Eight Ghosts Read online

  Someone was singing. ‘I never knew I’d miss you . . . Now I know what I must do . . . Walking back to happiness . . . I shared with you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Rita. Can it, will you.’

  ‘Girls, girls . . .’

  The women crossed the corridor and entered the room she recognised from the last time. The strip lights, the Perspex wall-maps. She was the tail of the crocodile. The red-eyed man stepped in front of her and closed the door so that they were alone in the corridor. The chug of machinery somewhere and the faint odour of diesel fumes. She could see now that there was a triangle of waxy flesh on his chin where no stubble grew. He had been burnt as a child, perhaps.

  ‘I need to know one thing and one thing only.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Can you do your job?’

  She closed her eyes and looked into her mind and saw fragments of something which had broken or fallen apart . . . a boiler suit made of white cotton . . . the EM wave and the optical wave . . . the sound of someone weeping at the end of a phone line . . .

  ‘Miss Pullman . . .?’

  She felt a rising panic and a painful yearning to be somewhere safe with no responsibilities. She began to sob.

  ‘I think that’s a fairly conclusive “no”.’

  Martin sat in the rocking chair beside the bed. She had been away for longer this time.

  ‘Where’s Bennie . . .?’

  ‘He bumped his head. My mother has taken him to the fair. Toffee apple and candy floss. Then he can go on the merry-go-round and be royally sick.’

  ‘I should have told you, earlier.’

  He cupped her cheek in his hands and shook his head. Was he saying goodbye? Were the doctors drumming their fingers in the living room, giving the two of them a final few moments’ grace? Under the fear was a relief she had not expected.

  ‘We’re going to see an exorcist.’

  Were it not for the steady confidence of his gaze she might have questioned his sanity. She had heard about exorcists only in third- and fourth-hand stories. She had always assumed that they were figments of desperate imaginations.

  ‘There are things I have never told you.’ He got to his feet. ‘Things you were safer not knowing.’ He handed her the black duffel coat he had laid over the arm of the chair. ‘Put this on. We have a long, cold walk ahead of us.’

  They slipped into an alleyway off Weaver’s Lane. They cut across the graveyard of St Saviour’s. Martin was a big man who attracted attention but the few people who passed them in the darkened streets took little notice. Only a dog was disturbed by their presence, growling at the end of its chain, hackles up and head down. It was the strangeness of the evening perhaps, or her growing detachment from her own life, but she felt as if she were traversing a city which was almost but not quite identical to the one in which she lived.

  He said, ‘I told you sometimes that I would be working late. It was not always true.’ He said, ‘I’ve never talked about my sister. We lost her. I promised I would never lose anyone again.’ He said, ‘I’ve done this for nineteen other people. I hoped I’d never have to do it for you.’

  They were heading downhill towards the docks. Fish and marine oil on the wind. The lights of The Raleigh still blazed, its patrons blurry behind dripping, foggy glass. They walked through a mazy canyon of warehouses. A big rat trotted casually past like a tiny insurance clerk late for the office. A precise half-moon lit their way.

  They turned a corner and the moon was swallowed by a double-funnelled steamer in red and cream, roped to the quayside and port-holed on three decks from stem to stern.

  Martin led her to the foot of a cast-iron fire escape which rose steeply to a door between two dirty, lit windows which might have been the eyes of a harbourmaster’s office were it not for the lack of signage. They mounted the ringing steps.

  The exorcist was a plump, forgettable woman whose ivy-green cardigan was fastened by walnut-brown toggles. She greeted Martin with the wordless nod one gave to a colleague. ‘So this is Nadine.’

  There was a Rolodex. There was a vase of dying irises. There was a framed reproduction of Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, cracked at the corner. A bagatelle board leaning against a wall would have seemed bizarre on any other day. Nadine took the empty armchair.

  ‘I’m afraid we have no time for pleasantries.’ The woman was steelier than she appeared. ‘You have to trust me completely and you must do exactly as I say. There is no alternative.’ Nadine glanced round and Martin nodded his assent. ‘The next time you cross over I will be waiting for you on the other side. We will not mention this meeting. We will not talk of Martin or your son. We will not talk of this world. Do you understand?’ The woman leant forwards and Nadine saw a charm bracelet slip from the cuff of her cardigan, a silver chain from which hung a little silver crow, a little silver moon and a little silver hammer.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I will try hard to find you a way home. I cannot tell you in advance what it will be. I can only tell you that I have not failed yet.’ Somewhere nearby the bell of a mariner’s chapel tolled twice. ‘I must go. I have difficult work to do.’ The exorcist stood slowly. She seemed to be in some pain. ‘When you next see me I will be changed.’

  She took a macramé shoulder bag and a dark blue cagoule from the back of the chair. ‘Get some rest.’ Then she was gone.

  Martin sat on the arm of the chair and held Nadine. She had many questions, but to ask any of them would open the door of the aircraft mid-flight. Better not to see how far she had to fall. She wanted more than anything to be with Bennie.

  ‘Remember that first long walk we took?’ Martin sandwiched her tiny hand between his great paws. ‘Near Minehead?’ A thundercloud had risen over Selworthy Beacon and the sunshine was replaced suddenly by a slate sky and hail like conkers. They ran hand in hand for a pillbox where they startled the sleeping, ownerless spaniel who would later accompany them for the remainder of the walk. ‘Let’s take it again . . .’

  She leant her head against the dependable mass of him. ‘OK.’

  ‘So . . . I picked you up from your parents’ house. It was half-past nine in the morning. You were wearing the orange skirt with the yellow circles . . .’

  An hour, two hours . . . She slept and woke and did not recognise her surroundings and was briefly terrified until she saw Martin, only to succumb to a different fear when she remembered why she was here with the dying irises and the bagatelle board. She slept again and woke and drank a glass of tepid water from the pitcher on the desk and was standing at the window watching faint smudges of peach light pick out the cranes and the hulks at anchor when she left the world for the final time.

  No taste, no noise, no darkness. Instantly she was sitting at a Formica-topped table in a canteen. On the far side of the table was the gangly, bearded man. Behind him sat a uniformed woman Nadine did not recognise. She had a lazy eye and black, black hair. There was a serving hatch and the rank perfume of boiled vegetables. She looked around for the exorcist but there was no one else in the room. The Formica had unglued itself from the chipboard at the table’s corner.

  ‘I apologise for Major Pine’s graceless behaviour. He is correct, but there are many different ways of being correct.’ She could hear now that the man’s accent was a soft, lowland Scots. ‘In better times you would have been cared for.’ He sighed. ‘But in better times our lives would not depend on a man like Major Pine.’

  His female colleague sat back and said nothing, as if she were supervising the man’s training.

  He cleared his throat and read from the sheaf of stapled papers. ‘You signed documents during your training to the effect that if, on active service with ROC No. 20 Group, you became incapacitated either physically or mentally . . .’ He dropped the paper ‘. . . and some more turgid bureaucratic nonsense I won’t bore you with.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘They want you to sign a form. Can you believe that? Because the last man in the world will be some prig from Whitehall trudg
ing across the scorched wasteland checking paperwork.’ The woman seemed neither surprised nor affronted by the diatribe. He pushed a pamphlet across the table. ‘Predictably, they provide a helpful guide to the situation.’

  Expulsion: Instructions for Short Term Survival. She flipped through the pages. ‘Root vegetables from allotments and gardens may provide another source of relatively uncontaminated food . . .’ There was a diagram showing how to kill a poorly drawn dog, though whether for protection or consumption it was not immediately clear. She was transfixed by the backs of the hands that were and weren’t hers, the dirt under the nails, the faint blue of returning blood. They were so real. She had never heard anyone speak about how utterly convincing it all was.

  ‘You know as much as anyone.’ The man shrugged. ‘Leeds has gone. Manchester has gone. The destruction is widespread from Holy Loch south. In other circumstances I would pray for God to go with you, but my faith in the old chap has been somewhat undermined of late.’ He stood up and pushed his chair back under the table, the legs screeching on the lino. ‘I wish you a strong wind off the North Sea and a cache of tinned beans.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘Let’s get this ghastly business over with.’

  The woman followed them into the corridor. Where was the exorcist? Nadine was increasingly certain that something had gone wrong. The man stood aside so that she could take the stairs first. Nadine felt sick. None of this was real. She had to remember that.

  The man waited for a few seconds then said, ‘I would much rather that this passed off without any unpleasantness.’

  She climbed to the concrete landing where she had entered the building that first time. A big cream hatch stood open revealing an airlock not much larger than a toilet cubicle. Rubber seals, pressure gauges and a red warning light in a sturdy wire cage. The far wall was a sealed, identical hatch. And beyond that?

  ‘It will be cold outside.’ The black-haired woman held out a black duffel coat, identical to the one Nadine had worn for the long walk earlier that evening, but older and dirtier with a skirl of torn lining dangling below the hem. Worlds slid over one another, like a cathedral in a café window, like the beach and the christening on the same photograph.

  And then she saw them, in the shadow of the woman’s military cuff, a crow, a moon, a hammer. ‘Thank you.’

  The man stared hard at the wall over Nadine’s shoulder, unwilling to meet her eye. She stepped into the airlock. She was not going to turn round. She was not going to treat him like a real person. She focused instead on a long cream-coloured drip where a painter had over-loaded his brush. Were these the echoes of some vanished world? Was this the future? It seemed inconceivable that her own mind could conjure a universe so rich in detail.

  The man said, ‘I wish you luck,’ the hinges squeaked and, with a soft kiss, seal met seal. There were four muffled clangs as the locks were turned on the landing then nothing, only the sound of her breathing in the steel chamber.

  She closed her eyes and pictured herself unconscious in the armchair in that little room, Martin at the window waiting for her to be returned to him. Outside, dockers yelled and busy tugboats worked at the jigsaw puzzle of the big freighters. Bananas and coal and coffee. Bennie would surely be awake now, wanting to know where she was.

  Nadine opened her eyes. There was a dirty grille at waist height. There was an abandoned pair of black wellington boots. There was a waste bin bearing the label ‘Contaminated Overalls Only’. In what way was a duffel coat meant to help? Had she deceived herself? Had she seen what she wanted to see in the glitter of some other jewellery?

  The red light came on and began to turn. Then the alarm went off, stupidly loud for such a small space. She covered her ears. Five, six seconds? The alarm stopped and the light went out. She took her hands from her ears and heard the dull hiss of air pressures equalising. The big door unlocked itself and let in a thin slice of grey light and a sweet, charred smell which raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She put the duffel coat on for the small comfort it offered and carefully opened the door.

  The panda car was burnt out, the paint black and blistered. Orange rust was already eating away at the unprotected metal, the tyres were gone, the glass was gone. There were no windows in any of the buildings. Many walls had fallen. Roofs were shipwrecks of black timbers. A thick, unwashed fog hid the far side of the park across the road. Every patch of grass was dead. She walked down the steps. Two silhouettes on a nearby wall looked like the shadows of children if children could leave shadows behind. The airlock bumped softly shut behind her. She listened. It was the kind of silence she had only ever heard on a still day in the mountains.

  A burnt dog lay beside the burnt car.

  There was movement in the corner of her eye. She turned and saw a tramp standing at the lane’s dead end, holding the hand of a girl of seven or eight. Their faces were soiled. He wore three dirty coats and carried a crowbar. There was an open wound on the girl’s cheek.

  ‘Oi! Lady!’

  The woman had been right. The air was bitterly cold. She slipped her hands into the pockets of the duffel coat. There was something hard and heavy in the right-hand side. She lifted out a tarnished, snub-nosed pistol. The words ‘Webley & Scott Ltd, London & Birmingham’ were stamped into the side of a fat, square stock. The trigger guard was a primitive hoop and the hammer looked like a sardine key. A gentle squeeze of the trigger showed that the machinery was oiled and ready.

  ‘You were in that bloody bunker, weren’t you!’ The man was limping towards her, dragging the girl behind him. ‘You did this!’ He swung the crowbar around, indicating the fallen walls, the dead grass. ‘You people did this!’

  Suddenly she understood. You have to trust me completely. Nothing had gone wrong. The exorcist had found her a way home.

  ‘Are you listening to me, lady?’

  She put the barrel of the gun into her mouth and bit the metal hard to hold it steady.

  ‘Idon’t believe in ghosts,’ Khalid said, his first day on the job as a security guard at Kenilworth Castle.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said the gardener, who had stopped at the staff kitchen for a cup of tea. ‘But when something funny happens that you can’t explain, just remember the ghosts here aren’t malicious. The boys on the top floor are mischievous – forever moving things around. And him along the corridor doesn’t like people in his space but he only gets a bit shouty. Or so I’ve heard from those who can actually see him. But there’s no harm involved.’

  ‘I’d stay away from the mere at night though,’ said the property supervisor, handing around a packet of digestives. ‘There was that siege in 1266; bodies catapulted over the walls, starvation, disease. If there really are ghosts of soldiers in the mere, they won’t be happy.’

  ‘What do ghosts do when they’re unhappy?’ Khalid asked, trying not to let any of what he was thinking enter his tone of voice. When you’ve lived through wars you don’t need to invent stories to scare you. Memory is more frightening than imagination.

  ‘I don’t know. I stay away from the mere at night,’ the property supervisor said, with a big laugh that made it acceptable to believe or not believe, just so long as you did it in good humour.

  Later that day, when everyone else had gone, Khalid took his torch and walked out of the gatehouse, where the staff offices were located, to wander through the Elizabethan garden and up the stairs to the keep. Keep what? he wondered, shining a beam on the signboard that identified the building – but that didn’t clarify the matter. Keep in? Keep out?

  Some days it still struck him as miraculous that the English language, once a series of unbeautiful left to right squiggles on a page, was now a friend, opening one door after another for him in this country far from home. But in moments such as this – encountering a word that should mean something but obviously meant something else, and feeling inadequate for not being able to work it out – he remembered that the language would never be to him what it was to his sister. For her it was a great
love, rich in riddles and double-meanings and ambiguities. She had delighted in it almost as soon as they started to learn it at the school set up in the early days of war, back when ‘liberation’ seemed a possible consequence of ‘occupation’. War backwards is raw! A group of crows is a murder! Where does the president keep his armies? Up his sleevies! Some days he thought the reason she’d really been so angry when he left home to come here was because she was jealous that he would live in English, as she could never do. Switching off his torch, he turned and faced the garden. The moon was full, illuminating the marble fountain and the statues of the muzzled bears that felt like something from his old life. But his old life was far behind. Nothing told him this like these ruins formed by time, not bombs.

  He switched the torch back on. He was a security guard without a gun, his presence enough to scare away any intruders – young lovers, teenagers in search of a dare. Here, even the ghosts were benign. He laughed softly, rapped his knuckles against the stone wall of the keep. ‘Any ghosts here?’ he called out, his voice echoing. No response, not even the wind through branches.

  When midnight approached he was sitting on a low stone wall on the other side of the keep, finishing his careful reading of the guidebook. The moon had gone now and when he switched off his torch the structures all around him transformed from stone to concentrated darkness. A chill sliced through his bones.

  Of course, the chill was brought on by the lateness of the hour, seeping even through his heavy jacket. He stood up, shook the pins and needles out of his hands and feet – he’d never sat in one place long enough to have pins and needles in both hands and both feet before – and approached the darkness, switching the torch back on just in time to see a single word rising up to meet his sight: ‘FOREBODING’. He spun in a circle, the torchlight skittering over stone and grass and stone and when it came to rest on the signboard once more he saw that really it read ‘FOREBUILDING’, followed by a dense explanatory text.