The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

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 . . .”