By Horror Haunted Page 4

  At one time, we used to be sorry for Cissie, the only one of our set who never married. But now, when the slow revolving of the decades have left me a widow and Rosemary stranded among the flotsam of a dead marriage—now, lately I have begun wondering whether Cissie hasn’t done just as well for herself as any of us, in the long run. Certainly, she has had plenty of fun on the fringes of other people’s lives, over the years. She wangles invitations to silver-wedding parties; worms her way into other people’s family holidays—and even if it ends up with the whole lot of them in quarantine at the airport because of Cissie coming out in spots—well, at least she’s usually had a good run for her money first.

  And, to be fair to her, it’s not just the pleasures and luxuries of our lives that she tries to share; it’s the problems and crises, too. I remember she managed to be present at the birth of my younger son, and if only she hadn’t dropped the boiling kettle on her foot just as I went into the second stage of labour, her presence would have been a real help. As it was, the doctor and midwife were both busy treating her for shock in the kitchen, and binding up her scalded leg, while upstairs my son arrived unattended, and mercifully without fuss. Perhaps even the unborn are sensitive to atmosphere? Perhaps he sensed, even then, that, with Cissie around, it’s just no use anyone else making a fuss about anything?

  But let me get back to Rosemary’s haunted cottage (or not haunted, as the case may be—let me not pre-judge the issue before I have given you all the facts). Of course, to begin with, we were half playing a game, Rosemary and I. The tension tends to go out of life as you come up towards your sixties. Whatever problems once tore at you, and kept you fighting, and alive, and gasping for breath—they are solved now, or else have died, quietly, while you weren’t noticing. Anyway, what with one thing and another, life can become a bit dull and flavourless when you get to our age; and, to be honest, a ghost was just what Rosemary and I were needing. A spice of danger; a spark of the unknown to re-activate these water-logged minds of ours, weighed down as they are by such a lifetime’s accumulation of the known.

  I am telling you this because I want to be absolutely honest. In evaluating the events I am to describe, you must remember, and allow for, the fact that Rosemary and I wanted there to be a ghost. Well, no, perhaps that’s putting it too strongly; we wanted there to might be a ghost—if you see what I so ungrammatically mean. We wanted our weekend to bring us at least a small tingling of the blood; a tiny prickling of the scalp. We wanted our journey to reach a little way into the delicious outskirts of fear, even if it did have to start from Liverpool Street.

  We felt marvellously superior, Rosemary and I, as we stood jam-packed in the corridor, rocking through the rainy December night. We glanced with secret pity at all those blank, commuter faces, trundling towards the security of their homes. We were different. We were travelling into the Unknown.

  *

  Our first problems, of course, were nothing to do with ghosts. They were to do with milk, and bread, and damp firewood, and why Mrs Thorpe from the village hadn’t come in to air the beds as she’d promised. She hadn’t filled the lamps, either, or brought in the paraffin … how did she think Rosemary was going to get it from the shed in all this rain and dark? And where were all those tins she’d stocked-up with in the summer? They couldn’t all have been eaten …?

  I’m afraid I left it all to Rosemary. I know visitors are supposed to trot around at the heels of their hostesses, yapping helpfully, like terriers; but I just won’t. After all, I know how little help it is to me, when I am a hostess, so why should I suppose that everyone else is different? Besides, by this time I was half-frozen, what with the black, sodden fields and marsh-lands without, and the damp stone within; and so I decided to concentrate my meagre store of obligingness on getting a fire going.

  What a job it was, though! It was as if some demon was working against me, spitting and sighing down the cavernous chimney, whistling wickedly along the icy, stone-flagged floor, blowing out each feeble flicker of flame as fast as I coaxed it from the damp balls of newspaper piled under the damper wood.

  Fortunately there were plenty of matches, and gradually, as each of my abortive efforts left the materials a tiny bit drier than before, hope of success came nearer. Or maybe it was that the mischievous demon grew tired of his dance of obstruction—the awful sameness of frustrating me time and time again—anyway, for whatever reason, I at last got a few splinters of wood feebly smouldering. Bending close, and cupping my hands around the precious whorls to protect them from the sudden damp gusts and sputters of rain down the chimney, I watched, enchanted, while first one tiny speck of gold and then another glimmered on the charred wood. Another … and yet another … until suddenly, like the very dawn of creation, a flame licked upwards.

  It was the first time in years and years that I had had anything to do with an open fire. I have lived in centrally-heated flats for almost all of my adult life, and I had forgotten this apocalyptic moment when fire comes into being under your hands. Like God on the morning of creation, I sat there, all-powerful, tending the spark I had created. A sliver more of wood here … a knob of coal there … soon my little fire was bright, and growing, and needing me no more.

  But still I tended it—or pretended to—leaning over it, spreading my icy hands to the beginnings of warmth. Vaguely, in the background, I was aware of Rosemary blundering around the place, clutching in her left hand the only oil lamp that worked, peering disconsolately into drawers and cupboards, and muttering under her breath at each new evidence of disorder and depletion.

  Honestly, it was no use trying to help. We’d have to manage, somehow, for tonight, and then tomorrow, with the coming of the blessed daylight, we’d be able to get everything to rights. Fill the lamps. Fetch food from the village. Get the place properly warm….

  Warm! I shivered, and huddled closer into the wide chimney-alcove. Although the fire was burning up nicely now, it had as yet made little impact on the icy chill of the room. It was cold as only these ancient, little-used cottages can be cold. The cold of centuries seems to be stored up in their old stones, and the idea that you can warm it away with a single brisk weekend of paraffin heaters and hastily-lit fires has always seemed to me laughable.

  Not to Rosemary, though. She is an impatient sort of person, and it always seems to her that heaters must produce heat. That’s what the word means! So she was first angered, then puzzled, and finally half-scared by the fact that she just couldn’t get the cottage warm. Even in late August, when the air outside was still soft, and the warmth of summer lingered over the fields and marshes—even then, the cottage was like an ice-box inside. I remember remarking on it during my first visit—“Marvellously cool!” was how I put it at the time, for we had just returned, hot and exhausted, from a long tramp through the hazy, windless countryside; and that was the first time (I think) that Rosemary mentioned to me that the place was supposed to be haunted.

  “One of those tragic, wailing ladies that the Past specialises in,” she explained, rather facetiously. “She’s supposed to have drowned herself away on the marsh somewhere—for love, I suppose; it always was, wasn’t it? My God, though, what a thing to drown oneself for!—if only she’d known …!”

  This set us off giggling, of course; and by the time we’d finished our wry reminiscences, and our speculations about the less-than-ecstatic love-lives of our various friends—by this time, of course, the end of the ghost story had rather got lost. Something about the woman’s ghost moaning around the cottage on stormy nights (or was it moonlight ones?), and about the permanent, icy chill that had settled upon the cottage, and particularly upon the upstairs back bedroom, into which they’d carried her body, all dripping wet from the marsh.

  “As good a tale as any, for when your tenants start demanding proper heating,” I remember remarking cheerfully (for Rosemary, at that time, had vague and grandiose plans for making a fortune by letting the place for part of the year) and we had both laughed, and tha
t, it had seemed, was the end of it.

  But when late summer became autumn, and autumn deepened into winter, and the North-East wind, straight from Siberia, howled in over the marshes, then Rosemary began to get both annoyed and perturbed.

  “I just can’t get the place warm,” she grumbled. “I can’t understand it! And as for that back room—the one that looks out over the marsh—it’s uncanny how cold it is! Two oil heaters, burning day and night, and it’s still …!”

  I couldn’t pretend to be surprised: as I say, I expect my friends’ weekend cottages to be like this. But I tried to be sympathetic; and when, late in November, Rosemary confessed, half-laughing, that she really did think the place was haunted, it was I who suggested that we should go down together and see if we could lay the ghost.

  She welcomed the suggestion with both pleasure and relief.

  “If it was just the cold, I wouldn’t be bothering,” she explained. “But there seems to be something eerie about the place—there really does, Lois! It’s like being in the presence of the dead.” (Rosemary never has been in the presence of the dead, or she’d know it’s not like that at all, but I let it pass.) “I’m getting to hate being there on my own. Sometimes—I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes I really do seem to hear voices!” She laughed, uncomfortably. “I must be in a bad way, mustn’t I? Hearing voices …! Me …!”

  To this day, I don’t know how much she was really scared, and how much she was just trying to work a bit of drama into her lonely—and probably unexpectedly boring—trips down to her dream-cottage. I don’t suppose she even knows herself. All I can say for certain is that her mood of slightly factitious trepidation touched exactly on some deep need of my own, and at once we knew that we would go. And that it would be fun. And that Cissie must at all costs be kept out of it. Once her deep needs get involved, you’ve had it.

  *

  A little cry from somewhere in the shadows, beyond the circle of firelight, jerked me from my reverie, and for a moment I felt my heart pounding. Then, a moment later, I was laughing, for the cry came again:

  “Spaghetti! Spaghetti Bolognese! Four whole tins of it, all stacked up under the sink! Now, who could have …?”

  And who could care, anyway? Food, real food, was now within our grasp! Unless … Oh dear …!

  “I bet you’ve lost the tin-opener!” I hazarded, with a sinking heart—for at the words “Spaghetti Bolognese” I had realised just how hungry I was—and it was with corresponding relief that, in the flickering firelight, I saw a smug smile overspreading her face.

  “See?” She held up the vital implement; it flickered through the shadows like a shining minnow as she gesticulated her triumph. “See? Though of course, if Cissie had been here …!”

  We both began to giggle; and later, as we sat over the fire scooping spaghetti bolognese from pottery bowls, and drinking the red wine which Rosemary had managed to unearth—as we sat there, revelling in creature comforts, we amused ourselves by speculating on the disasters which would have befallen us by now had Cissie been one of the party. How she would have dropped the last of the matches into a puddle, looking for a lost glove … would have left the front door swinging open in the wind, blowing out our only oil lamp. And the tin-opener, of course, would have been a write-off from the word go; if she hadn’t lost it in some dark corner, it would certainly have collapsed into two useless pieces under her big, willing hands…. By now, we would have been without light, heat or food….

  This depressing picture seemed, somehow, to be the funniest thing imaginable as we sat there, with our stomachs comfortably full and with our third helping of red wine gleaming jewel-like in the firelight.

  “To absent friends!” we giggled, raising our glasses. “And let’s hope they remain absent,” I added, wickedly, thinking of Cissie; and while we were both still laughing over this cynical toast, I saw Rosemary suddenly go rigid, her glass an inch from her lips, and I watched the laughter freeze on her face.

  “Listen!” she hissed. “Listen, Lois! Do you hear?”

  For long seconds, we sat absolutely still, and the noises of the night impinged, for the first time, on my consciousness. The wind, rising now, was groaning and sighing around the cottage, moaning in the chimney and among the old beams. The rain spattered in little gusts against the windows, which creaked and rattled on their old hinges. Beyond them, in the dark, overgrown garden, you could hear the stir and rustle of bare twigs and sodden leaves … and beyond that again there was the faint, endless sighing of the marsh, mile upon mile of it, half-hidden under the dry, winter reeds.

  “No …” I began, in a whisper; but Rosemary made a sharp little movement, commanding silence. “Listen!” she whispered once more; and this time—or was it my imagination?—I did begin to hear something.

  “Ee … ee … ee …!” came the sound, faint and weird upon the wind. “Ee … ee … ee …!”—and for a moment it sounded so human, and so imploring, that I, too, caught my breath. It must be a trick of the wind, of course; it must—and as we sat there, tensed almost beyond bearing by the intentness of our listening, another sound impinged upon our preternaturally sharpened senses—a sound just as faint, and just as far away, but this time very far from ghostly.

  “Pr-rr-rr! Ch-ch-ch ……!”—the sound grew nearer … unmistakable…. The prosaic sound of a car, bouncing and crunching up the rough track to the cottage.

  Rosemary and I looked at each other.

  “Norman?” she hazarded, scrambling worriedly to her feet. “But it can’t be Norman, he never comes! And at this time of night, too! Oh dear, I wonder what can have happened…?” By this time she had reached the window, and she parted the curtains just as the mysterious vehicle screeched to a halt outside the gate. All I could see, from where I sat, was the triangle of darkness between the parted curtains, and Rosemary’s broad back, rigid with disbelief and dismay.

  Then, she turned on me.

  “Lois!” she hissed. “How could you …!”

  I didn’t ask her what she meant. Not after all these years.

  “I didn’t! Of course I didn’t! What do you take me for?” I retorted, and I don’t doubt that by now my face was almost as white as hers.

  For, of course, she did not need to tell me who it was who had arrived. Not after nearly half a century of this sort of thing. Besides, who else was there who slammed a car door as if slapping down an invasion from Mars? Who else would announce her arrival by yelling “Yoo-hoo!” into the midnight air, and bashing open the garden gate with a hat-box, so that latch and socket hurtled together into the night?

  “Oops—sorry!” said Cissie, for perhaps the fifty-thousandth time in our joint lives; and she blundered forward towards the light, like an untidy grey moth. For by now we had got the front door open, and lamplight was pouring down the garden path, lighting up her round, radiant face and her halo of wild grey curls, all a-glitter with drops of rain.

  “You naughty things! Fancy not telling me!” she reproached us, as she surged through the lighted doorway, dumping her luggage to left and right. It was, as always, like a one-man army of occupation. Always, she manages to fill any situation so totally with herself, and her belongings, and her eagerness, that there simply isn’t room for anyone else’s point of view. It’s not selfishness, exactly; it’s more like being a walking take-over bid, with no control over one’s operations.

  “A real, live ghost! Isn’t it thrilling!” she babbled, as we edged her into the firelit room. “Oh, but you should have told me! You know how I love this sort of thing …!”

  On and on she chattered, in her loud, eager, unstoppable voice … and this, too, we recognised as part of her technique of infiltration. By the time her victims have managed to get a word in edgeways, their first fine fury has already begun to wilt … the cutting-edge of their protests has been blunted … their sense of outrage has become blurred. And anyway, by that time she is there. Inescapably, irreversibly, there!

  Well, what can you do? By
the time Rosemary and I got a chance to put a word in, Cissie already had her coat off, her luggage spilling on to the floor, and a glass of red wine in her hand. There she was, reclining in the big easy-chair (mine), the firelight playing on her face, exactly as if she had lived in the place for years.

  “But, Cissie, how did you find out?” was the nearest, somehow, that we could get to a reproof; and she laughed her big, merry laugh, and the bright wine sloshed perilously in her raised glass.

  “Simple, you poor Watsons!” she declared. “You see, I happened to be phoning Josie, and Josie happened to mention that Mary had said that Phyllis had told her that she’d heard from Ruth, and …”

  See what I mean? You can’t win. You might as well try to dodge the Recording Angel himself.

  “And when I heard about the ghost, then of course I just had to come!” she went on. “It sounded just too fascinating! You see, it just happens that at the moment I know a good deal about ghosts, because …”