The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women Part 23

There was a moment's respectful silence and then the Man U fan raised his gla.s.s. "And now he'll have a proper burial. Peace at last. Here's to Patrick."

Gla.s.ses were drained all round the cafe. Peace, Kate thought bitterly. Why would Patrick be any more at peace in the little white coffin in Ramparts Cemetery than he had been happed up in the clay in someone's back garden? He had never been at peace; the earth hadn't pushed him up he had struggled out of his muddy shroud and brought her here to Ieper.

She toyed with her mineral water. No wine for a pregnant lady, as if it mattered. But the leaflets from the doctor's surgery had been quite definite no alcohol. It was odd how authoritative a leaflet could be, even to a soon-to-be-over pregnant lady.

". . . They are all around here. You can feel them. I like to think they know we're here, that they're not forgotten." It was the man from Newcastle speaking. He had a tendency to sentimentalize. "There are times I think of my young great-grandfather, who never lived to see his son. The week before he was born, great-granny woke screaming and saw her husband at the foot of the bed. He appeared out of a stinking brown mist we reckon that was the mist of cordite and explosives that hung over the Somme valley and there was a great hole in his chest all gus.h.i.+ng with blood. Ghastly pale he was and he leaned forward as if to touch her belly and cried, 'Christ! I wish I'd seen that bairn!' and then disappeared."

And, of course, Kate thought, it turned out that he had been killed shot in the chest on the very night he appeared to his wife. All their stories ended like that with a supernatural punchline, the resolution of longing in a spectral return home.

"And often I wish that I could see him, that one time I'll turn a corner and there he'll be."

Oh, you wouldn't like it if he was, she thought silently.

"Imagine being able to talk to him," Newcastle said wonderingly, "and to ask him what it was really like."

"I don't suppose you'd have much to say to one another after all these years!"

She hadn't meant to speak aloud, or so sharply, but the words rose up and out like fizz. Fear, she realized, had the qualities of champagne.

The big man continued as if she hadn't spoken. "He'd want to know about the bairn, of course," he said. "And all the other bairns that came after."

It is spring at last, Mum and Dad, even in this place. Imagine my surprise to see bare blasted trees putting out little green buds; and there's a blackbird nesting not twenty yards from where we are entrenched. I hear her every morning, whistling with the important business of sitting on her eggs while the big guns boom with the important business of destruction. Corporal Mackenzie died this morning. A sniper shot. He lived for a few minutes after he fell but did not have much pain. He lay looking up at the sky. "It's spring," he said, surprised. The blackbird was singing and I thought what a hard thing it was to die listening to the happy burbling of the wild birds.

We said a prayer over him and then made tea. The edge was off the wind and the earth warm and stirring. Soon we were laughing and joking. What a force life is, even out here. But my head is full of thoughts which there is not time to write. When I come home, then we'll talk.

Cheer-ho!

Patrick May, 1917 Suddenly things were unbearable. The stony faces on the walls frowned down at her; Newcastle, who was after all a civil soul, drifted into a reverie; Gavin was trying to catch her eye. She got to her feet and retreated through the door that led into the courtyard where the toilets were. The last of the autumn leaves were thick on the cobbles and crunchy underfoot. She scuffed through them, then was irritated when a gust of wind s.n.a.t.c.hed them up and threw them p.r.i.c.kling against her legs. The wind blew from the road that led to the Lille Gate and past the moat which enclosed Ramparts Cemetery, where Patrick would lie. She had first seen the place from the other side of the moat: from a distance, the creamy headstones, stalwart on thick green lawn, looked like a stubby little village huddling under the trees. At Gavin's insistence they had crossed to go in and she had posed for a photo at the foot of the Cross of Sacrifice. The air was sharp with chrysanthemum scent which rose like thin smoke from the ragged clumps planted at each grave; sombre in their funeral purples and golds, the flowers sighed out the bitterness of the dying days of autumn and the finish of things. Patrick's grave was open and ready to receive him. And she was here to learn at last what he wanted.

The nights at Inverash were full of sound: the water lapped and the trees sighed and the owl in the woods to the rear of the house hooted mournfully. There were whispers too, boys' whispers, as they slipped out of the back door and into the woods, looking for badgers, or going down to swim in the dark, which was strictly forbidden but Mum and Dad slept deeply. Rowan was always pleased when Kate told her she'd heard them, and disappointed when Kate was sure there were only two.

They used to sit in the evening and read the letters, which were carefully stored in a square metal biscuit tin. Charlie's and Alex's were short, hoping everyone was as well at home as they were in France and Flanders, and please to send some tobacco; but Patrick, the clever one, wrote often and at length: . . . Jinty was bringing up the rear when we crawled back into the trenches and suddenly Fritz opened fire. Well, the bullets pinged off the wire and whizzed into the tin cans, and some of them hit Jinty's kilt, and next thing we knew, he was leaping up and down, flipping his kilt up to keep the smoulder off his legs, skirling like a banshee. Talk about a Highland Fling! Anyway, the snipers' bullets started falling short. They were probably laughing too much to take aim and Jinty got back in alive. There wasn't a mark on him, except for a little embarra.s.sing singeing.

Cheer-ho!

Patrick April, 1917 Kate had told the English teacher about the jokes and laughing when they were studying Wilfred Owen, but the teacher felt that Patrick had rather missed the point if he wasn't doom-laden and star-crossed. Kate thought the teacher had missed the point.

The worst thing would have been not keeping my end up. I was more afraid of that than anything else the first weeks. But I'm all right now. When it's time to go over the bags, when the whistles blow, something rises in me like the sap in spring and carries me along. I wouldn't call it courage. In both life and death there is nothing for it but to go forward. So forward it is.

Cheer-ho, Patrick.

August 1917 There were letters too from hospitals all over the country in response to the family's enquiries about a soldier who might have lost his memory, or been too ill to know who he was, a Scottish soldier, five foot six, dark-haired, blue-eyed.

"She wrote to hospitals for years. She never gave up hope," Rowan said. "The day he disappeared, there was an advance into autumn mist and gun fog. One minute he was there and the next not and no one saw what happened. So he might have been picked up or captured or lying bleeding in the mud. She was tormented for years by the thought that he might be somewhere. Because living or dead, he must be somewhere. Somewhere."

One night Kate and Rowan sat on the front step looking over the loch it was too warm for bed or to sit inside and shared dreams about what might have happened to Patrick. All the endings were happy until the realization that in life they hadn't been silenced them.

"We can only hope it was a clean shot," Rowan said, and went to bed first. Kate looked across at the winking silver coins on the rowan tree. Patrick's looked duller than the other two. She stared no, it was s.h.i.+ning as brightly then, no it wasn't. It was duller. Then brighter. Then dull again. A shadow? She glanced up at the sky, but it was clear of clouds and full of stars. She stared harder at the coin and it was as if the still air was gathering round it, not darker but thicker. She watched as the sixpence was gradually obscured by air as thick as syrup. She watched and then leaped to her feet and ran inside, locking the door behind her. In seconds she was in her room with the curtains drawn and the light on, but she could not shut out the sound of whispers and low laughter. The boys were on the path to the gate, scuffling, and then someone slapped the tree, and then someone else. And then a third. She flicked back the curtain, but there was nothing to see, only the coins twinkling and showers of blossom falling lightly and silently on to the gra.s.s.

Next day, she could hardly bear the eager flare of hope in Rowan's eyes when she was told the story, or the mischief in the eyes of the lost soldier on the mantelpiece.

"Kate!"

Gavin. Impatient. She wondered how long she had been standing here.

"Kate. Aren't you coming back inside? It's cold out here."

"Just getting a breath of fresh air."

"You were rather rude to that man, you know."

He was in the doorway with the light behind him, a bulky faceless shadow with a peevish voice which grated. She turned to face him.

"Was I? They're a bit much sometimes."

"You could show a polite interest."

"You laughed hard enough at the one who's dug a replica trench, complete with sandbags, in his allotment." She paused. "When we got back to the hotel anyway. But I'll allow you were polite and interested to his face."

They were spared an argument by the creak of the door set in the yard wall, then footsteps and the rustle of fallen leaves. Another shadow appeared out of the darkness. She froze. It was in uniform, complete with puttees and soup-plate tin hat, carrying a rifle. The squirming in her stomach was like live eels and she gasped.

"Sorry, hen. Didn't mean to startle you."

A thick Scottish accent, a broad face with a smile like the one on a Hallowe'en lantern. She stood unable to move or speak until he had pa.s.sed by into the cafe.

"Kate, you look like you've seen a ghost."

Patrick? His name dropped into her mind like an envelope falling on the mat. Was that Patrick? But no, Patrick was finer-featured, smaller. Gavin was beside her now, patting at her arm.

"Come inside. That was one of the re-enactors. They're here for a sing-song round the piano. Songs of the Great War."

Re-enactors. Of course. After the Armistice Day parade, they were going to march out of Ieper and follow the route the troops took to Messines, living on tins of bully beef and plum jam. They were mad as hatters.

"Their uniforms are exact replicas," Gavin said. He laughed. "Gave you quite a turn, didn't he? Now come inside and join the party. There's a little surprise for you."

He pulled her gently inside, towed her right up to the bar, and stood expectantly, pointing to a place above the gantry. Patrick. The photo from Rowan's mantelpiece, black-framed with a scarlet poppy stuck to one corner.

"I had it copied," he said, "so that Patrick could take his place with the others."

He was waiting for thanks, she knew, but she could not find the words, not when her stomach was heaving and her mouth dry. Patrick stared down at her impishly, the dimple at the end of his grin deeper than she remembered. She could not look away from the face she had avoided for years. Was she imagining a knowing triumph in the clear light gaze? Was she imagining the colour creeping into the face? The blue light flooding the eyes, the pink flus.h.i.+ng the skin, the deep black sweeping into the thick dense hair? He was in from the cold, warming up.

Words rattled round inside her skull like raindrops spattering on window gla.s.s: Here I am, here I am. At last, at last, at la-aaa-ssst. Her skull was transparent and he could see inside, she knew he could, her every thought, her every secret.

"Go away," she muttered. The dimple deepened and the eyes held her gaze. "Go," she said louder, but the piano player was thumping out cras.h.i.+ng chords and no one heard her. And Patrick wouldn't go away anyway.

Voices roared into song. "It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long way to go . . ." There were a dozen re-enactors round the piano, standing, slouching, leaning on one elbow as they sang. Lamplight shone on their bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, their buckles, their glossy boots. The sight made her queasy. "Tipperary" was too much to take.

Everyone loves to sing that song as we march, Mum. Sing it and think of us and the long straight roads with the big trees growing like spears on either side.

Cheer-ho, Patrick August, 1917 "Gavin I have such a headache. I think I'll go back to the hotel."

"Playing up a bit, aren't we? Not giving into hormones, are we?"

"I can't speak for you."

He stiffened. "I'll walk you back if you must go."

"It's only across the street. You stay here and . . . sing. I'll be fine."

She saw his hesitation, but he was reluctant to give up his place as centre of attention, as relative of the resurrected hero.

She wriggled through the a.s.sembled singers and was out the door before he could follow.

Inverash became a place of unease. She took to keeping her curtains drawn and her window closed at night. It was small comfort because then she had to suffer the knowledge that the night air, thick and viscous, was pressing up against the window pane, feeling for a crack to slide through, oozing around the house, searching for a way in, wrapping it in cool heavy darkness, flooding it with a longing for . . . she didn't know what. She didn't want to know.

Rowan scoffed, saying that if Patrick came he would enter through the door like anyone else. It wasn't a helpful reply. Kate found herself awake half the night, listening for a footstep on the gravel path outside, for the click of the old-fas.h.i.+oned latch. In the evenings, she found excuses to avoid the reading of the letters because the air outside was always thicker when they read of his adventures in Flanders, as if the telling drew him closer. She knew he was listening, reliving those days, watching her. It was intolerable.

Rowan was hurt by her early nights and the books she had to read for school, but it couldn't be helped. Patrick wasn't pleased either. Night after night she lay in bed, knowing he was out there. She heard the m.u.f.fled laughter, the excited whisperings like the buzzing of insects, and then the heavy silence when Charlie and Alexander wandered off down the path and left Patrick alone. She never heard him or saw him but knew he was there, waiting. He was the gently insistent tap of the tree branch on the window, not blown by a stray breeze, but regular and rhythmic, guided by someone; he was thick like warm summer air, dense as cat's fur rubbing at her wall, at her window, insistent, gentle, coaxing. He invaded her dreams in the form of a shadowy figure which ran silently into a brown mist and disappeared, and no matter how she peered, she could not see where he had gone. Once she woke to find herself at the window, hand clutching the curtain, ready to draw it back; another time she was in the hall at the front door. Both times she had a struggle to turn away: her hand would not let go of the curtain or the bolt; her feet would not take her away. Instead she listened and dreaded and sensed a smile in the darkness and, without her volition, her hand would reach forward to open, to let in a brownish mist or a lost soldier.

"What do you want?" she whispered each time, wrenching her hand away and holding it tightly behind her back.

No answer but the sigh of the waters of the loch and the whisper of leaves in the night breeze and a silence that listened hard. There was no one there and she did not know what that no one wanted.

Her last summer visit to Inverash was the time she sleepwalked to the parlour and woke up directly in front of the fireplace. He was smiling from the photograph frame, amused. She tried to turn away but was pinned to the floor where she stood while the colour crept into his face and made him seem alive. His head was tilted enquiringly at her. Rowan never believed that she had seen colour seep into the photo, but she had. He was warming up, gathering strength.

The following summer Kate said she was too busy to visit Rowan. And the next and the next. And soon Inverash and its unsettling experiences became part of childhood lore, a dream half forgotten, a nightmare half remembered.

The hotel was fifty yards down the street from Cafe Franz on the opposite side. Kate headed into the misty night, fis.h.i.+ng her room key from her pocket as she went. She was thinking of Rowan and the old woman's hurt at her defection, all the phone calls asking when she would come again, her own guilty irritation at having to fend off the gentle urgings to visit, year after year.

Then came the call she could not ignore. Rowan babbled and wept and made no sense at first. She'd had a visit from a man from the War Graves Commission. Patrick had been found. In a garden in Ieper. He was only bones, but his had been the easiest identification they'd ever had: his St Christopher medal had his name scratched on the back; there was a rotted leather pouch with his initials in bra.s.s on it, and inside that an oil-cloth parcel of letters safely wrapped, letters to him from Mother and Father, the address at Inverash still clear in Mother's loopy handwriting. Oh, such a pang she'd felt to see Mother's handwriting again! It had made her cry. Patrick was to be reburied on the day after Armistice Day, in a place called Ramparts Cemetery. She could not go herself at her age, but someone from the family should be there and that person should be Kate who was somehow closer to Patrick than anyone else. She would go, wouldn't she?

Closer to Patrick than anyone else? Her heart thudded against her ribs when she heard that, but there had been nothing to do but agree. An hour after the phone call, Rowan called again.

"I forgot to say. The strangest thing. He came to the surface on the anniversary of his disappearance. The seventh of September. He's come back out of that brown fog. I can hardly bear it oh, where has he been?"

Gavin had laughed at that. "He was under the earth and had a modern development built over him, and he was lucky not to wind up under the patio or he'd never have surfaced."

7 September. Two months ago. It was around then that Kate had conceived if the dates were right. Suddenly two members of the family had turned up unexpectedly, wanting to make her acquaintance, and neither of them welcome.

Mother, don't worry so. I'll be back, you wait and see. Nothing will keep me from Inverash and you, nothing, especially now that we've lost Alex and Charlie. Third one lucky. Don't fret.

Cheer-ho, Patrick 6 September 1917 Why did that letter terrify her so? Kate quickened her pace. Perhaps everything would settle once he was properly buried. She went to cross the road and, with a spurt of dismay, realized that she had been so deep in her thoughts that she had overshot the hotel. She glanced back the way she had come. The mist, silvery under streetlamps and a moon thin as a sixpence, was rising, but she could see that she wasn't even in the right street. She must have turned a corner or gone up a side alley. She stood for a moment, trying to get her bearings. The sky was bitter black and the small moon icily hard. Houses lined the street, their shuttered windows blind and unfriendly. She had no idea where she was. It was not possible to get lost on a fifty yard stretch of road, but lost she was. The sensible thing would be to walk back the way she had come, and yet going back felt wrong somehow. She hesitated. Ahead of her, the mist was spa.r.s.e and ragged so that she could see patches of building and wall; behind, it was thickening to fog, dense and heavy, dimming the beams from the streetlights to a fuzzy glow. Her insides twisted. The fog was rolling towards her, closing in. It was impossible to stand where she was or go back. She plunged ahead, into the wraiths and wreaths of mist, with a rolling fog at her heels.

Somewhere close by, she could hear a piano playing and singing: "Lili Marlene".

The re-enactors in full cry. So she wasn't so very lost after all. The trouble was that, as she sped along, the music came from behind her, and then from her left, and then it was ahead and she thought she was running towards it. And she was running, skimming along past darkened houses, her feet knowing where to go and herself with no idea where she was. Then the singing faded and she was alone in the foggy dark. With a huge effort, she stopped dead in her tracks. A gate beside her, a neat little wrought-iron gate. And overhanging it, a rowan tree, its clumps of berries still scarlet, brus.h.i.+ng cool and hard against her face as she put her hand on the gate. Of course she knew where she was now. Mr Westermann's house. This was the garden where Patrick had been found, where he'd wrenched himself muddy from the clay earth and summoned help with a crooked finger.

She tried to back away but her hand was glued to the gate. Close behind, she heard whispering, an excited buzz, a silvery giggle. She drew closer to the gate to get away from the sound. Her eyes fell on the new flagstones. He had been under there. By the light of the carriage lamp at the door of the house, she could see the neat square of stone, the earthenware pots of plants precisely placed. One held a holly bush, humped in the dim light in the centre of the patio. She looked at it, felt an excitement as the buzzing behind her grew louder. The holly bush darkened and grew bulkier, took shape. A sleeping man, seated, slumped over his knees. A blanket, a coat, something draped over his head. Rifle in hand. She could see it as plain as day, a rifle pointing downward, a hand clasping it loosely.

In spite of herself, she reached for the latch and opened the gate. She stepped forward into the garden; stepped lightly so as not to disturb him; stepped into a mist thick with the scent of summer rowan blossom and the bitterness of autumn chrysanthemums. A sound like a sigh behind her. In front of her a movement, the shoulders of the huddled figure turning slowly towards her, the rifle sc.r.a.ping on stone, the blanket slipping from the head. Except there was no head. Just shoulders and an obscene knot of tendons and bone rising from between them and a thick, sticky darkness all down the front of the tunic where blood had rushed down. The tendons writhed wormlike and in agony as if they had only just been severed. She closed her eyes, nauseated. Rowan's clean shot. Death must have been instantaneous. Ugly but instant. She clung to that something-to-be-thankful-for. For Patrick there had been no regretful listening to the singing of the wild birds. That was something to be thankful for too. She thought about that rather than the thing before her, then decided it was time to be gone. Eyes still closed, because she couldn't face the torn wriggling tangles of what was left of him again, she took a step back. There was a buzzing in her ear, the pressure of something soft and determined pus.h.i.+ng at her back. The fog billowed round her, carrying her forwards, cradling her coldly, carrying her to the slumped man.

She opened her eyes and recognized him at once. The head was in place, the face intact, the dimple deepening at the end of a smile, the eyes blue and gentle, studying her. Oh, her great-great-uncle was young and he was handsome! And he had the family flick of dark hair that tumbled on to the forehead. Like hers. What a shame it all was, what a shame, the cutting short, the blotting out, the end of things! What an end to humour and courage, to future and plans! A sense of might-have-beens pierced her through and through like a splinter of gla.s.s.

He laid his rifle across his knees and extended a hand, touched her midriff lightly. Oh, Christ, I wish I'd seen that bairn . . . No, no, that was the Newcastle man's story, not theirs. The hand lay there, lightly, but with a warmth that seeped through her clothes and the layers of flesh and deep inside where something stirred and leaped, feebly but thrillingly. No, she thought, no, and looked down. It's too soon. It can't move yet. But it leaped again. She felt Patrick's gaze heavy on her and raised her eyes to meet his. But he had disappeared. This time she saw a child's face, a little boy's, dark haired and with blue eyes full of rage and tears, the head sunk into the shoulders in despair, the dimple flattened out by a mouth tight with anger and grief. The buzzing at her ear grew more intense and became a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

"I've nowhere else to go."

She heard the words quite distinctly.

"Nowhere. Nowhere to go. Oh, that bairn . . . that bairn . . . Christ, I wish I'd seen it . . ."

She drew back and the fog parted for her. She was free to go now. She was out of the gate and down the street in seconds, at the steps in front of the hotel in minutes. Across the street the little square windows of Cafe Franz were golden with light. The piano was still thumping out the songs of war, and the men roaring the choruses the dead men, the nowhere men, used to sing "Keep the Home Fires Burning". How they yearned for home, and fretted over their dead ones.

She hurried upstairs to the bedroom. She wasn't surprised really to find it sweet with the scent of rowan blossom. Patrick, it was clear, though young, was determined to make an impression. She sat on the edge of the bed, her mind empty, unable to think or feel, at least not anything she wanted to think or feel. That was what uncertainty meant. Emptiness. Lack of direction or purpose. You sit and listen to an old song about faraway lads and home and then everything you thought or felt before seems trivial in the face of that desolation of endings. Sentimentality is what Gavin would call it, a feeling to be avoided as it rather got in the way of other things, but what those other things were she wasn't quite sure any more, except that beginnings were more appealing than endings.

She stood up and crossed to the window, breathing in the fragrance of summer blossom and growth Patrick had brought to her all the way from that place of the dead, and the green shoots and the nesting birds. Down the street, the men were gathering outside Franz's place, loudly calling their good-nights. The men in the anoraks and Aran sweaters mingled with the ones in khaki and puttees, laughing and backslapping and promising to meet tomorrow.

One soldier caught her eye. He was leaning against the wall in the circle of light from a street lamp, smoking a Woodbine. She knew it was a Woodbine because that's what the family sent the boys. The tin hat was at a rakish angle, the rifle hung loosely from his hand. She knew who it was. He was looking up at her window, head tilted enquiringly. The men walked past him, unseeing. How annoyed they would be if they ever found out that he had been among them and that they had missed him! Gavin was standing near him, self-important, promising to let his companions read all the letters next day. "So moving," he was saying. "They bring it all to life, make it real."

Patrick flicked his cigarette b.u.t.t into the gutter and hitched his rifle sling over his shoulder. She waved down at him and he smiled mischief at her from under his tin hat. Something inside her leaped like the sap in spring. As Patrick had written, in both life and death there was nothing to do but go forward, so forward it was. He moved off up the street, going to that somewhere or nowhere which she could not imagine. Gavin pa.s.sed right by him on the pavement they almost brushed shoulders. Neither of them looked at the other.

"Cheer-ho, Patrick," she muttered. "I'll be seeing you."

From somewhere far off, she heard a boy's silvery giggle.

What was she going to say to Gavin?

My Moira.

Lilith Saintcrow.

"This will make you see things, Georgie. Take it."

Moira Staufford pressed the pendant into my cold palm, her fingers slippery with sweat. When she walked quickly away down Hagen Street her hair was a fall of copper-gold in late-autumn sunlight, her strides leggy as always but anxious as they had never been. I remembered braiding that hair on hungover mornings, holding it back while she heaved on drunken nights, and the familiar sharp bite of frustration in my chest made my eyes water.

She got into a long s.h.i.+ning black limousine and it pulled away from the curb, inserting itself into the morning traffic with easy grace.

A heavy, antique silver chain held the clawed pendant, its sinuous shape a cross between a lion and a snake. Its eyes looked like chips of diamond, but oddly dark, and the whole thing vibrated in my hand. I stood outside the coffee shop, watching the limo until it vanished. I hadn't seen Moira since college, and I never saw her again.

At least, not alive.

It was all over the papers the next morning. Billionaire's Wife Dead in Car Crash. Fiery fatality. Police investigating. Husband distraught, rus.h.i.+ng back from a European trip. I stood in Harly, Withers & Chagg's grey fluorescent-lit break room and stared at the newspaper, my throat dry as rock.