An English Ghost Story

by Kim Newman

  Her knees were shaky, as if a weight were humped on her back. She reached out with both hands to lean on the walls. The tower stairs were narrow. A pleasant, appley-woody smell was unique to this part of the house. The stairs seemed narrower, the walls nearer. Light spilled into the gloom from a window at the end of the landing.

  She found herself sitting on the stairs.

  The back of her brain buzzed with the beginnings of what Vron diagnosed as ‘complex panic attacks’ but the rest of the family just called her ‘turns’. It had been months since she’d felt this. Even in London, she had got over these episodes. Their return was not welcome, could not be allowed at the Hollow. She got over it now, by force of will. Closing her eyes, gripping the cool brass rails, inhaling the appley-woody smell, she quelled the buzzing and overcame the incipient turn.

  The Hollow made her stronger.

  This was something Vron would never have been able to prescribe, even in her witchiest moods. Though Vron had reached out, sent messages. Were the two books supposed to be instruction or a warning?

  Kirsty opened her eyes and turned round.

  From where she was, halfway down the flight of stairs, she could see only six inches or so of the landing. Tassels hung over the top stair, from a long carpet that ran down the centre of the landing, a faded red and purple strip which left grey-white boards bare at either side.

  She saw a pair of shoes.

  Not Jordan’s shoes. These were smaller, a child’s, and old-fashioned. The heel was high. Rows of buttons rose above the ankles.

  She didn’t need to ask if there was anyone there.

  She didn’t need to crane to see if anyone stood in the shoes.

  There was a strange flood of relief.

  ‘Weezie,’ she said aloud.

  A ripple of laughter sounded. Giggly, girlish, carefree, innocent. It poured over Kirsty like a warm wave. The appley-woody smell surged and became almost overpowering, like a lungful of dope smoke. The aches in her knees and elbows were taken away.

  Kirsty felt a spark in her chest and was grateful.

  Then, she was angry. It wasn’t fair. Everything had been going well for her, but now Jordan was demanding again, taking up her attention even as she whined about being left alone. The daughter crisis diverted Kirsty from what she wanted to do, what she wanted to be. Why should the selfish girl’s sulky moods – self-destruction laced with blatant attention-getting – make her the centre of the universe? Kirsty resented being shunted aside into a cliché trembling on the stairs. Here, in the Hollow, she mattered too, and had a right to her share of the magic.

  The girl on the landing was angry too.

  * * *

  The wardrobe in her room was built into a corner and, for some reason, disguised. A pair of brass flowers concealed a hook and eye arrangement.

  Jordan lifted the hook and pulled the door open.

  An old-lady dress hung before her, scented with violets and medicine, a striped cardigan on the same hanger. She took it down and tossed it on the bed. Another dress hung behind it, much like the first. She reached in with her whole arm. Stiff, taffeta-like material scratched her bare skin. She pulled out an armful of dresses. The wardrobe still seemed full.

  The musty collection of old-lady outfits went back and back into the wall. Louise must have kept every dress she had ever owned. Eventually, Jordan found a layer of middle-aged clothes – an evening gown with a silk flower sewn to the shoulder – and then the dresses she’d been looking for.

  They were all the same, white and elegant and simple. Audrey Hepburn-style evening wear, with matching arm-length gloves and court shoes. In different sizes.

  The first was a balloon. She held it against her body and looked in the mirror. Flaps and folds hung loose. The next dress was a better fit. She slipped it on over her T-shirt and knickers. It was limp on her hips.

  The next dress fitted. She had to take off her T-shirt and hold her breath to get into it. The material was tight, too tight, over her ribs and bottom. She looked at herself in the mirror, holding up her hair and angling her neck, disapproving of the chubbiness growing around her chin and even under her ears.

  The next dress in, a size smaller, was the one she fell in love with. It shone somehow, not like the drab thing she had on, and would be her second skin. She stroked it, with longing, and anticipation.

  It was not beyond her. A year ago, before she got fat, she could have got into the dress. She couldn’t wait another year. It would take serious work, but she had a goal and Dad said that goals were important.

  Eating only the right things. And fewer of them.

  Careful exercise. Tummy and bum exercises, not arm and leg exercises. If she gained muscle mass, the dress would split at the hips and have ridiculous Popeye arms. She needed slim arms, a velvet sheath of skin over bone and wire.

  She looked at herself in the dress she would make do with until then. She saw the wobble of her stomach, navel outlined against the silk, and was repulsed by the pads of fat on her hips, around her nipples,

  …That’s not fat, Rick had once said, those are breasts; they come with the gender…

  under her arms, on her thighs.

  They would go. She had banished Rick with that letter, which she must put in the post immediately. She would forget every misleading thing he’d said, every wrong turn he had passive-aggressively let her take.

  She breathed out and saw her ribs move, emphasising the pear shape she was determined to lose.

  The dress, her goal, hung at the front of the wardrobe, a white tube. Behind it, she saw with a frisson, was another dress, lovelier still and a size smaller; and behind that…

  * * *

  ‘What news from the front?’ Steven asked.

  Kirsty glanced up at the ceiling.

  ‘All quiet,’ she said.

  Tim sat by the fireplace. He had disassembled his catapult and was cleaning and testing every component, using a rag and a tin of shoe-polish.

  ‘Has the little shit even phoned?’

  His wife shook her head.

  Steven was genuinely angry, though he thought this was a lesser evil than having Mr Precious around. If the toad were beating his daughter up, he couldn’t have done her more harm. If Rick were here, he’d be tempted to slap him silly. But if he were here, this wouldn’t be happening.

  ‘Should I call his father? Just to get things settled?’

  ‘I think things are settled,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘So do I.’

  He sat in his favourite armchair – high-backed, well-padded, by the fireplace. Come mid-winter, it would be the place to be in the Summer Room.

  ‘Did you go to the postbox?’ Kirsty asked.

  How could she have known? His stomach knotted and he found himself gripping the chair’s arms.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Anything you wanted sent off?’

  ‘Jordan’s written a letter.’

  ‘Ah.’ He eased inside. This was something else.

  ‘Yes.’

  Tim restrung the rubber of his catapult and tested the give of the material. Steven wasn’t sure whether his son had found the thing or made it. It was always with him. He slept with it under his pillow. When Steven was a boy, Dr Spock’s followers called such things fetish objects – he had prized a bright-red fire engine, and his best friend Jimmy Dee always carried an old, pea-less brass whistle – and were strict about weaning kids off them. He didn’t see the harm.

  Maybe he’d just never changed. As a grown-up, he suffered terrible fire-engine-type withdrawal symptoms if he ever left his Psion organiser behind on even the most trivial or recreational venture beyond his office.

  ‘I’ve been talking with Mr Wing-Godfrey. A deputation from the Society are coming at the end of the month.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll have to feed them Weezie cakes and high tea like at Drearcliff Grange. I bet none of them have kids.’

  ‘You mustn’t be a bore about it,’ she chided, not smiling. ‘They take
Louise Magellan Teazle seriously.’

  ‘I wonder if Louise would have wanted that. She might have been trying to be funny.’

  He had looked at a Weezie book as a boy and shuddered at the twee overdose. He had read American superhero comics. He could remember every detail of every panel of certain Fantastic Four or Daredevil issues, though he’d not physically seen them since his Mum gave his collection to War on Want during his first term away at university.

  ‘I want to do something special for the Society,’ Kirsty continued. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot…’

  ‘Uh oh… Danger, danger, warning, warning…’

  ‘HH, VF,’ Kirsty said, quelling his sarky tone.

  Had he overstepped the mark? At the Hollow, they’d relaxed so much he’d forgotten how sensitive she was about the way her last big plan turned out (though not so completely that he hadn’t pulled that SS – Sneaky Switcheroo – with the bank letter) and only now did the blazing meltdowns come back to him. When Oddments was going down in flames, so – it had seemed – was the family.

  ‘There might be a percentage in looking after the house, putting a bit of money into restoration.’

  ‘All mod cons?’

  ‘More like all old cons. With advice, we could get the place exactly as it was when Weezie was here.’

  ‘Which, if you remember, was only last year.’

  ‘Not Louise, Weezie. This is the house in the books, Hilltop Heights. We could get a replica made of the sign over the door, maybe change the name.’

  That was a bad idea. He felt it deep in his water, reacting strongly even before he could think about why Kirsty was wrong.

  ‘We’re on a moor, not a hill,’ he said. ‘This is a Hollow, not a Heights.’

  Kirsty angled her head on one side. She was also trying to say something she couldn’t put into words. They were venturing further out onto the ice. He recognised her incipient smouldering.

  (When angry, she was terrifying, a biter and a breaker.)

  ‘I know, but it’s as if the Hollow wants to rearrange itself.’

  ‘And we’re merely keepers of the flame?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, but we have to respect the house. This is not an ordinary place.’

  ‘You’ll get no arguments from me on that, Kirst. But, with respect, Weezie was never real and Louise is gone. We live at the Hollow now. Us, the Naremores. It’s our home. If it’s rearranging itself, it’s to suit us. We can’t live and work in a museum of childhood chintz.’

  ‘There are grants available for sites of interest.’

  Kirsty had always been keen on grants and loans and start-up schemes. Oddments had been puffed up with every hand-out going, and hadn’t been able to survive after the dole dried up.

  ‘It’s all very well to have Wing-Weirdie and his pals over for tea and buns, but you can’t cover the walls with Weezie paper to keep him happy.’

  ‘I knew you’d take it like this.’ Kirsty’s face was in shadow. ‘It’s a threat to you, OMB, isn’t it?’

  OMB. O Mighty Breadwinner.

  Tim looked up sharply, catapult at the ready.

  ‘Is this an argument?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a discussion,’ Steven assured him.

  ‘That’s all right, then. You promised. No arguments.’

  ‘So we did, soldier.’

  He looked at his wife and still couldn’t see her face.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said in precisely the tone that implied that nothing was all right or ever would be again. He couldn’t tell which of them she was failing to reassure. ‘Mum’s just off her head, as usual.’

  ‘But it’s such a nice head,’ he said, getting up.

  He wasn’t going to let ill-feeling last till bedtime. He was going to crawl to Kirsty, give her some ground (or at least seem to) and make things right again, in this room, at this instant. The move to the Hollow proved he could change, that he was not trapped in the patterns of the past.

  He stood up and walked to the long table. A splay of Weezie books was laid out like prospectuses in a travel agent’s. He pulled Kirsty up out of her chair and held her to him.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘You’re right. The Hollow is a responsibility. Get what you can out of Wing-Godfrey’s Society, only don’t let them run our lives.’

  ‘They won’t,’ she said, still cold. ‘They can’t.’

  He kissed her.

  ‘And, darling, think of the ghosts. How much do you want outsiders to know about them?’

  She closed her eyes.

  * * *

  Tim wasn’t fooled. His parents cuddled, but he stepped up to DefCon 2. There were definite signs that the peace was breaking. It was a strain to keep to treaty terms.

  The U-Dub was stripped, cleaned and back together.

  Something he could depend on.

  He would have to be careful. Negotiations with the IP were at a delicate stage. It wasn’t a question of going over to their side. He would always owe primary allegiance to the family unit. No state of hostility existed between the IP and the FU. He wasn’t sure such a state was even possible.

  Of them all, he was closest to the IP. Perhaps it was because he was physically nearer the ground, used to looking up at faces and paying attention to skirting boards. He was small for his age, shorter than most of the boys in his old class at school.

  Did his parents not see the girl standing in the fireplace, still as a statue? Dressed all in black, all black herself. Not like West Indian children in the city – they were brown, really. This girl was coal-black, down to her lips and eyeballs, camouflaged against sooty bricks.

  He saluted the IP officer.

  The black eyes passed approvingly over him and fastened on his parents.

  They’re five by five really, he thought at her, with a tiny, half-embarrassed shrug. Mum and Dad were doing that grown-up kissy stuff most kids were obsessed with. Unhygienic and surplus to requirements, but it was not his place to criticise.

  The black face didn’t smile or frown. Nothing was given away.

  The little girl stuck out her arms and legs, fastening toes and fingers into crannies in the walls at either side of the chimney, and scuttled upwards swiftly, like a big spider, climbing silently out of sight.

  A fine rain of soot fell, unnoticed by anyone except him.

  There were others in the room, but he was used to them. Dad’s chair was one, a set of dents and impressions in its back resembling a scowling face. A single pane of glass set high in the French windows was an eternal smile, which showed only in the afternoon when you stood in the doorway (and were four feet tall). The smile had eyes in other panes, but they were fixed like a painting; the smile could change from a close-lipped friendly crescent to an almost-ferocious grin, displaying rows of pearly whites.

  The IP were good people, Tim knew. Rock solid and reliable in a world where everything was always shifting. Men to go into the jungle with and have at your back during the thickest firefight.

  But there was something about that smiling window. Like a smirk in the ranks at inspection. Nothing against regulations, but Tim knew something was being put over on the sly. He had that one marked down as a potential discipline problem.

  Tim would keep an eye out in that direction. At the first sign of trouble, he would lodge an official complaint with the IP C.-in-C.

  The MP and the PP were dancing close together, without any music.

  Time to fade into the scenery.

  * * *

  After midnight, in her new dress, Jordan came down from her room, gliding silently so as not to wake anyone (they were all off in their tower, anyway). She went out into the orchard. It had been a hot day, stuffy in her room, so the chill of night was welcome, like feathers brushing her bare shoulders and arms. In the dark, she wasn’t such a grotesque frump. If she kept to shadows, the dress would make her seem slim.

  It was tight for walking, but a hidden slit, up to the thigh, meant she could make her w
ay. The shoes were a problem. She had kept her trainers (silly as they might look) because she knew walking along the unlit road to the village in heels was an invitation to disasters, from feet chafed bloody to a dunking in a ditch.

  In her right hand, the only part of her which was as slim and pale as she wanted to be all over, she held the Letter. Eighteen pages of perfect venom. Posting it would be a significant juncture in her life. The end of Rick and the birth of the new Jordan, the thin girl.

  She walked down the drive, opened the gate a crack, and tried to slip through. Her hips caught and she had to push the gate open wider to escape. Her cheeks burned with humiliation but there was no one to see. The night breeze stroked away her blush with a sympathetic touch.

  Cold caresses and whisper kisses.

  There was no traffic at this hour. She walked down the middle of the road, trainers flapping, her dress hiked up around her thighs to keep it from trailing along the tarmac. The Letter was tucked warm under her armpit, to impregnate it with the scent of her body, to remind Rick of what was lost to him for ever.

  Out of sight of the house and not yet within sight of the village, she wondered what she was doing. She was all alone on the face of a dark earth. Only the paved road distinguished this landscape from the moors King Alfred had known. The stars were fixed above her, glinting messages from a million years ago.

  What was she doing?

  She wasn’t fat and she was being silly.

  The caresses and chills were withdrawn. She was hot inside, almost with a fever. She spun around and around, dress skirling out like a flamenco dancer’s. The Letter slipped out of its flesh-nook, sailing over the verge and a rhyne. It fell, a shining white oblong, in dark grey-green grass.

  Her head buzzed.

  She looked at the black marble water of the ditch. A full yard across, unfathomably deep. Its verges were overgrown with sharp reeds and grasses, suggesting a patch of marsh into which a whole person could sink and be stuck.

  She was not dressed for fording the rhyne.

  Her fingers still tingled with the effort of typing the letter, the pads of her forefingers flattened from repeated jamming against the keys.