The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women Part 27

He's not ill any more. He knows he's not ill. Dr Sutton has told him he's not ill. Today is a big day. The interview is at ten. He's left himself enough time to get there and he's calm, prepared. There's no reason for a panic attack. Especially not today. In fact, there's no reason for an attack at all. He's worked hard, he's focused and he's not anxious. He tries to breathe. Breathe like Dr Sutton showed him how. But he can't. He feels faint.

It's not her. It's impossible. He knows it's impossible, and yet the icy chill of terror is spreading through him like black ink poured into a beaker of water. He wants to look away from those eyes, to tear this freezing hand from his shoulder. But he's solid with fear, immobilized and breathless.

His brain works feverishly to rationalize. It's his fault. This is his fault entirely. He should never have accepted, let alone kept, the photo they sent. It's the familiarity of her face that's making him recreate her so perfectly now in this madness. It has to be. He might have forgotten how she looked if he'd just binned it. It was nearly two years ago. But they meant well, the family. It was loving, not ghoulish, hunting down and retrieving the photo from the theme park after what had happened. They wanted to honour her last great thrill. To remember her. Remember her not as the fat, lonely, quiet girl they'd raised, but as a risk taker. Someone who lived large. A front row rider.

And they wanted to thank him for all he did. What did he do? How did that go again? What order did Dr Sutton say he should remember it in? Her screaming. His laughing. Her screaming again, and again, too much, too shrill, too long, too gurgled for an outburst of joyful abandonment. Then her jerking, and gasping, and slumping. His screaming for help as the ride stopped, and no one coming. Screaming more and more as the harness didn't lift, then, when it finally loosened, grunting and heaving to get the bulk of her sweat-slicked body out of the chair and on to the hard concrete. Still screaming for a doctor, with everyone standing watching as though it were an act. Then putting his mouth to hers, and blowing, and pumping her chest with his palms, and crying, and still shouting for help.

And then slumping himself, realizing she was gone, and he hadn't helped, hadn't saved her. This poor, frightened, lonely stranger. His was the last face she saw. The last hand she held. And now he was here, recreating it all in his crazy brain, just as he was about to start afresh. Sabotaging himself. That's what Dr Sutton calls it.

His anxiety has won. He blinks as he watches his guilty creation lower her hand and listens, numb with horror, as she speaks. She is stern. Almost angry.

"If you follow me on to this train, it won't be fine. It won't be fine at all."

He stays perfectly still. She holds his horrified gaze for a beat then walks past him, steps on to the train, and sits herself gracefully and serenely next to the man with the rucksack. The doors close. The train begins to move away, and as he watches her though the gla.s.s she smiles, an expression of release playing in her darkened eyes. She turns her head away from him, lifts a hand and lays it gently over that of the woman with parcels. She disappears with the train into the darkness of the tunnel.

His chill is gone now. He's sweating. His fevered imagination has made him miss the train that today, at 8.50 a.m., could have taken him to a new job and a new chance and a new life. He has no stomach to wait for another.

He weaves slowly and shakily off the platform and heads for the stairs.

He should feel defeated. He should feel insane, a failure, a casualty. But right now as he jostles through the crowds pushing in the opposite direction, he feels strangely elated, light of heart, released and invigorated. Baffled, he takes a breath and gives himself over to the emotion. In the months and years to come he will recall that this instant, these precious few moments of confused elation were to savour and not to fear.

In four and a half minutes' time the man with the rucksack in the train will detonate his bomb.

G.o.d Grant That She Lye Still.

Cynthia Asquith.

It was not until three weeks after I came to live at Mosstone that I first saw her. But most of my new patients had talked to me of Margaret Clewer, the youthful owner of the Manor House. Many shook kindly heads because she was so alone in the world. "Only twenty-two, and without a single near relation!" but they also spoke of her beauty and charm, and it was with agreeable curiosity that I set out to pay my professional call at what the Mosstone villagers called "the great house".

As I pa.s.sed through the gateway that I had so often admired from outside, into a large, grey-walled court, the m.u.f.fled atmosphere of the place seemed to envelop me like a cloak. The very air seemed thicker and more still. It was as though I had stepped out of the everyday world into something cloistered and self-sufficing.

Pigeons fluttered and crooned and plumes of blue smoke rose into the golden air. Absorbing its beauty like a long, lovely draught, I gazed at the exquisite gabled house, with its great mullioned windows and queer twisted chimneys, round which the swallows skimmed.

It struck me then, I remember, that more than any other building I had ever seen, this house appeared to have a face, an actual countenance that might vary like that of a beautiful woman. Yet could any building look more remote, more strikingly aloof?

Time had deposited so much on those mellowed walls; for so many centuries a deep reservoir of life, the house now looked withdrawn from any further partic.i.p.ation, as though with gentle repudiation disa.s.sociating itself from the present and the future.

My watch told me I had returned from my walk twenty minutes before I was due. Ever since my boyhood I had loved poring over old epitaphs, so I turned into the churchyard, which was only a few yards from the front windows of the house.

Like most village churchyards it was very overcrowded, but the dark red-fruited yew trees shed an air of sombre peace over the cl.u.s.tered graves. Most of these graves were mere uncommemorated gra.s.s mounds, but there were also a number of grey lichen-clad tombstones lying and leaning at all angles, and on many of these the name of Clewer was engraved. Evidently innumerable generations of my future patient's family had lived and died here. Most of these long-dead Clewers seemed to have been mourned by appreciative and verbose relations. Nothing that uncouth rhyme and shapeless sculpture could do to preserve the memory of the departed had been omitted. The scriptures had been ransacked for consoling texts, and prose and verse not only lavishly set down the virtues, talents and deeds of those described as "not lost but gone before", but also a.s.siduously struggled to describe the emotions of the bereaved. Only once in all those generations had a strange reticence descended on the Clewer family.

In the corner of the churchyard nearest to the house, directly beneath a darkly presiding yew tree, was a worn, flat stone. Here nothing implored the pa.s.sing tribute of a sigh. There was only the bare inscription: Here lyes the body of Elspeth Clewer. Born 1550 dyed 1572.

And beneath in different lettering the words: G.o.d grante that she lye stille.

This inscription struck me as laconic and queerly worded, so like, and yet so different from, the familiar Requiescat in pace. Could those who buried the dead girl find nothing to praise? Was it too great a strain on their capacity for hope to a.s.sociate her with peace? Or was the rather piteous supplication "G.o.d grante that she lye stille" more for themselves than for her they consigned to the grave?

Idly I wondered whether I should ever know Margaret Clewer well enough to question her about this undesignated ancestress.

It was now time to run from the dead to the living, so I moved towards the home of the Clewers. As I approached the iron-studded door, the air was heavily sweet with the scent of the magnolias. These, as well as wisteria and clematis, cl.u.s.tered thickly over the front of the building, but to my fancy the great house seemed to wear them with, as it were, a shrug of indifference, as though it knew nothing could really enhance its own beauty. The gentle austerity of that beauty humbled me again, and it was with a sense of intrusion that I pulled the bell and heard the responding clang and the bark of an aroused dog.

I don't know what I had subconsciously expected, but the smiling beribboned parlour maid who opened the door seemed incongruous.

"Dr Stone?" she asked. "Miss Clewer is expecting you."

Obedient to her "Come this way, please", I followed her through a large hall in which young people were playing ping-pong and noisy games of cards; the blare of a gramophone triumphing over the confusion of sounds. A heavy door through which we pa.s.sed cut us off into complete cool silence, and a short flight of shiny black oak stairs, splendidly solid to the tread, led us to the door of my patient's room. The strong evening sun streamed in and it was through a dance of dazzling motes that I first saw her.

She lay on a low wide bed drawn close up to the window, and a Golden Retriever luxuriously sprawled over the flower-embroidered coverlet that was spread across her feet.

I cannot remember how much I took in at first sight: I know the window-shelf and the tables were then, as always, crowded with flowers and great branches cut from trees, and the bed strewn with books, writing materials and needlework.

The shock with which I saw her was not without an element of recognition. Vaguely I had always expected that one day I should see a woman far more lovely than all others. Her hair gleamed in the sunshine, and her translucent face smiled up at me. I thought I should never see anything more beautiful, but I did the next time I saw her, for the variety of her beauty was unending. Changing as the sea changes with the sky, her colouring had its special response to every tone of light, just as her expression varied with every shade of feeling. It was a fluid, unset loveliness, suggesting far more than it a.s.serted.

After this first sight of her, I was often to wonder how I should describe her, supposing I had to reduce my impressions to the scope of words. What, for instance, should I set down if I were asked to fill in her pa.s.sport? Would she be allowed across frontiers if I described her mouth as normal? Normal! When it was never the same for two consecutive seconds. As for her eyes. I should not even have known what colour to call them. ''Eyes too mysterious to be blue, Too lovely to be grey,'' would not help. Many more than two colours met in those pools of light.

As I entered the room I was to know so well, two canaries in a large golden cage were singing loudly, and l could scarcely hear Margaret Clewer's welcoming words. In her lovely, lilting, but, to my professional ear, definitely nervous voice, before she began to speak of herself, she asked me many questions as to the comfort of my house and my impressions of my new practice. I had almost forgotten in what capacity I was there when she said: "I've been very silly and strained my heart, I think, over-rowing myself. I've got a craze for very violent exercise. Anyhow, I feel distinctly queer, and my heart seems to beat everywhere where it shouldn't be. And so," she added in her way how well I was to know that way of speaking in inverted commas, "my friends insist on my taking medical advice, so perhaps you had better see if my heart is in the right place."

It did not take me long to discover that her heart was severely strained. There was also a very considerable degree of anaemia, and I prescribed three weeks' rest in bed.

My verdict was received with equanimity.

"If I can't row or ride, I'd just as soon remain in the horizontal," she answered gaily. "I shall be quite happy with books and food and friends, and with my beautiful Sheen. Isn't he lovely?" she added, turning the Retriever's golden head towards me.

After paying homage, I asked if there were anyone to whom she would like me to speak about her health.

"Oh, no! I haven't any relations. I haven't anyone to edit me. I'm quite alone."

"But there seem so many people in the house."

"Oh, yes, but they're just visitors. When I said alone, I meant independent. I couldn't bear to be literally alone."

The last words were said with a vehemence that rather surprised me. Her room, with its mult.i.tude of books, a violin and several unfinished sketches, seemed to bear evidence of such varied resources, and I had already diagnosed her as a person who would be very good company to herself.

As I shook hands with her, saying I would return the day after tomorrow, I noticed that, for all their brightness, the responsive eyes held a slightly, not exactly hurt, but shall I say initiated expression. In spite of the nervous voice, my first impression had been that here, if anywhere, was one who had not felt the touch of earthly years. This superficial impression was already modified. Had life already bared its teeth at this lovely girl?

"I saw you groping about among the graves," she said, as I reluctantly turned towards the door. "Are you interested in the rude forefathers, in worms and graves and epitaphs?"

"Well, at any rate, I love epitaphs," I replied, "and this is a peculiarly picturesque churchyard. You, yourself, must surely have a weakness for it, as you occupy a room so immediately overlooking it."

"Yes, I am close, aren't I?" She laughed. "No rude forefather could turn in his grave without my hearing him. But this happens to be the room I like best in the house. There isn't any harm in being so close, is there?"

"I can't say I consider it physically unhealthy," I answered professionally.

She smiled her swift, slanting smile. "Are you afraid of my being troubled by ghosts, Dr Stone? Well, if it's a nervous patient you want, I'll see what I can do to oblige you; but first, please put my heart back into the right place."

I told her I would do my best and return the day after tomorrow to report progress.

"Au revoir, then," she said. "And meanwhile, I shall look out for you in the churchyard, you ghoul! You ought to come and see it by night. You can't think how lovely it is in the moonlight, with a great white owl swooping and brushing against the tombstones."

As I turned my back on the beautiful house I found myself walking with a light step. For the first time since I came to this friendless new country a fellow creature had made me aware of myself as a human being. Till then I had been merely the new doctor.

I walked back through the village with a sense of enhanced life. There was now something to which I looked forward.

I visited my new patient three times during the next week. Finding her physical condition very little improved, I decided that some electric treatment would be beneficial, and as I had a portable apparatus, I was able to give the applications in her own room. A long course of this treatment involved many visits, which were the occasion for the most enchanting talks I have ever known. I look back on these summer weeks as the happiest of my life. Day after day I drifted on a stream of delight. She was a magical companion, to me a real Pentecost. Her quicksilver sympathy, the lightning gaiety of her response, her dancing voice, and a way she had of appreciatively echoing one's last words: I suppose it was all these qualities that made me for the first time in my life feel so delightfully articulate. There can never have been a more receptive and therefore stimulating mind. It was as though she understood my thoughts almost before I had decided to put them into words.

There seemed no limitations to her understanding and sympathy. Her supple mind rejected nothing, and her iridescent gaiety was like running water in sunshine, continually flinging off a lovely spray of laughter. How, I wondered, had she found time to read so widely, so richly, to store her astonishing verbal memory? Of herself she spoke very little in any autobiographical way. After weeks of frequent conversation I knew nothing of the events of her life, of her dead parents or of her friends; but almost from the very beginning she showed a tendency to discuss herself psychologically, to expatiate on her character, or rather, on what to my amus.e.m.e.nt she called her lack of character.

I suppose it was about six weeks after my first visit that our conversation took a turn which for me sounded the first faint note of disquiet.

In her usual rather unconcerned voice she said: "It must be fun to be someone very definite and positive. You can't think how uncomfortable it is to have no personality."

I laughed. "Are you suggesting that you have none? I know of no one of whose personality one is more quickly and lastingly aware."

I'm not fishing," she said, with the slightest tinge of impatience. "I don't mean that I'm too insignificant and colourless to make any impression on other people. I know I'm quite nice to look at; I'm not stupid, and I've plenty of responsiveness. I don't know how to explain, but what I mean is that there is no real permanent essential Me. Of course, I've got plenty of facets, and your presence conjures up a certain Me not too bad a one. Thank you for the self with which you temporarily endow me. But I don't feel any sense of being a separate ent.i.ty. No I can't find any essential core of personality, nothing which is equally there when I'm alone, with you or with other people . . . There's no real continuity. I'm so hopelessly fluid!"

"But, if I may say so," I broke in, "it is that very fluidity of your mind that makes it such a treat to talk to you. We were discussing Keats's letters the other day. Do you remember where he writes: 'The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts not a select party'? I think-"

"No, no. I don't mean that sort of thing at all. You entirely misunderstand me!" she interrupted, and something in her face made me realize the subject was serious to her and that the characteristic lightness of her manner hid real concern.

"I'm not worrying about my qualifications as a companion," she continued. "You see the difficulty is that I can't talk about myself in a serious voice. I always sound so flippant. But my flippancy is a reflex. I should like to be able to talk to you about myself really melodramatically."

"Please do," I urged. "I'm feeling quite serious."

"I don't expect I'll be able to, but let me try," she said. "I don't want to be a bore, but I a.s.sure you it really is nightmarish this sense of having no ident.i.ty. You remember the very first time I saw you, I told you that I couldn't bear to be alone?"

"Yes."

"Well, that is because other people seem to a certain extent to hold me together to, as it were, frame me by, I suppose, their conceptions of me. But often when I'm quite by myself I feel like like water released from a broken bowl something just spilling away to be reabsorbed back into nothingness. It's almost like a temporary dissolution a lapsing away. Yes, lapsing is the word lapsing back into nothingness."

"I don't think there is anything so very unusual about your sensations," I said, I fear rather pompously. "I think we all of us at times feel something very like what you describe. It's a mild sort of neurosis, and it's in the nature of every neurosis to give the sufferer a sense of singularity."

"I daresay," she said, and went on as though making up her mind to take a fence. "But then, you see, I have twice had a strangely disturbing experience which has made those sensations I try to describe become a real obsession."

"Experiences?" I echoed. "What do you mean?"

"I'll tell you," she said. "Don't expect a ghost story. I should hate to raise false hopes. It will be difficult to describe these experiences, and I don't expect you'll believe me, but they are true. Anyhow, don't interrupt. Just let me Ancient-Mariner you. The first time was when I was very young scarcely grown up. Late one evening I was resting on my bed. I was very tired and consequently especially depressed by that curiously disagreeable feeling I have tried to describe the 'no-ident.i.ty' feeling. Like any other trouble it is apt to be worse when I am over-tired.

"It was dark and my window, against which the jasmine tapped, was on the ground floor. I slept downstairs then. Suddenly I had that sense we all know of being impelled to look in a certain direction. I turned and saw a dim face pressed against the window peering through at me. I wasn't exactly frightened just rather detachedly aware that my heart was thumping. Just then the moon slipped free from a fleece of clouds, so that I could see the face quite clearly. It was my own face!"

"What?" I broke in.

"Yes, Dr Stone. Of that there was no doubt. One knows one's own face. My face was gazing at me very intently, very wistfully and, as I stared, whatever it was that was outside shook its head very sadly. I hoped I was dreaming. I shut my eyes, but I couldn't keep them shut, and when I looked up again it was still there, and now it wrung its hands, oh! so mournfully.

"As I have said, it was my own face I saw through the window, but did I could I myself look so miserable? I wanted to see myself, my own self so I got out of bed. I found my knees were trembling and I swayed as I went up to my looking-gla.s.s.

"I don't know how to make you believe what I am going to tell you. Don't laugh. It was the most awful shock. I found I could not see myself in the gla.s.s. I stared, and stared. I shook the gla.s.s. But my reflection was not there. The pictures on the wall, the corner of the cupboard, the birdcage, all the familiar objects were reflected as usual, but I myself was not there.

"It was still outside, and now it looked as though it were trying to get in to get back, but could not. Terror came over me, and a feeling of faintness against which I desperately struggled. Dizzily I left my room, dragged myself upstairs and went up to the Chippendale mirror in the drawing room. The wide shining sheet of gla.s.s was hopelessly empty of what I sought. What had happened to me that I had no reflection? Surely the thing must be a delusion. Was I insane? I can't describe the state of mind in which I returned to my own room. I scarcely dared open the door. To my infinite relief the face was no longer looking through the window. I strode to the looking-gla.s.s. My reflection was there. Except that I looked strangely wan, my face was as usual." She paused. "That was the first time it happened. Shall I tell you about the second time, or do you wish to certify me at once?"

"Go on," I said.

"It was about three years later. I was laid up in bed with a sprained ankle. I had been in a sort of apathy all day and towards evening was a.s.sailed by that painful sense of the lack of ident.i.ty that I have tried to describe. There seemed no string threading the beads of mere moods. I felt without any real opinion, emotion, or impulse, as though I were an actor thrust on to a stage without having been given a single word of his part. Just a sense of complete vacuum. Neither my mind nor my hands were engaged. I was not even consciously looking in any particular direction. Suddenly I found myself rigid and staring. There was a sofa in my room, and on it a form was lying just as I lay on my bed. The form was mine, and again my own face gazed at me oh! so mournfully. As before, that awful sense of faintness of ebbing away came over me, but I just managed to remain conscious. It still lay on the sofa. The face gazed at me with an unforgettable look of sadness. It looked as though it wanted to speak in fact, the lips moved but I heard nothing. A hand-mirror lay on a table within my reach, and I forced myself to lift it in front of my face. My dread was realized. I stared into blankness. My face was not reflected. For some time I lay there, now staring hypnotized at what lay on the sofa, now searching the empty mirror. I don't know how long it was before my reflection began mistily and gradually to reappear, flickering in and out until at last it was still and as usual except that I looked as tired as I felt. Of course I didn't say anything about this to anyone. You are the first person I have mentioned it to. What is your verdict, Dr Stone?"

"I am going to say a very tiresome thing," I replied, with a sense of the futility of my words as I p.r.o.nounced them. "I think you dreamed both these experiences."

"If you are going to talk like that," she said wearily, "I shall never tell you anything about myself again. You know just as well as I do that I was awake."

"Well," I said, "you may not have been actually physically asleep, but I think this com-"

"If you are going to use the word complex, I shall change my doctor!" she interrupted laughingly.

"I think," I continued, "that you had allowed this shall we call it obsession of yours about your lack of continuous personality to weigh so heavily on your subconscious mind that it created a sort of symbolic imagery, which imposed itself on your senses even to the point of definite illusion. It was, so to speak, a fixation of an idea. This sort of phenomenon is quite well known to psychologists. I could give you many examples."

Margaret shook her head sadly. "It's sweet of you to try and rea.s.sure me, but I'm afraid I am not convinced. And," she added with darkening eyes, "this thing really troubles me far more than I have been able to convey. I think I told you I felt faint both times? Somehow I knew it was dreadfully important that I should not actually faint. With a desperate effort, I held on to consciousness. I simply didn't dare let myself go and quite slip my moorings. It would be awful to be ousted, wouldn't it?"

"Ousted?" I echoed blankly.

"Well, isn't it rather a risk to leave untenanted bodies lying about? Houses need caretakers." She laughed, but there was no laughter in her eyes.

Before I left her she had dismissed the subject and become her familiar radiant self, and yet never again was I to feel quite untroubled about her.

As for her "experiences", I dismissed them as purely subjective. Anything they might intimate was still for me too far removed in the regions of sheer fantasy. It was something in her voice, when she used the word "ousted", that had made me conscious of a chill. That and the expression in her eyes.

As usual I turned back to look at the house as I went out of the gate. The glow of the fading day warmed its grey austerity, and this evening, to my fancy, it wore an expression positively benign and sheltering.

I did not see much less of my patient after she ceased to be an invalid. Not only did I still give her electric treatment, but she would often ask me to dinner, and the happiest hours of my life were spent in her little sitting room, the most personal room I have ever known. It was like her very sh.e.l.l.

I look back on those magic evenings of that late summer and see them in a golden haze. The white room heavy with the scent of flowers; the Golden Retriever, his plumed tail sweeping from side to side; Margaret in her shimmering beauty; the two of us talking talking; or Margaret reading aloud, or at her piano playing by heart, gliding from one loveliness into another, characteristically never saying what it is that she is going to play.

She frequently reverted to what she had told me on that day of sudden confidence, but usually very lightly, as though the matter no longer preyed on her mind.

Once she even laughingly referred lo herself as the "absentee landlady". Indeed, from the lulled expression of her eyes, I judged her nerves to be much quieter, and it was a shock to me to realize how easily I had been deceived by the characteristic lightness of her manner. One evening she broke off in the middle of a poem she was reading aloud, and said, "I am feeling very detached from myself this evening disquietingly detached." She then began to harp on the old theme, dwelling on the affair of her reflection the "home-made symbol", as we had agreed to call it. Her voice was unconcerned, and in an attempt at rea.s.surance I said something rather perfunctory.

At that she suddenly burst out with wholly unaccustomed vehemence: "From every word you say I know that you do not understand, and that I can never make you understand!"

My chagrin at having failed her must have shown in my face.

"So sorry," she said in her sweetest manner. "How can you be expected to guess that I am serious when I can't help speaking even of these things in my small-talk voice? I am such an involuntary bluffer! But, you see, it happened again last night. But now, for heaven's sake," she broke in on my words of concern, "for heaven's sake, don't let's say another word about Margaret Clewer! Please read to me. I want to get on with my embroidery."

I look back on that evening as the end of a halcyon spell.

The next morning stands out sharply etched on my memory. From then onwards it was through a web of mystification, gradually thickening into horror which baffled belief, that I struggled to preserve my reason.