The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (30 page)

So much, I thought wryly, for Alice being any kind of spare-time witch; and to my scanty store of information about her I added the knowledge that there were no felines in her home.

She shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t bear to touch them. I really don’t like them.” This was the first sour note in any of our evenings.

“Derrick,” Jenny said to me, “for heaven’s sake grab it and shove it out of the door.”

“It’s their hair,” murmured Alice. “It would give me a terrible rash. I hope they don’t let it sleep in here at night. Sprawling on these seats, rubbing fur off all the time. If they do let it, and I knew that, well . . .”

The end of our Friday fivesome. Panic. We would never find another suitable pub.

“I’m sure it’s an outdoor cat,” Martin assured her. I was shoving my chair back quietly prior to attempting to collar the beast, when that fan on the wall went
click-clack
. It simply opened its slats for a moment, then shut them again as if a strong buffet of wind had surged through from outside – though the weather had been clement when we drove up.

The cat skedaddled as if a bucket of water had been dumped on it. “That’s scuttled him. Thanks, fan. Must be turning blowy outside.”

“We should go,” said Alice.

“Till next week?” Anxious me.

“Oh yes,” she promised. We all rose.

But outside the night was perfectly still. Not even a breeze.

“Is that your perfume, Alice? It’s glorious.”

It was indeed: rich, musky, wild, yet subtle nevertheless, like some treasure forever unattainable, unownable.

“A friend of mine runs a perfumery down in the Cotswolds,” Alice told her. “This is a new creation.”

“Could you possibly get me –?” began Charlotte. “No, don’t. Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

Of course not. If Charlotte wore that ravishing scent, what might Martin imagine? Alice didn’t press her.

“I’m trying to give up smoking,” added Charlotte as we headed through the November chill toward the door. “Tonight I think I’ll do without.”

This seeming nonsequitur was actually an intimate confidence between the two women; indeed between all of us. We mustn’t pollute Alice’s fragrance. The onus now lay on me to refrain from lighting up any of my slim panatelas.

I rechecked our host’s name painted over the lintel of the door – John Chalmers, of course–though I needn’t have bothered. I had to tinkle the bell on the counter several times before he came, seeming too preoccupied even to greet us beyond a few nods. As soon as I had extracted a couple of pints of Adnam’s for Martin and me, a gin for Jenny, and a lowland single malt for Alice, Chalmers withdrew. Alice was a connoisseur of scotches; another grace note in her favor.

“I’d like to sit under the fan tonight,” she announced.

So as to minimize her own fragrance diplomatically, symbolically? We sat at a table different from our usual one. Scarcely a couple of minutes passed before –
clunk-clack
– the slats of the fan sprang open, and the machinery sucked air.

“How odd,” said Martin. “None of us is smoking, and it switches on.”

“Maybe,” I said recklessly to Alice, “it’s breathing your scent in. Maybe it’s in love with you.”

Jenny darted me a dubious glance. The fan continued operating without ceasing, throbbing away, never shutting down.

Unaccountably John Chalmers kept wandering into the body of the bar, dusting ashtrays, adjusting the hang of hunting prints on the walls.

“What’s up, man?” Martin asked the landlord during his third incursion.

“Tiger’s gone missing. Our cat.”

“Aaah,” breathed Alice. “I meant to ask: Do you let that cat roam these rooms during the night?”

“The whole place gets a thorough vacuuming every morning,” said our house-proud host.

Alice pursed her lips. “An old building. Nooks and crannies. Mice?”

“I have never found any dead vermin inside. Outside, I’ve found Tiger’s trophies. What do you expect? Not in here, never. If there’s any mice, he scares ’em off.”

Alice continued gazing at him till he took umbrage. “Health inspector gave us a pat on the back last month. He’s more interested in kitchens, but he said this was the most spick-and-span bar he’d seen in all the county.” Chalmers wandered off, restaurantward.

When he had gone off, Martin pointed up at the busy Xtractall. “
There
’
s
a tiny bit that isn’t spick.” A russet something – barely noticeable – had lodged between the edge of one slat and the housing.

“What is it?” Alice asked, in a need-to-know tone. Martin had to take off his shoes and clamber onto an upholstered chair, handkerchief in hand.

“Just you be careful of those fingers!” Charlotte called.

“S’all right. Safety grille inside. Stops idiots from mincing themselves.” He pried with the hanky and stepped down. “Bit of ginger fur. Ugh, skin? Dried blood?” Hastily he folded the hanky over and plunged it deep in his pocket. I glanced anxiously at Alice, but she was smiling up at the fan.

Presently Charlotte started kidding Alice gently about the arty occult books published by Webster-Freeman. Charlotte had popped into a bookshop to buy new pages of her personal organizer, had happened upon a display of those volumes, and had skimmed through a few out of curiosity.

“What’s the use of it all nowadays?” she asked. “Is it a spiritual thread in a material world? Gurus, psychedelics . . . But the sixties are gone forever.”

Alice mused. “For a while it seemed as if the world would change. As if a new age were coming: of joy, the flesh, the mind, old values in a new incarnation. Instead, what came was plastic people making plastic money.”

Was she criticizing us? We got on so
well
together. Yet there was always the edge of wondrous difference, as if Alice came from . . . elsewhere, outside of our ken.

“You could only have been a little girl in the sixties,” protested Charlotte.

“Could I?” Alice craned her lovely neck to look at the Xtractall. “I suppose that’s a piece of the sixties. Soon it’ll be replaced by some silent faceless box controlled by a microchip . . .”

“High time too,” said Martin. “Can’t imagine why Chalmers hangs on to the thing.”

“He doesn’t know why,” said Alice. “He’s one of the most neutral people I’ve ever seen. Till the usual restaurant crowd turn up, prattling about barn conversions and BMWs, this place is limbo. Imagine if the past could grow angry – bitter, like a disillusioned parent . . . yet still somehow hopeful and radiant too. In a schizophrenic way! Trying to keep the old faiths alive . . . And what if earlier epochs feel the same way about, say, the whole twentieth century? If those epochs still try to intrude and guide their offspring who have changed out of recognition? To keep the old flames alive. Smilingly, yet bitterly too.”

“Er, how can the past keep watch on the present?” Martin asked with a grin. He thought a joke was due, but Alice stared at him quite seriously.

“The collective unconscious, which is timeless. The imprint of memory on material objects. Don’t you think this is what angels and devils may be all about? Affirmative vibrations from the past – and negative, angry, twisted ones?”

“Beats me,” said Martin. He laughed. “I always design vibrations out of buildings, mount ’em on shock absorbers, that sort of thing. Make sure there are no resonances likely to set people’s teeth on edge.”

My teeth were on edge. I felt that Alice was on the brink of revealing herself ... to us, the chosen few. She was the joyous, positive spirit of an older world – and I wondered how old she really was. She liked us. She hoped for us. Yet for the most part the old world hated us?

She said to Charlotte, “I suppose Webster-Freeman’s wisdom books must basically be about power, a power that has grown weak but still lingers on.” I had the momentary weird impression that Alice herself had only leafed through those volumes, as casually as Charlotte had. “Power today is money, property, investments, plastic. Empty, dead power. Zombie power. Yet so vigorous. The world’s soul is dying . . . of hunger. The plastic body thrives. That fan,” she added, “may well be a creature of the sixties.”

“Time to replace it,” Martin said stoutly.

“And what did it replace? An ancient stone, a hungry old stone. Well,” and she smiled sweetly, “must dash home in a few minutes and microwave some goodies. Mustn’t we all?”

Was that what she would really do at home, wherever home was?

Before departing, Alice told a ridiculous joke about how to circumcise a whale. How? You use four skin divers. After booking a table in the restaurant for the following Friday, to sample the oysters and partridge, we left contented.

“Alice was in an odd mood tonight,” Jenny remarked after we got home. “She
was
just kidding, don’t you think?”

“I think that was the real Alice. But I don’t know if Alice is real, the way we are.”

Jenny giggled. “Do we imagine her every Friday? Is she the soul that’s missing from our lives?”

“Not exactly. We’re her hope . . . for something. Some . . . rekindling.” I thought of flames, and a naked woman dancing, leaping the fire, singeing her public hair. “And yet . . . we don’t matter too much to her. That place matters more. Chalmers’s pub. The limbo pub, at that empty hour. That’s what binds us together.”

“
You
aren’t hoping for something from her, are you?” she asked archly.

“No, You know that would ruin—” I had been about to say “the magic.” I said instead, “The happy hour. Maybe,” I added, “without us it’s difficult for her to make contact with the modern world.”

“Come off it! Charlotte met her on the train from Euston. Alice is in publishing. In business.”

Is she?
I wondered. Alice spoke as if she had been at home in the sixties . . . not just a little girl back then, but herself as now. And I suspected, crazily, that she had existed in earlier times too.

Charlotte had met Alice on the train, Had any of us bumped into Alice
again
, either on the London-bound train or the return one? I knew I hadn’t. I had glimpsed Alice coming out of MK Station, and also cruising for parking in her Saab; yet I had never seen her anywhere on the platform at Euston. Given the rush and the crowding, that wasn’t totally odd in itself – unless none of us had ever coincided with Alice after that first occasion. Certainly Jenny had never mentioned doing so.

I refrained from asking. We microwaved duck
à l
’
orange
, went to bed, and made love the same way we usually made love on a Friday night. When Jen and I were making love, I never thought about Alice, never visualized her – as if I were forbidden to, as if Alice could reach out and control me. Only afterwards did I lie awake wondering about angels and demons – contrasting values in the same equation – as messages, vibrations from the past intent on charming or savaging the present day, but not widely so, only marginally, except where a magical intersection of persons and places occurred.

On Monday I had some hard talking to do to some visiting Hungarians, though I mustn’t be too stringent. I enjoyed the hospitality in Hungary.

It was a long, strong piss for both of us. Martin and I left one urinal basin untenanted between us: a kind of ceramic sword laid not between knight and lady but between squire and squire, both of us being chaste, faithful squires of Alice. Let us get up to no monkey business together. It’s odd that women can waltz off together to the ladies’ as a sort of social event, whereas chaps should do no such thing, as if mutual urination is a queer sign. Have the boys gone off together to compare their organs? In this case, need dictated.

As we were walking back, bladders emptied out, I heard the fan shut off and close itself. The bar proved to be deserted. We assumed that Alice had followed our wives to the powder room. We chatted about the innovative design of a new office block currently soaring near Euston Station. People were christening it “the totem pole.” Then our ladies returned without sight of Alice.

In case Chalmers had summoned us and Alice had gone ahead to the restaurant, I checked there, in vain. Chalmers’s wife ducked out from the kitchen to remark that I was a little early. I checked the car park, where Alice’s Saab sat in darkness.

“Can’t find her anywhere, folks!” I spotted Alice’s silvery purse lying on the carpet. Before I could go to retrieve it, Martin hurried to my side and gripped my arm.

“Look at the fan,” he whispered fiercely.

The slats of the Xtractall were moving in and out gently one by one, top to bottom, in an undulating fashion. I thought of someone sucking their teeth. The edge of each slat was streaked crimson, thin lines that faded, even as I watched, as if being absorbed or licked away atom by atom.