One
September 1983
There were ghosts at the Loch House long before we arrived, with ours. Marie told me about them towards the end of the journey. After nine hours behind the wheel and all that silence, her voice didn’t sound right. It was hollow and tinny and seemed to scrape at the air trapped between us. Air that had smelt of melting rubber for the entire four hundred mile drive.
"There have always been stories about the place," she said. "Sightings of shadowy figures and sudden lights. Strange noises in the night. For a while, we even thought about including them in the brochure. Some people like that kind of thing."
Looking back on it now that I’m older, I imagine that she was simply talking for the sake of talking, chatting to ward off the panic as the reality of what she was doing finally started to set in. I can clearly remember how her eyes flicked at me in the rear-view mirror, a dark, wet flash and then away, and how her shoulders had risen; she was practically cowering in her seat. Clinging to that wheel. And certainly not thinking straight to say the things she said.
"According to local legend, there are four or five, at least. A grey lady, of course – there’s always a grey lady, and some old, scraggy, wise woman, perhaps a witch, from long ago. And there’s a fisherman, lost out on the loch – actually, there are probably a few of those. But this one left his widow too, still waiting in the house. She killed herself when he didn’t come back. Hung herself, I think."
While she spoke, I turned away, away from her and away from the junk piled with me in the cramped back seat. There was so much of it, her clothes and books and a few of my things, my Metallic pen-set and my Girl’s World head, a Sindy horse wedged against my thigh. I was sick of looking at it all, as I was sick, already, of listening to Marie. The last thing I needed then was her thin, mindless chatter, her clumsy, stumbling voice, so different from my mother’s. I leant against the car window. Outside, there was only blue sky and yellow-lit grass. The blue was endless and very still, but beneath it, the grass moved in deep, slow swathes and ripples. It made me think of cat fur, of Mr Whiskers, left behind.
When I felt her gaze on me again, quick and hot, I didn’t turn. In the distance, across the grass, there was a black speckling of birds like a spreading rash. Crows, I decided. If I squinted, I could see that they were moving, but only just. Bobbing amidst that tide of grass. Pecking, I supposed.
"We used to be terrified, when we were kids," Marie went on. "Jamie, that’s my brother – sorry, was my brother, he’d spend the whole summer playing tricks on me, jumping out of wardrobes and putting ketchup on the sheets. But really, I think that he was just as scared as I was."
Inside my head, I began to hum. Wondering why she thought I might be interested in her brother, in her family at all. Through the window, I watched the black specks crawl and separate and rise. ‘A murder of crows’, I remembered; Dad had told me that. Despite the shine of the day, the glass was icy-cold against my forehead, but I kept my face there. I pressed harder, and felt the jolt of the car’s wheels inside my teeth.
And: "Oh," Marie went on, just as brightly. Just as stupidly. "There was supposed to be a child-ghost too. Another drowning, I think. A young girl, apparently. About the same age as you -"
She stopped, hearing herself at last. She didn’t gasp, but she might as well have. The thick air sucked in around her and I felt the chill from the window creep down my neck, and up again, beneath my hair. Goosebumps unfurled along my arms. I kept my palms pushed flat against the pane, my small jaw gritted.
"Damn," she said. "Oh, Damn and Christ, Libby . . ."
Her voice had fallen, it was low and whispery now, dangerously soft; I hoped that she wouldn’t start crying again. If she started to cry, if she so much as sniffed, I thought I might scream – although it wasn’t her ghost stories that bothered me. She should have known that.
Despite the ‘Misty’ annuals buried in my suitcase (two dog-eared volumes of comic-strips, featuring ghoulish teachers and cavernous portals and creeping, severed hands), the last three weeks had wiped away any belief I had in the supernatural. The world had become too solid for such fantasies, too harsh and real and hurting. There were no longer any mysteries, just cold, sharp facts.
I was only ten years old, but already my heart was hardening. Sitting there, pressed against the juddering glass, I could actually feel how hard it was, a stone fist clenched inside my chest.
And besides, I had seen photographs of the Loch House, and it didn’t look haunted. It didn’t even look real. It was too square and white, with a row of evenly spaced windows tucked beneath the roof, and a bright red door. It was too obvious, like a little kid’s drawing – not that I would have ever drawn a house that way.
In the front of the car, Marie was managing not to cry. Or sniff, even. I pulled myself away from the distant birds and the grass and the blue, to stare at the greasier stripes of hair sticking to her crown, and at her shoulder blades bunched-tight beneath her cheap, bobbled cardigan. Mouse-brown hair. Porridge-coloured wool.
At the cattery, Mr Whiskers had put his claws into that wool after she had dragged him from his carrier. He’d unhooked stray threads into baggy loops, and then drawn strings of blood across her fingers. But when they closed the cage, Marie had wept as if he was her cat, while I just walked away. I didn’t put my hands to the mesh, I didn’t touch him goodbye. As I reached the door, I heard her babbling and gasping behind me, and then a jangling crash as she dropped the contents of her handbag on to the tiled floor, in her search for a tissue.
"That witch ghost," I said, and my voice remained totally my own, clear and precise, as I leant closer to her mousy hair. "Did she keep cats?"
Marie turned her face; she opened her mouth, but didn’t speak. She shook her head instead, and I found some satisfaction in that, as I did in the warm flutter of her sigh, a moment later. A wave of helplessness that rolled out of her, despite herself. I let it lap over me. In the mirror, her eyes were glittering and even darker. Almost black.
And so the silence resumed between us, and we drove on, although now there was a kind of ringing to the quiet, and I felt an ache beginning, in my skull. The rubber smell deepened, becoming something scorched, and outside, the trees were back. They appeared every now and then, the furthest ones a spray of feathers and splinters, embedded in the blue. They were just beginning to yellow around their edges. The summer, like everything else, would soon be gone.
I was ten years old. I was ancient. I pictured my head drifting with dust instead of thoughts. I wanted that. But the turns in the winding road were distracting; they nagged at me, they kept me there. I realised that, more than anything else, I was longing to be still.
The car, which had been grating gradually uphill for a while, seemed to reach the summit all at once. The sparse trees and swirling grass fell away and for a moment, there was only that blue. The sky held us. And then the valley opened up and there was so much to see, I could only snatch at it in pieces. I glimpsed pale, overgrown fields and the broken lines of dry-stone walls. There were several shaggy, towering pines and a great, strange pyre of blackened logs. A line of gentler trees and bushes queued towards the water’s edge, their shivering foliage gauzy beside a white crockery tumble of shattered-looking rocks. And in the midst of everything, there was the massive silver of the loch.
It was literally breathtaking. I winced before it; I closed my eyes against the flash of it, but felt the burn even through my lids. The car was descending rapidly. The road had become surprisingly smooth, as if we were slipping down some vast, soft throat, and when I opened my eyes again, the land felt thicker, closer. The world outside was suddenly more real.
I found myself grabbing for my window, cranking at the handle. As I wound down the glass, the scent of water was so strong that I could taste it; it filled my mouth with glistening stones. We rounded another bend and there before us, was the Loch House, looking just like its picture, except that there was a car parked at an awkward angle outside it, and people too, a man and a woman, their bags strewn about the drive.
"Damn it," said Marie. "They were supposed to have left last night."
The wide, rusted gate stood open and we bumped through it over a cattle grid, invisible beneath a carpet of mud and fallen leaves. The house grew larger. This close, its whitewash was not quite so dazzling, age had soured it in places, like curdling milk, and there were long greenish water-stains running in giant fingers from the guttering. There was a pattern like graffiti on the door too, where the vibrant paint was peeling away in ragged strips.
The man scarcely registered our arrival. He drew back one arm and released his fishing rod, spearing the dark mouth of his Datsun’s yawning boot, but the woman tilted her head towards us, narrowing her eyes. She stood with her arms folded while the breeze played with her blue-black hair, lifting it away from her scalp in coiling springs, matting it like fleece.
Marie pulled over. She cut the engine, but instead of getting out, she sat amidst the emptiness with her head bowed, clutching her keys, while I stared at her. Beyond the windscreen, the woman went on staring at her too.
"Damn, damn, damn," Marie muttered and then practically threw herself against the door. I watched as her handbag bundled out with her from the floor of the car, the strap becoming tangled with her broad, clodhopping feet. She wore such heavy, sensible shoes, with thick soles and tightly knotted laces, but they didn’t stop her tripping up. I felt the black haired woman’s cool, sharp smile play across my own pursed lips. I met her watching, hazel eyes. But then Marie was hovering between us and although I couldn’t catch a single word she said, the tremor in her voice rattled all the way back to where I sat, among her luggage.
I gazed past them to the loch. I couldn’t help it; it pulled at me, although it wasn’t silver anymore, but a perfect petrol blue. Still gleaming. With an effort, I turned and saw that the windows of the Loch House were shining with the same slick light. The red front door was closed and judging from the visitors’ bags and their open boot, I thought that the house must be empty – and yet that blue at the windows made it appear full. Full to brimming. Like the loch, it was reaching out to me, and despite my newfound scepticism, I felt the small beginnings of a shudder pinching at my neck.
Then the red door slammed open and my heart swung with it, but in the next instant, I was rolling my eyes. There was a girl in the doorway, that was all. A girl with the same broad, brooding face as the black-haired woman. Her daughter, I supposed. She was not my age, but older, wearing a turquoise beret and a denim jacket, and a smear of lip-gloss so generous that I could see its glimmer from the car. She was twelve at least, perhaps even thirteen. Another tourist, no longer welcome. The red door fell slowly shut behind her; no one else appeared from within. She stalked away from the house with wide, bouncing strides without once glancing back, or out, towards the loch. Of course she’d be impatient to be gone. After all, what was there here? What was there, really?
As she approached Marie’s car, she stared right in. An impressive grey gum bubble billowed from her shimmering mouth and then snapped back, frog-like, against her face. Behind it, her expression was more bored than curious and when her eyes found me, she slung out a long, slow, curling look, as if I was scum. She’d probably been practising that look all week (what else was there to do here?), but where once I might have eyeballed her straight back, or barked "Yeah – what?" now I caught myself turning away, a mouse just like Marie.
No, not like her, I told myself. Never like her. And I pushed open my door and climbed out in one smooth motion, though there was a chill to the air that I hadn’t expected and the loch smell was even stronger down here, and danker too. There were pungent undercurrents of slimy weeds and rotting leaves and old, dead fish. The girl kept walking. She took no notice of me, but slipped into the back seat of her own family’s car, holding her turquoise beret to her head.
Meanwhile Marie went on speaking to the woman; she looked very young beside that harsh black hair and those folded arms, almost as young as the beret girl. While Marie squeaked, her hand moved slowly across her porridge-coloured stomach. Her fingers were creeping and circling, fiddling with her buttons before slipping back into an absent caress. She couldn’t have felt much, there wasn’t much there – a slight thickening perhaps, that was all. But then she wouldn’t really have started to show yet, not properly; I knew that. I knew a lot of things I wasn’t meant to. When Marie’s other hand joined the first, I turned away, disgusted.
I heard the girl’s voice cut across their gabbling: "For Gods sake Mum, can’t we just go?"
I focused on the loch while their doors slammed and their engine caught. The water seemed like something alien, an impossible metal plate that went on and on and on. The wind ruffled the surface as it had slipped softly through the grass. There was a silken luxury to the swirls and ripples, and an almost eerie quiet.
I only glanced back to the Datsun after the cattle grid went crump. Marie came and stood beside me as they left the way we’d arrived. A veil of black smoke trailed towards us from their exhaust, but there were no more dirty looks. Through the rear window, the girl didn’t turn. There was only the turquoise circle of her hat, growing smaller and smaller. As I watched it disappearing, I felt something tug and then tear bitterly inside me. An unexpected part of me was rising up, crying out as if in pain. Come back, please. Come back . . .
"Well," Marie said, "well, then. Here we are."
She reached for me, but I stepped backwards, dodging her hand. I couldn’t look at her. I was suddenly aware of the darkness beneath the surface. The secret cold of the loch was inside me and we were alone here, and I was scared. Scared of this place and of her touch, and of crying when I hadn’t cried yet, not once since I lost them. Not a single tear in those last three terrible weeks.
Not now, I thought. Please. Not here, not now, with her, and I weaved out of her reach, hating her and her Loch House, hating the loch itself for the way that it flashed and flickered and grabbed at me. I turned and began to stumble away, but I could feel it all, closing in - the blue sky, the loch, Marie. Even the distant birds were back, a blackness breaking overhead.
Swiping at my face, I tried to focus, to at least keep going, but when I reached the red door, I found it stuck, the Loch House barred to me. Frustrated, I tugged at the small iron handle and then slapped at the patchy wood, at that curling paint. I could feel Marie’s cautious approach, and the whole building bowing over me as if inspecting me, perhaps mocking me, with its eyes of gleaming glass. Once more, I felt the house’s weight, a sensation of pressure as if it might spill over – or crack and break.
I drew back, but at that moment, the door relented. It opened with such a smooth, surprising ease that I gasped. I stumbled inside feeling hoodwinked and disorientated, as if the shadows waiting in the hallway had been playing a game with me. Some kind of trick. And in a jumbled rush, I remembered what Marie had said.
A child ghost, I remembered.
A young girl, the same as me.
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