by Will Maclean
Abigail would then go on to tell how she was alone in the house one afternoon, and heard the scrapes and thuds in the attic for real, not in a dream. Terrified, she ran up the ladder to see if there was anyone up there. And there, scared out of her mind, she saw the terrible bride, with her rotting face and her black, bottomless eyes.
The weakest part of our story was the last bit. How had Abigail managed to take a picture, whilst being absolutely terrified? We never succeeded in making this sound anything but contrived, like something from the adventure stories we had grown up reading with a relentlessly critical eye, where plucky eleven-year-olds somehow have the presence of mind and physical strength to grab a gun from an armed robber. We settled on the following: the terrible bride began to fade away, but Abigail grabbed her camera and took one single snap before it faded away completely. It stank, but it would have to do. Somehow, I didn’t imagine Janice Tupp would dig too deeply into the logic of it all.
Most of the conversation between Abigail and Janice was too far away to read, but the moment when Abigail revealed the photo was unmistakeable. Janice started suddenly and tried to stand, her back sliding up the wall as she pushed away from the ground. Her eyes never left the picture. She tensed up and, to the surprise of both myself and Abigail, ran away, as fast as she could, zig-zagging this way and that through the various games of football and tag taking place across the playground, until she was out of sight.
I judged from this that our photo was a success.
Half the playground away, Abigail grinned at me with evident pride. We had achieved something amazing. Maybe we could now even send the picture to the local paper and get it published, fooling the world like the two girls who took the Cottingley Fairy photographs in 1917, although an audience of sceptical grown-ups would be a lot harder to convince than Janice Tupp. Abigail and I had agreed not to speak at school about the photo. We would decide on what course of action was best at the end of the day. I was feverishly excited.
The next lesson after lunch was Comprehension, presided over by Mr Crutton, a fearsome man in his late fifties who wore an ancient green suit and had luxuriant white hair spilling from ears that supported the arms of his tortoiseshell-framed glasses. Mr Crutton insisted on absolute silence in his classes and, after setting us a series of tedious exercises that would last the exact duration of the lesson, would invariably spend the next hour reading the Daily Telegraph. He always smelled of pipe tobacco and Murray Mints, and thinking about him now, as an adult, I suspect he was probably hungover for much of the time.
Abigail and I sat apart, as we always did, me at the back of the class and her at the front. Incredibly close though we were at home, we barely spent any time together at school. Halfway between us sat Janice Tupp. I thought she looked nervous and even more hunted than usual, if that was possible, but after a few seconds I stopped thinking about her altogether.
Experience had taught me that the only way through this lesson was to immerse yourself in the boring exercises without resisting, until you could hear the sound of your own thoughts. This was the method I was employing that day. As such, it was some time before I became aware that Janice Tupp was standing up.
Mr Crutton could fly into a violent rage at even the most minor disturbance to his lessons. In the past, these disturbances had included pupils shuffling papers, sharpening pencils and sighing too loudly, and he was not averse to physically expelling the offenders from his classroom. Janice’s behaviour was absolutely unheard of. What was she thinking? I looked at Abigail, and discovered she was already looking back at me. Our looks to each other wordlessly communicated our thoughts – we both suspected this had something to do with us.
‘WHAT do you think you are doing, Tupp?’ Mr Crutton’s voice boomed around the classroom walls. Normally it would strike fear into even the most brazen of us, but Janice Tupp didn’t look afraid. If anything, she looked disappointed, and sad, and terribly pale. For the first time, I became worried that we might have gone too far.
‘I need to go home,’ she said quietly.
‘WHAT did you say?’ Mr Crutton was incredulous. His eyes were so wide with furious disbelief I wondered if one or both of them would pop out of their sockets, to press wetly against the lenses of his bifocals.
‘I need to go home,’ repeated Janice, as if the conversation bored her.
‘What are you talking about? Are you ill, girl?’
‘I need to go home,’ she said.
Crutton was still struggling to put his fury into words when Janice twisted to the floor in a dead faint.
As if to counter any accusations that she might be faking, she struck her head, hard, on the corner of the desk as she fell.
There was a pause of about a second and then the whole classroom rang with the tortured squeal of chairs across the parquet floor. A space magically formed around the supine Janice, with desks being pushed aside and our classmates crowding to get a better look at her. Into the midst of this instant thicket of children crashed Mr Crutton, shouting at us to stand aside and give the girl air. At the edge of all this chaos, Abigail and I stood stock still, staring at each other. My stomach felt like it had lightning in it.
Janice came to soon after. She had a large, ugly cut on the side of her head, and blood trickled down her left cheek. Ironically, it was Abigail – regarded by the teachers in our school as responsible and grown-up – who was given the task of escorting her to the nurse’s office. Janice was still very pale and put her arm around Abigail as they hobbled out of the classroom together. I imagined I was pretty pale too.
Abigail did not return to the lesson until five minutes before the end, and even when she did, she simply returned to her seat without looking at me, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, leaving me to stew in my own private agony. What now? If Janice told a teacher that we had shown her a photograph of a ghost, there would be all kinds of uncomfortable questions. No one would be in any doubt that we’d faked a ghost photograph; it sounded like exactly the kind of project that people imagined my sister and I did all the time. I ran the situation through my head again and again, but there was no likely scenario that I could see where we were in anything but a huge amount of trouble. It was all I could do not to get up, to walk out, to run away.
When the bell rang and the class packed up to go to the next lesson, I threw everything into my schoolbag and pelted over to where Abigail sat, slowly and calmly packing up her books.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s fine,’ said Abigail, not really looking at me.
‘What? How can it be fine?’
‘I don’t really want to talk about this now,’ she said curtly, before turning and walking away. I watched her leave, stunned.
In the corridor, I caught up with her. ‘I think we have to talk about this now, Abi.’ I still had flashes like hot and cold daggers in my stomach. ‘I really don’t see how we can’t.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said simply. ‘Janice is fine. She just has a cut on her head.’
‘I know that, Abi.’ Being as close as we were, I never really used my sister’s name unless there was an emergency. It felt strange to hear it now. ‘I mean—’ I lowered my voice ‘Us. If the teachers find out that—’
‘It’s fine,’ said Abi. ‘I’m telling you, it’s fine.’
And with that, she walked away.
3
Miss Nail took us for art. She wore a kaftan and had a lisp and was always encouraging us to do screen printing, an activity she seemed mildly obsessed by. I usually looked forward to art classes, as they were the complete opposite to Mr Crutton’s stern Victorian lessons, often breaking out into agreeable chaos or moments of actual creativity. That day, however, I couldn’t find joy in anything. Abi had recently given up art, as she said she found it bourgeois, and did religious studies instead, where she took great delight in arguing theological contradictions with the teacher, a pale, putty-coloured man whose name I cannot now recall.
Miserably, I worked on a watercolour of a gargoyle until the bell rang.
Abigail had chess club immediately after school, so there was yet more agonising waiting to be endured before she got home. And even when she was home, there was still dinner to get through before we could be alone in the attic and I could hear her plan for how we were going to avoid getting expelled. Dinner was – as it tended to be – a family affair, around the big table in the dining room.
‘How was school?’ my father asked abstractedly, as he always did. The Times was folded in quarters in front of him, crossword up. He did The Times crossword every day, always over dinner. I never saw him complete one.
‘Great,’ said Abigail. ‘Janice Tupp fainted.’ I stared at her in horror, but Abi ignored me in favour of looking up at Mum, who was shovelling shepherd’s pie onto her plate from the Pyrex casserole dish.
‘Did she?’ said my father. ‘Well, well.’ I was absolutely certain he had no idea who Janice Tupp was. He barely knew who we were.
‘Why did she faint?’ said Mum, who definitely knew who Janice Tupp was. Both our mum and Mrs Tupp were on the PTA. ‘Was she unwell?’
‘Something like that,’ said Abigail. I couldn’t fathom what she was up to. She clearly had a plan – she wouldn’t have addressed the incident if she hadn’t. ‘Are there any more green beans?’
‘Poor girl,’ said my mother. ‘It has been very cold of late, I wonder if that’s what brought it on. I shall phone Gwynn later and see how she is.’
Abigail nodded and started work on her shepherd’s pie.
After dinner, Abi and I did the washing-up. It was part of a list of weekly chores from which we earned pocket money, and usually we conducted this ritual in good-natured silence, or discussing some topic of mutual interest. This time, however, we were neither silent nor good-natured. As soon as we were out of earshot of our parents in the living room, I immediately hissed at Abigail.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m sorting it out.’
‘It doesn’t look much like it to me. You’ve already told Mum about it and now she’s going to ring Janice’s mum. We should just tell her.’
‘No! What happens if we do that? We’ll lose the attic. Use your head.’
‘You should use your head! Thanks to you, we’re going to lose the attic for good. If we just tell the truth now, we’ll be banned from using it for a month, and Dad will mumble about turning it into a games room and getting a slate-bed snooker table, like he always does. The camera will get confiscated and we’ll lose some books. But, eventually, we’ll get everything back. We have to tell her.’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to tell her.’
Abigail grabbed my arm. I winced. Her grip was always surprisingly strong. ‘Don’t you dare!’
‘I don’t hear much dishwashing in there,’ said Dad from the living room.
‘Yeah, sorry, we’re just deciding who washes and who dries,’ said Abigail, with a casual intonation I wouldn’t have been able to muster. My dad harrumphed and was silent, probably returning to his crossword.
She looked directly at me. Her hair was so deeply black it gathered a dull blueness in the curls, and her eyes were slate grey. She looked very striking – we both did – and we had learned to use this to good effect when required.
‘Trust me,’ she said.
‘But—’
‘Trust me,’ she repeated. ‘I’m not going to tell Mum what we did. Or Dad, or Janice’s mum. I’m going to tell Janice.’
I was stunned for a second. It was a daring tactic, and it simply hadn’t occurred to me. I couldn’t see the sense in it.
‘What possible good will that do?’
‘Janice might be gullible, but she’s also proud. We tell her what we did, and she’ll be too embarrassed at being taken in by it to tell anyone. We say sorry, she learns a valuable lesson about not believing everything you see, and we get to keep the camera, the attic and our books, and everything goes back to the way it was.’
I couldn’t decide whether this was brilliant or stupid. Either way, it was risky.
‘What if she’s too angry with us for fooling her, and she tells on us anyway?’
Abigail shrugged. ‘Well then, we’re back to where we are now. But I think it will work. I just have to get to Janice before she talks to anyone else about it.’
‘She’s probably talked to someone else about it already. She does have brothers and sisters.’
Abigail chewed a fingernail. ‘I’m not so sure. They’re all either a lot older than her or a lot younger. And she doesn’t really get on with them. I know for a fact her mother is exasperated by her too. I actually saw her call Janice a “silly girl” one parents’ evening, after she told her that stupid story about a girl falling off the big slide in the park and dying.’
The slide story was routinely used by bigger children to scare the little ones in the local park. There was a lurid splatter of red house paint at the bottom of the big slide (so-called because there was a smaller slide in the same park), and it was common practice to tell children graduating to the big slide that a girl had fallen off it and died, and that the paint was – gasp! – her blood. Abigail and I had both been told this by bigger kids when we were small.
‘Well,’ said Abi. ‘What do you say?’
I thought about her plan. It didn’t seem likely Janice would tell her younger sister, and the other two Tupp children were much older, as Abi said, and very aloof. The older girl had the buck teeth common to all of the Tupp clan, and wore make-up that she couldn’t quite carry off; the oldest, a boy, had a leather jacket and a car and a not-quite moustache and smoked, and always seemed to be carrying an LP with a fantastically self-important band name on it – King Crimson, Pentangle, Jethro Tull – as if it were some indecipherably adult statement about his entire being. Both the two elder Tupps were too self-consciously grown-up to associate with their middle sister.
‘What about her dad?’
‘Her dad’s dead, you moron. You know that.’
Two winters ago, when Mr Tupp had been cutting across the waste ground at the back of the cinema, he’d come across a small boy thrashing around in panic in the crust of thin ice and slush that sat on the rank black water of the pond that festered there. He had dived in to recover the boy but they had become entangled in the wreckage of a submerged mattress that had been fly-tipped years ago, and both had drowned. I had somehow forgotten all about this. I wondered if I would have been so keen to show Janice Tupp our ghost photo if I’d remembered this fact. And then I realised with a start that Abigail had not forgotten it, and had shown Janice the picture anyway.
‘Well?’ said Abigail.
‘OK,’ I sighed. ‘What have we got to lose?’
I was very restless that night and couldn’t sleep, and not merely from contemplating, from all conceivable angles, Abi’s high-risk strategy. Our ghost photograph had proved a resounding success. Janice Tupp would probably always have a scar on her forehead because of it. And yet, it was impossible now to extract any satisfaction from this. For the very first time, I was forced to look at the things my sister and I got up to, our macabre experiments and reading habits, the gleeful bleakness of the imaginary world we shared, and wonder – is this right? Is this normal? And later that night, in my pyjamas, my bedside light burning brightly, I forced myself to look again at the photo of the Ghost Monk of Newby, considering for the first time the possibility that it was a fake, a double exposure rendered by some process I was ignorant of. That meant that someone had had to plan and stage the photograph, just as we had done with ours. It meant that someone would have put together the costume that the ghost wore, cloth mask and all, and someone would have had to wear it. The idea that a person would do this, would design this terrifying thing with no purpose other than scaring people, was in some ways more troubling than the idea that it might be a picture of a real ghost. If the Ghost Monk of Newby was a prank, it was not an amusing or enjoyable
one. It was malevolent and unpleasant, a manifestation of someone’s darker thoughts and feelings, feelings that couldn’t be expressed any other way.
And if that were the case – what, then, was our ghost?
4
Janice was not in school the next day. It was a Thursday, a day crammed full of lessons I didn’t like. Music, which meant singing until one’s head ached; PE, which meant running around the hard, cold football pitch being shouted at; and Maths, which meant maths. Thursday was usually a day to be endured, but the events of the previous day gave it an edge I was fearful of, as if all the circumstances and things contained within the day held the potential for catastrophe. The smooth red brick of the changing room block, where somebody had written COULOREDS OUT NF in magnolia gloss paint; the boarded-up doorway of the rotting lodge next door to it, a hangover from when the playing field was part of the estate of a stately home, unimaginable though that was now; the unsettled sky that drowned the silver sun in drenching waves of black cloud over the football field where we played out our inconsequential battle – all of this spoke of some hard-edged cataclysm in my future, assembling itself from the world around me, curving towards me in a knight move, unstoppable.
Despite all this, my team won 3–1.
That evening, neither Abi nor I had any extra-curricular activities, so Abi moved that we take the initiative and call Janice in person. As it was Thursday, Mum was out at her pottery class, and Dad wouldn’t have cared if we’d called the Kremlin as long as we reversed the charges and didn’t make too much noise. So whilst Dad sat in the living room watching television, Abigail sat in the hallway and called Janice Tupp’s house. We’d decided that, as Abi had shown Janice the picture, she would be the one to conduct the phone call.
