Companionship
She moves slowly on her Zimmer, placing one foot after the other, stretching her neck forward towards her little room, a distant, distancing smile on her face, like a carapace.
Everyone thought the old lady had a tame pigeon, until they entered after her death, and found its feet were nailed to the windowsill.
My First Ghost
The following story is true. It is my own experience of living in a haunted house and if, when you have read it, you are still sceptical about the existence of ghosts, I will be very surprised. All I have done is to change the names of the house and the other people involved, to protect their privacy, although the armchair detectives among you would not have too much difficulty establishing the real names!
In 1989 I was fortunate to have made a substantial sum of money from my first two supernatural thrillers, Possession and Dreamer (the true story that inspired this latter book is in this anthology, titled Dream Holiday), and my then wife and I went house-hunting. We fell in love with a stunning Georgian manor house on the edge of a Sussex hamlet. It had a long history — before being a manor house it had been a monastery in the middle ages, and prior to that there had been a Roman villa in the grounds, part of which — a Roman fish keep — was still largely intact.
During our time there, archaeological students spent two years doing a dig to discover the remains of the villa — much to my wife Geraldine’s dismay, as it meant they dug up an area of a very fine lawn, and without success. However, after we sold the house in 1999, the next owners dug foundations for a new garage at the top of the long drive and unearthed, by accident, the ruins. Their building work was then delayed for two years by a court order to allow excavations to take place.
‘You’ll like this house, with what you write,’ the owner told me, mischievously, on our first viewing. ‘We have three ghosts.’
It turned out he was fibbing — the house, we were to discover later, actually had four. The first one manifested while we were in the process of moving in. I was standing in the front porch, on a beautiful spring morning, with my mother-in-law, Evelyn, a very down-to-earth lady, who was a senior magistrate. But she had a ‘fey’ side to her in that she was very open-minded about the paranormal, and always had a particular recurring, frightening dream whenever someone she knew was about to die. She had told me about this and had come to accept it, without ever being able to come up with a rational explanation beyond, perhaps, telepathy.
I liked her a lot and we had always got on really well, I guess in part because although in court she was a formidable, doughty lady, who acquired the soubriquet (which she greatly enjoyed) of ‘The Hanging Magistrate of Hove’, she was an enthusiastic reader of my work and was someone both totally unshockable and hugely intelligent, with whom I could converse on any topic from aliens to ancient Egypt, to modern politics.
From the front door where we were standing, there was a long, narrow corridor which ran from the front of the house through to an oak-panelled atrium at the rear, with four Doric columns, which led into the kitchen. This atrium was all that remained of the monastery which had originally been on the site, and you could still see the arches where the altar had been.
As we stepped aside to let the removals men leave the house to fetch another item, I suddenly saw a shadow, like the flit of a bird across a fanlight, in the interior of the house.
‘Did you see that?’ my mother-in-law asked, with a knowing look.
Despite the warmth of the sunlight, I felt a sudden chill. I could tell by the expression on her face at that moment that she had seen something uncanny. But I did not want to spook my wife on our very first day in the house. Geraldine and I were both townies, and this was our first move into the countryside. She was already apprehensive about the isolation of the property. The last thing I needed was for her to be unnecessarily scared by a ghost! So I shook my head and told Evelyn I had not seen anything. But in truth, I was feeling a little spooked by this.
Our first night was uneventful, and our Hungarian sheepdog, Boris, had been very happy and calm. I’d been told that dogs would often pick up on any supernatural occurrence way before their owners, so I took this as a good sign.
In the morning, Geraldine left for work at 8 a.m. After breakfast I went to my study to resume work on my third supernatural novel, Sweet Heart. Around 10.30 a.m. I went downstairs to make a cup of coffee. As I entered the atrium, on my way through to the kitchen, I saw tiny pinpricks of white light all around me. My immediate reaction was that it was sunlight, coming through the window in the far wall, reflecting off my glasses. I took them off, put them back on, and the pinpricks of light had gone.
I returned to my study, but when I went downstairs to make myself some lunch, the same thing happened again. And again, after removing my glasses and putting them back on once more, the pinpricks had gone. But I was left with a slightly uneasy feeling. In the afternoon, when I went downstairs to make a mug of tea, it happened again.
I said nothing to Geraldine when she arrived home that evening, and she did not see anything.
The next day around mid-morning, when I was alone in the house, I saw the pinpricks again, and at lunchtime. After lunch I took Boris for a walk. We’d only gone a short distance along the lane when an elderly man came up to me, introducing himself as Harry Stotting, a neighbour in the hamlet. ‘You are Mr James, aren’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied.
‘You’ve just moved into the big house?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘How are you getting on with your grey lady?’ he said, with a strange, quizzical look that immediately unsettled me.
‘What grey lady?’ I asked.
He then really spooked me. ‘I was the house-sitter for the previous owners. In winter, they used the atrium as a ‘snug’ because, as it adjoined the kitchen, it was always warm from the Aga. Six years ago I was sitting in the snug watching television, when a sinister-looking woman with a grey face, and wearing a grey silk crinoline dress, materialized out of the altar wall, swept across the room, gave me a malevolent stare, flicked my face with her dress, and vanished into the panelling behind me. I was out of there thirty seconds later, and went back in the morning to collect my things. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back in there again!’
I was struck both by the sincerity of the man, and his genuine fear, which I could see in his eyes as he told me the story. It truly made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
I returned to the house after our walk feeling very uncomfortable. I even wimped out of going through the atrium into the kitchen to make my afternoon cuppa! But when Geraldine came home in the evening, I said nothing — I suppose I did not want to believe it myself, and she was still extremely nervous about living in such an isolated house. One of the things you realize when you move into the depths of the countryside after living in an urban environment is the sheer darkness of the nights. In a city, it is never truly dark, ever — there is always an ambient glow from the street lighting. But on a cloudy or moonless country night, it is pitch back. I had tried to convince her that for a potential intruder total darkness was harder than ambient light, so we were safer. But she did not buy that.
The following Sunday, we had invited Geraldine’s parents to lunch. Whilst she was occupied putting the finishing touches to the meal, I took her mother aside and asked her what exactly she had seen that day we were moving in.