Familiar and Haunting

by Philippa Pearce

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. If I were you, I’d get away. I’d go.”

  “But where could I go?”

  “Places,” Samantha said crisply.

  “Have a good time, you mean? But alone?”

  “Not alone. You said there must be lots of ghosts like yourself, stranded in midair, made more or less homeless. Go and find them. Join up with them. Make up a party and go places.”

  “Really?” He was becoming excited. “Cut a dash?”

  “That’s it. Leave this dreary ghost of a room and all this dreary rubbish.” Samantha reached forward and swept her hand dramatically over the surface of the medicine table, but her hand went through it all without effect, leaving it undisturbed.

  “Allow me!” The Ghost heaved himself from his chair and waddled the few steps toward the table. He was carrying his violin in his left hand, the bow in his right. With vicious dabs of his bow, the Ghost sent bottles and boxes flying off the table in an irregular rain of medication. Samantha saw that not one of them reached the floor, because they melted into nothingness even as they fell.

  The Ghost threw the bow after the bottles and boxes, and that vanished, too.

  A few more waddling steps, and the Ghost was at the window. With surprising agility, he clambered up, stood on the sill.

  Samantha gasped at the peril of it. But then, what peril to a ghost?

  “Never again!” cried the Ghost, and flung the violin from him in a great arc. For a moment Samantha saw its shape in the moonlight; then it faded, vanished.

  “And I’m off!” The Ghost flung himself forward through the window. He did not fall, he did not fly, and he certainly did not vanish. He went. He hurried through the air until he was lost to Samantha’s sight. Pleasure seeking.

  Samantha was left at the top of the apple tree. Round her, every trace of that ghostly bedroom had vanished with the going of the Ghost himself. She climbed down and went to bed.

  The next day Samantha went home. She wrote to her grandparents to thank them for her visit, and in time she had a letter back. They reported that, oddly, the screeches and moanings round the house and down the chimney had stopped.

  Samantha nodded to herself.

  In the spring she visited the bungalow again. The apple tree was full of fruit blossom—a picture, as Samantha’s grandmother said—and there was no question now of chopping it down.

  That autumn the tree bore its first crop, a bumper one. Samantha went to help pick the apples. Her grandfather was not allowed to climb ladders, so Samantha climbed and picked. She climbed to the very top of the tree and perched there for a moment.

  “What’s it like up there?” called her grandfather, from below.

  “Nice,” said Samantha. “But a bit lonely.”

  A Prince in Another Place

  I was caretaker at our school at the time, but I was not—I repeat, nor—responsible for the damage done to the school playground. People said the asphalt looked as if it had boiled up under quite extraordinary heat; how could I be held responsible for that?

  I’ll begin at the beginning, and the beginning was when poor young Mr. Hartley hanged himself.

  Mr. Hartley was one of the three teachers at Little Pawley Church of England Primary School; the other two were Mr. Ezra Bryce, the headmaster, and Mrs. Salt, in charge of Infants. The vicar, old Mr. Widdington, came into school sometimes to help with assembly and religious instruction.

  Mr. Hartley was very young, very timid, and very inexperienced, and he had just recovered from an illness, I believe. This was his first teaching job and, as it turned out, his last. Mr. Bryce did for him. Mr. Bryce bullied him and harried him and sneered at him and jeered at him and altogether made Mr. Hartley’s life so appalling (as only Mr. Bryce knew how) that the poor young man decided to leave it. He committed suicide in his lodgings on the second day of his second term at the school.

  Of course, anyone in the village could make a good guess at what lay behind that death, but Bully Bryce was sly as well as a bully, and he could always cover up after himself. At different times the police and the education people came round asking questions, but he was able to explain everything. He said that poor young Hartley had been far too highly strung to be a teacher—and he was in delicate health, too. So, in spite of all the fatherly support that he, Mr. Bryce, had tried to give him, the young man had cracked under the strain. Such a pity! said Mr. Bryce. (I can imagine the tears coming to his eyes as he spoke.)

  After the inquest the funeral took place far away, in Mr. Hartley’s home parish. His only family was a widowed mother and an elder brother, who came home from abroad for the funeral. That seemed to be the end of Mr. Hartley.

  The day after the funeral, a new teacher turned up at the school to take over Mr. Hartley’s work there. This was Mr. Dickins. He was just a stopgap, of course, a supply teacher sent by the education people; he wouldn’t be staying long, he said. For a teacher, he was rather a remarkable-looking man. He had a head of really flaming red hair. And he smiled to himself a good deal, and when he laughed, you saw he had excellent teeth, strong-looking and rather pointed, almost sharp. He had very small feet. I must have said something about them to him once; he was an easy chap and often had a word with me. I remember he said he had the greatest difficulty in getting shoes to fit. “The trouble is my odd-shaped feet, Mr. Jackson,” he said. But at least he was nimble enough, as far as I could see.

  At first, everyone wondered how the new teacher would stand up to his headmaster. For indeed, it was possible to stand up to Bully Bryce. Mrs. Salt, of Infants, had been doing it for years, by being deaf as a post whenever her headmaster addressed her, and she defended her Infants as a tigress defends her cubs. And the Juniors were able to look after themselves, chiefly by banding together in self-defense. I’ve heard them chanting outside the headmaster’s window:

  Bully B, Bully B,

  My dad will come

  If you touch me!

  As for me, I could stand up to Mr. Bryce, or I wouldn’t have been school caretaker for so long. But if I’d been young and frightened, like poor Mr. Hartley—oh! There’s no doubt of it: Mr. Bryce knew how to pick his victims.

  But it was soon plain that Mr. Dickins wouldn’t need to stand up to Mr. Bryce: he became his friend instead, his bosom friend. They were always together: in school hours, they consulted together and took their cups of tea and their dinners together. In the evening, they would go for a drink together in the pub.

  For some reason, old Mr. Widdington, the vicar, became very much upset at this friendship. He was worrying about it one day when he met me in the village street. “And there’s another thing, Mr. Jackson,” he said. “Is this Mr. Dickins really suitable as a teacher, even for a short time? You’ve a grandchild in the Juniors; what does she say?”

  “Well, Vicar,” I said, “I think our Susie quite enjoys being taught by him.”

  “We must look for more than pleasure,” he said, shaking his reverend gray locks. He was an old-fashioned chap in his ideas. “What does he teach them?”

  “The usual things, I suppose,” I said, “even if he teaches them in these unusual, funny ways they do nowadays.”

  “Unusual? Funny?” Mr. Widdington said quite sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Susie says her class was doing number work or arithmetic or new math, or whatever they call it nowadays. Mr. Dickins wanted to show them five and five. So he lit all the fingers and thumb of one hand, like candles. And then, with his flaming fingers and thumb, he lit all the fingers and thumb of his other hand, so that he had five and five—ten candles.”

  After a little pause, Mr. Widdington said, “That was a conjuring trick.”

  “I suppose it must have been,” I said.

  “Anything else?” asked Mr. Widdington.

  “Well, Susie says he’s told them that he’s really a prince in another place.”

  “Where?”

  “He didn’t say. In another place. Those
were his words, according to Susie. But I said to Susie, ‘He can’t be one of our princes from Buckingham Palace, and there aren’t many princes about elsewhere, as there used to be, even abroad.’”

  “I don’t like it,” said Mr. Widdington. “‘A prince in another place‘—no, I don’t like it at all. I shall get in touch with the Education Authority to check up on the man’s background and qualifications.” (I thought to myself, And a nice long time that’ll take!) “And in the meantime,” said Mr. Widdington, “I shall make a point of having a private word with Mr. Bryce about his Mr. Dickins.”

  “You’ll be lucky, Vicar,” I said. “You’ll find it hard to get Bryce without Dickins; it’s like a man and his shadow, nowadays.”

  “I’ll get Bryce to come into the church for a chat,” said the vicar. The church and the churchyard are right next to the school, with only a wall between them and a door in the wall.

  I don’t know why the vicar thought he could get Mr. Bryce into the church without Mr. Dickins coming, too; the plan didn’t seem a particularly good one to me. But the vicar thought it was, and oddly, he was proved right.

  The next day, just after school, the vicar caught Mr. Bryce and asked him to come into the church to look at some arrangements there for the next Children’s Harvest Festival. Mr. Bryce could be quite obliging, if it suited him, and he agreed to go at once. “Coming, Nick?” he said over his shoulder to Mr. Dickins. Mr. Dickins hesitated for a moment, then followed them through the door into the churchyard.

  I pretended to be clearing rubbish in the playground, so that I could watch the three of them, over the wall.

  They were going through the churchyard by a path so narrow that you could only walk single file. Mr. Widdington led the way, and Mr. Dickins came last, and Mr. Bryce was in the middle, between the two of them. They rounded the corner of the church and so came to the main south door. Mr. Widdington was just leading the way into the church, and Mr. Bryce following, when I heard Mr. Dickins give a cry of pain, and they turned back to him. I couldn’t hear what was said, but it was plain from the tones of voice and the gestures that Mr. Dickins had twisted his ankle or hurt it in some way. He wanted to rest it, while the other two went into the church. So they went in, and he stayed outside, sitting on one tombstone with his foot up on another.

  I was watching Mr. Dickins, but I didn’t realize that he was also watching me. He never missed much. Now he waved to me in a very cheery way from his tombstone. I had the feeling that if I’d been near enough, I should have seen him wink.

  Mr. Widdington and Mr. Bryce were a long time talking in the church, but I didn’t think the talk went the way that Mr. Widdington had hoped. When they came out of the church, they didn’t come out together. Mr. Bryce burst out first and rushed up to Mr. Dickins as if he’d been longing to get back to him. He seized him by the hand and hauled him to his feet, paying no attention to the hurt done to Mr. Dickins’s ankle, and really it didn’t seem as if there could ever have been much wrong with it, anyway. They went striding off together, the two of them, arm in arm. And a little later the vicar came shuffling out of the church, by himself. He looked his age then, old, and dejected. Somehow defeated. Yes, as if he’d failed.

  And now Mr. Bryce and Mr. Dickins seemed closer than ever. They took to staying on at the school, after the children and Mrs. Salt had gone home, and Mr. Dickins would play his fiddle. He may have played well, but his tunes were strange, and I didn’t like to hear them.

  And now I noticed that Susie and her friends had a new little ditty for playtime. They’d dance in a ring and chant:

  Bully B, Bully B,

  Where are you going,

  And what do you see?

  It wasn’t just a few children, either. That nonsense chant became a kind of craze. All the children were singing the same song in playtime, dancing round in rings of five or six or seven. The playground was giddy with the whirling and singing. Once I saw Mr. Bryce at his window staring out on it all and, at his elbow, just behind him, Mr. Dickins smiling quietly to himself, as usual.

  All this was in the summer term. The weather was fine, dry, but there was no sultriness, no hint of storms building up. Yet, perhaps there was a strange feeling in the air, or was I just imagining it? Certainly old Mr. Widdington was fussing more than usual and more anxiously. He dropped into the school almost every day now, on one excuse or another. The dancing and singing of the children in the playground worried him. Why did they do it? he asked. He got me to ask Susie that: where the words and the dancing came from, who started it, or who had taught them all. But Susie didn’t know. She said they had all just begun doing it; that was all.

  I told Mr. Widdington what Susie had said, and he looked even more upset. I said, “Well, have you had an answer to that letter you wrote to the education people, about Mr. Dickins?”

  “Not yet. But I’ve also written to—to someone else.”

  I didn’t want to seem inquisitive. As it turned out, I learned soon enough who “someone else” was.

  Playtime was just over that day. The rings of dancing, singing children had broken up; they were all going back to their classrooms. I had been by the school gate, watching them. I heard footsteps coming up behind me, but I paid no attention. Then a voice: “Excuse me. Is Mr. Widdington about?”

  And the voice was the voice of poor young Mr. Hartley, who killed himself. …

  I turned round because I was too frightened not to, if you see what I mean, and there was Mr. Hartley looking at me! For two awful seconds, that’s what I thought, and then I realized that this man was very like our Mr. Hartley, but older, more solid-looking, and sunburned from foreign lands. He could see what I had been thinking. He said, “I am the brother of Timothy Hartley, who used to teach here. And you must be Mr. Jackson.” We shook hands. He explained that the vicar had asked him to meet him here; he was a little early. Then he said, “Mr. Widdington has asked me to see Mr. Bryce, to talk to him.”

  I said, “If it’s for the sake of your poor brother, Mr. Hartley, it’ll be a waste of your breath. It will, really.”

  “It’s not for his sake; it’s for Mr. Bryce’s own sake.”

  I could only stare at him. He went on: “Mr. Jackson, I would never, never have consented to come here to see that man, except that your Mr. Widdington asked me to—implored me to. He said the matter was very urgent, indeed.” I still stared at Mr. Hartley, and now he looked aside in an embarrassed way and said, “Mr. Widdington mentioned Mr. Bryce’s immortal soul.”

  From the school the fiddle playing of Mr. Dickins had started up; Mr. Dickins had never played his tunes in school hours before.

  The elder Mr. Hartley heard the fiddling. He said, “I’m not waiting for Mr. Widdington after all. I’m going to Mr. Bryce now. Now.”

  “Through that door then,” I said, and pointed across the playground.

  When he had gone into the school, everything was very quiet and still, except for the fiddling. That went on for a while. Then the door from the churchyard into the playground clicked, and I looked that way and saw the vicar coming through. He hesitated on the edge of the playground, looking round him. I was just going over to him when things began to happen.

  The school door through which Mr. Hartley had gone opened again, and he came out. He had not looked to me a man to be easily scared, but now his face was chalky white, his eyes were staring, and he walked altogether like a sleepwalker in a nightmare. He came across the deserted playground toward the gate, and I came forward a little to meet him.

  Behind him, in the doorway, appeared Mr. Bryce. His face was dark, and he was shouting foul abuse after Mr. Hartley—abuse not only of him but of the poor young man who had hanged himself. And behind Mr. Bryce smiled the face of Mr. Dickins.

  Mr. Bryce stood in the doorway, nearly filling it, for he was a big man. I’ve not yet told you what he looked like. Bullies can be fat or thin or medium-sized; Bully Bryce was the heavy, bull-like kind. He filled his clothes almost to bursting,
and his head seemed to have burst up out of his collar, and his eyes seemed to be bursting from his head. They were bloodshot eyes, as well as bulging, and they glared now, and when he bellowed his abuse across the playground, the spittle flew from his mouth at every word.

  Mr. Hartley had reached me, and I was partly supporting him, while he tried to recover himself. So we stood on the edge of the playground, and I was facing it. Mr. Hartley had his back to it at first, but pretty soon he turned his head to see what was fixing my attention. And the vicar, too, also on the edge of the playground, was staring, and Mrs. Salt, of the Infants, now stood in her doorway to the playground, gazing distractedly and crying, “Children! Children! Stop, stop!”

  For all the children of the school were coming out of it, onto the playground. The Infants were climbing out of the low windows of their classroom, one after another, and holding hands as they danced away across the playground, while Mrs. Salt called to them in vain, “Whatever are you doing? Stop, stop!” The Juniors, too, had come streaming out of the building and, hand in hand, ran and danced and joined up with the Infants in one long skein of children that moved to and fro in ceaseless meander over the playground.

  Now Mr. Bryce was advancing into the playground, always with Mr. Dickins at his elbow. At first I thought he was coming to put a stop to what was going on, but this was not so. He had stopped storming and shouting; he was quite silent. He walked slowly, perhaps reluctantly, step after step, into the middle of the playground, and the skein of dancing children kept clear of him as he moved. I saw that Mr. Dickins had tucked his fiddle under one arm and now had the other hooked into Mr. Bryce’s. They were arm in arm, as so often, but this time they were not walking equally. Mr. Dickins was urging Mr. Bryce forward, positively pulling him along. They reached the middle of the playground and went no further. And the children were running mazily about them, chanting now:

  Bully B, Bully B,