The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

down the rain.

Suddenly the lightning forked again, and standing there, alive yet immobile, was the woman by the turnstile. She stared up at the windows of the house, and Deborah recognized her. The turnstile was there, inviting entry, and already the phantom figures, passing through it, crowded towards the trees beyond the lawn. The secret world was waiting. Through the long day, while the storm was brewing, it had hovered there unseen beyond her reach, but now that night had come, and the thunder with it, the barriers were down. Another crack, mighty in its summons, the turnstile yawned, and the woman with her hand upon it smiled and beckoned.

Deborah ran out of the room and down the stairs. Somewhere somebody called – Roger, perhaps, it did not matter – and Patch was barking; but caring nothing for concealment she went through the dark drawing-room and opened the French window on to the terrace. The lightning searched the terrace and lit the paving, and Deborah ran down the steps on to the lawn where the turnstile gleamed.

Haste was imperative. If she did not run the turnstile might be closed, the woman vanish, and all the wonder of the sacred world be taken from her. She was in time. The woman was still waiting. She held out her hand for tickets, but Deborah shook her head. “I have none.” The woman, laughing, brushed her through into the secret world where there were no laws, no rules, and all the faceless phantoms ran before her to the woods, blown by the rising wind. Then the rain came. The sky, deep brown as the lightning pierced it, opened, and the water hissed to the ground, rebounding from the earth in bubbles. There was no order now in the alley-way. The ferns had turned to trees, the trees to Titans. All moved in ecstasy, with sweeping limbs, but the rhythm was broken up, tumultuous, so that some of them were bent backwards, torn by the sky, and others dashed their heads to the undergrowth where they were caught and beaten.

In the world behind, laughed Deborah as she ran, this would be punishment, but here in the secret world it was a tribute. The phantoms who ran beside her were like waves. They were linked one with another, and they were, each one of them, and Deborah too, part of the night force that made the sobbing and the laughter. The lightning forked where they willed it, and the thunder cracked as they looked upwards to the sky.

The pool had come alive. The water-lilies had turned to hands, with palms upraised, and in the far corner, usually so still under the green scum, bubbles sucked at the surface, steaming and multiplying as the torrents fell. Everyone crowded to the pool. The phantoms bowed and crouched by the water’s edge, and now the woman had set up her turnstile in the middle of the pool, beckoning them once more. Some remnant of a sense of social order rose in Deborah and protested.

“But we’ve already paid,” she shouted, and remembered a second later that she had passed through free. Must there be duplication? Was the secret world a rainbow, always repeating itself, alighting on another hill when you believed yourself beneath it? No time to think. The phantoms had gone through. The lightning, streaky white, lit the old dead monster tree with his crown of ivy, and because he had no spring now in his joints he could not sway in tribute with the trees and ferns, but had to remain there, rigid, like a crucifix.

“And now . . . and now . . . and now . . .” called Deborah.

The triumph was that she was not afraid, was filled with such wild acceptance . . . She ran into the pool. Her living feet felt the mud and the broken sticks and all the tangle of old weeds, and the water was up to her armpits and her chin. The lilies held her. The rain blinded her. The woman and the turnstile were no more.

“Take me too,” cried the child. “Don’t leave me behind!” In her heart was a savage disenchantment. They had broken their promise, they had left her in the world. The pool that claimed her now was not the pool of secrecy, but dank, dark brackish water choked with scum.

4

“Grandpapa says he’s going to have it fenced round,” said Roger. “It should have been done years ago. A proper fence, then nothing can ever happen. But barrow-loads of shingle tipped in it first. Then it won’t be a pool, but just a dewpond. Dewponds aren’t dangerous.”

He was looking at her over the edge of her bed. He had risen in status, being the only one of them downstairs, the bearer of tidings good or ill, the go-between. Deborah had been ordered two days in bed.

“I should think by Wednesday,” he went on, “you’d be able to play cricket. It’s not as if you’re hurt. People who walk in their sleep are just a bit potty.”

“I did not walk in my sleep,” said Deborah.

“Grandpapa said you must have done,” said Roger. “It was a good thing that Patch woke him up and he saw you going across the lawn . . .” Then, to show his release from tension, he stood on his hands.

Deborah could see the sky from her bed. It was flat and dull. The day was a summer day that had worked through storm. Agnes came into the room with junket on a tray. She looked important.

“Now run off,” she said to Roger. “Deborah doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s supposed to rest.”

Surprisingly, Roger obeyed, and Agnes placed the junket on the table beside the bed. “You don’t feel hungry, I expect,” she said. “Never mind, you can eat this later, when you fancy it. Have you got a pain? It’s usual, the first time.”

“No,” said Deborah.

What had happened to her was personal. They had prepared her for it at school, but nevertheless it was a shock, not to be discussed with Agnes. The woman hovered a moment, in case the child asked questions; but, seeing that none came, she turned and left the room.

Deborah, her cheek on her hand, stared at the empty sky. The heaviness of knowledge lay upon her, a strange, deep sorrow.

“It won’t come back,” she thought. “I’ve lost the key.”

The hidden world, like ripples on the pool so soon to be filled in and fenced, was out of her reach for ever.

A Spot of Gothic

Jane Gardam

Location:  Low Thwaite, North Yorkshire.

Time:  Autumn, 1980.

Eyewitness Description:  “It was just after what appeared to be the loneliest part of the road that I took a corner rather faster than I should and saw the woman standing in her garden and waving at me with a slow decorous arm, a queenly arm. You could see from the moonlight that her head was piled up high with queenly hair . . .”

Author:  Jane Gardam (1928—) was born Jean Mary Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire, read English at Bedford College and worked for a travelling library before serving in editorial positions on the Weldon Ladies Journal and the literary weekly, Time and Tide. Her early fiction consisted of short stories which won several literary prizes before her first adult novel, God on the Rocks (1978), a coming-of-age story set in the thirties, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Prix Baudelaire in France and was adapted for television in 1992. Her interest in the supernatural has been evident in several of her subsequent collections of short stories, in particular Going into a Dark House (1994) and Missing the Midnight: Hauntings and Grotesques (1997) and her novel, The Queen of the Tambourine (1991), the haunting story of a woman’s fascination with a mysterious stranger, that won the Whitbread Novel Award. “A Spot of Gothic” is, in essence, a tribute to all those who have written gothic fiction, and describes the eerie encounter of a “ghost feeler”, Mrs Bainbridge, in a remote corner of the country, that is so contemporary it could have happened last night . . . or might just happen this evening.

I was whizzing along the road out of Wensleydale through Low Thwaite beyond Naresby when I suddenly saw a woman at her cottage gate, waving at me gently like an old friend. In a lonely dale this is not very surprising, as I had found out. Several times I have met someone at a lane end flapping a letter that has missed the post in Kirby Thore or Hawes. “It’s me sister’s birthday tomorrow. I near forgot” or “It’s the bill fort telephone. We’ll be cut off next thing.” The curious thing about this figure, so still and watchful, was that it was standing there waving to me