The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

As I sit here at the end of the garden, on the rockery, looking at the Christmas tree with its electric lights, it’s hard to believe that the house was almost gutted. The tree must have set the curtains alight, and so on. Anyway, it’s all been repaired, and you’d never know that anything happened. It’s part of the wonder of the house. It doesn’t die, it just keeps on evolving. The house is alive. It watches over me always, and it’s watching me now as I sit here, not feeling the cold, looking at it from the end of the garden.

The house may be alive, but my family aren’t. They all perished in the fire, from inhaling the smoke, every one of them, including the cat. Even so, it doesn’t stop them turning up. Just now my father put his hand on my shoulder, and said: “Come on, my boy.” Death hasn’t changed him at all. He’s just as solid, he’s still got the same voice and even the same smell of Three Nuns Navy Cut pipe tobacco. He still smokes a pipe. He wears the plus fours and long socks and brogues that I used to find so embarrassing and old-fashioned. Every time I sit here, he comes and asks me to leave. I wish he wouldn’t. I love him, but he isn’t entitled to tell me what to do any more.

They’re all here now, as solid and real as when they were alive. There’s Catherine and her baronet, hand in hand, and Sebastian and Michael looking at me pityingly. There’s even the cat. It’s not Tobermory. This one is Gerald, and he was two cats later. Gerald used to drink from the dripping tap in the bathroom basin, whereas Tobermory would get under the sofa, stick his claws into the hessian underneath, and drag himself along on his back as fast as he could go. Gerald settles on his haunches and looks up at me with interest, as if I were an experiment.

My mother is here too. She reaches out a hand to try to take mine, and says: “Please, darling, please,” but I take my hand away, not roughly, but gently. I know she loves me, you see, and I don’t want to cause her any hurt. She implores me with her eyes, and still holds out, her hand.

“Come on, you big fool,” says Sebastian, grinning like a big schoolboy, and Michael thumps me on the shoulder with the same old fraternal violence, and says: “Come on, old thing. You’ve been here quite long enough.”

“I’m watching the house,” I say.

The baronet lights a cigarette, and when he throws the match to the ground, it disappears. “Look,” he says, “I know I’m not strictly family and whatnot, only being married in, as it were, but you’ve got to give it up one of these days, this watching over the house lark.”

“It’s really the house watching over me,” I say. “Anyway, you’re all dead.”

“When are you going to understand?” asks Catherine, shaking her head.

“What’s wrong with staying here?” I say.

“Please,” says my mother.

After a while they leave, one by one, as they always do. My mother and Catherine give me a gentle kiss on the cheek. It’s surprising how you can distinctly feel the kiss of someone who is dead. My father once surprised me by taking my head between his hands and kissing me on the forehead. He would never have done that when he was alive, and he hasn’t done it since. Michael and Sebastian subject me to more claps between the shoulderblades. They all turn and wave modestly before they fade away not far from where the bonfire always used to be. Only Gerald stays a little while. He winds himself around my legs a few times, and reaches up to touch a claw to my hand, as he used to when he suspected that it contained a morsel of cheddar cheese. After a while he wanders away after the rest of them.

I don’t understand why they keep coming back. I am glad to see them, of course, but they are dead. I keep telling them, but they don’t seem to be able to take it in. They don’t seem to understand why I won’t go with them. Perhaps death makes you less perceptive.

Anyway, I am perfectly contented here, sitting atop this rockery by moonlight, not even feeling the cold, looking at the tree sparkling with so many colours in the french window. I love it here. I love this beautiful house, I love the way it holds me as if it had hands and I was cupped inside them. I sit here and it watches over me, I feel absolute happiness, and there’s nothing I’d rather do.

Appendix

A Century of Ghost Novels

1900–2000

1902:THE HAUNTED MAJOR by Robert Marshall

Inspired by the new craze for golf that had developed at the dawn of the 20th century, this comic story recounts the efforts of sports-mad Major Gore to beat Lindsay, a young golf champion. The Major receives supernatural assistance in his cause from the ghost of Cardinal Smeaton, a Scottish renaissance figure who is still nursing a grudge against his opponent’s family.

1904:THE GREY WORLD by Evelyn Underhill