The Dark and What It Said Read online

  She shrugged. “No one, I suppose. But it’s obvious, isn’t it, given the circumstances?” She took a corner of the tea towel I was wiping dishes with and dried her hands. “What are you getting at? Why the interest in the windows?”

  “Because I think your house is haunted.”

  “Come into the living room.”

  I racked my last dish and followed her through. We sat down, and Sonja said, “Ghosts?”

  That was a hard question to answer; it was such a vague term. So I told her about the sea sounds.

  “That?” she said. “That’s just the wind in the trees making freak noises now and then. I’ve heard it a couple of times myself.”

  I told her how terrified Axel had been, how he’d acted as if soaking wet even though he was dusty dry. Sonja called to him, and the big Doberman lumbered over.

  “Are you sure, Ernie?” She stroked Axel’s back. “He seems all right.”

  “He wasn’t this morning, and neither was I.” I hesitated. “Sonja, we’ve been friends for a number of years now and we have many things in common -- bikes and travel and music and films and how I tried to learn Dutch once, along with other interests we share -- and although the supernatural isn’t one of them...”

  “You’re sounding like you’re proposing to me, Ernie.”

  “Eh?” Yes, I was sounding that way, which didn’t make things any easier. “No, no. It’s just that...” I hesitated again, then quickly said, “Sonja, I think I better leave.”

  “Leave? Why?”

  “What do you mean ‘why’? Haven’t I just been telling you? Whether you believe it or not, your house is haunted and I don’t want to know about haunted houses anymore. I’ve had too many bad experiences with things like that. But the worst bit is I know myself too well. If I stay here I’ll start snooping, and if I don’t find anything I’ll go crazy, and if I do find something I’ll start digging and probing at it till it turns nasty. It’s what’s happened before; why should it be any different this time?”

  “OK, OK,” she said. “I’ll grant you your ghostly sea. But how can that hurt you? Axel apparently came in contact with it and he seems all right.” She scratched him under the chin and his tail stump wagged.

  “That’s just it. In the last six years you’ve heard the sea two, three times, right? Now suddenly it’s heard twice in a day and gives Axel an imaginary soaking.”

  “Are you saying your arrival here is causing this somehow?”

  “Not causing it so much as waking up something that’s been here dormant for at least the time of your occupancy. I’ve done something or there’s something about me that’s stirred up old echoes in this house, all of which gives me another damn good reason to leave. Right?”

  Sonja was silent for a moment, then said, “No. No, you’re not right. If anything it’s a damn good reason for you to stay. You say you know yourself too well. I think you don’t know yourself enough. When you’ve written to me in the past about your ghosts I have to admit I took it all with a grain of salt; but more than this I read between the lines and saw the person you are. You’re part bluster, part coward and part hero. The more you want to run away from these things the more you want to find reasons to face them. Even though you know the risks, the occult draws you again and again—of your own free will, Ernie. Your own free will. You may deny it to yourself, but you thrive on this sort of thing. A long time ago you told me some one once described you as an ‘uncouth Don Quixote’. Well, they were half right.”

  “Anything else you want to tell me about myself?” I asked, feeling every minute more and more exposed.

  “Only this. After all I’ve just said you may still feel perfectly justified in leaving. But I don’t think you will, despite what you’ve said about your attitude towards these things. And you know why?”

  “Why?” I said in a small voice, readying myself for another glimpse into the mirror.

  “Because you don’t have the money for alternative accommodation and your return plane ticket’s not valid for another twelve days.” She smiled and gave me a wink. “Like it or not. Ernie, you’re stuck with me and my haunted house until then.”

  ***

  The ocean sounded again through my window that night.

  I’d tried to sleep, but waiting for the sound to return had kept me awake. It’d probably been there a few minutes before I realized it. Soft it was, a gentle sea, possibly almost a flat calm.

  Once again I looked out the window, but there was nothing to see or smell. I pulled on my trousers and made for the back door. My bed was in an area adjacent to the living room, separated from it only by a couple of carved wooden posts; I had to pick my way carefully past tables, shelves and cabinets in the dark. A door creaked open behind me. Turning, I saw a vague, white figure emerge from the darkness. The figure said,

  “Do you hear it?”

  “Christ! Sonja, don’t do that! You scared me half to death floating out here in a white dressing gown!”

  “Listen.”

  We stood together by the back door as the sound of the ocean washed up at us from the yard. “So it’s true,” she said.

  “Yes.” I gallantly refrained from adding “I told you so.”

  I opened the door and stepped outside onto the landing. The ocean sounded no louder here, but seemed to come from all directions as if the house were an island. There were no lights on in the places either side and at the back, which made me wonder if it were too soft and calm to be heard by our sleeping neighbours, or if the sound simply didn’t exist beyond the fences. We crept down the stairs where we found Axel cringing in his basket under the house. He bared his teeth and growled as Sonja tried to pat him. He was frightened out of his wits.

  “He’ll calm down when the phenomenon stops,” I said, and we moved on to the front of the house. The ocean moved with us, never louder nor softer nor from any one direction. At the front gate I tested my theory, stepping out into the street, out into dead silence.

  “What does this mean?” Sonja whispered.

  “God knows,” I whispered back.

  We re-entered the front yard, re-entered the sound of the ocean to find the air had grown bitterly cold. Sonja exclaimed with a shiver and wrapped her dressing gown tighter about herself. Wearing only jeans and a tee-shirt I had to rub my arms briskly to ward off goose pimples. My bare feet hurt with cold, making my dash back out into the street more of a fast hobble. Sonja, in slippers, didn’t fare much better. It was warm in the street. Warm and silent.

  “Axel,” said Sonja.

  Bracing ourselves, we returned into the sub-zero temperature of the yard, picked up a half frozen dog from his basket and lugged him outside.

  “Did you notice our breath?” I said.

  “How it didn’t fog?” she said, tending to Axel who was quickly recovering from both cold and fear. “I wonder why.”

  “Maybe the cold’s not real.”

  “Is this a new phase of the haunting?”

  I shrugged and rubbed my arms again. The cold had gone but the memory lingered.

  After a minute Sonja said, “Well, we can’t stay out here all night.”

  “You don’t want to go back in, do you?”

  “It’s my home, Ernie. I’m not letting some ghost freeze me out.”

  “Well, you go ahead. Freeze your... bum off.” I almost said tits, but I didn’t know her that well.

  She didn’t move and I didn’t blame her. The Queensland night was humid and warm.

  “It doesn’t make sense!” she said suddenly.

  “Dutch doesn’t make sense,” I said, remembering my attempts to learn the language.

  “You don’t have enough experience with it,” she answered off-handedly.

  “Exactly! We haven’t had enough experience of these sorts of things to know why they do what they do. There’s sense here, if only we understood it.” I grinned. “Made you answer your own argument, didn’t I?”

  “Je bent ook zo’n slimmerik.”
/>   “What’s that mean?”

  “Never you mind.” She ducked her head quickly through the gate. “The sea’s still there and it’s still freezing.”

  “Is there a thermometer in the house?”

  “On a nail by the back door. But why do you want a thermometer? Aren’t your goose pimples evidence enough?”

  “Just want to find out how cold it is. Or at least see how real this cold is.”

  Bracing myself I belted into the yard, hitting the cold like a brick wall. My feet were two lumps of numbness by the time I got to the back door where the thermometer read a comfortable twenty-two degrees Celsius.

  Yet even as I looked at it, my teeth chattering, my nose beginning to leak, I felt the air grow warm again; and with this the ocean faded into silence. But a second before it did I thought a new sound crossed it, a low mutter like the distant hubbub of human voices.

  ***

  The house had no fireplace nor any sort of fixed space heater. But Sonja was able to dig out a one-bar electric job from somewhere, “Just to be on the safe side.” I’d brought a jumper up with me on my tropical holiday -- probably out of habit -- and before returning to bed that night I laid it out where it could be grabbed in a hurry.

  “Sonja, I want to go into town with you tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Research. I want to find out the what, where and why of who owned this house before you, right back to when it was built and what was on the land before that.”

  “Are you expecting more phenomena?”

  “Yes. I think this thing has only just begun.”

  “Your pneumonia and riding bikes, even on warm days, won’t mix well. Why not take the train?”

  “Because the station’s too far for me to walk in my condition. I’d be out of breath before I got half way. Anyway, I’ll go stir-crazy if I don’t get back on the road soon, and besides it’ll give me a flimsy excuse to hold you round the hips.”

  She muttered something about “typical male,” adding that I could hold onto the grab-rail like everyone else.

  Which is what I did.

  ***

  Another ‘awful truth’ revealed itself the next morning when we biked into Brisbane. After sixteen years of motorcycling

  I still didn’t know how to ride properly on the back, leaning when I shouldn’t and not leaning when I should. Sonja spent the whole ride screaming at me over her shoulder while trying not to wobble through corners.

  “Ernie,” she said, propping her machine in the Ann Street motorcycle park, “you’re a dear friend... but you’re a shit pillion!”

  Heading off to her office, she left me, properly admonished, to make my way to my first stop —- the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

  People think ghost-hunting is all bell, book and candle. Well, only up to a point. The use of magic, technology and common sense all come into it, along with holding lonely vigils in dark places with your nerves strung out to breaking point. Most of the time, however, it’s poking around in archives and libraries, arming yourself with knowledge.

  The deed to Sonja’s house had named a Mrs Emma Millstead as the previous owner. She had in fact built the house in 1931 on vacant land sub-divided from an old dairy farm whose title went back under a single family’s name to early settlement days. An hour’s searching in the archives discovered little about any of the previous owners, and all I found of Emma Millstead was a death certificate, which gave her date of death, which Sonja probably would’ve been able to tell me for free. Under ‘Cause of Death’ I hoped to find a lead: drowned, lost at sea, eaten by a shark; something, anything. But it was nothing more than heart failure; Mrs Millstead had, after all, been in her nineties.

  Next stop was the map section of the Brisbane Library. But the Castle Hill Road district showed no water courses other than a creek some kilometres to the east. Maps printed around the turn of the century showed the area as dairy grazing land.

  At the end of the day I met Sonja back at the bike park and, with me sitting rigid this time on the pillion seat, we weaved our way through the five o’clock traffic.

  Over dinner I related my adventures in the Information Society. “Then after the maps I checked out the electoral rolls, naturalization records and probate.”

  “And?

  “And nothing. There’s just too much information. I don’t even know what I’m looking for exactly. Some reference to the sea? Well, I checked the shipping lists and -- surprise, surprise -- found all the previous owners’ names.”

  “The thing is, Ernie, whatever is causing this haunting may be the simplest thing, and not everything we do and say is set down in ink.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” I said, remembering mountains of ledgers and lists.

  That night the roaring began.

  ***

  We were watching Sonja’s favourite movie, Brief Encounter, a 40s melodrama of railway platforms and illicit love. Once or twice we had to pause the tape, freezing the black and white trains of a long ago London while a real train hauled its noise slowly past. And every now and then we paused just to listen to the night.

  What we’d been waiting and listening for started gently enough. It was as if something gigantic had rubbed against the house; the floor, the walls, the windows rattled very faintly for ten or fifteen seconds. Sonja turned off the video. The sea sounds and cold were returning, seeping back into the house, getting louder, getting colder every minute. With them came the voices again, a murmur, a confusion of several animated speakers, yet with still no words distinguishable. Axel whined and belly-crawled under a table. We put on our warm clothing, then plugged in the heater. This time we were going to wait it out, if possible get close to it. We waited, huddled on the couch as the temperature dropped and the murmur of people and the sea drew nearer.

  All at once the night exploded into one mighty roar of solid sound far above us.

  Axel jumped up, knocking the table flying and plunged down the back stairs. With our hands clapped to our ears we scrambled down after him where we found him cringing again in his basket. Unable to lift him we simply dragged basket and all out the front gate.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Sonja in the sudden silence and warmth of Castle Hill Road.

  “Did you notice how nothing vibrated?” I said. “A noise like that should’ve shook the walls.?’

  “It shook me, I can tell you!”

  “But I bet your ears aren’t ringing. Right?”

  She listened a moment. “No. No, they’re not. And after that they should be ringing like a ten gong alarm.”

  “Exactly. That proves the sound’s not real, just like the cold’s not real.”

  Sonja knelt down, patted Axel and whispered reassuringly to him.

  “It must be a replay of something,” I thought aloud.

  Sonja looked up from the dog. “Of something that happened here? In my house?”

  “Don’t think so. It never gets that cold here, so you keep telling me. No, something’s been brought into your house, probably a long time ago and from far away. It’s laid dormant until now because for some reason I’ve set it off. Anyway, what could have been in the house that’d make that sort of noise?”

  “Sounds like steam.”

  “You mean from a train? The line never came up here, did it?”

  “I mean from a ship. The ship that brought my family out from Holland let off steam once and it sounded just like that, one hell of a noise. It’s something you don’t forget, particularly not when you’re a five year old.”

  “Yes, and it fits in with the sea. A ship blowing off steam.” I ducked my head through the gate. The cold was still there, the roar was still there, loud enough to wake...

  I refused to finish the thought.

  “Sonja, why did your ship blow off steam?”

  “My dad said there’d been a problem with one of the boilers.” She smiled at the memory. “You know, I thought we were --“ She stopped suddenly, her smil
e disappearing. She whispered, “I thought we were sinking.”

  We both looked through the gate again with what would have to have been the weirdest thought: Was a ship sinking there in the yard?

  ***

  One o’clock.

  I lay on my bed, waiting, listening, trying to go to sleep, going nowhere. The night was silent and humid again. But it couldn’t be guaranteed to stay that way. There was nothing to say the phenomenon was limited to one performance per night. And there was nothing to say it wouldn’t happen again once morning came; it’d happened once already during the day, it could happen again at any time.

  Just before two I fell asleep and drifted into a confused dream of slowly approaching doom and discordant music --

  Wood grated on wood, slamming. I jumped awake, fright stinging through my nerves. The noise echoed into silence. The room was still. No cold, no ocean sounds. But down the far end of the room a vague figure was creeping towards me along the wall. It stopped at the middle window of the room, reached up and slammed it shut, and as it turned and moved toward the last window by my head I saw it was Sonja. I called to her, but she paid no attention. She was sleep walking.

  I’d often heard it’s dangerous to wake a sleep walker, though it’s never said why, and as I’d only heard this in movies I’d always considered it just so much Hollywood crud. But as she approached I felt less sure of myself. If this was a new development it meant the phenomenon had changed from external mental projections to something intensely internal, though what that in turn meant was beyond me. Nevertheless, here was a chance to get some answers.

  Sonja stood now by the last window, staring out with eyes I was sure saw nothing of the real world. Her face was relaxed and expressionless, her hands lay lightly on the sill.

  “Who are you?” I asked quietly.

  She made no reply.

  “Are you Emma?”

  Still nothing. If this was a replay of past events talking to her would be as productive as talking to a movie screen. I tried a different tack. “Sonja... Sonja, this is Ernie. What do you see?”