The plump woman to his left was reaching right across him to take a chocolate from the thin woman on his right...
How bright the candles. But she, Joli, had not taught them their torchlike brightness. Her hair was dull and spoiled with the expensive treacle of1 hair products. Her eyes were dull as lead.
The audience laughed at the Best Man’s best joke. God knew what it had been.
The Ghost remembered finding the invitation to this reception. It was in the hall of the flats. He saw it just after
His agent called, on the crackling mobile that was running out of money, to say the commercial for the Energade Health Boost Drink had gone to another.
(A disco had started by now and figures flooded the Dining Room floor. He was partly conscious of their gesticulations, and the softly pulsating lights. And a clock sounded, or only a loud novelty watch – midnight, was it?)
‘Love to welcome you,’ the invite had said. ‘This happy celebration’ ‘Our valued Guest’ –
Why did she send it to him? Or had it been Burn? Either of them – why? To torture? To gloat, to hurt and harm worse? To dance on his grave to the tune of the Wedding March, or the Death March: Here comes the Died –
“Is anyone sitting here?” somebody asked, under the laborious syntho-bass and drums.
“No,” said the Ghost. As ever, he recognized his cue. He knew exactly when to leave. Invaluable, that, in an actor, perfect timing.
~*~
“That’s the bloody weird part,” said one uniformed man to another,
“Several people apparently saw Haine. At least, early on, even three or four hours later. One girl said he had a really cool white shirt – and she described this shirt – and it was the one he was wearing. I saw it on him myself.”
“Yeah,” said the other uniform, “And that guy – Stephen something – he said he really liked Haine’s copper wristband, asked him where he got it, but never had a reply.”
They drank their coffee. (The canteen never did it quite right, too frothy, not strong enough. Thank God in a few more hours there was a chance at Starbucks.
“Well, what I think,” said the first uniform, “he went to the reception, and then nipped home and finished up.”
“Yeah but – well, they’re hushing all this up, aren’t they? The SOCO, he was in a right state. Never saw him like that – and the T.O.D. –”
“It can’t be anything else, can it.” Flat as one more cold slate, these words. “And a wedding – all of them drinking. People see what they expect to. Even she –”
“Yeah. Ms Franken.”
“She’s Mrs Burnley now.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. She said she saw Haine. Said she was amazed he was there. She agreed she sent him an invite, but she meant him to take that as a warning, to let him know she had got hitched, and no hard feelings. Never reckoned he’d show.”
“Fucking slag,” said the first uniform.
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” agreed his companion. “Shall we hit the road?”
They had been called to the premises, (Haine’s flat) around midnight of the same evening that Joli Franken and Burnley held their Wedding Party at the Black Horse. And the party, in fact, had still been in full swing on the other side of London. It was a classic clue that alerted the people in the flat below Haine’s (flats – each one room; with a scrawny kitchenette and a shared toilet down the passage). The clue was reminiscent of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles – that was, blood seeping through the ceiling above. The lot downstairs found it on returning from the pub, supposing it red paint at first. But as it kept on spreading they didn’t want it in their take-away. Very wise.
The corpse was sitting upstairs, in a good suit and a really good white shirt. He hadn’t fallen off his chair, just leaned a bit. He had swallowed half a bottle of a choice red wine, and about twenty-three generally-prescribed sleeping tablets. He had also cut open the vein of his left wrist with a razor-blade, very, very efficiently, slicing longways not across, which was a pretty infallible method. There were no preliminary hesitant scratches or cuts, either. Matthew Haine had known exactly what he meant to do, and had done it with the adroitness of an actor who had, reasonably often, acted suicide on the stage.
He was recently bathed, and his hair washed. He was deodorized, shaved, and with a touch of mid-range cologne. The clothes, as stated, were of good quality. And he had somehow managed, even when consciousness departed, to keep the blood off them. He really had been got up for a party. It was just that he hadn’t gone to it. Or had he? This was the nagging question; except, of course, you did not want to ask it. He had died. And Time of Death was now established as being, at the latest, seven o’clock that evening. And so, when he walked into the Black Lion Hotel Dining Room – he could not have done so. He was already that smart, clean corpse which had drugged and bled the life out of itself, in the room whose door the police broke down at midnight.
The ‘copper wristband’ spotted at the party was uncomfortable too. Those that subsequently mentioned it soon tried to brush it off their awareness. Because it might, in some sordid supernatural tale, have been an accurate cipher for Haine’s blood-starved, blood-encrusted wrist. A lot of the guests had thought him very pale. “Dishy,” one girl said, “sort of goth-vampire.” Here and there one or two of them had been noting Haine as late as 11.30. And then – he just hadn’t seemed to be there. He was gone.
So. If you could credit the idea, even if never? never ever would you truly credit the idea as a fact – Matthew Haine had killed himself, and then arrived as a stone-dead ghost at the wedding party. The Ultimate Spectre at the Feast.
He hadn’t left a farewell message. There was just the invitation to the reception tucked in the breast pocket of his jacket - which, when they broke in the door, fell out and landed a few inches clear of the water-fall of spent blood. Very gracious it was, the invite. And almost just like all the other invites sent to all the other 300 odd guests. His name was spelled out in curlicues, and led to such phrases as: Love to welcome you and Happy celebration, addressing the recipient, at the end, as ‘Our valued Guest’. Yes, that was really the stumbling block, the problem. Matthew Haine – and who else would have done such a thing? – had, before placing the card in his pocket, changed two letters in those last three words. Crossing out the ‘u’ and the ‘e’ in the word Guest, he had rewritten them as an ‘h’ and an ‘o’. Which accordingly left the invitation to read, significantly or not, ‘Our valued Ghost.’
The Scariest Place in the World
Mark Morris
Holly resented daytime callers. Most of them weren’t to know that she worked at home, but even so, her first response when someone rang the bell or banged on the door was to grit her teeth and ball her hands into fists, as if in imitation of the tight knot of resentment she felt clenching in her belly. It had been several weeks after moving in before the old lady who lived next door got the message. The first time she turned up she’d been clutching a dented biscuit tin containing one of those old-fashioned sponge cakes, the ones with jam and cream in the middle and a light dusting of icing sugar on top.
“Hello, dear,” she’d said, her thin shoulders hunched like vestigial wings within her pale green cardigan and her grey hair drifting like a wind-stirred mass of cobwebs. “I’m Mrs Bartholomew. I’m your new neighbour – or rather, I suppose you’re mine, as I’ve been here for donkey’s years. I just thought I’d pop round to see how you’re settling in.”
Holly had kept the door half-closed, and positioned herself firmly behind it, as if wary the old lady might try to force her way inside. When Mrs Bartholomew smiled, her face crumpled like a brown paper bag and her beige-yellow teeth sprang forward, reminding Holly of a row of clothes pegs on a washing line.
“We’re fine, thanks,” Holly had replied, responding to her neighbour’s grin with a half-hearted grimace. “We’re a bit busy right now. Lots to do.”
She’d begun to push the door shut
. Quickly the old woman said, “Just the two of you are there?”
Holly had hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, me and my husband, Mike.”
“No children?”
“No.”
“Ah.” The old woman looked thoughtful. “Well, it’ll be a lovely house to bring up little ones. When the time comes.”
“Yes.” Holly inched the door further closed. “Well, thanks for coming round, but we really are busy.”
“Oh, I brought you this.” Mrs Bartholomew raised the biscuit tin as though making an offering to an arcane god. “A little house-warming present. Homemade.”
Holly had thought of the old woman’s bird’s-claw, liver-spotted hands buried in cake mix, perhaps even scraping it from under her yellowing fingernails, and her stomach turned over. Mustering a smile she’d said, “That’s very kind of you, but Mike and I don’t really eat cake.”
“Oh.” Mrs Bartholomew looked crest-fallen.
“Sorry,” said Holly. “Well, goodbye.”
She’d pushed the door shut, and then tensed as, from the other side, she heard the old woman call, “Goodbye for now, dear. Perhaps I’ll pop round again when you’re less busy.”
She had popped round again. In fact, she had ‘popped round’ on at least half a dozen occasions over the next few weeks, though Holly had never allowed her over the threshold. In the end Holly was forced to tell her that she worked from home, that her time was precious, that she had deadlines to meet, and that she couldn’t afford to just break off whenever she felt like it. Her voice, when she’d said this, had been a little snappier than she’d intended, and she’d felt bad about it afterwards, thinking that the old woman was probably just lonely and wanted a bit of company. But still… Her neighbour had to respect the fact that Holly needed to make a living. She had to understand that just because Holly was at home all day it didn’t mean that her time was her own to squander on coffee and local gossip. And when Holly did get time to herself, in the evenings, she wanted to spend it with Mike – which was natural, wasn’t it? They had things to do on the house, after all, plans to discuss.
She soothed her conscience by promising herself that at some point, when things had settled down and they were more on top of the situation, she would call on Mrs Bartholomew and say hello properly. She would. But just now she was too busy, too preoccupied. And besides, if the old lady had lived on the street for donkey’s years, then surely she had other friends to call on? It wasn’t as if Holly and Mike ought to feel responsible for her in any way.
Which was why, when the knock came on the front door one Tuesday morning, just as Holly was dropping a camomile teabag into the flip top bin in the kitchen and trying to structure the next sentence of her latest article in her head, she felt that familiar knot in her belly tightening once more. Who was this now? Surely not Mrs Bartholomew again? Perhaps it was one of those ex-prisoners selling shoddy and over-priced household wares from a leather holdall – the ones who always made her feel nervous. Or just someone delivering a parcel. Mike was always ordering himself the latest gadgets online. She’d told him to have them delivered to his work address so that she wouldn’t be disturbed during the day, but sometimes he forgot.
Pushing open the kitchen door, steaming mug held before her like a weapon, she looked to her right, moving her head slowly, a little fearful of making a sudden move and drawing attention to herself. She didn’t think whoever was standing outside would be able to see her, but you never knew. After all, she could see the caller through the stippled glass panel of the front door – or at least, she could see a vague dark shape with a pinkish blob on top.
She hovered a moment, willing the caller to go away. If it was someone with a parcel he’d put an attempted delivery slip through the letterbox, whereupon she could rush up to the door and open it before he’d reached the end of the drive, claim she’d been preoccupied with some household chore and hadn’t been able to get to the door in time.
But the caller didn’t put a note through the door. Instead he knocked again. Three quick taps, timid but insistent. If she’d been upstairs, sitting at her desk, she might have ignored it, but she was damned if she was going to stand in her hallway all day, feeling trapped.
With a grunt of exasperation she marched up to the front door and opened it. Standing outside was a thin young man in a dark jacket, jeans and a white T-shirt with some sort of fuzzy, black-lettered slogan on it that Holly could neither read nor identify. He looked like a student – bony wrists, thick mop of fashionably tousled hair, insipid expression.
“Yes?” she said sharply.
“Hi,” he said with a vague smile.
Holly didn’t smile back. “Can I help you?”
“Er…” The young man looked ill at ease. He wafted a hand vaguely. “This is a bit weird, but… I used to live here. A long time ago. I was in the area, so I thought… well, it was just a whim really. I just got an urge to see the old place. The house where I grew up.” He grimaced. “I haven’t been back in… I dunno… nearly twenty years? My name’s Rob, by the way. Rob Norton.” He nodded at the side wall of the house next door. “Is Mrs Bartholomew still there?”
“Yes,” Holly said.
Rob Norton smiled. “That’s good. It’s nice to know that some things never change.”
Holly narrowed her eyes. “When did you say you lived here?”
“I didn’t. The 70s. I was born in ‘78. We lived here till I was eighteen.” Nodding at the expression on Holly’s face, he said, “I know what you’re thinking. I get it a lot. But I’m older than I look.” He gestured vaguely at the house. “Any chance I could have a quick look round?”
“I don’t think so,” said Holly quickly. “I’m very busy. I’ve got a deadline to meet. I’m a journalist.”
He pressed the palms of his hands together, as if in prayer. “Please. Just five minutes. Two even. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been back, and I don’t know when I’ll be in the area again.”
“How do I know you’re who you say you are?” Holly asked.
Rob Norton flourished a hand almost triumphantly at the house next door, like a stage compere introducing a popular act. “You can ask Mrs B. She’ll vouch for me. She knew me from when I was a baby.”
Holly pictured it all in an instant, saw immediately how protracted and awkward the situation would become. They would knock on Mrs Bartholomew’s door, and the old lady would answer it. And when she clapped eyes on her old neighbour her face would light up with incredulity and delight. No doubt there’d be a joyous reunion, a babble of questions. Mrs Bartholomew would invite them in for a cup of tea, and Holly would have to play the killjoy, the party pooper, would – as usual – have to plead the pressure of work and deadlines. So she’d come home, and Rob would probably stay at Mrs Bartholomew’s for a bit. And even though Holly wasn’t with them, she’d be unable to settle to her work, because she’d be on edge, waiting for Rob to come back, knowing not only that at some point she’d be disturbed by him again, but also that next door they’d probably be talking about her – Mrs B telling Rob how unfriendly she was, how un-neighbourly, how she wished things were back to how they used to be, when he and his family lived next door.
Holly didn’t think she could stand all that – the time wasted, the disruption to her schedule, the uncomfortable knowledge that she’d be painted as the villain of the piece. And so she heard herself saying, “Oh, it’s okay, there’s no need for that. You can have a look round. But it will have to be quick. I do have a deadline.”
“Of course,” Rob said, nodding. “Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.”
Holly stepped back, tugging the door open reluctantly so that he could enter. He came in, looking around eagerly, peering up the hallway, towards the kitchen, his dark eyes gleaming, the light slithering across them.
Holly took another step back as he closed the door behind him, trapping the shadows and the silence in with them. Outside he’d seemed harmless, skinny, almost frail, but
here, inside, right next to her, he seemed taller, rangier, lithe rather than skinny, possessed perhaps of a deceptive strength, a tensile vigour.
What am I doing? she thought. If Mike knew he’d be furious. She wondered if she’d tell him. She knew what he’d say, could almost hear him saying it:
“How could you have been so gullible? Anything might have happened.”
You read about these things, don’t you? Strangers wheedling their way into people’s homes. And you think: serves them right for being so stupid. But it’s different when it’s you. After all, you’re not a newspaper headline; other people are. You’re too smart, too careful.
“Where do you want to start?” she asked.
Her voice was a little abrasive. Too abrasive? She didn’t want to antagonise him. Better to be businesslike, though, rather than demure, defensive. The worst thing would be to appear vulnerable, to show any nervousness, any fear.
“This was all wood-panelled when I was a kid,” he said, his eyes sparkling. “Well, not wood-panelled… you know that cheap stuff? Thin. It came in sheets and you just stuck it on the wall.” He gave a sudden laugh, little more than a hitch of breath. “Pretty tacky, I suppose. But people thought it was sophisticated back then.”
He sidled past her, away from her, towards the door on the left that led into the front room. “Is it okay if I…?”
She nodded, and he opened the door, pausing before he did so and taking a deep breath as he turned the handle – relishing the moment, or perhaps bracing himself for what he might see.
She guessed that the room must have changed a lot since he had lived here, been redecorated and refurnished several times over. Perhaps even rewired, the light fittings repositioned, the windows replaced. Yet he stood there looking around with a kind of wonder. She saw that he was trembling slightly.
Hauntings Page 17
