The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Was Mrs Allington blonde? There wasn’t a Mrs Allington any more; she’d died of leukemia quite a long time ago. Had he got his widowed father living here? (Arlington’s father, that is.) No, Mr Allington senior, and his wife, lived in Eastbourne. Was the house, the pub, haunted at all? Not as far as Palmer knew, and he’d been there three years. In fact, the place was only about two hundred years old, which completely clobbered a good half of my novel, where the ghosts had been hard at it more than a hundred years earlier still.

Nearly all of it was like that. Of course, there were some questions I couldn’t ask, for one reason or another. For instance, was Allington a boozer, like my Allington, and even more so, had this Allington had a visit from God. In the book, God turns up in the form of a young man to give Allington some tips on how to deal with the ghosts, who he, God, thinks are a menace to him. No point in going any further into that part.

I said nearly all the answers Palmer gave me were straight negatives. One wasn’t, or rather there were two points where I scored, so to speak. One was that Arlington had a fifteen-year-old daughter called Marilyn living in the house. My Allington’s daughter was thirteen and called Amy, but I’d come somewhere near the mark – too near for comfort.

The other thing was a bit harder to tie down. When I’m writing a novel, I very rarely have any sort of mental picture of any of the characters, what they actually look like. I think a lot of novelists would say the same. But, I don’t know why, I’d had a very clear image of what my chap David Palmer looked like, and now I’d had a really good look at George Palmer, this one here, he was nearly the same as I’d imagined, not so tall, different nose, but still nearly the same. I didn’t care for that.

Palmer, George Palmer, said he had things to see to and took off. I told Jane what I’ve just told you, about the resemblance. She said I could easily have imagined that, and I said I suppose I might. Anyway, she said, what do you think of it all?

I said it could still all be coincidence. What could it be if it isn’t coincidence? she asked. I’d been wondering about that while we were talking to Palmer. Not an easy one. Feeling a complete bloody fool, I said I thought we could have strayed into some kind of parallel world that slightly resembles the world I made up, you know, like in a science-fiction story.

She didn’t laugh or back away. She looked round and spotted a newspaper someone had left on one of the chairs. It was that day’s Sunday Telegraph. She said, if where we are is a world that’s parallel to the real world, it’s bound to be different from the real world in all sorts of ways. Now you read most of the Telegraph this morning, the real Telegraph. Look at this one, she said, and see if it’s any different. Well, I did, and it wasn’t: same front page, same article on the trade unions by Perry, that’s Peregrine Worsthorne, same readers’ letters, same crossword down to the last clue. Well, that was a relief.

But I didn’t stay relieved, because there was another coincidence shaping up. It was a hot night in August when all this happened – or did I mention that before? Anyway, it was. And Allington was out for the evening. It was on a hot night in August, after Allington had come back from an evening out, that the monster, the Green Man, finally takes shape and comes pounding up the road to tear young Amy Allington to pieces. That bit begins on page 225 in my book, if you’re interested.

The other nasty little consideration was this. Unlike some novelists I could name, I invent all my characters, except for a few minor ones here and there. What I mean is, I don’t go in for just renaming people I know and bunging them into a book. But of course, you can’t help putting something of yourself into all your characters, even if it’s only, well, a surly bus-conductor who only comes in for half a page.

Right, obviously, this comes up most of all with your heroes. Now none of my heroes, not even old Lucky Jim, are me, but they can’t help having pretty fair chunks of me in them, some more than others. And Allington in that book was one of the some. I’m more like him than I’m like most of the others; in particular, I’m more like my Maurice Allington in my book than the real Allington, who by the way turned out to be called John, seemed (from what I’d heard) to be like my Maurice Allington. Sorry to be long-winded, but I want to get that quite clear.

So: if, by some fantastic chance, the Green Man, the monster, was going to turn up here, he, or it, seemed more likely to turn up tonight than most nights. And, furthermore, I seemed sort of better cast for the part of the young girl’s father, who manages in the book to save her from the monster, than this young girl’s father did. You see that.