The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (61 page)

Alma awoke. Someone was outside on the landing. At once she knew: Peter had borrowed Maureen’s key. He came into the room, and as he did so her mother appeared from behind the door and drove the music-stand into his face. Alma awoke. She was swaddled in blankets, breathing through them. For a moment she lay inert; one hand was limp between her legs, her ear pressed on the pillow; these two parts of her felt miles distant, and something vast throbbed silently against her eardrums. She catalogued herself: slight delirium, a yearning for the toilet. She drifted with the bed; she disliked to emerge, to be oriented by the cold.

Nonsense, don’t indulge your weakness, she told herself, and poked her head out. Surely she’d left the light on? Darkness blindfolded her, warm as the blankets. She reached for the cord, and the blue window blackened as the room appeared. The furniture felt padded by delirium. Alma burned. She struggled into her dressing-gown and saw the clock: 12:05. Past midnight and Maureen hadn’t come? Then she realized: the clock had stopped – it must have been around the time of Maureen’s departure. Of course Maureen wouldn’t return; she’d been repelled by disapproval. Which meant that Alma would have no transistor, no means of discovering the time. She felt as if she floated, bodiless, disoriented, robbed of sensation, and went to the window for some indication; the street was deserted, as it might be at any hour soon after dark.

Turning from the pane she pivoted in the mirror; behind her the bed stood at her left. That wasn’t right; right was where it stood. Or did it reverse in the reflection? She turned to look but froze; if she faced round she’d meet a figure waiting, hands outstretched, one side of its face incomplete, like those photographs from Vietnam Peter had insisted she confront – The thought released her; she turned to an empty room. So much for her delirium. Deliberately she switched out the light and padded down the landing.

On her way back she passed her mother’s room; she felt compelled to enter. Between the twin beds shelves displayed the Betjemans, the books on Greece, histories of the Severn Valley. On the beds the sheets were stretched taut as one finds them on first entering a hotel room. When Peter had stayed for weekends her father had moved back into this room. Her father – out every night to the pub with his friends; he hadn’t been vindictive to her mother, just unfeeling and unable to adjust to her domestic rhythm. When her mother had accused Alma of “marrying beneath her” she’d spoken of herself. Deceptively freed by their absence, Alma began to understand her mother’s hostility to Peter. “You’re a handsome bugger,” her mother had once told him; Alma had pinpointed that as the genesis of her hostility – it had preyed on her mother’s mind, this lowering herself to say what she thought he’d like only to realize that the potential of this vulgarity lurked within herself. Now Alma saw the truth; once more sleeping in the same room as her husband, she’d had the failure of her marriage forced upon her; she’d projected it on Alma’s love for Peter. Alma felt released; she had understood them, perhaps she could even come once more to love them, just as eventually she’d understood that buying Napier Court had fulfilled her father’s ambition to own a house in Brichester – her father, trying to talk to Peter who never communicated to him (he might have been unable, but this was no longer important), finally walking away from Peter whistling “Release Me” which he’d reprised the day after the separation, somewhat unfeelingly she thought. Even this she could understand. To seal her understanding, she turned out the light and closed the door.

Immediately a figure rose before her mother’s mirror, combing long fingers through its hair. Alma managed not to shudder; she strode to her own door, opened it on blackness, and crossed to her bed. She reached out to it and fell on her knees; it was not there.

As she knelt trembling, the house rearranged itself round her; the dark corridors and rooms, perhaps not empty as she prayed, watched pitilessly, came to bear upon her. She staggered to her feet and clutched the cord, almost touching a gaping face, which was not there when the light came on. Her bed was inches from her knees, where it had been when she left it, she insisted. Yet this failed to calm her. There was more than darkness in the house; she was no longer comfortingly alone in her warm and welcoming home. Had Peter borrowed Maureen’s key? All at once she hoped he had; then she’d be in his arms, admitting that her promise to her mother had been desperate; she yearned for his protection – strengthened by it she believed she might confront horrors if he demanded them.

She watched for Peter from the window. One night while he was staying Peter had come to her room – She focused on the court; it seemed cut off from the world, imprisoning. Eclipsed by the gatepost, a pedestrian crossing’s beacons exchanged signals without meaning; she thought of others flashing far into the night on cold lonely country roads, and shivered. He had come into her room; they’d caressed furtively and whispered so as not to wake her parents, though now she suspected that her mother had lain awake, listening through her father’s snores. “Take me,” she’d pleaded – but in the end she couldn’t; the wall was too attentive. Now she squirmed at her remembered endearments: “my nice Peter” – “my handsome Peter” – “my lovely Peter” – and at last her halting praise of his body, the painful search for new phrases. She no longer cared to recall; she sloughed off the memories with an epileptic shudder.

Suddenly a man appeared in the gateway of the court. Alma stiffened. The figure passed; she relaxed, but only for a moment; had there not been something strange about its long loping strides, its trailing shadow? This was childish, she rebuked herself; she’d no more need to become obsessed with someone hastening to a date than with Peter, who was no longer in a position to protect her. She turned from the window before the figure should form behind her, and picked up her flute. Half-an-hour of exercises, then sleep. She opened the case. It was empty.

It was as if her mother had returned and taken back the flute; she felt the house again rise up round her. She grasped an explanation; last time she’d fingered her flute – when had that been? Time had slipped away – she hadn’t replaced it in its case. She threw the sheets back from the bed; only the dead bottle was exposed. She knelt again and peered beneath the bed. Something bent above her, waiting, grinning. No, the flute hadn’t rolled. She stood up and the figure moved behind her. “Don’t!” she whimpered. At that moment she saw that the dressing-table drawer was open. She took one step towards it, to her ring, but could not look into it, knowing what was there – a face peering up at her from the drawer, its eyes opening, infinitely slowly, the lashes parting stickily – Delirium again? It didn’t matter. Alma’s lips trembled. She could still escape. She went to the wardrobe – but nothing could have made her open it; instead she caught up her clothes from the chair at the foot of the bed and dressed clumsily, dragging her skirt round to reach the zip. The room was silent; her music had fled, but any minute something else would take its place.

Since she had to face the darkened house, she did so. She trembled only once. The Victorian valentines hung immobile; the mirrors extended the darkness, strengthened its power. The house waited. Alma fell into the court; from the cobblestones, the erect gateposts, the street beyond, she drew courage. Two years and she’d be far from here, a complete person. Freed from fear, she left the front door open. But she shivered; the night air knifed through the dangerous warmth of her cold. She must go -where? To Maureen’s, she decided; that was not too far, and she knew Maureen to be kind. She’d forget her disapproval if she saw Alma like this. Alma strode towards the orange fan which flared from the beacon behind the gatepost, and stopped.

Resting against the beacon was a white bag, half as high as Alma. She’d seen such bags before, full of laundry. Yet she could not force herself to pull back the gates and pass. Suddenly the gates were her protection against the shapeless mass, for deep within herself she suppressed a horror that the bag might move towards her, flapping. It couldn’t be what it appeared, who would have left it there at this time of night? A car hissed past on the glittering tarmac. Alma choked a scream for help. Screaming in the middle of the street – what would her mother have thought? Musicians didn’t do that sort of thing. Besides, why shouldn’t someone have left a bag of washing at the crossing while she went for help to heft it to the laundry? Alma touched the gates and withdrew, chilled; here she was, risking pneumonia in the night, and for what? The panic of delirium. As a child she’d screamed hoarsely through her cold that a man was bending over her; she was too old for that. Back to bed – no, to find her flute, and then to bed, to purge herself of these horrid visions. Ironically she thought: Peter would be proud of her if he knew. Her flute – must the two years any longer be meaningful? Still touched by understanding, she couldn’t think that her parents would hold to their threat, made after all before she’d written to Peter. What must have been a night-breeze moved the bag. Forcing her footsteps not to drag, Alma left the orange radiance and closed the door behind her; her last test.

In the hall the thing she had thought was Maureen’s coat shifted wakefully. Alma ignored it, but her flesh crept hot and cold. At the far end of the hall mirror, a figure approached, arms extended as if blindly. Alma smiled; it was too like a childish fear to frighten her: “enjoyably creepy” – she tried to recapture her mood of the morning, but every organ of her body felt hot and pounding. She broke and ran to her room; the light, oddly, was still on.

In the rooms below, her father’s desk creaked; the flower arrangements writhed. Did it matter? Alma argued desperately. There was no lock on her door, but she refused to barricade it; there was nothing solid abroad in the house, nothing to harm her but the lure of her own fears. Her flute – she wouldn’t play it once she found it; she’d go to bed with its protection. She moved round the bed and saw the flute, overlaid by
Victimes de Devoir.
The flute was bent in half.

One tear pressed from Alma’s eyes before she realized the full horror. As she whirled, completely disoriented, a mirror crashed below. Something shrieked towards her through the corridors. She sank onto the bed, defenceless, wishing all were over. Music blasted from the record-player, the
Nocturne
; Alma leapt up and screamed. “In roaring he shall rise,” the voice bawled, “and on the surface—” A music-stand was hurled to the floor. “–
die!
” The needle scraped across the record and clicked off. The walls seemed on the point of tearing, bulging inwards. Alma no longer cared. She’d screamed once; she could do no more. Now she waited.

When the figure formed deep in the mirror she knew that all was over. She faced it, drained of feeling. It grew closer, arms stretched out, its face inflated grey by gas. Alma wept; it was horrid. She knew who it was; a shaft of truth had pierced the suffocating warmth of her delirium. The suicide had possessed the house, was the house; he had waited for someone like her. “Go on,” she sobbed at him, “take me!” The bloated cheeks moved in a swollen grin; the arms stretched out for her and vanished.

The house was empty. Alma was surrounded by a vacuum into which something must rush. She stood up shaking and fell into the vacuum; her sight was torn away. She tried to move; there was no longer any muscle to respond. She felt nothing, but utter horror closed her in. Somewhere she sensed her body, moving happily on her bedroom carpet, picking up her ruined flute, breathing a hideous note into it. She tried to scream. Impossible.

Only in dreams can houses scream for help.

5

LITTLE TERRORS

Ghosts and Children

Lost Hearts

M. R. James