Death of a Ghost. Charles Butler
with Colin to fish with shrimping nets and chased an eel across the lawn as far as the drooped willows.
How long ago was that? Seven years?
It felt like another life.
Ossian lolloped at a diagonal from the house towards a fence where the Lychfont grounds ended in a field of sheep. The flood meadow was dry now, but still soft and peaty underfoot. All this time he knew he was being followed. The black mullioned windows of the hall behind him were unoccupied and his view up the sloping lawn gave no chance of cover. In the shadow near the house, where the long grass was uncut, he saw no footprints but his own. It didn’t matter; Ossian knew. A ghost had drifted from the stonework and latched on to him. Its atmosphere of puzzled disappointment had resonated, probably, with his own.
Ossian decided to be friendly. He stopped. The ghost stopped and watched him staring back up the slope. Its long sickly face quivered like a reflection in a pool. Ossian smiled a little, encouragingly – but his smile shot it to ribbons, sliced its joints like cockcrow. It fell in pieces, then laboriously reassembled itself and followed again, dog-like, without rancour. It tracked him along the fence, where the ground grew flat and tussocked. Ossian had no choice but to let it. It did not mean him harm. It shimmered just behind the grass, a green miasma. He guessed what that green colour meant. This ghost had died violently and young.
At the edge of the wood he stopped and looked back again. The ghost was still there, dogging him at thirty metres. The body was just as thin but more distinct now; he could see long fingers and a belt of tools that clinked silently at each step. The legs were bare stalks of flesh. And that sickly face? Ossian blinked into the greenness of the river meadow rising up behind. The face was yellowish – brass. It was a metal face! The long, kind, sickly features were gone and Ossian saw jagged mask holes where no light shone, and brass lips rounded as if to speak his name…
“Ossian!” it shouted. “Ossian! Ossian! Ossian! Ossian!”
Ossian turned and ran back to the house.
SULIS’S SHERBERT was finished long since, but the scryer was still explaining about temporal dispersal. The intricacies of human history animated him as few other subjects did, and his curl of white beard wagged puppyishly as he talked. Sulis listened with patience at first, until the scryer unwisely returned to his comparison between time and a beam of light. Entering a spiritually impoverished world, he told her, was like shining a light on to polished crystal. The light would be refracted into many colours and directions. “A marvellous sight, but one signifying disintegration…”
Before long, Sulis was not even pretending to pay attention. Her mind still ran on the humiliation of her abandonment. Every now and then it came back to her and shook her by the throat, in spiteful little sobs. It made all too much sense. Ossian could never have escaped her except by flying to some vulgar place where her own transcendent purity could not easily follow. And he would certainly pay – refracted, dispersed and impoverished as he might be.
“…so you may find he eludes you merely by shifting to another part of the, er, spectrum as it were.”
The scryer was waiting for a response. The point of his speech had been clear, at any rate. Following Ossian would be risky, no matter why. And the old man’s concern was genuine, Sulis guessed, for all his ludicrous verbosity.
She looked around her. Lychfont’s marble reflected in its extreme whiteness the snowy pallor of her own face, and her turquoise eyes were brindled with gold and lapis lazuli. Two colonnades fanned from where she sat, the space between them crossed with walks and pools and fountains. The sky, as always, was kingfisher blue, the earth her own blood red, and rising from its depths a wondrous perfume clothed the air in dark velvet. Sighing, she breathed the smoke of a thousand sacrificial fires.
It was all very beautiful. And should she give this up, even if only with part of herself, even for Ossian? Although she had laughed it off, the scryer’s warning had shocked her. Might she really forget her own divinity? What if she should become trapped in the tawdry sphere of existence where Ossian had taken refuge? She could not bear the thought of being tawdry.
“Ossian always was weak-minded,” she said. “He needed me, you see, to keep him steady. That’s why we were so perfectly matched.” She broke down again and a tear snaked down her cheek: “I’ll wring his neck!”
“He is unworthy of you, lady,” put in the scryer’s clerk.
He soon regretted it. Sulis was suddenly towering over him, her golden hair scraping the rafters. “Unworthy? Is that how you speak of my consort, little man? Am I a green girl to be soothed with childish comforts? How dare you!”
“My colleague spoke ill-advisedly,” hastened the scryer, stepping between them. “He meant no harm, lady. Pardon his folly.”
Sulis moved towards the clerk, whose legs were trembling so that they could scarcely bear him. She pointed one finger at him then, slowly, raised it to the roof. The clerk rose too – ten metres into the air, his feet wriggling. He floated out to the nearest pond, then Sulis closed her fist and let him fall. There was a yelp, a splash.
“Consider him pardoned. And now, scryer, let us prepare the cauldron and the irons. There has been too much delay.”
“THAT WAS HIS own fault, surely?”
“Not at all. The poor man just blundered into the wrong part of the forest. Hardly a capital offence.”
“You can’t expect Diana to see it that way. The Olympians are so touchy.”
Catherine’s house guests were talking about gods. The walls of the saloon were thick with them. Her great-great-uncle had toured Italy at a time when prices were low and brought back a job lot, packed in crates. Ossian found Catherine and the others examining an oil of the hunter Actaeon, stumbling between green bushes on to the bank of a lake. There, by the light of her own immortal face, the goddess Diana bathed naked with her maidens. The deer Actaeon had been chasing could be seen, its hind flank at least, leaping out of the scene stage right, forgotten. The hunter’s face was all surprised embarrassment, delight and fear. If he guessed what punishment the goddess would ordain for his intrusion – to be turned into a deer, chased and eaten by his own hounds – that handsome and rather stupid face betrayed nothing of his knowledge.
“The brushwork on his spear is very fine,” said Catherine.
Ossian turned away and gave a jump as he saw Sue Frazer sitting on the sofa behind him. The truth was, he had quite forgotten her existence. He blushed to think of it.
Sue was ignoring them all. She was alone on the sofa, trying to concentrate on a book. Between her fingers, Ossian recognised the broken crosier, the mitre in a pool of blood. Murdering Ministers. An Inspector Gordius mystery! It might be a good way to open a conversation. That was hard, though. Sue was not exactly taking up the whole sofa, but her leg was crooked under her thigh, with a knee sticking out horizontally to ward off approach. She did not look as if she wanted to talk.
What was there to say about Sue Frazer? The moment Ossian wondered this, a neat packet of knowledge fell open in his mind. Sue was Colin’s half-sister: early twenties, bright, sardonic, keen on horses. It was a cause of continual jibing between her and Colin. Horses made Colin sneeze – a shameful allergy for one born to the saddle and he got teased unmercifully for it. It had always been like that. How could Ossian have forgotten?
Sue had been shielding her face with the book. Now, sensing Ossian’s presence at her side, she lowered it and looked up at him curiously.
“Ossian? I was wondering what had become of you.”
Ossian stared back. He had seen girls as beautiful as this one