Spirit

  A FAMILIAR FACE

  Elizabeth slowly continued her walk toward Main Street, frowning in perplexity. Why had the girl seemed so familiar? It was almost as if Elizabeth had known her all her life; and yet she knew for sure she hadn’t.

  It was only when she reached Main Street and saw the sign across the street saying Walter K. Ede & Son, Mortician, that she was seized with the most horrific of thoughts. She turned, and stared back down the street, and she was so frightened that she felt as if centipedes were crawling in her hair.

  “Peggy,” she whispered. Then she screamed out, “Peggy?”

  Other Leisure books by Graham Masterton:

  THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

  PREY

  SPIRIT

  GRAHAM

  MASTERTON

  To my mother, Mary, with love.

  DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

  April 2011

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 1995 by Graham Masterton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 13: 9784-42854096-8

  E-ISBN: 97844285-0429-5

  The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  SPIRIT

  Contents

  A Familiar Face

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Chilling

  One

  Two

  Three

  2 Heart of Ice

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  3 Garden of Death

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  4 Gold Sun

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  5 Strange Days

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  6 Fire And Ice

  Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  The Chilling

  “She was exquisitely fair and delicate,

  but entirely of ice—glittering, dazzling ice.”

  One

  Elizabeth glimpsed Peggy running around the side of the house, a little mouse-grey furry figure barely visible through the duck’s-down snowflakes, and for one moment she felt as if something terrible were about to happen.

  In the distance, she heard the school clock striking, its tone flattened by the cold. Dongg.

  Elizabeth stopped, crimson-cheeked, runny-nosed, panting. She stared at the empty garden, and at the white weather-boarded corner around which Peggy had vanished so completely, as if running from one life into the next.

  The garden seemed to be holding its breath, hushed, with its dark snow-blanketed fir trees, and its curved, wind-razored drifts. All Elizabeth could hear was the occasional shuddering of overladen branches as they dropped their little offerings of snow. But there was nothing else. The huge, empty sound of nothing else. Sky, garden, house, and that was all.

  She turned around, uncertain, nine years old. She wiped her nose on the back of a red woollen glove. She wondered if she ought to run after Peggy, but she guessed that Peggy would have scrambled through the hedge at the back of the conservatory, and along the patio, and around the kitchen garden; and that by now she would probably be crouching in the shed, giggling and sniffing and sure that nobody could find her.

  But Elizabeth was still disturbed by that feeling. That deep, inexplicable feeling, which had glided through her mind like a huge black shark gliding through cold black water without disturbing the surface.

  She knew for sure that Peggy was hiding in the shed. Where else would she go? But she felt more strongly that Peggy had gone; that Peggy had disappeared; and that she would never see Peggy again, ever.

  She called, ‘Peggy! Peggy, where are you?’ But the garden remained snow-muffled and silent; and she hesitated; and stopped.

  ‘Peggy, where are you?’ But there was no reply. Elizabeth hated the sound of her own voice.

  ‘Peggy!’ she called. Then she called, ‘Laura!’

  Eventually, Laura came struggling across the garden in her poppy-red corduroy coat. Laura was seven, and everybody said that she was the prettiest. Her hair was blonde and curly (like her mother’s) while Elizabeth’s was dark and straight (like her father’s). Peggy’s was blonde and curly, too, but Peggy had disappeared around the weatherboarded corner and Elizabeth wasn’t sure if they would ever see Peggy again.

  Laura, panting, said, ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Peggy’s gone.’

  Laura stared at her. ‘What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just gone.’

  ‘She’s hiding, that’s all,’ said Laura. ‘Daddy caught her playing with his fairy egg-cups and he shouted at her.’

  Elizabeth bit her lip. ‘Fairy egg-cups’ was what they called her father’s golf-tees. All three of them found them fascinating, and all three of them, at one time or another, had been scolded for stealing them. Elizabeth felt worried. Worried, that was it, in the same way that mommy got worried, whenever it was night-time and snowing really hard and daddy hadn’t come back from New Milford.

  ‘We’d better find her,’ she said.

  They trudged through the snow together, around the side of the house. It was half past three, and already it was growing dark. The tennis courts were deserted, their nets sagging and clotted with snow. The only footprints on the snow were the fork-like footprints of robins, and the dabs of the family cat.

  ‘Peggy!’ they called. ‘Peggy, we’re coming to get you!’

  Silence. The wind rose, and whirled up a snow-devil. ‘She didn’t come this way,’ said Laura, emphatically.

  ‘She must have, I saw her.’

  ‘But there’s no footprints.’

  ‘Of course not. The snow’s covered them up.’

  They struggled across the patio, and around the conservatory. All along the guttering, icicles hung; and at the very end of the conservatory, where the guttering usually flooded, a grotesque ice-figure hunched beside the house, a frozen hooknosed witch, clinging to the downpipe. Whenever the sun came gleaming through the trees, the witch’s nose dripped, and the girls danced around her in terrified glee, singing, ‘Nose-drip, nose-drip, witchy-witchy, nose-drip!’ But tonight the witch was gunmetal grey and gleaming and her nose was hooked in a cold, impossible curve; and Elizabeth and Laura circled her in genuine dread.

  Supposing she spoke? Supposing she struck them stone-cold dead, right where they stood? Walking the stiff, quick walk of the seriously frightened, the two girls managed to reach the steps that led down to the rose-lawn, unscathed, unclawed, their coats unbloodied and their livers intact.

&nb
sp; ‘Peggy,’ said Elizabeth, so softly that Laura could scarcely hear her.

  ‘That’s no good,’ said Laura. ‘You’ve got to scream at the top of your voice. Peggy! Peggy! Peggy-peggy-peggy-peggy-peggy!’

  Laura’s voice rose up into a piercing scream, a scream that echoed and echoed across Sherman, and echoed from the top of Green Pond Mountain, invisible in the snowstorm, and from Green Pond Mountain to Wanzer Hill, and all across Lake Candlewood, until the snow suddenly snuffed it out forever.

  The two girls waited, and listened. No reply. Elizabeth turned around, and stared at the Nose-Drip Witch, but she remained where she was, moulded out of ice, around the downpipe. Somehow she looked rather forlorn. Perhaps she was thinking that spring would soon be here, and she would melt away.

  They went to the shed. It stood under a tall fir tree. It was small and dark, although its roof was covered with an extravagantly thick coating of snow, so that it looked like a frosted fruit-cake. There were no footprints around it, and Elizabeth could hardly manage to pull open the door, because of the snow. Inside, the shed was gloomy and smelled of creosote and dried grass. Elizabeth could just make out the antlers of the lawnmower handles, and spades, and shovels, and stacks of earthenware flowerpots. The windows were thickly curtained with spiderwebs, in which all kinds of colourless and skeletal shapes dangled and danced.

  ‘Peggy?’ she whispered.

  ‘Peggy, where are you?’ shrieked Laura, making Elizabeth jump.

  They listened. They could faintly hear music coming from the house. ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby’. The kitchen window was warmly lit and behind the red gingham curtains they could see their mother crossing and recrossing from table to sink to oven, carrying cakes and pies and mixing-bowls. Further along, the library windows were lit up too, though much more dimly.

  ‘I think we ought to tell mom,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘She can’t have gone far,’ said Laura. They both knew that they would get into trouble for having lost their little sister. ‘Drat her! She’s such a menace.’

  ‘Yes, drat her!’

  Together, they pushed the shed door shut, and fastened it. Then they continued their plodding circuit of the house. It was a huge, rambling place, the largest house this side of Sherman. There were eleven bedrooms and four bathrooms and three huge reception rooms. The girls’ father was always complaining that he spent more of his life carrying logs to the various fireplaces around the house than he did writing or editing. ‘My passport should read “stoker”, not “publisher”,’ he used to say. But their mother had fallen in love with the house because of its huge galleried drawing-room, in which they could raise a fifteen-foot Christmas tree, just like those movies in which everybody comes home for the holidays and the children are dressing the tree with tinsel and ribbons, and there’s some kind of romantic misunderstanding but everybody ends up dewy-eyed and toasting each other in punch and singing ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’.

  Their mother had come from a broken home, that was all they knew. Until she was eight, Elizabeth had thought that a ‘broken home’ was a house with a massive crack down the middle. Now she knew that it meant something else, worse, and that was why they had just one grandpa, whereas most of their friends had two.

  Elizabeth and Laura reached the southern end of the house. There was nothing here but the swimming-pool and then a narrow triangle of lawn and then the woods. The snow was falling even more thickly now, and Elizabeth’s toes were beginning to hurt, even though she was wearing her boots with the sheepskin linings.

  ‘Well, I don’t know where she is,’ Laura declared.

  ‘I’ll bet she went back indoors,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She saw mommy baking, I’ll bet, and she’s probably licking the frosting-bowl and all the raw cake.’

  They made their way back to the house. A gust of wind blew pungent woodsmoke around them, like a fuming cloak.

  ‘I’ll bet she’s eaten all the frosting,’ said Laura, cross ‘already. ‘I’ll bet it’s strawberry and I’ll bet she’s eaten all of it. I’ll bet she’s even sucked the spoon.’

  Elizabeth didn’t say anything. She felt it would be spiteful to say anything. But she knew that Peggy was mommy’s little special darling, and sometimes when mommy was laughing and playing with Peggy it made her feel old and tall and rather plain, and not exactly unwanted but resentful of having grown up.

  They reached the snow-covered steps that led back towards the front door, and it was then that they saw the footprints.

  ‘Footprints!’ said Laura.

  ‘They’re ours,’ said Elizabeth. She remembered how Pooh and Piglet had walked around and around in the woods, becoming more and more alarmed at the discovery of their own ever-multiplying tracks in the snow.

  But Laura frowned and said, ‘No, they’re not, look, they’re too small and it’s only one person.’

  The footprints were already clogged up with falling snow, so that they were little more than dimples. When they looked more carefully, however, the girls could see that they came around the front of the house and down the steps. After she had disappeared around the corner, Peggy must have hidden behind the bushes until Elizabeth and Laura had passed her by, and then doubled back.

  But where was she now?

  Standing on top of the steps, the girls tried to make out the line of the footprints across the luminous white garden. They were slurred, the footprints of a small hurrying child, and there was no doubt where they were heading. Across the garden, diagonally, and straight towards the swimming-pool.

  The snow was so thick that it was impossible to tell that there was a pool there, except for the two white-painted metal ladders, about fifty feet apart, and the metal mountings for the diving-board. Father had thought about emptying the pool for the winter but the pump had broken down, and then there had been trouble with the drainage because of all the rain, and by the time the first frost started it was too late. At least, he had said it was too late, but he had been frantically busy with his new series of books called Litchfield Life, and he hadn’t had very much time for the house, apart from bringing in logs for the fires, logs, logs and more logs.

  The girls had skated pebbles across the frozen surface of the pool, and once they had sent Elizabeth’s Shirley Temple doll windmilling out on an Arctic expedition. It was after Elizabeth had stepped on to the ice to rescue Shirley that their father had forbidden them to go anywhere near the pool during the winter; or else he’d slap their legs.

  But Peggy must have gone near the pool. Her footprints led directly towards it; and about five feet away from the nearer ladder, there was a faint greyish depression, which was quickly being filled by falling snow.

  Elizabeth opened her mouth in completely silent horror. Cold snowflakes whirled against her lips and melted on her tongue.

  ‘Go find father,’ she whispered. ‘Go find father!’

  Laura stared at her. Those wide blue eyes. Then Elizabeth stumbled down the steps and across the lawn, ploughing and hopping through the knee-deep snow. She didn’t even look back to see if Laura had gone. Her throat felt completely raggedy-red, as if she had every sore throat of her entire childhood, all at once. ‘Peggy!’ she screamed. ‘Peggy!’

  She reached the brink of the pool and almost overbalanced. Only the slightest line in the snow showed where the edge lay. She hesitated, gasping and panting. There was no doubt about it. Peggy’s footprints headed unerringly across the surface, and then stopped.

  Elizabeth turned around, trying to swallow her sore throat away. Laura had vanished, so father must be coming. The silence was overwhelming. She could have been the only person in the whole world. She looked back at the faint depression in the snow, and said, ‘Please God, please God, please help me,’ in the highest and tiniest of voices.

  She grasped the top of the metal ladder, and cautiously trod down into the snow. Much further down than she had expected, the sole of her boot met the surface of the ice. She took a deep breath and gradually p
ut her weight on it, still holding on to the ladder. The ice seemed to be thick enough. She stood on it with both feet, and gave a cautious little hop, and still it seemed to hold her.

  She glanced back at the house. There was no sign of father yet. She would have to find Peggy herself. She didn’t want to. She was sure that Peggy must have drowned; and she was terrified that the ice would break underneath her and that she would drown, too, long before father could get here. But she knew that she had to, Peggy might be clinging on to the edge of the ice, underneath the snow, and how would she feel for ever and ever if she didn’t try to save her?

  Holding on to the ladder for as far as she could reach, Elizabeth shuffled out across the surface of the pool. The snow was almost a foot deep, so that it came right up to her knees, and over the top of her boots.

  She let go of her ladder, and started to slide-step towards the depression in the snow where Peggy’s footprints disappeared. She found herself whispering Pooh’s song under her breath. ‘The more it snows (tiddely pom), The more it goes (tiddely pom), The more it goes (tiddely pom) on snowing.’

  She heard the ice complain – an odd, squeaking noise, like two pieces of broken glass rubbing together. She paused, her arms held out wide to keep her balance. She had almost reached the depression in the snow, and if the ice had broken here, then it could easily break again. She cleared away the snow with her feet, and then knelt down and cleared it away with her gloves. Just under the snowflakes, water was slopping, already gelid, more like grey tapioca pudding than water. Carefully, she cleared all around the hole in the ice, and it was no more than two feet across.

  Behind her, she heard her father shouting, ‘Lizzie! Elizabeth! Get off the pool! Get off the pool!’

  But she didn’t turn around. She had glimpsed something stirring, just beneath the surface of the ice. Something that bobbed and dipped and slowly revolved.

  ‘Lizzie!’ her father was calling her – much closer now. His voice sounded almost hysterical. ‘Lizzie, don’t you move!’