Fragile Things Page 8

  “Aye!” called Amelia Earnshawe, her voice no longer unsteady. “The compact.”

  For the scroll, the long-hidden scroll, had been the compact—the dread agreement between the Lords of the House and the denizens of the crypt in ages past. It had described and enumerated the nightmarish rituals that had chained them one to another over the centuries—rituals of blood, and of salt, and more.

  “If you have read the compact,” said a deep voice from beyond the door, “then you know what we need, Hubert Earn-shawe’s daughter.”

  “Brides,” she said, simply.

  “The brides!” came the whisper from beyond the door, and it redoubled and resounded until it seemed to her that the very house itself throbbed and echoed to the beat of those words—two syllables invested with longing, and with love, and with hunger.

  Amelia bit her lip. “Aye. The brides. I will bring thee brides. I shall bring brides for all.”

  She spoke quietly, but they heard her, for there was only silence, a deep and velvet silence, on the other side of the door.

  And then one ghoul voice hissed, “Yes, and do you think we could get her to throw in a side order of those little bread roll things?”

  VII.

  Hot tears stung the young man’s eyes. He pushed the papers from him and flung the quill pen across the room. It spattered its inky load over the bust of his great-great-great-grandfather, the brown ink soiling the patient white marble. The occupant of the bust, a large and mournful raven, startled, nearly fell off, and only kept its place by dint of flapping its wings several times. It turned, then, in an awkward step and hop, to stare with one black bead eye at the young man.

  “Oh, this is intolerable!” exclaimed the young man. He was pale and trembling. “I cannot do it, and I shall never do it. I swear now, by…” and he hesitated, casting his mind around for a suitable curse from the extensive family archives.

  The raven looked unimpressed. “Before you start cursing, and probably dragging peacefully dead and respectable ancestors back from their well-earned graves, just answer me one question.” The voice of the bird was like stone striking against stone.

  The young man said nothing, at first. It is not unknown for ravens to talk, but this one had not done so before, and he had not been expecting it to. “Certainly. Ask your question.”

  The raven tipped its head to one side. “Do you like writing that stuff?”

  “Like?”

  “That life-as-it-is stuff you do. I’ve looked over your shoulder sometimes. I’ve even read a little here and there. Do you enjoy writing it?”

  The young man looked down at the bird. “It’s literature,” he explained, as if to a child. “Real literature. Real life. The real world. It’s an artist’s job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors.”

  Outside the room lightning clove the sky. The young man glanced out of the window: a jagged streak of blinding fire created warped and ominous silhouettes from the bony trees and the ruined abbey on the hill.

  The raven cleared its throat. “I said, do you enjoy it?”

  The young man looked at the bird, then he looked away and, wordlessly, he shook his head.

  “That’s why you keep trying to pull it apart,” said the bird. “It’s not the satirist in you that makes you lampoon the commonplace and the humdrum. Merely boredom with the way things are. D’you see?” It paused to preen a stray wing-feather back into place with its beak. Then it looked up at him once more. “Have you ever thought of writing fantasy?” it asked.

  The young man laughed. “Fantasy? Listen, I write literature. Fantasy isn’t life. Esoteric dreams, written by a minority for a minority, it’s—”

  “What you’d be writing if you knew what was good for you.”

  “I’m a classicist,” said the young man. He reached out his hand to a shelf of the classics—Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Monk, and the rest of them. “It’s literature.”

  “Nevermore,” said the raven. It was the last word the young man ever heard it speak. It hopped from the bust, spread its wings, and glided out of the study door into the waiting darkness.

  The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers…

  “It is escapism, true,” he said, aloud. “But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?”

  The young man returned to his desk, and he gathered together the pages of his unfinished novel and dropped them, unceremoniously, in the bottom drawer, amongst the yellowing maps and cryptic testaments and the documents signed in blood. The dust, disturbed, made him cough.

  He took up a fresh quill; sliced at its tip with his pen-knife. In five deft strokes and cuts he had a pen. He dipped the tip of it into the glass inkwell. Once more he began to write:

  VIII.

  Amelia Earnshawe placed the slices of wholewheat bread into the toaster and pushed it down. She set the timer to dark brown, just as George liked it. Amelia preferred her toast barely singed. She liked white bread as well, even if it didn’t have the vitamins. She hadn’t eaten white bread for a decade now.

  At the breakfast table, George read his paper. He did not look up. He never looked up.

  I hate him, she thought, and simply putting the emotion into words surprised her. She said it again in her head. I hate him. It was like a song. I hate him for his toast, and for his bald head, and for the way he chases the office crumpet—girls barely out of school who laugh at him behind his back, and for the way he ignores me whenever he doesn’t want to be bothered with me, and for the way he says “What, love?” when I ask him a simple question, as if he’s long ago forgotten my name. As if he’s forgotten that I even have a name.

  “Scrambled or boiled?” she said aloud.

  “What, love?”

  George Earnshawe regarded his wife with fond affection, and would have found her hatred of him astonishing. He thought of her in the same way, and with the same emotions, that he thought of anything which had been in the house for ten years and still worked well. The television, for example. Or the lawnmower. He thought it was love. “You know, we ought to go on one of those marches,” he said, tapping the newspaper’s editorial. “Show we’re committed. Eh, love?”

  The toaster made a noise to show that it was done. Only one dark brown slice had popped up. She took a knife and fished out the torn second slice with it. The toaster had been a wedding present from her uncle John. Soon she’d have to buy another, or start cooking toast under the grill, the way her mother had done.

  “George? Do you want your eggs scrambled or boiled?” she asked, very quietly, and there was something in her voice that made him look up.

  “Any way you like it, love,” he said amiably, and could not for the life of him, as he told everyone in the office later that morning, understand why she simply stood there holding her slice of toast or why she started to cry.

  IX.

  The quill pen went scritch scritch across the paper, and the young man was engrossed in what he was doing. His face was strangely content, and a smile flickered between his eyes and his lips.

  He was rapt.

  Things scratched and scuttled in the wainscot but he hardly heard them.

  High in her attic room Aunt Agatha howled and yowled and rattled her chains. A weird cachinnation came from the ruined abbey: it rent the night air, ascending into a peal of manic glee. In the dark woods beyond the great house, shapeless figures shuffled and loped, and raven-locked young women fled from them in fear.

  “Swear!” said Toombes the butler, down in the butler’s pantry, to the brave girl who was passing herself off as chambermaid. “Swear to me, Ethel, on your life, that you’ll never reveal a word of what I tell you to a living soul…”

  There were faces at the windows
and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world.

  THE FLINTS OF MEMORY LANE

  I like things to be story-shaped.

  Reality, however, is not story-shaped, and the eruptions of the odd into our lives are not story-shaped either. They do not end in entirely satisfactory ways. Recounting the strange is like telling one’s dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can color one’s entire day.

  There were places I believed to be haunted, as a child, abandoned houses and places that scared me. My solution was to avoid them: and so, while my sisters had wholly satisfactory tales of strange figures glimpsed in the windows of empty houses, I had none. I still don’t.

  This is my ghost story, and an unsatisfactory thing it is too.

  I was fifteen.

  We lived in a new house, built in the garden of our old house. I still missed the old house: it had been a big old manor house. We had lived in half of it. The people who lived in the other half had sold it to property developers, so my father sold our half-a-house to them as well.

  This was in Sussex, in a town that was crossed by the zero meridian: I lived in the Eastern Hemisphere, and went to school on the Western Hemisphere.

  The old house had been a treasure trove of strange things: lumps of glittering marble and glass bulbs filled with liquid mercury, doors that opened onto brick walls; mysterious toys; things old and things forgotten.

  My own house—a Victorian brick edifice, in the middle of America—is, I am told, haunted. There are few people who will spend the night here alone anymore—my assistant tells of her nights on her own here: of the porcelain jester music box that spontaneously began to play in the night, of her utter conviction that someone was watching her. Other people have complained of similar things, following nights alone.

  I have never had any unsettling experiences here, but then, I have never spent a night here alone. And I am not entirely sure that I would wish to.

  “There is no ghost when I am here,” I said once, when asked if my house was haunted. “Perhaps it is you who haunt it, then,” someone suggested, but truly I doubt it. If we have a ghost here, it is a fearful creature, more afraid of us than we are of it.

  But I was telling of our old house, which was sold and knocked down (and I could not bear to see it empty, could not stand to see it being torn apart and bulldozed: my heart was in that house, and even now, at night, before I sleep, I hear the wind sighing through the rowan tree outside my bedroom window, twenty-five years ago). So we moved into a new house, built, as I said, in the garden of the old one, and some years went by.

  Then, the house was halfway down a winding flint road, surrounded by fields and trees, in the middle of nowhere. Now, I am certain, were I to go back, I would find the flint road paved, the fields an endless housing estate. But I do not go back.

  I was fifteen, skinny and gawky and wanting desperately to be cool. It was night, in autumn.

  Outside our house was a lamppost, installed when the house was built, as out of place in the lampless countryside as the lamppost in the Narnia stories. It was a sodium light, which burned yellow, and washed out all other colors, turning everything yellow and black.

  She was not my girlfriend (my girlfriend lived in Croydon, where I went to school, a gray-eyed blonde of unimaginable beauty who was, as she often complained to me, puzzled, never able to figure out why she was going out with me), but she was a friend, and she lived about a ten-minute walk away from me, beyond the fields, in the older part of the town.

  I was going to walk over to her house, to play records, and sit, and talk.

  I walked out of our house, ran down the grass slope to the drive, and stopped, dead, in front of a woman, standing beneath the streetlamp, staring up at the house.

  She was dressed like a gypsy queen in a stage play, or a Moorish princess. She was handsome, not beautiful. She has no colors, in my memory, save only shades of yellow and black.

  And, startled to find myself standing opposite someone where I had expected no one, I said, “Hello.”

  The woman said nothing. She looked at me.

  “Are you looking for anyone?” I said, or something of the sort, and again she said nothing.

  And still she looked at me, this unlikely woman, in the middle of nowhere, dressed like something from a dream, and still she said nothing at all. She began to smile, though, and it was not a nice smile.

  And suddenly I found myself scared: utterly, profoundly scared, like a character in a dream, and I walked away, down the drive, heart thudding in my chest, and around the corner.

  I stood there, out of sight of the house, for a moment, and then I looked back, and there was no one standing in the lamplight.

  I was fifty paces from the house, but I could not, would not, turn around and go back. I was too scared. Instead I ran up the dark, tree-lined flint lane and into the old town, and up another road and down the road to my friend’s house, and got there speechless, breathless, jabbering and scared, as if all the hounds of hell had chased me there.

  I told her my story, and we phoned my parents, who told me there was no one standing under the streetlight, and agreed, a little reluctantly, to come and drive me home, as I would not walk home that night.

  And that is all there is to my story. I wish there was more: I wish I could tell you about the gypsy encampment that was burned down on that site two hundred years earlier—or anything that would give some sense of closure to the story, anything that would make it story-shaped—but there was no such encampment.

  So, like all eruptions of the odd and strange into my world, the event sits there, unexplained. It is not story-shaped.

  And, in memory, all I have is the yellow-black of her smile, and a shadow of the fear that followed.

  CLOSING TIME

  There are still clubs in London. Old ones, and mock-old, with elderly sofas and crackling fireplaces, newspapers, and traditions of speech or of silence, and new clubs, the Groucho and its many knockoffs, where actors and journalists go to be seen, to drink, to enjoy their glowering solitude, or even to talk. I have friends in both kinds of club, but am not myself a member of any club in London, not anymore.

  Years ago, half a lifetime, when I was a young journalist, I joined a club. It existed solely to take advantage of the licensing laws of the day, which forced all pubs to stop serving drinks at eleven PM, closing time. This club, the Diogenes, was a one-room affair located above a record shop in a narrow alley just off the Tottenham Court Road. It was owned by a cheerful, chubby, alcohol-fueled woman called Nora, who would tell anyone who asked and even if they didn’t that she’d called the club the Diogenes, darling, because she was still looking for an honest man. Up a narrow flight of steps, and, at Nora’s whim, the door to the club would be open, or not. It kept irregular hours.

  It was a place to go once the pubs closed, that was all it ever was, and despite Nora’s doomed attempts to serve food or even to send out a cheery monthly newsletter to all her club’s members reminding them that the club now served food, that was all it would ever be. I was saddened several years ago when I heard that Nora had died; and I was struck, to my surprise, with a real sense of desolation last month when, on a visit to England, walking down that alley, I tried to figure out where the Diogenes Club had been, and looked first in the wrong place, then saw the faded green cloth awnings shading the windows of a tapas restaurant above a mobile phone shop, and, painted on them, a stylized man in a barrel. It seemed almost indecent, and it set me remembering.

  There were no fireplaces in the Diogenes Club, and no armchairs either, but still, stories were told.

  Most of the people drinking there were men, although women passed through from time to time, and Nora had recently acquired a glamorous permanent fixture in the shape of a deputy, a blonde Polish
emigrée who called everybody “darlink” and who helped herself to drinks whenever she got behind the bar. When she was drunk, she would tell us that she was by rights a countess, back in Poland, and swear us all to secrecy.

  There were actors and writers, of course. Film editors, broadcasters, police inspectors, and drunks. People who did not keep fixed hours. People who stayed out too late or who did not want to go home. Some nights there might be a dozen people there, or more. Other nights I’d wander in and I’d be the only person around—on those occasions I’d buy myself a single drink, drink it down, and then leave.

  That night, it was raining, and there were four of us in the club after midnight.

  Nora and her deputy were sitting up at the bar, working on their sitcom. It was about a chubby-but-cheerful woman who owned a drinking club, and her scatty deputy, an aristocratic foreign blonde who made amusing English mistakes. It would be like Cheers, Nora used to tell people. She named the comical Jewish landlord after me. Sometimes they would ask me to read a script.

  There was an actor named Paul (commonly known as Paul-the-actor, to stop people confusing him with Paul-the-police-inspector or Paul-the-struck-off-plastic-surgeon, who were also regulars), a computer gaming magazine editor named Martyn, and me. We knew each other vaguely, and the three of us sat at a table by the window and watched the rain come down, misting and blurring the lights of the alley.

  There was another man there, older by far than any of the three of us. He was cadaverous and gray-haired and painfully thin, and he sat alone in the corner and nursed a single whiskey. The elbows of his tweed jacket were patched with brown leather, I remember that quite vividly. He did not talk to us, or read, or do anything. He just sat, looking out at the rain and the alley beneath, and, sometimes, he sipped his whiskey without any visible pleasure.

  It was almost midnight, and Paul and Martyn and I had started telling ghost stories. I had just finished telling them a sworn-true ghostly account from my school days: the tale of the Green Hand. It had been an article of faith at my prep school that there was a disembodied, luminous hand that was seen, from time to time, by unfortunate schoolboys. If you saw the Green Hand you would die soon after. Fortunately, none of us were ever unlucky enough to encounter it, but there were sad tales of boys from before our time, boys who saw the Green Hand and whose thirteen-year-old hair had turned white overnight. According to school legend they were taken to the sanatorium, where they would expire after a week or so without ever being able to utter another word.