The Time of the Ghost
Read The Time of the Ghost Online
Authors: Diana Wynne Jones
DIANA WYNNE JONES
To my sister Isobel and to Hat
CHAPTER
1
There's been an accident!
she thought.
Something's wrong!
She could not quite work out what was the matter. It was broad daylightâprobably the middle of the afternoonâand she was coming down the road from the wood on her way home. It was summer, just as it should be. All round her was the sleepy, heavy humming of a countryside drowsing after lunch. She could hear the distant flap and caw of the rooks in the dead elms and a tractor grinding away somewhere. If she raised herself to look over the hedge, there lay the fields, just as she expected, sleepy gray-green, because the wheat was not ripe by a long way yet. The trees were almost black in the heat haze, and dense, except for the bare ring of elms, a long way off where the rooks were noisy specks.
I've always wanted to be tall enough to look over the hedge
, she thought.
I must have grown.
She wondered if it was the heavy, steamy weather that was making her feel so odd. She had a queer, light, vague feeling. She could not think clearlyâor not when she thought about thinking. And perhaps the weather accounted for the way she felt so troubled and anxious. It felt like a thunderstorm coming. But it was not quite that. Why did she think there had been an accident?
She could not remember an accident. Nor could she think why she was suddenly on her way home, but since she was going there, she thought she might as well go on. It made her uncomfortable to be reared up above the hedges, so she subsided to her usual height and went on down the road, thinking vague, anxious thoughts.
What's happened to me?
she thought.
I must stop feeling so silly. I'm the sensible one. Perhaps if I ask myself questions, my memory will come back. What did I have for lunch?
That was no good. She could not remember lunch in any way. She realized, near to panic, that she could not remember anything about the rest of today at all.
That's silly!
she told herself.
I must know!
But she didn't. Panic began to grow in her. It was as if someone was pumping up a very large balloon somewhere in the middle of her chest. She fought to squash it down as it unfolded.
All right!
she told herself hysterically.
All right! I'll ask something easy. What am I wearing?
This ought to have been easy. She only had to look down. But first she seemed to have forgotten how to do that. Then when she didâ
Panic spread, roaring, to its fullest size. She was swept away with it, as if it were truly a huge balloon, tumbling, rolling, bobbing, mindless.
There's been an accident!
was all she could think.
Something's awfully wrong!
When she noticed things again, she was a long way on down the road. There was a small house she somehow knew was a shop nestling in the hedge just ahead. She made herself stand still. She was so frightened that everything she could see was shakingâquivering like poor reception on the telly. She had a notion that if it went on shaking this way, it would shake itself away from her, and she would be left with utter nothing. So she made herself stand there.
After a while she managed to make herself look down again.
There was still nothing there.
I've turned into nothing!
she thought. Panic swelled again.
There's been an accident! STOP IT!
she told herself.
Stop and think.
She made herself do that. It took awhile, because thinking seemed so difficult, and panic kept swelling through her thoughts and threatening to whirl her away again, but she eventually thought something like:
I'm all right. I'm here. I'm me. If I wasn't, I wouldn't even be frightened. I wouldn't know. But something has happened to me. I can't see myself at all, not even a smear of shadow on the road. There's been an accident! STOP THAT! I keep thinking about an accident, so there must have been one, but it does no good to say so, because every time I do, things just get vaguer. So I must stop thinking that and start thinking what's the matter with me. I may be just invisible.
On that not altogether comforting thought, she took herself over to the hedge andâwellâsort of leaned into it. She had, as she leaned, strong memories of the way a stout prickly hedge bears you up like a mattress and sticks spines into you as it bears you.
Not this time. She found herself in the field on the other side of the hedge without feeling a thing. She could not even feel anything from the clump of nettles she seemed to be standing in.
Seemed is the right word
, she thought unhappily.
Let's face it. I'm not just invisible. I haven't got a body at all.
She had to spend another while squashing down bulging panic after this.
It does no good!
she shouted at herself. In fact, she was beginning to see that the panic did positive harm. Each time it happened she felt odder and vaguer. Now she could hardly remember coming down the road or why she had been coming this way in the first place.
It probably comes of not having a proper head to keep my thoughts in
, she decided.
I shall have to be very careful.
She half put a nonexistent hand to what she thought was probably her head but took it away again.
If I put my hand right through, I might knock all the thoughts out
, she said, forgetting she had already been through a hedge.
Where am I?
The field had a path winding through it, and there was a stile in the hedge opposite, leading to somewhere with trees. As she looked at that stile, she had a very strong feeling that beyond it, she would be able to get help. She went that way. Now she knew herself to be bodiless, she was almost interested by the way she moved, dangling and drifting, with her head about the height she was used to. She could rise higher if she wanted, or sink lower, but both ways made her uncomfortable. When she reached the stile, she started to climb it, out of habit. And stopped, feeling foolish. For a moment she was glad no one was there to see her. Of course she could just go straight through. She did. Then she was in an orchard, a rather messy place that she seemed to be used to. The nettles and the chickens pecking about were rather familiar, and as she passed a hut made of old doors and chairs and draped with soggy-looking old carpet, she had almost a twinge of recognition. She knew there would be a mildewy rag doll inside that hut. The doll's name was Monigan.
How do I know that?
she wondered.
Where am I?
The fact that she did not know confused her. She dangled sideways across the orchard, avoiding trees out of what seemed to be habit, and found herself faced with a hedge againâa tall, hefty hedge, which looked as impenetrable as a wood.
Well, let's see
, she said, and went through.
Here she was more confused still. For one thing, she had a very strong sense of guilt. She was now somewhere she ought not to be. For another thing, it was all much less familiar here. It was a very sparse, open garden, much trampled, so that the grass was mostly bare earth. Beyond that, behind a line of lime trees, was a large redbrick building.
She drifted under the lime trees and inspected the red building. Bees buzzed among the flat, wet heart shapes of the lime leaves, and little drops of lime liquid pattered down around (and through) her. Oddly enough, the bees avoided her. One flew straight at her face and swerved off at the last minute. This comforted her considerably.
There must be something of me for it to dodge
, she told herself, staring at a churchlike window in the red house. From behind the window came a buzz, quieter than the bees, but quite as perpetual. There was also a smell, distinct from the smell of lime trees, which she found she knew.
This is School
, she said.
Maybe this was why she felt so guilty here. Perhaps she should be at school. Perhaps at this moment a teacher was looking up from a register and asking where she was.
This was alarming. It caused her to speed along the front of the red house to a small door she somehow knew would be there and dart through it, to a dark space full of blazers and bags hung on pegs. No one was there. They were all in lessons evidently. She sped on, through tiled corridors, wishing she could remember which was her classroom. She knew there was a rule about not running in the corridors, but she was not sure it applied to people without bodies. Besides, she was not running. It was more like whizzing.
She could not find her classroom. It was like a bad dream. And here she had an idea which made her much, much happier. It
was
a dream, of course. It was a bad dream, but a dream definitely. In dreams one could run without really running and often could not feel one's body, and above all, in dreams one was always urgently looking for something one could not find. She was so relieved that she slowed right down. And there, beside her, was a door labeled “IV A.”
That was her class, IV A. She was more relieved than ever, even though she did not remember the door looking like this. It was pointed, like the school windows, with thick ribs and long iron hinges on it. But behind the door she could hear a teacher's voice droning on, and the voice was definitely one she knew. She put out her hand to turn the ringlike handle of the door.
Of course the handle went right through the part that seemed to be her hand. She stood back. A strong pricking where her eyes ought to have been suggested that she might be going to cry disembodied tears. She knew she could go through the door by leaning into it, but she did not dare. Half the class would laugh, and the rest would scream. The teacher would sayâ
Dreamlike, she had entirely forgotten she could not even see herself.
I will do it! I will, I will!
she said.
She put her nonhand to the handle again. This time, by exerting enormous effort, she managed to make it flip and rattle gently.
The handle turned fiercely under her not-fingers. The door was wrenched open inward from her. A voice roared, “When I ask you to decline
mens
, Howard, I do not mean
mensa
! Come!” the voice added, and a man's bristly head looked round the door.
Uncertainly she slipped through the opening into the sudden light of a classroom. It was more dreamlike than ever. They were all boys here, rows of boys, some leaning forward writing busily, some leaning back on two legs of their chairs looking anything but busy. There was not a girl in the room.
“Nobody there,” said the teacher, and clapped the door shut again.
She looked at him wonderingly. For some reason she knew him enormously well. Every line of his bristly head, his birdlike face, and his thin, angry body were known to her exactly. She felt drawn to him. But she was afraid of him, too. She knew he was always impatient and nearly always angry. A name for him came to her. They called him Himself.