Reginald Hill: The Stranger House

It was, she recognized even as she put it, a bloody stupid question. Once admit ghosts, then the laws of rational discourse no longer applied.

There was a faint chink of china from the doorway. Thor stood there, a trayful of dirty dishes in his hand.

He said, “I didn’t realize you two had snuck off to hold a séance. What’s all this about spirits?”

Sam looked from Thor to Mig and back again. This was in some sense holy ground to both of them, but you didn’t acknowledge holiness by evasion and deception.

She said, “Mig sees ghosts sometimes. One of them looks like your painting of my namesake, Sam Flood.”

She saw the jocular light fade in the big man’s eyes and his knuckles whiten as he gently set down the tray.

“Indeed,” he said in a cool controlled voice. “Then you asked a good question, Sam. Why on earth should our Sam’s phantom decide to take a trip to Spain when there were people closer to home he had so much more cause to haunt?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” said Mig wretchedly.

“A case of mistaken identity, perhaps?” Thor went on. “I don’t have any personal experience, but I daresay one ghost looks much like another.”

“For Christ’s sake, Thor, stop being so sodding English!” yelled Sam. “I know this is sensitive stuff for you, but it’s the same for Mig too, can’t you see that?”

Thor froze for a moment then, making himself relax, he said, “Sorry. This has been a hell of a day for all of us. Why should anything surprise me? Mig, tell us about your ghost.”

Mig looked at Sam as if requiring her permission. She smiled encouragingly and he told his story, all of it, including the information gleaned from Simeon’s document.

“I thought I was beginning to make some sense of it all,” he concluded. “I’ve felt from the start that I was guided here. I think Sam was too, though no doubt she’ll put it down to the power of inductive reasoning.”

“I think if there’s some divine power clever enough to get us both here, why the hell didn’t it stop what happened to my gran in the first place?” she retorted.

“Children, children,” said Thor, back in full control. “Young people who are fond of each other should never have serious arguments in the presence of a witness and out of reach of a bed. Mig, I have no idea what your visionary experience might signify other than you need psychiatric help. If we discount that possibility, then that leaves some sort of supernatural intervention which by definition is not susceptible to rational analysis. There was a hymn we used to belt out in St. Ylf’s back when I was too young to resist the pressures of convention and the back of my dad’s hand. It went on about the mysterious ways of God and concluded, He is His own interpreter and He will make it plain. In other words, wait and see.”

Good plain common sense, but he was using it to conceal how deeply this trespass on his most deeply sensitive memories had troubled him, thought Sam. Her own instinct faced by any problem was to rip at it, tooth and claw, until she found a solution. Nothing is unknowable. But she was learning to tread more delicately.

Thor picked up the tray again and said, “I don’t know about you two, but I think another little drink is in order.”

He went out into the kitchen.

Mig stood up, said “Thanks” to Sam and tried to kiss her forehead. This struck her as a touch too avuncular so she raised her lips to meet his and gave him a bit of tongue into the bargain just to remind him who he was dealing with. He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled, and turned to study the portrait once more.

“Hey, you’re not going to go weird on me again,” said Sam.

“No. I’m past that. In fact it was more the shock of recognition than any sense of the supernatural. That’s the odd thing. I could understand it better if I did get that kind of feeling as I looked at the picture, but I don’t. And when I was up at the Moss yesterday, standing there looking out over the place where he drowned himself, you’d have thought I would have got something. But there was nothing other than a normal reaction to such a dreary place.”

Sam said, “Describe it.”

“The Moss? Why, it’s just a huge flat area of lank grass, the kind of spiky olive-colored stuff that grows on swampy ground. From a distance it looks as if you could walk over it, but as you get closer you see it’s dotted with pools of black water, some hardly more than puddles, others large as ponds. The only brightness is the occasional patch of livid green, some kind of lichen, I think. Again, it looks solid enough, but if you put your weight on it, your foot goes right through into foul black mud, as I found to my cost. Which reminds me, I haven’t returned the clothes I borrowed from Thor.”

“What about stones? Rocks?”

“I told you,” he said, puzzled. “It’s wetland. A morass. When you get back to the solid ground there are some huge boulders, terrifying things, God knows where they rolled down from. But there’s nothing on the Moss itself, or if there is it’s buried so deep you’d need a submersible to find it. Why so interested?”

Sam was saved from answering by the return of Thor with three tumblers filled with Scotch. Mig took his gratefully and downed half of it in a single draft.

Sam said, “No thanks, Thor. Like I said, I want to keep a clear head. I’ll get myself some more coffee though.”

She went into the kitchen, refilled her mug from the cafetiere, but didn’t return to the living room. Instead she went out into the courtyard. What she was looking for was exactly where her eidetic memory told her it was, the tub of polished and many-colored stones standing in a corner. She put her hand into the tub and plucked three of them out, one gleaming white, one dusty red, one gray-blue, like the Woollass eyes.

Like her own eyes.

“There you are,” said Thor behind her. “Mig suddenly remembered he’d been heading for the loo when he strayed into the living room and saw the picture. And you were on your way to the phone, weren’t you? Changed your mind?”

“Decided it’s a bit too late,” she said. “Thor, these stones…”

“Nice, aren’t they? You like them? Trust a sharp Aussie to pick the one thing unchargeable to my artistic magic. Nature did all. To wit, the sea. There’s a couple of beaches and one bay in particular which abound in such lovely pebbles. I suppose I could charge you for my time in collecting them. But no, I feel a generous fit coming on. Help yourself, my dear, help yourself!”

“Thanks,” said Sam. “So what do you use them for?”

“Pebble mosaics mostly, our rough Cumbrian answer to the glittering pavements of Byzantium. Curiously enough, the first one I ever did was up at the Hall, to mark the elevation of old Dunny to a papal peerage or some such thing. It took the local fancy and there are many homes in Skaddale where you can see the result. The Woollasses have always been the glass of fashion and the mold of form… Sorry. I’m being crass. I was forgetting… you know…”

“That it’s my family you’re talking about?” said Sam. “That’s OK. I’m going to be facing them shortly, remember? The better prepared I am, the better prepared I’ll be. So Dunstan got a title from the Pope?”

“Oh yes. His father was delighted. Even more pleased, I heard, than when his boy was awarded the Military Cross in the war. God and Caesar, no question who came first in old Rupert’s eyes.”

“So he’s a hero too? I can imagine him leading a cavalry charge!”

“I think you’re thinking of the wrong kind of war,” said Thor. “No, he didn’t dash about in a lovely uniform waving a saber. On the contrary; as he was in the SAS, I suspect he did more crawling than dashing, and more quiet garrotting than noisy swashbuckling.”