Spirit

Elizabeth slowly continued her walk toward Main Street, frowning in perplexity. Why had the girl seemed so familiar? It was almost as if Elizabeth had known her all her life; and yet she knew for sure she hadn't.

It was only when she reached Main Street and saw the sign across the street saying Walter K. Ede & Son, Mortician, that she was seized with the most horrific of thoughts. She turned, and stared back down the street, and she was so frightened that she felt as if centipedes were crawling in her hair.

“Peggy,” she whispered. Then she screamed out, “
Peggy?
”

Other
Leisure
books by Graham Masterton:
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT
PREY

GRAHAM
MASTERTON

To my mother, Mary, with love.

DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

April 2011

Published by

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 1995 by Graham Masterton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 13: 9784-42854096-8
E-ISBN: 97844285-0429-5

The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

SPIRIT

A Familiar Face

Title

Copyright

Dedication

The Chilling

One

Two

Three

2 Heart of Ice

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

3 Garden of Death

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

4 Gold Sun

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

5 Strange Days

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

6 Fire And Ice

Twenty-Four

Epilogue

“She was exquisitely fair and delicate,
but entirely of ice—glittering, dazzling ice.”

 

 

Elizabeth glimpsed Peggy running around the side of the house, a little mouse-grey furry figure barely visible through the duck's-down snowflakes, and for one moment she felt as if something terrible were about to happen.

In the distance, she heard the school clock striking, its tone flattened by the cold.
Dongg
.

Elizabeth stopped, crimson-cheeked, runny-nosed, panting. She stared at the empty garden, and at the white weather-boarded corner around which Peggy had vanished so completely, as if running from one life into the next.

The garden seemed to be holding its breath, hushed, with its dark snow-blanketed fir trees, and its curved, wind-razored drifts. All Elizabeth could hear was the occasional shuddering of overladen branches as they dropped their little offerings of snow. But there was nothing else. The huge, empty sound of nothing else. Sky, garden, house, and that was all.

She turned around, uncertain, nine years old. She wiped her nose on the back of a red woollen glove. She wondered if she ought to run after Peggy, but she guessed that Peggy would have scrambled through the hedge at the back of the conservatory, and along the patio, and around the kitchen garden; and that by now she would probably be crouching in the shed, giggling and sniffing and sure that nobody could find her.

But Elizabeth was still disturbed by that
feeling
. That deep, inexplicable feeling, which had glided through her mind like a huge black shark gliding through cold black water without disturbing the surface.

She knew for sure that Peggy was hiding in the shed. Where
else would she go? But she felt more strongly that Peggy had gone; that Peggy had disappeared; and that she would never see Peggy again, ever.

She called, ‘Peggy! Peggy, where are you?' But the garden remained snow-muffled and silent; and she hesitated; and stopped.

‘
Peggy, where are you?'
But there was no reply. Elizabeth hated the sound of her own voice.

‘Peggy!' she called. Then she called, ‘Laura!'

Eventually, Laura came struggling across the garden in her poppy-red corduroy coat. Laura was seven, and everybody said that she was the prettiest. Her hair was blonde and curly (like her mother's) while Elizabeth's was dark and straight (like her father's). Peggy's was blonde and curly, too, but Peggy had disappeared around the weatherboarded corner and Elizabeth wasn't sure if they would ever see Peggy again.

Laura, panting, said, ‘What? What is it?'

‘Peggy's gone.'

Laura stared at her. ‘What do you mean,
gone?
'

‘I don't know. Just gone.'

‘She's hiding, that's all,' said Laura. ‘Daddy caught her playing with his fairy egg-cups and he shouted at her.'

Elizabeth bit her lip. ‘Fairy egg-cups' was what they called her father's golf-tees. All three of them found them fascinating, and all three of them, at one time or another, had been scolded for stealing them. Elizabeth felt worried.
Worried
, that was it, in the same way that mommy got worried, whenever it was night-time and snowing really hard and daddy hadn't come back from New Milford.

‘We'd better find her,' she said.

They trudged through the snow together, around the side of the house. It was half past three, and already it was growing dark. The tennis courts were deserted, their nets sagging and clotted with snow. The only footprints on the
snow were the fork-like footprints of robins, and the dabs of the family cat.

‘Peggy!' they called. ‘Peggy, we're coming to get you!'

Silence. The wind rose, and whirled up a snow-devil. ‘She didn't come this way,' said Laura, emphatically.

‘She must have, I saw her.'

‘But there's no footprints.'

‘Of course not. The snow's covered them up.'

They struggled across the patio, and around the conservatory. All along the guttering, icicles hung; and at the very end of the conservatory, where the guttering usually flooded, a grotesque ice-figure hunched beside the house, a frozen hooknosed witch, clinging to the downpipe. Whenever the sun came gleaming through the trees, the witch's nose dripped, and the girls danced around her in terrified glee, singing, ‘Nose-drip, nose-drip, witchy-witchy, nose-drip!' But tonight the witch was gunmetal grey and gleaming and her nose was hooked in a cold, impossible curve; and Elizabeth and Laura circled her in genuine dread.

Supposing she spoke? Supposing she struck them stone-cold dead, right where they stood? Walking the stiff, quick walk of the seriously frightened, the two girls managed to reach the steps that led down to the rose-lawn, unscathed, unclawed, their coats unbloodied and their livers intact.

‘Peggy,' said Elizabeth, so softly that Laura could scarcely hear her.

‘That's no good,' said Laura. ‘You've got to scream at the top of your voice. Peggy! Peggy!
Peggy-peggy-peggy-peggy-peggy
!'

Laura's voice rose up into a piercing scream, a scream that echoed and echoed across Sherman, and echoed from the top of Green Pond Mountain, invisible in the snowstorm, and from Green Pond Mountain to Wanzer Hill, and all across Lake Candlewood, until the snow suddenly snuffed it out forever.

The two girls waited, and listened. No reply. Elizabeth
turned around, and stared at the Nose-Drip Witch, but she remained where she was, moulded out of ice, around the downpipe. Somehow she looked rather forlorn. Perhaps she was thinking that spring would soon be here, and she would melt away.

They went to the shed. It stood under a tall fir tree. It was small and dark, although its roof was covered with an extravagantly thick coating of snow, so that it looked like a frosted fruit-cake. There were no footprints around it, and Elizabeth could hardly manage to pull open the door, because of the snow. Inside, the shed was gloomy and smelled of creosote and dried grass. Elizabeth could just make out the antlers of the lawnmower handles, and spades, and shovels, and stacks of earthenware flowerpots. The windows were thickly curtained with spiderwebs, in which all kinds of colourless and skeletal shapes dangled and danced.

‘Peggy?' she whispered.

‘
Peggy, where are you?
' shrieked Laura, making Elizabeth jump.

They listened. They could faintly hear music coming from the house. ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby'. The kitchen window was warmly lit and behind the red gingham curtains they could see their mother crossing and recrossing from table to sink to oven, carrying cakes and pies and mixing-bowls. Further along, the library windows were lit up too, though much more dimly.

‘I think we ought to tell mom,' said Elizabeth.

‘She can't have gone far,' said Laura. They both knew that they would get into trouble for having lost their little sister. ‘Drat her! She's such a
menace.
'

‘Yes, drat her!'

Together, they pushed the shed door shut, and fastened it. Then they continued their plodding circuit of the house. It was a huge, rambling place, the largest house this side of Sherman.
There were eleven bedrooms and four bathrooms and three huge reception rooms. The girls' father was always complaining that he spent more of his life carrying logs to the various fireplaces around the house than he did writing or editing. ‘My passport should read “stoker”, not “publisher”,' he used to say. But their mother had fallen in love with the house because of its huge galleried drawing-room, in which they could raise a fifteen-foot Christmas tree, just like those movies in which everybody comes home for the holidays and the children are dressing the tree with tinsel and ribbons, and there's some kind of romantic misunderstanding but everybody ends up dewy-eyed and toasting each other in punch and singing ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing'.

Their mother had come from a broken home, that was all they knew. Until she was eight, Elizabeth had thought that a ‘broken home' was a house with a massive crack down the middle. Now she knew that it meant something else, worse, and that was why they had just one grandpa, whereas most of their friends had two.

Elizabeth and Laura reached the southern end of the house. There was nothing here but the swimming-pool and then a narrow triangle of lawn and then the woods. The snow was falling even more thickly now, and Elizabeth's toes were beginning to hurt, even though she was wearing her boots with the sheepskin linings.

‘Well,
I
don't know where she is,' Laura declared.

‘I'll bet she went back indoors,' said Elizabeth. ‘She saw mommy baking, I'll bet, and she's probably licking the frosting-bowl and all the raw cake.'

They made their way back to the house. A gust of wind blew pungent woodsmoke around them, like a fuming cloak.