Silver Birches Read online

  “Right,” she said, resting her elbows on the table and placing the palms of her hands together as if she were about to pray, “I’ll tell you a ghost story.

  “First of all, I ought to come clean and say that I don’t really know what to think about ghosts and ghouls. Things that go bump in the night so often turn out to be doors banging and things blown over by the wind, or foundations shifting, especially in this house. And then, of course, I’ve got a bit of a reputation to keep up for the visitors. When people come to look round one of the most haunted houses in England, they demand ghosts, and they’ve paid good money to have ghosts, so I make sure they get ’em! — well, I make sure they get stories about them anyway. Strangely warm beds on cold days, objects unaccountably moving from room to room, little girls in old-fashioned clothes seen walking across the lawn from upstairs windows at twilight — that sort of thing.”

  “You don’t mean you make them up?”

  Graham sounded more admiring than critical.

  “Oh, no, they’re actual tales that Alan and I were told by various people when we first came here. But they’re all the sorts of stories that would come with any old common or garden haunted house if you were buying the complete set, if you know what I mean, and they were all things that happened to someone else, never to the person telling the story.”

  Mike picked up half a prawn cracker that had escaped his earlier attention. Narrowing his eyes and nibbling tiny pieces from the edge of it, he mumbled through the crumbs.

  “So, you’re saying there are no little ghosties.”

  Angela clasped her hands together on the table in front of her and, for the first time that evening, looked very serious.

  “I’m going to tell you a story that I usually keep to myself. You’ll see why when you hear it. I heard it only a month or so after coming here, and the person who told it to me is dead and gone, so I doubt if anyone else knows about it nowadays, not very accurately anyway.” She broke off, frowning. “You are sure you want to hear this? It’s — quite unpleasant in a way.”

  “Excellent!” said Mike.

  Silent, rapt attention from the rest of us, an even more eloquent reply.

  “Okay, as you wish. Well, as I said, we’d only been here a few weeks, and one day after doing a bit of shopping down in the village I decided to have a cup of coffee and read a newspaper in our one and only café, one of those really chintzy ones, in the High Street. I didn’t get much reading done. The owner asked me where I was from and I told her that Alan and I had only recently bought Headly Manor. So we chatted for a bit and in the course of the conversation she mentioned that she knew a Doris Campbell who used to work up here three or four days a week, a long time ago, when it was owned by some posh people called Patterson. She’s the one who said they were posh, by the way. Obviously thought I wasn’t at all. I asked her what had happened to the Pattersons in the end, and she said, as far as she could remember, something strange and scary had happened, and the family had had a nasty accident one day not far from the house, and left not long after that, and it had all been a terrible shame, but she was sure she’d got a bit muddled about it, so why didn’t I go round and ask Doris about it, because she knew all there was to know about it all, and she’d enjoy a bit of different company anyway.”

  “Mmm, shaping up nicely,” commented Mike, rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation and adding in a silly, creepy Vincent Price voice, “Evil doings at the big house on the hill!”

  “So,” continued Angela, ignoring him, “as you can imagine I was pretty intrigued by this, and a possible true creepy story for the punters seemed a very good wheeze, so a couple of days later I dug out my portable tape recorder and took the trouble to track this Doris Campbell down to her council flat, which was up on what they call the Ridgeway, running along behind the police station just next to the little old-fashioned parade of shops where the post office is.

  “Doris turned out to be Glaswegian and lovely. She was one of those overweight, kindly souls. Frilly blouse and heavy skirt. Happy eyes. Dead white permed hair. Rosy cheeks. Suffering terribly with her legs though. You know that awful swelling you see sometimes with older people when it seems to sort of overflow their shoes. She found it difficult just getting out of her chair, but that tiny little flat of hers was spotless, and she wouldn’t hear of me making the tea when I got there. She had to do it. She really was very elderly and obviously not at all well. Dead lucid though. Bright as a button, and more than pleased to have an unexpected visitor, especially when she heard about the Manor connection. I told her that Alan and I had these plans to eventually open the place to the public, and in return she told me all about how she used to be the main one of what Mrs. Patterson called her ‘ladies.’ Did all sorts of different jobs at the big house. Cleaning, washing, even a bit of serving at table when special guests came to dinner. Apparently Mrs. Patterson ‘trained her up properly’ to make sure she laid the right number of knives and forks and handed everything out from the correct side and all that sort of thing.

  “So, eventually I got round to asking her what had happened to the Pattersons in the end, and that was when she put her cup and saucer down and went very quiet, chewing her bottom lip and rocking to and fro for a little while as though she was trying to make a decision about something. Then she started speaking, but in a totally different way. If I wanted to accurately describe the way she spoke, I’d have to say that she was very— very grave.

  “ ‘Mrs. Steadman,’ she said, ‘you seem to me a very sensible, level-headed lady, so I’m going to tell you about something that happened up at the hall not long before Mr. and Mrs. Patterson and little Emily left — well, it was the main reason they left, although I think I must be the only one in the village who knows that. And I know what happened because I was there. I don’t want you to feel you’ve got to worry, though, because it was a long time ago, and I’ve never heard or seen anything like it before or since up at the hall. But it was — it was very serious at the time. Very serious.’ ”

  Angela paused dramatically. In the ensuing silence I prayed that Mike would not feel the need to sing the X-Files tune or suddenly reach out to grab Graham’s arm and shout in his ear. Way above our heads the very faintest of scrabbling noises suggested the presence of mice or some other creature, probably up in one of the attics. Jenny momentarily lifted her gaze to the ceiling and shivered despite the heat of the fire.

  “What happened?” Graham was totally caught up in the story.

  “Well, this is the way Doris told it to me,” continued Angela. “It was one day in late autumn, this time of year, in fact, about six-thirty in the evening. Mr. Patterson was due home from his rich-making, high-powered work in the city in about half an hour, and Mrs. Patterson was busy in the kitchen — which I don’t think can have been so very different from the way it is now — getting a meal ready for the four of them, including Doris, who’d been hoovering right through the house all afternoon.

  “Little Emily Patterson was seven years old at the time. She was a bright, happy, intelligent kid according to Doris. She’d been decanted a few minutes earlier by the parent of a school friend after some kind of after-school thing. Apparently Emily and Doris got on like a house on fire, and no more than a few minutes after arriving home, Emily, who’d rushed in all excited, shedding bits of her day left, right, and center, asked Doris if she’d come up to her bedroom while she got changed so that she could tell her all about being given a part in some play that evening.

  “Doris said that so far this was all quite normal and unexceptional.

  “So, the two of them climbed the back stairs, the ones that eventually lead up to the room you’re in, David. Emily was a bit in front of Doris, having scampered up the stairs like a demented rabbit, I expect, the way children do, and was about to turn right toward her bedroom at the end of the landing when she seemed to stop dead, as though her eye had been caught by something along to the left. Then she actually moved off in tha
t direction and disappeared from sight.

  “When Doris finally puffed her way to the top, she found the little girl a few yards along the landing, head back, peering up into a dark rectangular hole that opened into one of the attics when its wooden hatch was moved aside, as was the case now. Emily was standing with one foot on the bottom rung of a stepladder that stood directly under this opening, staring into the black space with eyes as round as portholes, probably enjoying a few goosebumps at the thought of that dark, cobwebby place up there above her head.

  “Now, Doris was quite surprised to see the ladder there. She knew Mrs. Patterson had been up in the loft earlier that day stowing away a box of unwanted bits and pieces, but she could have sworn the ladder had been replaced in its cupboard just along the landing afterward. She was much more surprised to see the hatch left open. Mrs. Patterson and her husband had a real horror of their beloved daughter getting accidentally hurt in the house — especially this house, because of the whole place being sort of creaky and unpredictable. For Mrs. Patterson to leave that hatch open with a ladder standing underneath it at a time when Emily was due home from school at any minute was so out of character as to seem virtually impossible.

  “We stretch the muscles of our credulity to accommodate things we don’t understand, though, don’t we? And that’s exactly what Doris did on this occasion. She assumed that either Mrs. Patterson had some good but as yet unexplained reason for leaving things in that state, or it was maybe one of those lapses in concentration that we’re all guilty of from time to time. Putting it out of her mind for the time being, but thinking she’d mention it to her employer when they got back downstairs, she hustled the little girl away from the ladder and back along the landing past the top of the stairs to her bedroom at the other end of the passage, the one Andrew slept in last night. For the next few minutes or so she sat on the bed listening to Emily prattling happily on about her drama group and her school day and what her friends were up to. Doris was just beginning to think they ought to be heading downstairs again when both of them heard Mrs. Patterson’s voice calling faintly but audibly from somewhere beyond the closed bedroom door.

  “ ‘Emily! Emily, darling, do you want to come up and see what mummy found in the loft today?’

  “Naturally, Emily got wildly excited about doing something so deliciously frightening and safe, and started squealing, ‘Mummy’s letting me go up in the loft with her! Mummy’s letting me go up in the loft with her!’

  “Half in and half out of a jumper, she pulled the door open and, closely followed by Doris, happily convinced now that the loft mystery was more or less solved, started toward the ladder at the other end of the landing. Doris said (and Emily said exactly the same later on) that she could see, as clearly as you like, Mrs. Patterson’s slim, bare arm reaching down from the hole in the ceiling. Without giving it any particular thought at the time, she even found herself noticing the familiar solitaire diamond wedding ring on the third finger of the hand that was waiting to help Emily up from the ladder into the attic.

  “Doris said that what happened in the next few seconds was like one of those dreams where everything happens in slow motion and you don’t think you’re going to be able to move fast enough to do the thing that’ll avoid a frightful disaster.

  “Emily was no more than a step or two away from the bottom of the ladder at the moment when Doris passed the top of the flight of stairs that the two of them had come up a little earlier. At that precise second Doris happened to glance down to her left. What she saw there filled her with such horror and confusion that for a split second she did nothing at all. Standing just on the bend of the stairs, looking up inquiringly toward Doris, was Emily’s mother, Mrs. Patterson.

  “Doris said she felt as if her brain had slowed down like a record played at the wrong speed, and her body had ceased to function. Simply turning her head again seemed to take a huge effort, as though she was straining at some horribly heavy weight. The sight that met her eyes when she did manage it stuck in her memory for the rest of her life, like a photograph you don’t want to look at but you can’t throw away or destroy. Emily’s left foot was actually on the bottom rung of the ladder, her hand extended trustingly upward to grasp the larger hand that still stretched down welcomingly from the darkness of the loft. It was another paralyzed fraction of a second before Doris was able to locate the muscles of her mouth and make them work. Then she gathered all her terror and apprehension into one shouting, screaming cry of warning:

  “ ‘EMILY! NO!’

  “Emily jumped as if she’d been shot, and after one confused, fleeting look upward, flung herself, white-faced, along the landing toward Doris, who grabbed her and bundled her down the stairs past her bewildered mother, who followed them, of course, back down to the lower part of the house. The two of them sat on the sofa in the kitchen crying their eyes out, Doris because something horribly inexplicable and dangerous had happened, Emily because she had no idea what was going on and she’d been badly frightened by Doris screaming so loudly at her. She thought she must have done something terribly naughty, you see.”

  Angela sat back in her chair and glanced around at our faces. She certainly had our full attention. Mike was the first to speak. He sounded like someone who has found the last page of his whodunit missing.

  “And? So? What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know, when they went back upstairs — When did they go back upstairs? What did they find?”

  “Oh, right. Well, Mr. Patterson turned up just after that, and when he heard what had happened he grabbed a golf club and went to have a look. When he came back down he said he couldn’t understand what they were talking about, because he’d found the hatch closed and the ladder back in its cupboard. Apparently he actually lugged the ladder out for himself and climbed right up into the loft — ”

  “Goodness me, that was very brave!” said Jenny. “I don’t think anything could have persuaded me to go up there, especially on my own. Did he — did he find anything?”

  “Nothing unusual or out of place. Certainly no red-faced ghouls or ghosts. They calmed Emily down as best they could and plonked her in front of the television, and then the Pattersons and Doris sat down with a shot of brandy each and went over and over what had happened. Mrs. Patterson explained that she’d come up the stairs because she thought she heard someone shouting out. Doris reckoned that could only have been the voice that called from the loft, the same one that had brought her and Emily along the landing.”

  “And what about Emily?” I asked. “Was she very upset by it all — in the long term, I mean?”

  “No, not really. Doris said that with everything happening so fast, she’d barely registered the fact that her mother seemed to be in two places at the same time. She’d been more upset by being shouted at, and when Doris told her something about being worried that she’d fall off the ladder and hurt herself she quite happily accepted it. Kids of that age do, don’t they? Well, the ones who’ve never had any reason to stop trusting the grown-ups do, anyway.”

  “And the parents?”

  “Ah, that was different, I’m afraid. Mr. Patterson was just a bit skeptical at first. You could hardly blame him. But when he added together the things that Doris and Emily said, and the fact that his wife had also heard this voice calling out, well, that’s when the trouble really started. Because, whatever this thing was — and obviously no one could quite say what it was — if it had nearly happened once, then it could actually happen again. And the person it had nearly happened to was their beloved Emily. They made sure she slept in their bedroom from that night onward, and she was never allowed to go up the stairs on her own again.

  “Doris said the worry over that one incident just wore them down after a while, the constant fear that, however silly it might sound to outsiders, someone — something — might be waiting for a chance to get Emily. They felt as if they were going mad. To cut a long story short, in the end the
y decided to get out. It all happened very quickly after that. When the lorry had gone on their moving day they put a few last odds and ends in their estate car and drove up to the end of the drive, and there, for some unknown reason that he never could explain, Mr. Patterson pulled out into the lane without stopping or looking. A Land Rover coming down the lane toward the village went straight into them — hit the back door and buckled it in to within inches of where the little girl was sitting. She wasn’t hurt, a bit shaken up, but . . .”

  “But they thought it was this evil something-or-other having one last go at Emily?”

  “I suppose so. I think so. That’s the way Doris told it to me, Graham. Apparently they didn’t even go back to the house after the accident. They just walked down into the village to Doris’s house and fixed things up from there.”

  Silence. This all seemed a very long way from strangely warmed beds or objects moving from room to room or even harmless old Cavaliers statutorily carrying their severed heads along battlements.

  Before speaking again Graham glanced around the table as if he thought that someone else might have been about to make a comment. Nobody did.

  “And nothing like that’s happened since?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Definitely not to me. I sometimes wonder if ghosts are like dogs.”

  I was happy to supply the cue.

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because I have a distinct feeling they’re far less likely to be aggressive with people who aren’t scared of them.”

  Graham took the tiniest of sips from his glass of wine as he pondered for a moment or two.

  “I was just wondering,” he said, “if anyone asked Emily what she saw when she looked up into the attic, the second time I mean, just before Doris shouted at her. What I mean is — well, was there anything on the other end of the arm?”

  There was something horribly bald about the way in which Graham had phrased his question. I shivered a little myself at the realization that my own bedroom was a matter of feet away from the site of such strange, inexplicable happenings. Jessica and I had never really discussed such things. Our shoulder imps had never let us. We never would now. The familiar wave of alienation and childlike rage swept through me at the notion of my wife going off to qualify for after-death experiences and failing to take me with her. Oh, Jessica, Jessica, Jessica! Please don’t be dead . . .