Haunted by Moonlight

15 min read · Paranormal romance · Free, complete, 18+

“You can stop reading the bus timetable,” Stella said. “It’s been out of date since June, and you’re dead.”

The man at the lamppost on the corner of Mercy Street did not turn round at once. He finished the column he was on, as a matter of principle, and then he looked at her over his shoulder like someone interrupted in a library.

He had been there every night since she moved in. Always at the corner, never a step past it, in a dark frock coat the drizzle went straight through, watching her carry boxes up the stairs beside Hobday’s Books. Four weeks of it. Stella had grown up in south London with the dead in the kitchen and the dead on the bus, and she knew the difference between a ghost who was lost and a ghost who was paying attention. This one was paying attention.

“The timetable,” he said, “is the only new thing to read on this corner since the summer. I was rationing it.”

“You’ve been following me.”

“I have been standing at the end of my own street, where I have stood since Gladstone was prime minister, and you have been walking past me. Repeatedly.” A pause. “Also I followed you. As far as this lamppost. It is as far as I go.”

“Why?”

“Because you look at me. Nobody looks at me. You looked straight at me the day you moved in, over a box marked Kitchen, fragile, honestly, and then you pretended you hadn’t. You are a very bad liar for a woman in your profession.”

“What profession?”

He nodded at the card in the window of Hobday’s, propped against a stack of cookery books: STELLA. Readings, clearings, houses settled. Ask inside.

“I am a house,” he said, “that would like to be settled.”

She had a rate for that. Sixty pounds for a sending, and a cup of tea thrown in for anybody who cried. Instead of saying so she said, “What’s your name?”

“Septimus Wren. Novelist. I died at number eleven, in the first-floor front room, which I believe is now your kitchen. Arsenic, in the claret. The man who poured it believed I had been making love to his wife.” He straightened a cuff that did not need it. “I hadn’t. I should like that on the record. I would have been a great deal more careful about the claret if I had.”

Stella laughed before she could stop herself. Then she stepped closer and did what she always did with a new one: put out a finger to show him, kindly, that it went through.

It didn’t.

Her fingertip stopped on wool. Damp, coarse, cold as a doorknob in January, with an arm inside it. Septimus Wren went perfectly still. Over the railway bridge the moon hung full and yellow above Deptford, and he looked up at it, then down at her finger, as though both had insulted him.

“Do that again,” he said.

She laid her whole hand flat on his sleeve. He shut his eyes.

“Three nights,” he said at last. “Every month, while it’s full. Three nights when I can be felt. There has never been anybody to do the feeling.” He opened his eyes. They were grey and very tired, and thirty-six years old, which was the age he had stopped at. “Would you take your hand away, please. Slowly. I don’t know what I shall do otherwise, and I should like to keep a little dignity for our second meeting.”

She took it away slowly.

“Come up,” she said. “I’ll make tea. Can you hold a cup?”

“Tonight,” said Septimus, “I imagine I could hold anything.”

He could hold the cup. He could not drink from it. The tea went in and was simply not there any more, which he said was the most Victorian thing about him. But he held it in both hands at her kitchen table, in the room where he had died, and turned it round to feel the heat. Stella did not ask what it was like to sit there.

On the three nights of the full moon he was a man: cold to the touch, able to turn a page and lift a spoon and, on the second night, drop the spoon on the lino for the pleasure of hearing it ring. On every other night he was a draught in the shape of a man. Books stayed shut for him. When she reached for him on the sofa without thinking, the cold went up her arm to the elbow and stayed there for an hour, and he apologised as if he had trodden on her foot.

And he could not pass the lamppost. He had tried, he said, for the first forty years: at a run, at a walk, backwards, once in a temper at something close to a gallop. The street simply ended for him there, like the edge of a page.

Stella worked days on the till at Hobday’s and evenings on whatever the dead needed. He came down to the shop with her, unseen, and read over customers’ shoulders and passed sentence.

“This man,” he said of a bestseller with a gun on the cover, “has never met a semicolon he could not avoid.”

“It’s sold four million copies.”

“So did cholera.”

In October, in the fifty-pence box by the door, she found a book with a cracked green spine: The Quiet Shore, by S. Wren. Vol. II. He stood over it for a long time.

“Fifty pence,” he said finally.

“I’ll buy it.”

“It was published in three volumes.”

“I’ll buy the one they’ve got.”

She read it to him between moons, a chapter a night, on the sofa, him at the far end, careful never to let any part of himself overlap any part of her. At the end of chapter twelve a husband came home early and found his wife alone with a young man and a decanter, and Septimus said, “Ah. Yes. Mr Ambler read that in eighteen ninety-two and decided it was about him,” and Stella closed the book and did not read any more that night.

At the October moon she was waiting under the lamppost when the light came up over the bridge. She watched him become solid. It was like watching breath fog a window, then hold. He lifted one hand towards her face and stopped a careful inch away.

“I have been thinking about this for twenty-six nights,” he said. “I have composed several speeches. They are all too long.”

“Give me the short one.”

“May I kiss you?”

“Yes.”

He kissed her as if he had all three nights and meant to use every one of them, under the lamppost, with a fox watching from the bins. His mouth was cold, and then, slowly, it wasn’t. When he drew back his hands stayed on either side of her face, learning it: the bridge of her nose, the scar through one eyebrow from a bicycle at nine, the lobes of her ears.

“That wasn’t short,” Stella said.

“I am a three-volume man.”

They spent most of the next two nights on the sofa, where his weight was a fact she could put her head on. On the third she fell asleep against his chest and woke at dawn alone on the cushions, cold all down one side, with the moon gone and Septimus at the far end with his hands in his lap. Not touching her, because he couldn’t.

“Twenty-six nights,” he said. “I’ll count them.”

So would she. That was the trouble.

In November the power went on the darkest night of the month, the whole of Mercy Street at once. Stella was halfway down the stairs from the flat with two bags of recycling and her phone torch in her teeth. Afterwards she remembered the step that wasn’t there, the bags going one way and her going the other, and the noise her wrist made on the bottom stair, which was the noise of a stick of celery.

Then the hall floor against her cheek. The phone had gone skittering, light up, and come to rest under the radiator by the front door, shining at the ceiling a yard and a half away. When she tried to get her knees under her, her ankle said no in a voice she did not argue with.

Septimus was there before she had finished falling. The house was his; he was always there. He knelt beside her, and his hands went to her shoulders and through them, to her wrist and through it, and he made a sound she had not heard a man make before.

“Phone,” she said. “Under the radiator.”

He reached for it. His fingers went into the radiator and the phone and the skirting board and came out holding nothing. He tried six times; she counted, because counting was something to do. On the seventh he hit the floor with his fist, and the fist went into the boards, and he stayed there on his knees with his arm in the floor to the wrist like a man who has dropped a ring down a drain.

“Wait,” he said, and went through the front door.

She heard him in the street. He was shouting the way people shouted in the novels he used to write, Help, a woman is hurt, help, in that lovely old-fashioned voice, at the one man walking a dog past Hobday’s at eleven at night. The man did not hear him. The dog did. It barked itself hoarse at an empty piece of pavement until the man dragged it off, swearing, towards the corner, and Septimus’s voice went after them and stopped where it had to stop.

Stella got herself to the radiator on one elbow, which took a while, and dialled with her left hand, which took longer.

The ambulance turned out of Mercy Street with its lights going, and through the back window, in the blue wash of them, she saw him standing exactly at the end of the kerb, where the street ended for him, with his hands at his sides. They kept her in until morning.

He was still there at seven, when a minicab brought her back with her right arm in plaster to the elbow and her ankle strapped. He had not moved. The bin lorry, he told her later, had gone through him twice.

“I could not hand you a telephone,” he said.

“I know.”

“I stood in front of a man and shouted, and the only creature in London that heard me was a Staffordshire terrier.” His voice was very level. “I have had a hundred and thirty-three years to get used to being nothing, Stella. I had got used to it. And then you came, and now I find it is not to be borne.”

He asked her two days later, once she had learned to make tea with one hand.

“Send me on.”

She put the kettle down.

“It is what you do,” he said. “It says so on the card. You told me about the woman in Catford with the husband in the airing cupboard; you had him gone by teatime. I know my own anchor. It is this house, and the claret, and nobody ever saying sorry. Do it at the next moon, on the third night, while I can still hold your hand for it.”

“No.”

“You will spend your life laying a table for a man who can eat three nights a month. You will fall down the stairs again, and I will watch. You are thirty-two. Somewhere in this city there is a living man who can pick up a telephone.”

“Don’t tell me what’s in this city. You’ve seen one street of it.”

That landed. She was sorry, and she wasn’t.

That night she took her grandmother’s recipe book down from the shelf above the cooker. It was all she had asked for when Gran died: a fat exercise book swollen with forty years of steam, Marjorie’s handwriting going from careful to scrawl through jam, scones and a curry that had clearly been a disaster. On the last page, after the brandy butter, a heading was underlined twice.

Lending (don’t).

Stella had known it by heart since she was fourteen, sitting on the kitchen counter while Gran explained what she was never to do with the gift.

Septimus read it over her shoulder. He could do that much. She watched him reach the rite itself, which was short (a needle, a thumb, the ghost’s two hands, eleven words, a full moon), and then the line in the margin, in blue biro, written later and steadier than the rest.

One year in three. Worth it. M.

“Your grandfather,” he said.

“Lenny. He went in the river at Greenwich in nineteen seventy-six, drunk, trying to rescue somebody’s hat. Gran had him back at the table by Christmas. Forty years. Nobody else ever saw him. Mum thought Gran talked to herself at bus stops.” Stella turned the page over and back. “A lending moves the anchor. Off the house, onto the person. He’s solid every night and every day, and he goes where she goes. And he takes a share of her time to do it. One year in every three she has left.”

“And she died—”

“At seventy. Her sisters both made ninety.” She touched her own left temple. “She had a white streak in her hair from the night she did it, right here. We called it her badger. I thought she dyed it.”

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

“I haven’t asked you anything.”

“You did the sums. I watched you do them, on the back of the gas bill, at four o’clock this morning, with your left hand.”

“Nineteen years,” Stella said. “Give or take. If I make ninety like her sisters.”

“I will not eat nineteen years of you.” He stood, and the lamp showed through him. “I died at thirty-six. I have watched every person on this street get old, Stella. I have watched them go grey and slow and difficult and loved. Old age is the one thing I never got. I will not take yours.”

“It’s not yours to take. It’s mine to spend.”

“Send me on. On the third night. Promise.”

She did not promise. “I’ll set it up,” she said, which was true, and was not the same thing.

The November moon came up fat over the railway bridge, and he was solid for it, and for two nights neither of them mentioned the third.

On the first he carried the washing down the stairs to the launderette two doors along and came back up looking as if he had won a war. On the second he took the pins out of her hair one by one and laid them on the bedside table in a row, and asked about the arm, and asked again when she was lying down.

“Tell me if anything hurts.”

“Nothing hurts. Come here.”

He came. His skin was cool and then it was the temperature of hers, and he was slow about everything, slow and attentive and, at one point, unexpectedly funny, so that she laughed with her face in his neck and felt him laugh too. Afterwards she lay with her ear on his chest and listened to nothing at all where his heart should be, and she did not mind, and she minded very much.

On the third night she set it up.

Salt along the windowsill, the sash up, the November air coming in. A glass of claret on the kitchen table for the anchor, because a sending always started with the thing that held. And next to the claret, open at the last page, Gran’s book, with Gran’s darning needle laid across it.

Septimus looked at the table from the doorway.

“You said you would set it up.”

“I set up both.”

“Stella.”

“Listen. I’ll say this once, and then you can do your speech.” She sat down so she would not have to hold herself up. “I’ve had living men. They told me the dead weren’t real while there was a dead woman in their kitchen doing the washing-up. I don’t want a living man. I want the one who reads bus timetables out of principle. I know what it costs; I did the sums. I’m not doing it to you without your yes, and I’m not sending you anywhere without mine. So it’s one or the other, tonight, and we both say it out loud.”

He did not do his speech. He came and sat opposite her and put his hand next to the claret, palm up.

“You are certain,” he said.

“As certain as arsenic.”

His mouth went crooked. “That is in appalling taste.”

“You started it. You died of it.”

“Yes,” he said. “God help me, Stella. I never wanted to go. Yes.”

She pressed the needle into the pad of her thumb. One bright bead came up. He closed both hands round hers, cool and solid, and she read Gran’s eleven words in Gran’s spelling, aloud, with the moon in the open window behind her.

It went out of her like water out of a bath. No pain; a long low pull somewhere at the back of everything, and with it a feeling, as if the end of her own road, which had been a long way off, had turned into Mercy Street and was walking up it towards her, unhurried, nineteen years nearer than it had been a minute before. Her heart missed, and caught, and ran. She found she was on the floor. He was on the floor with her, holding her up.

“Stella.”

“Fine. I’m fine. Gran said it was like missing a stair.”

“Was it?”

“It was like missing several.”

The moon went down behind the bridge towards morning. When the sky greyed and the sun came up on Deptford he was still there, his arm under her head, his weight on the lino, the cold of him gone just slightly warm where they touched.

He reached past her, very carefully, and picked up her mug from the table, and held it.

In the bathroom, at eight, she found the streak. A finger’s width of white at her left temple. He stood behind her in the mirror, where he did not show, and touched it with one finger as if it might come off.

“Your grandmother’s,” he said.

“Mine now.”

In the first week of December she took Gran’s book down and wrote under the blue biro, in her own left-handed scrawl, Worth it. S. Then she put it back above the cooker, where the steam would get at it.

On the night of the December dark they walked to the corner. She was slower on the stairs these days and got out of breath at the top of them, and he carried the shopping without being asked and pretended it was for the exercise.

At the lamppost he stopped. For a fortnight he had found reasons not to try it, and a hundred and thirty-three years of habit stopped him now. Stella kept walking until their arms were stretched between them, and then she tugged.

He stepped off the end of his street.

Nothing happened. That was what undid him: the kerb was only a kerb. He stood on the far side of it with his face working, and then he walked, fast, past the chip shop and the shuttered betting office, down to where Deptford Creek ran black into the river. He stood at the railings and looked at the Thames as if it had been kept from him on purpose, which, Stella supposed, it had.

“It’s very much bigger,” he said. “And very much uglier. I want to see all of it.”

“There’s a lot of it,” Stella said. “And I’ve got nineteen years less to show it you in.”

“Then we had better not waste the evening.”

They came home by the bus stop on the corner. He paused, out of courtesy, to read the timetable.

“Still June,” he said, and took her hand on a night with no moon in it at all.