The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (66 page)

Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. “Why, I didn’t understand it – strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find your husband.”

Mary continued to scrutinize him. “Then why are you telling me now?”

Still Parvis did not hesitate. “Well, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than you appear to – I mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter’s been raked up again. And I thought, if you didn’t know, you ought to.”

She remained silent, and he continued: “You see, it’s only come out lately what a bad state Elwell’s affairs were in. His wife’s a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and taking sewing at home, when she got too sick – something with the heart, I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help. That attracted attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people began to wonder why—”

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. “Here,” he continued, “here’s an account of the whole thing from the
Sentinel
– a little sensational, of course. But I guess you’d better look it over.”

He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the
Sentinel
had first shaken the depths of her security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring headlines “Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid”, ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table upstairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.

“I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down—” she heard Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat and ears. Then she gave a cry.

“This is the man – the man who came for my husband!”

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

“It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!” she cried in a voice that sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis’s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless, fog-muffled windings.

“Mrs Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a glass of water?”

“No, no, no!” She threw herself towards him, her hand frantically clenching the newspaper. “I tell you, it’s the man! I
know
him! He spoke to me in the garden!”

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. “It can’t be, Mrs Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.”

“Robert Elwell?” Her white stare seemed to travel into space. “Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him.”

“Came for Boyne? The day he went away?” Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. “Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?”

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.

“Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me – the one you found on his desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.” She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. “Surely you remember that!” he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words – words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.

“This was the man who spoke to me,” she repeated.

She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. “He thinks me mad; but I’m not mad,” she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.

She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: “Will you answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?”

“When – when?” Parvis stammered.

“Yes; the date. Please try to remember.”

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. “I have a reason,” she insisted gently.

“Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should say.”

“I want the date,” she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper. “We might see here,” he said, still humouring her. He ran his eyes down the page. “Here it is. Last October – the—”

She caught the words from him. “The twentieth, wasn’t it?”

With a sharp look at her, he verified, “Yes, the twentieth. Then you
did
know?”

“I know now.” Her white stare continued to travel past him. “Sunday the twentieth – that was the day he came first.”

Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. “Came
here
first?”

“Yes.”

“You saw him twice, then?”

“Yes, twice.” She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. “He came first on the twentieth of October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.” She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.

“We saw him from the roof,” she went on. “He came down the lime-avenue towards the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.”

“Elwell had vanished?” Parvis faltered.

“Yes.” Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. “I couldn’t think what had happened. I see now. He
tried
to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough – he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months; and then he came back again – and Ned went with him.”

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.

“Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned – I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!” she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush towards her, like inward-falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch; she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

“You won’t know till afterward,” it said. “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”

Gaie Sebold

Inspector Gairden turned up the collar of his coat as a steam velocipede puffed and churned its way past him, filthy water spraying up from beneath its wheels. Its driver hunched under a bowler and greatcoat, rain shedding down his back; its single passenger was no more than a smoky shape behind the yellowed glass. Gairden scowled at the red-glass lantern that marked its retreat.

He crossed the road, picking his way among the puddles. A dead goblin, about the size of a terrier, swollen-bellied, lay face down in the gutter, its tail wavering in the water. He sighed. The things were a damn nuisance, but he had a lingering fondness for them. Some of the lesser sidhe seemed to be adapting to the city, thriving on its debris; others ended like this.

Gairden stood in front of the looming bulk of the Rheese Manufactory. The place roared and fumed in the darkness; shadows moved in the high windows, paper silhouette puppets against a brutal white glare. Rain, snagged by the light, plummeted like steel needles. A rhythmic thudding jarred the paving under his feet. He walked past the great gates to the side door.

Set into the stone surround was the brass opening of a speaking tube supported by two plaster cherubs. Below it, mounted in an elaborately decorated brass surround, a doorbell bore the stern injunction: “Press”.

Inspector Gairden did so.

“Yes?” A muted buzz, stripped of gender, emerged from the tube.

“Inspector Gairden,” he said, wondering how he sounded to his hidden interlocutor. Less like a machine, he hoped.

“One moment, please.”

It was, in fact, a good few moments before someone opened the door, by which point rain was trickling steadily off the brim of the inspector’s hat.

“Apologies for keeping you, sir. Terrible night.” The man beckoned him in. He was a lean fellow in a workman’s uniform of heavy canvas trousers, woollen waistcoat and plain shirt with the sleeves held back by leather bands. His hands were stained with black and brown on the fingers and palms. “Please follow me. It’s up three flights. Sorry for the climb, but the lift isn’t working.”

“May I take your name?”

“Oh, sorry, sir. I’m the foreman. Lassiter. Ben Lassiter.” He shook his head. “Awful thing, it is. Got everyone very shaken. We shall have to be very careful, the next few days, that there aren’t accidents. Nothing like bad nerves for making people careless.”

“Do you have many accidents?” Gairden raised his voice over the noise.

“Not so many in the last five years, since poor Jamie joined us. We do get accidents, yes. But when it happens . . . the machines, they’re not
malevolent
, if you see what I mean.”

Lassiter glanced through the archway as they passed the factory floor, where the great levers and pistons rose and fell in relentless rhythm, regular as the pumping of a giant heart, the scurrying workers tiny and doll-like. “I suppose so.” Had the machines been malevolent, Gairden would have felt . . . not sympathy, but some capacity for understanding. That was how he worked: by trying to sense something about the hearts, the minds, the spirits of those involved in a case. There was none of that, with a machine.

“The idea of someone actually—” Lassiter wiped his mouth. “Well, it’s not the same, you see.”

“No, you’re right, it isn’t. You knew the young man, then?”

“Oh, everyone knew young Jamie, sir. Not to speak to, so much; he kept himself to himself, you know. But he was a nice lad when you could get him to notice you existed.”

“Preoccupied, was he?”

“You could say that, sir, yes. A bear for his work, he was.”

“An asset to the firm, then.”

“Oh, I don’t think it would be too much to call him a genius, Inspector. We shall be very sorry to lose him.” There was, the inspector thought, the slightest possible emphasis on the
we
.

The iron stairway shuddered to the regular thudding; bright curls of shaved metal and fragments of dirt jumped about their feet as they climbed. Smells of hot metal and steam surrounded them. Glittering dust hung in the air.

“What was his position here?” Inspector Gairden said.

“Assistant Deviser, sir.”

“And who was he assistant to?”

“That’d be Mr Rheese, sir. The owner.”

“I see.”

The noise lessened slightly as they moved higher. They stepped into a corridor; heavy wooden doors, gas lamps hissing in their lily-petal shades. Lassiter hurried his steps; Gairden speeded up to stay with him.

Lassiter glanced up and down the corridor; pushed open a door. “In here, sir. It’s pretty bad, but I suppose you’ve seen worse, in your line of work.”

Tiny limbs, their sizes carefully graded, hung on the walls. Jars of eyes stared in all directions. A music box stood with gaping lid, the dancer on top poised forever
en pointe
. Neatly arrayed in trays, on hooks, in boxes, were levers, wheels, cogs. Brass and copper, glass and steel. A vice gripped the edge of a workbench like a parrot waiting for a snack; against one wall was a bed, narrow as a coffin, the sheets and one rough blanket tucked in with an almost military precision.