9 Tales From Elsewhere 13 Read online

  ‘I said we should have booked,’ I said as Matt came back from the car park. ‘It’s packed.’

  He swore softly. ‘We might as well try; now we’re here. You never know, they might have a cancellation or something.’

  He took my arm and pushed open the door.

  As we stepped inside he turned to me quizzically. Apart from a table in the far corner where a young couple sat drinking Chianti, the place was empty.

  ‘I thought you said... Ah, you were winding me up. Trying to make me feel bad for not booking. Very funny.’

  I managed a smile, letting him believe his own explanation. It was certainly better than anything I could come up with. Though later, as I played it over and over in my mind, there was something unusual about the scene I’d witnessed through the restaurant window. I tried to recall details, the people I’d seen, what they were wearing. Most of the men were wearing suits and had short haircuts – old-fashioned haircuts, lots of brylcreem. And the women... well the women could have graced the pages of a 1940’s fashion magazine.

  It made no sense to me then, though later things became much clearer.

  We live in a house set back from the road, separated from the hard macadam by a walled garden. A man comes twice a week to keep it looking tidy, removing weeds, cutting the grass, and pruning the shrubs.

  It was a Monday morning. Matt had already left for work in town. I worked locally at a solicitor’s office, fifteen minutes away from home. I’d showered, applied a layer of make-up – heavy on the foundation to cover the tiny purple scars that remained from the accident – and made myself some toast. I was eating the toast in the bedroom and washing it down with sips of strong tea. I never usually looked out of the window at the front garden, but this morning the sun was high, summer was in the air and it felt good to be alive. I stood at the window staring down at the rose bushes, heavy with bud, ready to unleash their riot of red to add to the multi-coloured palette of the garden. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye.

  Two children appeared in the garden, a girl and a boy, no more than seven, skipping across the lawn, the boy using a stick to propel a large wooden hoop in front of him. He was dressed in something that looked like a sailor suit, a white peaked cap sitting on his head at a jaunty angle. The girl was wearing a flouncy pink dress, and her long fair hair was caught up at the back of her head and hung in ringlets down her back. I watched them curiously. They seemed wrong, out of place, out of time. The girl called something to the boy, and he glanced back at her, taking his eye from the hoop, batting it into a flowerbed. He took one step forward to follow it and disappeared. The girl called something else, ran forwards and vanished.

  It was a curious kind of disappearance. Not instant. One minute they were there, playing happily, and then they slowly eroded. It was gradual. They disappeared inches at a time, as if slipping slowly behind a curtain.

  I rushed downstairs and out through the front door, eyes darting everywhere, looking for the slightest sign of them. I dashed across to the flowerbed where the hoop had fallen, but there was nothing there, not even a bent flower to show where it had landed.

  ‘I think I’m seeing ghosts,’ I said to Matt. He was sitting in the lounge, his laptop on his knees, tapping away at the keyboard.

  He looked up at me. ‘Pardon?’ he said and stopped typing.

  ‘Ghosts,’ I said. ‘I’m seeing ghosts.’ I pulled a chair across and sat down facing him. ‘I know you’re probably going to think I’m mad, but it’s true.’

  He closed the lid of the laptop and put it down on the arm of the chair.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he said. His tone was even and his eyes gave nothing away.

  I told him everything, about Anne-Marie, about the restaurant, about the children in the garden. ‘I’ve thought long and hard about this,’ I said. ‘It’s the only explanation.’

  He took my hands in his, squeezing them tightly. ‘No, Chrissy, it’s one explanation – your explanation. But there are other possibilities.’

  ‘I’m not mad,’ I said.

  He smiled indulgently, like a parent would to a child, and I swear I wanted to slap the smile from his face there and then.

  ‘Have you called Mr Henderson, spoken to him about it?’

  ‘No, but...’

  ‘Well, don’t you think you should? Your eyes suffered a huge trauma. Don’t you think a more likely explanation is linked to the accident?’

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ I said flatly. ‘I didn’t think you would. That’s why I’ve said nothing before now.’

  He held on to my hands, his fingers making tiny circles on the skin of my wrists. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you. I certainly believe that you think you’ve seen these things, but ghosts, Chrissy. Come on; think about what you’re saying.’

  I tugged my hands away and stood up. ‘I’m not mad!’ I said again, almost shouting it this time. I took a breath. ‘I spoke to mum today. She said that the building where the restaurant is now took a direct hit from a German bomb towards the end of World War II. It was a restaurant then too, and full that night. Everyone was killed. And I’m sure if we looked into the history of this place we’d find there were two children living here that matched the description of the ones I saw.’

  ‘“I see dead people”,’ Matt said with heavy sarcasm. ‘I saw the film, Chris.’

  I glared at him. ‘Fuck off!’ I said and went to bed.

  I lay there, unable to sleep. What the hell was the matter with me? Matt and I never argued. In nearly ten years of marriage I could count the number of rows we’d had on the fingers of one hand. Yet I lay there in the bed, hating him for his lack of understanding, for making me feel...I wasn’t sure how I did feel.

  When he came to bed an hour later I pretended to be asleep. He undressed with accompanying sound effects as he always did. A sigh as he took off his shirt, a couple of grunts as he reached down and peeled of his socks. Familiar sounds of the man I loved. He climbed in beside me and wrapped an arm around me.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered in my ear.

  ‘S’all right,’ I mumbled.

  ‘It’s just... well, ghosts...’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll call Henderson in the morning. Make an appointment.’

  He kissed my neck and I rolled over to face him, letting his arms curl around me, needing his warmth, his protection. We fell asleep like that.

  I’ve mentioned the Dark Souls. My first experience of them came a few days later when I travelled up to London to keep my appointment with Mr Henderson at his Harley Street clinic.

  I’d always found Kings Cross station a depressing place. Commuters mingled with beggars looking for handouts, emaciated whores with cartoon make-up and scraped back hair looked for punters. The whole place had an air of seediness that no amount of fresh paint, fast food bars and bright, smiling railway staff could dispel.

  I got off the train on platform eight and started to walk the hundred yards or so to the entrance of the Underground.

  ‘Christine.’

  Someone hissed my name.

  I glanced back, startled. Over by the entrance to the gents’ toilets I saw a small group of, what I thought at first were, black dressed people. There were four, perhaps five of them, but it was impossible to be certain. Their images kept shifting and changing, like smoke caught in a breeze. They were cloudy, indistinct. I looked again and wasn’t even sure they were wearing black clothes. They were black in their entirety – their faces, their hands – and they seemed to keep moving within themselves, rippling and eddying. One peeled away from the group and started to follow me.

  I must have made a sound, a small cry as I quickened my pace, because several of my fellow commuters turned to look at me curiously. I didn’t look back again. Instead I lowered my head, walking quickly towards the Underground. The crowd of people in front of me parted suddenly, and there, directly ahead, was one of the black shapes, amorphous; a body in a state of
flux, moving swiftly towards me, skimming over the concrete platform, not touching the ground.

  I stopped dead as it hovered in front of me. I could make out two long black arms, a black sheathed torso, but the face was nothing more than a shifting black cloud, twisting and rolling as if trying to mould itself into something approaching human.

  I looked around at the other people walking with me, trying to judge from their reactions whether or not they could see it too. One woman pushing a small child in a buggy walked straight through it, oblivious. The black shape seemed to envelop the pushchair and the women, but then they were through, walking onwards as it nothing untoward had happened.

  A man in a business suit pushed past, tutting impatiently, glancing back at me with profound irritation, and he too walked through the black shape, but as he passed through he began to brush the front of his suit with his hand as if wiping away moisture or cobwebs, but then he too was gone, disappearing down the stairs towards the Underground.

  I stood there motionless as the black shape gradually became more solid, more human. I could discern a face now. There was a hooked nose, a thin, almost lipless mouth and piercing, glittering eyes. It was a face I recognised. I’d seen it when I’d read the newspaper reports of my accident. Gary Slater, the robber who’d crashed into my car and been crushed under his own on that narrow country lane a few weeks ago.

  He hovered in front of me, the thin mouth curling into a smile, an evil, knowing smile. And then the mouth opened and he spoke in a fierce, liquid whisper.

  ‘Join us,’ he said. ‘We’re waiting for you.’

  ‘No!’ I hissed.

  At that moment two young boys running along the platform barged into me, knocking me off balance. I lurched forward into the black shadow.

  It felt as if I’d stepped into a freezing shower. It was so cold it took my breath away. I could see only blackness and felt wave after wave of despair flooding through me, filling me up. Another step and I’d passed right through it. The chill ebbed away, leaving my skin tingling. I started to run.

  I reached the stairs to the Underground and barrelled down them, muttering apologies as I shouldered people out of the way. At the bottom I stopped and looked back, terrified that the thing was following me.

  There was no sign of it, just another group of passengers on their way down, some of them giving me curious looks as I stood at the bottom of the stairs, panting, trying to get my breath.

  ‘You all right, dear,’ an elderly lady said as she passed.

  I nodded. ‘Fine,’ I said.

  She looked unconvinced. ‘Rush hour’s murder these days,’ she said sympathetically, and hurried down to get her train.

  Mr Henderson peered into my eyes with an ophthalmoscope. ‘You’re healing nicely,’ he said. ‘Nothing to concern yourself about.’

  His consulting room was plush, furnished expensively, the floor covered with a thick-piled cream carpet. Sharing wall space with various diplomas and three different eye charts were a cluster of watercolour landscapes depicting the Cornish coast. They gave the room a feeling of calm, a safe and secure environment. Despite the restful ambience my hands were still trembling.

  ‘Why am I seeing things then?’ I said.

  He returned to his desk and sat back in his black leather chair. ‘You must remember, Christine, your eyes suffered a severe trauma...’

  ‘I’m seeing ghosts!’ I said, my voice rising to somewhere close to hysteria.

  He steepled his fingers in front of his lips and blew across them softly, his kind brown eyes regarding me steadily. ‘I’m going to give a course of drops,’ he said. ‘To speed the healing process.’ He pulled out a prescription pad from the desk drawer and started to write.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said I’m seeing ghosts.’

  He tore a leaf from the pad and slid it across to me. ‘What you’re describing isn’t that unusual in cases like this. The eye is a very delicate mechanism, and the optic nerve sometimes takes a long time to fully heal. I think what you’re experiencing is some kind of short circuit between the nerve and your brain. I’m sure it will pass in time.’

  ‘But I saw Slater, the man who was killed in the accident. The one who crashed into me. He was there at Kings bloody Cross station!’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you receiving counselling at the moment? Sometimes it helps when someone’s been through....’

  At that point I switched off. I saw his mouth working, but the words had degenerated into a low meaningless hum. He thinks I’m crazy, I thought.

  I stood up. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. Obviously I’m wasting your time.’ I walked to the door and through to the outer office, closing it quietly behind me.

  I hurried down the stairs to the street and only when I’d covered half the distance to the station did I remember the prescription still lying on Henderson’s desk. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need more medication. I’d come looking for answers, not a panacea.

  Matt was still at work when I got home. I drifted around the house in a kind of daze, looking at familiar objects, moving from room to room, reminding myself of the ordinary, safe life I’d enjoyed here. Now that life had been shattered. Nothing was ordinary any more, nothing was safe.

  A phone call at seven o’clock woke me from a fitful sleep. I’d been dozing on the couch in the lounge. As I got up to answer the persistent ringing I kicked the empty wine bottle over, sending it skimming across the polished boards. My head was still swimming with the effects of the alcohol and I tried hard not to slur my words. ‘Yes?’ I said into the phone.

  There was a steady crackle of static on the other end of the line. Underneath the static I could just make out a voice, but it was faint and I strained to catch the words.

  ‘...join us, Christine.... join us...waiting…’

  I slammed down the handset and wrapped my arms around myself, trying to fight off the chill that was seeping into my skin.

  The phone rang again. I unplugged it and went back to the lounge, turning on the television and pressing the volume control on the handset until it was almost too loud to bear.

  Where was Matt? He should have been home an hour ago. I took my mobile from my bag and rang his office. There was no reply. I rang his mobile. It was switched off.

  From the front bedroom window I had a clear view along the road. I would be able to see his car when it turned in off the high street. I was starting to feel panicky. The rational part of my mind told me that Matt was fine, that he was stuck in traffic, or something equally mundane. But a small voice whispered in the shadowed recesses of my brain, hinting at darker explanations.

  When I saw a black shape rolling down the road I almost cried out. I backed away from the window, drawing in deep breaths to steady myself. When I looked out again I nearly laughed. The black shape was nothing more that a plastic rubbish sack, twisting and turning down the centre of the road as the wind caught it and made it dance. Seconds later Matt’s silver BMW turned the corner at the end of the road.

  I went downstairs and opened the front door, looking out anxiously onto the street. Matt pulled onto the drive, waved at me, switched off the engine and reached into the back of the car to retrieve his brief case. He was dressed as if he’d just come from the gym. Squash, of course! He was playing squash with Alex Hammond tonight. That was why he was late. I ran out to the car, a smile on my lips, relief flooding through me. And then I froze.

  Three shadowed shapes were sharing the car with him – two in the back, one in the front – the one I recognised as Gary Slater, his dark, saturnine face grinning blackly.

  I ran to the car and yanked the door open.

  Matt turned to me. ‘Chrissie? What the...’

  ‘Get out of the car!’ I screamed at him. ‘Get out, now!’

  Abruptly the car door slammed again, the lock clicking down, and the black shapes, the Dark Souls, flooded over him.

  I hammered on the windows, I pulled at the door handle, but there was
nothing I could do. Matt had his hands to his throat, his face turning a deep shade of red as he struggled for breath.

  Gradually his eyes closed and he stopped struggling, and I knew he was dead. I sank to my knees, fat tears pouring down my face. I hugged myself, rocking backwards and forwards.

  A neighbour found me like that twenty minutes later. He glanced into the car, led me back into the house and rang for an ambulance.

  ‘Only thirty-three. It’s no age.’

  ‘A stroke you say? Well, I always said he worked too hard.’

  ‘I blame the squash. I aways said he was carrying to much weight to play on such a regular basis.’

  And so on, ad nauseum. Snippets of overhead conversations. I tried to block it all from my mind, tried to keep my dignity – the grieving widow, bereaved at thirty. But all the while I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell them the truth; tell them what had really happened to Matt. But there was no point. No one would listen, and if they had listened then they wouldn’t have taken me seriously. I would be seen as the hysterical widow, unable to face up to the reality of her loss.

  I looked around at the sombre faces as they stared into the grave. Matt’s parents, clinging to each other, trying to be brave and failing dismally. Matt’s work colleagues, ashen, wondering if they were heading for the same kind of executive burn out. Friends, dabbing away tears as they remembered happier times.

  I just wanted them to go. I wanted solitude, to be alone with my memories. Losing Matt was like having part of me removed. I felt incomplete; shattered, like a broken china doll. There was nothing I or anyone else could do to bring him back. He was gone and I was just going to have to get used to it.

  I looked from the faces to the boundary wall of the cemetery. They were there, the Dark Souls, clustered in groups, twenty, thirty of them, drifting in and out of focus, waiting.

  Eventually the funeral ended and we went back to Matt’s parents house. They’d done food – ham rolls, cold meats, cheese, french bread – like a party. I couldn’t eat. I moved around the periphery of the mourners, much like a ghost myself. Occasionally someone would speak to me, but mostly they smiled sincere, sympathetic smiles, and gripped my arm, or my hand reassuringly.