help me?”

  Burying a dog. So not my style. I really hated dead things.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Thanks Caro. I knew you’d be there for me. I’m so sorry – so sorry…”

  “Never mind that. Where – when did this happen?”

  “This morning. While we were out. I went to see a friend after I dropped you off. When I got home, I – I found him. Oh Caro, there was so much blood –”

  “What was he doing in the lodge? He was supposed to be at the shoot.”

  “He came to find you. Apparently, he didn’t know you’d left – he said he would bring you along himself…”

  Was I going to feel guilty? Nope. No guilt in not wanting to take a gun and shoot some poor birds who’d never done me any harm. Then last night we’d joked about poisoning Gordon, and now he was dead. Bugger it, I wasn’t going to feel guilty about that either. Death doesn’t make you a nice person. But the cold-water-slap of reality was so different from the small-hours smalltalk, the shock of it, the raw horror… I was still trying to take it in.

  “But Beth – why would she attack him?”

  “The police said – maybe she thought he was an intruder.”

  “Did he have a key?”

  “Yes of course. It’s his house. I mean, it was.”

  “So he didn’t break in, and she knows him – knew him. She didn’t like him, but…”

  “He had a gun. I told them, she was afraid of guns. They said… maybe that was it. The gun. The smell of it, or something. The gunpowder smell. They reckon he fired it when she attacked, but he didn’t hit her. Just the wall. The plaster’s come down. It’s such a mess, the dining room. All plaster and blood.”

  “She’d have run a mile,” I said positively. “Even if she did leap at him, or something like that, when he fired the gun she’d have been out of there.”

  “The police said… you never know, with animals.”

  The taxi seemed to take ages. I arrived at the lodge, eventually; the police had gone by then. Annabel clung to me. She’d stopped crying but there was blood on her clothes, brown and stiff and dried – more blood on her hands in rust-coloured smears.

  “You should wash and change,” I said, trying to be practical. Practical had never been my strong suit. It had never needed to be, I suppose.

  “We ought to bury Beth first,” she said. “I was trying to dig a hole…”

  She’d been digging at the end of the rose-bed; the soil was looser there. Fortunately the ground wasn’t frozen, or we’d never have managed it. There was only one spade so I took over, borrowing her spare wellies and gardening gloves, things I never wear. But then, I’d never buried a body before, or even dug a hole. I found myself thinking it must be bloody hard work to be a mass murderer, burying all those victims in your garden – and human bodies are much bigger, they need bigger holes. Beth was small for a Lab, stocky rather than leggy… Annabel was so shaken, I finished the hole myself, though it took ages, I can’t really remember how long.

  I kept asking questions, struggling to figure out how something so awful could have happened.

  “How could they tell it was an animal which killed him?” I demanded. “Perhaps he was shot – in the throat. That’s possible, isn”t it?”

  “There was blood in Beth’s mouth, and toothmarks…”

  “She might have tried to lick him better,” I said. “St Bernard’s do that, when they find someone in the snow. I heard that in Switzerland.”

  “Toothmarks,” Annabel reiterated, speaking with difficulty, “in his neck, Gordon’s neck… The doctor found a piece of canine, broken off. He said – he said it belonged to an animal. C-case closed.”

  When the hole was deep enough, we bundled Beth in a blanket and placed her in it. Her mouth was open; her teeth didn’t look chipped to me, but how could I tell?

  We were too upset to say much, but Annabel prayed: “Please God, take her to dog heaven, whatever she did. I’m sure she was only protecting us.”

  Inside the house, there was crime scene tape across the dining room door, blue and white, but it hung loose. “We can go in now,” Annabel said. “They’ve finished. It’s just… such a mess. Such a horrible, horrible mess.”

  “You go shower and change,” I said. “I’ll make tea. Or Scotch. Or both.”

  “I must look in on Neil…”

  “Then shower and change.”

  She went upstairs. I stood at the dining room door. The dangling strip of tape made it ominous, sinister, a Bluebeard’s Chamber door, a door to the Room of Doom. I had to open it, I don’t know why. Curiosity, fascination, horror – whichever. I turned the knob, pushed it wide…

  As Annabel said, it was a mess. The gunshot had punched a big hole in one wall; plaster flakes and dust were everywhere; blood spatter, like in a crime show – a great spray of it – seemed to have arced across the room. Beth must have bitten through that major neck vein, the carroty one, the caryatid vein, I used to call it, joking around, joking… The blood was dark now, purplish-brown like the stains on Annabel’s clothes. A chair was knocked over; a vase had spilt its flowers across the table; the lid was off the otter’s case.

  I thought: There must be plaster dust all over the otter.

  But it didn’t look dusty. It looked white and glossy as ever.

  The otter… I walked towards it like something was pulling me, something irresistible: curiosity, fascination, horror. There was no dust on it at all. Its fur was clean, shining. Its eyes gleamed like wet blood. Albinos have pink eyes but the taxidermist had made these red. They were the only red thing in all that terrible room. Perhaps because of its pose, with its paw on the trout, it seemed to be gloating, exuding a malignant satisfaction, even triumph…

  But its eyes shouldn’t be the only red. Neil had re-touched the blood round its mouth: I’d noticed it two days ago. The painted blood which was now as brown and dry as the spatter on the wall. I peered closer… closer… One of the big fangs seemed to be broken off at the tip…

  Annabel found me when she came downstairs from the shower, lying on the floor in a dead faint.

  ~*~

  There was nothing we could do, of course. You can’t ask the police to test the paint in the mouth of stuffed otter for blood, or request to match a tooth-fragment to its broken incisor. Forensics are expensive – and they’d only have laughed. A couple of weeks later, when Neil was up to it, we planted a rose-bush on Beth’s grave, and read from the poem, her poem, Spencer’s Beth Gelert. It wasn’t quite right, but what did it matter? She had been true, and faithful, and misjudged.

  I went to Gordon’s funeral, too, but only to support Annabel. It was much less moving – in fact, it only moved me to the pub, as quickly as possible.

  Neil didn’t sell the otter. He buried it, down by the river; Annabel says some of the village kids claim to have seen it, after dark, sliding down the bank into the water, but that’s probably just an excess of local beer. After all, we’re the only ones who know it’s buried there.

  Neil inherited a quarter of the estate; Annabel’s pregnant. All good. I just don’t want to think about how it happened.

  Now, when I’m confronted with a stuffed animal, I don’t feel queasy, because I don’t look, I walk away…

  I hate taxidermy.

  The Ghost (In Two Letters)

  Tanith Lee

  The Ghost walked into the elaborate Dining Room of the Black Lion Hotel at exactly thirteen minutes past 7p.m. He was fashionably late.

  He knew nobody there, he thought, apart from the ‘Happy Couple’. Burn (was that an abbreviation of Bernard - or Burning? – the Ghost had never known) was expansively greeting people by the free bar, under the coloured lights. Dinner itself was scheduled for eight o’clock. But where was she - for an anxious
moment the Ghost could not quite recapture her name. But of course, it did come back. He was, after all, haunted by it, her name, the Ghost. Jolinda Franken, as it had appeared in the theatre programme; Joli for short. He didn’t like ‘Joli’, he thought now. And did he like her? No, he thought. He only loved her. And there she was. In a silky orange outfit, presumably her ‘Wedding Dress’. Dark hair streaming to her waist, honey-colour eyes wide with excitement and mascara. Cool and hot.

  She had not seen him. But presumably she, not Burn, had sent the invitation.

  The Ghost took one of the glasses of quite decent champagne from the edge of the bar. He was glad, even in the state he was, he could grip the glass. Yet, when he sipped and swallowed a couple of times, the drink seemed flat and pale to him, a worn-out taste... He set the glass aside half consumed.

  All the while, his eyes having located her, followed her

  Jolinda, Joli. Was she beautiful? Was she what he had taken her for? Did he love her, even now?

  Puzzled, he frowned, and someone in the adjacent crush of guests noticed him. “Hi! Cheer up! It’s a wedding! I’m Steve – and you?”

  “Matthew,” he said, thoughtless. Yes. He was Matthew.

  But “Hi, Matt!” abreviated the idiot, swigging back his full and foamy glass and reaching for a refill. “Who is it you know? Burny, or Joli?”

  “Oh,” he said vaguely, “both.” Lies. He knew neither of them.

  “He’s a lucky fuck, isn’t he, old Burn.”

  “Yes,” said the Ghost, reflectively,

  “I mean, she’s a looker – and an actor – I admit, never seen her in anything myself. But I don’t do theatre much. Have you?”

  “Yes,” said the Ghost.

  He did not add that he had acted opposite Joli only last year, in that strange production in Edinburgh, The Talking Street. A silly play, badly written – except, almost annoyingly, for its radiant middle section. He had saved himself each night, he felt, making do through all the first half hour, just being – what was it? Professional – until you hit the buffers and exploded, three quarters of an hour before the interval. And that explosion had been his big scene with her. With Joli – Jolinda. Actors often got tangled up ‘romantically’ because passion had to burst out between them in a blaze, on stage, or in front of the camera. And presumably that was what had happened with them. From the tussle and fireworks on stage they were eventually decanted into the real sex scenes in his bed, there in the canny grey windings of that Scottish town. She knew it was nothing, really. The ‘pleasure and suppliance of a minute’. But for him it had meant rather more. Lovers, Matthew and Jolinda, Matt and Joli. (The twat with the abreviation-fix had wandered off by now, the Ghost was alone again in the heart of the crowd.) Interesting, so much raucous festive life, and at its core, his deadness.

  Was that then what finally he felt about her, his lover? Only deadness? She did not seem, certainly, as he recalled – vulnerable, inflammatory, tender – other. No, this sexy young woman in her orange silk – and silk it was, for Burn, with his IT business, could afford it – she looked to the Ghost... only like – a memory.

  Does it always come to this? Did I have to come to this to see the bitter truth of it, a tissue of lies, and like all tissues easily sodden with tears, or blood.

  And now they were all to sit down to dinner. He moved, will-less, to the long tables, among the rest. Maybe there was a place marked for him? No, they hadn’t gone that far. You simply sat where there was room. He took a chair way down from the cross-wise main table where Burn and she had sat. He could see her better from here. That was, she was farther off and so, oddly, clearly to be focused on. Outside the tall windows the sun had started its long English set. The hotel garden, with its flowers and nicely-shaped tame trees, filled with shadow. The sky was pinkly gold, toning well with the orange dress; probably ordered, the sky, beforehand. And candles were being lit in here by the hotel staff.

  There was perhaps a danger he would come to see, in the cameo of the candlelight, and after the sun’s long fade, only her. Well, why not. She was why he had come here.

  “Oh, hello,” said a plump young woman to his left. “I’m Susie.”

  “Matthew,” he said.

  “Sorry, what? Andrew did you say?”

  “Hey,” (male voice) “Andrew, could you pass that wine carafe along, mate?”

  He wondered if actually he could, but taking hold of the glassy jug, although his chilled fingers seemed to sink into its side as if into a cold jelly, he did make it move. That was love then. Love could move a wine carafe, even now, just as Dante told you it moved the sun and the other stars.

  His thoughts grew disorganized again. He wondered if he would be able to see that celestial movement, see the sun, for example, sinking inch by inch... But really, no doubt, he couldn’t. All he would see was that dark-haired girl, beautiful in the most ordinary way, and shining with an almost painterly candle-ine lustre, as she clasped the hand of her husband. Burn.

  Obviously, Matthew didn’t know Burn. Only of him. But that was enough. Matthew stared. Burn was ugly, wasn’t he. Was he? He was a creep with too-short hair and a fat mouth. In a couple more years he’d be fat. Or he’d work out in the gym and get muscle-bound. Or somebody would kill him for being the dubious business type Matthew had assumed Burn was.

  The Ghost recollected when Jolinda first mentioned Burn. The recreated moments fell like thin cold slates into the Ghost’s mind. It was when he and she came back from Edinburgh. The small part that had been mooted for him at the National had fallen through, as they so often did. His agent was talking about securing him work on a commercial – “Okay, Matthew, I know it isn’t sixteenth sword-porter in Lear, but you’ll get good money –”

  “Off which you’ll take your fifteen percent,” Matthew added, so they had parted lukewarm to frigid. And then, going back to his room, Jolinda had gone out. And later she called him, “Sorry, Matthew. Someone I have to see. I’ll be back – oh, midnight. Don’t wait up, love.” As if he were her bloody mother. She didn’t come back any way. (People always called each other, just ‘met’ – so direct. More honest – or more crass?) And next day they did meet, in the wine bar off the Strand. “Look, Matthew, I haven’t been quite straight with you. I’m really sorry. It’s just –” It turned out she had been seeing Burn (Bernard? Burning?) for some months before the Edinburgh stint. “I didn’t know I’d meet someone like you... Oh, love,” she added, sorrowful, acting her guts out, he was sure. “I’ve been a bitch. I couldn’t resist. You’re so tempting. And we’ve had a great time, haven’t we? I couldn’t have got through that crappy run if I hadn’t been with you –”

  “But now you’re with him.”

  “Well, you see.” She paused, and drank down all the wine in her big glass – as if she desperately needed it, or more likely she wanted to finish it before she made a bolt for a taxi, Hampstead and Burn. “You see... he and I – we sort of – we may get married. I mean, not yet. In the summer. And so I can’t go on seeing you, can I? I mean, it wouldn’t be fair to him.”

  “Were you fair to him in Edinburgh?” he had asked her deadly.

  “No. Nor to you. Nor me. But – these things happen.”

  These things.

  Before she could make her bolt for freedom he himself got up and left.

  Yes, people always called, or texted each other, or emailed if you could afford a computer. Or they just met. He did try once, twice, to write to her, a letter. But he tore both of them up. Wasted paper.

  She though had called him twice, since then. Once she was high – booze, or something; she liked her spliff. She seemed to be saying during these calls she would really enjoy one last sex session with him. Conceivably, he later thought, even after she got roped and tied with Burn, she might still like the occasional off-leash frolic with Matthew.. But he wouldn’t do that. They said women were the ones that got hurt, couldn’t let go, made themselves miserable, died inside. Christ, what fucking rubbis
h. He had died, inside, the Ghost. You couldn’t help where you loved, even if it was some illusion, some flake of candle-gleam, some echo of a once-off kiss or cry, a body smooth and soft as fur, a laugh you would know in blind darkness, the lamp of a golden eye that, for all those single seconds, saw only you.

  He would always have to love her. He could let go – but love wouldn’t let go of him. Love, which could move a wing, carafe and the sun, had him firmly by its poisoned fangs and was shaking him to and fro. He would always love that stupid, brainless, ordinary scrap of flesh – a rag, a bone, and a hank of brunette hair –

  “Are you done, sir?”

  He glanced. A waitress leaning to him. There had been – still was – something uneaten on his plate – paté, he guessed, a whisker of purple and green salad.

  Am I done? “Yes,” he said, “quite done.”

  And away it went, and here was something else. He stared at it, as he had stared at her, and could not translate what it was – meat? Pasta? – as he could not, any more, make out what she was.

  The sun had gone down. A dark blue vitreous box covered the garden, with the twinkle of city lights beyond, the ever-reassuring pretence of mundane reality.

  The Ghost reached for his glass. Found now he had neither the will nor the strength to raise it. But he would have to, he thought, because look, Burn and Joli were kissing in a sloppy adolescent way no actor, surely, would ever disgrace themself with in public. And then there was going to be a speech – the Best Man – who the hell was that – oh, that grinning twot with a beard – and the Ghost too would be expected to clap and perhaps whistle, and lift and gulp champagne, and where had the second or third course gone?