The Ghost Writer

FOLLOWING THE QUIVERING PATCH OF LIGHT THROUGH THE darkness to the front door, with a hundred malignant eyes playing up and down my spine, was almost as terrifying as listening to the voice in the dark. I walked all the way down through Camden to the hotel and arrived at three in the morning, smelling like an incontinent drunk but cold, shivering sober. Even the headache had gone. I showered and made tea and stood at the window, staring down at the yellow vapour lights ranged along the bleak expanse of Euston Road.

I had been awake when I heard the voice. No point pretending otherwise. And no one could have got into the house; not even, to be totally paranoid for a moment, Alice. She didn't have keys, and I hadn't told her about the black thread.

Either my mind was coming apart, or I'd been listening to a real ghost. Though when you thought about it, there wasn't much difference. The voice was part of me; it had said so; it knew everything about me. It knew about Alice; it knew about Filly. It was the embodiment-the disembodiment-of all my worst fears, an escaped nightmare, loose in the house.

You don't know what you might meet. The veiled woman on the gallery. I'd been awake then too.

When we first began writing, Alice had often said that her parents were watching over her, that they appeared to her in dreams, not just as memories but as actual beings. Every emotion, she thought, left some trace in the material world. Ghosts appeared wherever those traces were concentrated, but only certain people could perceive them, and only when they were alone and quiet.

Ghosts or hallucinations-did it make any difference what you called them? The whispering had certainly started in my head. It had been lurking there most of my life; ever since that hot January afternoon in Mawson when I first saw the photograph and Mother stopped talking about Staplefield. And now it had got out of my head and on to the gallery, and I had nearly died of terror, and there was absolutely no limit to what might happen, or what I might meet, if I went back to Ferrier's Close alone.

A police car went tearing west, no siren, red and blue lights flashing wildly.

So far the-manifestations-had been confined to the house, but if something truly monstrous appeared, how did I know it wouldn't cross the threshold? Or walk into this hotel room and send me running head-first through the window rather than meet it face to face?

And supposing Alice came with me to the house, would she hear what I heard, see what I saw? I might believe I was trying to save her from some nightmare creature when I was actually strangling her. All of my doubts and suspicions about Alice might be symptoms of incipient madness.

I remembered the story of the iron bedstead sailing across the empty dormitory, the appalling crash when it hit the wall. The image was still as vivid as if I'd been there myself. If a roomful of troubled adolescents could generate that much psychic energy, why couldn't one very troubled thirty-five-year-old man cause a planchette to move by itself: when he was somewhere else in the house, perhaps, upstairs in another room? I liked that even less than the idea of whispering voices escaping from my head.

How could I be sure Alice would ever be safe with me?

Filly killed us all, one by one. Hugh too. Filly killed Hugh too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet. Or had it said 'you too'?

The dead know everything. No: these were my own worst fears running wild, not the words of an omniscient ghost, and to prove it, maybe even to save my sanity, I would have to prove the voice wrong. Search the deaths in Family Records this morning for Hugh Montfort-as well as the searches I'd already planned for him. Renew my reader's ticket and search The Times on microfilm in the new British Library for any mention of Anne Hatherley or Hugh Montfort. Find out where lists of missing persons were kept. No more speculation.

Another police car hurtled past, heading towards King's Cross.

The police had searched the house; Miss Hamish had said so. I knew her letter almost by heart, but I got it out anyway, to check her exact wording. 'They found nothing amiss, and concluded that Anne had simply packed her things, locked up the house and left.'

I wondered if they had opened the padlocked door in the basement.

I stayed up until well after dawn writing to Alice, telling her as dispassionately as I could manage everything that had happened since my last message, and what I feared might be happening to my mind. Meeting at the house, I said at the end, would be a very bad idea; I would go anywhere she chose, but not Ferrier's Close. I lay down on the bed, not expecting to sleep until the alarm dragged me out of a black, dreamless void.

PASSING CORAM'S FIELDS PLAYGROUND, BREATHING DIESEL and cut grass and the dusty farmyard smell of the miniature zoo, I found myself wondering whether Alice would want to have children now that she was healed. Neither of us had ever raised the question. I felt certain I didn't, and probably shouldn't, but supposing she did… what would we tell them? 'Your grandmother? Oh, she murdered her sister; the police never caught her.' No: I would lie to them, as my mother had lied to me.

In fact the best thing I could do for everyone involved-for the living, at least-would be to walk down Doughty Street, which I was now approaching, to Gray's Inn and along to Bedford Row, and return the keys to Mr Grierstone's secretary. Because I still didn't know, for certain, that my mother had murdered Anne. And so long as I didn't discover anything more, I need never know. Already I could almost believe that the whispering had been a drunken nightmare. 'Miss Jessel' would fade from the sheet of butcher's paper on the library table. Tell Miss Hamish I had searched the house thoroughly and found nothing at all.

Only I would have to go back once more because Anne's diary was still on the library table. Along with the planchette and the messages and half a bottle of Braveheart. And a bit of a mess on the chesterfield.

I could whisk the butcher's paper off the table and crumple it without looking. Clean up, lock up, restore Anne's diary to its hiding-place, and take the keys straight back to the office. The shutters were open; the ghost would not walk in daylight. I hailed a cab, changed my mind as it pulled up, and told the driver to take me to the Family Records Centre instead. First set my mind at rest about Hugh Montfort. I realised, as we hurtled along Calthorpe Street, that I didn't know his middle name, and that it would have been better to start by searching The Times in the British Library for an engagement notice, but then if I didn't find one I'd have to come back here anyway. Besides, it wasn't a common name; and anyway why was I doing this search at all? At four in the morning it had seemed overwhelmingly urgent to prove the whispering voice wrong. Now it just seemed mad.

The doors were opening as I came up the front steps. A small eager crowd surged in ahead of me and dispersed among the registers, leaving me alone with Deaths 1945 to 1955. All I wanted was not to find anything.

Nothing for the second half of 1949. Or the first, second or third quarters of 1950. But in the register of deaths for Oct.-Dec. 1950, I found my own name.

Montfort, Gerard Hugh Infant District of Westminster

Filly killed us all, one by one. You too. She killed you too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet.

I filled out the form for Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, with the sensation of ordering my own death certificate. By express, ?24 for a guaranteed twenty-four-hour turn-around; they might have it by late afternoon. Then I went over to Births, where I found him in the second quarter of 1950, also District of Westminster.

There was no entry in Marriages for either Phyllis May Hatherley or a Hugh Montfort. No Hugh Montfort in Deaths either; I searched both registers all the way through to the end of 1963, the year my mother married Graham John Freeman in Mawson.

Under her maiden name, it struck me as I was leaving the registry, prompting a sudden crystal-clear memory of my mothers drawn, anxious smile, already middle-aged in the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece in Mawson. And then of the picture I had found in the study, my amazingly youthful mother with an infant on her knee. Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant. Deceased.

From an internet cafe I wrote to Alice, telling her what I had just discovered, in the spirit of a castaway consigning a message to a bottle.

I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY IN HUMANITIES READING Room Two in the British Library searching