The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

laugh at.

From the age of ten Chloe had been a striking beauty who only seemed to become more and more beautiful with every passing year. But then she made the fateful choice of getting into the car when her husband told her to, even though she knew he was drunk, even though she knew that she shouldn’t. But she was an obedient wife and she always did as she was told. And after that, for the first time in her life, Chloe felt what it was like to be something less than startlingly stunning. She felt what it was like barely even to be beautiful at all. She felt the cold hard bite of self-conscious inferiority and inadequacy when she saw another woman in the room who was clearly more attractive than she was. And the realization hit her hard and hit her fast: her delicate, lovely beauty was gone. It was gone and it was never coming back. Her career was over, too – she would never model again.

She soon realized that her husband was no longer attracted to her. He recoiled at the thought of touching that ruined flesh. It was only a matter of time before he sought out a replacement. The divorce had been finalized for over a year now and yet, still, all Chloe could do was brood and agonize over how much time she had wasted. And in doing so she only wasted more. Her life had always seemed such a full one back in London but her husband had been the one underpinning it all. The places that she went, the things that she did – sometimes even the clothes that she wore and the words that she said – were all formed by him. Like she was his doll. His dancing puppet on invisible strings. Even her friends were his friends. His friends first, and hers second. How could she continue to move in those circles when he might be there with her? With that new one. The younger model. The unruined one. The teenager who looked almost as pretty as Chloe had been before the accident.

So, finally, she made a decision – an actual decision that she took for herself and by herself, for the first time in her life. She would leave London. Money was not a problem. Aside from all the earnings she had saved back when her supermodel career was still going strong, she had received a handsome settlement in the divorce. Her ex- husband had made no attempt to deny or to hide his infidelity. He did not want a disfigured wife, and he was quite willing to pay through the nose to be rid of her. Chloe could live wherever she liked.

But what did she like? She had grown so used to thinking and saying that she liked something just because she knew it was what he liked. She had lived with him from the age of seventeen, and been married to him from the age of eighteen. She had been a weak-willed girl – impressionable and eager to please and afraid to disappoint. So she had moulded herself to him as well as she was able, and now she was no longer sure how much of herself was really her, and how much of it was him. Now that it was her choice – and only hers – where did she want to live? Not a modern, brand new loft apartment like she had shared with him, she knew that. But then where?

It had taken her a long time but she had finally found the place. As soon as she saw the photos on her computer screen, she knew it was the one. A red-brick Georgian house that had been standing empty for almost two years since the owner had moved abroad. No doubt the prohibitive cost had put people off but Chloe had to have something to spend her money on. She liked the thought of all those elegant, airy, empty rooms, waiting to be filled with her choice of decor and her taste in furnishings. While the purchase had been going through, Chloe had scoured Christie’s and Sotheby’s looking for appropriate period furniture by Hepplewhite or Chippendale – all via their websites, of course; she never left the house now if she could help it because she didn’t want people staring at her ruined face.

But she enjoyed acquiring the furniture. Here, at last, was something to do with her time, to take an interest in, and to work towards. The house was a promise – her promise to herself – of a new beginning and a new Chloe and a new attempt actually to live instead of allowing other people to live for her. Or, at least, that was the promise she made to herself in a rare burst of optimism on one of her good days – before she sank back down into bitterness and self-loathing and that brooding hatred towards him that she derived a perverse sort of pleasure out of fostering and nurturing. A pointless sort of promise made with the best of intentions but which Chloe would never be able to keep. Even if her life depended on it.

She arrived at Arietta House on a cold, drizzly morning in mid-February. As she drove down the drive, the elegant, redbrick facade slowly materialized out of the mist that drifted in shredded ribbons about the house’s square, symmetrical lines and tiled, sloping roof, almost hiding the paired chimneys from view. The sash windows with their small eight-by-eight panes were neatly lined up in rows across the front of the house, dark and cold and unwelcoming. She parked and got out of the car. The slam of the door closing seemed to echo strangely in the silence as she stared up at the empty house. Her house. A big place for a small person to hide away from the world.

Her boots crunched on the gravel as she walked up to the front door, complete with canopy and pediment and a filigree fanlight above it depicting a single ballerina dressed all in white against a dark green background of trees. Chloe took the key from her pocket, unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The house was empty and quite silent, and smelled of dust and damp and cold. She put her bag down and walked slowly from room to room. The house still had its original floors, and the wooden boards creaked beneath Chloe’s weight in a way that she liked. As well as a bathroom and kitchen, there were three living rooms on the ground floor. They were all currently empty but Chloe paused to admire the walls, panelled to dado height, with chipped painted plaster above. She also admired the ceilings, intricately adorned with mouldings of ribbons and swags, ballerinas and trees. In fact, the ballerina was a common motif within the house. Chloe remembered reading something about a famous ballerina who had lived here once.

Fireplaces dominated each room, flanked with pillars, and elegant with cast-iron backs and decorated fronts. These, too, were adorned with the ballerina motif, along with swans and forests and lakes and stars. After touring the downstairs rooms, Chloe climbed the original wooden staircase to the second floor where she inspected the bathroom and the four bedrooms – three of which she would have no need of whatsoever. She lingered a while in the largest one and looked out of the window at the grounds below, still shrouded in mist, the sky grey with the promise of more rain. The lawn swept away towards a line of trees, broken only by a small lake filled with murky water and the remains of a disused stone fountain.

Chloe turned away from the view and went back downstairs. She had noticed brass bell pushes fixed to the walls in most of the rooms and, here in the kitchen, high upon the wall, was the bell board – used back in the days when the house still had servants so that they would know which room required attention.

The old teak cabinet contained ten windows in two rows upon a black glazed panel with red-and-white striped flags. The top windows were labelled: Front Door, Back Door, Dining Room, Breakfast Room, Parlour. In the second row the windows were labelled Bedrooms One, Two, Three, Four and Five – which was odd since the house only had four bedrooms. Chloe assumed it must have been a standard board and that they had simply never set up the bell for the non-existent fifth bedroom.

While she stood staring up at the board, a bell suddenly sounded – a harsh, shrill sound that echoed through the empty rooms and made her jump. The flag for the front door moved back and forth within the cabinet, indicating that was the bell that had been rung. She went to answer it and found that the removal men had arrived right on schedule.

Chloe spent the rest of that day overseeing her old possessions and new furniture being brought into the house. By the time the oriental rugs had been laid upon the wooden floorboards, and the wing chairs had been placed before the fireplaces, and the kettle had been plugged into a socket in the kitchen, the house was starting to have a more homely feel about it.

Finally all of Chloe’s things were inside the house, and all the furniture was right where it ought to be. It had been a wearying task and she decided to unpack the remaining boxes the next day. It was later than she’d realized – the light had already drained from the sky outside, and darkness pressed in softly against the windows as if the house had been wrapped up in black velvet. Chloe cooked herself dinner for one and ate alone at the kitchen table.

Shortly after nine o’ clock, a bell rang somewhere within the house.

Chloe had just finished her meal and laid down her knife and fork when the shrill ringing caught her unawares and made her jump. She looked up at the bell board in surprise, thinking that one of the removal men must have forgotten something and must now be at the front door. But it was not the front-door flag that was moving behind the glass. It wasn’t the flag for the back door either. It was for bedroom five.

Even as Chloe looked, the bell rang again and the red-and-white striped flag waved back and forth even more rapidly in the little window. Chloe sat and watched the flag for a full minute, until it was quite as still as the others once again. Then she slowly stood up from her chair, picked up a rolling pin just in case, and searched the house