A Ghost Story

This ghost story begins with a dinner invitation. In a life as humdrum as mine an invitation for someone else to provide and, more importantly, pay for, food is always welcome, not matter how unlikely the source. Or the timing. Halloween. An odd choice for a date, but then my cousin Oswald was an odd sort of chap. As far as I could recall. We hadn’t seen each other for some time. Which made him seeking me out as a guest seem even odder. Well, childhood boredom will make friends from the most unlikely of companions. As the only two young children in our extended family, Oswald and I had spent a considerable amount of of our childhoods in chilly nurseries and distant playrooms with only each other for company. Looking back on it now, though, what strikes me is how many of our games seemed to be chosen to allow us to play together without actually speaking: hide and seek, blind man’s buff, even a simple game of cards necessitated a strategic silence. Perhaps it is not then surprising that, in adulthood, we quickly lost contact. We moved in different spheres, after all. Oswald had inherited the house in the country, I worked in town. He lived, as far as I could tell, alone and out of contact with the rest of the family, I could never get away from them. And we were always of very different temperaments. Oswald had, even as a child, a macabre turn of mind and was always trying to tell me about the strange creatures and customs and events he had read about in books. I, on the other hand, was as uninterested in such things as he was in the trains and machines and feats of engineering that I tried to share with him. So, as children, we resorted to our silent games, and so, as adults, he hid away in his bookish concealment and I went out into the world to seek my fortune. Or at least a living. But he was still my cousin, and my companion of childhood and so, no matter how odd it might be, I answered his invitation and went to dinner. I had never liked that house as a child and I can’t say that the intervening years had done much to help, neither in my taste for it, nor in the house itself. It had always been chilly, in temperament and in temperature. Rangy, under furnished and full of shadows. Long, echoing corridors receding into cold darkness, damp and broken armchairs, empty rooms in which the only sound was a distant ticking: of clocks, of rain on the panes, of death watch beetles in the panelling. Even when fully occupied it felt strangely deserted, with guests instinctively retreating into the few heated rooms. Now that only Oswald lived there, it was positively abandoned. Arriving in the darkening late October afternoon did the looming house no favours. It was like carrying ones luggage into a particularly grandiose mausoleum. And Oswald its sepulchral occupant. He had always been a thin and sickly child, but he had paled and narrowed with the years, as if he was diminishing with age, slowly turning into one of the crumbling, yellowed pages of the innumerable books that lined the walls. He did seem, though, genuinely pleased to see me. I imagine that he saw so few people these days that he was grateful for the company. “Decades, eh?” He said. “It must be decades since you were last here.” “At least thirty years, I imagine.” “The nursery. Remember the old nursery, eh? Where we used to play? You won’t recognise it. Come and see.” And so we straggled off into the depths of the house, Oswald carrying a lantern because a lot of the place was still not wired for electricity. “No money,” he said, “No money for modernisation. Have to open it to the public, eh?” “Well that’ll take money too, I imagine,” I said, “People expect so much from their entertainment these days.” “Oh, we have our entertainment,” said Oswald. “You’ll see. We have quite the entertainment, eh? Look here.” The old nursery was at the very top and back of the house but up there, incongruously in the attics, Oswald had constructed a dungeon. The room was low and lit only by candle light and cluttered up with strange and gruesome objects, relics of ancient horrors and mysteries that Oswald preceded to walk me around with a horrible glee. A bookcase of heavy and ominous grimoires, vitrines full of little bronze household gods and lead curse tablets, a skull on a velvet cushion under a dome, and, in one corner, an iron maiden. “A fake, eh?” He said, “A genuine fake. Never really used in the Middle Ages, these things. An invention of show men and curators. This is a trick one. Made by a magician. See this mechanism here? Close the front and the spikes at the back retract. Quite safe, you see? Quite safe to get into, eh?” I began to see quite why there was no money. Oswald had spent it all. Not on repairing the roof or getting the electricians in but on this peculiar little museum of his, his attic full of the ghastly and bizarre. “See the skull there?” He said. “The skull. The skull of Gilles de Rais. It was sold as. I doubt it somewhat but an interesting piece nonetheless. Supposed to be haunted, you know.” “Aren’t all skulls?” I said. “By the owner, I mean?” “Oh, I see what you mean. See what you mean. Ghost in the machine, eh? Very clever. Still this ghost in this skull has never seen one in that one. Supposed to. Everyone who has owned it has seen something. I was told. Not a glimmer, though, not a glimmer. Shame, eh?” Personally I didn’t think it was a shame, especially since it transpired we were to have our supper up there, surrounded by all these oddities and it was going to be trying enough to eat under the gaze of those empty eye sockets, let alone having the original owner looming over one, however phantasmal. I went and dressed for dinner. The bedroom was damp and cold, but that didn’t surprise me. And neither did the dinner, which was also damp and cold, and entirely in keeping with its setting, being something of a torturous horror itself. Oswald didn’t seem to mind, though. I suppose he must have been used to it. “Ought to be a ghost, don’t you think?” He said, sawing away at his leathery chop. “Ought to be a ghost in a house like this, eh? Deserves one, don’t you think? Popular with the public, too, I imagine.” “Far too interesting a feature for our family,” I said. “Quite right,” said Oswald, “You’re quite right. More right than you know. Tragedy, eh? That’s what gets you ghosts. Tragedy. Violent deaths. Unexpected deaths. Not in this family. Can’t imagine any of us being murdered. Or murdering, eh?” “Not the done thing, really,” I said, “Liable to get in the papers.” “Too lively, eh? Too lively. Or perhaps too deadly, I should say. More likely to be bored to death. Bored quite to death. Yes, boredom, eh? That’s what we’re haunted with.” “Certainly this house always was.” I said, “Stuck up here all the dull afternoons of our childhoods, but look how... interesting you’ve made it.” “Gratified you think so,” said Oswald, looking around at the collection, “Very gratified. Funny when you remember all those dull afternoons, eh? Funny... I say...” He swallowed loudly, evidently having trouble with one of the rock hard potatoes. “Remember the games we played, eh? The hide and seek?” “Two people weren’t really enough for blind man’s buff, were they?” I said. “What about it, eh?” said Oswald. “What about a game, eh? Hide and seek? For old times’ sake?” It was a ludicrous idea, but then it was suggested in such a ludicrous setting that it seemed almost suitable. Besides, he had such a pleading, wistful look as he suggested it that I couldn’t quite bring myself to refuse. Locked up here with his nasty knick knacks, I imagine he was somewhat starved for wholesome entertainment. I was to go first. Oswald stepped out into the dark corridor and I was left in his attic dungeon to find somewhere to hide. The most obvious place was, naturally, the iron maiden, given that Oswald had already assured me it was quite safe, and it was my first thought, but my curiosity got the better of me. I have something of a weakness for engineering and I couldn’t help examining the hidden mechanism that retracted the spikes. Which is when I noticed something which made me think again. I suppose the demonstration Oswald had made of it must have loosened something. It was old, after all, and I can’t see how else it might have happened, Oswald had been in the room the whole time, even while I went to dress for dinner, so no one else could have stolen in and tampered with it. Yet it seemed to me that now the secret catch would not quite catch, and the retracting spikes thus not quite retract, and the door, when shut, be very shut indeed. If only I had been able to to tell Oswald this. I was, after all, only a few feet away, hiding behind the curtain. I could easily have reached out and... well, pulled him away, I suppose. You see, he must have had the same thought as I, that the iron maiden was the obvious hiding place, as the moment he came back in the room, he rushed straight to it. We think he must have tripped. It’s the only reasonable explanation for how he fell into the thing, causing the door to swing shut on him and the spikes to not retract. I can still hear his terrible shrieks. Not only because they were memorable, but because he still repeats them. Every year, on the anniversary of the accident. The house has its ghost now and he was right, it has proved very popular. As the closest surviving relative, I inherited the house and, in Oswald’s memory, I have opened it to the public. His collection has proved quite a draw, and I hope that that might, in some way, gratify his shade as, every Halloween, up in the attic, it plays its endless, tedious game of hide and seek.