Ghost Read online

  Langlands House is haunted, but not by the ghost you think.

  It’s the ghost of a girl who died here during the War, that’s what they say.

  The house is difficult to get to – in the middle of a private estate and surrounded by forest. But if anyone does make their way up the winding track under the dark canopy of trees, they eventually find themselves on a gravel area in front of a big grey stone building topped with slate-roofed turrets. Langlands.

  Although rare, this does actually happen. People travelling across country by foot stray from the usual routes and stumble across the house. Once, a census taker came to knock in vain. And occasionally, people come especially to look for the ghost.

  Any of these people may find themselves standing on the gravel staring up at those grey walls, streaked with patches of damp and lichen, and the windows which are always darkly reflective, like jet, because there is never any light behind them. They may glimpse her at one of those windows, looking down, or perhaps gazing back at them from a patch of deep shadow under the trees that ring the house.

  Sometimes they doubt their own eyes. They stare and stare, and sometimes she goes away. She drifts away from the window or vanishes into the darkness under the trees. Other times, she gazes back at them, not going anywhere. That always frightens them off. They back away, or they just turn right round and make a run for it, skidding on the gravel, stumbling on the ruts in the tracks. I’ve seen this happen.

  A rational person would say, how can this be, considering that there are no such things as ghosts? And they would also say: how did you see this happen?

  The answer to both of these questions is: it’s me they see. I’m the one they run away from, round-eyed, sometimes screaming. The Langlands ghost is me.

  In an instant my eyes were open, staring into the dark. My heart was thudding at the deep rumbling that swelled until it seemed to fill the sky above the house. There was one brilliant flash that traced the outline of everything in my room for a split second: the iron bedstead, the wash stand, the bookcase. Then a terrible splintering crash which reverberated through the entire house. It was so loud that I thought the entire roof must be coming down on my head.

  I threw back the covers and slid out of bed, the wooden floorboards cold under my feet. From somewhere within the ancient house I heard a series of minor shocks, as though something were crumbling and falling in. I imagined a widening breach, cracks running through the aged structure, a sudden and final collapse. I ran for the door.

  The moment I wrenched it open I knew my mistake. Langlands House had neither gas nor electricity; the passage outside was pitch dark, lacking even the moonlight that seeped into the bedroom between the shabby velvet curtains. The candle, unlit, was by my bed; instinctively I felt for the matchbox I always carried in my pocket, but of course I was clad only in a nightdress.

  No time to go back for it. I was thinking about the one other person in Langlands House – the person who was also in danger if the building came down.

  “Grandmother,” I shouted.

  Light bloomed at the other end of the passage as my grandmother came out of her bedroom, carrying a brass oil lamp with the flame protected by a glass chimney. She too wore a long nightdress, but she had sensibly thrown a warmer robe over hers. Her white hair hung over one shoulder in a loose plait, giving her a strangely ethereal look.

  “Are you all right?” I wanted to drag her downstairs that instant, to find safety, although I could hardly think where that would be – under the stairs, outside in the grounds?

  Grandmother was remarkably composed. “Perfectly all right,” she said calmly. She looked at me carefully, with no sign of urgency in her manner.

  “We should go downstairs,” I said urgently. “We’re being bombed.”

  “I very much doubt it,” she said drily.

  Now it was my turn to gape at her. “But did you hear it? It sounded like something fell on the house,”

  “Yes,” she said. “But listen. Do you hear anything else?”

  She raised her hand, and in spite of myself, I did listen.

  Nothing. No further reverberating crashes; no droning of engines overhead. A window rattled in its frame from a sudden gust of wind. That was all.

  “But what was that crash?”

  Grandmother said, “We had better go and see what it was. But you must put a robe on first.”

  I was amazed that she could be so sensible at such a time. But my teeth were beginning to chatter. I went back to the bedroom and wrapped myself in my dressing-gown before we went to investigate.

  The subsiding, shifting noises I had heard had stopped. Instead, there was a curious rushing sound that I could not at first identify; it made me think first of the sound of a distant river flowing, and then of loud whispering.

  The first two rooms we looked into were seemingly undamaged. We looked into the third, on the east side of the house, and even Grandmother was shocked; a soft sound escaped from her, as though she had been winded by a blow. There was a hole in the ceiling, and through it we could see the night sky. In fact, we could feel the night on our upturned faces, because the wind was coming in, and it was carrying drops of rain with it. You could see the whole structure of the roof in a brutal cross section, the ragged-edged plaster and the shattered beams and beyond that the broken edges of tiles.

  Apart from the rain and the wind’s doleful howling, which was producing the rushing noise I had heard, there was no sound from outside that I could detect. Nor was there any light except that of the moon, half hidden behind the scudding clouds. If this was an attack, it was over.

  In the middle of the worn Persian carpet was a mess of plaster – whole chunks and pale dust – and broken stones. I approached it with caution, looking for pieces of the bomb that must surely have done this. At first, I saw nothing, but as I circled the heap of rubble, the light from Grandmother’s lamp picked out the dull gleam of metal.

  “Look at this.”

  I craned over, straining my eyes in the low light. Grandmother came closer to look for herself, but after a moment she shook her head.

  “That’s not part of a bomb, child. It’s the weathervane. The storm has brought one of the chimneys down. That was what we heard.”

  I didn’t think a person of seventeen could possibly be considered a child. But I let it pass because I was digesting what she had just said.

  The storm.

  Was it possible that the tremendous crash that had ripped me out of sleep was simply a chimney coming down in the wind and rain?

  I glanced up to check that no more debris was about to fall from the ceiling, and then I put out a hand and brushed plaster dust off the metal object. Sure enough, it was the weathervane from the topmost chimney, bent and twisted beyond repair.

  I suppose I should have been relieved. For the War to have reached somewhere as remote as Langlands would have meant something very serious indeed. That the skies above the house were lit up with nothing more sinister than lightning was a good thing. We were safe. Langlands was safe. So why was I disappointed?

  I used to dream of someone from the outside coming to Langlands. I dreamed of a friend before I even knew what that was.

  I didn’t lack company. Grandmother was always there, except on the rare occasions when she went into the nearby town for things we couldn’t make or grow or find for ourselves at Langlands. She was never too busy to talk to me; in fact, sometimes I had the feeling she pushed herself to do it, to amuse me or to tell me things she considered educational. She told me about the assassination of Julius Caesar while kneading bread dough so forcefully that it might have been the assassins’ heads she was pummelling. Another time, I r
emember listening to her describing the life of Mary, Queen of Scots while we pulled up carrots and potatoes from the earth, shaking them to loosen the clinging soil.

  It wasn’t as though I was always alone, or never heard the sound of another voice. I simply felt that there could have been something else. The idea was somehow shapeless; I couldn’t think how or why things would be different with a friend to the way they were with Grandmother. They just would be.

  I would daydream about someone being there with me – someone my own age. Sometimes when I had no chores to do and was free to roam around the house and grounds, I would imagine that this someone was with me, keeping step but a little way behind, so they were just invisible, even out of the corner of my eye. It was understood that I was too polite to turn around suddenly to catch them unawares. Since we never entertained, I had no idea how I was supposed to amuse a guest. So I would show them Langlands, as a way of showing them my life.

  Langlands was a fortress and a labyrinth and a treasure chamber all rolled into one. There were bedrooms and sitting rooms, dressing rooms and store rooms, and funny little circular rooms in the turrets that were no use for anything because you couldn’t put furniture against the walls. It had a grand main staircase, with newel posts carved into stylised thistles that looked more like fat artichokes, and other, hidden staircases once used by servants. There were servants’ passages, too, so that the long-vanished staff of Langlands House could move about discreetly. I wondered whether their footsteps had been audible. I thought so, because in every part of the house the ancient floorboards creaked and groaned under passing feet. It must have been strange, I thought, to hear the sound of someone pattering from one end of the house to another, without being able to see them. Perhaps that was how Langlands had acquired its reputation for being haunted.

  Some of the rooms were not in a state to be used – they were full of lumber, or empty, or closed up completely. Two of us could hardly use so many rooms, after all, let alone heat them all properly. We had a bedroom each, furnished with some of the best things in the house, although the rooms themselves had been selected on the basis of which held the best beds, since it was completely impossible for the two of us to move anything so heavy by ourselves. A long time ago, back in a time my memory could not reach, I shared Grandmother’s room, but as soon as I was old enough to have my own, I had moved to my current one at the other end of the passage because I liked the iron bedstead and the green velvet curtains.

  In addition to our own rooms, there was a library containing thousands of volumes, and we had a piano, which Grandmother played beautifully and I less so. There were other, fascinating things all over the house – paintings and portraits, and stuffed creatures and exotic souvenirs brought from overseas by adventurous ancestors. It was easy to lose an afternoon sorting through strange seashells or faded postcards or coins worn smooth by age.

  There was even a little stone mausoleum hidden away in a tangle of overgrown bushes in the woods, where former inhabitants of Langlands House had been laid to rest centuries before. The path that had once led to it was almost entirely overgrown. Grandmother discouraged me from going there out of respect for the dead, but sometimes when I strayed close to it, I would glimpse the grey walls, disfigured with growths of lichen. It had never bothered me, solitary child that I was, to have the long-dead nearby. There was something almost reassuring about it; if I had no wider family circle than Grandmother, at least I had these historical forebears.

  I’m making it sound like a museum, but Langlands was a working house, even if we couldn’t keep up every part of it with only two of us to do the work.

  We had nearly everything we needed. There was plenty of firewood for the winter, and we grew a lot of our own food. We had a vegetable garden, chickens, and aromatic herbs in pots. There was a water pump in the kitchen. It took a fair amount of effort to keep things running: to tend the vegetables, to bring in the wood, to draw and heat water for a bath. I preferred the work to studying, though. As well as Mathematics and Botany, Grandmother made me learn Greek and Latin, but I could never see the point of those. It wasn’t as though I even had anyone to talk to in English apart from her. If outsiders ever came to Langlands, I always had to hide.

  And that is my very earliest memory: hiding.

  I don’t recall who came to the house, or why. I remember someone knocking at the front door, the blows brisk and loud on the weathered oak panels. I remember toiling up the wooden staircase to the first floor, holding up my skirts in my fists. At the turn of the stairs, I looked down at the hallway below with its black and white chequered tiles and saw my grandmother staring back at me, her brows drawn together and her jaw thrust forward, her eyes blazing an urgent message. She gestured at me, abruptly.

  Go.

  She couldn’t shout it – the person outside would have heard.

  I reached the top of the stairs before I heard the bolts being drawn back on the oak door. In a corner of the upstairs landing there was a stuffed bear standing on his hind legs, his jaws frozen in an eternal snarl. I was not afraid of him; his savage expression was belied by the moth-eaten patches in his fur and the bluntness of his claws. I squeezed into the space between his hairy back and the panelled wall and crouched down, hugging my knees. I waited, breathing in the dusty scent of fur.

  I don’t know how long I hid there, nor what my grandmother said when she came to find me. What I remember is just that: having to hide myself.

  You don’t question things like that when you are really tiny. But later, I did. Why did I have to hide? Why couldn’t I leave the estate? Where was my mother, Grandmother’s daughter, of whom she spoke so seldom and so sadly? And eventually: who was my father, of whom she never spoke at all, and what had become of him?

  The answer was always the same: the War.

  Far away, on the other side of the dark forest that surrounded Langlands House, War was raging. Aeroplanes flew in formation across the night sky, showering the cities below with incendiary bombs. Great metal machines with caterpillar treads instead of tyres rumbled through the ruins of towns, crushing everything in their path. Even the oceans were infested with deadly submarines that cruised back and forth, stalking the ships. Those who were not called up to fight had to work for the war effort. Grandmother was too old, she said, but I was not; if I were discovered, we would be separated.

  “You’d be taken away.”

  I remember her saying that to me, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the tenth. She held me by the shoulders, shaking me a little, and her grip hurt – it was too tight. I wanted to pull away. A strand of white hair had shaken loose from the knot at the back of her head, and hung down over her face; she looked a little wild.

  “You’d never come back, do you understand?”

  I did understand; she made me understand all of it. I would have to go into the city and work in a munitions factory, under constant threat of bombing. No more hours passed curled on the window seat in the library with a book open on my lap; no more picking my way silently through the forest, to be rewarded with a glimpse of a young deer lifting its head to look at me, or a rabbit dashing away with a flash of white tail. Just endless, grinding work, with the stink of hot TNT in my nostrils and the constant danger of accidental explosions in addition to the threat of enemy attacks. Grandmother talked and I listened until terrible visions filled my head, of girls my age whose skin and hair was dyed yellow from incessant contact with sulphur, of girls crushed flat in the bombed rubble of their apartment houses. And supposing my curiosity about the world outside Langlands was so persistent that it overcame my fears? Well, there was the guilt.

  Alone at Langlands, Grandmother would be unable to keep things running by herself. A practical problem like being unable to chop enough firewood could make a harsh winter lethal for someone her age. When the War finally ended, then assuming I had survived it, I might tramp back to Langlands and find that
it had become a tomb. I imagined myself walking up the track in winter, the frozen earth black under my feet, white flakes of snow drifting slowly down; finding the house dark and cold, the front door locked, no answer to my knocking. Walking around to the back door; glancing into the chicken run and seeing a few pitiful heaps of feathers lying still and silent. Seeing those tiny deaths; knowing I don’t want to go inside the house because death is there too.

  That – that was why I had to hide, and why I could never go outside the estate. It didn’t mean my mind didn’t want to go there.

  Sometimes I would go down to the very edge of the Langlands estate, where the forest ended. There was a track leading away through the fields, eventually meeting a road. The road was too far away for me to see very much of what passed up and down it, but I could pick out the larger vehicles. Everything seemed to be moving about very peacefully. Now and again I saw an aeroplane, but there never seemed to be anything sinister about that, either: no dropping bombs, no distant fires.

  So, I said to myself that Grandmother had chosen our hiding place well, and Langlands really was too remote to be affected by the War. What else could I believe in, if not in her? Who else did I have in the whole world but her?

  The morning after the storm, we went into the damaged bedroom to find more rainwater coming in through the hole in the ceiling.

  The room was never slept in, and the carved oak bed once used by a previous occupant had been dismantled, the large wooden sections propped against a wall. It had escaped damage, but the ancient Persian carpet that covered most of the floor was sodden, its faded crimson threads darkened to the colour of blood.

  I glanced at Grandmother and her face was grim. It was already nearly the end of October; with winter coming, we could expect more rain, and worse. I imagined opening the door on one of those glacially cold December mornings and finding the room a dazzling white cavern of fallen snow, the skeleton of the bed almost buried in a drift of it.