The Time of the Ghost (14 page)

They had stopped the Worship—or thought they had—because it made them all so uncomfortable. The ghost remembered that and remembered Cart saying, “We may call it Monigan and think it's a game, but I don't think it is. I know there really is a dark old female Something, and whatever it is, we've woken it up and brought it stalking closer. And we mustn't go on. It's not safe.” At the time the ghost remembered wondering if Cart was saying that just to keep them all believing even though Cart was tired of the game. But now she knew otherwise.

Cart had been right. As the bodily Sally went on with her invocation, the ghost could feel Something stirring, rising, stalking closer. It closed in toward the dead elms out of the dark like the bellying of the mist, wet and tasteless and shapeless. But it was still very, very powerful. She felt its flat, stealthy vibrations, like but not like the crackle of life surrounding Sally and Julian Addiman, and far, far stronger, slowly drawing in among the dead trees.

She threw herself at the invoking Sally and hovered round her.
Stop it! Run away! You don't know what you're doing! It isn't a joke. Monigan's real! And I think Julian Addiman's a bit mad!

But as always, she was ineffectual as a guardian angel. The bodily Sally did not hear and continued reciting under the moon. The invocation was longer than it used to be. Sally, or Julian Addiman, must have enlarged it. Now it was full of phrases like “gust thy hot breath through us” and “let thy bloodlust inflame our souls,” which Cart would never have dreamed of putting in.

Meanwhile, Julian Addiman was busily lighting a ring of candles round Sally. They were tall, fat yellow candles, stolen from School chapel. As each one flickered alight, it gave a new view of his handsome, white, red-mouthed face. It was brilliant with sarcastic amusement, and his mouth seemed very wet.

The invocation finished. Thirteen candles were now burning, and the ghost could feel the thing which was Monigan pressing close round the flickering circle.

“Right,” said Julian Addiman. “My part now.” He stood up with a flourish and stepped to a spot about a yard off where a spade was lying—stolen from Mr. McLaggan. This he planted briskly in the earth and heaved. A large sod of turf, loaded with half-lit closed shapes of dandelions, peeled backward and flopped over. The ghost could not resist hovering over to see what was underneath. On top of the dim hole was the carcass of the black hen. It was earthy but not long dead. It lay with its neck bent sideways on a heap of rusty iron links. Julian Addiman tossed the hen to one side and took out the iron, which proved to be a clanking armful of chain. He hung the chain carefully, in a heavy loop, over one arm. Then he picked the hen up by its neck and stood facing the moon and Sally and the candles. “These and myself I dedicate to thy use, O Monigan,” he intoned. He was not serious about it. He was grinning all through.

Then he stepped inside the candles and hung the chains on Sally.

Once more the ghost threw herself at Sally and tried to make her run away. But Sally just stood there, her eyes shining and blinking quietly in the light of the candles, letting Julian Addiman drape her in heavy chains, as if she was bewitched. The Monigan feeling was in among the candles now, hanging its heavy presence on Sally, as heavy as the chains. It knew the ghost was there. It was cruelly amused at the ghost's efforts to frighten Sally. But to be on the safe side, it threw contemptuously to both the idea that this was just a game. Just a game Julian Addiman was playing. As a result, Sally felt a mixture of disgust and amusement and horror. It seemed awfully silly and gruesome that the clanking chains should be sticky with hen's blood, which shone in the candlelight, mixed with rust and earth. It was a silly touch when Julian Addiman saved a separate length of chain to hang round his own neck.

“We have bound ourselves to thy service, O Monigan,” he said, and laughed, to show that it was silly.

As a final touch he took the dead hen and pressed its bloody, feathery side to Sally's forehead. Then to his own. After which he raised the hen solemnly in both hands and said, “Repeat after me. I, Selina Melford, am now your servant, O Monigan, and this bargain solemnized this night of the seventeenth of July. Now and henceforward I am yours.”

When Sally started to repeat these words, the ghost felt the Monigan force moving among the candles to take what was hers. Frantically she tried to go upward to avoid it. But it was no good. She was caught and pressed downward above the uplifted dead hen, pressed and pressed, squirming and struggling. Monigan was all round her, like a flat, misty blackness.

And the force seemed to say she must feed on the hen.
Feed on the hen
, it told her.
You can speak with mortals then. Feed.

But she could not feed. She did not know how, and she was too disgusted and too terrified. She knew it would serve Monigan's purpose if she did. She struggled and struggled and finally broke away from the hen, out as far as the ring of dead trees. But Monigan was still with her. She was held, hanging between two trees, with the mist at her back, unable to go forward or backward. She could still clearly see the ring of candles and Sally standing like a statue loaded with chains and Julian Addiman standing in front of her, triumphant and amused.

The force that held them was cruelly angry, but it was also amused, just as Julian Addiman was.
You refuse to feed.
It was a joke, really.
Very well. You set me aside. I set you aside for seven years. I can afford it.
The joke turned very cruel, with triumph in it.
Those seven years are up now.

At this the mist from behind the dead elms rose up and advanced into the open space, slow and bulging and milky. It flowed across Sally and across Julian Addiman and hid them. For a moment the thirteen candle flames blinked feebly through it. Then they were gone, and the mist was rising again, into a fat, maggotlike shape which dominated everything else. The trees, the moon, and the fields vanished into the maggot, as if it was eating them up. But it was not a maggot. It was a thing swathed in bandages like a rotting mummy. It had a curious head, something like a dog's head without ears. Its face was hideous. It was made of fat, pink, fleshy lumps, peering out of the bandages. She did all she could not to be drawn toward this thing, and it drew her, helplessly. In seconds she was face-to-face with it.

And it was a foot. It was a foot and a leg encased in plaster, raised up in front of her eyes by a sort of pulley. The face which had so terrified her were the toes of the foot, which the plaster did not quite cover.

She lay and stared at it. Is Monigan only a leg? she wondered in some bewilderment. One of my legs, she corrected herself. Somehow, she had no doubt that the leg was part of her. She could feel it aching, in a dismal, distant way. She could feel the other leg aching, too, and just catch glimpses of it, lower down, also in plaster. She was not really able to move. Just trying to see made everything turn gray. She shut her eyes and lay sniffing smells of antiseptic and polish. She could hear machinery humming in the distance, something clattering rather nearer, the squeak of shoes on polished tiles, and brisk voices not very far away.

Before she opened her eyes again, she was fairly sure she was in hospital. Sure enough, when she forced herself to look again, she could see a stand to her right, holding high up a transparent bag of red stuff that looked like blood. Tubes led down from the bag and vanished out of sight where her right arm must be. That seemed to be the arm she could move a little. The other arm, when she swiveled her eyes that way, was raised up and in plaster, too. She had a feeling something was also wrong with her head. It hurt, and she could not move it. But nothing hurt very much. It was all remote and dreamy.

No wonder I thought I had an accident! she thought. I wonder how I got this way.

She had to close her eyes again then, and her question was answered almost immediately. Once again she was a floating nothingness, but this time it was more as you float in dreams. She knew she was lying in bed. She lay, and she floated, and she saw, driving away from her at furious speed, a small, powerful car. She could see the heads of two people through its back window. But as she saw them, the two people were clearly fighting. The one on the right, who was driving, was bigger. The heads were swaying over to the left as the bigger one won. The car gave a sharp wobble, and its left-hand door came open. It continued to go at a furious speed. The door was blown almost shut with the speed and then forced open again to let a lady tumble out. She tumbled just like a doll, helplessly, to the rushing road and, like a doll, went on tumbling for yards and yards, because her foot was hooked in a long black loop of seat belt. When at last her foot came loose, the car door slammed shut, and the car sped away, leaving the doll-like, crumpled lady lying at the side of the road.

Although she had no sense that this had happened to
her
, it was not a pleasant thing to see. The strong one driving that car had intended to throw the lady out. There was no question about that. She brought her eyes open and again tried to look at the hospital she was in.

This time she grasped that she was in a small room at the end of a bigger ward. There were no windows in the room, but most of its walls were glass, so that there was sufficient bleak gray light. Beyond, in the ward, the light was warm and sunny. She had glimpses of more white plastered legs and of a nurse walking with a lady.

She had just closed her eyes again when the nurse came into her glass room. She heard the nurse's voice. “I think she should be awake now. What name did you say it was?”

A very well-known voice, clear and pleasant, said, “Sally. Selina, really, but we say Sally.”

Then the nurse was bending over the bed, saying, “Try to wake up, dear. Here's your sister Sally to see you. She's been waiting for hours.”

Highly confused, the person in the bed opened her eyes on swimming grayness. Then who am
I
? she wondered.

She heard someone give a distressed noise. No doubt she was an awful sight. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

She managed to focus on her sister. It was all a bit gray still, but she could see. It was the lady she had seen walking with the nurse, a grown-up lady. But it must be Sally. There was the fair hair that had surprised her in the farmhouse, now scraped back and done up somehow in a way that did not seem very pretty—although it could have been fashionable. Not that this lady had a very fashionable air. She was drab and depressed and seemed to be trying not to cry. But the depressed face had the right slight hawkiness about it, and there was no question that they knew one another well.

“I can hear you,” she mumbled. It hurt a bit to speak, but not too much.

“Then I'm sorry!” Sally burst out, nearly in tears. “This is all my fault! It was me going on at you that did it! It was all my missionary zeal, telling you you really must finish with Julian Addiman. You do know what happened to you, do you?”

She thought. The doll-like lady and the car. “Julian Addiman threw me out of his car,” she said. It did not worry her just then. She felt sorry for Julian Addiman in a way, because he had bound himself to Monigan and was going to have to murder her after seven years. “Seven years have passed,” she said. It seemed a reasonable guess. But she did wish she could remember even a single one of the things that must have happened in those seven years.

Sally said, “Look, I brought you some flowers. Here.”

Flowers were put in front of her face, where she could see them. They were lilies. Some were flaming speckled tiger lilies, some delicate pink and gold, some white and some yellow. They were beautiful, waxy things with big, dusty stamens. She could not imagine them growing.

“Do you like them?”

She tried to nod and found she could not. But she managed to smile. “Lovely. Just as if I was dead.”

“Oh,
don't
!” her sister cried out. “You're not dead! Listen—” And she embarked on some kind of explanation. It was rambling and it was tearful, and it seemed to be some kind of self-accusation. Perhaps it was about Monigan. But the patient did not know. She found it hard to listen. All that came over to her was a rather familiar dismalness. Her sister blamed herself about Julian Addiman and the accident, it was true, but she was also far more worried and discontented about herself—as one would be after seven years of Monigan, the patient supposed. And she was expecting her injured sister to listen to it all and bear the weight of her discontent as if there was nothing wrong with her. It was all just as usual. And it was exhausting.

“Sally,” the patient said at length. “Please. Talking hurts my head.”

Sally's reply was to burst into tears. “Oh, dear!” she sobbed. “I'm sorry! I'll go. I really have to go. I waited as long as I could, but I have to get hold of one of my teachers before this evening. I'll come back after that, shall I?”

“Yes,” said the patient, hoping she could stand it by then.

She closed her eyes and floated in grayness, trying to puzzle out what seemed to have happened. She was one of four Melford sisters, who had once, as a game, invented the Worship of Monigan. Sally had gone on with the game and taught it to Julian Addiman and had ended by dedicating herself to Monigan. But after that the dedication seemed to have got passed on to one of Sally's sisters. The question was, Which one? If she was not Sally, who was she? She tried looking back at her experiences as a ghost to see if she felt any more fellow feeling for Cart, Imogen, or Fenella. Not really, except for Imogen, when Imogen was dangling like a crazy scarecrow under the beam—and that might only have been because she knew what it felt like to be at the point of death.