Familiar and Haunting

  The boy at the table was stirring a Christmas pudding for the family upstairs, and he was stirring into it his hatred and a wish. …

  Wish! whispered the wooden spoon. Wish! Wish! And the boy at the table smiled at Eddy, a secret and deadly little smile: They were two conspirators, or one boy. Either way, they were wishing, wishing.…

  Someone screamed, and at that Eddy woke. And the screamer was Eddy himself. He tore out of his bed and his bedroom to where he could see a light in the little kitchen of the basement flat. There were his parents in their dressing gowns, drinking cups of tea. The kitchen clock said nearly three o’clock in the morning.

  Eddy rushed into his mother’s arms with a muddled, terrified account of a nightmare about a Christmas pudding. His mother soothed him and looked over his head to his father. “You said it was just coincidence that neither of us could sleep tonight for bad dreams. Is Eddy part of the coincidence, too?”

  Mr. Napper did not answer.

  Mrs. Napper said, “That hateful, hateful old corpse of a pudding, or whatever it is, isn’t going to spend another minute in my home.” She set Eddy aside so that she could go to the wastebin under the sink.

  “I’ll take it outside,” said Mr. Napper. “I’ll put it into the dustbin outside.” He was already easing his feet into his gardening shoes.

  “The dustbin won’t be cleared for another five days,” said Mrs. Napper.

  “Then I’ll put it on the bonfire, and I’ll burn it in the morning.”

  “Without fail?”

  “Without fail.”

  Mr. Napper carried the Christmas pudding, wrapped in old newspaper, out into the garden, and Eddy was sent back to bed by his mother. He lay awake in bed until he heard his father’s footsteps coming back from the garden and into the flat. Eddy didn’t feel safe until he had heard that.

  Then he could go to sleep. But even then he slept lightly, anxiously. He heard the first of the cars on the road outside. Then he heard the people upstairs letting their dog out into the garden, as usual. The dog went bouncing and barking away into the distance, as it always did. Then he heard his parents getting up. And then, because he wanted to see the bonfire’s first burning—to witness it—Eddy got up, too.

  So Eddy was with his father when Mr. Napper went to light the bonfire. Indeed, Eddy was ahead of him on the narrow path, and he was carrying the box of matches.

  “Whereabouts did you put the—the thing?” asked Eddy.

  “The plum pudding? I put it on the very top of the bonfire.”

  But it was not there. It had gone. There was a bit of crumpled old newspaper, but no pudding. Then Eddy saw why it had gone, and where. It had been dragged down from the top of the bonfire, and now it lay on the ground, on the far side of the bonfire, partly eaten, and beside it lay the dog from the ground-floor flat. Eddy knew from the way the dog lay, and the absolute stillness of its body, that the dog was dead.

  Mr. Napper saw what Eddy saw.

  Mr. Napper said, “Don’t touch that dog, Eddy. Don’t touch anything. I’m going back to tell them what’s happened. You can come with me.”

  But Eddy stayed by the bonfire because his feet seemed to have grown to the ground, and his father went back by himself. Alone, Eddy began to shiver. He wanted to cry; he wanted to scream. He knew what he wanted to do most of all. With trembling fingers he struck a match and lit the bonfire in several places. The heap was very dry and soon caught. It blazed merrily, forming glowing caves of fire within its heart. Eddy picked up the half-eaten Christmas pudding and flung it into one of the fiery caverns, and blue flames seemed to leap to welcome it and consume it.

  Then Eddy began really to cry and then felt his father’s arms round him, holding him, comforting him, and heard the voice of his mother and then the lamentations of the family of the ground-floor flat, whose dog had been poisoned by what it had eaten.

  And the bonfire flamed and blazed with flames like the flames of hell.

  Samantha and the Ghost

  This was the first time that Samantha had climbed her grandparents’ apple tree, and at the top she found the Ghost. After expressions of surprise on both sides, they settled sociably among the branches.

  “Nice to have someone to chat to, for once,” said the Ghost.

  “But oughtn’t you to be groaning or clanking chains?” asked Samantha.

  “I’m not the groaning kind, and I haven’t chains to clank,” said the Ghost. “Although I do have something else, for moonlight nights.”

  “What?”

  But the Ghost slid away from that point; he was evasive. All that Samantha could see of him in the sunlight was a wide shimmer of air over one of the outermost apple branches. If she looked directly, she could hardly be sure that he was there at all. If she focused her gaze to one side on, say, the chimney pots of her grandparents’ bungalow, then, out of the corner of her eye, she could see him more clearly. Not his face, not his clothing, but an impression of a wide body and limbs. His hands seemed to be resting on his knees; was he holding something across them?

  “I’ve never thought of an apple tree being haunted,” Samantha remarked. She remembered something. “My grandfather says this tree never bears any fruit, never has any blossom even. He says it’s unnatural. Well, perhaps it’s because you live here.”

  “Possibly,” said the Ghost, not interested. Samantha thought he would be interested all right if she revealed to him that her grandfather was seriously thinking of cutting down this unsatisfactory tree, to make room for raspberry canes. But she decided not to tell him that.

  The Ghost said, “This tree is not my real haunt, not my original one. I was already haunting here when it was planted. You see, my bedchamber, where I first began to haunt, was here.”

  “Here?”

  “Here, where the top of this apple tree now is. Our mansion was ten times the size of any of these low cottages”—he meant the bungalows, Samantha realized—“and it stood handsomely where they have now been built. My bedchamber, naturally, was on the first floor, at exactly this level, here—here.” The ghostly shimmer moved around in the top of the apple tree and beyond it, apparently pacing out the dimensions of a long-ago bedroom.

  “And the mansion has gone—completely gone?” Samantha asked wonderingly.

  “I suppose I overhaunted it,” the Ghost admitted. “I made life impossible for the inhabitants.”

  “But, if you don’t groan or clank chains or anything …”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t do anything.” The shimmer was seated again, and the hands moved—yes, holding something. “At first I haunted thoroughly—much more thoroughly than I have ever had the heart to do since. I haunted that house to the top of my ability. Nobody could go on living in it. Nobody. Soon the house stood empty, neglected. Woodworm abounded; dry rot set in. In the end the thing had to be pulled down completely—razed to the ground—to make room for lesser dwellings.”

  “Leaving you stranded in midair,” said Samantha.

  “Exactly. Most awkward. There must be quite a few unfortunate spirits in my plight, up and down the country.” (Samantha suddenly remembered a piercingly cold pool of air always to be passed through on a certain staircase of her school—an old ghost built into a new building, perhaps?)

  The Ghost was going on: “I can tell you, I was glad when the apple tree grew up to bedchamber level. Something solid to put my feet up on at last.”

  “Why do you haunt a bedroom?” asked Samantha.

  “I was a permanent invalid.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Samantha had quite a tender heart. “Not bedridden, though?”

  “Not entirely, but confined to the bedchamber.” The Ghost sighed. “I died there.”

  A sad little silence, in which they heard from below the sound of the opening of the French windows of the bungalow.

  Samantha’s grandmother stepped into the garden. “Samantha!” She looked all round, but not upward, and Samantha made no sound. “Tea, Samantha!” She added
enticingly, “And something special for tea!” She did not wait for an answer, partly because she was rather deaf and knew it. She went back indoors, confident of Samantha’s following her.

  “What’s special for tea?” the Ghost asked eagerly.

  “I think it’ll be fried sausages and bacon today.” Samantha was already beginning to clamber down the tree. She paused to sniff the air. “Yes, sausages and bacon.”

  The Ghost was also sniffing, in a different way. He was crying, Samantha realized. Between sobs he whimpered, “Fried sausages and bacon! How I used to adore fried sausages and bacon! Bacon all curled and crisp, and sausages bursting out of their little weskits …” Samantha had no idea how you comforted a ghost or lent one a handkerchief. And she hadn’t a handkerchief, anyway, and she was not really sure how sympathetic she felt toward a shimmer crying its heart out over fried sausages and bacon. And her tea was waiting for her. …

  She hardened her heart against the Ghost and jumped the last few feet to the ground. She heard, from behind her and above, the Ghost’s pleading: “Come again, please, come again. …”

  She went indoors.

  After tea, Samantha spent the evening as usual with her grandparents, watching TV and playing cards. When they played, the room seemed very quiet, except for the wind moaning in the chimney and shrieking and screeching round the bungalow. “The wind’s up again,” said Samantha. “Like last night.”

  Her grandmother went on counting knitting stitches, but her grandfather began his usual complaint. He was not really a grumbler, Samantha knew, but the sound of the wind got on his nerves. He said so. “It’s a ghastly sound,” he said, “and it’s against all reason and nature. How can the wind wail and moan and shriek when there isn’t any wind? Time and time again, when that row starts, I’ve gone outside, and the air is still—still. It’s unnatural.”

  “Unnatural…” Samantha repeated to herself, and remembered the barrenness of the apple tree and remembered the Ghost.… Suddenly it dawned on her that almost certainly she knew what object the Ghost held in his hands. She flushed with indignation.

  The next morning she climbed the apple tree and tackled the Ghost. “You may not have chains to clank, but you have a violin and you play it at night. You play it shockingly, horribly badly, don’t you?”

  The Ghost actually seemed pleased. “So you heard my fiddling last night?”

  “We couldn’t help hearing you. You made my grandfather’s evening a misery. Need you?”

  “It’s a very important part of the haunt,” the Ghost said.

  Before she could stop him, he had tucked the misty instrument into position under his misty chin and had drawn the bow across the strings. A long, thin screech tore the morning quiet. Down in the bungalow garden, Samantha’s grandfather dropped his trowel with an exclamation of agony and clapped his hands to his ears.

  “I’m sure you’ve no right to do that in the daytime,” Samantha said sternly to the Ghost. “And why do it at all?”

  “I played in life. I must do so after death.”

  “But why? I mean, why did you play in life? You play so abominably you can’t ever have enjoyed it.”

  “No,” said the Ghost. “But I didn’t mind it. I’m not in the least musical, you see.”

  “Then why—why?”

  “I was an invalid. I needed constant attention. Constant. But after some years I found that people were losing interest in me; they were beginning to neglect to answer my bell. That’s when I got myself a fiddle and began fiddling. Oh, my! They came soon enough then!” He chuckled. “They rushed to beg me to stop. I got into the habit of fiddling instead of ringing the bell.”

  Samantha was looking at the Ghost with new eyes. “What was your illness?” she asked.

  Again the Ghost was pleased. “Nobody knew, ever. The doctors, one and all, were baffled. Every medicine and drug and linctus and embrocation and inhalant and tablet and pill—they tried everything. In vain, in vain.”

  “What were the symptoms of the illness?”

  “Difficult to define,” said the Ghost. “Certainly lassitude.”

  “Lassitude?”

  “Well, lethargy.”

  “Lethargy?”

  “Don’t repeat so, dear girl! Manners, manners! Yes, lassitude and lethargy. The mere notion of activity, work of any description, produced faintness, prostration, collapse. So, lassitude, lethargy—”

  “Laziness,” Samantha said under her breath.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. How old were you when you died?”

  “A medical triumph, I suppose. I was eighty-nine. A frail eighty-nine, of course.”

  “How much did you weigh?”

  “I really cannot see what—two hundred and thirty-eight pounds, actually.”

  Samantha drew a deep breath. She shouted, “You were a great, fat, lazy old pig!”

  The Ghost shimmered violently with anger. “You’re an ill-bred, uppish, rude little girl!”

  Samantha disregarded him as though he had not spoken. “You’re selfish and unkind, and you’ve just got to stop making my grandfather’s life a misery with your horrible fiddling!”

  “Who says?”

  “I say!”

  They glared at each other.

  “Get out of my tree!” said the Ghost.

  “Your tree!”

  “As long as my bedchamber is at the top!”

  “I wouldn’t stay anywhere near your silly bedroom or your stupid violin, so there!” And Samantha slid rapidly down through the branches to the ground and ran indoors. Nor did she emerge again.

  That evening the screaming and shrieking round the bungalow reached an almost unbelievable pitch. Even Samantha’s deaf grandmother seemed to notice it, and her grandfather grew very pale.

  Samantha flung down her hand of cards and shouted: “You’ll have to move house, won’t you?”

  “No, dear,” said her grandmother.

  “No,” said her grandfather. “At our age, on our pensions, we can’t afford to move house all over again.”

  “And perhaps we’ll cut down the apple tree next spring,” said Grandmother, “and perhaps that’ll make a difference. Wind whistles through trees.”

  “This isn’t wind,” said Grandfather.

  “I’m glad you’ll cut the tree down, anyway,” Samantha declared with savagery.

  “But only if the poor thing still doesn’t have any fruit blossoms next spring,” said her grandmother.

  They resumed their cards, playing with stony determination. Then Samantha went to bed, where she fell asleep at last to the infuriated raging of a badly played violin.

  The next day was the last of Samantha’s visit. Deliberately she went nowhere near the apple tree. She and her grandmother went by bus to the shops. Gently it rained.

  That night they all went to bed early. There had been only a little moaning and wailing down the chimney—nothing violent. To Samantha’s surprise, even this sound had died to silence. She wondered why.

  Late into the night Samantha stayed awake, wondering. Almost she was worrying. At last she got up, put on her dressing gown, tiptoed through the bungalow to the French windows and out.

  There was the apple tree, sharply defined in the moonlight, and there was the Ghost. By moonlight he and his ghostly surroundings were much more visible. He seemed to be leaning out of a window at the top of the apple tree. He was looking down at her. She was taken aback. He was, indeed, grossly fat, and very old, too, with floating white hair. But he had a babyish look that, without being exactly attractive, was at least pitiful.

  “Please,” he whispered down to her, “please—please come up. …” Samantha had, of course, been warned against strangers with strange invitations, but this one was still not very much more than a shimmer up a tree. He was no danger. She climbed up to him, and they sat together, as they had done on that first—friendly—afternoon, talking. Samantha perched on a branch; the Ghost, in a long, flowered dressing gown
, sat in his rocking chair by an open fire, which gave out an uncozy blaze. Round the Ghost, foggily, Samantha could see the bedchamber itself: tall windows, one of them still open; a four-poster bed; and a table whose top was crammed with medicine bottles and old-fashioned pillboxes.

  “You didn’t visit me today,” the Ghost said reproachfully.

  “I thought we’d quarreled.”

  “My dear girl, in life I was used to quarrels. What I never got used to—can never get used to—is being alone. Loneliness …” He shed tears.

  With an effort Samantha said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ll visit me again tomorrow?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’m going home tomorrow morning.”

  He burst into sobs.

  Samantha could contain herself no longer. “You cry because you have to put up with not having a visitor, but what about my poor grandfather, who has to put up with your awful, awful fiddling night after night? What about that?”

  “I’d stop playing, I’d stop playing forever,” wailed the Ghost, “if only I didn’t have to haunt here alone, all alone. Alone for hundreds and hundreds of years…”

  “I’m sorry,” Samantha repeated. “I go home tomorrow.”

  The Ghost said wistfully, “Do you think anyone else will ever climb this apple tree for a chat?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Because my grandfather’s going to have it chopped down next spring unless it has blossom then. And it won’t do that, as long as you stay here, will it?”

  “I can see what you’re hinting at,” said the Ghost. “You think I should leave.”

  Samantha said nothing.

  “But how could I leave this?” He waved his arm round the misty bedroom. “I’m not fond of it, but it’s all I have of home.”

  “Do you know,” said Samantha, “you’re not only a ghost, but you’re haunting the mere ghost of a bedroom? That’s not worthy of you.”