Death of a Ghost Read online

  The sun was high and unforgiving now. The shadows crouched under the eaves. Adam’s house was easy to pick out, though, even if Ossian had to shield his eyes to do so. In the whole sweep of the sea-raked valley his was the only smoking chimney.

  “God bless Mother Bungay!” cried Ossian as he set off down the hill.

  God had blessed Mother Bungay. She was snoring, with a pitcher of ale at her side. Ossian sheathed his dagger and replaced the latch. He passed into the farther room, where Susannah was lodged. On a rush mat, under a woollen blanket, he found her. Heard her first – the rustling of her breath gave her away. Otherwise, she was still, appalling in her stillness. The place stank of Adam’s experiments, and Ossian looked with new disgust at the vials of acidum salis and of vitriol, and the reeking jar of sheep’s urine in which Adam hoped to steep a cross of copper and convert it, with Susannah’s aid, to gold. Ossian spat. Who needed alchemy? He saw everything with transformed eyes now. He was himself converted. To Adam, Susannah was no more than an ingredient to be used and sluiced away. And this was the man to whom he owed his life? His Christian master? He steadied himself against the table.

  “Ossian. I knew you’d come,” she whispered.

  “Don’t talk.” He was kneeling beside her. “I’m going to take you somewhere safe. Away.”

  “You have a winged horse in the yard?”

  She laughed – horribly, painfully. But also loudly; Ossian clapped his hand over her mouth. “Mother Bungay!”

  Susannah’s eyes bulged with agonised laughter. “Ah, you really are the fool I took you for, sweet Ossian. She’d sleep through Doomsday now.”

  Ossian stared at her.

  “Your master should never have tapped his beer so close under that jar of pretty green crystals.”

  It took a while for Ossian to understand. “You poisoned her?”

  “I just made her – careless. Don’t look so horrified! She did not change my dressings as Adam Price commanded her. She hit me and called me Satan’s whore.” Susannah’s eyes blazed, challenging him to find fault in her. “She is a sloven,” she added for good measure.

  “But she’ll wake again?”

  “You ask too much. I am in pain now. Will you lift my shoulder, brother?”

  Ossian fetched one of Mother Bungay’s shawls. The snoring of Mother Bungay, he heard now, was not her own. It was a rattling, tongue-sucking snore that would have wakened her from any natural sleep. He did not want to listen to it. He feared that it would stop.

  He cushioned Susannah’s head with the shawl. The sacking beneath her dress was bloody, but the blood was old.

  “I’ll fetch Jerusalem,” he said.

  He put Jerusalem between the shafts, but it was pitifully hard, getting Susannah on to the cart. Every movement tore her wounds. He found a hurdle and pulled Susannah on to it, sacking bed and all. She whimpered like a child. Jolted over the threshold she screamed outright. And, having held her by the midriff to ease her in, he drew back his hand to find it scarlet with fresh blood.

  “It’s a corpse you’ll be lugging to freedom,” she whispered. “Fool.”

  Jerusalem did the lugging. Ossian was grateful that the weather had been dry for the past week. They left no tracks and the cart ran freely down the road from Adam Price’s house to the river. But the hard ruts shook blood from Susannah at every step. Ossian guessed that it was eight hours since he had left Winchester. Adam must have noticed his absence. But perhaps he would not yet guess the reason for it. The night before, Ossian had been careful to speak of the fair at St Giles – a big place, full of booths and hawkers, and easy to get lost in. Adam would never have spared him, but Ossian had managed to sound wistful.

  “They say there will be parrots, master.”

  So Adam might seek his errant boy with the parrots at St Giles Fair first, before he turned to Lychfont – and Ossian hoped for that. It was as close as he had ever come to telling Adam a lie.

  He had covered Susannah with her blanket and a few scraps of sacking. But it was hard for her to stay silent as Jerusalem pulled the cart along. At first they met no one. There were workers in the fields, but they were not interested enough in the distant sight of Ossian leading a cart to approach him. Adam’s lad was tainted with Adam’s own sinister power, an ill-omened child. It was only at the Kerney Stone that they found Peg of the Willow, the swaddling bundle at her breast, her with the ghosts for company.

  “Where are you taking that dead lad, Ossian?” The question whistled out between her two good teeth. “What are you doing in a dead lad’s skin?”

  Peg was old – fifty years at least. Her baby son had died in her belly, and that was thirty years back. Being unbaptised, he could not be buried within the churchyard wall. But if he was not given a Christian burial, Peg demanded, then who was to say that he was truly dead? The priest, Sir John, grown gluttonous on tithes, could not answer her. Nor could Adam Price, the cunning man, for all his spells. They would hide it from her, but she knew the truth. Her William was alive. Or if he was not, he could be made to live, and she would make the necessary sacrifice. That was nothing but her mind, which she laid down willingly. William came to her now, in the shape of a raggedy moppet – and all other lads were dead lads next to him.

  “I’m off to fetch firewood, Peg.”

  “There’s wood in your barn. What do you need with firewood?” she asked.

  “It must be the sweet-smelling pine that grows by the King’s Wood. My master says.”

  “And why are you taking a dead lad with you?”

  “There’s no dead lad, Peg,” said Ossian. He could not stop himself from glancing back to make sure that Susannah’s legs were covered. The blanket trembled, a very little, with her breathing. “Just you and me.”

  “I can smell his sweet flesh from here. But Adam Price will have his secrets.” She hugged the bundle to her and laughed.

  Ossian slapped Jerusalem and they started off from the Kerney Stone. Peg of the Willow called after them. He heard the words again: “Dead lad!”

  He turned back to Peg and made the sign against the evil eye. The laughter buzzed back down the slope from the Kerney Stone to the birch wood, through the grass where the track now took them. He could no longer make out Peg’s voice. There was shelter here, a tunnel of leaning green with high banks. Ossian knew that it would guide them to a creek and so to a small harbour where two or three families kept their boats. They knew Ossian. He could have asked them for a roof that night for himself. But for Susannah? He tried out lies in his mind until he found one that fitted. He would say he had found her robbed and wounded in the lane. If he could keep them from searching her wounds too closely, they would probably believe him. They must not see when those wounds had been made, nor how. He must not let them recognise Susannah as a witch’s child.

  “Stop!” said Susannah.

  Her voice had been so faint that even the small sounds of the tunnel lane had swallowed it. Ossian abandoned Jerusalem and ran to the back of the cart. Susannah had somehow kicked her cover off. Her skin was mottled shadow under the restless leaves and, watching the play of the leaves on her skin, Ossian felt the lane change around him. It came to him that he was standing underwater, fathoms deep, that the lane was roofed with the green scum of a standing pool. Susannah’s head was crooked, angled to the earth.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Ossian’s words bubbled from his mouth and pricked on the treetops.

  “I’ve a pain. No, here.” She placed his hand on her heart. “You’re fading, Ossian.”

  Her lips barely moved. Ossian looked about him in panic. The lane was green, watery green, nothing but water. They were drowning in greenness. He had to get them away. Scrambling up through the trees at the side of the lane, he saw patchwork forest, then the river marshland: impassable, green. He fell back into the dyke lane and waded through green light to the other side, pulled himself up by green branches. First he saw only the dark mud floor split with leaf-light. A green
, tranced world. Then: dint, dint. The blunt sound of a hammer on metal and there was a sign, nearby, of a broad red track and smoke at the end of it, and a warning voice told Ossian that there had been no forge in this place before. But the birds were spiralling from their roosts at the shunt of a hammer into red-hot iron, the whinny of a horse nervous at being shod.

  There was Susannah dying at his back.

  Ossian hurried to the cart. Jerusalem chewed a thistle, oblivious of the suffocating greenness in which he stood. Ossian urged the beast forward, to the dip in the bank where the red track split and curved between tall, spaced trees. Susannah said, did nothing. He was afraid that she was already dead and dared not look. The smithy was a low heap of mortared stone. The red path led straight to it and ended. There was no sign of the shod horse and the hammering died as they approached. Inside, though, someone was working a bellows. Ossian recognised the sound as it blew through the packed coals, turning them to dragon’s teeth. Fire made him feel safe. He remembered – starved, gaunt days, with ice on the river and iron light, when Adam’s fierce blaze had been his only comfort and he had clung to the hearthstones until he was cinder-black. He forgot to be careful about the cart and whipped at Jerusalem’s flank to make him run.

  “You’ll be safe here,” he heard himself say. “A smithy’s safe.”

  The door of three lashed planks stood open. But the smell of the place was wrong. Not the leather and burned horsehair, the crimson-orange heat of the farrier; not the charred-bitter, metal-sour smell of the goldsmith’s forge, but some yellow harsh poison, a sparking cloud of blue gases. And in the midst of that cloud sat Adam Price. He was pouring thick liquid from a glass vessel with a long swan neck. He looked up – but not in surprise – and, seeing Ossian, placed the vessel calmly on the table before him. Ossian recognised Adam’s expression. It was the same one he had worn when he knew he would have to take the poker to Scrope’s thigh.

  “I am almost sorry,” he said to Ossian, “that you came.”

  “OK. WHAT DO you want?” Ossian stood four-square in front of Colin, who was hugging a marble fish to stop himself from toppling into the ornamental pond. Colin’s mind and voice were clear enough, but his body was not quite sober and his face was copper-green.

  “You should have paid attention before, when I first warned you. It’s much too late now.”

  “You’re talking about Sue?”

  Colin gave a round of slow, ironic applause. “Still taste her on your lips, can you? That soft tongue flicking?”

  “Sod off. At least I’m not a pathetic loser spying through the grass. Is that how you get your kicks now, Colin?”

  Colin smiled. “I wasn’t spying. I was right behind you, over by the trees. Sue saw me well enough. Meant me to see, too. She wanted to show me just how deep she had her hooks into you.” He lurched forward and made a grab at Ossian’s arm: “I feel sorry for you though, my ghostly friend!”

  Ossian took a moment to catch up. “You heard as well as saw then.”

  “I heard. Sue was spot on there, I’ll grant her. You’re virtually transparent.”

  Ossian said angrily: “You were the one who warned me off all that ghost stuff. You told me not to listen to her.”

  “And how I wish you hadn’t! She’s a siren, see? You shouldn’t listen to sirens.”

  “You can’t have it both ways! Do you really believe I’m a ghost? Are you as crazy as her?”

  Ossian stepped forward with his fist bunched and bent Colin back over a tail with marble scales.

  “All right,” Colin winced. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about the King’s Head the other night. I thought I’d dreamt it at first, but now – now I don’t think so. I was sitting outside the pub, looking up the lane. It was just getting dark when I saw you, Ossian, with the sunset red behind you and your shadow stretching out like a giant’s. And I was about to call to you, only you were—”

  “I was what?” prompted Ossian.

  “Different. This will sound ridiculous. But your head was glowing. Like it was made of polished metal – all yellow and red. And then the sun ducked under the horizon. You weren’t there any more.” He looked Ossian full in the face. “You vanished.”

  “Hah! I bet you needed another drink after that.”

  “Too right. But since then I’ve been watching you, Ossian. I’ve been on your case. You want to know what I think? Truly? I think you’re the genius of the shore, my friend. I think you’re part of the furniture here in Lychfont, the ghost of all ghosts.”

  This meant nothing to Ossian. He pushed Colin back further, till his head was dangling just above the water. But still Colin spoke.

  “You’ve always been here. You are Lychfont.”

  Ossian scoffed. “I’ve only been here twice in my life!”

  “You reckon? I thought you might have more of a clue. Where did you stay in America?”

  “Philadelphia. You know that.”

  “Yeah? And what’s it like, Philadelphia?”

  Ossian corralled a few maverick facts. “You’ve seen it on the telly, haven’t you? The Liberty Bell? Betsy Ross? Cheesesteaks?”

  Colin shook his head. “That’s what I’d get out of a travel brochure. I want to know what you did. Did you have a life there? Friends? You sure you didn’t dream it?”

  It was ridiculous. But for a moment, that dreadful blankness threatened to swamp Ossian’s mind. The radio static that flared whenever he thought of America hummed and buzzed. Think! Philadelphia!

  “Lizzy!” Ossian clutched at the name. “I had – I have – a girlfriend there.”

  Colin smiled thinly. “You sound relieved – but I bet you haven’t thought of her in days. How nice to remember her now, though, as things start getting weird the Lychfont way. Lizzy sounds like a good, steady girl, the kind you could settle down with. A student, did you say?”

  “She is and I didn’t,” said Ossian. He was still wondering whether or not to punch Colin in the mouth.

  “Studying something reassuring like Social Sciences, perhaps, or Applied Upholstery.”

  “Art History,” Ossian muttered.

  “Not so far off the mark. What were we talking about again? Oh, yes, Philadelphia. City of Brotherly Love. That place you remember so well.”

  “If you don’t believe me, ask my dad.”

  “Is he substantial enough for that? No, of course, Jack Purdey is a towering figure in today’s landscape scene. Get real, Ossian – if you can! How large do you think you loom in his world? When he’s here, your dad thinks he has a son called Ossian. When he’s outside Lychfont, who knows? He’s doing his watery thing. Pastels and gouache! You said it yourself – you’re only here to make the scenery look good. Excuse me.”

  Colin paused to be sick into the pond. The vomit spread in cumbersome circles, then caught in reeds. Something bright-eyed and small was fritting beneath the surface.

  “Don’t you get it, Ossian? This place is heavy! It presses down! It takes strong minds and twists them like spaghetti round a fork!”

  “Piss off, Colin.”

  “Don’t believe me. No, no, you shouldn’t. I’m not very trustworthy and this story looks about as likely as your dad winning the Turner Prize. So off you go; pretend to be a real person with a real life. I won’t stop you. But just try leaving Lychfont and see. Head up the road into the forest. Put the Solent at your back and see if you can feel that hot wind shrinking skin to bone. See if the road bogs up to your thigh.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Colin. I’ll try that some time.”

  “Don’t leave it too long, Ossian!”

  But Ossian did not go into the forest yet. He turned on his heel and walked along the path to the front of the house. The two-seater was parked near the porch, with a bare patch in the gravel where Jack had skidded to a halt a few days before. The metallic paint was growing dusty. And there was Jack himself, lumbering out of the house with a canvas under his arm and a holdall on his shoulder. He pointed the remote. The
horn sounded twice. Lights flashed.

  OSSIAN WAS STANDING on the spongy lip of a bog. Moss grew under his feet and sedge, yellow and withered, speared the margins of the water. He dared not look behind him, for he knew that at his back a crowd had gathered – a crowd that was nervous and expectant. The people in it had come to watch him die.

  Peering down through the midge-haze into the shallows, he saw the shapes of half-rotted branches and roots, tangled like corpses in the fine mud. The mud itself was streaked with dark lines and misty in the water, as if an object barely buried there had just stirred. Was stirring! Ossian gasped – the ripples of the mud pool thickened and the light coarsened as it fell on a rough, leathery arm. He saw the creature’s elbow first, but it might have been a wrist, so impossibly long were its fingers, and so deceivingly folded with billows of dank, black skin. Those long fingers were forced to curl and bend at the edge of the bog; they reached up the bank and presented him with a row of tapered nails, and just below the water’s surface a pair of round eyes blinked. Ossian backed in terror, but at the same moment he felt the soft edge of the bog slide from under him and he was toppling over, down and down.

  “Shall I dip the napkin again?” said a female voice.

  “No, no – let him wake. It’s better he knows a little, as I say. Ignorance will never find the path.”

  “Well, keep that blade ready.”

  Ossian remembered now. A cloth had been clapped over his mouth. It had smelt foul but the foulness had made him sleep – so deep that it was not until the blade was tried against his neck that he blustered free of it.