Greyglass, Tanith Lee [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

marriage before I married Jem. I don’t wear it, I keep it in a box – and then it was gone. And I thought for a minute Dosha had – well it was terrible, because she’s a darling girl, from Helsinki, and she would never – and when I got that sorted out, the ring reappeared – under the box, where I’d looked – but then my jogging shoes went missing – jogging shoes. And oh, lots of things. And yes, there are sounds. Not knocking, I haven’t heard that, perhaps Dosha has – more – sort of breathing – pacing –”

Susan stared. She saw that Olivia was pale, Pale Milk, like the hall without the splash of stained glass window light thrown there.

“But the worst thing is, we do see things.”

Susan no longer felt removed. She felt as if she were trapped, one of the lesser stars, in a horror film.

“What?” she fumbled out.

Dosha came in wobbling a tray of priceless coffeepot and cups, and some exotic biscuits. She seemed calmer now, as Olivia had told her to be. Putting her tray on a coffee table, Dosha said, suddenly, “It has gone.”

“It always does,” said Olivia. But she had by now frightened herself out of any pretence at organisational cool, and Dosha stood there, shaking her head bleakly.

“Mr Jeremy say,” said Dosha, “he has never been the one of us to see this thing.”

“No, he hasn’t, the bastard. He never sees it. Or hears it. He says it’s possible, but won’t believe we have it. He thinks I’m mad. Dosha’s mad. That we’re hysterical and affect each other and imagine it. Even about the ring, he said I’d lost it.”

“What is it,” said Susan, “that you see?” She didn’t want to know.

Dosha spun round and stared at Susan wildly. “Up on the stair, out in passage. Or in rooms. Once in my room – is on the wall – like a fly–”

“Yes, she saw it in her room, didn’t you, Dosha. And I have, in the bedrooms and even in Jem’s study. Down here, everywhere.”

Susan heard herself again: “Is it – a person?”

“No,” said Olivia surprisingly, and with abrupt flatness, most of the energy seeming to leave her. “I can’t describe it. It’s – a sort of absence of anything else. Like – oh, if you look at something too bright and there’s a dark patch on your vision a few moments. Only not like that. And then taps turn on, and sometimes lights, or they go out when they’re on. They fuse all the time, too. At least Jeremy has to believe in that.”

The coffee sat on the table. They all looked at the coffee, not making a move to try anything with it.

Susan said, “What will you do?”

“I hoped you might know something. I haven’t had the courage to ring up Jackie. Honestly, I’m afraid of what she might say, after the thing with the cats.”

Susan said, “I do know an old woman used to live here, once.” As she said it, she felt the hair rising on her own scalp.

The digger outside had fallen quiet again. An enormous silence filled the house, a stillness as if time had come to a stop.

“An old woman. Oh God. And I suppose she died here.”

“No I don’t think she did.”

“Only that was it about the cats. Let me explain. Even though this will sound crazy. Crazier. Cats were in the garden, a lot of them, about fourteen. I saw them, Jeremy saw them. The builders saw them – some of them left bits of food, which Jeremy put a stop to. But the cats got in anyway and peed up the walls, apart from screaming the place down every night. So I called Jackie and said could she do anything about the cats she’d left here, and Jackie said they hadn’t left any cats, they were all accounted for. So I said it must be a feral colony then, that had moved in when the house was standing empty for a few weeks, what a strange coincidence, sounding sarcastic because I didn’t believe her. Then Jackie said, of course a few cats had died during the years they were here. Old ones or sick ones that didn’t make it. Which got me thinking, because by then I’d heard the noises, and Dosha had seen something in her room – Oh, I don’t know. I just know I’m bloody sick of it.”

Dosha had by now sat down in a chair done in complex jazzy russet weave.

Olivia said, with fresh sharpness, “Coffee, Dosha.”

Then Dosha got up, and poured out coffees and handed them round with the biscuits.

“Could you get a priest?” Susan said, lamely.

“Tried that. They won’t come. We’re not Catholic, anyway. They’re the only ones who pay attention to ghosts or demons. And what have we got? An old lady and some cats.”

Susan said, “She really didn’t die here, the old lady. She – I think she left the house and went into the park and they – she was found on a bench. It was cold.”

“Christ.”

Dosha said, “That’s why she is here, then.”

“Oh Dosha,” said Olivia.

“She has to come back she thinks, though she should go elsewhere, for she’s dead. So she goes the wrong way, and is stuck now.”

“No, Dosha. Just shut up.”

Dosha said in a low stubborn howl, “I have written to my uncle. I am to be going home.”

“All right, Dosha. Let’s talk about it later with Jem.”

Out in the wide hall, the light had moved from the glass in the door.

Susan looked around. The entry into the other succession of rooms had surely been moved, it was further along. On the blank of new wall thus provided, hung a sepia photograph of a Roman aqueduct.

But she thought of how she dreamed once, of Catherine, in the sepia photograph she, Susan, had perhaps seen, or not.

“She was called Catherine,” Susan said. She felt ashamed.

Olivia looked at her, evidently wanting her to go now, and to forget