The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (21 page)

Her boots crunched on the gravel as she walked up to the front door, complete with canopy and pediment and a filigree fanlight above it depicting a single ballerina dressed all in white against a dark green background of trees. Chloe took the key from her pocket, unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The house was empty and quite silent, and smelled of dust and damp and cold. She put her bag down and walked slowly from room to room. The house still had its original floors, and the wooden boards creaked beneath Chloe’s weight in a way that she liked. As well as a bathroom and kitchen, there were three living rooms on the ground floor. They were all currently empty but Chloe paused to admire the walls, panelled to dado height, with chipped painted plaster above. She also admired the ceilings, intricately adorned with mouldings of ribbons and swags, ballerinas and trees. In fact, the ballerina was a common motif within the house. Chloe remembered reading something about a famous ballerina who had lived here once.

Fireplaces dominated each room, flanked with pillars, and elegant with cast-iron backs and decorated fronts. These, too, were adorned with the ballerina motif, along with swans and forests and lakes and stars. After touring the downstairs rooms, Chloe climbed the original wooden staircase to the second floor where she inspected the bathroom and the four bedrooms – three of which she would have no need of whatsoever. She lingered a while in the largest one and looked out of the window at the grounds below, still shrouded in mist, the sky grey with the promise of more rain. The lawn swept away towards a line of trees, broken only by a small lake filled with murky water and the remains of a disused stone fountain.

Chloe turned away from the view and went back downstairs. She had noticed brass bell pushes fixed to the walls in most of the rooms and, here in the kitchen, high upon the wall, was the bell board – used back in the days when the house still had servants so that they would know which room required attention.

The old teak cabinet contained ten windows in two rows upon a black glazed panel with red-and-white striped flags. The top windows were labelled: Front Door, Back Door, Dining Room, Breakfast Room, Parlour. In the second row the windows were labelled Bedrooms One, Two, Three, Four and Five – which was odd since the house only had four bedrooms. Chloe assumed it must have been a standard board and that they had simply never set up the bell for the non-existent fifth bedroom.

While she stood staring up at the board, a bell suddenly sounded – a harsh, shrill sound that echoed through the empty rooms and made her jump. The flag for the front door moved back and forth within the cabinet, indicating that was the bell that had been rung. She went to answer it and found that the removal men had arrived right on schedule.

Chloe spent the rest of that day overseeing her old possessions and new furniture being brought into the house. By the time the oriental rugs had been laid upon the wooden floorboards, and the wing chairs had been placed before the fireplaces, and the kettle had been plugged into a socket in the kitchen, the house was starting to have a more homely feel about it.

Finally all of Chloe’s things were inside the house, and all the furniture was right where it ought to be. It had been a wearying task and she decided to unpack the remaining boxes the next day. It was later than she’d realized – the light had already drained from the sky outside, and darkness pressed in softly against the windows as if the house had been wrapped up in black velvet. Chloe cooked herself dinner for one and ate alone at the kitchen table.

Shortly after nine o’ clock, a bell rang somewhere within the house.

Chloe had just finished her meal and laid down her knife and fork when the shrill ringing caught her unawares and made her jump. She looked up at the bell board in surprise, thinking that one of the removal men must have forgotten something and must now be at the front door. But it was not the front-door flag that was moving behind the glass. It wasn’t the flag for the back door either. It was for bedroom five.

Even as Chloe looked, the bell rang again and the red-and-white striped flag waved back and forth even more rapidly in the little window. Chloe sat and watched the flag for a full minute, until it was quite as still as the others once again. Then she slowly stood up from her chair, picked up a rolling pin just in case, and searched the house from top to bottom. It was quite empty. There was no one there but her. The bell board was old and obviously faulty. Chloe decided she would have to get someone in to fix it because she’d be extremely annoyed, and perhaps a little unnerved, if the bell started ringing in the middle of the night and woke her up. She needed her sleep now more than ever. It was the only time she didn’t hurt.

But in order to get it fixed, she needed to know which bell was faulty – which of the four bedrooms upstairs was bedroom five. She went up and pressed the brass bell push in the first bedroom, then went downstairs to check the bell board. The flag for bedroom one was swinging back and forth within the window. She repeated the same process for the other three bedrooms and moved the flags for bedrooms two, three and four. But the flag for bedroom five remained quite still.

Chloe then tried all the other bell pushes in the downstairs rooms but each bell was linked to the correct room on the board, and no bell that she pushed could move the flag for bedroom five, which remained completely still in its dark window. Finally, she decided to climb up into the attic in case there was a bell push up there. She switched on her torch and at first saw only spiders and cobwebs. Then the beam of light sliced into one of the dark corners and fell upon a strange old wicker chair in a wooden frame, coated in dust and spun with webs.

Chloe took a step closer, believing it to be an old armchair at first because of the adjustable arm and foot rests, but then she noticed the big spoke wheels and realized that it was an antique wheelchair. An ugly thing – unwanted junk that some past owner had decided to shove up into the attic instead of disposing of it properly. It seemed to pull her forwards like a magnet and she found herself brushing the cold wheels with her fingertips, leaving deep marks in the thick dust.

Irrepressible sorrow. Blistering anger. Abject misery. Unreasoning hatred.

Inanimate objects don’t give off feelings, of course, every sane person knew that – and yet those were the emotions Chloe felt when she touched the chair. It was like drowning in someone else’s desperate depression. Chloe snatched her hand away as if she’d been burned. She shook herself and stepped back. She suddenly felt a strong, unreasoning desire to get away from that chair, so she turned and went back towards the hatch leading downstairs.

The incident with the bell for bedroom five was an odd thing, but these were old bells and an old bell board and an old house. Chloe had known before she came here that there would be restoration work to be done. This was just one more job to add to the list.

She went to bed and spent her first night in Arietta House dreaming of ringing bells and decrepit wheelchairs.

The bell for bedroom five rang several times over the next few days, always at night when the house was empty but for Chloe. No one ever heard it but her. There was so much to do in the house and in the grounds she told herself that was why she hadn’t got around to finding someone to fix the bell yet. But the truth was that she had made no move to start on any of the work that needed doing. The first job she had decided to tackle was painting the chipped plaster on the walls above the dado rails. She had the paint and the brushes and the step ladder all ready but she had made no move to begin.

Instead she had spent her first morning in the house lying in bed crying. Crying for her disfigured face, and her ruined marriage, and her broken heart. And when she did drag herself out of bed, she spent most of her time walking around the chilly, misty garden brooding over how much she hated her ex-husband and how fiercely she wished all sorts of miserable suffering on him and his new pretty puppet. Perhaps he would have another car crash and die this time, and good riddance. Or perhaps he would fall down the stairs and break his neck. Or perhaps he would slip into the Thames and drown.

A little smile played about Chloe’s lips as she gazed down at the murky water of the lake. How she would love to be the one to force his head beneath the surface and hold him there until he stopped struggling. Until he stopped breathing. Until there was nothing left of him, just like there was now nothing left of her. The temperature seemed to drop suddenly. Chloe shivered and turned back to the house. She noticed instantly that she’d left a light on in one of the upstairs rooms – it glowed softly through all the neat little panes of glass. Which was odd because it wasn’t her bedroom – that room was at the end of the house and this one was in the middle. It couldn’t be the bathroom either because that faced the other side of the garden. It had to be one of the other bedrooms but Chloe hadn’t set foot in them since that first night when she had been looking for the faulty bell.

She trudged back to the house, walked up the creaking wooden staircase and checked the bedrooms. They were dark – all four of them. When she went back outside there were no lit windows in the house’s façade but something seemed . . . changed. Wrong. As if there were suddenly fewer windows than there had been before. When Chloe walked into the kitchen and looked at the bell board on some sudden whim, she saw that the flag for bedroom five was still moving slightly, as if the bell had been rung unheard while she’d been out in the garden.

She stood still for long, long moments, her heart thumping in her chest, her own breathing suddenly loud in her ears. The bell and the light could both be down to faulty electrics, she decided. Yes. Faulty electrics. That was the explanation.

Chloe made herself a cup of tea because she suddenly needed something normal to do. She took her steaming mug – and another glass of wine for good measure – into the living room instead of drinking it at the kitchen table. She found she did not want to sit in the same room as the bell board, waiting for that red-and-white striped flag to start waving back and forth, as if it were mocking her – just like the rest of the world.

As she sat down in a very elegant, very uncomfortable, tall, wing-backed chair before the dark hearth, it occurred to Chloe that perhaps the house had once had five bedrooms some time in the past. On a whim she turned her laptop on and googled Arietta House, thinking to get back to the old estate agent’s page if it was still up. But instead the house instantly came up in a different context – as the former residence of Giselle Girard, a prima ballerina in the late-nineteenth century.

Giselle had been one of the most naturally gifted ballerinas the world had ever seen. Her career was like a shooting star sparkling across the sky in bursts of cold fire and flashes of twinkling diamond lights. She was on the verge of being awarded the rank of prima ballerina assoluta – an almost unheard of honour – when the theatre where she was working was burned down in a great fire. Giselle survived but a falling wooden beam crushed her legs. She would never dance again. She would never even walk again. So at the age of twenty-five she left France and retired to Arietta House, where she lived out the rest of her days confined to a wheelchair. Giselle had died in 1940 at the age of eighty.

Two black-and-white photos accompanied the article. One was of Giselle before the accident, dressed in a white tutu with a bell-shaped, free-flowing skirt made of tulle; her thick black hair pulled back into a severe ballerina’s bun; her chin high and her eyes shining with a sort of grim pride. The second photo was dated just two months before Giselle died and showed her in the grounds of Arietta House, an old, bent woman, her face wreathed in bitter lines, a look of sullen resentment in her eyes that was almost identical to the look that sometimes came into Chloe’s own eyes, only Giselle had had many more years to work upon her bitterness.

The second photo startled Chloe, not because she recognized her own misery on another person’s face, but because of the wheelchair. The elderly Giselle was sitting in a wicker chair with a wooden frame and large spoke wheels. Chloe was quite sure it was the same chair that was upstairs in the attic. That photo had been taken here in the grounds. When she peered closer she could see that the lake had been much clearer back then, and had had swans on it.

The moment Chloe read of Giselle’s sad story and saw her unhappy face, she felt an instant connection – a sympathy and an empathy – with a kindred spirit. For had they not both lost that which they cherished most, right at the very prime of their lives, through no fault of their own? Chloe had been a model who had lost her looks; Giselle had been a ballerina who had lost the use of her legs. They’d even been of similar ages when their respective disasters had struck. Chloe felt an instant affinity with the dead ballerina. A powerful, unreasoning rush of feeling. Other people might offer vapid commiserations and empty condolences, but here at last was a woman who could have truly understood what Chloe was feeling because she must have felt exactly the same. Chloe found herself wishing forcefully that she could have met the ballerina just once – that she could have spoken, just once, with someone who could have understood how she felt inside.

As Chloe stared at the computer screen and yearned for a meeting – a connection – that could never take place, a bell rang again, and she knew that it was from bedroom five. Before the last echoes of the bell had faded, music began to play from somewhere within the house. Softly at first, and muffled, as if coming to her through a dense fog, so that Chloe had to strain to hear it, but gradually becoming louder and clearer until each sad, sweet note was crystal perfect. It was the aria from the second act of
Giselle
, when the grief-stricken duke mourns at the tomb of the girl he has himself driven to madness and to death. Chloe had been to that ballet several times with her ex-husband. The last time had been after her accident and she could remember sitting there, twisting her handkerchief into knots, knowing that her marriage was almost over and that this was the last ballet they would ever attend together. That this was one of the last times they would ever do anything together.