Sarah liked to be scared. She enjoyed the feeling.
Mind you, there were some things that scared her that she didn’t like to be
scared by. Vocabulary tests, for example. But they didn’t count, because they
were natural, well, perhaps not natural, after all, no languages except English
were natural, but just things that happened, like spiders, and
they were scary, too, but not the right kind of scary. The right kind of scary
was the unnatural – or did she mean the supernatural? The sort of
stuff you couldn’t explain. Well, you couldn’t really explain why the French
and the Germans and the Spaniards did the things they did to their poor
defenceless words in order to make up correct sentences – at least, no one had
ever been able to explain it to Sarah’s satisfaction – but that was,
quite definitely, different. The sort of stuff she liked to be
scared by was inexplicable and unnatural and – well – scary. It raised the
hairs on the back of her neck. She could feel them rising sometimes at the mere
thought of these scary things.
So, she was very pleased indeed to be invited to a
sleepover. Now for some fun, she thought, some scary fun. They would all be in
one room together and they would turn out the lights and sit around and tell scary
stories. They’d have to tell them, because they wouldn’t be able to read
them if all the lights were out. That worried her a bit, because she wasn’t
sure if the other girls actually knew any scary stories.
As it turned out, they probably didn’t, but it
didn’t matter, because the people who owned the house, who must have been
somebody’s parents, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been involved in all
this, because, indeed, why would anyone who didn’t have to invite a lot
of teenage girls to occupy their attic – only Sarah had no real idea whose
parents they were because she’d been invited by someone who’d already been
invited and wanted someone else that they knew better than the other people
who’d already already been invited, just to kind of even things up –
anyway, the grown-ups (if they really were grown-up, which was something
Sarah often worried about when she was dealing with grown-ups because so many
of them seemed so much more childish than the children they were bossing
around) – the grown-ups had a huge library of ghost stories, and they’d
got the books out and marked the places in them, and provided a pencil torch
(only one, to make it scarier) for the reader to hold, leaving everyone
else in the dark – which was, Sarah knew, a metaphor as well as a reality,
because she was good at spotting things like that.
So, it didn’t really matter that the girls
themselves were all normal and had cats called Pappy and dogs called Froggle or
rode a horse called Zac, who had been thought to be 15 hands 3 high, but turned
out to be 16 hands 1, without the intervention of spirits or demons or aliens,
but just because somebody hadn’t managed to measure him properly to start with.
This was the sort of conversation that went on over
the meal before the sleepover. It was a blameless meal, an acceptable meal, a
digestible meal: pasta (fusilli, actually) served with a choice of sauces to
cater for meat-eaters and vegetarians and hardly any parmesan, because, as
Sarah remembered from A Christmas Carol, too much cheese could make you
see ghosts. (She wondered exactly how much, and did the kind of cheese make a
difference? If you ate too much Stilton, did you see blue ghosts, for
instance?) It was certainly the sort of meal you served to a large number of
teenage girls, because it was easy, and they’d all eat it (except for
the ones who had a gluten allergy, and they ate the sauces with baked
potatoes).
Then they all went up the stairs and up the stairs,
into the newly converted attic. It turned out that the sleepover was a kind of
attic-warming. The rafters had been boarded over and a cheap but hard-wearing
carpet had been laid and some windows had been put in the roof, but the big
beams that supported the roof itself were still in place, so it was hard to
walk around anywhere, and certainly hard to do it upright, and although there
were some lights fitted, they hadn’t been connected to the main electricity
supply yet, so all the girls had for the moment was the light from the sky
(which wasn’t bad, because it was between late spring and early summer) and the
single pocket-torch they had been allowed.
Because they didn’t all know each other, since one
knew one who knew someone else who knew someone else, the idea of reading
caught on sooner than it might have done with a group who had a lot of
confidences to share. The stories were very varied. There was one about a
purple car, which pursued people but didn’t really exist, there was one about a
carving of a cat in a cathedral that came alive under the hand of a churchman
who had done something bad, there was one about a man who drank too much green
tea and began to see the red eyes of a small monkey following him in the dark
wherever he went. Sarah thought about the cat of the household, and almost
imagined she could see its eyes glowing in the dark in the corner of the attic;
but then she reflected that it had been a very earthly cat – in fact, it
had smelt quite strongly, not of graveyard mould, but of cat-food. Ghost cats,
she was sure, didn’t smell of pilchard and tuna. And besides, she’d drunk
Coca-Cola and not green tea, and if Coca-Cola made you see things that weren’t
really there, then there was no hope for the world! No, Coca-Cola most
definitely didn’t open the eyes for inner vision.
Finally, there was a story about a man who found a
whistle in some abbey ruins by the sea, and on it there was written in Latin
“If you whistle, I shall come” and the man (rather foolishly) blew it, but
there wasn’t any sound. That night, however, the sheets on his bed rose up and assumed
a human form and began to attack him... Sarah rather liked that story, but was
glad she used a duvet herself. One of the man’s friends threw the whistle into
the sea.
And then it was time for sleep. The house wasn’t
especially old, just an ordinary (but quite large) semi in an ordinary street,
built just over a hundred years ago, not exactly a tremendous amount of
atmosphere, Sarah thought, but as she climbed into her sleeping bag she tried
to put herself in the right mood to be scared – only she fell asleep almost at
once.
The first thing to wake her was the tapping.
Insistent. Not quite regular. Ghostly fingers at a windowpane, perhaps? Kathy
come home to haunt Heathcliff? She opened her eyes and had the second fright.
What were those lights above her? Sharp pinpricks in the darkness, some large
and bright, some small and faint, almost making patterns but not quite. And
then they began to be obscured, they ran, they melted into each other, they
became monstrous and distorted, as if through a magnifying glass at the wrong
distance, while the initial tapping turned into a violent drumming.
Then she realised. She had been looking at the stars
through the window in the roof, which was right above her head, and the rain,
which had begun as large isolated drops, had become much heavier, and now the
clouds from which it was falling had covered the sky and blotted out the stars.
Well, thought Sarah, that was quite scary,
even if there wasn’t any reason for it to be. I wonder what will happen now?
She didn’t have long to wait. A low moaning sound
began to distinguish itself from the whistling of the wind round the gutters
and the roof-tiles. It became louder, and its musical range wider, almost
whooping – a classic ghost noise. Sarah sat up and looked round the attic to
see where it was coming from. There was no light, of course, and the attic
hadn’t been fully converted, so the background everywhere was dark beams and
the black underside of the roof felt which had been nailed on beneath the tiles
when the roof was renewed to stop snow and rain driving in between them. Then
she spotted the movement, and shuddered.
A white sheet was waving, undulating, in the far
corner of the attic, lifting itself up from the floor and moving, though it
didn’t actually seem to be going anywhere yet, just coiling and uncoiling
itself, like a snake about to strike.
Sarah felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.
This, she thought, really was scary. It was just like that awful story,
the last one that had been read, when the thing that had been summoned
came, and took the bedclothes to give itself a shape.
She watched, open-mouthed, while the sheet swayed
more and more, till it touched one of the beams with a very solid sound and a
little gasp. Sarah was surprised. She thought ghosts were supposed to be
immaterial. They just passed through solid objects without let or hindrance.
They didn’t go clunk and make a noise like “ow!”
With eyes now used to the darkness she scanned the
scattered sleepers. One sleeping bag was empty, in the far corner, where the
ghost was. As the sheet began to move across the attic, avoiding the beam now
it had found out by painful experience where it was, Sarah saw something at the
bottom of it that provided an explanation and flattened the hairs on the back
of her neck. Even if ghosts have feet, she thought, I’m sure they don’t put
blue pearl-lustre varnish on their toe-nails.
From somewhere beside Sarah, a voice that might have
been Sophie’s or Erin’s said, “For goodness’ sake, Rosie, just go to sleep!
Nobody’s scared of you – though they might be if they could see your face!”
Everyone who was awake laughed at that, because
cruel things are always funny if they’re not directed at you.
As she started to lie back down again, Sarah found
she needed to go to the loo, so she got up and trod delicately between the
sleepers and the would-be sleepers, holding on to the beams and rafters as she
went, partly to keep her balance as she avoided people, and partly to make sure
she didn’t hit her head. On one beam she put her hand on to something sharp,
which pricked her finger and drew a little blood. She paused to suck it better
and looked at what had injured her. It was a rusty metal triangle, suspended by
a nail driven through a hole in its upper corner. There were similar holes in
the two lower corners, and pieces of thin, rusty wire wound round each of them,
sticking out sideways in sharp points which looked, in each case, as though
another length of wire had been cut away – recently, too, because the ends were
still shiny. Sarah touched the metal triangle with her finger, and it swung to
and fro quite freely on the nail. She wondered for a moment what on earth it
could be, but the call of nature was stronger than the call of curiosity, so
she went down the stairs to the loo. On the way, she peeped out of the landing
window, but there was no purple car in the road, and no monkey’s eyes flashing,
and the big round wooden ball on the newel post just felt like a big round
wooden ball under her fingers.
When she came back into the attic, she wanted
nothing so much as to go to sleep, but she still had to negotiate a passage
between the jumbled partakers of the sleepover. What with concentrating so hard
on that and being so tired, she would probably have missed the figure that was
standing by her sleeping bag, if it hadn’t been for the cough. It began as one
of those polite coughs designed to draw attention, but it rattled on longer
than it should have done, and didn’t sound healthy at all. Sarah certainly
didn’t know all the girls, but she couldn’t recall any of them having a cough
or a cold.
“What would you like, miss?” said the figure.
I’d like to be scared, thought Sarah, instinctively.
But then she realised that she was, already. She found she could see the figure
quite clearly, despite the darkness. It was a young girl, about her own age,
fourteen, say – only she was very pale, almost grey in her complexion –
obviously her parents didn’t take her to the South of France or the Greek
islands for holidays. And she had that nasty cough. And she was wearing an
apron over a sort of Laura Ashley dress – quite out of fashion! And shabby and
faded, as well, which was odd, because it should have been posh and new...
Sarah looked round. All the sleeping bags, except
her own, were full.
“Why are you here?” she said, trying not to sound
insulting.
“Because you called me, miss.”
“Called you?” asked Sarah.
“Yes, miss,” said the figure. “You rung the bell.”
“I rang the bell?” asked Sarah, feeling the hairs rise on the back of her neck.
“Yes, miss,” said the figure, and she pointed to the
metal triangle on the beam, and pushed it to and fro with her finger, just as
Sarah had done before.
“I didn’t hear it,” said Sarah.
“No, miss,” said the figure, “but it rings all the same,
whether you hear it or not. And when it rings, we have to answer it, whether
you want anything or not.”
“I see,” said Sarah, wondering whether there was
anything she ought to say, anything she ought to ask. What could she ask?
What’s it like, being dead? What was it like, being alive? Well, she
could guess the answer to that one, looking at the shabby clothes and hearing
that wracking cough. No, there wasn’t anything she really wanted to know.
Nothing, at any rate, that she could bear hearing.
“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” she said, “please go
and rest.”
“Very good, miss,” was the reply, and all of a
sudden the figure was no longer there. There was only the beam, which occupied
all the space where the figure had been, and made its previous existence all
the more evidently impossible.
No one else was awake. Sarah looked round and
checked. Then she scrambled into her sleeping bag as fast as she could, pulled
it up over her head and fell asleep as quickly as possible.
Breakfast was a formality, cereal and milk (soya
milk for the ones with allergies), and hardly any conversation. Sarah pretended
to still be half-asleep, even though she wasn’t, and took great care not to
exchange phone numbers with anyone.
When her parents came to pick her up, they were surprised
that she hadn’t made any new friends, because she usually did, but they didn’t
say anything, because they let her live her own life, and when she sat squashed
up in one corner of the back seat all the way home they didn’t say anything
either, because that was the way they were, open and tolerant and not
interfering.
But when they’d got her indoors they asked the
inevitable question: did you like it? And Sarah didn’t answer. Sarah couldn’t
answer. I like.... she began inside herself. I like.... but she couldn’t finish
the sentence, because what had been true wasn’t true any more, and she didn’t
yet know what the new answer ought to be.
Finished 00.24
11.iv.2003, started the previous week, written on 9th and 10th