Eight Ghosts Read online

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  First published in 2017 by September Publishing

  Collection copyright © English Heritage 2017

  ‘They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek’ ©Sarah Perry 2017

  ‘Mr Lanyard’s Last Case’ ©Andrew Michael Hurley 2017

  ‘The Bunker’ ©Mark Haddon 2017

  ‘Foreboding’ ©Kamila Shamsie 2017

  ‘Never Departed More’ ©Stuart Evers 2017

  ‘The Wall’ ©Kate Clanchy 2017

  ‘As Strong as Death’ ©Jeanette Winterson 2017

  ‘Mrs Charbury at Eltham’ ©Max Porter 2017

  The right of English Heritage and the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  Project concept: Michael Murray-Fennell and Bronwen Riley

  Gazetteer: Katherine Davey

  Press and publicity: Alexandra Carson

  Cover and title page design: Anna Morrison

  Typesetter: Ed Pickford

  ISBN 978-1-910463-73-4

  eISBN: 978-1-910463-74-1

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-910463-75-8

  September Publishing

  www.septemberpublishing.org

  CONTENTS

  They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek SARAH PERRY

  Mr Lanyard’s Last Case

  ANDREW MICHAEL HURLEY

  The Bunker MARK HADDON

  Foreboding KAMILA SHAMSIE

  Never Departed More STUART EVERS

  The Wall KATE CLANCHY

  As Strong as Death JEANETTE WINTERSON

  Mrs Charbury at Eltham MAX PORTER

  Afterwords

  Within These Walls ANDREW MARTIN

  A Gazetteer of English Heritage Hauntings

  Biographical Notes

  ‘The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view: the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest.’

  From ‘On the Past and Future’ in Table-Talk; or, Original Essays by William Hazlitt, 1821

  ‘Did I ever tell you,’ said Salma, ‘about my friend Elizabeth?’

  We sat in the café at Audley End, where we’d come to wheel her mercifully sleeping infant through shaded rooms, and to gaze with due respect at pendant plaster ceilings and extinct waterfowl wading nowhere behind panes of glass.

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘I say friend . . .’ Salma paused, and with her right hand rocked the pushchair back and forth. Her face, which habitually had a merry, benevolent look, altered; I saw there, very briefly, an expression of contempt. ‘We were never close.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned her,’ I said.

  There was again that contemptuous look, which had in it also a kind of disgust. It troubled me, so that I looked away, and up to where the lawn gave rise to a distant folly.

  ‘She worked here, last year, or perhaps the year before. She’s dead now.’ This was said with so little expression I had no idea how to respond. ‘Look, fetch me coffee, and perhaps some cake, and I’ll tell you a story.’

  I could hardly complain at the prospect of one of Salma’s tales, since she had the gift of contriving an hour’s anecdote out of a minute’s incident. Dutifully I brought her a steaming pot, and a plate of something sweet. Her child had woken, and was hungry, and she nursed him contentedly; meanwhile the café had begun to fill, so that what she told me then was lost to anyone but me. This was all ten years ago or more: I’ve not seen Salma since, but the tale has remained with me, like something told to frighten me when I was very young.

  Elizabeth (she said) had been one of those charmed and charming folk one would dislike if one could, but never can. She wore old and shabby clothes as though they were velvet and silk; she was a beauty; she had many friends, and her parents seemed to have done her no harm. She’d been a gifted artist as a child, and became a gifted conservator. She’d lived in Paris, restoring a set of opera curtains damaged in a fire, and had once uncovered an art nouveau wall painting concealed behind the plaster of a Norfolk house. Late in the last summer of the last century she was summoned to Audley End. Being an Essex native she was familiar with the house – with its long approach beside a sunny lawn, and its famous yew hedge cut to resemble storm clouds. She was married by then, and if a week’s work in her home county lacked the glamour of a Bohemian wall hanging in Prague, it allowed her to stay with her husband in the house where she’d grown up, and with parents to whom she was devoted.

  The task for which she was hired was unlike any she’d undertaken before. Wool and silks were her stock-in-trade, and the pads of her fingers were rough with needle-pricks – but at Audley End, she was one of three hired to restore a great Jacobean screen to its former glory. It was carved from oak, and the polish had lost its lustre.

  Arriving early at the house – cheerful as ever, if a little nervous – she was greeted at the door.

  ‘Ah! Come along in. Elizabeth, yes? I don’t like to contract names. I, for example, am Nicholas, and never Nick – here we are: all is prepared.’

  They stood then in the great hall. Banners suspended overhead bore Latin inscriptions; the blinds were lowered. A pair of outlandishly large boots hung above a pale stone staircase that led to a pale stone gallery, and a wasp’s nest was concealed in a glass case on a pedestal. It was a warm morning, with a high white haze that promised a scorching day, but nonetheless Elizabeth shivered as she shook the hands of her companions, since a chill rose from the stone floor.

  ‘Morning,’ she said, greeting the young men brought bustling forward by Nicholas. ‘Ade,’ said the first, smiling and shaking her hand. ‘And this is Peter, who doesn’t speak much.’ Peter smiled also, and that smile had in it a kind of wry pleasure that made conversation redundant. Elizabeth felt at once the warm companionship that comes with common purpose.

  ‘Well then,’ said Nicholas, proudly, as if he’d carved the screen himself: ‘What d’you make of it?’

  In truth, Elizabeth’s first response was one of distaste. The dark and massy screen ran the breadth of the great hall. At its centre, an arched door was covered in red velvet and flanked by four vast busts that resembled the kings and queens in a deck of cards. It was festooned with carved wreaths, and with wooden bunches of peach, grape and pear, all of which seemed overripe: her eye rested on a pomegranate splitting open to reveal its store of seeds, and she almost thought she caught the scent of rotting fruit. Here and there were other faces: grinning green men and limbless women with hard bulbous breasts. It was all in the Jacobean style, and admirable in its way; but nonetheless she found herself unwilling to meet its many unblinking eyes.

  Watching her, Nicholas grinned. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’ he said. Then he drew near, confidingly; it seemed for a moment as if he were about to reveal some secret, but evidently he changed his mind. He clapped his hands together, and briskly rubbed them. ‘Not what one would choose for the living room, but well worth a spit and polish. Now then,’ he gestured to a trestle table on which cloths, brushes, pots of wax and bottles of solvent were laid out on a white sheet, ‘Ade is the expert, I believe? Splendid, splendid. I’ll leave you to it, and can be found in the café at lunch.’ Departing through the scarlet door he bid a general farewell, though it seemed to Elizabeth he gave her a conspiratorial look as he passed.

  The morning went swiftly, with rituals of preparation undertaken in a companionable silence broken only by ca
utions from Ade, who was an expert in woodwork and had the splinters to prove it. Elizabeth was given charge of a royal pair to the left of the great door, and the pedestals on which they stood. Even from behind the lowered blinds it was possible to feel the heat of the day, which by noon had banished the last of the chill. Her first task was to remove the dust that had settled in the empty eyes of the carved figures, and in the splitting fruit. Her distaste for the screen dissolved as she grew rapt by the grain of the wood and by the skill of the hands that had cut it.

  Shortly after noon, by common consent, they left their work. Ade and Peter, having some other appointment, departed in a van, promising to return by close of day. Left alone in the hall it seemed to Elizabeth that the chill had returned: with hands pressed to her aching back she regarded the screen, and the screen regarded her. Then she laughed, and went in search of Nicholas.

  It seemed he’d been waiting for her, since the moment she opened the door to the deserted café he beckoned her over.

  ‘How fares it?’ he said.

  ‘Well, I think. Although the dust makes me sneeze.’

  ‘I’m sorry you have been abandoned for the afternoon. Will you mind?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Splendid! And what do you make of it?’

  ‘Of the screen? It’s not to my taste, but it’s very fine, isn’t it? I found myself thinking: they must have bled over this.’

  Her companion did not laugh again, but looked almost comically grave.

  ‘It has a curious history,’ he said.

  ‘I should think it does.’

  ‘No, no . . .’ He began to fiddle with a button on his cuff. ‘Not in the ordinary way. They say it’s cursed. Ah, of course you will laugh. Quite right, quite proper.’

  ‘Then you must tell me how, and by whom!’

  Seeming both reluctant and delighted, he leaned forward over clasped hands. ‘Of course you know the house is built on consecrated land. The first owner had made a pretty penny out of the dissolution of the m onasteries, and having turfed out the monks made the abbey his home for a time.’

  ‘The rogue!’

  ‘As it was, so shall it ever be. The abbey already had the very faintest of whiffs about it: one of the monks had hanged himself in the cloister, a sin which is of course unforgivable. It was said he’d been so despised by his brothers that by the end nobody would even meet his eye and Christian forbearance be damned. The loathing simply got too much, I suppose. Wait a moment: aren’t you dreadfully hot? – let me bring water.’

  He returned with a glass, which she gratefully drank, and resumed his tale. ‘The abbey fell into ruin, and the land was passed on; fresh plans were made, new foundations laid; always more wealth, a bigger fireplace, costlier paintings on the walls. The carved screen was a crowning glory of the time: on trend, you might say. Shortly after it was completed one of the workmen killed himself by driving an iron implement into his eye. They say there were other wounds all over his face, as if it had taken several attempts. Nobody attended his funeral.’ He looked at her, and there was in his eyes an expression of delight in her discomfort.

  ‘Time passed. Fashion changed, and the screen was painted white – but one of the workmen drank paint and died in agonies fifteen days later, corroded from within. It’s said that neither his wife, nor his children, nor any of his fellow workers, visited him as he lay dying. Again, the fashion changed, and men were hired to scrape the paint from the screen, and restore it to its original form. On the final day one man was missing; they searched, and found him hanging by his belt in the folly up the hill. There was pipe ash scattered about, and the core of an apple: it seemed others had stood by smoking or idly eating, and simply watched him do it.’

  Elizabeth was appalled, but didn’t like to show it. ‘It wouldn’t be a proper country house,’ she said, ‘without a ghost attached.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do to say “ghost” precisely: no white sheets here, no grey ladies. The screen does not, I would say, reveal a cowled monk at midnight! It is more – a sensation, if you like. One of desolation, of abandonment – the fear that secretly one is an object of disgust and pity, even to one’s family. Haven’t we all feared so, in dead of night?’

  Elizabeth had always been loved, and always known it; but she nodded, and smiled. ‘And it is the screen, they say, that brings about this sensation?’

  ‘So it seems. There have been other incidents – a local woman who came to photograph it was savaged by a gentle dog she’d bottle-fed since birth – but nothing to trouble the makers of vulgar documentaries.’

  ‘Then I’ll keep my wits about me!’

  ‘Do so, do so. Well: you’ll be hungry, I should think. Don’t let me keep you from your cheese-and-tomato.’ Straightening his collar in the manner of a man who’d done a good day’s work, he left.

  A little troubled, Elizabeth gazed for a time at a framed photograph of a Victorian family which hung on the wall. It reflected the summer light, but the glass was uneven, so that it seemed for a moment the wrinkled stockings of a tall girl moved on her bony ankles.

  When she had eaten, Elizabeth returned to the great hall. That it had once been so cold as to make her shiver seemed now impossible: particles of dust rose in the hot air. The wax had begun to melt in its pots: there was a sweetish, acrid scent that made her feel drowsy. Left to her own devices she paced the hall: here was the wasps’ nest in its case and there the shell of a tortoise emptied of its warm, soft body and hanging hollow on the wall. She imagined it blindly paddling against the wood in a stupid longing to find its living self.

  Cursing Nicholas cheerfully for having put her in an eerie frame of mind, she took up her tools and returned to the task. Her head ached, from the heat and from the scent of wax and solvents in the air, and she felt a pulse set up painfully strong in her ears. She thought for a moment of the abbey it once had been – thought of a pale stone cloister, and godly men pacing the paving stones, quietly singing. It called to mind the image of a hanging man, and she wondered vaguely if he’d used his knotted belt, and if perhaps he’d placed the knot against his throat, and that had made things quicker. Out on the lawn a crow croaked; then there was silence, and if it hoped for an answer, there was none.

  Seated now beside the screen, Elizabeth felt an irresistible drowsiness come over her. The hollowed tortoise on the wall was still – the wasps in their case were motionless behind the glass – even the dust in the beams of light had ceased to move. Drearily her hand moved across the grinning face of a limbless woman, and it seemed she ought to apologise for so intimate a touch. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Elizabeth, removing dust from its hollowed eye: ‘I’m so sorry.’ The pain in her head grew worse, and she leaned for a while upon the screen. The wood was hard, and cool; there came again the croaking crow, and from some distant place a stranger speaking. The heavy air pressed against her and she fell into a doze.

  In her sleep it seemed that the screen softened like wax in the heat, and had taken on the pliant soft warmth of skin – seemed she felt it move against her cheek. The air grew still more acrid and more sweet – it was surely the fruit breaking open, the pomegranate blooming mouldy at the split – it was the scent also of flesh, sweating in the evening heat; yes: certainly it was not oak against which she rested but living things, or things not long dead. The limbless woman’s torso rose and fell – her grin grew wider – her mouth was not dark but rather crimson, and wet from a passing tongue. ‘I am so sorry,’ said Elizabeth, suspended between sleeping and waking, uncertain what apology she made, only that it was demanded. Sleepily she reached for the woman, and the woman reached for her – and in the moment before waking she felt against her own mouth the press of another – very soft, very hot; a tender kiss, but one which, with a sensation of abhorrence, woke her at once.

  Hours had passed as she dozed – her knees ached from pressure against the stone floor, and the heat had dissipated, leaving behind the old damp chill. For a long moment she could n
ot move: could not bear to look up at the carved woman, with her hard breasts and her smile; and find, perhaps, that there lay now on her lip the tip of a wet tongue. She shook herself from her stupor with laughter at her own absurdity, but all the same could not quite leave the great hall as quickly as she might have liked. It delighted her, then, to see a white van approach as she stood on the threshold of the house: Ade and Peter, returned from their business elsewhere.

  ‘Evening all,’ she said, tugging ironically at a forelock. It seemed they didn’t recognise her, since there was no return of her cheerful greeting. ‘It’s me,’ she said: ‘Elizabeth!’

  Ade, at the wheel, would not turn his head; beside him silent Peter looked at her impassively. Then suddenly his face altered, as if a foul smell had reached him: it was faint, but unmistakable – the sneer of a disgusted man. Then the van moved on, and she was left alone. Bewildered, Elizabeth watched them go; and for all the tales she’d been told it merely seemed to her they’d had some business that had gone bad, and put them in a temper. All the same, in the minutes left before her husband came to drive her home, she longed for a moment of something kind and ordinary. She took out her phone, and called her mother.

  ‘Mum?’ she said. ‘Oh, what a day: what’s for dinner, and how have you been?’ She waited, but there was no answer. ‘Mum?’ she said; and then, childish in her anxiety, ‘Mummy? Are you there?’

  Again, silence; then her mother’s voice, but not as she’d ever heard it. It had hardened and acquired edges; it had in it a kind of cool disinterested rage. ‘Don’t call here,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever call here again.’ There was the click of a phone put in its cradle, and in Elizabeth’s stomach a moment’s roiling terror – then the thought that of course something lay behind it: a bad line, and exasperation with insistent salesmen. Then in the distance – over the bridge and up the pale drive – there came a small car: red, noisy and familiar. Gratefully she ran down the gravel drive, towards the car, picturing everything that was dear about her husband: the hair thinning faintly at the crown, the capable hands on the wheel. Thank God! she thought: thank God!