The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (27 page)

I decided not to contact her unless I had to. Allison Rand was clearly a disturbed person, and I wasn’t sure how far I could trust her. It wasn’t just that, though. I knew by then that Lorna Loomis would be the inspiration behind my next novel and I didn’t want to spoil things by talking about them. As far as was possible, I wanted to solve the Loomis mystery by myself.

I contacted our building society and asked if I could have a copy of the house deeds. It gave me a shock to see that the Rands had lived at our address for less than four years, that they had moved in just a couple of months before Sophie was born. Before the Rands the house had been the property of a Mr Dennis Michaels; before that the owner’s name had been Tillyer. I paged backwards through the document, jotting down the names in my notebook. I couldn’t help noticing that nobody had stayed in the house for very long.

Anthony Loomis, a GP, had bought the house in 1953. In 1955 the deeds had been altered to designate Mrs Lorna Loomis as the sole owner. It was strange to see her name in black and white at last, strange to see she really had lived here. Strangest of all was that it was not that long ago. I had expected some long-dead mystery, but there would still be people in town who remembered the Loomises. I imagined the girl from the allotments had heard about them from a parent or most likely a grandparent. How could she have known about them otherwise?

I realized I didn’t know her name. I hadn’t seen her since the evening she had brought me the newspaper cutting. I hoped nothing had happened to her.

The house became strange to me. I assumed Lorna Loomis was dead, but her presence seemed all-pervasive. I had never given more than a passing thought to the previous owners of other houses I had lived in, but as the days passed I found myself dwelling on Lorna Loomis almost obsessively. I tried to imagine how she had arranged the rooms, what colours she liked.

I still had only the vaguest notion of what she had done.

I started to hear noises at night: the faint murmur of a radio, the muffled thump of footsteps on the upstairs landing. Once or twice I felt someone push past me on the stairs. I was writing by then, so I was less bothered by these occurrences than I might have been otherwise. When I’m working on a novel there is scarcely any divide between the world I am creating on paper and the world outside, especially at the first draft stage. The book was going well and that was all I cared about. I told myself the rest was all in my mind.

The room I used as my study was one of the things that had attracted me to the house in the first place. It ran directly off the bedroom, no more than a box room really, the kind of odd little space that might normally be used as a nursery or an en suite bathroom. It overlooked the garden, and I liked it because it had a feeling of being separate from the rest of the house.

I kept the door closed at night, though. I didn’t like waking up in the dark and seeing a yawning black gap in the wall, a minor phobia that Roy found hilarious.

“What do you think might be in there?” he said when I first told him about it. “Zombies?”

He’d disappeared inside the room and then emerged moments later, shambling towards me with his arms outstretched, like one of the living dead in the George Romero movies. That was during our first week in the house, and I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. Later though he stopped going anywhere near my study, even when I was in there working. I put it down to his claustrophobia, the same impulse that induced his marathon walks, but during the weeks of his absence I became less sure.

On one particular night I awoke in the small hours to see a light shining from beneath the door. I kept perfectly still, flattening myself against the mattress. I was terrified of what I was seeing, but I was even more afraid to turn on the bedside lamp because then I would no longer be able to see what the light inside my study was doing.

I stared at the glowing yellow line, clinging to the panicky hope that looking directly at it might cause it to disappear. In fact the opposite happened. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw that the sliver of light was intersected by darkness in two places. Someone was standing directly behind the door.

I lay there for what seemed like hours, too frightened to move. Eventually, though, my fear outwore itself. I got out of bed and tiptoed across the carpet towards the study door. Logic told me there was no one inside. The room had been empty when I went to bed and it was empty now. But my palms were sticky with sweat, and my pulse was throbbing so loudly it made me feel faint.

I grabbed the handle and threw open the door. Bright light poured out in a rush, soaking the bedroom in colour. For a moment I thought I saw someone standing there, a dark apparition that in my enervated state I felt certain was the girl from the allotments. I reeled backwards in surprise and horror, colliding with the side of the bed. I sat down heavily, almost collapsing. When I dared to look again there was no one there.

Through the open doorway to my study I could see the corner of my desk, starkly outlined in the light from my desk lamp, which was on.

I must have forgotten to turn the lamp off before I went to bed. It was not something I would normally do but it was the only explanation that made sense. I turned it off and stood there for a moment, just listening. The room was silent, and as far as I could see nothing had been disturbed, but being there was making me nervous, all the same.

I went back to bed, but for the first time ever I left the study door standing open. When I woke the following morning the door was closed. I felt convinced I had shut it myself, after all.

I opened it again and went in. The papers on my desk – some photocopied news articles about Allison Rand, a map of the town the way it had been in the 1950s – had not been touched. I glanced around the room, trying to see if I could spot anything that seemed different.

There was a pencil on the floor under the chair. I bent to pick it up. It was bright red and dotted with flowers, a schoolgirl’s pencil. The irregular paring marks around the nib showed it had been sharpened with a pen knife and not a pencil sharpener.

It was not mine and had never been mine. I felt certain of it.

Quite suddenly I wanted Roy. I wanted the man who had called the house perfect, who thought my ritual with the study door was a load of nonsense but who would do anything to protect me or save me from fear. At least, he would have done once. I felt tears start in my eyes at the way he had changed since we had first come here, my own helplessness in the face of that.

It came to me that I had no idea really of what his life was like from day to day, just as I had no idea of what it was that had traumatized him during his last tour of duty. I didn’t agree with the war in Afghanistan and so I had dismissed the life Roy had chosen as none of my business.

Had I dismissed Roy also as not my business? Had he changed at least in part because of my indifference?

My friends said I was stupid to marry a soldier, that his interest in photography was simply a hobby.

I wished I could phone him, just to hear his voice: broad Lancashire, so sexy. I knew it would do no good though, that even if we could speak it would end in an awkward silence or a row. He had forgotten how to talk to me, just as I had somehow forgotten how to talk to him.

The only way we could make things work now was by meeting as different people and starting again.

I was out of milk. I slipped the pencil into my pocket then walked to the bakery and convenience store that stood on the junction with the main road out of town. By the time I got there I had stopped thinking about Roy altogether. My mind was back on the book. I couldn’t work out if what I was writing could still be called a novel or whether it had mutated into something else. I picked up a carton of milk and a copy of
New Scientist
and two fresh croissants. It wasn’t until I was standing in line to pay for them that I noticed the girl from the allotments was in the queue ahead of me, back in her school uniform and clutching a copy of
Jackie
magazine.

I hadn’t known that
Jackie
still existed. The girl fumbled in her cardigan pocket, searching for coins. A fifty-pence piece dropped to the floor and as she bent to pick it up I saw she had a large brown bruise, high on her thigh and a sickly greenish-yellow around the edges. As she came past me on the way to the door I held out the red pencil, the polished wood the queasy, urgent colour of blood oranges.

“I think this might be yours,” I said. “I saw you drop it.”

The child beamed. “Oh, thank you,” she said. “I thought I’d lost that. I’ve been looking everywhere.”

She took the pencil from my outstretched fingers. I opened my mouth to ask what her name was but then decided not to. I was afraid, you see, even then.

I was afraid she was going to tell me her name was Nancy.

“Well then, I’m glad I found it,” I said instead. The girl smiled at me again and left the shop. I paid for my things and followed, but by the time I got outside there was no sign of her. When I got home I put the milk in the fridge then telephoned the admin office of the school the Rands had worked at. I asked if I could speak to Steven Rand. I wasn’t sure if he still worked there even, but it turned out that I was in luck.

“I think he’s on a free period,” said the woman who answered. “I’ll see if he can come to the phone.”

There followed a few minutes of silence before Rand himself came on the line.

“How can I help you?” he said. “Who is this?” He sounded testy, put out, though whether it was my call that was the irritant or the stress of trying to teach mathematics to a bunch of sixteen-year-olds I could not have said.

“Mr Rand,” I said. “Steven. My name is Marian Pritchard. I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions.” I told him my address then held my breath and waited. I heard him sigh.

“I’m sick of journalists,” he said. “It’s been three years. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I’m not a journalist,” I said. “I’m a novelist. It’s your house I’m interested in, not you.”

“It’s your house now,” he said. “Bad luck. I’ve got nothing to tell you.” Some of his initial hostility was gone, though. I even thought he sounded intrigued.

“You should speak to my wife,” he said. “She’s the one who believes in ghosts.”

“I’ve already done that. I’d like to hear your own thoughts, if you’ll share them.”

There was silence, and I thought he’d put down the phone. When he eventually spoke again he sounded resigned.

“I don’t suppose it can hurt,” he said. “God knows what Allison’s told you.”

We arranged to meet the following afternoon in a café we both knew near the centre of town.

“I like it because the kids hate it,” he said. “They think it’s poncey.”

“I googled you,” he said. “You really do write books, then.”

He was different from what I’d expected. I had imagined Allison Rand being married to someone like herself, buttoned up and a little staid. Steven Rand was confident and expansive. He was even good-looking, in an aquiline, ageing-maths-professor kind of way, and I imagined he was popular with his pupils. I thought he and Allison must have made an interesting couple, that they must once have been happy. I wondered how he felt about her now.

We ordered coffee. I watched Rand spoon brown sugar into his cup and wondered how I ought to begin. He solved that particular problem by himself.

“You might not believe this, but I’m glad you called me,” he said. “It’s the loneliest thing in the world when someone dies. People are all over you at first, but eventually they get bored. They’re tired of hearing the story and they’re sick of your feelings. It’s as if there’s a sell-by date, and once your time is up you’re supposed to be over it. Apart from school stuff and conversations with shop assistants, I’ve hardly spoken to anyone in months.”

“That must be terrible.”

He looked at me sharply, inquisitorially almost, as if he was trying to judge the sincerity of what I had said. “It is terrible actually, if you want to know. It makes you doubt your own existence. I’ve lost my two daughters, just at the point where I was coming to understand what it means to have daughters, the terror and the joy of it. They were alive, and now they’re dead. And here I am, still marking quadratic equations.” He sipped his coffee and made a face. “It’s the algebra that keeps me going, actually. It’s odd how things are, isn’t it? It’s the things that first enthral you when you’re young that turn out to be your survival kit later on.”

“It’s always been that way for me,” I said. “I started writing stories when I was five.”

“Is that all my life is to you then, a story?”

I hesitated. “Only if you think of mine as a quadratic equation.”

“Touché,” he said, then laughed. “My God, you’re as bolshie as Allison. I bet you two got on like a house on fire.”

“If you’re asking me if I liked her, then yes, I did.”

“I’m glad.” He took a sharp, nervous breath, as if he were about to dive underwater. “Allison’s mad, you know. I didn’t know that when I married her. Perhaps I would never have known, if we hadn’t had children. Did she tell you her theory about the house?”

“In a way she did. She said there was something in the house that harmed Alana and Sophie. I got the feeling she didn’t like to talk about it.”