Not a Ghost Story Page 3
***
I'd been up to Highgate for supper with a friend of mine, a journalist who was hardly ever in town; she'd bought a flat there, and was busy furnishing it.
Like me, she had the top floor; but her flat was dark, low-beamed, squashed into the roof of a huge Victorian apartment block. The green carpet – that had been there when she moved in, Ellen explained, and she had decided to live with it rather than turn the place upside down changing everything – and the dark beams exacerbated the gloom; the small windows looked out to an internal courtyard. Once it started to get dark, and she put the lights on, the flat came alive. The little glass paperweights she collected began to glow – she'd got one for pretty much every city she'd visited, it was her way of commemorating her career. One with elephants for Delhi (she'd covered the Bhopal story); an Empire State Building and an Eiffel Tower ("because I don't care if they're clichés. In fact, that's really the point, isn't it?" she'd said); a camel paperweight from Dubai (property boom) and a cow from Switzerland (the crumbling ramparts of banking secrecy), and a couple of puffins from the Faroe Islands (oil discoveries). Looking at them you'd have thought she hadn't had much of a life; like my mother's horse brasses, which stood for all the opportunities she'd never had, all the chances she'd never taken. But then Ellen would tell the stories behind the paperweights – how she'd braved out a hurricane in the Cayman Islands, seen skyscrapers go up in two days in Shanghai, taken the last flight out of the Congo or the first one into East Timor. It didn't leave much room for soft furnishings or soft sentiments, she said, but she felt she could reach out and touch the fabric of history.
"One of the French journalists in Shanghai said we are weaving the tapestry of history ourselves," she'd said. "Politicians make decisions, but we make history."
"Do you really believe that?"
She thought for a moment, then said; "It sounds better in French, I expect."
"Was he a good fuck?"
"How did you know?" She scowled, then laughed. "Well, yes, actually..." Her voice dropped. "Married, of course. I didn't keep in touch."
I came back, late, on the tube, through stations full of fluorescent glare with empty platforms. I wondered; does she feel lonely, out in Frognal or Finchley or wherever it is? I wondered why she hadn't changed that carpet.
I went straight to bed. Tell a lie, I poured a pint glass of water and put it by the bed, as I always do when I've had a bit to drink; it was late, and we'd got through a bottle of wine and a few liqueurs afterwards, just the two of us. It was difficult getting to sleep, though; it always is, with too much alcohol in the bloodstream, and sometimes even without.
I was almost asleep when I heard it. Scratching. A thin, insistent scratching somewhere above my head. Mice? Rats? It wasn't the scrabbling of something running; the scratching suggested it was trying to excavate its way through the plaster; it was purposeful, evil.
I'd seen rats at tube stations, scuttling between the live rails in the track bed. What a life; an inch away from being fried. Which we all are, I suppose; as I was reminded yesterday, you're only as good as your last deal.
I couldn't sleep; if the noise stopped for a few moments, I'd hope the thing, whatever it was, had gone, but then just as I had decided it was safe to try to sleep, it would start up again, closer and louder. I began to get angry; eventually I realised I was never going to sleep. I got up, went into the other room and picked up a book; I tried to read, but while my eyes performed their regular walk down the page, when I reached the bottom I realised no meaning had reached my brain. I was sure I could still hear the scratching.
I got my laptop. I spent about an hour playing solitaire on it; it was the only thing I could do that didn't demand too much concentration. I lost every single game.
I woke about half past five, to the shifting purple flicker of the screensaver. I was panicky; I couldn't breathe; I was still in the middle of nightmare, and it took me a couple of minutes to throw off the sense of impending doom and get the daylight of conscious reason into my head. I'd been dreaming of furnishing the flat; all the projects I hadn't had time for had crushed into my brain – the pictures I hadn't bought, the bookshelf I hadn't put up, the suitcases I still hadn't unpacked. (It must have started easily, and then drawn me in, as such dreams do, further and further into the swampy wastes; the pianos that lurched on swollen black legs up the staircase, the paintings that were stacked against the wall because there was no longer enough wall to lean them on, the piles of magazines slipping slowly into landslides of glossy paper, bookcases toppling, spilling books across the floor. I was being buried under the chaos that had invaded; vampire bats made of newspapers flew at me, scratching, and everywhere I turned paper was flying at me, clinging to my face, stopping my breath. I was drowning in it.) I was still shaken; I went to fix a cup of coffee, but half my mind was marooned in the dream world, and all that day in the office if I stopped focusing on my work, the nightmare would seep back, like a blackness glimpsed at the corner of your eye, that slips away if you look at it directly, but comes back as soon as you look away.
***
I'm still not happy with the flat. The sofa, the bed, the chairs seem to be marooned in emptiness. It has an unnerving echo; when I move, or cough, I feel guilty, like someone speaking too loud in an art gallery. I keep moving the two pictures I've bought, but they still don't look right.
I think the rats have gone. I spend so little time here I can't be sure. Maybe they only scratch on the ceiling when I'm not here.
I wonder whether other people have this problem; a flat that refuses to become a home. I might ring Ellen and ask; but then I remember she's in Ulan Bator this week on a press trip.
The phone rang at four this morning. I thought it might be a colleague phoning from the States, but when I picked it up there was nothing but a rushing sound like the sea in a shell.
I saw an apple in the middle of the tunnel under the Barbican when I walked into work. It was in the middle of the road, gleaming in the iodine light. Its perfection disturbed me; the way it sat neatly as if it had been deliberately placed there.
I looked for it on my way home, expecting to see a smear of browning pulp on the asphalt. There was nothing. It felt like an omen.
I got an email on my laptop this evening. It said: I know you're there.
Must be a friend. Strange sense of humour. And nothing else. Nothing from anyone else. Not even from work.
***
I dreamt I was growing old, and the flat was stifling me, and I was drowning in paper... It's true work has been stressful, the last couple of weeks. Obviously, it was an anxiety dream. They're making redundancies at the firm; one of my colleagues told me it will be one in three in my department. I'm an expert at calculating probabilities, and mine are worse than 33 percent; my last deal fell through. The one before that made a loss.
The rats have started again.
***
When I came back from work yesterday there were policemen standing outside the house, and red-and-white tape stretched across the road. I told them I lived in the top flat; they said they needed to talk to me.
"What's happened?"
"Did you know Mr Rosenbaum?"
"Rosenbaum?"
"The tenant on the ground floor."
"No."
"You've lived here how long?"
"Six months."
"Oh. Then..."
The other policeman whispered something to him; he stopped speaking.
"He kept himself to himself," I said.
That's what they always say about serial killers. The neighbours, when they're interviewed. Did you hear the screams? Did you see the missing girls? Did you never suspect anything? He kept himself to himself.
"You ever notice anything unusual about the flat?"
"Rats," I said. "There are rats in the roof. They scratch."
He looked at me blankly. An anonymous face as if he'd been made by photo-fit and then airbrushed to blandness.
&nb
sp; "That's about it," I said.
They didn't ask me any more. They told me nothing. They let me up to my apartment; I had to duck under the police tape.
I read in the paper afterwards that he might have been dead for fifteen years.
Acknowledgments
Trademarks used in the book
Other acknowledgements
Author's Note
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About the Author
A M Kirkby writes fantasy, SF, and historical fiction, as well as children's books.