The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

The question was, where to wait. If what was going to happen – assuming something was – if it went like the book, then the young girl, the daughter, was going to come out of the house because she’d thought she’d heard her father calling her (another bit of magic), and then this Green Man creature was going to, from one direction or the other he was going to come running at her. I couldn’t decide which was the more likely direction.

A bit of luck, near the front door there was one of those heavy wooden benches. I sat down on that and started keeping watch first one way, then the other, half a minute at a time. Normally, ten minutes of this would have driven me off my head with boredom, but that night somehow it was all right. Then, after some quite long time, I turned my head from right to left on schedule and there was a girl, standing a few yards away; she must have come round that side of the house. She was wearing light green pyjamas – wrong colour again. I was going to speak to her, but there was something about the way she was standing . . .

She wasn’t looking at me, in fact I soon saw she wasn’t looking at anything much. I waved my hand in front of her eyes, you know, the way they do in films when they think someone’s been hypnotized or something. I felt a perfect idiot, but her eyes didn’t move. Sleepwalking, presumably; not in the book. Do people walk in their sleep? Apparently not, they only pretend to, according to what a psychiatrist chum told me afterwards, but I hadn’t heard that then. All I knew, or thought I knew, was this thing everybody’s heard somewhere about it being dangerous to wake a sleepwalker.

So I just stayed close to the girl and went on keeping watch, and a bit more time went by, and then, sure enough, I heard, faintly but clearly, the sound I’d written about, the rustling, creaking sound of the movement of something made of tree-branches, twigs, and clusters of leaves. And there it was, about a hundred yards away, not really much like a man, coming up at a clumsy, jolting sort of jogtrot on the grass verge, and accelerating.

I knew what I had to do. I started walking to meet it, with the cross ready in my hand. (The girl hadn’t moved at all.) When the thing was about twenty yards away I saw its face, which had fungus on it, and I heard another sound I’d written about coming from what I suppose you’d have to call its mouth, like the howling of wind through trees.

I stopped and steadied myself and threw the cross at it and it immediately vanished – immediately. That wasn’t like the book, but I didn’t stop to think about it. I didn’t stop to look for the cross, either. When I turned back, the girl had gone. So much the better. I rushed back into the inn and up to the bedroom and knocked on the door – I’d told Jane to lock it after me.

There was a delay before she came and opened it. I could see she looked confused or something, but I didn’t bother with that, because I could feel all the calm and confidence I’d had earlier, it was all just draining away from me. I sat her down on the bed and sat down myself on a chair and just rattled off what had happened as fast as I could. I must have forgotten she’d been meant to be watching.

By the time I’d finished I was shaking. So was Jane. She said, What made you change your mind? Change my mind? – what about? Going out there, she said; getting up again and going out. But, I said, I’ve been out there all the time. Oh no you haven’t, she said, you came back up here after about twenty minutes, she said, and you told me the whole thing was silly and you were going to bed, which we both did. She seemed quite positive.

I was absolutely shattered. But it all really happened, I said, just the way I told you. It couldn’t have, she said; you must have dreamed it. You certainly didn’t throw the cross at anything, she said, because it’s here, you gave it back to me when you came back the first time. And there it was, on the chain round her neck.

I broke down then. I’m not quite clear what I said or did. Jane got some sleeping pills down me and I went off in the end. I remember thinking rather wildly that somebody or other with a funny sense of humour had got me into exactly the same predicament, the same mess, as the hero of my book had been: seeing something that must have been supernatural and just not being believed. Because I knew I’d seen the whole thing; I knew it then and I still know it.

I woke up late, feeling terrible. Jane was sitting reading by the bed. She said, I’ve seen young Miss Allington. Your description of her fits and, she said, she used to walk in her sleep. I asked her how she’d found out and she said she just had; she’s good at that kind of thing.