The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women Part 21

Bill's face is grim as he stares down at her, doing his best, as he always has, to make her feel insignificant. His lips are drawn so tight that his words are almost difficult to understand. "We'll have to start this all over again," he says. He is looking at her, but talking to the others. "We'll have to watch her constantly to make sure she doesn't get back into the drugs and start running with her dope-addict friends. Make sure she isn't sneaking out to go to parties in the middle of the night." He shoots a glance at his wife and she cringes a little before he fixes his gaze on his daughter once more. "You know how she is. It better not interfere with my work like it did the last time. My work is very important, and this isn't going to be a repeat. I d.a.m.ned well won't stand for it." He leans closer, and now he does speak directly to her. "Do you hear me, young lady?"

Mara expects to feel something, anything, but she doesn't. Certainly not fear, although she knows that is what her father wants most. It is an interesting thing, this . . . state she is in, this condition. It's vaguely like being wrapped in a protective coc.o.o.n, insulated from anything and everything that might affect her. She can't even smell the cinnamon mints that her father is always chewing because he thinks it makes his breath smell good. For that she might feel grat.i.tude, if she could feel anything at all beyond the mild surprise at her current predicament. She always hated that smell.

Something crashes against the floor and Mara's head swivels until she locates the source of the sound Brianna has slammed her books flat against the golden wood. Another lie, that wood picked specifically by her mother to give the illusion of warmth, but Mara remembers how it felt against the skin of her cheek and knows there is nothing warm about a wooden kitchen floor at 3 a.m. on a winter morning.

"Well, this is great," Brianna says. "I can't believe you're going to let her waltz in here like it's just another day in the life of anything normal. Just slide right back into the groove and make the rest of us have to fit our lives around it. Around her. Oh, and let's not forget that disgusting little dog of hers we should have put that d.a.m.ned thing to sleep back in December." Her younger sister's voice is full of the hatred she has built up for Mara over so many months, perhaps years. "Thank you for coming back and making me miserable all over again, Mara. I suppose you'll want your room back now. And your clothes and stuff, too. I guess G.o.d, or what ever, sent you back to punish me because I was glad when you-"

"Brianna!" Amber sits up straight for the first time since her husband came home. "You watch how you speak to your sister!"

"I'm sorry." If anything, her tone is even more venomous. "Am I being a little too honest here? In fact, am I the only one being honest?" She pushes herself to her feet and takes a step towards Mara. "You were always the one who got all the attention, weren't you? Well, it's my turn now, so why don't you just f.u.c.k off and go away!"

"Boy, I hear that," Andy says before either of Mara's parents can respond to Brianna's fury. He is still on the floor and now he runs his fingers through his hair, something he has always done when he is feeling guilty. There was a time after her eleventh birthday when he did that a lot, but only Mara noticed. And only Mara knew why. "And don't be thinking I'm gonna be driving you around like before, you know. I got stuff of my own to do now- I got a summer job and a girlfriend, a football scholarship to college. My coach says I'm good enough for the pros."

Mara considers this as she looks at him. He can't meet her eyes, and she realizes what he's doing trying, in his own, inept way, to rea.s.sure her, to give her an unspoken promise that things will be different now, he won't repeat the sins of his past, it was all nothing but a big, terrible mistake, one of those nasty and dark O'Shannon secrets. Andy looks left and right, up and down, but eventually he meets her eyes, and when he does, he is pinned, the once-proud predator frozen and knowing doom on some instinctive level within the sight of the hunter's rifle.

He begins to cry.

"I'm sorry, Mara. Jesus, G.o.d, I am so sorry." Tears course from the corners of his eyes and flow over his cheekbones and strong jaw, that chiselled look the girls began to notice in his soph.o.m.ore year in high school. "I should never have done that to you, I didn't mean to, I don't even know why I did it and then I couldn't stop-"

He goes on and on, babbling and blubbering, and now, of all the times since she walked into this house, Mara thinks she should feel something, she should.

Across the kitchen, her brother is wailing, unable to stop himself from releasing the poisonous guilt bottled inside for the last four years. "You should've told on me, you should've exposed me for what I was, I should've been punished!" He sobs again, and he isn't just running his hands through his hair any more, he's actually pulling on it. "Everyone thinks I'm such a nice guy . . . I'm not a nice guy, you could tell them that. You could've told them any time. I'm not!"

"Wait a d.a.m.ned minute." Silent until now, shocked, Bill O'Shannon finally finds his voice. He strides across the kitchen and pulls his teenaged son to his feet, then grasps the front of the boy's jersey with both hands like a man about to shake an enemy. "What are you saying, Andy? What . . . what did you do?"

"I made her have s.e.x with me when she was eleven!" Andy screams into his father's face. "For months and months and months! And I took pictures of it and swore I'd tell everyone at school she was a s.l.u.t if she told anyone!"

"Oh my G.o.d," Amber O'Shannon whimpers. "Oh. My. G.o.d."

William O'Shannon throws his son across the kitchen like he is tossing away something he no longer wants.

Then he turns and walks to one of the kitchen chairs, where he sits down with all the grace of an improperly strung marionette. A very heavy one.

Andy has landed in a heap against the front of the refrigerator. He picks himself up, then wipes his bleeding mouth on his sleeve. He studies the blood but doesn't see it, then goes back and sits in the same place he'd been before his ugly confession.

"Pervert," Brianna suddenly hisses. "You're so lucky you never tried that s.h.i.t with me." Before anyone realizes what she's going to do, she reaches over and gives Mara a stinging, loud slap across her bare left arm. "You're an idiot, you know that? Why couldn't you open your mouth? Oh, no instead you held it all inside and let it drive you crazy."

Mara glances down and sees Brianna's hand print clearly against her skin. It's OK, because it didn't hurt. She still has that sensation of insulation, or maybe it's something stronger, an unseen force field. This is a good thing, because she thinks there is more coming.

"All these years," Amber says softly. "I thought she was over it. I thought the parties and the drugs were a school thing, she was running with the wrong crowd, and if we could wait it out, she'd get better. She'd . . . forget." Somehow over the last fifteen minutes Mara's mother has grown deep purple shadows beneath her eyes. "But she didn't get over it, did she? Not ever. All that stuff, every pill and joint and needle, it was her trying to get away from the memory of what Andy did. It was just her trying to escape."

Andy sits up suddenly. "Wait you knew? Mom, you knew and you didn't do anything?" His voice is rising, climbing back towards the scream it had been before Bill threw him. "Why? Why didn't you put a stop to it?"

"Because I thought this . . . this dirty little problem of yours would just go away!" Amber's voice is shrill, painful. "Sometimes teenaged boys do things they shouldn't, but it all gets better I thought that's what this was!"

"I can't believe I'm hearing this," Bill says hoa.r.s.ely. "My son rapes my daughter and my wife knows it's happening and doesn't do anything about it? What-"

"Oh, like you would have done anything if we'd have told you," Brianna sneers. "Mr I Can't Be Bothered With Anything But Money And Work."

Bill O'Shannon stumbles to his feet, not noticing when his chair tumbles backwards. "Are you saying that you knew, too?" He has gone from shock to rage, just that quick.

But thirteen-year-old Brianna will not be cowed. "Yes, I knew!" she shrieks. "I wasn't sure what it was, but I knew!" Mara watches as her little sister's finger jabs in her direction. "Were you deaf? Didn't you hear her when she cried every night? Before and after, like clockwork you could hear her through the door to her room. And you didn't do anything!"

"So you're what?" Andy asks bitterly. "Little Miss Holier Than Thou? You're better than all of us?"

Brianna whirls. "Me? Oh, sure, I'm great. Just put me in Mom's corner, where we sit and wish it would all go away. Where we wished she would go away."

Now no one can look at her; no one can say anything else. Through all of it their confessions, their anger at her, their self-hatred Mara has felt nothing, thanks to the insulating layer of . . . something around her. Now she finally knows what that something is.

It is the secret shame of her family.

There is guilt here, lots of it, but it is not hers. Yes, it was her own hand that tied off the vein and held the needle, her own decision to try a score from an unknown dealer, a guy too new to the street trade to know he should cut his junk a few more times before pa.s.sing it down to the high-school crowd. But what she did that night in mid-December was a consequence not a cause, the result of a family so corrupted by selfishness that no one but she felt enough pain to search for a way to avoid it.

Mara still doesn't know why she has come back, or where she has been since the night she died right here on this supposedly "warm" kitchen floor. She doesn't recall wanting to come back, and she certainly never had any desire to bring out the dreadful truth that had been her true existence it simply doesn't matter to her any more. Whatever the reason, now her being here is done . . . for the second time. And when the compulsion to leave takes her, she doesn't fight it.

She rises and feels their gazes on her, but she has no desire to say goodbye. She takes one step, then two, and something tickles her ankle. When she looks down, she sees Greepers; the old dog sniffs at her ankle then gives it an affectionate lick before looking up at her and wagging his tail.

Mara reaches down and picks him up.

He is as soft and warm as she remembers, wonderfully so, and he wiggles with joy and tries to lick her face. She has one quick moment of confusion as she realizes that even though she is holding him, she can still see his body on the floor, eyes open and chest still, small and silent next to the chair on which she had been sitting.

She glances at each member of her family in turn. Her mother is pallid, crying quietly; for the first time that Mara can ever remember, she looks at her daughter with something close to longing. Her father seems to have shrunk on his chair, a man broken by the hideous truth of what has transpired, unseen and unstopped, in his own home. Her brother and sister stare first at her and the soft bundle of fur in her arms, then at the cooling corpse of the family pet. Their expressions are tight with self-recrimination and remorse.

But Mara doesn't care.

She hugs Greepers close and walks out of the kitchen, going down the steps and into the utility room.

It is filled with white light, and somewhere at the end of that light she knows she and Greepers will find a long-awaited peace.

Let Loose.

Mary Cholmondeley.

The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold

Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still.

Some years ago I took up architecture, and made a tour through Holland, studying the buildings of that interesting country. I was not then aware that it is not enough to take up art. Art must take you up, too. I never doubted but that my pa.s.sing enthusiasm for her would be returned. When I discovered that she was a stern mistress, who did not immediately respond to my attentions, I naturally transferred them to another shrine. There are other things in the world besides art. I am now a landscape gardener.

But at the time of which I write, I was engaged in a violent flirtation with architecture. I had one companion on this expedition, who has since become one of the leading architects of the day. He was a thin, determined-looking man with a screwed-up face and heavy jaw, slow of speech, and absorbed in his work to a degree which I quickly found tiresome. He was possessed of a certain quiet power of overcoming obstacles which I have rarely seen equalled. He has since become my brother-in-law, so I ought to know; for my parents did not like him much and opposed the marriage, and my sister did not like him at all, and refused him over and over again; but, nevertheless, he eventually married her.

I have thought since that one of his reasons for choosing me as his travelling companion on this occasion was because he was getting up steam for what he subsequently termed "an alliance with my family", but the idea never entered my head at the time. A more careless man as to dress I have rarely met, and yet, in all the heat of July in Holland, I noticed that he never appeared without a high, starched collar, which had not even fashion to commend it at that time.

I often chaffed him about his splendid collars, and asked him why he wore them, but without eliciting any response. One evening, as we were walking back to our lodgings in Middeburg, I attacked him for about the thirtieth time on the subject.

"Why on earth do you wear them?" I said.

"You have, I believe, asked me that question many times," he replied, in his slow, precise utterance, "but always on occasions when I was occupied. I am now at leisure, and I will tell you."

And he did.

I have put down what he said, as nearly in his own words as I can remember them.

Ten years ago, I was asked to read a paper on English Frescoes at the Inst.i.tute of British Architects. I was determined to make the paper as good as I could, down to the slightest details, and I consulted many books on the subject, and studied every fresco I could find. My father, who had been an architect, had left me, at his death, all his papers and notebooks on the subject of architecture. I searched them diligently, and found in one of them a slight unfinished sketch of nearly fifty years ago that especially interested me. Underneath was noted, in his clear, small hand Frescoed east wall of crypt. Parish Church. Wet Waste-on-the-Wolds, Yorkshire (via Pickering).

The sketch held such a fascination for me that I decided to go there and see the fresco for myself. I had only a very vague idea as to where Wet Waste-on-the-Wolds was, but I was ambitious for the success of my paper; it was hot in London, and I set off on my long journey not without a certain degree of pleasure, with my dog Brian, a large nondescript brindled creature, as my only companion.

I reached Pickering, in Yorkshire, in the course of the afternoon, and then began a series of experiments on local lines which ended, after several hours, in my finding myself deposited at a little out-of-the-way station within nine or ten miles of Wet Waste. As no conveyance of any kind was to be had, I shouldered my portmanteau and set out on a long white road that stretched away into the distance over the bare, treeless wold. I must have walked for several hours, over a waste of moorland patched with heather, when a doctor pa.s.sed me, and gave me a lift to within a mile of my destination. The mile was a long one, and it was quite dark by the time I saw the feeble glimmer of lights in front of me, and found that I had reached Wet Waste. I had considerable difficulty in getting anyone to take me in; but at last I persuaded the owner of the public house to give me a bed, and, quite tired out, I got into it as soon as possible for fear he should change his mind, and fell asleep to the sound of a little stream below my window.

I was up early next morning, and enquired directly after breakfast the way to the clergyman's house, which I found was close at hand. At Wet Waste everything was close at hand. The whole village seemed composed of a straggling row of one-storeyed grey stone houses, the same colour as the stone walls that separated the few fields enclosed from the surrounding waste, and as the little bridges over the beck that ran down one side of the grey wide street. Everything was grey. The church, the low tower of which I could see at a little distance, seemed to have been built of the same stone; so was the parsonage when I came up to it, accompanied on my way by a mob of rough, uncouth children, who eyed me and Brian with half-defiant curiosity.

The clergyman was at home, and after a short delay I was admitted. Leaving Brian in charge of my drawing materials, I followed the servant into a low panelled room, in which, at a latticed window, a very old man was sitting. The morning light fell on his white head bent low over a litter of papers and books.

"Mr er-?" he said, looking up slowly, with one finger keeping his place in a book.

"Blake."

"Blake," he repeated after me, and was silent.

I told him that I was an architect, that I had come to study a fresco in the crypt of his church, and asked for the keys.

"The crypt?" he said, pushing up his spectacles and peering hard at me. "The crypt has been closed for thirty years. Ever since-" And he stopped short.

"I should be much obliged for the keys," I said again. He shook his head.

"No," he said. "No one goes in there now."

"It is a pity," I remarked, "for I have come a long way with that one object"; and I told him about the paper I had been asked to read, and the trouble I was taking with it.

He became interested. "Ah!" he said, laying down his pen, and removing his finger from the page before him. "I can understand that. I also was young once, and fired with ambition. The lines have fallen to me in somewhat lonely places, and for forty years I have held the cure of souls in this place, where, truly, I have seen but little of the world, though I myself may be not unknown in the paths of literature. Possibly you may have read a pamphlet, written by myself, on the Syrian version of the Three Authentic Epistles of Ignatius?"

"Sir," I said, "I am ashamed to confess that I have not time to read even the most celebrated books. My one object in life is my art. Ars longa, vita brevis, you know."

"You are right, my son," said the old man, evidently disappointed, but looking at me kindly. "There are diversities of gifts, and if the Lord has entrusted you with a talent, look to it. Lay it not up in a napkin."

I said I would not do so if he would lend me the keys of the crypt. He seemed startled by my recurrence to the subject and looked undecided.

"Why not?" he murmured to himself. "The youth appears a good youth. And superst.i.tion! What is it but distrust in G.o.d!"

He got up slowly and, taking a large bunch of keys out of his pocket, opened with one of them an oak cupboard in the corner of the room.

"They should be here," he muttered, peering in, "but the dust of many years deceives the eye. See, my son, if among these parchments there be two keys: one of iron and very large, and the other steel, and of a long thin appearance."

I went eagerly to help him, and presently found in a back drawer two keys tied together, which he recognized at once.

"Those are they," he said. "The long one opens the first door at the bottom of the steps which go down against the outside wall of the church hard by the sword graven in the wall. The second opens (but it is hard of opening and of shutting) the iron door within the pa.s.sage leading to the crypt itself. My son, is it necessary to your treatise that you should enter this crypt?"

I replied that it was absolutely necessary.

"Then take them," he said, "and in the evening you will bring them to me again."

I said I might want to go several days running, and asked if he would not allow me to keep them till I had finished my work, but on that point he was firm.

"Likewise," he added, "be careful that you lock the first door at the foot of the steps before you unlock the second, and lock the second also while you are within. Furthermore, when you come out, lock the iron inner door as well as the wooden one."

I promised I would do so and, after thanking him, hurried away, delighted at my success in obtaining the keys. Finding Brian and my sketching materials waiting for me in the porch, I eluded the vigilance of my escort of children by taking the narrow private path between the parsonage and the church which was close at hand, standing in a quadrangle of ancient yews.

The church itself was interesting, and I noticed that it must have arisen out of the ruins of a previous building, judging from the number of fragments of stone caps and arches, bearing traces of very early carving, now built into the walls. There were incised crosses, too, in some places, and one especially caught my attention, being flanked by a large sword. It was in trying to get a nearer look at this that I stumbled, and, looking down, saw at my feet a flight of narrow stone steps green with moss and mildew. Evidently this was the entrance to the crypt. I at once descended the steps, taking care of my footing, for they were damp and slippery in the extreme. Brian accompanied me, as nothing would induce him to remain behind. By the time I had reached the bottom of the stairs, I found myself almost in darkness, and I had to strike a light before I could find the keyhole and the proper key to fit into it. The door, which was of wood, opened inwards fairly easily, although an acc.u.mulation of mould and rubbish on the ground outside showed it had not been used for many years. Having got through it, which was not altogether an easy matter, as nothing would induce it to open more than about eighteen inches, I carefully locked it behind me, although I should have preferred to leave it open, as there is to some minds an unpleasant feeling in being locked in anywhere, in case of a sudden exit seeming advisable.

I kept my candle alight with some difficulty and, after groping my way down a low and of course exceedingly dank pa.s.sage, came to another door. A toad was squatting against it, who looked as if he had been sitting there about a hundred years. As I lowered the candle to the floor, he gazed at the light with unblinking eyes, and then retreated slowly into a crevice in the wall, leaving against the door a small cavity in the dry mud which had gradually silted up round his person. I noticed that this door was of iron, and had a long bolt, which, however, was broken. Without delay, I fitted the second key into the lock and, pushing the door open after considerable difficulty, I felt the cold breath of the crypt upon my face. I must own I experienced a momentary regret at locking the second door again as soon as I was well inside, but I felt it my duty to do so. Then, leaving the key in the lock, I seized my candle and looked round.

I was standing in a low vaulted chamber with groined roof, cut out of the solid rock. It was difficult to see where the crypt ended, as further light thrown on any point only showed other rough archways or openings, cut in the rock, which had probably served at one time for family vaults. A peculiarity of the Wet Waste crypt, which I had not noticed in other places of that description, was the tasteful arrangement of skulls and bones, which were packed about four feet high on either side. The skulls were symmetrically built up to within a few inches of the top of the low archway on my left, and the shin bones were arranged in the same manner on my right. But the fresco! I looked round for it in vain. Perceiving at the further end of the crypt a very low and very ma.s.sive archway, the entrance to which was not filled up with bones, I pa.s.sed under it, and found myself in a second smaller chamber. Holding my candle above my head, the first object its light fell upon was the fresco, and at a glance I saw that it was unique.

Setting down some of my things with a trembling hand on a rough stone shelf hard by, which had evidently been a credence table, I examined the work more closely. It was a reredos over what had probably been the altar at the time the priests were proscribed. The fres...o...b..longed to the earliest part of the fifteenth century, and was so perfectly preserved that I could almost trace the limits of each day's work in the plaster, as the artist had dashed it on and smoothed it out with his trowel. The subject was the Ascension, gloriously treated. I can hardly describe my elation as I stood and looked at it, and reflected that this magnificent specimen of English fresco painting would be made known to the world by myself. Recollecting myself at last, I opened my sketching bag and, lighting all the candles I had brought with me, set to work.

Brian walked about near me, and though I was not otherwise than glad of his company in my rather lonely position, I wished several times I had left him behind. He seemed restless, and even the sight of so many bones appeared to exercise no soothing effect upon him. At last, however, after repeated commands, he lay down, watchful but motionless, on the stone floor.

I must have worked for several hours, and I was pausing to rest my eyes and hands, when I noticed for the first time the intense stillness that surrounded me. No sound from me reached the outer world. The church clock, which had clanged out so loud and ponderously as I went down the steps, had not since sent the faintest whisper of its iron tongue down to me below. All was silent as the grave. This was the grave. Those who had come here had indeed gone down into silence. I repeated the words to myself, or rather they repeated themselves to me.

Gone down into silence.

I was awakened from my reverie by a faint sound. I sat still and listened. Bats occasionally frequent vaults and underground places.

The sound continued, a faint, stealthy, rather unpleasant sound. I do not know what kinds of sounds bats make, whether pleasant or otherwise. Suddenly there was a noise as of something falling, a momentary pause and then an almost imperceptible but distant jangle as of a key.

I had left the key in the lock after I had turned it, and I now regretted having done so. I got up, took one of the candles, and went back into the larger crypt for though I trust I am not so effeminate as to be rendered nervous by hearing a noise for which I cannot instantly account; still, on occasions of this kind, I must honestly say I should prefer that they did not occur. As I came towards the iron door, there was another distinct (I almost said hurried) sound. The impression on my mind was one of great haste. When I reached the door, and held the candle near the lock to take out the key, I perceived that the other one, which hung by a short string to its fellow, was vibrating slightly. I should have preferred not to find it vibrating, as there seemed no occasion for such a course; but I put them both into my pocket, and turned to go back to my work. As I turned, I saw on the ground what had occasioned the louder noise I had heard, namely, a skull which had evidently just slipped from its place on the top of one of the walls of bones, and had rolled almost to my feet. There, disclosing a few more inches of the top of an archway behind, was the place from which it had been dislodged. I stooped to pick it up, but fearing to displace any more skulls by meddling with the pile, and not liking to gather up its scattered teeth, I let it lie, and went back to my work, in which I was soon so completely absorbed that I was only roused at last by my candles beginning to burn low and go out one after another.

Then, with a sigh of regret, for I had not nearly finished, I turned to go. Poor Brian, who had never quite reconciled himself to the place, was beside himself with delight. As I opened the iron door he pushed past me, and a moment later I heard him whining and scratching, and I had almost added, beating, against the wooden one. I locked the iron door, and hurried down the pa.s.sage as quickly as I could, and almost before I had got the other one ajar there seemed to be a rush past me into the open air, and Brian was bounding up the steps and out of sight. As I stopped to take out the key, I felt quite deserted and left behind. When I came out once more into the sunlight, there was a vague sensation all about me in the air of exultant freedom.

It was already late in the afternoon, and after I had sauntered back to the parsonage to give up the keys, I persuaded the people of the public house to let me join in the family meal, which was spread out in the kitchen. The inhabitants of Wet Waste were primitive people, with the frank, unabashed manner that flourishes still in lonely places, especially in the wilds of Yorkshire; but I had no idea that in these days of penny posts and cheap newspapers such entire ignorance of the outer world could have existed in any corner, however remote, of Great Britain.

When I took one of the neighbour's children on my knee a pretty little girl with the palest aureole of flaxen hair I had ever seen and began to draw pictures for her of the birds and beasts of other countries, I was instantly surrounded by a crowd of children, and even grown-up people, while others came to their doorways and looked on from a distance, calling to each other in the strident unknown tongue which I have since discovered goes by the name of "Broad Yorkshire".

The following morning, as I came out of my room, I perceived that something was amiss in the village. A buzz of voices reached me as I pa.s.sed the bar, and in the next house I could hear through the open window a high-pitched wail of lamentation.

The woman who brought me my breakfast was in tears, and in answer to my questions told me that the neighbour's child, the little girl whom I had taken on my knee the evening before, had died in the night.

I felt sorry for the general grief that the little creature's death seemed to arouse, and the uncontrolled wailing of the poor mother took my appet.i.te away.