The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women Part 16

I shivered, then realized the back door was still open.

"Come in and I'll make you a sandwich," I said to the girl.

She lounged at the kitchen table, all elbows and knees. I noticed the way she looked at my iPod, her eyes wide, as if it were an alien artefact.

"Don't touch that," I said. I didn't want her erasing Allison Rand's interview by mistake. The girl started back at once, folding her arms beneath the table, and I realized I must have spoken more harshly than I'd intended. I supposed she might be accustomed to getting hit. Her reaction suggested it, though I hated to believe it was so.

"Do you like cheese?" I said. "Marmite?"

"I lo-o-ve Marmite," she said. She stretched the 'o' length-wise, tw.a.n.ging the vowel in midair like a piece of elastic. "All my friends hate it, but that only makes me like it more."

I laughed at that. The girl was clearly sharp as a flint. It wasn't late, not yet, but it was getting later. I wondered who knew she was out, if anyone cared.

"Why did you bring me this?" I said. I picked up the cutting from where I had placed it, on the kitchen table. It crackled between my fingers, brittle with age, and I realized that if I didn't handle it more carefully it would disintegrate.

The girl bit into her sandwich and began to chew. "I thought you wanted to know," she said. "About the murder, I mean." She shifted in her seat. "It's different in here," she said. "It was darker before. A horrible green colour." She stuffed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth and gulped it down. "I'd better go now."

She left as she had arrived, through the back door. I stood at the sink and washed up her plate, feeling vaguely worried about what she might be going home to and wondering when she had been in the house before. The kitchen had not been green when Roy and I bought the house; the young couple we'd bought from, the property developers, had drowned the whole place in magnolia.

Perhaps Allison Rand's kitchen had been green. I read the clipping again, the words about Lorna Loomis, who had been seen by three reliable witnesses outside the Gilmore public house, holding tightly to the hand of a child dressed in her school uniform of grey skirt and green cardigan answering to the description of Nancy Creel.

The Gilmore was still there, a heavy-set, half-timbered building at the end of the High Street. One of Roy's favourite haunts. Nancy Creel, I supposed, must have been the murder victim.

Suddenly I remembered the incident in the lane earlier that evening, the child who had rushed across the road in front of my car. At least I thought that was what I had seen, but when I'd climbed out of the car the road had been empty. Empty of traffic and empty of people. I had dismissed the whole thing at the time, probably because I was still preoccupied with Allison Rand, but all at once it seemed sinister and frightening.

I went all round the house, putting the lights on in every room and checking the doors and windows.

A fat lot of good that's going to do. I thought. Ghosts are famous for walking through walls, or haven't you heard?

I should have found the thought amusing but I didn't.

Information on Lorna Loomis was hard to find. In view of what I discovered later I still find that odd. It is as if her crime was considered so terrible that everyone who found themselves involved with it, however tangentially, became locked in some silent agreement to keep it secret. In any case, there was nothing on the internet. One afternoon shortly after my interview with Allison Rand I drove into Oxford and spent an afternoon in the newspaper archive attached to the Central Library, but the records were all still on microfiche and without a date for when the crime had occurred it was next to hopeless.

I thought of writing to Allison Rand and asking her if she had heard of the Loomis case. She was a historian after all, or at least she had been. But if the two crimes were connected, it seemed odd that Rand hadn't mentioned Loomis during the course of my visit.

I decided not to contact her unless I had to. Allison Rand was clearly a disturbed person, and I wasn't sure how far I could trust her. It wasn't just that, though. I knew by then that Lorna Loomis would be the inspiration behind my next novel and I didn't want to spoil things by talking about them. As far as was possible, I wanted to solve the Loomis mystery by myself.

I contacted our building society and asked if I could have a copy of the house deeds. It gave me a shock to see that the Rands had lived at our address for less than four years, that they had moved in just a couple of months before Sophie was born. Before the Rands the house had been the property of a Mr Dennis Michaels; before that the owner's name had been Tillyer. I paged backwards through the doc.u.ment, jotting down the names in my notebook. I couldn't help noticing that n.o.body had stayed in the house for very long.

Anthony Loomis, a GP, had bought the house in 1953. In 1955 the deeds had been altered to designate Mrs Lorna Loomis as the sole owner. It was strange to see her name in black and white at last, strange to see she really had lived here. Strangest of all was that it was not that long ago. I had expected some long-dead mystery, but there would still be people in town who remembered the Loomises. I imagined the girl from the allotments had heard about them from a parent or most likely a grandparent. How could she have known about them otherwise?

I realized I didn't know her name. I hadn't seen her since the evening she had brought me the newspaper cutting. I hoped nothing had happened to her.

The house became strange to me. I a.s.sumed Lorna Loomis was dead, but her presence seemed all-pervasive. I had never given more than a pa.s.sing thought to the previous owners of other houses I had lived in, but as the days pa.s.sed I found myself dwelling on Lorna Loomis almost obsessively. I tried to imagine how she had arranged the rooms, what colours she liked.

I still had only the vaguest notion of what she had done.

I started to hear noises at night: the faint murmur of a radio, the m.u.f.fled thump of footsteps on the upstairs landing. Once or twice I felt someone push past me on the stairs. I was writing by then, so I was less bothered by these occurrences than I might have been otherwise. When I'm working on a novel there is scarcely any divide between the world I am creating on paper and the world outside, especially at the first draft stage. The book was going well and that was all I cared about. I told myself the rest was all in my mind.

The room I used as my study was one of the things that had attracted me to the house in the first place. It ran directly off the bedroom, no more than a box room really, the kind of odd little s.p.a.ce that might normally be used as a nursery or an en suite bathroom. It overlooked the garden, and I liked it because it had a feeling of being separate from the rest of the house.

I kept the door closed at night, though. I didn't like waking up in the dark and seeing a yawning black gap in the wall, a minor phobia that Roy found hilarious.

"What do you think might be in there?" he said when I first told him about it. "Zombies?"

He'd disappeared inside the room and then emerged moments later, shambling towards me with his arms outstretched, like one of the living dead in the George Romero movies. That was during our first week in the house, and I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. Later though he stopped going anywhere near my study, even when I was in there working. I put it down to his claustrophobia, the same impulse that induced his marathon walks, but during the weeks of his absence I became less sure.

On one particular night I awoke in the small hours to see a light shining from beneath the door. I kept perfectly still, flattening myself against the mattress. I was terrified of what I was seeing, but I was even more afraid to turn on the bedside lamp because then I would no longer be able to see what the light inside my study was doing.

I stared at the glowing yellow line, clinging to the panicky hope that looking directly at it might cause it to disappear. In fact the opposite happened. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw that the sliver of light was intersected by darkness in two places. Someone was standing directly behind the door.

I lay there for what seemed like hours, too frightened to move. Eventually, though, my fear outwore itself. I got out of bed and tiptoed across the carpet towards the study door. Logic told me there was no one inside. The room had been empty when I went to bed and it was empty now. But my palms were sticky with sweat, and my pulse was throbbing so loudly it made me feel faint.

I grabbed the handle and threw open the door. Bright light poured out in a rush, soaking the bedroom in colour. For a moment I thought I saw someone standing there, a dark apparition that in my enervated state I felt certain was the girl from the allotments. I reeled backwards in surprise and horror, colliding with the side of the bed. I sat down heavily, almost collapsing. When I dared to look again there was no one there.

Through the open doorway to my study I could see the corner of my desk, starkly outlined in the light from my desk lamp, which was on.

I must have forgotten to turn the lamp off before I went to bed. It was not something I would normally do but it was the only explanation that made sense. I turned it off and stood there for a moment, just listening. The room was silent, and as far as I could see nothing had been disturbed, but being there was making me nervous, all the same.

I went back to bed, but for the first time ever I left the study door standing open. When I woke the following morning the door was closed. I felt convinced I had shut it myself, after all.

I opened it again and went in. The papers on my desk some photocopied news articles about Allison Rand, a map of the town the way it had been in the 1950s had not been touched. I glanced around the room, trying to see if I could spot anything that seemed different.

There was a pencil on the floor under the chair. I bent to pick it up. It was bright red and dotted with flowers, a schoolgirl's pencil. The irregular paring marks around the nib showed it had been sharpened with a pen knife and not a pencil sharpener.

It was not mine and had never been mine. I felt certain of it.

Quite suddenly I wanted Roy. I wanted the man who had called the house perfect, who thought my ritual with the study door was a load of nonsense but who would do anything to protect me or save me from fear. At least, he would have done once. I felt tears start in my eyes at the way he had changed since we had first come here, my own helplessness in the face of that.

It came to me that I had no idea really of what his life was like from day to day, just as I had no idea of what it was that had traumatized him during his last tour of duty. I didn't agree with the war in Afghanistan and so I had dismissed the life Roy had chosen as none of my business.

Had I dismissed Roy also as not my business? Had he changed at least in part because of my indifference?

My friends said I was stupid to marry a soldier, that his interest in photography was simply a hobby.

I wished I could phone him, just to hear his voice: broad Lancashire, so s.e.xy. I knew it would do no good though, that even if we could speak it would end in an awkward silence or a row. He had forgotten how to talk to me, just as I had somehow forgotten how to talk to him.

The only way we could make things work now was by meeting as different people and starting again.

I was out of milk. I slipped the pencil into my pocket then walked to the bakery and convenience store that stood on the junction with the main road out of town. By the time I got there I had stopped thinking about Roy altogether. My mind was back on the book. I couldn't work out if what I was writing could still be called a novel or whether it had mutated into something else. I picked up a carton of milk and a copy of New Scientist and two fresh croissants. It wasn't until I was standing in line to pay for them that I noticed the girl from the allotments was in the queue ahead of me, back in her school uniform and clutching a copy of Jackie magazine.

I hadn't known that Jackie still existed. The girl fumbled in her cardigan pocket, searching for coins. A fifty-pence piece dropped to the floor and as she bent to pick it up I saw she had a large brown bruise, high on her thigh and a sickly greenish-yellow around the edges. As she came past me on the way to the door I held out the red pencil, the polished wood the queasy, urgent colour of blood oranges.

"I think this might be yours," I said. "I saw you drop it."

The child beamed. "Oh, thank you," she said. "I thought I'd lost that. I've been looking everywhere."

She took the pencil from my outstretched fingers. I opened my mouth to ask what her name was but then decided not to. I was afraid, you see, even then.

I was afraid she was going to tell me her name was Nancy.

"Well then, I'm glad I found it," I said instead. The girl smiled at me again and left the shop. I paid for my things and followed, but by the time I got outside there was no sign of her. When I got home I put the milk in the fridge then telephoned the admin office of the school the Rands had worked at. I asked if I could speak to Steven Rand. I wasn't sure if he still worked there even, but it turned out that I was in luck.

"I think he's on a free period," said the woman who answered. "I'll see if he can come to the phone."

There followed a few minutes of silence before Rand himself came on the line.

"How can I help you?" he said. "Who is this?" He sounded testy, put out, though whether it was my call that was the irritant or the stress of trying to teach mathematics to a bunch of sixteen-year-olds I could not have said.

"Mr Rand," I said. "Steven. My name is Marian Pritchard. I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions." I told him my address then held my breath and waited. I heard him sigh.

"I'm sick of journalists," he said. "It's been three years. Why can't you leave me alone?"

"I'm not a journalist," I said. "I'm a novelist. It's your house I'm interested in, not you."

"It's your house now," he said. "Bad luck. I've got nothing to tell you." Some of his initial hostility was gone, though. I even thought he sounded intrigued.

"You should speak to my wife," he said. "She's the one who believes in ghosts."

"I've already done that. I'd like to hear your own thoughts, if you'll share them."

There was silence, and I thought he'd put down the phone. When he eventually spoke again he sounded resigned.

"I don't suppose it can hurt," he said. "G.o.d knows what Allison's told you."

We arranged to meet the following afternoon in a cafe we both knew near the centre of town.

"I like it because the kids hate it," he said. "They think it's poncey."

"I googled you," he said. "You really do write books, then."

He was different from what I'd expected. I had imagined Allison Rand being married to someone like herself, b.u.t.toned up and a little staid. Steven Rand was confident and expansive. He was even good-looking, in an aquiline, ageing-maths-professor kind of way, and I imagined he was popular with his pupils. I thought he and Allison must have made an interesting couple, that they must once have been happy. I wondered how he felt about her now.

We ordered coffee. I watched Rand spoon brown sugar into his cup and wondered how I ought to begin. He solved that particular problem by himself.

"You might not believe this, but I'm glad you called me," he said. "It's the loneliest thing in the world when someone dies. People are all over you at first, but eventually they get bored. They're tired of hearing the story and they're sick of your feelings. It's as if there's a sell-by date, and once your time is up you're supposed to be over it. Apart from school stuff and conversations with shop a.s.sistants, I've hardly spoken to anyone in months."

"That must be terrible."

He looked at me sharply, inquisitorially almost, as if he was trying to judge the sincerity of what I had said. "It is terrible actually, if you want to know. It makes you doubt your own existence. I've lost my two daughters, just at the point where I was coming to understand what it means to have daughters, the terror and the joy of it. They were alive, and now they're dead. And here I am, still marking quadratic equations." He sipped his coffee and made a face. "It's the algebra that keeps me going, actually. It's odd how things are, isn't it? It's the things that first enthral you when you're young that turn out to be your survival kit later on."

"It's always been that way for me," I said. "I started writing stories when I was five."

"Is that all my life is to you then, a story?"

I hesitated. "Only if you think of mine as a quadratic equation."

"Touche," he said, then laughed. "My G.o.d, you're as bolshie as Allison. I bet you two got on like a house on fire."

"If you're asking me if I liked her, then yes, I did."

"I'm glad." He took a sharp, nervous breath, as if he were about to dive underwater. "Allison's mad, you know. I didn't know that when I married her. Perhaps I would never have known, if we hadn't had children. Did she tell you her theory about the house?"

"In a way she did. She said there was something in the house that harmed Alana and Sophie. I got the feeling she didn't like to talk about it."

"Well, you'd be wrong about that." He spooned more sugar into his coffee. His movements were automatic, absent-minded. I knew he'd forgotten having done the same thing only minutes before. "For the final year of our marriage it was all she would talk about. Allison did a lot of research into our house's history. She did that with all our houses. It's something that gives her pleasure, the way I get a kick out of maths problems and you enjoy stories. Anyway, she discovered there'd once been a murder there. It wasn't some common or garden domestic incident either, it was something horrible. I didn't see that it mattered much. Everyone involved in the case was dead and that included the murderer. But Allison was quite upset by it. She started saying we should never have moved there, that we'd been lured. She'd never come out with anything like that before and I didn't believe a word of it. To be honest, I thought it was hormonal. She was pregnant with Sophie by then, and the murder victim had been a little girl. I thought Ally would get over it but she didn't. She was convinced the dead child was still in the house and trying to make contact with her. After Sophie was born things got worse. Allison started saying that the other girl the murdered girl was jealous of the new baby.

"I hate to say this but I was worried for my daughter. It wasn't that Allison didn't care for her anyone could see she was besotted with the baby. But there was something else, something I couldn't put my finger on. I felt I didn't know her any more."

"You're talking about the Loomis case, aren't you? The name of the murdered child was Nancy Creel?"

"You know all that already, then?"

"Actually I hardly know anything. There's no information anywhere. All I've been able to discover is their names."

"Allison was always good with information. She had problems at first as well, but then she managed to turn up this grotty little true-crime book from somewhere that described the whole case from A to Z, even down to the court transcripts. It had Ally hooked from day one."

"Did Lorna Loomis kill Nancy Creel?"

"In a manner of speaking she did. She kidnapped her and tied her up, then locked her in an upstairs bedroom. Then she took off to Chester to visit her cousin. Nancy Creel starved to death in her absence. It was a month before they found her body."

"That's appalling," I said. I knew without having to ask that it was the box room Nancy Creel had died in, the room I had commandeered as my study. "Why on earth did she do it?"

"It was all on account of a man, if you can believe that. Lorna Loomis had been having an affair with Nancy Creel's father. Tony Creel wanted to break it off, but Lorna Loomis was having none of it. She threatened to tell his wife, but Creel got there before her and confessed everything. Apparently the wife forgave him. He'd had affairs before and they never came to anything. Loomis was furious. She started telephoning the house at all hours of the day and night, making threats and shouting insults. If she hoped to drive a wedge between the Creels it didn't work. Then suddenly the phone calls stopped. Six months later Nancy Creel went missing. Loomis knew Creel doted on Nancy. The child was probably the main reason he decided to break off the affair."

"She killed the daughter to get back at the father?"

Rand nodded. "Her defence was that she never intended for Nancy to die, that she always meant to return to the house and release her. She just wanted to scare Tony Creel a bit first. But she fell and broke her leg while she was in Chester and her cousin insisted on keeping her there until the plaster came off. Loomis couldn't think of any reasonable excuse not to stay, and the more time pa.s.sed the more terrified she became of having to admit to what she'd done. Finally she convinced herself that Nancy's kidnapping had all been a dream. That's what she claimed anyway. You can imagine what the jury thought of that. She got life without chance of parole. If it had happened a decade earlier she'd have hanged for it."

"Is Loomis still alive? She'd be old now."

"She died eight years into her sentence. Allegedly of natural causes, although there was a story about one of the other inmates managing to sneak some a.r.s.enic into her food."

I realized that I liked Steven Rand. I admired the way he had managed to hang on to himself in spite of his tragedy. Also I liked the way he told stories. Sitting in the cafe listening to him tell me about Lorna Loomis made me realize that the events as they had happened made a more compelling narrative than anything I could invent, and in spite of the horror of the thing I was tense with excitement.

Later, once I was home, a strange thing happened. I was in the bedroom, changing the sheets, when suddenly and out of nowhere I was overcome with desire for him. I wanted to know what it felt like, to be with him here in this room, to perform the s.e.xual act in a place that still resonated with the terrible things that had happened there. I imagined Rand's sinewy arms, the long lean rake of his body. He had told me there had been no one else in his life since Allison and I wondered with a tremor inside if that would bring an extra urgency to his lovemaking.

I shuddered and sat down on the bed. I was disgusted by my thoughts, yet still aroused by them. The house was still and silent as it always was, and yet I sensed something hovering on the outer edge of my perception: the haunted, broken laughter of Lorna Loomis.

Allison Rand had told me the house was not safe for children. Could it be that it was not safe for lovers, either? Roy and I had been so happy when we bought the place. I had blamed our problems since on his war experiences, but what if the house itself was the cause of our breakdown? The house working on us and through us, the same as it had with the Rands.

I dismissed the idea as so much rubbish and tried to put it from my mind but I went to bed still thinking about it and that night I had a horrible dream. I was in the study drawing the curtains, but each time I looked away they would open again. It was dark outside, and I was afraid to look out of the window. I became increasingly agitated, because I knew Roy was waiting for me downstairs, only I was scared it would not be him I found when I went down there. I went to the wardrobe to fetch my evening dress, and found the girl from the allotments curled up inside. She lay quite still, her bony knees drawn up to her chest. She was staring right at me, but I knew she was not really seeing me, and when I shook her by the shoulder I discovered she was not the real girl at all but some kind of copy, papery and weightless and balloon-like, reminding me of the pleated orange fruits of the Physalis francheti that grew in my parents' front garden, years and years ago when we lived in Birmingham. Chinese lanterns, they were called. I hadn't thought of them in ages.

I closed the wardrobe door and then woke up. I was breathing heavily, and I had the feeling I might have called out in my sleep although there was nothing to prove this either way. I turned on the bedside lamp and got out of bed. It was still dark, still early. I tiptoed out on to the landing. There were shadows bunched in every corner but no human presence, at least none that was visible to me.

I used the toilet then returned to the bedroom. The girl was lying on the bed, looking right at me as she had in my dream, only this time she was seeing me, I was sure of it. She had on the same grey school skirt and green cardigan she'd been wearing on the day she disappeared.

In the yellow light from the lamp her eyes gleamed like gla.s.s marbles.