A Good Heart is Hard to Find

by Trisha Ashley

  Certainly a punishment was overdue now the comforting bubble surrounding my long-standing affair had well and truly popped, exposing me to the cold blasts of self-doubt and guilt, status quo rocked.

  And it wasn’t like I hadn’t been through all this before, when I was struggling to resist Max. Being quietly pursued by a handsome professor may be flattering, but it was also scary to a young student, especially after I discovered that he was not only married, but his wife had been crippled in a skiing accident a couple of years before.

  I was a habitual sinner, but if I hadn’t thought Rosemary accepted the situation I would never finally have agreed to it … and Max definitely let me think it wouldn’t be for long, I didn’t imagine that.

  But I couldn’t blame Max for my sins. What on earth was I thinking of, waiting to step into a dead woman’s shoes?

  And where had the years gone while I was doing that? I was heading for middle age and I hadn’t done anything. Well, maybe I had done things, but they were all the wrong things, and most of my life had been spent writing and waiting.

  Waiting for Max, waiting for Rosemary to die, waiting for children, waiting for a damned bestseller. (Or even a Damned bestseller.)

  Now I felt not so much mistress of the macabre, as macabre mistress.

  At lunchtime (ham and pineapple pizza, large glass of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon), a Jason, hangdog and most strangely marked about the lower lip, turned up to apologize.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I assured him. ‘At least when I bit you the fangs loosened, so they were quite easy to get out when I got home.’

  By then I was so desperately in need of comfort that had he not been in Penitent Mode, the chances are that he could have had from me what he was so keen on having the previous night, because I would have been anyone’s for a good bear hug.

  Just as well perhaps that he didn’t know that?

  Still, we resumed our friendship as before, the only flaw in our entente being Tom, who apparently wanted to pop round later and tell me how much he’d enjoyed my last book.

  Over my blood-spattered mortal remains, he would.

  … clutching The Book he stood over her blood-mired corpse, while flies admired themselves in the twin mirrors of her surprised eyes, and …

  Jason seemed unable to see what Tom was up to, and I seemed unable to tell him, but at least I now knew to check who was at the door before I opened it that afternoon. Tom was larger, stronger and younger than Jason, but without the cuddle factor. Thank goodness he was going back to university the following day.

  I gave Jason an edited version of Rosemary’s death, which depressed him still further, since he assumed it meant that Max and I would be marrying in the near future, even when I pointed out that we could hardly do so immediately after the funeral.

  After Jason had gone I accidentally caught sight of myself in the mirror, and really it was a miracle that anyone wanted me! My face, naturally whiter than white, still had the remains of last night’s greenish make-up, my eye-liner was smeared into Alice Cooper streaks, and the crimson lipstick had rubbed off, leaving a ghastly stain. To add the coup de grâce, my usually straight, dark red hair now stuck up on one side like a yard brush.

  Roll up, roll up, see Max’s mistress of the macabre. You saw it here first, folks!

  I scrubbed the exterior of the Whited Sepulchre then went to bed for a couple of hours, for, after all, I still had a haunted house to visit and a chapter to write that night.

  Mental and physical exhaustion meant I fell asleep instantly, only to go straight into The Nightmare like somebody’d dropped me through a trapdoor into hell.

  This time the somersaulting was so dizzyingly fast (and why did my forward motion always turn into back-flips?), and the cupboard door pulsed so ominously with greenish light, that I thought it would all be over and the door slammed behind me for ever in the time it usually took for the first backwards tumble.

  But the pulsing quickly turned to throbbing and then a hard rattling tattoo that jarred me awake: someone was beating hell out of my front door.

  I staggered down and threw it wide open, because at that moment I’d have welcomed even Tom for getting me out of that corridor. Could I perhaps survive for ever without sleep? (‘For ever’ being whatever miserly amount of years I’ve got left.)

  But to my surprise it wasn’t Tom, only the small, portly and inoffensive figure of Jane’s husband, Gerald. He was the same vintage as Max, only looked it, and was nice in an unexciting way. I’d always got on fine with him providing I didn’t malign Sweet Baby Jane, but he’d never before crossed my threshold.

  ‘Come in,’ I said, staring at him. His blue Pringle jumper was on inside out and he appeared to be wearing odd socks, one Argyle patterned and the other plain maroon.

  ‘If it’s not inconvenient. Sorry to bother you. Were you working?’

  Now, that’s the nice thing about Gerald, he appreciates that writing is working and not some little pastime you can fit in between shopping and cooking dinner for six. And what is more, he even recognizes horror writing as real writing.

  ‘No, that’s all right, I was sleeping: but I’m glad you woke me up because I was having my nightmare.’

  ‘Your nightmare?’ he echoed, looking round him in some surprise. ‘This is all very light and open, isn’t it? I expected something more—’

  ‘Dark? Sinister?’

  ‘I was going to say cottagey, actually.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I suppose it is light and bare-ish but I like to keep the dark stuff for the writing. And I hate big cupboards.’

  ‘You don’t have cupboards?’

  ‘Not with doors. I have cupboard-phobia, you see, hence the nightmares?’

  He looked baffled.

  ‘You know, because of Pa locking me in the cupboard under the stairs as a punishment when I was a child? Jane must have mentioned it. The devil was supposed to get fed up and come out of me, though if he did I never noticed.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, though clearly he hadn’t been following what I’d been saying with any great attention. ‘I … er … heard about Max’s wife, Rosemary. I’m sorry. Or should I say—’

  ‘Congratulations? Better not to say anything.’

  ‘No – right.’

  ‘Tea, coffee, cocoa, rum, whisky, wine – no, I finished the last bottle of wine with lunch – sherry, crème de menthe, gin?’ I offered hospitably.

  ‘Tea, just tea, would be fine,’ he said, and followed me into the kitchen while I made it.

  ‘Cass, I came because I wanted to ask you something about Jane.’

  ‘What on earth for? You never believe anything I say about her.’

  ‘That was just sister stuff. I knew you didn’t really mean it.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘This is serious, Cass, and I thought you might tell me …’

  He tailed off and stared helplessly at me, a greying, pleasantly homely man with worried blue eyes. ‘Jane’s younger than me, and I know I’m not very exciting, but I did think we were happy. Only someone hinted to me that she’d been more than friends with that artist in residence we had last year, and that she was still seeing him.’

  We gazed at each other like someone had waved a magic wand and painted us both purple, and neither wanted to tell the other.

  ‘It can’t be true, can it?’ he pleaded. ‘I mean, he left for Cornwall months ago, so when could she have seen him? The only time she’s been away is on holiday with me, or all those weekends she’s spent here with you. And I do understand that you needed her support while Max was away, so don’t think I resented that,’ he added earnestly.

  ‘Weekends here with me?’ I exclaimed, then swallowed hard and said with a weak smile: ‘Oh yes – you know how sisters slag each other off all the time, but they’re always there for each other in a crisis.’

  ‘Jane’s never said a bad word about you,’ he assured me.

  Big of her. And that was not her way: Jane’s skill was to
plant the poison dart with such skill and artistry that no one noticed she’d done it until paralysis set in and it was too late.

  ‘There you are then,’ I said soothingly. ‘You can see yourself that she hasn’t had time to meet him even if she wanted to. Besides I met him once, don’t forget, and he was a hairy, rough-looking young man – hardly Jane’s type.’

  ‘No, but years younger than me, and Jane’s still so youthful and attractive that everyone thinks she’s my daughter when we’re on holiday,’ he added glumly.

  Most men seem to be pleased when people say that, but not Gerald. My estimation of him went up.

  People always tell me I don’t look anything like my real age, but they should have seen me that day: round my eyes it wasn’t so much crow’s feet as rookery nook.

  I managed to soothe him down, but, as Jane should know, once you let a little tiny doubt lodge into the crevices of your mind it was hard to uproot it totally, and if you were not careful it just grew back again in a slightly different place.

  He made me swear not to tell Jane he’d ever doubted her, and took himself off still looking a sad and sorry version of his usual self.

  I didn’t know what to make of it all. Jane and a non-immaculate, non-famous, years-younger, scruffy painter? I couldn’t see it. But if not, what had she been doing when she said she was here with me?

  I tried to phone her before Gerald got home, but there was no reply.

  Perhaps she was away perfecting her brushstrokes?

  For once I didn’t go to the pub for dinner, but instead ate my second pizza of the day (quattro formaggio with sun-dried tomatoes) and spent a quiet hour pasting my review cuttings into a pirate scrapbook with a skull and crossbones on the cover, and renewing my subscription to Skint Old Northern Woman Magazine.

  Then I went to my study and unleashed the inhabitants of Lover, Come Back to Me on to expanses of virgin white paper until it was time to leave for Kedge Hall.

  New haunts.

  6

  Tall, Dark and Cadaverous

  Cass Leigh’s novels form the sludge at the bottom of a very murky pond indeed …

  Guardian

  It was a March night so cold that I walked in an ectoplasmic cloud of my own breath and everything, including me, was crispy-crunch-coated with frost. Even the circle of light from my big rubber torch just hung in the air like a yellow reptilian eye.

  There was a reasonable moon, but lots of grubby-looking rubber bone-shaped clouds kept writhing about in front of it.

  I was wrapped in the ankle-length purple velvet cloak again, not for effect, but simply because of its warm quilted lining. Perhaps it was a trifle over the top for a nocturnal ramble, but definitely in keeping with a night in Spook Hall.

  The whole ambience of the night was right for inspiration as I let myself in through the unlocked front gate, pondering subplots involving a vampire full of ancient wisdom, demonic energy, and twisted logic.

  … something called to Keturah, compelling her reluctant feet to follow the gravelled drive to where the dark shape of the old house squatted among its dank weeds like a drowned widow …

  He would live, my vampire (if vampires can be said to live?), in a wing of the old house, a dark family secret passed from generation to generation.

  I felt strangely excited as I neared the house, though it was not the first time by any means that I’d spent the night hours in a deserted mansion, even if it was one I’d been trying to get into for years and rumoured to be the most haunted in Britain. (But then, aren’t they all?)

  Perhaps even now the shade of Miss Kedge was watching me pick my way up the overgrown drive while rubbing her transparent little hands together with anticipatory glee. There were reputedly so many ghosts up there that the drive might be the only place where there was room for her to stand.

  Jack told all the old ghost stories down at the pub, but most of them I’d already read in old books on the subject, especially Kedge Hall – The Haunted Manor. You’d expect Jack to be immune to all that superstition too, since his family had been servants there for centuries, but the lodge had been dark as I passed, so he must have been abed rather than doing a midnight round of the property, braving the spirit world. Or just too lazy, now that there was no one to check up on him?

  Emerging into the gravelled circle before the low, half-timbered manor house I consulted the map, then followed the path round the side, through an unlocked gate set in a little archway, and into the courtyard beyond.

  This bit was new to me, though once years ago I’d seen the front of the house, the single time the rose garden was opened to the public in aid of some charity Miss Kedge favoured. Retirement homes for knitted tea-cosies, or something.

  The kitchen door was half-shadowed by encroaching stems of wisteria, and after fumbling for several minutes to insert the key with cold, gloved fingers, I discovered that it was unlocked.

  Some caretaker! I could probably just have walked up here any night during the last year, without the wasted time or expense of working on Jack.

  Still, I was in. Casting my torch beam around the kitchen I observed with some surprise that the seventeenth-century room had been done out in Ye Olde Worlde style, but with all mod cons and every piece of kitchen gadgetry known to woman. Reclusive Miss Kedge might have been, but clearly she liked her comforts and could afford to indulge herself.

  The light switches didn’t work, so the electricity supply must have been disconnected. I wished I’d brought a bigger torch, especially after I’d opened the doors to a larder and two sculleries (scarily dark-cupboard-like) before finally finding one that opened on to a promising corridor.

  The heavy, expectant dark silence awaited me, so I followed my torch beam along the flags until something groaned deep within the stone wall under my groping hand, and I dropped the thing.

  It bounced once with a faint tinkling, then went out. So much for unbreakable rubber-cased torches, I thought, berating myself for a clumsy idiot, because all old houses moan and creak with every small change in the temperature, and if walls groan it’s usually because there are dodgy water pipes in them.

  Then as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized that it wasn’t after all total: a faint light outlined the edge of a partly opened door ahead of me.

  I groped my way along the (now mercifully silent) wall, and emerged warily into the great dark maw of a hall, where the flickering stub of a candle set on a Sèvres saucer had been left on a dusty refectory table.

  ‘Jack?’ I called softly, but answer came there none, unless you count the creaking of the floorboards somewhere above me, which surely must be the maligned caretaker come to make his last evening rounds. Hence the unlocked door, of course: I’d simply arrived before he’d expected me to, but I had wanted to get here before midnight when allegedly all the fun starts.

  Who would have thought Jack was this conscientious? What a creature of surprises he was turning out to be!

  Still, now my torch was broken the candle was handy, and Jack might even have a supply on him that I could borrow. Picking the saucer up, I climbed the stairs and found myself standing in a long, dark gallery that seemed to run endlessly away from me in both directions, the windows down one side making barely lighter rectangles.

  It was just like my recurring nightmare, except there was no menacing door awaiting me at one end. (Or if there was, I couldn’t see it.)

  Then a distant light slowly began to grow, and a giant shadow moved with unnerving stealth across the wall: someone was coming.

  ‘Jack?’ I hissed.

  Why was I whispering? Did I think the ghosts might wake up if I yelled? And why was Jack’s shadow so much more imposing than his small and wiry self?

  Maybe because it wasn’t Jack. With a soft, heavy padding like a big cat, out of the shadows materialized the tall, gaunt figure of a man.

  Unearthly light flowed from cupped hands edged in ruffles to illuminate an austere, hollow-cheeked face framed by two sweeps of da
rk hair. Add to that a loose white shirt open at the neck, knee-breeches, and a general impression of looming menace, and you get the idea why I nearly did a quick Keturah on to the carpeted floor.

  Then he looked up and saw me, and I swear his eyes blazed an unearthly green-blue. He stopped dead and uttered in a low, hoarse voice: ‘Emma? My God, Emma, have you come back?’

  That horrified, eerie whisper was the last straw. Dropping the saucer I turned to flee, running blindly into the darkness with the sound of his long, loping strides coming after me.

  The gallery must have taken a turn at the end but I didn’t, running straight into a door and bruising my outstretched hands. Frantically I wrenched it open, slamming it behind me, heart racing; though don’t ask me why I thought a closed door would stop a ghost, or even why I’d run from one of the ghosts I’d come to see.

  And it was pointless anyway, for I found myself in a walk-in cupboard and the ghosts were in there with me.

  A chill current of air moved my hair as something swooped low over my head – and I went berserk with panic.

  It’s odd: you think you’ve subjugated your old demons, and then suddenly you’re right in the stuff of your worst nightmares and all the restraints are off. I was probably screaming like a banshee.

  When the ghost wrenched open the door I ran right into him. Not through him – he was far too solid for that. Solid and warm.

  So, not a vampire or anything either, then? Clasped to his chest by a sinewy arm I could hear his heart racing even faster than mine.

  ‘What the hell?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘The birds – don’t let the birds get me,’ I pleaded. ‘They’re in there!’

  Still retaining a grip on me, my jailer (or rescuer, I didn’t then care which) lifted a small lantern high to illuminate the walk-in cupboard behind me, and observed ironically: ‘Open window – no birds to be seen. Most likely it was a bat, but it’s gone now whatever it was.’

  He had an invigoratingly cold-water-running-over-gravel sort of voice now he wasn’t whispering.

  Reluctantly removing my face, neatly imprinted with chest hair patterns, from the neck of a shirt opened so far that his swash was almost unbuckled, I took a deep, relieved breath. ‘A bat? Of course, how silly of me! And I like bats,’ I said, pushing myself away shakily, although not very far since he didn’t let go of my arm. ‘Sorry about that! But I wasn’t expecting to see a total stranger – especially dressed like that!’