If my urge to tell Robert Underhill my husband’s name had grown from a heartfelt wish to break away at last from my terror of the séance and the proof it carried of my absolute loneliness, imagine my pulse when I woke sometime after two o’clock to feel Archie’s presence in my room.
The dream had been a pursuit of those ridiculous heating pipes in the Ashbrook coach house. They mattered because hot water and steam were Archie’s field of expertise. He had been training for a career as a railway engineer – of the scientific sort who moulded their talents at university. He had graduated and been immediately snapped up by the Royal Navy for rigorous instruction in Bristol. We’d met at a dance there two wild weeks later – and the whole rush had suited him because he had been one of those nice capable men for whom amiableness was a marker of his wonderfully energetic grip on life.
By contrast, when I woke these five years later, I was flustered and my attic room was an unmoving box filled with cold air.
The light switch on the wall above my mattress was found with a fumbling hand and went on with a brief blue shock of an electrical spark. The chairs, the bookcase and the door were all as they had been, standing upright or shut depending on the need. The small fire in the hearth was out but still giving off that pungent smell of coal. The only real difference was that my small, brown handbag had fallen from the table to the floor.
I slid out of bed in the glaring light of the rose at the centre of the ceiling. The leather bag seemed an alien object, somehow. The contents were in danger of tumbling out because the flap had been left open and now it had landed face-down.
I righted the handbag and returned it to its place on the tabletop. Then I heard the board pop on the stairs.
It wasn’t the step that tended to groan in the night. The sound was the crack of old wood finding release after bearing weight.
By rights, I ought to have barricaded myself in and stayed put to talk sense into myself until morning. I’d had dreams like this before, of course, where ghosts and memories muddled my reason.
As it was, I was already dragging open the door in my nightgown – a stiff floor length affair because it was winter and the world beyond the heavy blankets of my bed was utterly freezing. I passed in one barefooted stride across the silent space of the landing.
Closed doors stood inoffensively to my left and to my back. They barred the kitchen and the storeroom. The staircase below was a steep narrow descent into utter blackness.
I arrived at the bottom in a blind slither and dragged heavily upon the grip I threw out to the banister rail. My shoulder met the door that rested upon the bottom step. It swung. I was out into the space beside the box of the main stairs. I could hear my footfalls and the rustle of my nightdress. There was light here because a distant streetlamp was able to penetrate the dark through the open door of my uncle’s office. My desk showed ghost-like in the far corner. A second glow from that streetlamp spread from Robert’s office. His door was open too, only that was wrong because all these doors were usually shut.
A short rush across bare floorboards towards that vacant doorway was all I managed. My pulse was rapid, but not pounding enough to smother the sudden whisper of movement behind.
I span. My heart lurched. The door to the main stairs was open. It was swinging shut. I lunged and got my right hand onto the door’s rim just as it neared the end of its final arc. There was a gap still between the door and the frame. There was glass in the door itself. But no face shone white out there beyond, and that was worse. There was nobody there at all. Not even the ghostly form of a departing figure.
And in that single wild moment of seeing that no one was leaving, I felt the cringing sensation at the back of my skull as my senses began to wonder if the door had been opened to let someone in. I forgot that I was still gripping the rim of the door. And then I remembered. Because the door slammed like it had been caught in a sudden gust of wind and it carried my hand with it to meet the frame.
I remember even now the sound I made.
It was a product of that awful cringing anticipation of knowing that my hand was trapped and imagining what I would see when the door eased a little. And what it would mean for my hand if it didn’t ease at all.
Then the prison of that wooden trap opened for long enough that instinct was able to snatch my hand away.
There was a line across the bones. I was clutching at the limb and barely even clear when the suck of cold air jerked a second time and slammed the door onto its catch.
I tottered. I remember finding enough room within the fierce inrush of pain to know that if a person were truly here, he cannot have been deaf to the sound he’d dragged from me. But the door closed and stayed closed.
And I reeled and shook my hand as if to drive the pain away and gibbered because it just wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t broken because the fingers still worked, and yet the pain wouldn’t stop. And then I was suddenly intensely afraid of more pain, or to be accurate, the first real violence, because there was no thought in my head of ghosts now, but still nothing was moving out there. No telltale shadow was fading away behind the glass into the dark below. No footsteps were beating a reassuring retreat. I couldn’t even be sure that the glass window wasn’t about to darken with his shape before the door opened once more to let this madness back in.
I called it ‘him’ because it was the only way I could frame the strength of this night. In the seconds that followed I was kicking the guest chair across the floor to jam under the door handle. And cringing even as I dropped into the seat to add my weight to the barrier, and sobbing a little now as I nursed my injured hand.
It was a while before I felt the decidedly unpleasant draught of cold air that wafted through the gap under the door. And it was later still that I discovered that the breeze had come from the opening of the shop door. The force that had dragged upon my hand really was made of flesh and blood, and his exit had been secret to the last. I didn’t, needless to say, have the presence of mind to run to the window to spy upon his departing form.
I only had the mind to give up the chase, to stay bound to that securing chair where the telephone was within my sight and to twist back against the office door with my leg braced; while my skin crawled from the bitter cold of the painted wood through my nightdress until the shock eased.
It was in the last few hours before dawn that I stopped cradling that injured limb and went upstairs and dressed.
I had to do it gingerly with my left hand only. The waistband of my skirt was hard to fasten like that. Then I bound up the increasingly swollen right hand with a bandage. It wasn’t broken. I was certain it wasn’t broken, but it still benefitted from the relief of being bound. I think it was terrified of being touched.
I hadn’t even probed the bruise. The skin was too frightened to bear the idea of any more contact after the brutal line of that doorframe. And I was treating it as if it had an opinion of its own because, to be honest, it did. The bandage gave it comfort and a shield to hide behind, and then I could function again as me.
When six o’clock came and the first car drifted past in a wash of headlights, I slipped downstairs into the shop. It was still and calm and the only thing out of place was my set of keys lying on the mat before the door. The door was locked as though it had never been opened. There was a letterbox in the door to explain the arrangement, and there was no ambush waiting within the utterly black ranks of bookshelves. He hadn’t laid a lure for me. He truly had gone.
I returned the keys to their home in my handbag. It was quite something to realise that my ghoul must have claimed them from my room while I slept. It meant he must have been here before I had locked him in with me last night. He must have been trapped inside even before I’d had that complicated conversation about names and farewells outside the darkened office with Robert.
He had been near me all the time that I had been shuffling about the rooms upstairs and listening to the news on the wireless. He had heard me go to bed and finally he had decided to find the means of making his exit.
I didn’t know what he had been doing in Robert’s office, because the papers on the desk were always disordered. But there was certainly a sign that he had let himself into the print room to examine our new store of paper.
I stood there staring at it, wondering just how much of a row Robert had truly had with those fellows from the Oxford printworks.