The Time of the Ghost

  “How are you, Sally?” he asked.

  She stared at him. Who was mad? Or was she Sally after all? Things fell about in her head, and the confusion seemed to get into the rest of her body, in a mass of distant aches and numb prickles. She was Sally. Phyllis had known, after all. But this was crazy! That meant the drab lady had been Imogen!

  Ned did not seem to notice her amazement. He said anxiously, “I’m sorry I got here so late, Sally. I’d have been here an hour ago, only I ran into Imogen outside the music college. She said she’d just been to see you, and you seemed to think she was you. She was in an awful state about it. So I brought her back here with me. Would you mind seeing her, Sally, and setting her mind at rest? She’s sitting down the corridor, crying her eyes out.”

  “Of course,” Sally said guiltily.

  “Fetch her in,” said Fenella. “If they say there’s too many people, we two can go.”

  “But tell her I’ll kill her if she starts grieving in here,” said Cart.

  “She won’t,” said Ned. “She promised. I’ll get her.” He passed his window box flowers carefully to Fenella—they were rather wilted—and went.

  While he was gone, she lay not really listening to Fenella telling Cart about her singing lessons, and to Cart saying things in reply about Cambridge, and thinking about the person she now knew was herself. It was not good. She had painted a picture of Fenella; that was the one good thing she knew. For the rest, she had taken Audrey over from Fenella, purely in order to spend a night in Audrey’s farm, and she had done that in order to meet Julian Addiman secretly for the midnight dedication to Monigan. That had been so foolish. It was not that she had been under Julian Addiman’s spell either—not then. She had known he had a craving for dark doings and bloodthirsty excitement which was not quite normal. That was why he had made the rest of them hold the séance. But she had been determined to be the one who helped him find his dark excitement. She remembered her disgust, now, when he had killed that poor black hen. She could even remember, dimly, running through the moonlit mist to the dead elms that night. It was a memory queerly overlaid by the more recent memory of herself as a ghost, watching the girl run through the fields. Why had she gone? The hen had almost been too much for her. She could only think that as the most normal one of four truly peculiar sisters, she had been trying to prove that she could go further than any of them.

  The worst bit was after that, when she had got rid of Audrey the next day. She had watched herself doing that just now. True, she had paid for all that after seven very dreary years, but she was not sure now that this Sally she was, was worth saving from Monigan. And she wondered if this was why she had forgotten she was Sally: She did not like herself.

  “What happened to Audrey?” she asked.

  “Hush,” said Cart. “Ned’s coming back.”

  Then she did not need to be told. She remembered. Audrey had made a fool of herself over Ned Jenkins. For seven years, she had sent him letters and valentines and declarations of love. She had embarrassed Ned horribly by turning up in London and making scenes. Ned said Audrey was the most boring girl he knew, and he swore he had never once given Audrey an excuse for her devotion. But now Sally wondered about that. There was not only that bunch of flowers Ned and Audrey had picked. There was that nice-looking nurse, too. Ned was rather given to turning on a kind of helpless charm. He had got round Himself that way; in fact, he managed Himself even better than Howard. And no doubt he was going to get round the window box people the same way, too. All the same, Monigan had a lot to answer for. So did Sally. Poor Audrey. She had only been roped in because she happened to live in the farm up the road.

  She looked at Ned as he came back with the melancholy grown-up Imogen. No charm now. He simply looked extremely anxious. She looked at Imogen and was still unable to believe that this drab lady had once been an angel-faced little girl with blazing blue eyes who wore yellow trouser suits and frilly green pajamas. What had happened to make her like this?

  Imogen’s eyes were puffy, but she was making an evident effort not to grieve. She managed a smile when Cart and Fenella said, “Hallo, Imo!” And she smiled again when Ned pushed her toward the bed. Sally looked up at that dismal little smile and braced herself to bear Imogen’s discontent again—exactly the same discontent, she was now aware, that Imogen had borne from her. She had been as dismal as Imogen these last years.

  “I’m sorry, Imo,” she said. “I couldn’t remember anything when you were here first. I was being a ghost—”

  “I know,” said Imogen. She gulped on a sob. At that Fenella and Cart both started to speak, explaining the ghost in order to prevent an attack of grieving. Ned, however, cut through the explanation.

  “We know all about the ghost,” he said. “Imogen thinks there’s something she can do.”

  “But Sally says she saw Julian Addiman sneak back and pinch the Monigan doll,” Cart said. “That really worries me. I’d no idea—”

  “It doesn’t matter. We can still cheat her,” said Imogen. She sat down in the chair, leaning over Sally, breathing out a faint lavenderish smell. Sally knew that smell so well. It hung in the bathroom of the flat she and Imogen had shared these last two years. How could she have forgotten! Imogen was, of course, at music college, training to be a concert pianist. “Listen, Sally,” Imogen said. “I tried to explain before, but you didn’t seem to hear. I was terrified. I thought Monigan had been too clever for us. But I think she’s too—too primordial to be clever. She just blocked your mind off and hoped. Do you remember how I ran away?”

  “Back to the Back of Beyond,” said Sally. Once again she had one of those memories, overlaid with her memory as a ghost: Imogen’s running yellow figure, herself as a girl crossly shouting after her, and herself as a ghost utterly dismayed.

  “Yes, well, I want you to go and find me,” said Imogen. She had those two earnest creases above her nose. “Find me before I decide to go home. Can you do that? Try every way you can to make me go back to Monigan. Make me give her something, too. You won’t have to tell me what. I’ll know.”

  Cart said doubtfully, “But aren’t you trying to change the past, Imo? I don’t think that can be done.”

  “I know it can’t,” said Imogen. “It’s the future I’m trying to change.”

  “But did you go back to Monigan?” Ned asked. He was equally in earnest. “It’s important—because if you didn’t, there’s no point Sally trying to make you.”

  Imogen ran her hands through her drawn-back hair. Some gray-blond locks of it fell down round her face, making her look a little more like the Imogen of seven years before. “I—think I did,” she said. “I think something made me go. But it’s all muddled in my head because there was a thunderstorm. I was terrified of thunder in those days. But I think there were ghosts in the storm somehow.” She leaned earnestly down to Sally. “Try it, Sally. For my sake as well as yours.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Sally said.

  Doubtfully she closed her eyes and tried once again to become a ghost. Nothing happened at first. She seemed to have forgotten how. She lay there with a prodding sort of ache in one leg and niggling pains all over the rest of her, listening to the quiet voices of the others. They were exchanging news again. She heard Cart say, delighted, “You mean Oliver’s going to be a comic strip! That’s marvelous!”

  That was the last thing she heard. She faded into a ghost.

  But it was wrong. She was in the low light of evening instead of the afternoon. And it had stopped raining. Soaked grass and drips on brambles were catching late beams in red and orange twinkles.

  She was facing Himself. That was quite wrong.

  Himself was in such a towering rage that he made all other rages seem almost peaceful. His eyes popped with anger. He was roaring. His white face pecked and stabbed with fury. He kept pointing, stabbing an eagle talon down toward the earth, where a soaked clump of dandelions had been heaved out of the grass. Mr. McLaggan’s spade lay there, b
eside a metal detector, and there was a ragged hole by Himself’s feet. In it lay the black hen on top of a pile of chains. Insects were crawling on the hen. Above all this the rooks were going noisily to their nests in the dead elms.

  “Evil!” roared Himself. “Evil! This—this is the veriest Black Magic! This is wicked, destructive, perverted, loathsome, horrible, devilish! Evil, I say!”

  In front of him, Cart, Sally, Imogen, and Fenella stood in a scared line. They all looked bewildered, but Cart, Imogen, and Fenella, because Himself was so angry, were looking guilty as well. Sally was looking rather pained. She could not understand why Himself should rage so at what had only been a macabre sort of experiment. It had not done any harm, her face said.

  “And a perfectly good hen!” bawled Himself. “How many innocent boys have you corrupted with this—this Satanism? Howard and Jenkins. Who else? Answer me, Selina—Imogen—Charlotte!”

  “Julian Addiman,” said Fenella.

  “Nonsense!” yelled Himself. “You malicious little hag, Charlotte—Imogen—Fenella! Addiman is above reproach!” And Himself was so incensed at what he thought was a downright lie that he commenced swinging impartial, heavy slaps at all four, roaring furiously at the same time.

  The ghost was forced to back off from his fury. Himself, in his extreme anger, seemed to have expanded his field of life until it was sparking and fizzing for yards round him. But what made her even more uncomfortable was that she did now actually remember this scene. She remembered being fetched from a supper of custard—which was all Mrs. Gill would spare that evening—by Nutty Filbert, looking so smug and righteous that they all felt he deserved to have two heads, and being marched over the field to confront Himself across the grisly hen. And it was the strangest feeling, to be having the same experience twice at one time—once as an unseen watcher and once as the real Sally’s memory, wincing to each remembered slap.

  She decided not to stay. Once was enough, and it was the wrong time, anyway. This was hours after Imogen had pedaled home, soaked and grieving. She knew what was due to happen after this, too. Phyllis would put them all, and Oliver, in the school minibus, by which they knew how badly they were in disgrace. Himself had never allowed them near that minibus before; it belonged to School. But Himself had said he never wanted to see any of them again. So Phyllis was allowed the minibus to drive them all to Granny’s.

  After that everything had gone quiet. Granny was a gentle tyrant. She took one look at Fenella and fetched her scissors and cut Fenella’s knots off. She had made them all wash their hair. She insisted on a bath every evening and proper table manners. Granny’s house, anyway, was the kind of place where you naturally walked quietly and did not quarrel. And there were regular meals and constant attention. Granny bought Fenella and Imogen new clothes out of her own pocket—nice clothes. She gave Sally her good old paint box and Cart a silver box for jewels. And she had fallen in love with Oliver. They were all secretly very grateful. Even Oliver had behaved well. But the only bit of excitement had been when Will Howard turned up.

  She opened her eyes.

  They had all been waiting for her. She saw a line of anxious faces. “Well?” said Cart.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “I don’t think Monigan’s going to let me get to the right time. I got back to the hen row.”

  Imogen, Cart, and Fenella all began unconsciously rubbing their arms. The hen row was a painful memory. “What time did you try for?” Imogen asked.

  “Just after I left before,” said Sally. “But—”

  Imogen plunged forward. She intended to plant both hands on Sally, just as she so often plunged both hands down on the yellow piano. But she stopped, realizing it would hurt Sally. “No, no! That’s too late!” she cried out. “You must get there before I panicked in the thunder!” With the jerk, and her eagerness, hairpins slid from the back of her head and tinkled on the floor. Long pieces of ash blonde hair flopped down on the shoulders of her drab coat.

  Sally smiled. Hairpins fell out of Imogen all the time. Ever since Imogen had decided she would look more like a pianist with her hair pulled back, there had been hairpins all over the flat. You found them buried in the sugar and stuck in the butter. “But I was there when the thunder started before,” she objected.

  “But have you tried to be there twice at once?” Fenella asked.

  It was the deep, arresting voice Fenella used on Mrs. Gill. It stopped Sally in the middle of saying no. She remembered the strange feeling she had had during the hen row, as if she was there twice. And she had been there twice with herself running through the fields at midnight, in a way. She remembered doing that now, as a real person, with her hands to her face and the owls making noises, almost too terrified to go on—but going on, because she had decided that her whole character was at stake. And so it had been, in the wrong way. “I suppose I could try,” she said. “But if Monigan notices—”

  “But that’s it!” Cart said. “Aim for a time when Monigan was busy—when we were all in Monigan’s Place!”

  “When we were all giving her things she didn’t want and took anyway,” Ned said, very bitter about it.

  “And another thing,” Imogen said vehemently. More hairpins tinkled on the floor. “You find me, and we’ll help. Move this hand when you’ve got me, and we’ll all will me to hear you. Won’t we?” she demanded, whirling round on the others in a sheet of hair.

  “We can try,” Fenella said dubiously.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Monigan had taken from Audrey, and from Will Howard, and probably from Ned, too, things they had never expected to give. Now she knew that, Sally did not feel at all bad about cheating Monigan. She sauntered back seven years, pretending this was only a visit of curiosity. She was going, she let Monigan know, to see what happened to Howard and Ned when they were caught soaking wet trying to get back into School. Monigan let her go. It was not important. Sally waited until she had a glimpse of a master—it was not Himself—sarcastically watching the two boys drip on the floor of a corridor, and then she slipped away sideways, ten miles off and an hour or so back.

  She almost went too far. She found herself in the ring of private gallops, under twittering larks, looking down into the bowl of the valley. There was Julian Addiman lying in the grass, and someone sitting some way from him who had to be herself. The rest were all standing up, looking slightly the wrong way. She could not find herself as a ghost there. She was lost among the unreal, shifting posts and the screaming and bleeding phantoms, which surrounded the thick, invisible presence of Monigan. At the moment when she looked, Fenella, shrill in her green sack, stepped forward and carefully put her hands to her head. She could feel Monigan avidly concentrating on what Fenella had to give. She slipped quickly back over the brow of the hill.

  Oh, help! she said. She had forgotten those barrows. There they humped, to her left, a crowd of small green hills, old and peaceful enough to living eyes. But she could see them shrouded in unseen shadow and full of flitting, half-faded scraps of denser shade. Half faded though they were, those shadows had sent that lark up to warn Monigan before. They had been Monigan’s people. That was why they were buried so near to Monigan’s Place. And if they saw her, they would send a lark up again.

  But she had to go past. Imogen had run toward the wood. There seemed nothing for it but to get by as fast as she could. She gathered all her strength and fairly whizzed up the path. From her left, as she whizzed, she could hear the muttering of the old ghosts. It was a blurred mumble, like talk in the next room which you have not quite heard, of old things, old troubles, and arrangements for old crises that had gone by long ago. On her right, the three near-red horses in the field knew she was going past. They broke into a sudden gallop and went, with streaming tails and level backs, from one end of the field to the other. Terrified that this would make the old shadows notice, she went faster still, faster even than Julian Addiman’s car, and hardly knew she was doing it. She only wanted to get by.
r />   The mumbles faded, the wood flashed past, and she was beside the heap of bicycles. Imogen had not been there. Her bicycle was in the midst of the heap, with its chain trailing off on the grass. So where was Imogen? She wished she had asked in the hospital, but it had seemed, from the way Imogen talked, that it was muddled in her mind anyway. Perhaps she did not know where she went. The most likely place seemed to be the heaving, surging wood.

  She drifted into the Back of Beyond. It was unexpectedly open inside. It was all tall young beech trees, rising like gray pillars to the green and tossing roof. Close by the end where she came in, the trees stood aside to make room for a long, sloping mound, overgrown with moss. The mound was not natural. She knew at once that this was another tomb—a different kind of barrow from another age—of someone very important. It was so hushed and cool in there, and the trees so like pillars, that the wood might have been a church built over the bones of an old king.

  As she drifted past the barrow, a voice spoke out of it. I wait here under the hill. Has the time come when I am needed?

  I—I don’t think so, she said.

  I hoped you had come to summon me, said the voice. You are both living and dead, as is fitting.

  This alarmed her considerably. I—I’m really not a messenger, she said. I’m looking for my sister Imogen. You—you haven’t seen her by any chance, have you?