The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  It was even easier now to imagine that there were invisible creatures wandering over the surface of the overgrown orchard, or moving about beneath the bindweed, but they no longer seemed as monstrous as they had when Angie had first imagined them. It was easy enough to picture them as ordinary animals of an ordinary size— sheep, perhaps, or dogs—or even as people, more likely children than adults. It was easy enough, too, to imagine small people wandering in the gaps between the lines of her spirals, as if they were lost in a maze. Even though they couldn’t really be lost, Angie realized, they might still feel lost. If they didn’t know that the path would eventually lead them out, if only they stuck to it stubbornly, they could easily become convinced that they were wandering hopelessly around in wonky circles.

  When her father and Cathy finally arrived Angie tried to put the puzzle out of her mind for a while, but she couldn’t help dragging her father upstairs at the first possible opportunity to show him what she’d uncovered.

  “That’s interesting,” he said obligingly. “I wonder when that first layer of wallpaper was stuck on. Before nineteen hundred, probably—more than a century ago.”

  “The person who drew them must have been looking out of the window,” Angie said. “What do you suppose he could have been looking at?”

  “Staring into infinity, constructing mandalas,” her father replied. “He must have been left-handed, you know.”

  “I figured that out,” Angie was quick to say. “The left-handed bit I mean. What’s a mandala?”

  “Just a design—anything like a maze or spiral, however simple. There’s a famous psychoanalyst called Jung, who thought that they were reflections of something fundamental in the unconscious mind—maybe ways of symbolizing space, or time; I’m not sure.”

  “I thought it might be something in the garden,” Angie said.

  Her father obligingly looked down. “I can’t imagine what it could have been,” he said. “Certainly can’t tell now, with all that convolvulus getting in the way.”

  Angie knew that convolvulus was just a fancy term for bindweed. She gave up on her father at that point, but she made another bid for support when she finally persuaded Cathy to come in and take a look.

  “I’ve seen better tags on railway bridges and tube trains,” was Cathy’s judgment of the drawings on the wall.

  “Look out of the window,” Angie said. “Try to match the lines to the pattern of the treetops.”

  “There aren’t any treetops,” Cathy objected. “There’s just that green stuff with the white flowers, drowning everything.”

  “You can still see vague shapes underneath it,” Angie persisted.

  “I guess,” Cathy said. “You could imagine it as a miniature model of the downs, if you tried hard—except that the real hills don’t sway like that.”

  “That’s just the invisible monsters walking about on it,” Angie said, with a sigh of disappointment.

  “Right,” Cathy said. “So that’s, what the wind is: invisible monsters wandering back and forth. Good job I found out before I sit my GCSEs.”

  “Actually, they’re not that monstrous,” Angie said, resentfully. “They’re just ghosts, really. Animals, mostly, except for the boy. You can hear him at night, you know, crying—and sometimes you can hear his footsteps running over the roof. He’s looking for something, but I don’t know what. Maybe you’ll remind him of his mother and he’ll come to sit on your bed.”

  “You think you can scare me with silly ghost stories?” Cathy said, incredulously. “Listen, kid—I know all about ghosts. Dad says they can’t exist, because if they did there’d be at least six ghosts hanging around for every living person, most of them left over from prehistoric times—but what he doesn’t take into account is that only a few unlucky spirits get trapped here on Earth, while the rest make it through to the afterlife. If there’s a little boy ghost hanging around here, he’s far more likely to be interested in you than me. Misery loves company, they say.”

  “Maybe he’s not that little,” Angie countered. “Maybe he’s more of a teenager, still yearning for his first kiss after a hundred years of loneliness. He’ll be in your room tonight, there’s no doubt about it—watching you.”

  Cathy decided to laugh instead of getting angry; she was right about Angie’s inability to scare her by making things up. “In that case,” she said, “it’s up to me to help him out, isn’t it? You’re a weird kid, Ange—but I have to admit that you’re pretty good with a scraper. I’m glad I don’t have to do my room. Do you think Mum will be crazy enough to trust you with a paintbrush next week?”

  “Only in your room,” Angie replied. “Don’t worry—I’ll be sure to cover up all the magic mandalas on the walls.”

  “There aren’t any whatsits on my walls,” Cathy said, walking straight into the trap that Angie had set.

  “There could be, now that I’ve practiced drawing them,” Angie said. “But you’ll never know, once the walls are painted over, what anyone might have drawn or written there—or what they might be for.”

  “Sticks and stones might break my bones,” Cathy retorted, serenely, as she went back to her own room, “but the ghosts of little boys and invisible magical graffiti will never hurt me.”

  The topic came up again at dinner, this time raised by Angie’s mother—who was trying to help rather than to add to the rain of mockery.

  “Angie asked Mrs. Lamb what was out back before the orchard was planted,” Mrs. Martindale told her husband. “Apparently it was a vegetable garden and a herb garden. Is there any possibility, do you think, that there are still herb seeds lying dormant beneath all that rubbish? I quite like the idea of having a herb garden.”

  “I don’t think so,” Angie’s father replied. “It wouldn’t matter if there were. I’ll have to use weed-killer to kill off the roots of the hawthorns and the brambles once the actual growth’s cleared away. We’ll never get a lawn otherwise. What sort of herb garden was it, Angie?”

  “Is there more than one sort?” Angie asked.

  “There used to be. Your mother is thinking about herbs used in cooking—thyme, fennel, rosemary and the like. There was a time, though, when people grew herbs for medicinal purposes.”

  “Witches, you mean?” Cathy put in. “Must have been a lot of them around here, since the village is named after them.”

  “It’s not,” Angie said, quick to score a point. “It’s named after wych-elms.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Cathy. “So what are wych-elms named after, then?”

  “It’s possible that people who had herb gardens might have been more likely to be accused of witchcraft than people who didn’t,” their father said, cutting off the argument, “but that would have been back in the seventeenth century. If there was a medicinal herb garden behind the cottage in the 1920s, before the house became Orchard Cottage, its owner would have been perfectly respectable. Anyway, the Romans used to think that hawthorn was a charm against sorcery, so any witchcraft in our garden must have been obliterated long ago, along with the apple-trees.”

  “That’s a pity,” Cathy said. “It might have explained Angie’s ghost.”

  “What ghost?” Mrs. Martindale asked, while her husband frowned.

  “Nothing,” Angie was quick to say. “I just made it up to tease Cathy. She started it.”

  “I did not!” Cathy retorted, evidently feeling unjustly accused. “She started it, with her silly graffiti. She says there’s a little boy haunting the place. I just thought that if there’s a witch’s garden buried underneath all those brambles, it might be the ghost of some child sacrifice whose innocent blood had been used to fertilize the ground where the plants used to make love potions once grew.”

  “Where do you get such nasty ideas?” her mother complained.

  “She’s a teenager,” her father said, dismissively.

  “I never said any of that,” Angie added. “The witches and the human sacrifice were all Cathy’s idea.”

  “Unlike t
he invisible monsters and the magic graffiti,” Cathy pointed out.

  “That was just a joke,” Mrs. Martindale said.

  “Well, it’s probably best to get these things into the open and out of the way as soon as possible,” Mr. Martindale said, deliberately making light of it all. “We’ve bought an old ruined house built in the seventeenth century, which has been left to lie derelict for more than fifty years—exactly the sort of place that generates talk of hauntings. If you can cook up a good enough story between the two of you, my darlings, maybe we can get the place on TV, in one of those shows where people walk around in the dark, lit by infra-red, with glowing eyes, squawking in terror every time the director drops a paper-clip. I suppose I’d better take some photographs of those drawings on Angie’s wall. That’s the sort of thing the TV people like—the camera can zoom in on them over and over again, while they spin around suggestively. The entire audience will be hypnotized into seeing ghosts.”

  “I never thought of that,” Angie said, suddenly feeling stupid.

  “Getting the house on TV?” her father said.

  “No—taking photographs. I wasted all that time trying to copy them by hand.”

  “That’s because you don’t have a mobile phone yet,” Cathy put in, to emphasize the fact that she did have one. “If you’d borrowed Mum’s, you could have sent us pictures when you first found them.”

  “The time wasn’t wasted, love,” her father said. “Drawing’s good for hand and eye co-ordination, and very useful to an engineer. You should draw more.”

  “Have you got your digital camera with you?” Angie asked. “Can you take the photos anyway?”

  “I brought it down to take family photographs,” her father said. “And the house too, of course. I’ll certainly make a record of your discovery—and anything else we might unearth.”

  “You don’t really want the girls to go on one of those TV shows, do you, Rob?” Mrs. Martindale asked.

  “Of course not. Our girls are far too sensible to believe in ghosts, and far too honest to pretend. I was joking.”

  “Pity,” Cathy said. “The story was getting better every time we told it.”

  “That’s how these silly things develop,” her father said. “Every teller adds an extra twist. The sooner we get the walls painted and the back garden sorted, the sooner we’ll be able to see the cottage for what it really is, and what it deserves to be: our home-away-from-home, a place to rest and recuperate from the stress of city life.”

  “A place to get bored to death instead of scared to death,” Cathy added. “Personally, I’d rather be on TV, faking ghosts.”

  * * * *

  5.

  On Saturday Angie’s father drove the family to a large supermarket just outside Chichester. They stocked up enough food to see them all through the holiday weekend and make sure that Angie and her mother didn’t starve in the remainder of the week, when they’d be abandoned again. Mr. and Mrs. Martindale also bought lots of other oddments for the house, and items that would help with the cleaning and decorating.

  After lunch, there was supposed to be an all-out assault on the last of the wallpaper stripping, but among all the things they had bought no one had remembered to include a fourth scraper. Angie argued that she’d already done her share and more during the week, and that Cathy had a lot of catching up to do, so she was let off. Her delight in the unusual experience of watching Cathy work soon faded away, and she began to feel slightly uncomfortable being the only idle person is a busy house, so she went out into the front garden.

  Mrs. Lamb, who must have been taking a walk, had just paused in the road to inspect the house. “Hello Angela,” she said. “How’s the decorating coming along?”

  “Daddy’s going to start the plastering tomorrow,” Angie told her. “He’ll try to get it done before he goes back to Kingston, so that Mummy and I can start painting on Tuesday.”

  “It’s strange to see the place looking lived-in,” Mrs. Lamb observed. “I’ve got used to seeing it as a ruin.”

  “I found some drawings behind the wallpaper in my bedroom,” Angie told her. “Spirals, but bent out of shape. They’re beside the window—as if someone were trying to draw something that was in the garden before it was an orchard.”

  “Is that why you asked me if I knew what was there before the orchard?” Mrs. Lamb asked.

  “Yes,” Angie admitted. “You’d already said there was something nasty in there—I thought you might know something.”

  “No,” Mrs. Lamb said, thoughtfully. “Nothing specific, at any rate. I mentioned it in the village, though. Some of the regulars in The Elms said they remembered talk of a ghost—a little boy—but they’re the type who’d make up that sort of thing just to get a rise out of you.”

  “Cathy and I made up a ghost of our own,” Angie told her. “He’s a boy, too. I think he might be trapped in the old orchard because he can’t find his way out of the spiral, even though it’s not a real maze. All he has to do is keep on going, but he doesn’t know that, because he just seems to be going round and round and getting nowhere.”

  Mrs. Lamb looked at her sharply, then. The story had awakened her interest, as it had been intended to do, but this didn’t seem to be the right kind of interest.

  “You shouldn’t joke about things like that,” Mrs. Lamb said. “You shouldn’t make up stories, any more than those old fools in The Elms. Sometimes, spirits do become trapped between this world and the next, and it’s very frightening for them.”

  Angie could see by the pained expression on Mrs. Lamb’s face that she had accidentally touched a nerve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Our story doesn’t make sense, anyway—if the boy who made the drawings had been the one who got trapped in the maze, he’d know that it was just a spiral, not a real maze.”

  “Never you mind about ghosts,” the old lady said. “It’s not them you need to look out for.” Angie could tell that as soon as the final sentence was out of her mouth, the old lady wished she hadn’t said it.

  “What do we need to look out for?” Angie asked, immediately.

  “Townsfolk on motorbikes,” Mrs. Lamb replied, sharply— although Angie was quite certain that it wasn’t what she’d previously had in mind.

  “No, really,” Angie said.

  “Seeing things that aren’t there,” the old lady retorted, just as sharply—except that this time she did seem to mean it.

  Some day, Angie thought—perhaps a long time ago now—Mrs. Lamb must have seen something that wasn’t there. “What kind of herb garden was behind the house before the orchard?” she was quick to ask, to keep the conversation going. “Was it for cooking, or medicines—or magic?”

  “What an imagination you’ve got,” Mrs. Lamb observed, grimly. “For cooking, I expect.” The old lady’s manner suggested that there was still something that she was deliberately not saying.

  “It wouldn’t matter anyway,” Angie said, stubbornly plugging on. “Dad says that hawthorn wards off sorcery, so any magic there ever was in the orchard is dead now, just like the apple trees.”

  Mrs. Lamb tried to smile, and almost managed it. “I expect that’s right,” she said. “But you’d best remember what I said. Don’t go looking for things you don’t want to see.”

  “Maybe I do want to see them,” Angie said, teasingly.

  “If we only had to see what we wanted to see,” Mrs. Lamb retorted, “the world would be a nicer place. What I should have said was that you shouldn’t look too hard in places where there might be things you definitely wouldn’t want to see. Curiosity killed the cat, remember.”

  Having said that, Mrs. Lamb turned on her heel and marched off in the direction of Well House. She didn’t give Angie the opportunity to mention that cats were also supposed to have nine lives, and could probably afford a certain amount of curiosity. There was nothing to be done then but to go round to the back of the house and stare hard at the overgrown orchard, to see what might be seen.

  In ord
er to get a better view, Angie climbed up on to the side wall of the property. She wasn’t sure that she could keep her balance if she stood up on it, so she contented herself with sitting down. That left her at just the right height to look out over the waves of greenery from the same sort of viewpoint she’d have had if she’d been on a harbor at high tide, looking out over the waves of a wind-tossed sea.