A little smile played about Chloe’s lips as she gazed down at the murky water of the lake. How she would love to be the one to force his head beneath the surface and hold him there until he stopped struggling. Until he stopped breathing. Until there was nothing left of him, just like there was now nothing left of her. The temperature seemed to drop suddenly. Chloe shivered and turned back to the house. She noticed instantly that she’d left a light on in one of the upstairs rooms – it glowed softly through all the neat little panes of glass. Which was odd because it wasn’t her bedroom – that room was at the end of the house and this one was in the middle. It couldn’t be the bathroom either because that faced the other side of the garden. It had to be one of the other bedrooms but Chloe hadn’t set foot in them since that first night when she had been looking for the faulty bell.
She trudged back to the house, walked up the creaking wooden staircase and checked the bedrooms. They were dark – all four of them. When she went back outside there were no lit windows in the house’s façade but something seemed . . . changed. Wrong. As if there were suddenly fewer windows than there had been before. When Chloe walked into the kitchen and looked at the bell board on some sudden whim, she saw that the flag for bedroom five was still moving slightly, as if the bell had been rung unheard while she’d been out in the garden.
She stood still for long, long moments, her heart thumping in her chest, her own breathing suddenly loud in her ears. The bell and the light could both be down to faulty electrics, she decided. Yes. Faulty electrics. That was the explanation.
Chloe made herself a cup of tea because she suddenly needed something normal to do. She took her steaming mug – and another glass of wine for good measure – into the living room instead of drinking it at the kitchen table. She found she did not want to sit in the same room as the bell board, waiting for that red-and-white striped flag to start waving back and forth, as if it were mocking her – just like the rest of the world.
As she sat down in a very elegant, very uncomfortable, tall, wing-backed chair before the dark hearth, it occurred to Chloe that perhaps the house had once had five bedrooms some time in the past. On a whim she turned her laptop on and googled Arietta House, thinking to get back to the old estate agent’s page if it was still up. But instead the house instantly came up in a different context – as the former residence of Giselle Girard, a prima ballerina in the late-nineteenth century.
Giselle had been one of the most naturally gifted ballerinas the world had ever seen. Her career was like a shooting star sparkling across the sky in bursts of cold fire and flashes of twinkling diamond lights. She was on the verge of being awarded the rank of prima ballerina assoluta – an almost unheard of honour – when the theatre where she was working was burned down in a great fire. Giselle survived but a falling wooden beam crushed her legs. She would never dance again. She would never even walk again. So at the age of twenty-five she left France and retired to Arietta House, where she lived out the rest of her days confined to a wheelchair. Giselle had died in 1940 at the age of eighty.
Two black-and-white photos accompanied the article. One was of Giselle before the accident, dressed in a white tutu with a bell-shaped, free-flowing skirt made of tulle; her thick black hair pulled back into a severe ballerina’s bun; her chin high and her eyes shining with a sort of grim pride. The second photo was dated just two months before Giselle died and showed her in the grounds of Arietta House, an old, bent woman, her face wreathed in bitter lines, a look of sullen resentment in her eyes that was almost identical to the look that sometimes came into Chloe’s own eyes, only Giselle had had many more years to work upon her bitterness.
The second photo startled Chloe, not because she recognized her own misery on another person’s face, but because of the wheelchair. The elderly Giselle was sitting in a wicker chair with a wooden frame and large spoke wheels. Chloe was quite sure it was the same chair that was upstairs in the attic. That photo had been taken here in the grounds. When she peered closer she could see that the lake had been much clearer back then, and had had swans on it.
The moment Chloe read of Giselle’s sad story and saw her unhappy face, she felt an instant connection – a sympathy and an empathy – with a kindred spirit. For had they not both lost that which they cherished most, right at the very prime of their lives, through no fault of their own? Chloe had been a model who had lost her looks; Giselle had been a ballerina who had lost the use of her legs. They’d even been of similar ages when their respective disasters had struck. Chloe felt an instant affinity with the dead ballerina. A powerful, unreasoning rush of feeling. Other people might offer vapid commiserations and empty condolences, but here at last was a woman who could have truly understood what Chloe was feeling because she must have felt exactly the same. Chloe found herself wishing forcefully that she could have met the ballerina just once – that she could have spoken, just once, with someone who could have understood how she felt inside.
As Chloe stared at the computer screen and yearned for a meeting – a connection – that could never take place, a bell rang again, and she knew that it was from bedroom five. Before the last echoes of the bell had faded, music began to play from somewhere within the house. Softly at first, and muffled, as if coming to her through a dense fog, so that Chloe had to strain to hear it, but gradually becoming louder and clearer until each sad, sweet note was crystal perfect. It was the aria from the second act of Giselle, when the grief-stricken duke mourns at the tomb of the girl he has himself driven to madness and to death. Chloe had been to that ballet several times with her ex-husband. The last time had been after her accident and she could remember sitting there, twisting her handkerchief into knots, knowing that her marriage was almost over and that this was the last ballet they would ever attend together. That this was one of the last times they would ever do anything together.
The notes of the solo oboe seemed to fill the house with exquisite melancholy – beautiful and terrible – and the sadness of that music was so intense that Chloe wept where she sat. Giselle was communicating with her – reaching out to her – she was sure of it. Trying to touch her with ghostly fingers because they were the same. They had both suffered and lost – they had both been grossly mistreated and abandoned. Chloe sat in her high-backed chair and wept for them both until her eyes dried up and she had no more tears to spill for either of them. Then she fell into bed, spent and exhausted.
The next morning she wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing. Or perhaps hallucinated it in a drunken haze. There were a fair few empty bottles around the kitchen the next morning, after all. Perhaps no ghostly music had filled the empty house. Perhaps it had only been in her head. Her ex-husband had told her she was sick but that was probably only because she’d gone at him that one time with a knife outside the court house. And what did he know anyway? What did anyone know? No one could understand her pain. Not like Giselle could, if only she were still here.
When Chloe heard the same music again the next night, she was almost beside herself with delight. It was real, after all. Giselle was still here. She was here and she was reaching out to Chloe. Night after night, the score from Giselle filled Arietta House, always heralded by the bell ringing from the fifth bedroom.
On one occasion, on the exact stroke of midnight, Chloe looked from one of the windows and saw white shapes flitting between the trees at the end of the garden. She was certain they were wilis – the female spirits described in the ballet as risen from their graves at night, to seek revenge upon men by dancing them to death. As Chloe stood and strained her eyes to peer into the darkness outside, she wished that she could become a wili herself so that she could entrap her ex-husband in a dance that would kill him as he so richly deserved. How hard it was to be merely a mortal woman who could do nothing to right the wrongs she had so unjustly suffered.
These thoughts depressed her and she spent almost the whole of the next day in bed. She was drained and so very, very tired. No doubt that was
why, upon opening her eyes some time the next afternoon, she gazed along her pillow and saw hair spreading out upon the fabric that wasn’t hers, for this hair was thick and black instead of silky and chocolate-brown. She jerked upright in the bed, clutched a length of hair between her fingers and examined it in the afternoon sun streaming through the small, square windowpanes, only to find it was exactly the colour that it ought to be. A trick of the light, no doubt. Merely a trick of the light.
But she began to notice the black hair around the house at other times too. One day she bought a cupcake while out shopping. The sort of cake she never could have bought before when she’d been working as a model because she knew then that she could not afford to be anything other than carrot-thin. This was a rich, buttery cupcake, with thick lashings of cerise-pink icing covering the top, resplendent beneath blood-red cherries and crystals of sugar.
When she took her first bite of this cake it was creamy and delicious and sweet and sugary, and everything she had thought it would be. It melted in her mouth and fizzled upon her tongue. She closed her eyes to savour the taste, and then the bell rang and she knew, even before she opened her eyes, that it was the bell for bedroom five.
At almost the exact same second she felt the presence of something odd and alien inside her mouth – something that did not belong to the cake and did not belong to her, tickling the back of her throat in a way that made her want to gag. She spat the mouthful out on to the table in front of her, and her fingers scraped across her tongue until she found the thing and pulled. A long thick black hair came dragging out of her mouth – so long that it seemed it would keep on going forever. When Chloe finally had it out, it curled round and round itself on the kitchen table, black and shiny and sleek, glistening with her saliva. She threw the rest of the cupcake away, uneaten.
That night she picked up her brush, only to find that the bristles were all tangled up with that same black hair, as if someone else had been using her hair brush. Chloe raised the brush and sniffed it, and it smelled to her of powdered makeup, and silken costumes, and the sputtering gas lights of a theatre, and she knew that it was Giselle trying to reach her.
The night after that, Chloe was sitting in her uncomfortable wing-backed chair before the fireplace when the sad oboe music began to drift through the house once again. She was glad to hear it – almost as glad as she might have been to hear an old friend’s voice calling to her through the empty rooms, and she sighed a contented sort of sigh where she sat. Then a lock of hair tickled her cheek and she reached up to tuck it behind her ear. Or, at least, that was what she thought she was going to do.
But instead of stopping at her face, her hand continued rising, until it was stretched up above her head, seeming to bring the rest of her body with it, like a puppet dragged up by its strings. She stood away from the chair, thinking that she would stretch her stiff limbs. One arm curled above her head, the other twisted elegantly in front of her, as Chloe reached up on to the very tips of her toes. En pointe. Naturally, fluidly, wonderfully, her left leg lifted up off the floor and stretched out behind her, perfectly in sync with the notes of the oboe, leaving her trembling right leg to take all her weight as she threw back both arms and tilted her head, allowing the music to glide around her, wrapping her in a sad, soft, safe embrace that was far more satisfying than any man’s clumsy touch could ever be. Her leg, stomach, back and shoulder muscles all screamed in protest, but her soul sang out with joy as she felt her body hold the flawless beauty of the sylph-like pose.
Then she caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror on the opposite wall and saw the firelight flickering in soft golden patterns over the beautiful shape she was making with her body. But Chloe didn’t know how to stand upon the tips of her toes like that. No sooner had the startled thought crossed her mind than her trembling foot collapsed, her toes crunching horribly under themselves as she fell heavily to the ground, all that lovely grace draining from her limbs like water flowing through a sieve.
The music stopped and Chloe cried out in pain and tore off her slipper, only to find that her sock was spotted with blood. She huddled on the floor for some moments, cradling her throbbing foot and wondering what on earth had just happened to her. And wishing that it hadn’t stopped. Those moments when her body had been stretched out like that – strong and beautiful – had felt so wonderful. So right. Already, Chloe felt she would do anything to get that feeling back, and black frustration bubbled up in her chest that she had only been able to hold the position briefly.
Chloe found herself spending more and more time down by the lake. She’d sit on the bench there and stare into the muddy water and think about her ex-husband dying a horrible death. Or she would think about drowning herself in those dirty depths and putting an end to her suffering. It would be so easy. One strong thrust of the wheels and her chair would tip into the water and she would be dead before her nurse could drag her out. The thought always made her feel so happy – so relieved – and she played it over and over in her head since there were few enough things that brought her pleasure nowadays. She clung to the dark fantasy desperately, even though it confused her – because, of course, she didn’t have a wheelchair. That had been Giselle.
One afternoon, after what seemed like hours spent staring at the water, dreaming of drowning, Chloe found herself phoning her mother. She sounded surprised to hear from Chloe, and why shouldn’t she? It wasn’t as if they ever really spoke. Chloe couldn’t even have explained to herself why she had called.
“Hi, Mum,” she said, sounding strained and unlike herself. “No, nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to . . . I don’t know. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
When her mother asked how she was, Chloe barely knew how to answer her. “I don’t miss him. But I miss my career. The way I felt when the stage lights were on me and— What? Oh. I meant the cameras. I miss the way I felt when the cameras were on me. I don’t know why I said stage lights ...”
At the other end of the line, her mother started to say that she didn’t understand but Chloe cut her off. “Mum, can I ask you something? Do you think I’m a chameleon? That’s what he used to call me. He said I had no thoughts or feelings that were my own. Mum, I think maybe he was right. I can’t find myself under . . . under all this pain and heartache and anger. Sometimes I think I have but then it’s like smoke I can’t hold on to and it drifts away from me. I can’t always tell if my thoughts are mine or if they’re hers . . .” Chloe paused and in the silence her mother said, once again, that she didn’t understand. “It’s Giselle,” Chloe said. “Giselle’s thoughts. She’s . . . she used to live here in this house. I think she reaches inside my head sometimes— Mum, please . . . stop saying you don’t understand and just listen to me! I’m . . . I’m trying to tell you that I need help!”
But her mother just kept repeating that she didn’t understand. Over and over again like a broken record. Then Chloe heard her father’s voice ask something in the background and she heard her mother’s fraught response: “I can’t understand a word she’s saying! She’s been speaking in French for the last five minutes.”
“I’m not speaking in French!” Chloe exclaimed, but as the words came out of her mouth she heard them properly for the first time and they were French. Chloe said something else but she couldn’t understand it herself because she spoke those words in French too, and Chloe didn’t know a single word of French – not one single word.
Her hand gripped the phone, tight enough to crack the plastic casing, and a cold sweat formed at her hairline as she babbled incoherently, quite unable to understand herself any more than her mother could. A dreadful, appalling sense of isolation pressed down on her as she found herself suddenly unable to communicate in any human language. All those words she’d taken for granted all her life and had unthinkingly used to shape the world and shape herself were now gone, leaving her no different from and no better than the lowliest animal. But then, finally, something clicked – shifted savagely in h
er head – and Chloe could understand her own words once again.
“Mum, Mum, am I speaking English now?” she gasped. “Am I speaking in English or in French?”
She breathed a sigh of relief at the answer, then went rigid with indignation a moment later. “No, I haven’t been drinking!” She wiped the clammy sweat from her brow as she listened to the stern voice at the other end of the line. Finally she said flatly, “All right, Mum. Yes. Yes, I will. Yes. Bye.”
She hung up and stared at the phone for long moments before turning away from it, trying to shake the strange feeling that this was the last time she would ever speak to her mother.
She went upstairs to take a shower – as if the feeling was one she could wash away with hot water and soap. Steam filled the room as Chloe stripped off her clothes and stepped into the bath, the water from the showerhead pummelling her back and shoulders for a moment before she turned her face directly into the oncoming jets. She picked up the vanilla shower gel and slowly, methodically, began to wash herself from head to toe, the sweet, sugary smell mixing pleasantly with the hot steam. She breathed deeply and felt herself start to relax a little.
Chloe was almost finished in the shower when the bell rang. Her head jerked up and she froze, listening. It could have been the front door, of course, that was a definite possibility, but it was one that Chloe did not even consider. She was sure it was Giselle, ringing the bell in the fifth bedroom as she often did – as if she wanted to be found, as if she was calling out for help in the only way she could.
“I don’t know where you are,” Chloe whispered. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to get to you.”
She listened out for it but the bell didn’t ring again so she squeezed some more shower gel into the palm of her hand and leaned down to finish washing her legs and feet. The vanilla gel glided over the smooth skin of her thigh, down her shin, towards her ankle. And then Chloe’s fingers made contact with the skin of her foot and it was not smooth and supple as she had expected but old and leathery and tough. She jerked her hand away with a cry, causing flakes of something crusty to lodge beneath her fingernails as she pulled back to stare down at her feet.
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) Page 16
