“We can try.”
Charity sat back on her heels and held out her hand to Nantan. He took it. Julie grasped his other hand.
And they all felt it. A strange and sudden surge between them, a blue, undulating energy that took their dead hearts and set them pounding.
Julie almost let go but Charity said, “No, don’t! Don’t let go!”
“Why?”
“Just don’t, please. Let’s get up together.”
“Why?”
“Please?”
“I guess,” said Julie.
The three of them stood then, a young woman, a girl, and a little boy. Charity’s brothers had said there were magic numbers ghosts used to their advantage. One was three. And here they were, three ghosts, holding hands. There was something special there. There was power.
She led Julie and Nantan to the door.
“What are you doing?” asked Julie.
“Trying something.” Charity closed her eyes, thought about Fawn, dead, her body God only knew where now. Perhaps her spirit lingered on the outskirts of Flinton, not knowing what happened or what to do about it all.
“Come with me,” said Charity. “And don’t let go of each other, OK?”
“OK,” said Julie.
Nantan nodded.
She pushed through the door. The others came with her, sliding silently out on to the uneven concrete walk then across the night-darkened parking lot.
Yes! Yes!
Together, they could go where they needed to go. Together, they would take care of the business each needed to take care of. They had all the time in the world to figure it out and get it done.
You will be avenged, sister. I may see you again. I may not. But you will be avenged. You will be freed!
Flinton wasn’t so much hell as hellish. Not so much owned by the devil as bedevilled by humans and their cruelty. Charity led the others down the road, heading westward through the shadows, casting none of their own. She imagined herself shaking the town’s foul soil from her feet.
And as the silver moon rose over the desert and dogs barked behind chain link fences, she smiled her first smile in years, savouring the expressions she would see on the faces of Rufus and the Prophet when she took them to task back in Gloryville.
The Fifth Bedroom
Alex Bell
Meet Chloe Benn – a bitter, bitter divorcee at the tender age of twenty-two, with no qualifications, no job, no interests, no passions, no dreams and no hopes. She’d had most of those things once but they had been stripped and stolen from her, with her permission and with her blessing. She had wasted five years of her life, and she knew it. Made all the wrong choices, and trusted all the wrong people. She’d known – deep down – for at least a year that her husband no longer loved her, and yet she had fought viciously against herself to deny that wicked truth, even though she was not happy any more, even though that internal struggle almost tore her apart.
Perhaps there had never been anything real between them at all. She had enjoyed the lifestyle he had given her very much: the champagne bubbles and the designer underwear and the private yachts and the exclusive parties. And he had loved her beauty – worshipped it, almost. He had loved the fact that every man who saw him with her would envy him; loved the way that every man’s eyes would go to Chloe as soon as she walked into a room; loved to feel that she was the best and that she was his. She was petite and graceful with a delicate, almost ethereal beauty. Like a bare-footed fairy who had danced straight out of a fairy tale. She had creamy white skin and huge, huge eyes the colour of dark chocolate. Sweet and shy and scared – like a gazelle. That was what he used to call her. A beautiful, fragile gazelle. But beauty fades and dies. A delicate thing that can so easily shatter into a hundred heartbroken pieces. And when that happens, love – or what passes for love – dies too. Dies and rots into something twisted and ugly and bitter.
Chloe’s looks had been stolen from her prematurely by the car accident. That drunken bastard had even snatched those from her before he chewed her up and spat her out – ruined and broken, to be abandoned at the side of the road like an unwanted puppy. Although the right-hand side of her face remained flawless and lovely, the left-hand side was scarred and burned – creating a horrible contrast between what she was now and what she once had been. If she stood in just the right way in front of the mirror, at precisely the right angle, all she could see was the untouched side of her face. A strange optical illusion – like a fantasy that the accident had never happened at all. Skilled doctors and expensive plastic surgeons had managed to fix some of the damage, but they could not eradicate it completely – they could not get rid of all the scars or fix her drooping eyelid. They could not give her back the perfection she had lost.
In truth, it was not as bad as Chloe believed it to be. But the fact remained that she was now utterly unable to see any beauty whatsoever in her own reflection. All she saw was the disfigurement, and the lines already starting to form around her eyes and mouth – the mental and emotional scars from five long years of pain and heartache and disappointment and disillusionment. Clear evidence stamped across her skin of all those times the world had hurt her – written across her scarred face in permanent ink for everyone to see, and to point at, and to laugh at.
From the age of ten Chloe had been a striking beauty who only seemed to become more and more beautiful with every passing year. But then she made the fateful choice of getting into the car when her husband told her to, even though she knew he was drunk, even though she knew that she shouldn’t. But she was an obedient wife and she always did as she was told. And after that, for the first time in her life, Chloe felt what it was like to be something less than startlingly stunning. She felt what it was like barely even to be beautiful at all. She felt the cold hard bite of self-conscious inferiority and inadequacy when she saw another woman in the room who was clearly more attractive than she was. And the realization hit her hard and hit her fast: her delicate, lovely beauty was gone. It was gone and it was never coming back. Her career was over, too – she would never model again.
She soon realized that her husband was no longer attracted to her. He recoiled at the thought of touching that ruined flesh. It was only a matter of time before he sought out a replacement. The divorce had been finalized for over a year now and yet, still, all Chloe could do was brood and agonize over how much time she had wasted. And in doing so she only wasted more. Her life had always seemed such a full one back in London but her husband had been the one underpinning it all. The places that she went, the things that she did – sometimes even the clothes that she wore and the words that she said – were all formed by him. Like she was his doll. His dancing puppet on invisible strings. Even her friends were his friends. His friends first, and hers second. How could she continue to move in those circles when he might be there with her? With that new one. The younger model. The unruined one. The teenager who looked almost as pretty as Chloe had been before the accident.
So, finally, she made a decision – an actual decision that she took for herself and by herself, for the first time in her life. She would leave London. Money was not a problem. Aside from all the earnings she had saved back when her supermodel career was still going strong, she had received a handsome settlement in the divorce. Her ex-husband had made no attempt to deny or to hide his infidelity. He did not want a disfigured wife, and he was quite willing to pay through the nose to be rid of her. Chloe could live wherever she liked.
But what did she like? She had grown so used to thinking and saying that she liked something just because she knew it was what he liked. She had lived with him from the age of seventeen, and been married to him from the age of eighteen. She had been a weak-willed girl – impressionable and eager to please and afraid to disappoint. So she had moulded herself to him as well as she was able, and now she was no longer sure how much of herself was really her, and how much of it was him. Now that it was her choice – and only hers – where did she want to li
ve? Not a modern, brand new loft apartment like she had shared with him, she knew that. But then where?
It had taken her a long time but she had finally found the place. As soon as she saw the photos on her computer screen, she knew it was the one. A red-brick Georgian house that had been standing empty for almost two years since the owner had moved abroad. No doubt the prohibitive cost had put people off but Chloe had to have something to spend her money on. She liked the thought of all those elegant, airy, empty rooms, waiting to be filled with her choice of décor and her taste in furnishings. While the purchase had been going through, Chloe had scoured Christie’s and Sotheby’s looking for appropriate period furniture by Hepplewhite or Chippendale – all via their websites, of course; she never left the house now if she could help it because she didn’t want people staring at her ruined face.
But she enjoyed acquiring the furniture. Here, at last, was something to do with her time, to take an interest in, and to work towards. The house was a promise – her promise to herself – of a new beginning and a new Chloe and a new attempt actually to live instead of allowing other people to live for her. Or, at least, that was the promise she made to herself in a rare burst of optimism on one of her good days – before she sank back down into bitterness and self-loathing and that brooding hatred towards him that she derived a perverse sort of pleasure out of fostering and nurturing. A pointless sort of promise made with the best of intentions but which Chloe would never be able to keep. Even if her life depended on it.
She arrived at Arietta House on a cold, drizzly morning in mid-February. As she drove down the drive, the elegant, redbrick façade slowly materialized out of the mist that drifted in shredded ribbons about the house’s square, symmetrical lines and tiled, sloping roof, almost hiding the paired chimneys from view. The sash windows with their small eight-by-eight panes were neatly lined up in rows across the front of the house, dark and cold and unwelcoming. She parked and got out of the car. The slam of the door closing seemed to echo strangely in the silence as she stared up at the empty house. Her house. A big place for a small person to hide away from the world.
Her boots crunched on the gravel as she walked up to the front door, complete with canopy and pediment and a filigree fanlight above it depicting a single ballerina dressed all in white against a dark green background of trees. Chloe took the key from her pocket, unlocked the door and stepped inside.
The house was empty and quite silent, and smelled of dust and damp and cold. She put her bag down and walked slowly from room to room. The house still had its original floors, and the wooden boards creaked beneath Chloe’s weight in a way that she liked. As well as a bathroom and kitchen, there were three living rooms on the ground floor. They were all currently empty but Chloe paused to admire the walls, panelled to dado height, with chipped painted plaster above. She also admired the ceilings, intricately adorned with mouldings of ribbons and swags, ballerinas and trees. In fact, the ballerina was a common motif within the house. Chloe remembered reading something about a famous ballerina who had lived here once.
Fireplaces dominated each room, flanked with pillars, and elegant with cast-iron backs and decorated fronts. These, too, were adorned with the ballerina motif, along with swans and forests and lakes and stars. After touring the downstairs rooms, Chloe climbed the original wooden staircase to the second floor where she inspected the bathroom and the four bedrooms – three of which she would have no need of whatsoever. She lingered a while in the largest one and looked out of the window at the grounds below, still shrouded in mist, the sky grey with the promise of more rain. The lawn swept away towards a line of trees, broken only by a small lake filled with murky water and the remains of a disused stone fountain.
Chloe turned away from the view and went back downstairs. She had noticed brass bell pushes fixed to the walls in most of the rooms and, here in the kitchen, high upon the wall, was the bell board – used back in the days when the house still had servants so that they would know which room required attention.
The old teak cabinet contained ten windows in two rows upon a black glazed panel with red-and-white striped flags. The top windows were labelled: Front Door, Back Door, Dining Room, Breakfast Room, Parlour. In the second row the windows were labelled Bedrooms One, Two, Three, Four and Five – which was odd since the house only had four bedrooms. Chloe assumed it must have been a standard board and that they had simply never set up the bell for the non-existent fifth bedroom.
While she stood staring up at the board, a bell suddenly sounded – a harsh, shrill sound that echoed through the empty rooms and made her jump. The flag for the front door moved back and forth within the cabinet, indicating that was the bell that had been rung. She went to answer it and found that the removal men had arrived right on schedule.
Chloe spent the rest of that day overseeing her old possessions and new furniture being brought into the house. By the time the oriental rugs had been laid upon the wooden floorboards, and the wing chairs had been placed before the fireplaces, and the kettle had been plugged into a socket in the kitchen, the house was starting to have a more homely feel about it.
Finally all of Chloe’s things were inside the house, and all the furniture was right where it ought to be. It had been a wearying task and she decided to unpack the remaining boxes the next day. It was later than she’d realized – the light had already drained from the sky outside, and darkness pressed in softly against the windows as if the house had been wrapped up in black velvet. Chloe cooked herself dinner for one and ate alone at the kitchen table.
Shortly after nine o’ clock, a bell rang somewhere within the house.
Chloe had just finished her meal and laid down her knife and fork when the shrill ringing caught her unawares and made her jump. She looked up at the bell board in surprise, thinking that one of the removal men must have forgotten something and must now be at the front door. But it was not the front-door flag that was moving behind the glass. It wasn’t the flag for the back door either. It was for bedroom five.
Even as Chloe looked, the bell rang again and the red-and-white striped flag waved back and forth even more rapidly in the little window. Chloe sat and watched the flag for a full minute, until it was quite as still as the others once again. Then she slowly stood up from her chair, picked up a rolling pin just in case, and searched the house from top to bottom. It was quite empty. There was no one there but her. The bell board was old and obviously faulty. Chloe decided she would have to get someone in to fix it because she’d be extremely annoyed, and perhaps a little unnerved, if the bell started ringing in the middle of the night and woke her up. She needed her sleep now more than ever. It was the only time she didn’t hurt.
But in order to get it fixed, she needed to know which bell was faulty – which of the four bedrooms upstairs was bedroom five. She went up and pressed the brass bell push in the first bedroom, then went downstairs to check the bell board. The flag for bedroom one was swinging back and forth within the window. She repeated the same process for the other three bedrooms and moved the flags for bedrooms two, three and four. But the flag for bedroom five remained quite still.
Chloe then tried all the other bell pushes in the downstairs rooms but each bell was linked to the correct room on the board, and no bell that she pushed could move the flag for bedroom five, which remained completely still in its dark window. Finally, she decided to climb up into the attic in case there was a bell push up there. She switched on her torch and at first saw only spiders and cobwebs. Then the beam of light sliced into one of the dark corners and fell upon a strange old wicker chair in a wooden frame, coated in dust and spun with webs.
Chloe took a step closer, believing it to be an old armchair at first because of the adjustable arm and foot rests, but then she noticed the big spoke wheels and realized that it was an antique wheelchair. An ugly thing – unwanted junk that some past owner had decided to shove up into the attic instead of disposing of it properly. It seemed to pull her forwards lik
e a magnet and she found herself brushing the cold wheels with her fingertips, leaving deep marks in the thick dust.
Irrepressible sorrow. Blistering anger. Abject misery. Unreasoning hatred.
Inanimate objects don’t give off feelings, of course, every sane person knew that – and yet those were the emotions Chloe felt when she touched the chair. It was like drowning in someone else’s desperate depression. Chloe snatched her hand away as if she’d been burned. She shook herself and stepped back. She suddenly felt a strong, unreasoning desire to get away from that chair, so she turned and went back towards the hatch leading downstairs.
The incident with the bell for bedroom five was an odd thing, but these were old bells and an old bell board and an old house. Chloe had known before she came here that there would be restoration work to be done. This was just one more job to add to the list.
She went to bed and spent her first night in Arietta House dreaming of ringing bells and decrepit wheelchairs.
The bell for bedroom five rang several times over the next few days, always at night when the house was empty but for Chloe. No one ever heard it but her. There was so much to do in the house and in the grounds she told herself that was why she hadn’t got around to finding someone to fix the bell yet. But the truth was that she had made no move to start on any of the work that needed doing. The first job she had decided to tackle was painting the chipped plaster on the walls above the dado rails. She had the paint and the brushes and the step ladder all ready but she had made no move to begin.
Instead she had spent her first morning in the house lying in bed crying. Crying for her disfigured face, and her ruined marriage, and her broken heart. And when she did drag herself out of bed, she spent most of her time walking around the chilly, misty garden brooding over how much she hated her ex-husband and how fiercely she wished all sorts of miserable suffering on him and his new pretty puppet. Perhaps he would have another car crash and die this time, and good riddance. Or perhaps he would fall down the stairs and break his neck. Or perhaps he would slip into the Thames and drown.
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) Page 15
