Diana Jones - Black Maria

“So I called out to him,” said Chris.

“Weren’t you scared?” I said. My heart seemed to be beating in my throat at just the idea. “Yes, but I thought he was a burglar then,” Chris said. “I sat up and thought about people getting killed for surprising burglars and decided I’d pretend I was sleeping with a gun under my pillow. So I said, ‘Put your hands up and turn round.’ And he whirled round and stared at me. He looked absolutely astonished – as if he hadn’t realised there was anyone else there – and we sort of stared at one another for a while. By that time I knew he wasn’t a burglar, somehow. He had the wrong look on his face. I mean, I know he was odd-looking, but it wasn’t a burglar-look. I even almost knew he had lost something that belonged to him and he was looking for it because it was in that room. So I said, ‘What have you lost?’ and he didn’t answer. There was a look on his face as if he was going to speak, but he didn’t.”

Chris said he still didn’t realise the man was a ghost, even then. At first he said he only realised next morning when he snapped at me there was a ghost in his room. Then he said, no, he must have known the moment the man turned round. The room was full of an odd feeling, he said. Then he corrected himself again. I think ghosts must be muddling things to meet. He said he began to be puzzled when he noticed the man was wearing a peculiar dark green robe, all torn and covered with mud.

By the time Chris had told me that far, we had got right along the sea front, past all the little boats pulled up on a concrete slope, almost to Cranbury Head. We looked up the great tall pinkish cliff. It looked almost like a house, because creepers grow up it. We could just see the gap in the creepers and a glimpse of the new fence. And we both went very matter-of-fact, somehow.

Chris said, “You can see some of the rocks at the bottom, even with the tide in.”

“Yes, but it was at night,” I said. “They didn’t see the car till morning.”

Then Chris wondered how they got the car cleared away. He thought they winched it up the cliffs. I said it was easier to put it on a raft and float it to the concrete slope. “Or drag it round the sands at low tide,” Chris agreed. “Poor old car.”

We turned and went back through the town then. I kept thinking of the car. I know it so well. It was our family car until six months ago, when Dad took a lady called Verena Bland to France in it and phoned to say he wasn’t coming back. I wondered if the car still had the messy place on the back seat where I knelt on an egg while I was fighting with Chris. Does sea water wash out egg? And I remembered again that I’d left the story I was writing in that hiding-hole under the dashboard. All washed out with the sea water. I hated to think of that car smelling of sea and rust. It used to have a smell of its own. Dad once got into the wrong car by accident and knew it was wrong by the smell. Chris didn’t get on with Dad. I did, a lot of the time, unless Dad was in a really foul mood.

“When did you know it was a ghost then?” I said.

“Right at the end, I suppose,” Chris said. “He didn’t speak, but he gave a great mischievous sort of smile. And while I was wondering what was so funny, I realised I could see books on the shelf through him and he was sort of fading out.”

That makes four different versions, I thought. “Weren’t you frightened?”

“Not so much as I expected,” Chris said. “I quite liked him.”

“And has he come every night?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Chris. “I keep asking him what he wants, and he always seems to be just going to tell me, but he never does.”

It was windy among the houses too, cream houses, pink houses, tall grey houses with boards saying Bed and Breakfast, creaking in the wind, and sand racing across the roads like running water.

The place had been deserted up to then, but after that we kept meeting Mrs Urs. We saw Benita Wallins first, puffily shaking a rug out of the front door of a Bed and Breakfast house. She shouted, “Hello, dears.” Then there was Corinne West, coming round a corner with a shopping basket, Selma Tidmarsh in the next street with a scarf over her head, and Ann Haversham walking a dog round the corner from that. It was “Hello, how are you? Is your aunt well?” each time.

“Aunt Maria will be able to plot our course exactly at this rate,” I said. “Or Elaine will. How many more of them?”

“Nine,” said Chris. “She talks about thirteen Mrs Urs. I read a book and counted while she was talking yesterday.”

“Only if you count Miss Phelps and Lavinia too,” I said. “What did Miss Phelps say to upset her? Did she tell you?”

“No. Unless it was ‘Stop that boring yakking,’” Chris said. “Let’s get on a bus and get out of this place.”

But the buses don’t start until next month. We went to the railway station and asked. A porter in big rubber boots told us it was out of season, but we could get a train to Aytham Junction, and it turned out that we hadn’t got enough money for that. So we walked out along the path that started by the station car park, through brown ploughed fields to the woods.

“I think it was the day after that I noticed mud on his robes,” Chris said, looking at the ploughed earth. He kept talking about the ghost like that, in snatches. “And the light seems to come with him. I experimented. I went to bed without a candle last night and I could hardly see to find the bed.”

“Do you wake up each time?” I said.

“The first two nights. Last night I stayed awake to see if I could catch him appearing.” Chris yawned. “I heard the clock strike three and then I must have dropped off. He was just there suddenly, and I heard four strike around the time he faded out.”

We had lunch in the woods. They were good, lots of little trees all bent the same way by the sea wind. Their trunks grow in twists from all the bending they get. It gives the wood a goblin sort of look, but as soon as you are among the goblin trees you can’t see any open land outside. We nearly got lost later because of that.

“But what’s the ghost looking for?” I said. I know that was during lunch because I could hear the twisted trees creaking while I said it, and I remember dead leaves under my knees, clean and cold as an animal’s nose.

“I’d love to know,” Chris said. “I’ve looked all along the books in that wall. I took them out and looked behind them, in case the ghost hadn’t the strength to move them, but it’s just wall behind them.”

“Perhaps it’s a book?” I suggested. “Are any of them A History of Hauntings , or maybe Dead Men of Cranbury , to give you a clue who he is?”

“No way!” said Chris. “The Works of Balzac, The Works of Scott, Ruskin’s Writings and Collected Works of Joseph Conrad .” He thought a bit and the trees creaked a bit, and then he said, “I think the ghost brings rather awful dreams, but I can’t remember what they are.”

“How can you like him then?” I cried out, shuddering.

“Because the dreams are not his fault,” Chris said. “You’d know if you saw him. You’d be sorry for him. You’re the soft-hearted one, not me.”

I do feel quite sorry for the ghost anyway, not being able to lie quiet because he’d lost something, and having to get up out of his grave every night to hunt for it. I wondered how long he’d been doing it. I asked Chris if he could tell from the ghost’s clothes how long ago he died, but Chris said he never saw them clearly enough.

The creaking of the trees was making me shudder by then. I couldn’t finish my lunch – Mum always gives you far too much anyway. Chris said he was blowed if he was going to cart a bag full of half-eaten pork pie about and I hate carrying carrier bags. So Chris put some of the cake in his pocket for later and we pushed the bag under the twisted roots of the nearest tree. Litter fiends, we are. The wood was wonderfully clear and airy, with a fresh mossy smell to it. It made it seem cleaner still that there were no leaves on the bent branches – barely even buds. We both felt ashamed of leaving the bag and made jokes about it. Chris said a passing badger would be grateful for the pork pie.