An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman

Author:Kim Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Titan

From the

JOURNAL

of a

VICTORIAN

GENTLEWOMAN

8 February

The Reverend Mr Bannerman is blind. He does not – cannot – understand the Hollow. No one who has not spent night after night after night under its roof can hope to fathom this place. The Mama understands, only too well. But not half so well as I.

13 February

I barely remember Father, yet I am certain the portrait which hangs in the Summer Room, painted from his death mask, is not a good likeness. I have read every word he ever set down, but still he is a stranger. The Mama has devoted her life – and mine! – to his sacred memory, but she despises him. His first great sin was dying so carelessly. His second, more unforgivable lapse was not to manifest thereafter. The parade of mediums and sensitives and psychics and charlatans who have passed through the Hollow bear witness to the Mama’s desperate need that Father linger here as a ghost. These people, without fail, commence by stating that they sense his presence, that they are sure they can coax him out of his shadows of concealment with their especial – expensive – services. Then, after a period of various mumbo-jumbo, they take fright. Even arrant frauds swiftly realise that the Hollow is capable of trumping their manufactured illusions. Some flee in panic, some swear to quit their professions, a few even return monies given over to them. Father is not here, not any more, but others are… earthbound spirits and goblins damned!

20 February

The Mama is a worse monster than the others. She is petitioning Bannerman to perform a rite of exorcism. She wishes to be alone in the Hollow, with Father. I am never mentioned. She half-believes an exorcism will cast me out too, I think. She cannot tell the difference between her own living daughter and Apple Annie. That song, heard all too often hereabouts, has stuck in her mind. None of the ghosts we have seen or heard – ghosts are not all people, some are things or sensations or transformations – resembles in the least the wailing girl of the song, but the Mama has taken it into her head that Father has deserted her for this chit of a spirit and dallies with her in the orchard. She has fixed upon the tallest of the trees as their amorous nest and loiters by it, tutting and fretting. If Bannerman doesn’t allow bell, book and candle, she will have sawmen in and bring down the tree. The prospect horrifies and saddens me, though I know her beliefs about the tree are baseless. It is a living thing and spirits do cling to it. Apple Annie is a creature from a song and Father is gone. The Mama cannot accept this. Bannerman, no less than her charlatans, is not helping her, or me.

28 March

Bannerman will not come back. The Hollow took against him as soon as he started to believe in it. I have seen it do that before, to the worst of the sensitives.

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