Hauntings

by Ian Whates (ed)

  “Are you all right?” she asked to break the silence.

  His eyelids fluttered, as if he was about to pass out. He turned his head so slowly towards her she almost expected to hear the bones creak in his neck.

  He licked his lips. “I can’t tell you how strange this is,” he said. “It’s like… somewhere I’ve seen in a recurring dream. Or like I’ve been asleep for a long time and I’ve just woken up.” He shook his head suddenly. “Sorry. You must think I’m a total weirdo. It’s just… It’s hard to explain. Everything is so familiar… intensely familiar. And yet at the same time it’s different. Like a new reality has been laid over the top… Does any of this make sense?”

  Holly was a forward-looking person. She was not nostalgic. She had never had any desire to revisit the past, to explore old haunts. Last year she had been invited to a school reunion but had declined; the very idea of it made her shudder. Yet she found herself nodding now, to humour him. “It must be very odd coming back,” she said.

  “It is.” He swayed a little on his feet. “Sorry, could I have some water?”

  “Sure.” He wasn’t the only one who found the atmosphere stifling; she was glad of the opportunity to step away from it for a moment. “Sit down. I’ll get you some.”

  She exited the room, hurried to the kitchen, opened the cupboard above the sink and reached instinctively for a glass. Then she thought better of it and took down a plastic beaker instead.

  It was becoming heavier in her hand as she filled it with water when a shadow crept across the wall and the cupboard door in front of her. She turned with a gasp, water splashing over her hand.

  He was standing right behind her.

  “What are you doing?” she cried, immediately appalled at how shrill she sounded.

  He backed off, raising a hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you jump.” His attention seemed suddenly caught by the room, his eyes flickering from wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

  “Strange how small this room seems now,” he said. “How narrow.”

  She felt oddly insulted. “It’s plenty big enough for us,” she said.

  He smiled crookedly. “I just meant… When I was a kid this seemed… not vast, but… bigger, you know? Everything seems bigger when you’re a kid, doesn’t it? More formidable.” He looked out of the narrow window beside the cooker. “I used to think that field out there was massive. But it’s not, is it?”

  “You sound disappointed.” Holly was still holding the beaker. Water was dripping from her hand, forming dark coins on the slate-coloured tiles at her feet.

  “Not disappointed,” said Rob. “Just…” he looked thoughtful, even sad. “The older you get, the more the world closes in on you. Stifles you.”

  Holly didn’t agree. She thought the opposite was true. But she didn’t argue. She held out the beaker. “Do you want your water?”

  “Thanks.” He took the beaker, but he didn’t drink. “Is it okay to look upstairs? My old bedroom.”

  “Sure,” she said, and raised a hand. “After you.” She hoped her reason for inviting him to go first – because she didn’t want to feel trapped with him; because she knew that if he stayed ahead of her she would always have an escape route – wasn’t as evident to him as it seemed to herself.

  He turned obediently enough, and as he did so he put the beaker down on the breakfast bar that ran along the left-hand wall of the kitchen. She looked at it, thought about saying something. But why make it an issue? Was it really such a big deal that he hadn’t drunk the water he’d asked for? Maybe he’d changed his mind. People were entitled to do that. Maybe his feeling of faintness had passed.

  She followed him up the stairs, though remained a good few steps behind him. She didn’t want to get close enough that he could thrust out an arm and give her a shove. He moved slowly, deliberately, as if wary of disturbing a sleeping incumbent on the floor above. Two steps from the top he halted and turned. When he spoke his voice was sombre, hushed.

  “That first door was my bedroom. Is it okay if I…?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He ascended the last two steps, crossed the landing, pushed the door open. It was her study, so the door was already ajar. Pearly light spilled out of it as he stepped forward, softening his outline. When she entered the room behind him he had already crossed to the window beside her desk and was looking at the paved yard below.

  “I thought you might have turned it into a garden again,” he said. He sounded wistful, disappointed.

  “Again?”

  He turned to her. His eyes were wide and soft. He looked… haunted? Was that too strong a word to describe the expression on his face?

  “When we came here it was a garden. Lawn. Flowerbeds. Then my parents… my dad really… began to breed dogs. Alsations. And he had the lawn ripped out, paved over. I thought… I hoped… it might be green again by now.”

  “It was like that when we moved in,” Holly said defensively. “We haven’t been here long.”

  Rob seemed not to hear her. His gaze swept the poky, square room, little more than a cell really. “This was my room.”

  “Yes, you said.”

  His eyes fixed on her. They were dark, almost black. And seemed suddenly flat. “You know what a little boy’s bedroom is, don’t you?”

  She shrugged, discomfited. “What?”

  “It’s the scariest place in the world.”

  A beat. A silence in which meaning thrummed and throbbed, like the air beneath an electricity pylon.

  “Is it?” she said at last, and to her own ears her voice sounded hollow, on the verge of cracking.

  He nodded. “He dominated us… my dad, I mean. He never touched us, my mum and me, but we were scared of him all the same. He had a way about him… a way of grinding us down…”

  His eyes drifted away from hers, becoming unfocused. She knew he was looking into his past. “Some people do. There’s a force about them… a sense that… that something terrible could happen at any moment… Do you know what I mean?”

  Holly wasn’t sure what to say. Yet she felt compelled to say something. In the end she muttered, “You felt threatened?”

  “More than that. I was scared… terrified… every minute of every day of my life.”

  His voice had dropped to a whisper. Suddenly he shook himself, like a dog. His head jerked up and his eyes were bright and black again.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “What?”

  “Have you seen anything? Since you moved in? Anything… unusual?”

  “No.” She shook her head angrily. “What do you expect me to have seen?”

  He half-smiled. “I used to see… even after he died…”

  “He died?” said Holly. “Your dad, you mean?”

  He nodded. “His car was hit by a lorry on the motorway. I was eleven. I cried, and Mum cried, but secretly… I was glad. Relieved. I think she was too, but she didn’t say so. But then…” His eyes drifted, not to the window, but to the corner of the room beyond the window, the one where Holly kept her exercise bike when she wasn’t using it. His voice had dropped to a whisper again, and his eyes were full of fear now. “Then he came back. I’d see him at night. I’d wake up and he’d be standing there. A dark shape in the corner. Watching me.”

  “It was just your imagination,” said Holly carefully. “You felt guilty, and afraid.”

  He looked bewildered. “So you haven’t seen him?”

  “Of course not.”

  He nodded slowly. “I couldn’t wait to get away. When I did, when I moved out, I thought it’d be over, that I’d never see him again.” He gave a sort of sob, and his face twisted for a moment, an expression of fearful anguish. “But it was no good. He followed me. Wherever I went, wherever I lived, I’d wake in the night, and he’d be there, standing in the corner, watching me…”

  He swayed, as though about to collapse. Standing beside the window, framed by the light, he looked ethereal, as though the blaze of his own fear
was corroding him, devouring him.

  Against her better judgement, Holly stepped forward, raising her hands as though to grip his elbows, hold him upright.

  “He’s not real, Rob, don’t you see?” she said. “You only think you saw him because he was such a presence in your life, because he frightened you, and because you felt guilty for being relieved when he died. But you mustn’t let him haunt you any more. He’s gone. You’re free of him.”

  Rob shook his head. “I thought if I came back, I might be able to bring him with me, leave him here, lay him to rest.”

  “Do that,” said Holly decisively. “Leave him here. He has no power over me. I don’t believe in him.”

  Rob barely seemed to hear her. His eyes were wild, distracted. “But it’s no good,” he said. “He’ll always be with me. I see that now.”

  “No he won’t,” said Holly. “You just have to –”

  Her words dried in her throat, her body jerking in horror. Rob had produced a black-handled kitchen knife from his pocket and was now holding it uncertainly in front of him.

  Holly’s voice, when she rediscovered it, was eerily calm, far calmer than she felt. “Rob,” she said, “put that away. You don’t need it.”

  “He won’t leave me alone,” he said miserably.

  “But that won’t solve anything, will it? By… by using that… you’d be letting him win.”

  Though she said it, she had no idea how he intended to use it. On her? On himself? On his non-existent father? She backed towards the door, not deliberately, almost subconsciously.

  He looked at her and his face was wretched. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Then he rammed the blade of the knife in his own throat and jerked it sideways.

  It was like puncturing a high pressure hose. There was a hiss and a fan of blood spurted from him, rising high in the air and coming down with a spatter like falling raindrops. He reeled and tumbled sideways, his legs simply folding beneath him. Blood continued to gush and jet from his neck as his body bucked, staining everything – the sand-coloured carpet, the walls, the bookcases, the laptop on the desk, even the ceiling – with streaks and spatters.

  Holly crammed her fists to her mouth and screamed. She felt a wrench and a wave of dizziness, as though some instinctive, essential part of her was so appalled by what it was witnessing that it was trying to flee, to tear itself from the unresponsive lump of flesh in which it was housed. Barely aware of what she was doing, she turned and stumbled, almost fell, down the stairs. The air felt thick and heavy as soup, and yet at the same time vibrant and piercing, as if filled with a thousand screeching alarms.

  “Ohmygod,” she whispered, barely aware that she was doing it. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

  She couldn’t think straight. Her only thought was to get away, to put as much distance as possible between her and the terrible thing that had happened upstairs. She felt contaminated, poisoned by it. She rubbed and clawed at her arms, at her clothes, as if she was covered with crawling things that were biting her, trying to burrow under her skin.

  At the bottom of the stairs she made instinctively for the light falling in fractured waves through the stippled glass of the front door. Her hand felt large and clumsy as she grasped the door handle, but somehow she managed to twist it, tug it open. She staggered outside, and the light hit her like a slap, causing her to spin around – or perhaps it was the world that was spinning. Next thing she knew her feet somehow became tangled together, and suddenly she was on the ground. She lay there sobbing.

  When hands began to tug at her she screamed, but the voice that accompanied them was soft, soothing.

  “Now, now, dear, it’s all right. You’re perfectly safe.”

  Holly looked up. Mrs Bartholomew was crouching beside her, the sun turning her feathery grey hair into a halo of white fire.

  “You’ve got to… need an ambulance,” Holly spluttered.

  “An ambulance?” Mrs Bartholomew looked her over quickly. “Are you hurt? What happened?”

  “Not me – him,” Holly wailed.

  “Who, dear?” asked Mrs Bartholomew.

  Holly’s thoughts were racing, hurtling through her head at such a speed she could barely communicate. Forcing herself to think, to concentrate, she said, “You know him. His name’s… Rob Norton. He used to… used to live here.”

  A strange look came over Mrs Bartholomew’s face. “Rob,” she said. “So he’s come back, has he?”

  “Yes, but he’s… hurt. Maybe dead. He had a knife and he…” unable to say the words she mimed stabbing herself in the throat.

  Slowly Mrs Bartholomew rose to her feet, wincing as her knees cracked. She took hold of Holly’s hand, and with a tug she encouraged her to stand.

  “Come with me, dear.”

  “Where?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  Holly stood shakily, but resisted when Mrs Bartholomew started to pull her back towards the open front door that Holly had just tumbled out of.

  “No,” she said, “I can’t. He’s in there. I don’t want to see.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Mrs Bartholomew said. “Come on, dear.”

  Such was the gentle authority in her voice that Holly allowed herself to be led. Inside, though, when Mrs Bartholomew tried to persuade her to go upstairs, she shrank back again.

  “No, I can’t,” she said again.

  “All right, dear,” Mrs Bartholomew said gently. “All right, I’ll go. You wait here.”

  She went upstairs. Holly waited, slumped against the wall – the one that Rob had told her used to be covered in sheets of chipboard made to look like real wood – panting as though she had just run a five-miler.

  Eventually Mrs Bartholomew appeared at the top of the stairs. “Come up, dear,” she said.

  Holly shook her head. “No.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” Mrs Bartholomew said. “Trust me.”

  Such was the conviction in her tone, combined with a note of reassurance, that Holly sidled across to the foot of the stairs and crept up them like a timid child ready to bolt at the slightest sign of threat. When she reached the top Mrs Bartholomew took her hand.

  “It’s all right,” she said gently.

  The door to the room in which Rob Norton had cut his own throat was ajar. Holly flinched, and almost cried out, as Mrs Bartholomew stepped towards it, holding her at arm’s length, and pushed it open.

  The door swung back. The room was empty. Holly stared. There was no blood, no body. Everything was as it should be.

  She felt her mind flex. That was honestly how it felt.

  “I’m going mad,” she whispered.

  Mrs Bartholomew shook her head. “No, dear, you’re not.”

  “But he was there. I saw him. I spoke to him.”

  “I’m sure you did. But he died a long time ago. 1997 to be exact. He never got over his father’s death, and he came back and killed himself in his childhood bedroom. I expect it was the only place where he felt safe.”

  “No.” Holly shook her head. “He didn’t feel safe here. He said it was the scariest place in the world.”

  Mrs Bartholomew looked sad. “He’s been back several times. Everyone who’s lived here since Kath Norton moved out has seen him – spoken to him too. Only once, mind,” she added hastily. “He never visits the same person twice.”

  Holly looked round the room. The pristine laptop, its cursor blinking languidly on the last word she had written. The sand-coloured carpet. The white ceiling, fresh and newly-painted. Her eyes moved past the window to the corner, where her exercise bike stood at an angle.

  Who will I see at night, she thought. Who will I see standing there?

  She didn’t believe in that sort of thing. She didn’t believe in ghosts. But from now on, whenever she came in here in the dark, she would see someone. She felt certain of it. She would see a tall, dark shape, standing there, watching her.

  She knew that she would never be alone agai
n.

  Simon Harries

  Robert Shearman

  A basic problem with early photography was its inability to hold the image of cats. Nicephore Niepce’s process of taking a metal plate coated with bitumen and bombarding it with light was quite the discovery, of course, and the further pioneering efforts by Daguerre and Talbot to develop this technique were of huge influence. For the first time in history there really was the sense that a moment in time could be frozen forever, that people and places and events could be preserved accurately. It gave us a glimpse of something godlike, something immortal. We drew a blank with cats, though.

  Dogs were all right. There was something so essentially noble and straightforward about a dog, it would have been an offence to the sensibilities had dogs not been photographed. And, although it took a bit of fiddling with the lenses, by the late 1870s it had become increasingly easy to capture the likeness of horses as well. But no one had successfully managed to hold a cat upon film; there were various (unsubstantiated) reports from experimental ‘graphers that they had done so (and on the continent, always on the continent!) – only for a little while, and blurred maybe, not a good likeness, though quite definitely feline. But the image never held long enough for anyone to verify these claims; the cats faded away from the pictures within seconds.

  Some said it was because the cat had no soul. Others, that it was simply too minor a lifeform, too low down upon the table of creation for the camera to recognise. And some people – the ones who actually owned cats, who knew what they were about, knew their moods and their characters – said that the cats were doing it deliberately. Cats had no interest in their images being preserved on paper via a collusion of light and oil. What was in it for them?

  For the sake of simplicity we had long claimed that the photography of cats was impossible, but that didn’t mean we thought it was actually, genuinely, impossible; no one believed that, I think, except perhaps Gerard Pomfrey, but his fustian ideas about the photosciences had long since been discredited. I was certain that the solution was out there, somewhere. It would be a long voyage of discovery for someone. That someone was not going to be me. I don’t like cats. I was not prepared to devote my hard-earned photoscopic skills to them.