By Horror Haunted Page 5

  Well, of course she did. It was her knowing a good deal about Classical Greek architecture last spring that had kept her arguing with the guide on the Parthenon for so long that the coach went off without us. And it was precisely because she’d boned-up so assiduously on rare Alpine plants that she’d broken her leg trying to reach one of them a couple of years ago, and we had to call out the Mountain Rescue for her. The rest of us had thought it was just a daisy.

  “Yes, well, we don’t even know yet that there is a ghost,” said Rosemary, dampingly; but not dampingly enough, evidently, for we spent the rest of the evening—and indeed far into the small-hours—trying to dissuade Cissie from putting into practice, then and there, various uncomfortable and hazardous methods of ghost-hunting of which she had recently informed herself—methods which ranged from fixing a tape-recorder on the thatched roof, to ourselves lying all night in the churchyard, keeping our minds a blank.

  By two o’clock, our minds were blank anyway—well, Rosemary’s and mine were—and we could think about nothing but bed. Here, though, there were new obstacles to be overcome, for not only was Cissie’s arrival unexpected and unprepared-for, but she insisted on being put in the Haunted Room. If it was haunted—anyway, the room that was coldest, dampest, and most uncomfortable, and therefore entitled her (well, what can you do?) to the only functioning oil-heater, and more than her share of the blankets.

  “Of course, I shan’t sleep!” she promised (as if this was some sort of special treat for me and Rosemary). “I shall be keeping vigil all night long! And tomorrow night, darlings, as soon as the moon rises, we must each take a white willow-twig, and pace in silent procession through the garden….”

  We nodded, simply because we were too sleepy to argue; but beyond the circle of lamplight, Rosemary and I exchanged glances of undiluted negativism. I mean, apart from anything else, you’d have to be crazy to embark on any project which depended for its success on Cissie’s not falling over something.

  But we did agree, without too much reluctance, to her further suggestion that tomorrow morning we should call on the vicar and ask him if we might look through the Parish archives. Even Cissie, we guardedly surmised, could hardly wreck a call on a vicar.

  But the next morning, guess what? Cissie was laid up with lumbago, stiff as a board, and unable even to get out of bed, let alone go visiting.

  “Oh dear—Oh, please don’t bother!” she kept saying, as we ran around with hot-water-bottles and extra pillows. “Oh dear, I do so hate to be a nuisance!”

  We hated her to be a nuisance, too, but we just managed not to say so; and after a bit our efforts, combined with her own determination not to miss the fun (yes, she was still counting it fun)—after a bit, all this succeeded in loosening her up sufficiently to let her get out of bed and on to her feet; and at once her spirits rocketed sky-high. She decided, gleefully, that her affliction was a supernatural one, consequent on sleeping in the haunted room.

  “Damp sheets, more likely!” said Rosemary, witheringly. “If people will turn up unexpectedly like this …”

  But Cissie is unsquashable. Damp sheets? When the alternative was the ghost of a lady who’d died two hundred years ago? Cissie has never been one to rest content with a likely explanation if there is an unlikely one to hand.

  “I know what I’m talking about!” she retorted. “I know more about this sort of thing than either of you. I’m a Sensitive, you see. I only discovered it just recently, but it seems I’m one of those people with a sort of sixth-sense when it comes to the supernatural. It makes me more vulnerable, of course, to this sort of things—look at my bad back—but it also makes me more aware. I can sense things. Do you know, the moment I walked into this room last night, I could tell that it was haunted! I could feel the … Ouch!”

  Her back had caught her again; all that gesticulating while she talked had been a mistake. However, between us we got her straightened up once more, and even managed to help her down the stairs—though I must say it wasn’t long before we were both wishing we’d left well alone—if I may put it so uncharitably. For Cissie, up, was far, far more nuisance than Cissie in bed. In bed, her good intentions could harm no one; but once up and about, there seemed no limit to the trouble she could cause in the name of “helping”. Trying to lift pans from shelves above her head; trying to rake-out cinders without bending, and setting the hearth-brush on fire in the process; trying to fetch paraffin in cans too heavy for her to lift, and slopping it all over the floor. Rosemary and I seemed to be forever clearing up after her, or trying to un-crick her from some position she’d got stuck in for some maddening, altruistic reason.

  *

  Disturbingly, she seemed to get worse as the day went on, not better. The stiffness increased, and by afternoon she looked blue with cold, and was scarcely able to move. But nothing would induce her to let us call a doctor, or put her to bed.

  “What, and miss all the fun?” she protested, through numbed lips. “Don’t you realise that this freezing cold is significant? It’s the chilling of the air that you always get before the coming of an apparition …!”

  By now, it was quite hard to make out what she was saying, so hoarse had her voice become, and so stiff her lips; but you could still hear the excitement and triumph in her croaked exhortations:

  “Isn’t it thrilling! This is the Chill of Death, you know, darlings! It’s the warning that the dead person is now about to appear! Oh, I’m so thrilled! Any moment now, and we’re going to know the truth …!”

  *

  We did, too. A loud knocking sounded on the cottage door, and Rosemary ran to answer it. From where I stood, in the living-room doorway, I could see her framed against the winter twilight—already the short December afternoon was nearly at an end. Beyond her, I glimpsed the uniforms of policemen, heard their solemn voices.

  “‘Miss Cecily Curtis’?—Cissie? Yes, of course we know her!” I heard Rosemary saying, in a frightened voice; and then came the two deeper voices, grave and sympathetic.

  I could hardly hear their words from where I was standing, yet somehow the story wasn’t difficult to follow. It was almost as if, in some queer way, I’d known it all along. How last night, at about 10.30 p.m., a Miss Cecily Curtis had skidded while driving—too fast—along the dyke road, and had plunged, car and all, into deep water. The body had only been recovered and identified this morning.

  As I say, I did not really need to hear the men’s actual words. Already the picture was in my mind, the picture which has never left it: the picture of Cissie, all lit up with curiosity and excitement, belting through the rain and dark to be in on the fun. Nothing would keep her away, not even death itself….

  A little sound in the room behind me roused me from my state of shock, and I turned to see Cissie smiling that annoying smile of hers, for the very last time. It’s maddened us for years, the plucky way she smiles in the face of whatever adversity she’s got us all into.

  “You see?” she said, a trifle smugly, “I’ve been dead ever since last night—it’s no wonder I’ve been feeling so awful!”—and with a triumphant little toss of her head she turned, fell over her dressing-gown cord, and was gone.

  Yes, gone. We never saw her again. The object they carried in, wet and dripping from the marsh, seemed to be nothing to do with her at all.

  *

  We never discovered whether the cottage had been haunted all along; but it’s haunted now, all right. I don’t suppose Rosemary will go down there much any more—certainly, we will never go ghost-hunting there again. Apart from anything else, we are too scared. There is so much that might go wrong. It was different in the old days, when we could plan just any wild escapade we liked, confident that whatever went wrong would merely be the fault of our idiotic, infuriating, impossible, irreplaceable friend.

  THE SUNDAY OUTING

  IT WAS NOT seven o’clock yet; but already you could see that it was going to be a hot day. The golden, early-morning mist was beginning to break up,
and shafts of sunlight were striking through on to the lawn, the rose-arch, and the herbaceous border ablaze with June flowers.

  Another sunny Sunday—just my luck! thought James, staring moodily out of the French windows at the burgeoning glory of the morning. Sunshine on a Sunday morning was something that he dreaded, for it meant almost certainly that they would have to drive down to the coast. Pamela would insist on it.

  “But look at the sunshine!” she would cry, already—in the teeth of his reluctance—reaching for the thermos, the beach-bags, the sandwich-spread; “Look, darling, what a lovely day it is! It would be a shame to waste it!”

  Waste it! As if there was any more sure and total way of wasting a lovely June day than by spending it cooped-up first in a car and then on a jam-packed Sunday beach!

  He knew, from long experience, just exactly how it would be, from the moment when Pamela, all smiles, issued the dreaded ultimatum: “What a lovely day!”

  These words were the battle-orders. At their summons, the children would have to be dragged in out of the garden, and forced, whining, up to their bedrooms to change their clothes, their shoes, their small plans, preparatory to hanging about, bored and clean, while the rest of the preparations for the outing bulldozed their way through the golden peace of the morning, shattering everything in their path—games, conversation, leisure, everything.

  And, in place of these, came sandwiches, and plastic bags of lettuce-leaves, and hurryings to-and-fro. Lemonade … tinned luncheon meat … bathing-towels. Canvas chairs to be wedged into the boot of the car; lilos and inflatable rings to be unearthed from the rubbery recesses of the cupboard under the stairs.

  And after all this, the driving. The nose-to-tail crawl along the motorway, while the children grizzled, and kicked each other’s shins, and said they felt sick; and Pamela kept saying, “If only we’d started earlier, darling, like I said …!” and the man in front hooted his random fury into the uncaring universe. And all the time the sun would be rising higher and higher in the sky, the glory of its warmth turning to a penance and a weariness through the stifling roof of the car…. It was like being in prison, five to a cell, for no crime that he could think of … and the beach, when they finally reached it, wouldn’t be much better. Queues for ice-cream … queues for the pier … queues for the toilets; queues, almost, for a brief dabble in the used-up sea. By the afternoon, the children, too, would be bored; but they knew—even Robin, the five-year-old knew—that at the seaside it wasn’t called “boredom”. Its name, here, was “having fun”.

  “Having fun, darlings?” Pamela would enquire benignly from under her big sun-hat, as she looked on, with gratification, at the children’s tight, restricted little delvings in the gritty sand, and the sad little travesties of games that could still just be played among the paralysis of deck-chairs on every side. And, “Yes, Mummy,” they’d say; either out of politeness, or out of a failure to grasp the way in which words were being used to double-cross them. The day’s outing was a “treat”, they knew, and therefore couldn’t possibly be boring. A “treat” is. by definition, enjoyable.

  So instead of complaining about boredom, they complained about each other: “Daddy, Perry’s got my water-wings, he’s let the air out on purpose!” … “Mummy, make her give me back my spade!” … “It’s my turn!” … “She took it!” … “It’s not fair!” … And after a certain amount of this sort of thing—say half an hour—Robin’s nose would start to bleed. Regularly. Whether anyone had punched him or not. It was Robin’s way, James concluded, of registering his protest against the universe at large. Like that man in the traffic-block, hooting.

  *

  It was going to be worse than ever today. James felt sure of it. For a start, Pamela was going to be in a bad temper because of him coming home so late last night. No good explaining to her how the meeting had dragged on till nearly eight o’clock; and how, having missed the 8.15, he’d decided he might as well stay for drinks with the rest of them … and next thing he knew, he’d missed the 9.15 as well. After this second setback, he’d pulled himself together and made sure of getting to Victoria in plenty of time for the 9.52 … only to find (such was his luck that evening) that the 9.52 had been cancelled. He’d best try Waterloo, the man had said; and so thither James had hastened, in a taxi—just in time, of course, to miss the fast train at 10.23. What with one thing and another, he’d ended up on the 11.10—the slowest train on the whole Southern Railway, it seemed to James, as he sat, seething with impatience, while it dawdled from hamlet to hamlet through the night, stopping at every single station, and arriving, finally, nearly an hour late, and long after all the taxis were finished for the night. By the time he’d walked the mile and a half from the station it must have been nearly two—a tricky hour for a husband to be arriving home at the best of times, and no joke at all when he has been expected ever since half-past nine….

  “Yes, dear,” Pamela would say when he tried to explain; and, “Yes, I see,” just exactly as if she did see—and then just carry on being in a bad temper as if she hadn’t taken in a word. With Pamela in a mood like this, it would be impossible to cross her—especially over an issue as potentially explosive as these Sunday outings to the sea.

  But wait! Was there any need, actually, for Pamela to know precisely how late he’d been? He’d crept in with mouse-like quietness and had slipped straight off to bed on the couch in the sitting-room (as was his habit when very late, in order not to disturb Pamela in her first sleep). With any luck, she might have been sound asleep since eleven; or even earlier; in which case, there was no need to confess anything more than that he’d missed one train and had had to catch the next. A simple, straight-forward excuse; far preferable to the rambling, improbable rigmarole that was the truth. A meeting over-running its time, and a cancelled 9.52, and a delay on the 11.10 … it was too much for any thoughtful wife…. And at that moment, James heard the fussy little rattle at the front door which meant that the Sunday papers had arrived.

  *

  It was front-page news in both of them.

  “RAIL CRASH INFERNO: HUNDREDS FEARED INJURED” shrieked the sprightlier of the two journals; while “DERAILMENT ON SOUTHERN RAILWAY: SOME CASUALTIES” announced the other, more sedately.

  Either way, it set James’ head spinning. His train—the 8.15 that he normally caught after meetings—it had been derailed! Just outside Penge! Twenty-three people had been taken to hospital … or hundreds, as the case might be…. Back and forth darted James’ eyes, from the one paper to the other, trying to assess, to absorb into his imagination, the nature and extent of the danger he had so narrowly escaped.

  No one had been killed. Some of the twenty-three, it seemed, were in hospital merely for “cuts and bruises”: others just “for observation”.

  It was at this phrase, “for observation”, that James’ heart began beating in a very strange way. Not shock any longer, or horror; but excitement. A mounting, incredulous excitement.

  It was so simple! So breathtakingly, miraculously simple! Pamela hadn’t heard him come in last night; and now, this morning, she need not hear him go out! A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, handed him on a plate by the long arm of coincidence! “For observation” … “detained for observation”…. The phrase rolled around James’ mind like a drum-roll of freedom. Freedom, for one whole summer’s day! And the deception involved would be minimal: no souped-up limping; no phoney bandages and sticking-plaster. “Observation” leaves no mark; even the most canny of wives cannot disprove it.

  It would have to be managed, of course, without alarming Pamela, or causing her to worry. James had no desire at all to hurt his wife—merely to get away from her for a day.

  So he must phone her, it was unavoidable. As soon as he was safely away from the house, he would call her from a phone box and tell her he was in hospital but quite all right; would be back this evening. They were just “detaining him for observation” in this hospital at—where was it?—Penge.

&nbs
p; He must do it soon, too. It would be awful for her to see those headlines before she’d received the reassuring message.

  Tiptoeing to the foot of the stairs, he stood for a minute absolutely still, listening.

  Not a sound. Not even the clink of a dinky-car from Robin’s room, nor any murmur of voices from the older children. The whole household was sleeping like the dead.

  Swiftly, silently, and with one eye on the clock, James cleared away all traces of his sojourn here. There weren’t many. Just the settee to straighten … some town clothes to be stowed out of sight as he donned the tee-shirt and canvas shoes that had been left among the other seaside things in the cupboard. Last of all, he carefully re-folded the Sunday papers, and stuffed them back in the letter-box as if they had just arrived.

  And now, his heart all a-quiver with excitement, he slipped noiselessly out of the house into the gleaming freshness of the morning.

  It was still barely half past seven, and the street was empty as a dream. For a moment, James stood on the pavement, breathing in the fresh, glittering air; and then he set off walking, straight into the first slanting rays of the rising sun.

  He had not realised, when he’d so impulsively planned this escapade, just how plain scared he’d be once he was inside the phone box, with his forefinger poised to dial his home number.

  What was he going to say to her? How was he (no skilled dissembler at the best of times) going to answer the inevitable flood of questions that in a few more seconds would be spattering from that earpiece. What train …? What do you mean …? Well, where are you ringing from, then …? But I thought you just said you were all right …? Then why …? Well, what happened …? Why didn’t they let me know at once …? … Trapped?—You mean right underneath it … all this time …?

  For the first time, James realised that he hadn’t the slightest idea what happens when a train is derailed. Do the carriages tip right over? Or do you just get thrown about? Would there have been flames … screams … heroic scenes of rescue? For a few moments, his imagination struggled helplessly, like a bird with a broken wing, against the intransigent barrier of the facts; then gave up, knowing itself beaten.