Ghost E-Book

Helen Grant

• Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 543

Beschreibung

"Highly propulsive, incredibly seductive. A masterclass in how to develop intrigue and heighten tension. I loved it."CJ Skuse, author of SWEETPEA Langlands House is haunted, but not by the Ghost you think. Augusta McAndrew lives on a remote Scottish estate with her grandmother, Rose. For her own safety, she hides from outsiders, as she has done her entire life. Visitors are few and far between - everyone knows that Langlands House is haunted. One day Rose goes out and never returns, leaving Augusta utterly alone. Then Tom McAllister arrives - good-looking and fascinating, but dangerous. What he has to tell her could tear her whole world apart. As Tom and Augusta become ever closer, they must face the question: is love enough to overcome the ghosts of the past? In the end, Langlands House and its inhabitants hold more secrets than they did in the beginning...

Leseprobe

Langlands House is haunted, but not by the ghost you think.

It’s the ghost of a girl who died here during the War, that’s what they say.

The house is difficult to get to – in the middle of a private estate and surrounded by forest. But if anyone does make their way up the winding track under the dark canopy of trees, they eventually find themselves on a gravel area in front of a big grey stone building topped with slate-roofed turrets. Langlands.

Although rare, this does actually happen. People travelling across country by foot stray from the usual routes and stumble across the house. Once, a census taker came to knock in vain. And occasionally, people come especially to look for the ghost.

Any of these people may find themselves standing on the gravel staring up at those grey walls, streaked with patches of damp and lichen, and the windows which are always darkly reflective, like jet, because there is never any light behind them. They may glimpse her at one of those windows, looking down, or perhaps gazing back at them from a patch of deep shadow under the trees that ring the house.

Sometimes they doubt their own eyes. They stare and stare, and sometimes she goes away. She drifts away from the window or vanishes into the darkness under the trees. Other times, she gazes back at them, not going anywhere. That always frightens them off. They back away, or they just turn right round and make a run for it, skidding on the gravel, stumbling on the ruts in the tracks. I’ve seen this happen.

A rational person would say, how can this be, considering that there are no such things as ghosts? And they would also say: how did you see this happen?

The answer to both of these questions is: it’s me they see. I’m the one they run away from, round-eyed, sometimes screaming. The Langlands ghost is me.

In an instant my eyes were open, staring into the dark. My heart was thudding at the deep rumbling that swelled until it seemed to fill the sky above the house. There was one brilliant flash that traced the outline of everything in my room for a split second: the iron bedstead, the wash stand, the bookcase. Then a terrible splintering crash which reverberated through the entire house. It was so loud that I thought the entire roof must be coming down on my head.

I threw back the covers and slid out of bed, the wooden floorboards cold under my feet. From somewhere within the ancient house I heard a series of minor shocks, as though something were crumbling and falling in. I imagined a widening breach, cracks running through the aged structure, a sudden and final collapse. I ran for the door.

The moment I wrenched it open I knew my mistake. Langlands House had neither gas nor electricity; the passage outside was pitch dark, lacking even the moonlight that seeped into the bedroom between the shabby velvet curtains. The candle, unlit, was by my bed; instinctively I felt for the matchbox I always carried in my pocket, but of course I was clad only in a nightdress.

No time to go back for it. I was thinking about the one other person in Langlands House – the person who was also in danger if the building came down.

“Grandmother,” I shouted.

Light bloomed at the other end of the passage as my grandmother came out of her bedroom, carrying a brass oil lamp with the flame protected by a glass chimney. She too wore a long nightdress, but she had sensibly thrown a warmer robe over hers. Her white hair hung over one shoulder in a loose plait, giving her a strangely ethereal look.

“Are you all right?” I wanted to drag her downstairs that instant, to find safety, although I could hardly think where that would be – under the stairs, outside in the grounds?

Grandmother was remarkably composed. “Perfectly all right,” she said calmly. She looked at me carefully, with no sign of urgency in her manner.

“We should go downstairs,” I said urgently. “We’re being bombed.”

“I very much doubt it,” she said drily.

Now it was my turn to gape at her. “But did you hear it? It sounded like something fell on the house,”

“Yes,” she said. “But listen. Do you hear anything else?”

She raised her hand, and in spite of myself, I did listen.

Nothing. No further reverberating crashes; no droning of engines overhead. A window rattled in its frame from a sudden gust of wind. That was all.

“But what was that crash?”

Grandmother said, “We had better go and see what it was. But you must put a robe on first.”

I was amazed that she could be so sensible at such a time. But my teeth were beginning to chatter. I went back to the bedroom and wrapped myself in my dressing-gown before we went to investigate.

The subsiding, shifting noises I had heard had stopped. Instead, there was a curious rushing sound that I could not at first identify; it made me think first of the sound of a distant river flowing, and then of loud whispering.

The first two rooms we looked into were seemingly undamaged. We looked into the third, on the east side of the house, and even Grandmother was shocked; a soft sound escaped from her, as though she had been winded by a blow. There was a hole in the ceiling, and through it we could see the night sky. In fact, we could feel the night on our upturned faces, because the wind was coming in, and it was carrying drops of rain with it. You could see the whole structure of the roof in a brutal cross section, the ragged-edged plaster and the shattered beams and beyond that the broken edges of tiles.

Apart from the rain and the wind’s doleful howling, which was producing the rushing noise I had heard, there was no sound from outside that I could detect. Nor was there any light except that of the moon, half hidden behind the scudding clouds. If this was an attack, it was over.

In the middle of the worn Persian carpet was a mess of plaster – whole chunks and pale dust – and broken stones. I approached it with caution, looking for pieces of the bomb that must surely have done this. At first, I saw nothing, but as I circled the heap of rubble, the light from Grandmother’s lamp picked out the dull gleam of metal.

“Look at this.”

I craned over, straining my eyes in the low light. Grandmother came closer to look for herself, but after a moment she shook her head.

“That’s not part of a bomb, child. It’s the weathervane. The storm has brought one of the chimneys down. That was what we heard.”

I didn’t think a person of seventeen could possibly be considered a child. But I let it pass because I was digesting what she had just said.

The storm.

Was it possible that the tremendous crash that had ripped me out of sleep was simply a chimney coming down in the wind and rain?

I glanced up to check that no more debris was about to fall from the ceiling, and then I put out a hand and brushed plaster dust off the metal object. Sure enough, it was the weathervane from the topmost chimney, bent and twisted beyond repair.

I suppose I should have been relieved. For the War to have reached somewhere as remote as Langlands would have meant something very serious indeed. That the skies above the house were lit up with nothing more sinister than lightning was a good thing. We were safe. Langlands was safe. So why was I disappointed?

I used to dream of someone from the outside coming to Langlands. I dreamed of a friend before I even knew what that was.

I didn’t lack company. Grandmother was always there, except on the rare occasions when she went into the nearby town for things we couldn’t make or grow or find for ourselves at Langlands. She was never too busy to talk to me; in fact, sometimes I had the feeling she pushed herself to do it, to amuse me or to tell me things she considered educational. She told me about the assassination of Julius Caesar while kneading bread dough so forcefully that it might have been the assassins’ heads she was pummelling. Another time, I remember listening to her describing the life of Mary, Queen of Scots while we pulled up carrots and potatoes from the earth, shaking them to loosen the clinging soil.

It wasn’t as though I was always alone, or never heard the sound of another voice. I simply felt that there could have been something else. The idea was somehow shapeless; I couldn’t think how or why things would be different with a friend to the way they were with Grandmother. They just would be.

I would daydream about someone being there with me – someone my own age. Sometimes when I had no chores to do and was free to roam around the house and grounds, I would imagine that this someone was with me, keeping step but a little way behind, so they were just invisible, even out of the corner of my eye. It was understood that I was too polite to turn around suddenly to catch them unawares. Since we never entertained, I had no idea how I was supposed to amuse a guest. So I would show them Langlands, as a way of showing them my life.

Langlands was a fortress and a labyrinth and a treasure chamber all rolled into one. There were bedrooms and sitting rooms, dressing rooms and store rooms, and funny little circular rooms in the turrets that were no use for anything because you couldn’t put furniture against the walls. It had a grand main staircase, with newel posts carved into stylised thistles that looked more like fat artichokes, and other, hidden staircases once used by servants. There were servants’ passages, too, so that the long-vanished staff of Langlands House could move about discreetly. I wondered whether their footsteps had been audible. I thought so, because in every part of the house the ancient floorboards creaked and groaned under passing feet. It must have been strange, I thought, to hear the sound of someone pattering from one end of the house to another, without being able to see them. Perhaps that was how Langlands had acquired its reputation for being haunted.

Some of the rooms were not in a state to be used – they were full of lumber, or empty, or closed up completely. Two of us could hardly use so many rooms, after all, let alone heat them all properly. We had a bedroom each, furnished with some of the best things in the house, although the rooms themselves had been selected on the basis of which held the best beds, since it was completely impossible for the two of us to move anything so heavy by ourselves. A long time ago, back in a time my memory could not reach, I shared Grandmother’s room, but as soon as I was old enough to have my own, I had moved to my current one at the other end of the passage because I liked the iron bedstead and the green velvet curtains.

In addition to our own rooms, there was a library containing thousands of volumes, and we had a piano, which Grandmother played beautifully and I less so. There were other, fascinating things all over the house – paintings and portraits, and stuffed creatures and exotic souvenirs brought from overseas by adventurous ancestors. It was easy to lose an afternoon sorting through strange seashells or faded postcards or coins worn smooth by age.

There was even a little stone mausoleum hidden away in a tangle of overgrown bushes in the woods, where former inhabitants of Langlands House had been laid to rest centuries before. The path that had once led to it was almost entirely overgrown. Grandmother discouraged me from going there out of respect for the dead, but sometimes when I strayed close to it, I would glimpse the grey walls, disfigured with growths of lichen. It had never bothered me, solitary child that I was, to have the long-dead nearby. There was something almost reassuring about it; if I had no wider family circle than Grandmother, at least I had these historical forebears.

I’m making it sound like a museum, but Langlands was a working house, even if we couldn’t keep up every part of it with only two of us to do the work.

We had nearly everything we needed. There was plenty of firewood for the winter, and we grew a lot of our own food. We had a vegetable garden, chickens, and aromatic herbs in pots. There was a water pump in the kitchen. It took a fair amount of effort to keep things running: to tend the vegetables, to bring in the wood, to draw and heat water for a bath. I preferred the work to studying, though. As well as Mathematics and Botany, Grandmother made me learn Greek and Latin, but I could never see the point of those. It wasn’t as though I even had anyone to talk to in English apart from her. If outsiders ever came to Langlands, I always had to hide.

And that is my very earliest memory: hiding.

I don’t recall who came to the house, or why. I remember someone knocking at the front door, the blows brisk and loud on the weathered oak panels. I remember toiling up the wooden staircase to the first floor, holding up my skirts in my fists. At the turn of the stairs, I looked down at the hallway below with its black and white chequered tiles and saw my grandmother staring back at me, her brows drawn together and her jaw thrust forward, her eyes blazing an urgent message. She gestured at me, abruptly.

Go.

She couldn’t shout it – the person outside would have heard.

I reached the top of the stairs before I heard the bolts being drawn back on the oak door. In a corner of the upstairs landing there was a stuffed bear standing on his hind legs, his jaws frozen in an eternal snarl. I was not afraid of him; his savage expression was belied by the moth-eaten patches in his fur and the bluntness of his claws. I squeezed into the space between his hairy back and the panelled wall and crouched down, hugging my knees. I waited, breathing in the dusty scent of fur.

I don’t know how long I hid there, nor what my grandmother said when she came to find me. What I remember is just that: having to hide myself.

You don’t question things like that when you are really tiny. But later, I did. Why did I have to hide? Why couldn’t I leave the estate? Where was my mother, Grandmother’s daughter, of whom she spoke so seldom and so sadly? And eventually: who was my father, of whom she never spoke at all, and what had become of him?

The answer was always the same: the War.

Far away, on the other side of the dark forest that surrounded Langlands House, War was raging. Aeroplanes flew in formation across the night sky, showering the cities below with incendiary bombs. Great metal machines with caterpillar treads instead of tyres rumbled through the ruins of towns, crushing everything in their path. Even the oceans were infested with deadly submarines that cruised back and forth, stalking the ships. Those who were not called up to fight had to work for the war effort. Grandmother was too old, she said, but I was not; if I were discovered, we would be separated.

“You’d be taken away.”

I remember her saying that to me, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the tenth. She held me by the shoulders, shaking me a little, and her grip hurt – it was too tight. I wanted to pull away. A strand of white hair had shaken loose from the knot at the back of her head, and hung down over her face; she looked a little wild.

“You’d never come back, do you understand?”

I did understand; she made me understand all of it. I would have to go into the city and work in a munitions factory, under constant threat of bombing. No more hours passed curled on the window seat in the library with a book open on my lap; no more picking my way silently through the forest, to be rewarded with a glimpse of a young deer lifting its head to look at me, or a rabbit dashing away with a flash of white tail. Just endless, grinding work, with the stink of hot TNT in my nostrils and the constant danger of accidental explosions in addition to the threat of enemy attacks. Grandmother talked and I listened until terrible visions filled my head, of girls my age whose skin and hair was dyed yellow from incessant contact with sulphur, of girls crushed flat in the bombed rubble of their apartment houses. And supposing my curiosity about the world outside Langlands was so persistent that it overcame my fears? Well, there was the guilt.

Alone at Langlands, Grandmother would be unable to keep things running by herself. A practical problem like being unable to chop enough firewood could make a harsh winter lethal for someone her age. When the War finally ended, then assuming I had survived it, I might tramp back to Langlands and find that it had become a tomb. I imagined myself walking up the track in winter, the frozen earth black under my feet, white flakes of snow drifting slowly down; finding the house dark and cold, the front door locked, no answer to my knocking. Walking around to the back door; glancing into the chicken run and seeing a few pitiful heaps of feathers lying still and silent. Seeing those tiny deaths; knowing I don’t want to go inside the house because death is there too.

That – that was why I had to hide, and why I could never go outside the estate. It didn’t mean my mind didn’t want to go there.

Sometimes I would go down to the very edge of the Langlands estate, where the forest ended. There was a track leading away through the fields, eventually meeting a road. The road was too far away for me to see very much of what passed up and down it, but I could pick out the larger vehicles. Everything seemed to be moving about very peacefully. Now and again I saw an aeroplane, but there never seemed to be anything sinister about that, either: no dropping bombs, no distant fires.

So, I said to myself that Grandmother had chosen our hiding place well, and Langlands really was too remote to be affected by the War. What else could I believe in, if not in her? Who else did I have in the whole world but her?

The morning after the storm, we went into the damaged bedroom to find more rainwater coming in through the hole in the ceiling.

The room was never slept in, and the carved oak bed once used by a previous occupant had been dismantled, the large wooden sections propped against a wall. It had escaped damage, but the ancient Persian carpet that covered most of the floor was sodden, its faded crimson threads darkened to the colour of blood.

I glanced at Grandmother and her face was grim. It was already nearly the end of October; with winter coming, we could expect more rain, and worse. I imagined opening the door on one of those glacially cold December mornings and finding the room a dazzling white cavern of fallen snow, the skeleton of the bed almost buried in a drift of it.

Now that the savage Scottish weather had breached the old house, it would gnaw its way more and more deeply into the open wound. Damp would seep into the rooms below; timbers would rot and collapse. Like a festering injury, untreated, it would be the death of Langlands.

Grandmother looked at the ragged hole in the ceiling for a while, her lips set in a tight line. Then she said, “This is more than we can repair ourselves.” She shook her head. “I shall have to drive into the town and ask someone to come.”

It was a good thing she was looking at the hole in the ceiling and not at me. Ask someone to come. I could have danced around the room. I glanced up at the hole in the ceiling, willing the damage to be even worse than it looked.

“You know what this means, don’t you, Augusta?” Grandmother was saying.

Her calling me that, Augusta, snagged my attention. She only ever did it when she had something serious to say. The rest of the time she called me Ghost, a nickname I’d had ever since I was tiny and hadn’t been able to say my own name properly. ’Gust, I used to say, and somewhere along the line it had turned into Ghost. It was apt really, considering that that was what the few people who saw me thought I was.

I knew what was coming.

“I have to hide,” I said. I did my best to sound resigned. If she realised I was dying to see whoever came to the house, she would make it her business to see that I was out of sight. Would she go so far as to lock me in my room? I didn’t think she would, but I didn’t want to risk it.

“I’m sorry,” Grandmother said. “It will be very dull for you. The work may take days.”

She looked at me. Grandmother had eyes the colour of summer skies, but the impression they gave was anything but sunny. There was an intensity to their gaze; it was nearly always useless lying to her. This was important though. I made myself hold her stare, my expression carefully neutral. I tried very hard to look as though it had not occurred to me that having someone come to Langlands would be anything but very, very boring.

“You really cannot be seen,” she said. “You understand that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll go up to the attic and stay there the whole time, Grandmother.”

“You’ll be terribly uncomfortable up there,” said Grandmother, doubtfully. She looked down at the sodden carpet, strewn with chunks of stone and plaster. “But we simply cannot leave this as it is. It’s out of the question.”

“No,” I agreed. “It’s all right, Grandmother. I’ll be perfectly fine. I can take some bread and cheese and a lantern and a stack of books,” I added.

“You’ll be so cold,” she objected, but I could see that she was weakening. There wasn’t much else she could suggest, anyway.

“I’ll put the old bearskin from the library up there, and wrap myself in blankets,” I said. “I’ll go and make a space, right now,” I added and slipped off before she could protest. I ran to the end of the passage, where there was a green baize door. On the other side of that were the steep narrow stairs that ran up to the attic; I went up them as fast as I could, hearing the door slap shut behind me. I had to suppress the urge to whoop out loud, in case Grandmother heard me.

I didn’t really need to clear a space in the attic. There was a space there already, behind all the trunks and shrouded picture frames, and close to the only window. I went up there sometimes when I wanted to think about something in peace. The window had a view out over the gravel drive and the forest; I could imagine myself skimming away over those treetops like a bird. Now, I picked my way over the trunks and boxes and settled myself by the window.

Outsiders were coming to Langlands. Never mind that it would probably be ancient workmen, too old to be called up to fight. It was still the most interesting thing that had happened for ages. New people. New faces. And I would see them; I was resolved about that.

Grandmother drove into the town in her black Austin. The car reminded me of an enormous black beetle, with its darkly gleaming body and rounded lines. It had two big headlights like protuberant eyes.

Grandmother did not think that the workmen would come back with her that day, but she told me to make myself scarce anyway. After she had left, I dragged the bearskin up to the attic, and then went back for some books. I spread out the bearskin and tried lying on it, experimentally, with my head close to the window. There was a very clear view of the drive, although I wasn’t sure how much detail I would be able to pick out from that distance – and I wanted to see everything, even if the workers were gnome-like old men.

I was still staring down when Grandmother’s Austin reappeared, coming up the drive from the forest. I watched the car turn the corner, and waited to see whether a second vehicle would follow. There was none.

By the time I had run downstairs, Grandmother was already in the kitchen, unbuttoning her sober navy coat. There was a cardboard box full of groceries on the big pine table. Normally, I would have fallen on it, to see what she had brought back with her; today, I had other things on my mind.

I suppose I showed it too clearly, because Grandmother said rather sharply, “Stop dancing about, Ghost. Whatever is the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“If you have so much energy, there’s plenty of work to do.” Her expression softened. “I mean it, Ghost. You may as well use some of it up, because you’re going to be stuck in the attic for the next few days.”

I made myself stand very still. “A few days?”

“Probably. I spoke to Mr. McAllister. He’s coming to assess the damage tomorrow morning, but he doesn’t think he can repair it in a day.”

“Oh dear,” I said gravely. I didn’t miss the glance she shot me. There are dangers in living for a long time with only one other person; eventually, you can more or less read each other’s minds. Something in my tone of voice had hit a false note. She was wondering whether I could be trusted to stay out of sight. I was asking myself the same thing, only I already knew the answer.

She didn’t pursue it, though. What else was there to do? We couldn’t mend the roof ourselves; we would have had no idea where to start. Leaving the room open to the elements wasn’t an option, either. Grandmother had no choice but to trust me.

Early the next morning I took what I needed up to the attic: the blankets, the bread and cheese. I took a couple of apples from the kitchen too. At twenty to nine I slipped downstairs one last time, hoping that Grandmother wouldn’t hear me. There was a room on the first floor that we used to call “the study”, although it didn’t look as though it had been used as one for a very long time; too much furniture had been put inside, so that you had to weave your way around it to get from one side of the room to the other. I went straight to a tall oak press, the dark wood shiny with age, and opened the door, turning the key with exquisite care to avoid making any sound. I was just reaching inside for the thing I wanted when I heard something from outside the house: the distant rumble of an engine.

“Augusta!” My grandmother’s voice sounded brittle with anxiety.

I grabbed what I wanted and slipped out of the room, closing the door behind me as I quietly as I could. Then I went to the head of the stairs and looked down. Grandmother was standing in the middle of the hallway, like a queen on the black and white chessboard of a floor; her hands were clasped in front of her, and she was rubbing them together compulsively.

“I’ll go,” I called down in a low voice, keeping the hand with the precious object in it out of sight. When I saw that she had understood me, I flitted away along the passage. I was halfway up the back stairs when I heard tyres crunching on the gravel before the main entrance, and by the time the slam of a door closing reached my ears, I was in the attic, pulling the door shut behind me.

There were voices below, already inside the house, I thought. My heart sank a little. It was no good if the visitors were already inside; I wouldn’t see a thing.

I glanced down. Perhaps it had been a mistake going downstairs again for the field glasses; it had cost me just a little too much time. I’d probably have to wait right until the end of the working day for a glimpse of anyone coming out of Langlands now.

Still, I couldn’t resist looking. I got down onto my hands and knees, and then onto my stomach and elbows, inhaling the dusty scent of bear fur, and then I wriggled forward until my breath was misting the window glass. There was a vehicle parked in front of the house. It was nothing like Grandmother’s. This was something altogether more functional, like a big box on wheels. I supposed that was what it was: a container for transporting things from place to place. It was somehow sleeker than Grandmother’s Austin, but I thought it was uglier. There were letters painted onto the side of it, scarlet against the white background: Neil McAllister. Underneath that was a string of numbers.

I put the field glasses to my eyes. They were heavy, and the little screw you had to use to adjust the focus was stiff; first I struggled to turn it, and then it came loose and went too far, and the view swam out of focus again. I managed it in the end, though, and now I was able to see the vehicle in sharp detail.

It was then that I caught a flicker of movement at the front of it. I held my breath, waiting, and for a moment I thought I had imagined it, or that I had simply seen the motion of the tree branches in the wind at the other side of the drive. Then someone stepped out from behind the vehicle, out into the open, and I saw him.

He was young, like me.

It was a shock, realising that; I felt it as sharply as an indrawn breath of freezing air. Someone the same age as me, or just a little older. And he was...he was something I didn’t have words for, or words I would not have dared to say, even to myself.

I gazed down from the attic window with a kind of stunned fascination, watching him strolling about the gravel drive, scanning the front of Langlands with casual interest, his breath visible on the cold autumn air. I felt the warmth in my skin as the blood rose to my face, but I didn’t stop looking.

The weight of the field glasses was already beginning to make my wrists ache but I couldn’t put them down; instead I tightened my grip on them. He had brown hair, not quite dark enough that you could call it black. Even with the field glasses it was impossible to see the exact colour of his eyes at this distance, but I thought they were grey or hazel, light-hued under dark brows. He looked around him in a way that somehow suggested wary interest. Perhaps he had heard the stories about Langlands – about the ghost.

Once, he glanced up towards the high window behind which I lay full length on the bearskin, gazing down, and I froze, my heart thumping, not daring to move in case I drew attention to myself, but he looked away without reacting. I suppose my face was invisible, so high up, behind the reflections on the glass.

He wore a dark jacket of some thick material, blue cotton twill trousers and heavy boots. Nothing as smart and elegant as the costumes displayed in the oil paintings at Langlands, which included tailcoats and frock coats and military braid.

Clearly, people on the outside had no time or energy to spend on fancy clothing.

Why hasn’t he been called up? I wondered. What he does, rebuilding things, maybe that’s considered important, like being a doctor. Grandmother said they don’t get called up. Maybe this is the same.

I touched the glass, feeling it cool under my fingertips. I watched him lean against the side of the vehicle, obscuring the lettering. Neil McAllister. Was that his name? His face was turned towards the house; I suspected he was listening to or watching something. A moment later his posture changed, and he pushed himself away from the van, standing to attention.

Grandmother appeared on the gravel below with a second stranger, whose shiny bald head pronounced him old and therefore less interesting.

Something about the way Grandmother moved suggested that she was not happy. She moved stiffly, her shoulders raised, her head a little to one side, as though she were turning away from bad news. I thought I knew what the problem was. It was the younger man. She didn’t want him here. She probably judged, quite rightly, that I would find him interesting – assuming I ever laid eyes on him, which she was evidently determined I wouldn’t.

I watched the three of them – Grandmother and the two men – moving around the gravel drive as though they were taking part in some formal dance that none of them liked performing. Grandmother gesticulated several times, and then I saw the older man shake his head. I guessed that she was objecting to the younger workman, though I couldn’t imagine on what grounds. She could hardly say that she didn’t want young men around her granddaughter, since they weren’t supposed to know I was here. At any rate, whatever she was saying, it wasn’t working. The older man had his cap in his hands, standing politely bareheaded before a lady, but he evidently wasn’t giving way. Several times I saw him shake his head very slowly.

After a while, some kind of agreement seemed to have occurred; all three of them began to move towards the stone porch which overhung the main door of Langlands House, and they vanished from my sight. I knew what was happening now. Grandmother would take them to the bedroom with the ruined ceiling so that they could assess the amount of work required to repair it.

I knew better than to go downstairs and try to eavesdrop or even peep out through a crack in the door, although I was dying to. Grandmother would be on her guard; the merest creak on the attic stairs would land me in hot water. All the same, I came down three or four steps and sat there for a while, listening. I knew those stairs, like I knew every other part of Langlands; the creaks they gave when you went up or down them was like playing a tuneless harmonium. The top ones weren’t too noisy so long as you kept to the right-hand side, so I did that and then I sat and waited.

Langlands was never truly silent. Even at night, when I lay motionless in my bed, I could hear the house creaking. A change in temperature as day broke or night fell would make the ancient boards expand or contract. Sometimes you would have sworn that someone was moving stealthily about. The slightest breath of wind would make the old windows rattle in their frames, or shake the branches of the trees that clustered close to the back of the house, so that they would tap on the glass. I wasn’t frightened by these noises. My ear was finely attuned to them, so that now I could pick out the discordant notes, the sounds that told me people were moving along the upper floor of the house. Not just people: Grandmother, the old man, and...him.

I hugged my knees and tried to hold my breath, the better to hear the tiniest sound. I heard the brisk sound of a door closing; that would be Grandmother, shutting off one of the rooms from the visitors’ view.

She must hate this, I realised. I couldn’t remember any outsider ever coming into the upstairs part of the house. No work that the house had ever needed had required it – until now.

What was his name, the one my age? I supposed it was reasonable to assume that the older man was the one in charge, so presumably he was the Neil McAllister whose name was painted onto the vehicle. Was the younger one his son? Sons were sometimes named after their fathers; I knew that from the dusty novels in the Langlands library. He might also be Neil – but he might just as easily not. I tried to imagine what name might suit him instead, and in this way, I amused myself for some time, until the door at the bottom of the stairs opened and Grandmother appeared.

It was just as well I hadn’t been sitting at the bottom with my ear to the door. I had been too preoccupied with my own thoughts to hear her coming.

She looked up at me, and although half her face was in shadow, I could see the disapproval on it.

“You shouldn’t sit there, Ghost. If someone were to open the door, you would be plainly visible.”

I knew whom she meant by someone. The thought of coming face to face with him gave me a sharp pang that was both thrilling and guilty.

I took a risk and said, “I heard them leave, so I was just waiting here for you.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “Well, you had better come down now. They have gone, and they’re not coming back.”

“Not at all?” I couldn’t keep the note of alarm from creeping into my voice, and I saw her frown. “I mean, what about the repairs?”

“No,” she said. “Just not today. Mr. McAllister has some materials he has to buy.” She went on for a minute or two after that, telling me what the workmen had to get and what they were going to have to do both outside on the roof and inside in the bedroom, but I was only half listening to that; I was too overwhelmed with my own relief. I couldn’t have stood the disappointment if the outsiders had gone without my having more than a glimpse of them.

I went down the stairs to where Grandmother stood and followed her down the landing. I wasn’t thinking at all about where she was going, but I should not have been surprised that we went back to the bedroom with the damaged ceiling. Of course, she would want to examine it again and satisfy herself that she trusted the workmen’s opinion, and she would want to tell me about it.

I hoped half-heartedly that the men would have left some sign of themselves in the room. There was a certain thrill in knowing that they had been here, on this exact spot – that he had been here. The room wasn’t one I had visited very often, but now I looked around it with new interest, trying to fix everything in it in my mind: this was the environment in which the men would be working, these were the things that they would be seeing every day they were here.

Grandmother talked, gesturing at the ruined ceiling, holding out a chunk of fallen plaster. Meanwhile, I wandered about, giving as much of an appearance of rapt attention as I could whilst taking in everything for myself, and after Grandmother had finished and taken herself off downstairs, I still lingered in the room.

It was the middle part of the day now, and for once it was clear and dry; the light coming in through the windows was cold but very bright, showing the contents of the room with crystal sharpness. That was how I came to see it – a small sliver of silver glinting on the dusty floorboards. I knelt and picked it up. It was flat and thin and I had to use my fingernails to do it. I held the thing in the palm of my hand and stared.

A key. It was obvious what it was, but I knew immediately that it didn’t belong to Langlands; there was nothing here it would have opened. Grandmother had a great bunch of keys, although we rarely bothered to lock anything up, and all of them were of a much more robust design, with cylindrical stems. Nor were any of them silver-coloured; they were mostly made of dull brass.

It belongs to them. One of them dropped it.

It’s like we’re being watched. I had the same feeling yesterday when we arrived. It’s a dark day, because of the rain, and inside the house, it’s so gloomy you can hardly see what you’re doing. The air feels thicker in here, like something invisible is pressing in on us.

Well, I say to myself, perhaps it is thicker, there’s that much dust in it. You can smell the house – a smell of old furniture polish and dead flowers and mould. Like something decaying.

We go up to the bedroom we saw yesterday, and right enough, the rain is pouring through the hole in the ceiling. Dad asks Mrs. McAndrew whether there’s any other way we could get at the roof so he can take a closer look – a ceiling hatch leading into the space between the ceiling and the roof, maybe? While they’re discussing that, I wander over to the window to look out.

There’s something on the window sill. A shiny silver key. It looks newer than anything else in this room. It looks like my door key, the one on the keyring in my pocket. I put my hand into my jeans and pull out the keyring, and my door key’s not on it. There’s just the key for the bike and another one I never use, a locker key I was supposed to give back when I left high school.

I glance behind me. Dad is following Mrs. McAndrew out of the room. She’s still talking, in that voice that makes it sound like she’s telling him off, and waving her hands around. I suppose they’re going to look at ceiling hatches.

It’s definitely mine. How did it get here? I didn’t miss it yesterday, but Dad let us in when we got home. Okay, so I could have dropped it in this room, but I didn’t come over here to the window. Someone’s picked it up and put it here, and if it was old Mrs. McAndrew, why didn’t she just give it back to me? And it’s not just my key that’s sitting here on the window sill. There is something else with it. Until I picked the key up, the two things were side by side, like they were put there on purpose.

It’s a coin, an old one, now brown and dull. There’s a man’s head on it. There are words around the edge of the coin, but they don’t make a lot of sense: what does IND IMP mean? The only one I can recognise is GEORGIUS. I guess that’s George.King George. When was that?

I turn the coin over in my fingers. On the back there’s a woman in a helmet with a thing like a pitchfork. ONE PENNY, it says. Underneath the woman’s feet is a date. The date is 1944.

1944, that was the Second World War – we did it at high school. I think about the other thing I heard about back then, only it was from the other local kids, not the teacher, who came from Edinburgh. The Langlands ghost. The girl who died in the War.

I tell myself I’m being stupid. It’s just an old coin, old like everything else in this house. The old lady must have left it here.

But why? I think. Why would she do that?

I have a strange cold feeling about this. The back of my neck prickles; I think I have my hackles up, like a dog at bay.

I think: What if it wasn’t Mrs. McAndrew who left that coin there where I would find it, if I looked around for my key? What if it was someone else?

A coin – that was what I decided on. I gave the matter a lot of thought. I had to leave something, to show that the key had been put there on the window sill on purpose. It couldn’t be anything as obvious as a note. Supposing Grandmother went into the room before the men did, and found it? Or supposing they showed it to her? No; a coin was safer. If Grandmother saw that on the window sill, she might reasonably conclude that one of the men had found it lying about and put it there, or even that it had been there all along, overlooked. There were bits and pieces all over Langlands house – things put down and forgotten by former inhabitants, decades ago.

If they found the key and the coin and said nothing to Grandmother, then–

Then what? I said to myself, as I sat at the top of the attic stairs, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and wondering whether anyone had gone into the damaged room yet. It was a question I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know who would find the things I had left. Didn’t it all depend on that?

For a while, there was nothing to hear except the rain; then I heard the groans that meant that the landing floorboards were protesting under the weight of people moving about. I heard muffled voices, but I couldn’t pick out any individual words.

I hugged my knees, shivering. I was used to Langlands House with its unheated corridors and ill-fitting windows, but it was hard to stay warm sitting still in one place. I dared not move about, though. I imagined the men working in the rooms below under Grandmother’s watchful eye, pausing to listen to the sound of light footsteps overhead. They would glance swiftly at Grandmother: isn’t she supposed to be the only one in the house? Then they would look at each other and wonder...

The men weren’t the problem, though. Grandmother would tell them it was the boards expanding or rats in the attic. The trouble would come later.

No. Better to stay still and silent, at least while I knew they were all on the first floor. I did my best, although by the middle of the day I was so chilled that I crept across the attic and opened one of the trunks that were stored there to look for another layer to put on.

Every single piece of clothing I owned had come from these trunks. Whenever something had become too short or too tight for me to wear, or latterly, when I had worn something so long that it was beyond our powers to repair it with sewing and darning, Grandmother and I would come up and select some new items from the trunks and boxes stored in the attic. There were a great many things, ranging from tiny silk robes edged with lace to fit a young baby, to a sombre dark greatcoat of heavy wool, with a cape over the shoulders. Grandmother tended to pick out the plainest, most hard-wearing things she could for me; it was no use, she said, my wearing a tulle dress when I had to collect firewood or pump water or pull up carrots from the kitchen garden. This hadn’t prevented me from seeing some of the treasures folded away neatly in the trunks, with lavender bags that had long since lost all but the faintest trace of their scent tucked between the layers. As well as the tulle, there were high-necked lace blouses and delicate white lawn frocks, and a beautiful violet silk dress with dozens of tiny buttons up the back. There were gloves and underthings and pretty fans, although these last struck me as useless: I could hardly remember a single occasion when it had ever been hot enough at Langlands that I might have needed to fan myself.

The trunk I opened now did not look promising: the first thing I found in it was a black bombazine mourning dress, the fabric stiff and heavy. After I had burrowed down through several layers of gloomy-looking clothing, however, I found something that looked deliciously warm: a thick velvet cape decorated with tiny jet beads and trimmed with black fur. I didn’t care that it looked funereal; I wrapped myself in it and luxuriated in its warmth, rubbing my nose against the soft fur.

Late in the day, when the light was fading from the attic window, Grandmother opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and looked up to find me still swathed in the black cape.

“Goodness me, Ghost,” she said. “You look like a very young widow.”

I was stiff from the cold and sitting so long, despite the cape. I went carefully down the stairs towards her. “Have they gone?”

“Yes,” said Grandmother. “A few minutes ago.”

I hesitated, wondering how to ask what I wanted to know. I didn’t want to seem too eager.

“Have they finished the work?” I asked in the end. I knew they couldn’t possibly have, but it seemed a safe thing to ask.

“No, it’s going to take a couple of days,” said Grandmother. She looked directly at me as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and for a few seconds we were staring into each other’s eyes.

Then I shivered, and she said, “You look chilled. Come down to the kitchen and have some cocoa.”

I followed her along the passage. It would be time to light the lamps when we got downstairs; already Grandmother was little more than a dark shape moving ahead of me. We passed the room where the work was being done; the door was ajar but there was no time to do more than glance through the crack.

It was not until much later, after we had eaten and I had warmed myself by sitting close to the kitchen range, that I was able to come back upstairs by myself to look. By then, it was completely dark both outside and inside the house, so I had to take a candle with me.

As I made my way upstairs, the flame flickered, sometimes streaming out almost horizontally behind the wick. Langlands was a draughty place; sometimes it seemed as though the old house was sighing. I paused at the head of the stairs and looked down, just in case Grandmother should have decided to leave the warmth of the kitchen and follow me up. But all was still and silent in the hallway below.

I pushed open the door of the room and stepped inside, holding up the candlestick. It was colder in here than it was in the rest of the house, because of the hole in the ceiling. Overhead I could hear something billowing restlessly in the wind, and guessed that the men had put up some kind of temporary covering.

I stood for a moment, eyes straining to see in the soft yellow candlelight, nostrils flaring in the cold air. There was not much to see. The pile of broken stones and twisted metal that had been in the middle of the carpet had been removed; all that remained was an outline in pale dust on the darker background of the Persian carpet. I went over and stood looking down at it, and I could feel the yielding dampness of the carpet under my feet. Once the work was finished, we would have to light a fire in here, to try to dry it out. I looked up at the ceiling, but the light from the candle did not reach far enough to show me the state of the repairs.

I found myself putting off going over to the window where I had left the key and the coin. Now that it came to it, I was afraid I would find that they were exactly where I had left them, unnoticed. Or perhaps the key would have been found and pocketed without any further thought. I lifted the candlestick again, experimentally, and I thought I saw something gleam on the window sill. Oh no. Still there. My heart sank.

Now was the only time to look, though, so I picked my way carefully across the room.

The coin was there on the window sill, that was the first thing I saw. It wasn’t exactly where I had left it – at least I didn’t think so – but it was still there.

I stepped closer and saw that the key had gone. I glanced all along the windowsill and it was not there. Then I looked at the floor and there was no sign of it there, either. So it had really been taken.

I looked more closely, and I could see the tracks of fingertips in the dust on the sill, where someone had picked up the things I had left, then pocketed one and put the other back. I put out a hand and touched the track marks with my forefinger, tracing them. Behind me the covering in the roof shivered in the wind.

Then I saw what I had not seen before. Among the faint marks on the dusty sill with their abstract sweeps and arabesques, one stood out very clearly.

Someone had drawn a question mark in the dust.

It was not such a big thing, a shape drawn in the dust on a window sill; it was gone in an instant when my hand passed over it. But I had stepped over a boundary; I had exchanged messages with someone from outside. It felt as strange as if one of the bewigged and bejewelled ladies in the oil paintings downstairs had suddenly come to life. Writing in the dust was a brilliant idea. Easily executed, easily erased, and if Grandmother happened to see it, it could be passed off as a piece of idle amusement.

What shall I say in return?

Of course, I was going to reply; it never even entered my head that I wouldn’t. But as I stood there with the wax from the candle slowly running down the candlestick and congealing on my fingers, I wondered what my answer should be. If I committed myself so far as to write my entire name on the windowsill and Grandmother saw it, I would have incriminated myself quite clearly. No; I dared not do that, not yet.

After some further thought, I reached out and wrote A with my fingertip – simply that, the letter A, for Augusta. I wrote it at the side of the window sill, close to the shabby brocade curtain, where it was only obvious if you were looking for it. Then I rubbed my dusty fingers clean on my dress, feeling vaguely guilty.

It was time to leave. No point in risking being caught in here when Grandmother came upstairs. It would only make her suspicious. I took one last look at my handiwork, the initial drawn out in the dust. Then I shielded the candle flame with my free hand and slipped out of the room as silently as I could.

The passage outside was completely dark. The blackness at the head of the stairs was so absolute that it was clear Grandmother was still shut up in the warm kitchen; otherwise I would have seen the faint glow of the lamp she carried when she came up to bed.

I went to my own room and closed the door. I set the candlestick down on the bedside table and began to get ready for bed. It was never a task I wanted to linger over – the room was high-ceilinged, and even if we lit the fire, it rarely became properly warm. The moment between taking off my clothes and pulling my nightdress over my head was always gruesome. I put on a robe too before I started undoing my hair from its long plait. Unbraided, my hair fell to below my waist and it took some time to brush it out. Sometimes this task irritated me, but tonight I brushed mechanically, hardly aware of what I was doing.

All I could think about was that question mark drawn in the dust. Did he write it there – the younger one? I imagined him standing there by the window, head bowed, tracing out the shape with his forefinger. Thinking about it made me feel hot and cold with a strange guilty excitement, as though I had been caught eavesdropping on someone.

But was it him? Or could it possibly have been the older man? I wished I knew more about the way people behaved. It seemed to me that Grandmother was more serious than I was, and less tolerant of anything unexpected. I could not imagine someone old exchanging cryptic messages with an unknown person for the fun of it. This didn’t mean that every older person was like Grandmother, though, nor that every younger person was as consumed with curiosity as I was.

I went on thinking about it after I had climbed into bed and blown out the candle. It was the last thing I recall thinking about as I gradually became warm in my cocoon of blankets and drifted off into sleep, and it was the first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes the next morning.

I awoke to the sound of rain rattling against the window panes. The downpour had not stopped.

From the attic window I saw the men arrive again, but this time they parked close to the corner of the house, out of my line of vision. I watched for a long while after that but saw nothing more, and heard nothing but the rain on the roof.

Eventually, driven by frustration, I crept down to the bottom of the attic stairs and pressed my ear to the door. You could never say that Langlands was entirely silent, with all the creaks and groans the old house made, but it was as silent as it could ever be. I pulled the door open and stepped out into the passage.

The damaged room was empty, as expected. I approached the window from the side, keeping behind the curtain where I could not be seen from outside. Then I looked out.