The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (21 page)

Again, the drunk bellowing from the front room.

‘Who the hell is it?’

‘Go, please go,’ she said, desperate this time. ‘She’s not here.’

I didn’t want to cause trouble between this downtrodden woman and her husband.

‘At least tell me if she’s not here, where else might she be?’

For an instant, the haunted look in her eyes gave way to something else. Grief, perhaps. Resignation, maybe.

‘The church,’ she said softly.

This caught me out. ‘So late?’

‘Where else would she be?’

I heard the sound of a bolt being shot, then a heartrending sob. I raised my hand to knock again, then let it drop. The woman was clearly terrorised by her brute of a husband. Perhaps Mary was too scared to go home?

I walked back to the High Street. The Ship Inn and the White Hart had called last orders and one or two rag-taggle farm workers were calling their goodnights into the damp night air.

One of the black wrought-iron gates into the churchyard was ajar, as if someone had recently slipped through. I pushed it open, thinking Mary might have taken refuge here after all. But the door stayed shut when I rattled the heavy cast-iron handle. I stepped out into the graveyard. Neat headstones closer to the church, rather more overgrown in the corners. Yew and mulberry and evergreen hedges. By an imposing flint wall, a row of older gravestones like broken teeth, a little crooked and sinking back into the earth.

I sensed movement. I narrowed my eyes and tried to adjust my vision to the darkness. Another fox? A sound in the undergrowth, little more than that.

‘Mary?’

I skirted the building and walked towards the sound. The bottom of my trousers grew damp with the dew from the grass and the cold night air slipped beneath my collar, but I paid no attention.

‘Mary, is that you?’

I rounded the corner and found myself in a more secluded section of the graveyard. Stone angels and crosses, the flat tombs of an older age, and a few modern headstones. I could see no one, just shadows, phantasms in the intermittent moonlight.

No one.

But there was something moving, swaying in the breeze, something hanging on one of the gravestones. My jacket. I walked forward, then leant down to take it from the headstone. Forced myself to read the inscription, though I feared what it was going to say.

MARY STARR
3rd OCTOBER 1931 – 27th OCTOBER 1951
IN GOD’S CARE

Bill tells me they found me there in the morning, clutching my jacket to my chest. I had a slight fever, a chill from spending the night out of doors. I wasn’t ill, but not quite right either.

A local had seen my car still parked in the square, remembered me asking for directions to the Starr’s house and put two and two together. It wasn’t the first time, you see.

Bill came to fetch me – his number was on the map still lying on the passenger seat of the car. I stayed with him for a few days until I felt well enough to drive back to town. He told me the whole story. Mary had been seen before, always on the same stretch of road, always on the anniversary of her death. A local girl, Mary Starr, killed on Harting Hill ten years before. Hit and run in the days before there were such things. Or had she simply lost her footing and fallen? No one was sure. A sweet girl, innocent, who had gone for a drive with a local boy and without her father’s permission. When the boy wouldn’t take no for an answer and put her out of the car, Mary had no choice but to walk home in the worst storm they’d suffered for years. He raised the alarm when rumours spread that Mary had never arrived. Rain and mudslides, flooding on the lower roads, her body not found for days.

This happened some time ago. And although I was haunted by thoughts of Mary lost on the hillside, the memory of that night and my role in bringing her home is less troubling now.

Several years have passed. I married again, happily this time, and we have a wonderful daughter. Bright, charming, works hard at school. My wife says I am overprotective, and perhaps I am. From time to time, when we drive down to spend a weekend with Bill and his wife, he teases me about it too, though he understands.

I don’t believe in ghosts, never did. All the same, each time I pass through South Harting, I stop at the church. To lay flowers on the grave of a girl I once met.

Author’s Note

This story, written for the collection, was inspired by an experience I had more than thirty years ago.

I was driving home to Chichester, in Sussex. It was late at night, I hadn’t long passed my driving test and as I went through the village of South Harting, The Specials were singing ‘Ghost Town’ on the radio.

When I turned to go up Harting Hill, a mist descended. I allowed myself to become completely spooked and started to worry what I’d do if the car broke down and I was stuck there on my own. This was 1981 and there were no mobile phones.

The car didn’t break down. The mist lifted. Nothing happened. But I’ve never forgotten that journey and the illogical sense of threat in the darkness.

THE
PRINCESS ALICE

Deptford, south-east London
September 1998

The
Princess Alice

The bosun pipes the watch below,
Yeo ho! lads! ho!
Then here’s a health afore we go
A long, long life to my sweet wife an’ mates at sea;
And keep our bones from Davy Jones, where’er we be

from the ballad ‘Nancy Lee’ performed
aboard the
Princess Alice
, September 1878

The girl was crying again. A desolate sound of great grief, devoid of any hope, a child abandoned.

I sat up in bed, trying to identify where it was coming from. Somewhere nearby. I couldn’t bear to hear it and do nothing.

I leant over and shook my husband’s shoulder.

‘There,’ I whispered, ‘she’s here again. Can’t you hear her? The same as before.’

He stirred. We listened. But now, though I could hear the traffic on the Broadway and two lads shouting about a taxi, I could no longer hear the weeping of a child.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Someone in the street, that’s all. Don’t let it bother you.’

Rob rolled over and went back to sleep, leaving me sitting in the dark, knees drawn up, wondering if I was going bonkers. It was the third time in a week I’d been woken by the desperate sobbing. I glanced at the clock: five minutes past one in the morning, just like before.

This was our first flat and we loved it. A one-bedroom in a modern block conversion in Glaisher Street overlooking the Thames, good value for money, excellent transport links to the City for Rob’s work and cycling distance to the University of Greenwich campus where I was due to take up a new teaching job in a couple of weeks’ time. We’d only moved in at the end of August, but I’d met all of the neighbours already. Like us, they were mostly in their twenties and concentrating on their careers. None of them had children.

I leaned back against the wall. So why could I hear a little girl crying? Who was she?

Rob didn’t mention it in the morning and neither did I.

We went through the usual morning rituals – shower and shaving, a shared pot of coffee, a peck on the cheek and a smell of aftershave.

‘I’ll be back by six,’ he said. ‘Seven tops. Fancy Chinese?’

I smiled. ‘I thought we might go out. Find somewhere nice by the river. See what there is.’

‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘Let’s play it by ear. I’ll call.’

I nodded. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Have a good day.’

Since it wasn’t raining, I went out for a walk. I wanted to get to know our new neighbourhood before the demands of timetables, students, marking, colleagues took over. Once term started, I knew I’d have no time to explore. To get under the skin of the place.

I headed towards Lewisham first, following the Ravensbourne, one of London’s old forgotten rivers, then doubled back parallel to Brookmill Road. A smell of stale beer seeped out of the pub at the bottom of St John’s Vale. In the morning sunshine, a cellar man clanked and rolled his empty barrels into the waiting lorry, a cigarette balanced on his lower lip. Along Cranbrook Road and over Friendly Street, through the white clapboard estate towards Tanner’s Hill and Wellbeloved the Butcher, then on to Deptford Broadway.

Deptford Church Street was shut for the weekly market, so the traffic was heavy. All the lorries on their way to Dover, the salesmen in their clean company cars, jackets hanging from the hooks in the back, tapping their fingers impatiently on the steering wheel.

I held my breath, trying not to inhale the diesel and petrol fumes.

For a fraction of a second, nobody moved, then the lights turned green and the front runners surged out of the gates, up the hill towards Blackheath.

As the whine of the engines grew fainter, I found myself wondering if any of the drivers had even noticed the tiny streets through which they were driving. Did they see the stories beneath the cobbles and all the wharf buildings, the distinctive character of this corner of south-east London? Or did they only notice the booze shops hidden behind metal grilles, the burger joint and 24-hour supermarket where the drunks congregated, trying to make friends with anyone foolish enough to make eye contact.

A piece of urban art – what town planners and the
Daily Mail
call a ‘feature’ – sat at the top of Deptford Church Street. A large wrought-iron anchor set in stone, reminding shoppers of the district’s maritime past. Two boys and a girl were clambering all over it, hooking their legs over the arms, hanging upside down like monkeys. The hoods of their coats flopped over their faces and muffled their childish giggles.

And, with that, the memory of my broken sleep slipped back into my mind. The girl who cried in the night. I wondered who and where she was. Why no one did anything to comfort her. Rob thought I was making something out of nothing and I supposed he was right. Sound carries in the small hours, so the fact that there were no children in our block didn’t mean anything. There were plenty of families living nearby. But as I walked back towards Glaisher Street, the oddness of it – the fact that I always heard her at the same time, the fact that Rob hadn’t ever heard her – and nor had any of the neighbours – played on my mind.

The market was now in full swing. Men shouting into microphones, selling toasters, dinner sets and sofas. You want it, they’d got it. I negotiated my way between the two rows of stalls, their red and white plastic awnings rustling and flapping in the wind. There was even someone selling Jesus. Bibles, embroidered pictures with Christ’s face stitched in bright gold thread on shiny black material, a pauper’s Turin Shroud. CDs of gospel music proclaiming the happy day and a man, half preaching, half singing, welcoming in the lost souls. It seemed to be working – the stall was surrounded by women and their shopping trolleys. Just fifty pence per prayer or three for a pound: a bargain.