Read by Peter Noble
“Do you like ghost stories?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
The man looked as if he was about to answer me, then stopped himself, smiled, and scratched his chin. He was in his late thirties, I reckoned, but he was in a bad way. His eyes were bloodshot, and his fingers stained with nicotine. I had just popped into the pub off Cavendish Square to get out of the rain: I suspected that he had been drinking all day.
“You say that,” he said. “But I’ve never found anyone who’ll listen to mine.” He picked at the papery skin on the back of his hands. “Now I don’t think I’ve got much time left to tell it in.”
I glanced out of the window. The rain was slacking off, but the sky was still a threatening gunmetal. “How long do you need?”
He looked up. “Ten minutes. No more. Seriously: you want to hear it?”
Perhaps it was his line about not having much time that swayed me. A mixture of pity—he was clearly very unwell—and the implicit salesmanship in his words: limited supply. Buy now to avoid disappointment.
“Why not?”
The man hesitated for a moment, then began. “It happened ten years ago, when I was working just down the road.” He stopped, and looked at the bottom of his empty glass.
I asked the barman for another two pints; he turned away from the TV screen, served us, and then went back to his viewing. My companion took a swig of his drink, sloshed it around his mouth as if tasting a fine wine, and went on.
“I was a junior doctor during the last days of the old Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer Street. It's gone now. The house is gone, too. The one where the doctors’ room was. It was knocked down at around the time the hospital was demolished. There’s just a gap where it used to be.”
“The doctors’ room?”
“The doctors' room was something only the juniors knew about. We were supposed to stay on the hospital site during our on-calls, but sometimes it was dead quiet, and you wanted to catch up on some sleep. The people who ran the hospital wanted us awake for the whole shift, even if there was nothing to do: hospital managers are like that. They took the couches out of the doctors' mess, and put hard chairs in. So to have a lie down, you went round the corner to this old house. The key was under the mat. All the doors, except the one to the doctors' room, were shut and locked, and hadn't been opened in a long time. There was an old mirror in the hallway, a full-length one tarnished and darkening at the edges. And that was it for decoration. The wallpaper, I remember, was peeling—peeling in strips, as if someone had slashed at it with a knife.
“The doctors’ room was where the old living room had been, round the front of the house. The hospital owned the building, but they'd long forgotten it, some bit of paper got lost somewhere, probably. I think the electricity company forgot about it, too, because the lights still worked. Our bleeps were within range of the hospital, so they could get hold of you. When your bleep went off, you just had to get out of bed, stroll down the road, and get to work. The room itself, the doctors' room, had been done up really nicely. There was the bed, a kettle, a TV. Just bits and bobs people had brought in over the years. You wouldn’t have guessed what was underneath.”
The man took hold of his pint, and slid it gently across the smooth, dark wood of the bar as if it were a glass on a Ouija board.
“Go on”, I said. He took a deep breath, like a diver preparing to jump, then continued.
“During the war, a doctor and his family had lived in the house. They were well-to-do, and they were tired of going down into the tube at night to escape the bombs dropping on London. The doctor’s wife didn’t want to wreck their garden with an Anderson shelter, so they had a builder come in and convert their basement. They had to enlarge it quite a lot, of course – dig a bit deeper, strike out further under the house, but once it was done they just opened a trapdoor in the living room, and down they went. They had it fixed up really well—it was decorated just like the room above it. So after a while you’d forget you were in a shelter at all.
“One day, the doctor didn’t turn up for work. It wasn’t like him, so the hospital checked to see if he’d been injured and brought in anywhere. He hadn’t—and no one had seen his wife, or his child, either. It was evening by the time they got a locksmith to let his registrar into the house. It was completely dark inside, and the blackout curtains were still drawn. All the rooms were locked. The registrar knew about the shelter; he reckoned that maybe something had gone wrong, and his consultant had got trapped down below. So they broke the door open, went in, and opened the hatch in the floor. He was right. Something had gone wrong. Something had gone very wrong.”
“What?”
“The carpet, the wallpaper, the furniture: everything was soaked in blood. In the corner was what looked like a heap of wet clothes: it was only when the registrar went over to look that he saw it was the body of the doctor and his wife, slashed about and broken so horribly that they barely looked human any more. And behind them—against the wall, as if his mother and father had been trying to protect him—was their young son.”
“Alive?”
The man shook his head. “Dead. Dead of fright.”
“What killed them?”
“I have my own ideas about that. Do you think much about London under? The towns, and villages, and temples under our feet? Places where things went to die, or to hide. Places where sacrifices were performed, perhaps.” He put his hand on the crumpled copy of the Evening Standard resting on the bar. “I’ve read that more and more rich folk are building under their houses these days. Gyms, swimming pools, cinemas. They should be more careful.”
The man took a long sip of his drink: already, it was almost finished. “The registrar and the locksmith decided that whatever it was in that house should stay there. So they told the authorities they hadn’t found anything, and eventually, everyone forgot about it. People went missing the whole time in the war.”
“Then how did the story get passed on? How did you hear it?”
“I’ll come to that. The next thing I have to tell you is what happened to me. It was a night in October: I was about two months into my job. Someone else was covering A and E, while the patients on the ward were tucked in and asleep. I didn’t expect to be disturbed, but when I lay down on the bed in the doctors’ room, I left the light on just in case I was bleeped and had to leave in a hurry. I left the light on. I’m sure I left the light on. And that was the thing.” His voice was lower now, and I had to lean forward to hear. “When I woke up, the light was off. It was completely black in the room. I wondered what had woken me up: I felt around for my bleep, and checked it, but it hadn’t gone off. My eyes adjusted to the darkness a little: the door had swung open as I slept. And then I saw it, in the hallway outside.”
“Saw what?”
“A face. It was pale and blurred, like an old photograph. I could only just make out the eyes—dark circles—and the mouth … it was … it was wide open as if it were hungry. I — I got up from the bed, and I hit the light switch. I forced myself to look back into the hallway. I realised then what I had seen.”
“What was it?”
“It was the mirror. My reflection.”
I laughed. I had been led up the garden path: still, it hadn’t been too bad a story for the price of a pint. The man looked offended. “What? What are you laughing at?”
“So there was no ghost? You just frightened yourself with a story?”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. Remember you asked me how the story was passed on?”
“Yes.”
“I looked different in the mirror because I was different. Something had changed in my mind. When I had gone to the house that night, I had no idea about the ghost story: I had never heard it. Now it was clear in my head: every image, every detail, as if someone had whispered it in my ear as I slept.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“If you knew your house was being demolished, what would you do?”
“I’d find somewhere else to live.”
“Exactly. Whatever lived under that house, whatever it was they let out in the 1940s, wanted somewhere else to live. And where better to live than inside a story? The ghost now existed in the story. And through the story, it existed in me. Look!”
He pointed at the TV screen across the bar. The picture had just faded to black, revealing the reflection of the barman, and behind him my companion, and—
And where I should have been, I caught a glimpse of something else. Just for a moment. A face: a pale, drawn, hungry face.
The man knocked back the last of his drink, got up from his stool, and straightened his clothes. He suddenly looked years younger.
“Thank you,” he said.
*
I don’t know if there was ever a house off Mortimer Street with a bomb shelter underneath. I don’t know if the doctors’ room existed. I don’t know if the man I met had ever even worked as a doctor.
This is all I know: I have not been alone for a long time.
To be rid of the ghost story — the ghost that is the story — I had to pass it on. But no one would listen. Nobody wanted to hear about it. I had to wait until I could find a way to tell it; a new way, make people want to listen, desperate to know the end. And now I have.
Do you like ghost stories? Doesn’t everyone?
(c) Niall Boyce, 2014
Niall Boyce is a writer and editor; he was born and brought up in Wales, but gradually drifted east. He has published one novel and lots of short stories, most notably for Big Finish’s Doctor Who range.
Peter Noble (left) was born in a South African valley, lovely beyond any singing of it. Hippie musicians dragged him from an idyllic childhood, running barefoot through rich and matted grass with his dog, Bartok, to vegetarian communes from California to India, via Lisbon, London and Findhorn. He likes telling stories.
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