Singled Out (9 page)

But to my surprise it wasn’t Tom, only the small, portly and inoffensive figure of Jane’s husband, Gerald. He’s the same vintage as Max only looks it, and is nice in an unexciting way. I’ve always got on fine with him providing I don’t malign Sweet Baby Jane, but he’s never before crossed my threshold.

‘Come in,’ I said, staring at him. His blue Pringle jumper was on inside-out and he appeared to be wearing odd socks, one Argyle patterned and the other plain maroon.

‘If it’s not inconvenient. Sorry to bother you. Were you working?’

Now, that’s the nice thing about Gerald, he appreciates that writing is working and not some little pastime you can fit in between shopping and cooking dinner for six. And what is more, he even recognises horror writing as real writing.

‘No, that’s all right, I was sleeping: but I’m glad you woke me up because I was having my nightmare.’

‘Your nightmare?’ he echoed, looking round him in some surprise. ‘This is all very light and open, isn’t it? I expected something more—’

‘Dark? Sinister?’

‘I was going to say cottagey, actually.’

‘Oh. Well, I suppose it is light and bare-ish but I like to keep the dark stuff for the writing. And I
hate
big cupboards.’

‘You don’t have cupboards?’

‘Not with doors. I have cupboard-phobia, you see, hence the nightmares?’

He looked baffled.

‘You know, because of Pa locking me in the cupboard under the stairs as a punishment when I was a child? Jane
must
have mentioned it. The devil was supposed to get fed up and come out of me, though if he did I never noticed.’

‘I see,’ he said, though clearly he hadn’t been following what I’d been saying with any great attention. ‘I … er … heard about Max’s wife, Rosemary. I’m sorry. Or should I say—’

‘Congratulations? Better not to say anything.’

‘No – right.’

‘Tea, coffee, cocoa, rum, whisky, wine – no, I finished the last bottle of wine with lunch – sherry, crème de menthe, gin?’ I offered hospitably.

‘Tea, just tea, would be fine,’ he said, and followed me into the kitchen while I made it.

‘Cass, I came because I wanted to ask you something about Jane.’

‘What on earth for? You never believe anything I say about her.’

‘That was just sister stuff. I knew you didn’t really mean it.’

‘Didn’t I?’

‘This is serious, Cass, and I thought you might tell me…’

He tailed off and stared helplessly at me, a greying, pleasantly homely man with worried blue eyes. ‘Jane’s younger than me, and I know I’m not very exciting, but I did think we were happy. Only someone hinted to me that she’d been more than friends with that artist in residence we had last year, and that she was still seeing him.’

We gazed at each other like someone had waved a magic wand and painted us both purple, and neither wanted to tell the other.

‘It can’t be true, can it?’ he pleaded. ‘I mean, he left for Cornwall months ago, so when could she have seen him? The only time she’s been away is on holiday with me, or all those weekends she’s spent here with you. And I
do
understand that you needed her support while Max was away, so don’t think I resented that,’ he added earnestly.

‘Weekends here with me?’ I exclaimed, then swallowed hard and said with a weak smile: ‘Oh yes – you know how sisters slag each other off all the time, but they’re always there for each other in a crisis.’

‘Jane’s never said a bad word about you,’ he assured me.

Big of her. And that’s not her way: Jane’s skill is to plant the poison dart with such skill and artistry that no one notices she’s done it until paralysis sets in and it’s too late.

‘There you are then.’ I said soothingly. ‘You can see yourself that she hasn’t had time to meet him even if she wanted to. Besides
I
met him once, don’t forget, and he was a hairy, rough-looking young man – hardly Jane’s type.’

‘No, but years younger than me, and Jane’s still so youthful and attractive that everyone thinks she’s my daughter when we’re on holiday,’ he added glumly.

Most men seem to be pleased when people say that, but not Gerald. My estimation of him went up.

People always tell
me
I don’t look anything like my real age, but they should see me today: round my eyes it isn’t so much crow’s feet as rookery nook.

I managed to soothe him down, but as Jane should know, once you let a little tiny doubt lodge into the crevices of your mind it’s hard to uproot it totally, and if you’re not careful it just grows back again in a slightly different place.

He made me swear not to tell Jane he’d ever doubted her, and took himself off still looking a sad and sorry version of his usual self.

I didn’t know what to make of it all. Jane and a non-immaculate, non-famous, years-younger, scruffy painter? I can’t see it. But if not, what has she been doing when she said she was here with me?

I tried to phone her before Gerald got home, but there was no reply.

Perhaps she was away perfecting her brushstrokes?

*   *   *

For once I didn’t go to the pub for dinner, but instead ate my second pizza of the day (quattro formaggio with sun-dried tomatoes) and spent a quiet hour pasting my review cuttings into a pirate scrapbook with a skull and crossbones on the cover, and renewing my subscription to
Skint Old Northern Woman Magazine.

Then I went to my study and unleashed the inhabitants of
Lover, Come Back To Me
on to expanses of virgin white paper until it was time to leave for Kedge Hall.

New haunts.

Chapter 6: Tall, Dark and Cadaverous

Cass Leigh’s novels form the sludge at the bottom of a very murky pond indeed …

Guardian

It was a March night so cold that I walked in an ectoplasmic cloud of my own breath and everything, including me, was crispy-crunch-coated with frost. Even the circle of light from my big rubber torch just hung in the air like a yellow reptilian eye.

There was a reasonable moon, but lots of grubby-looking rubber bone-shaped clouds kept writhing about in front of it.

I was wrapped in the ankle-length purple velvet cloak again, not for effect, but simply because of its warm quilted lining. Perhaps it is a trifle over the top for a nocturnal ramble, but definitely in keeping with a night in Spook Hall.

The whole ambience of the night was right for inspiration as I let myself in through the unlocked front gate, pondering subplots involving a vampire full of ancient wisdom, demonic energy, and twisted logic.

… something called to Keturah, compelling her reluctant feet to follow the gravelled drive to where the dark shape of the old house squatted among its dank weeds like a drowned widow …

He would live, my vampire (if vampires can be said to live?), in a wing of the old house, a dark family secret passed from generation to generation.

I felt strangely excited as I neared the house, though it was not the first time by any means that I’d spent the night hours in a deserted mansion, even if it
was
one I’d been trying to get into for years and rumoured to be the most haunted in Britain. (But then, aren’t they all?)

Perhaps even now the shade of Miss Kedge was watching me pick my way up the overgrown drive while rubbing her transparent little hands together with anticipatory glee. There are reputedly so many ghosts up there that the drive might be the only place where there’s room for her to stand.

Jack tells all the old ghost stories down at the pub, but most of them I’ve already read in old books on the subject, especially
Kedge Hall – The Haunted Manor.
You’d expect Jack to be immune to all that superstition too, since his family have been servants there for centuries, but the lodge had been dark as I passed, so he must have been abed rather than doing a midnight round of the property, braving the spirit world. Or just too lazy, now that there was no one to check up on him?

Emerging into the gravelled circle before the low, half-timbered manor house I consulted the map, then followed the path round the side, through an unlocked gate set in a little archway, and into the courtyard beyond.

This bit was new to me, though once years ago I’d seen the front of the house, the single time the rose garden was opened to the public in aid of some charity Miss Kedge favoured. Retirement homes for knitted tea-cosies, or something.

The kitchen door was half-shadowed by encroaching stems of wisteria, and after fumbling for several minutes to insert the key with cold, gloved fingers, I discovered that it was unlocked.

Some caretaker! I could probably just have walked up here any night during the last year, without the wasted time or expense of working on Jack.

Still, I was in. Casting my torch beam around the kitchen I observed with some surprise that the seventeenth-century room had been done out in Ye Olde Worlde style, but with all mod. cons. and every piece of kitchen gadgetry known to woman. Reclusive Miss Kedge might have been, but clearly she liked her comforts and could afford to indulge herself.

The light switches didn’t work, so the electricity supply must have been disconnected. I wished I’d brought a bigger torch, especially after I’d opened the doors to a larder and two sculleries (scarily dark-cupboard-like) before finally finding one that opened on to a promising corridor.

The heavy, expectant dark silence awaited me, so I followed my torch beam along the flags until something groaned deep within the stone wall under my groping hand, and I dropped the thing.

It bounced once with a faint tinkling, then went out. So much for unbreakable rubber-cased torches, I thought, berating myself for a clumsy idiot, because all old houses moan and creak with every small change in the temperature, and if walls groan it’s usually because there are dodgy water pipes in them.

Then as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realised that it wasn’t after all total: a faint light outlined the edge of a partly opened door ahead of me.

I groped my way along the (now mercifully silent) wall, and emerged warily into the great dark maw of a hall, where the flickering stub of a candle set on a Sèvres saucer had been left on a dusty refectory table.

‘Jack?’ I called softly, but answer came there none, unless you count the creaking of the floorboards somewhere above me, which surely must be the maligned caretaker come to make his last evening rounds. Hence the unlocked door, of course: I’d simply arrived before he’d expected me to, but I had wanted to get here before midnight when allegedly all the fun starts.

Who would have thought Jack was this conscientious? What a creature of surprises he was turning out to be!

Still, now my torch was broken the candle was handy, and Jack might even have a supply on him that I could borrow. Picking the saucer up, I climbed the stairs and found myself standing in a long, dark gallery that seemed to run endlessly away from me in both directions, the windows down one side making barely lighter rectangles.

It was
just
like my recurring nightmare, except there was no menacing door awaiting me at one end. (Or if there was, I couldn’t see it.)

Then a distant light slowly began to grow, and a giant shadow moved with unnerving stealth across the wall: someone was coming.

‘Jack?’ I hissed.

Why was I whispering? Did I think the ghosts might wake up if I yelled? And why was Jack’s shadow so much more imposing than his small and wiry self?

Maybe because it wasn’t Jack. With a soft, heavy padding like a big cat, out of the shadows materialised the tall, gaunt figure of a man.

Unearthly light flowed from cupped hands edged in ruffles to illuminate an austere, hollow-cheeked face framed by two sweeps of dark hair. Add to that a loose white shirt open at the neck, knee-breeches, and a general impression of looming menace, and you get the idea why I nearly did a quick Keturah on to the carpeted floor.

Then he looked up and saw me, and I swear his eyes blazed an unearthly green-blue. He stopped dead and uttered in a low, hoarse voice: ‘Emma? My God. Emma, have you come back?’

That horrified, eerie whisper was the last straw. Dropping the saucer I turned to flee, running blindly into the darkness with the sound of his long, loping, strides coming after me.

The gallery must have taken a turn at the end but I didn’t, running straight into a door and bruising my outstretched hands. Frantically I wrenched it open, slamming it behind me, heart racing; though don’t ask me why I thought a closed door would stop a ghost, or even why I’d run from one of the ghosts I’d come to see.

And it was pointless anyway, for I found myself in a walk-in cupboard and the ghosts were in there with me.

A chill current of air moved my hair as something swooped low over my head – and I went berserk with panic.

It’s odd: you think you’ve subjugated your old demons, and then suddenly you’re right in the stuff of your worst nightmares and all the restraints are off. I was probably screaming like a banshee.

When the ghost wrenched open the door I ran right into him. Not
through
him – he was far too solid for that. Solid
and
warm.

So, not a vampire or anything either, then? Clasped to his chest by a sinewy arm I could hear his heart racing even faster than mine.

‘What the hell?’ he exclaimed.

‘The birds – don’t let the birds get me,’ I pleaded. ‘They’re in there!’

Still retaining a grip on me, my jailer (or rescuer, I didn’t then care which) lifted a small lantern high to illuminate the walk-in cupboard behind me, and observed ironically: ‘Open window – no birds to be seen. Most likely it was a bat, but it’s gone now whatever it was.’

He had an invigoratingly cold-water-running-over-gravel sort of voice now he wasn’t whispering.

Reluctantly removing my face, neatly imprinted with chest hair patterns, from the neck of a shirt opened so far that his swash was almost unbuckled, I took a deep, relieved breath. ‘A bat? Of course, how silly of me! And I
like
bats,’ I said, pushing myself away shakily, although not very far since he didn’t let go of my arm. ‘Sorry about that! But I wasn’t expecting to see a total stranger – especially dressed like that!’