An English Ghost Story Read Free Page B

from the village comes in every couple of weeks to mow the orchard and hack the weeds. This is a very fertile patch. Miss Teazle had a pair of goats to nibble the grass, but they’re gone now.’
    ‘Frisky and Whiskey?’ said Mum. The agent looked baffled. ‘Those were the goats in the Weezie books.’
    Dad raised his eyebrows. Mum wasn’t embarrassed.
    ‘It all comes back,’ she said, tapping her head.
    ‘All sorts of things are stored away up here.’
    ‘Anything useful?’
    Jordan tensed slightly but Mum laughed. Dad gave her waist a squeeze and kissed her.
    The barn had a second storey, reachable via a wooden ladder and a hatch. They all looked up.
    ‘There isn’t anything up there,’ said the agent. ‘Miss Teazle was quite infirm. She wouldn’t have been able to manage the climb.’
    ‘I’ll do a recce,’ Tim announced. He swarmed up the ladder, disappeared through the hatch, clattered around in the dark, and poked his head back over the edge.
    ‘There’s a door,’ he reported, ‘in the wall, leading nowhere.’
    She stepped out of the barn and saw what her brother meant. Twenty feet above ground was a wooden door, with a gibbet-like structure above it. The door rattled as Tim shoved it from the inside. It swung open and Tim leaned out over the drop, grinning broadly.
    ‘That was for lowering bales of hay down into the yard,’ Brian Bowker explained. ‘You might think about keeping it bolted shut to prevent accidents.’
    They took the point.
    ‘Come down, Timbo,’ said Dad. ‘Before you do yourself an injury.’
    Dad and the agent were both relieved when Tim vanished inside the barn and reappeared, dusty but unhurt, at ground level.
    Brian Bowker knew he had a sale. He was talking as if there was a done deal and the Naremores were moving in a week from Tuesday.
    Mum and Dad didn’t contradict him.
    They all left the barn, for a last look around.
    Jordan felt funny. She was – she realised with a shudder – happy. After all she’d been through these last few years, she was home. A fresh start in a new place. It felt right, in a way she had either forgotten or never known.
    Her secret plan was revised. The Hollow changed everything. Rick would understand; he always let her do the forward thinking.
    Afternoon sunlight made a green-gold haze about the place, an aura of contentment. Shapes formed and wisped in the light patterns. Jordan imagined they were reluctant to see her go, eager for her return.
    She couldn’t wait to tell Rick about the Hollow but stifled an excited impulse to beg Dad for the car phone. The thought of calling her boyfriend now – with Tim and her parents eavesdropping – made her squirm inside. The family had been here less than half an hour and already she knew it was where they would settle.
    In the hunchback, on the way to the last viewing, to a perfectly nice house that would have no chance of winning their hearts, Tim kept on about ‘his room’, listing places where his things could be put, and new things he would need. Usually, when he spun methodical fantasies upon impossible premises, he would continue until one or other of the family was forced to shoot him down. This time, they let Tim run on and on. This time, they understood exactly what he meant.
    Mum pressed the play button on the in-car cassette player. Music filled the car, ‘Spring Spring Spring’ from
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
. Jordan shivered again, not with cold but love.
    She looked back, out of the rear window, and kept her eyes on the Hollow, even when only the tip of the taller tower was visible. When they were on the main road, she turned around and felt the need to count heads. All four of them were in the car but it was as if they had left someone vital behind.
    * * *
    A s soon as the family was away from the Hollow, they missed their new home, each in their different way, each feeling at bottom the same thing. But they took the sights, sounds and smells with them, to well up