Ghost Stories - Lorna Bradbury [2]
My heart is thudding. oh for goodness’ sake, it’s just a house! I take a deep breath and begin to walk. They’ve put tarmac on the road and fenced off the fields on either side but wildness still lingers about the place.
The house looms up before me against a darkening sky. I feel suddenly weak. a woman is in the garden, unpegging a line of billowing sheets. She stops when she sees me approaching.
Mum and Dad didn’t believe me, so I made them come upstairs and see for themselves. The door was locked and wouldn’t open, even when my father rammed it with his shoulder. My mother thought I must be suffering from the heat and insisted on taking my temperature. When I checked outside, later that afternoon, the shutters on that part of the house were indeed closed.
A few days later, I tried to open the door again, but it really was locked. I began to think I must have fallen asleep that afternoon and dreamt the whole thing. Yet that night, I couldn’t sleep at all. She troubled me, that sad girl with her ice-grey eyes. I wanted to be her friend, to help her maybe. I didn’t even know her name … I sat up and saw a strip of yellow light underneath the door, so I got out of bed and turned the handle.
It was open.
The woman is wondering who I am. I explain why I am here and it must sound to her as is does to me – sentimental nonsense. I tell her that my parents are both dead and that this house represented the last happy moments of my childhood. if only she knew.
‘when we stayed here,’ I say, ‘that part of the house was closed up’. I can see that the short stroke of the ‘L’ is lived in now. There are curtains at the windows.
‘Ah,’ she says, frowning, as the first drops of rain begin to fall, ‘let me finish this and i’ll show you around.’
She starts to fold the sheets.
I pushed the door gently, not wanting to startle her. She was lying on the bed, her black hair spread over the pillow. I moved closer and saw that her eyes were open, lifeless, frozen. One arm hung over the side of the bed, the thin, white hand dangling like a broken wing. I watched helplessly as the steady trickle of blood crept in scarlet rivulets across the floor.
outside, the rain was lashing against the window. was it already daylight? Surely I had only been in the room for a few minutes? I rushed out, shouting for help. as I flung open the door of my own room, my father was running down the corridor towards me.
Only then did I scream …
The house has been modernised and I can barely recognise it inside. it has a great deal of black ash furniture and an enormous television set in the sitting room. I have to be patient while the woman shows me her streamlined kitchen and the new patio door and then I ask her if I could see my old bedroom.
‘Of course, madame,’ she says, leading the way up the stone staircase. ‘it is empty now. My daughter Grace has the room next to it.’
I can’t understand why I am trembling so hard. The room is bare but familiar all the same. I look out of the window at the Sainte Victoire that rises beyond a new housing estate. a memory flickers: Rooftops where once there were only fields. The rain is lashing against the window now; the sky is the shade of a swollen bruise. and someone is playing Chopin.
I turn as a door opens. The young girl is standing there, watching me, pale as a ghost. She pushes back her long, black hair with a thin, white hand. She doesn’t smile and, of course, she can’t recognise me, but as I meet her gaze, I feel the blood rushing to my head. Because her eyes are like lakes of ice and fathoms deep with all hope drowned, and suddenly, I know. it isn’t too late. it never was too late. I know why I had to come back.
‘Grace,’ I say, as I reach out to her at last.
Daniel’s Caul
Ceri Hughes
The rain flailed across the windowpane like hawsers. She watched the squally, grey, white-tipped waves as they moved urgently across the bay. She looked down at the serene face lying next to her. he was, of course, beautiful.
‘Good grain,’ her mother had explained. ‘You know what I mean, love, he’s