The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

I tried to explain all this to Jane. Evidently I got it across all right, because she said straight away, We’d better stay here tonight, then. If we can, I said, meaning if there was a room. Well, there was, and at the front of the house too, which was important, because in the book that’s the side the monster appears on.

While one of the blokes was taking our stuff out of the car and upstairs, I said to Jane, I’m not going to be like a bloody fool in a ghost story who insists on seeing things through alone, not if I can help it – I’m going to give Bob Conquest a ring. Bob’s an old chum of mine, and about the only one I felt I could ask to come belting up all this way (he lives in Battersea) for such a ridiculous reason. It was just after ten by this time, and the Green Man wasn’t scheduled to put in an appearance till after one a.m., so Bob could make it all right if he started straight away. Fine, except his phone didn’t answer; I tried twice.

Jane said, Get hold of Monkey; I’ll speak to him. Monkey, otherwise known as Colin, is her brother; he lives with us in Barnet. Our number answered all right, but I got my son Philip, who was staying the weekend there. He said Monkey was out at a party, he didn’t know where. So all I could do was the necessary but not at all helpful job of saying we wouldn’t be home till the next morning. So that was that. I mean, I just couldn’t start getting hold of George Palmer and asking him to sit up with us into the small hours in case a ghost came along. Could any of you? I should have said that Philip hasn’t got a car.

Well, we stayed in the bar until it closed. I said to Jane at one point, You don’t think I’m mad, do you? Or silly or anything? She said, On the contrary, I think you’re being extremely practical and sensible. Well, thank God for that. Jane believes in ghosts, you see. My own position on that is exactly that of the man who said, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.

Which brings me to one of the oddest things about this whole business. I’m a nervous type by nature, I never go in an aeroplane, I won’t drive a car (Jane does the driving), I don’t even much care for being alone in the house. But, ever since we’d decided to stay the night at this place, all the uneasiness and, let’s face it, the considerable fear I’d started to feel as soon as these coincidences started coming up, it all just fell away. I felt quite confident, I felt I knew I’d be able to do whatever might be required of me.

There was one other thing to get settled. I said to Jane, we were in the bedroom by this time, I said, If he turns up, what am I going to use against him? You see, in the book, Maurice Allington has dug up a sort of magic object that sort of controls the Green Man. I hadn’t. Jane saw what I was driving at. She said she’d thought of that, and took off and gave me the plain gold cross she wears round her neck, not for religious reasons, it was her grandmother’s. That’ll fix him, I thought, and as before I felt quite confident about it.

Well, after that we more or less sat and waited. At one point a car drove up and stopped in the car park. A man got out and went in the front door. It must have been Allington. I couldn’t see much about him except he had the wrong colour hair, but when I looked at my watch it was eight minutes to midnight, the exact time when the Allington in the book got back after his evening out the night he coped with the creature. One more bit of . . . call it confirmation.

I opened our bedroom door and listened. Soon I heard footsteps coming upstairs and going off towards the back of the house and then a door shutting, and then straight away the house seemed totally still. It can’t have been much later that I said to Jane, Look, there’s no point in me hanging round up here. He might be early, you never know. It’s a warm night, I might as well go down there now. She said, Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? Absolutely sure, I said, I’ll be fine. But I do want you to watch from the window here. Okay, she said. She wished me luck and we clung to each other for a bit, and then off I went.

I was glad I’d left plenty of time, because getting out of the place turned out to be far from straightforward. Everything seemed to be locked and the key taken away. Eventually I found a scullery door with the key still in the lock.

Outside it was quite bright, with a full moon or not far off, and a couple of fairly powerful lights at the corners of the house. It was a pretty lonely spot, with only two or three other houses in sight. I remember a car went by soon after I got out there, but it was the only one. There wasn’t a breath of wind. I saw Jane at our window and waved, and she waved back.