by Gene Kemp
When he was level with the spring he walked across the open and stood by the low fence, gazing down at the troubled water. It looked very black, and in this light he couldn’t see into it at all. He tried to find the exact place he had stood in the dream, and waited. A narrow rim of moon-shadow cast by the wall on the left side edged the disc of water below. It thinned and thinned as the slow-moving moon heeled west. And now it was gone.
The reflection of the moon, broken and scattered by the endlessly upswelling water, began to pass glimmeringly across the disc below. Derek could feel the turn of the world making it move like that. His heartbeat came in hard pulses, seeming to shake his body. Without knowing what he was doing, he climbed the fence and clung to its inner side so that he could gaze straight down into the water. His own reflection, broken by the ripples, was a squat black shape against the silver moonlight. He crouched with his left arm clutching the lowest rail and with his right arm strained down towards it. He could just reach. The black shape changed as the reflection of his arm came to meet it. The water was only water to his touch.
Somehow he found another three inches of stretch and plunged his hand through the surface. The water was still water, but then another hand gripped his.
He almost lost his balance and fell, but the other hand didn’t try to pull him in. It didn’t let go either. When Derek tried to pull free the hand came with him, and an arm behind it. He pulled, heaved, strained. A head broke the surface. Another arm reached up and gripped the top of the side wall. Now Derek could straighten and take a fresh hold higher up the fence. And now the stranger could climb out, gasping and panting, over the fence and stand on the moonlit lawn beside him. He was a boy about Derek’s own age, wearing ordinary clothes like Derek’s. They were dry to the touch.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ said the boy. ‘Have we got somewhere to live?’
‘I suppose you’d better come home.’
They walked together towards the trees.
‘Who …?’ began Derek.
‘Not now,’ said the stranger.
They stole on in silence. We’ll have to walk the whole way home, thought Derek. Mightn’t get in before breakfast. How’m I going to explain?
The ladder was still against the wall. They climbed it, straddled the top, lowered the ladder the far side and climbed down, propping it back against its tree. Then back towards the road.
There were two bikes hidden in the bushes.
‘How on …?’ began Derek.
‘Not now,’ said the stranger.
They biked in silence the whole way home, getting in just as the sky was turning grey. They took off their shoes and tiptoed up the stairs. Derek was so tired he couldn’t remember going to bed.
They were woken by Cindy’s call outside the door.
‘Hi! Pests! Get up! School bus in twenty mins!’
Derek scrambled into his clothes and just beat David down the stairs. Dad was in the hallway, looking through the post before driving off to work.
‘Morning, twins,’ he said. ‘Decided to have a lie-in?’
They gobbled their breakfast and caught the bus by running. Jimmy Grove had kept two seats for them. He always did.
Very occasionally during that year Derek felt strange. There was something not quite right in the world, something out of balance, some shadow. It was like that feeling you have when you think you’ve glimpsed something out of the corner of your eye but when you turn your head it isn’t there. Once or twice it was so strong he almost said something. One evening, for instance, he and David were sitting either side of Mum while she leafed through an old photograph album. They laughed or groaned at pictures of themselves as babies, or in fancy dress – Tweedledum and Tweedledee – and then Mum pointed at a picture of an old woman with a crooked grinning face, like a jolly witch, and said, ‘I don’t suppose you remember her. That’s Great-aunt Tessa. You went to her funeral.’
‘I remember the funeral,’ said David. ‘There was a grisly sort of cousin who grabbed us and told us how handsome we were, and then talked over our heads about us to someone else as if we couldn’t understand what she was saying.’
‘She had a face like a sick fish,’ said Derek.
‘Oh, Cousin Vi. She’s a pain in the neck. She …’
And Mum rattled on about Cousin Vi’s murky doings for a bit and then turned the page, but for a moment Derek felt that he had almost grasped the missing whatever-it-was, almost turned his head quick enough to see something before it vanished. No.
On the whole it was a pretty good year. There were dud bits. David broke a leg in the Christmas hols, which spoilt things for a while. The girls kept complaining that the house wasn’t big enough for seven, especially with the pests growing so fast, but then Jackie got a job and went to live with friends in a flat in Totton. Dad bought a new car. Those were the most exciting things that happened, so it was a nothing-much year, but not bad. And then one weekend in June Mum and Dad went off to the abbey to look at the roses again. Cindy and Fran were seeing friends, so it was just the twins who tagged along.
The roses were the same as last year, and Mum and Dad slower than ever, so after a bit David said, ‘Let’s go and look at the river. OK, Mum?’
Dad gave them a quid for ices and told them when to be back at the car. They raced twigs on the river, tried to spot the largest trout, and then found the stream that ran through the lawn and followed it up to the spring. They stood staring at the uprushing water for a long while, not saying anything. In the end Derek looked at his watch, saw it was almost four, woke David from his trance and raced him off to look for ices.
A few nights later Derek woke with his heart pounding. It was something he’d dreamt, but he couldn’t remember the dream. He sat up and saw that David’s bed was empty. When he got up and put his hand between the sheets, they were still just warm to the touch.
All at once memory came back, the eleven years when he’d been on his own and the year when he’d had David. The other years, the ones when he’d been growing up with a twin brother and the photographs in the album had been taken – they weren’t real. By morning he wouldn’t remember them. By morning he wouldn’t remember David either. There was just this one night.
He rushed into his clothes, crept down the stairs and out. The door was unlocked. David’s bike was already gone from the shed. He got his own out and started off.
The night was still, but he felt as though he had an intangible wind in his face. Every pedal-stroke was an effort. He put his head down and rode on. Normally, he knew, he’d be faster than David, whose leg still wasn’t properly strong after his accident, but tonight he guessed David would have the spirit wind behind him, the wind from some other world. Derek didn’t think he would catch him. All he knew was that he had to try.
In fact he almost ran into him, about two miles from the abbey, just after the turn off the main road. David was trotting along beside his bike, pushing it, gasping for breath.
‘What’s happened?’ said Derek.
‘Got a puncture. Lend me yours. I’ll be too late.’
‘Get up behind. We’ll need us both to climb the wall. There mayn’t be a ladder this time.’
Without a word David climbed on to the saddle. Derek stood on the pedals and drove the bike on through the dark. They leaned the bike against the wall where the ivy grew. It still wasn’t thick enough to climb, but it was something to get a bit of a grip on. David stood on the saddle of the bike. Derek put his hands under his heels and heaved him up, grunting with the effort, till David could grip the coping of the wall. He still couldn’t pull himself right up, but he found a bit of a foothold in the ivy and hung there while Derek climbed on to the crossbar, steadied himself, and let David use his shoulder as a step. A heave, a scrabble, and he was on the wall.
Derek stood on the saddle and reached up. He couldn’t look, but felt David reach down to touch his hand, perhaps just to say goodbye. Derek gripped the hand and held. David heaved. Scrab
bling and stretching, Derek leaped for the coping. He heard the bike clatter away beneath him. David’s other hand grabbed his collar. He had an elbow on the coping, and now a knee, and he was up.
‘Thanks,’ he muttered.
The drop on the far side was into blackness. There could have been anything below, but there seemed no help for it. You just had to hang from the coping, let go and trust to luck. Derek landed on softness but wasn’t ready for the impact and stumbled, banging his head against the wall. He sat down, his whole skull filled with the pain of it. Dimly he heard a sort of crash, and as the pain seeped away worked out that David must have fallen into a bush. More cracks and rustles as David struggled free.
‘Are you OK?’ came his voice.
‘Think so. Hit my head.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m OK. Let’s get on.’
They struggled out through a sort of shrubbery, making enough noise, it seemed, to wake all Hampshire. Derek’s head was just sore on the outside now. Blood was running down his cheek. David was already running, a dark limping shape about twenty yards away. His leg must have gone duff again after all that effort. Derek followed him across the moonlit slopes and levels. They made no effort to hide. If anyone had been watching from the house they must have seen them, the moonlight was so strong. At last they stood panting by the fence of the spring. The rim of shadow still made a thin line under a wall.
‘Done it,’ whispered David. ‘I thought I was stuck.’
‘What’d have happened?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘What’s it like … the other side?’
‘Different. Sh.’
The shadow vanished and the reflection of the moon moved on to the troubled disc. Derek glanced sideways at his brother’s face. The rippled, reflected light glimmered across it, making it very strange, grey-white like a mushroom, and changing all the time as the ripples changed, as if it wasn’t even sure of its own proper shape.
David climbed the fence, grasped the bottom rail and lowered his legs into the water. Derek climbed too, gripped David’s hand and crouched to lower his brother – yes, his brother still – his last yard in this world. David let go of the rail and dropped. Derek gripped his hand all the way to the water.
As he felt that silvery touch the movement stopped, and they hung there, either side of the rippled mirror. David didn’t seem to want to let go, either.
Different? thought Derek. Different how?
The hand wriggled, impatient. Something must be happening the other side. No time to make up his mind. He let go of the rail.
In the instant that he plunged towards the water he felt a sort of movement around him, very slight, but clear. It was the whole world closing in, filling the gap where he had been. In that instant, he realized everything changed. Jackie would still be at home, Fran would be asleep in his room, not needing to share with Cindy. Nobody would shout at him to come to breakfast. His parents would go about their day with no sense of loss; Jimmy Grove would keep no place for him on the school bus; Mum would be a director of her company, with a car of her own … and all the photographs in the albums would show the same cheerful family, two parents, three daughters, no gap, not even the faintest shadow that might once have been Derek.
He was leaving a world where he had never been born.
Almost a Ghost Story
ROBERT WESTALL
‘Is the abbey really haunted?’ asked Rachel.
‘Well, there’s the ghost of the nun,’ teased Mum. ‘Rubbish,’ said Dad, without taking his eyes off the road. ‘What would a nun be doing in a monastery?’
‘There’s the Nun’s Grave,’ said Mum, leading him on. And getting him on his high horse, like she always could.
‘It’s been proved, time and again, that the Nun’s Grave’s an eighteenth-century folly. Bits of the old church dug up and stuck together to improve the view from the squire’s drawing room windows. They’ve excavated it three times – nothing but black beetles.’ He changed gear grumpily. The long driveway to the abbey had become very bumpy. The headlights turned it into a series of miniature mountains and black caverns.
A tall grey shape with upstretched arms glowed dimly into view, far away; grew and grew till every last twig glistened white against the darkness; then, when it seemed about to engulf them, whirled away overhead. Then another, and another. Once, said Dad, there’d been a whole avenue of beech trees, but each winter gale left fresh gaps. Huge beech-corpses lay at intervals, shorn of their branches by power saws.
‘All the same,’ said Mum, ‘it feels funny, coming back after all this time. How long has it stood empty?’
‘Twenty years – since the country club closed. I was there when it happened – we were under drinking age, but they were letting in anybody with money at the end. Anyway, the barman dropped a crate of beer in the upstairs bar, and the beer trickled down through the floorboards and blew all the wiring. You ought to have seen the sparks. We thought we were all going up in a blue light – we never stopped running till we reached Davenham. Club closed straight after …’ Dad laughed to himself, at the memory of being a young rip; he was never cross for long. But Mum couldn’t leave him alone.
‘Perhaps the nun disapproved of all that boozing …’
‘Rubbish! That electric wiring must’ve come out of the ark. It’s just that they tried to turn the abbey into so many things – Civil Defence Centre, school for accountants – none of them prospered.’
His voice trailed off. The gaunt beeches continued to appear and whirl overhead. Rachel snuggled up tight behind Mum and Dad’s shoulders. It was suddenly cold, dark and lonely in the back of the Maxi. There was a draught and a rattle from the right-hand door.
‘Daddy, my door’s not shut properly …’
Dad reached behind him without stopping, opened the door and slammed it solidly. That made Rachel feel better. So did the string of car rear lights in front; the distant headlights behind, bouncing wildly into the sky as the following cars hit the cart ruts in the drive. Rachel was glad they weren’t alone.
‘It’s a good place for a Christmas concert,’ said Mum, snuggling down into her fur collar with an enjoyable shiver. ‘With a ghost an’ all …’
‘The new owners are desperate for funds. Place is full of dry rot. They say that upstairs the hardboard partitions are buckled with it, like a shell had hit them. And down in the cellars, it grows out of the walls like an old man’s beard.’
‘D’you think it’ll be safe?’ asked Mum, suddenly really worried.
‘You bought the tickets. You wanted the thrill!’
‘I don’t want to break me ankle.’
‘That’s more likely than any flippin’ ghost.’
‘Were the monks good men?’ asked Rachel, suddenly.
‘Bunch of layabouts,’ Dad snorted. ‘Lived a life of idle luxury. Tried to build a church bigger’n Westminster Abbey – for only twenty of them – only the walls blew down in a great storm, afore they got the roof on, an’ that was that. But they still went on squeezing their tenants for every penny they had. Tenants murdered one monk, an’ played football wi’ his head.’
‘Oh,’ said Rachel.
‘That nun,’ said Mum dreamily. ‘The book said she fell in love with the wicked Abbot an’ pined away.’
‘That book was the worst Victorian novel ever written. Ever tried reading it?’
‘Only the first five pages. Then I skipped, looking for juicy bits.’
‘Find any?’
Mum shook her head as they swung on to the rough grassy car park.
‘Looks funny, all lit up,’ said Dad. ‘I came past it many a time, in me courting days, an’ never a light but the moon glinting on the windows.’
‘You never brought me,’ said Mum.
‘Where’s the Nun’s Grave?’ asked Rachel.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Dad, glancing at his watch and getting his big rubber torch out of the glove compartment. ‘We’ve got fi
ve minutes before it starts.’
‘Not me,’ shivered Mum. ‘Give me the tickets and I’ll keep your seats.’
Dad and Rachel walked down the great dark side of the abbey; the grass was so frosty it scrunched under their feet.
‘Them’s the Abbot’s chimneys,’ said Dad, nodding upwards. Rachel stared up at the great black hexagons, towering above the roofline.
‘How long have the abbots been gone?’
‘Henry the Eighth got shot of them – sold the house to the Holcrofts. It passed from hand to hand after that – nobody kept it long. Last real owner went to farm in Kenya in 1940. Then it was a prisoner-of-war camp – Jerries. Anyway, here’s your so-called grave.’
He shone the torch. There was a hexagonal stone base, then a square pillar, then a little stone house on top, with a figure sitting in the arch. In the torchlight, Rachel could see that the figure’s hands and face had been worn away by wind and rain. And yet, as Dad flicked the torch contemptuously around, you could almost make out a little face … nose and eyes … but they changed, as the light flickered.
‘She’s got a headdress like a nun!’
‘All ladies wore them, in those days. C’mon, or your mum’ll be having a fit.’
There was a man on the door, in overcoat, hat and muffler up to his ears. He waved them through, with a mumble through the muffler, because Mum had explained about the tickets. They were in a long, long vaulted corridor, colder than outside. It had been painted a filthy bright orange by the owners of the country club, but that made it more spooky, not less. Like Dracula wearing make-up.
‘There’s the Ladies, in case you need it,’ said Dad. They walked on and on, under the orange vaults and weak buzzing neons, past the black, black windows.
