Lazar (7 page)

“Think about it, Hal,” Jan interrupted in a tone of
patronising irritation. Hal stopped in mid-sentence and gaped at his cousin,
completely unable to follow the point of Jan’s interjection.

“Think about it, Hal,” Jan repeated slowly and deliberately,
“who did you bump into when you ran
out
of this room?”

“But I didn’t bump into you, did I?” Hal retorted, “you were
behind me.” He emphasised the point. “
Behind
me. You’d come out of my room.”

“Yes…”

“Aha!”

“I mean yes, I was behind you, but no, I hadn’t just come out
of your room. You saw me. I was coming down the stairs from my bedroom.”

Hal stood thinking for a moment, then smiled and slowly
nodded his head.

“Yeah!” he said in apparent admiration. “Very clever. You ran
out of my room, halfway up the stairs, then turned and called my name and
started running back down again …” Hal was watching his cousin carefully, to
see whether she would show any sign of admission of guilt, but was unable to
reach the end of his sentence before bursting into laughter.

“OK,” he conceded, when he had stopped, “so it was a pretty
dumb theory. But it
could
have been
you sitting there. I thought it
was
you
when I first came into the room. Same colour hair, same clothes … same grass
stain down the trouser leg, come to think of it.”

He frowned, but not half as much as Jan.

“Say that again,” she said, incredulously.

“She was wearing exactly – and I mean
exactly
– the same clothes as you
had on this morning. Like you said she did. Why?”

“Because, when
I
left
her,” Jan explained, quietly, “she was wearing exactly what I’m wearing
now
.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are
you
sure?”

“I thought I was.” Hal stared into the middle distance as he
went over his encounter with Margaret in his mind.

Jan sat down next to him and opened one of the books from her
bedroom that she was still holding in her hand. She turned to the index then
thumbed determinedly through the pages. She soon found what she was looking
for.

“Yes!” she hissed, softly but triumphantly. She glanced
briefly at her cousin, to make sure that he had heard her, then began to read
aloud.

“
For a location so
steeped in myth and legend, Wickwich is strangely lacking in ghosts. Other than
the story of the ancient city itself, rising from the sea in spectral form to
the sound of its own church bells every July 29th, the only other recorded
sighting of a ghost is that of a young girl in the vicinity of old St James’
Church. It is not known who she is, or why she walks the earth, but those who
have seen her describe her as ‘a lost soul, searching desperately for something
or someone
’.”

 
“See? She
is
a ghost,” Jan was exultant, then
defensive. “And before you say anything, no, I
hadn’t
read that before. I
didn’t
know anything about any ghost until just then, and I most certainly did
not
invent Margaret as a wind-up…”

“OK, OK, I believe you,” Hal half conceded, “but I
don’t
believe she’s a ghost. There are
no such things, for a start, and it wouldn’t explain her change of clothes even
if there were.

“And in any case,” he continued, “she was solid, wasn’t she? She
certainly looked it to me. And it was
you
who told me that she’d given you a hand-up when you fell down into the ditch
–
and
she gave you her half of
the ring to hold.”

Hal leant back on the bed and waited for Jan’s answer.

“Well, yes, but…” she stumbled. “Perhaps – perhaps she
just made me
think
she’d helped me up
and handed me the ring. Perhaps that’s what ghosts do – make you think
things.”

Hal looked at his cousin for a second, then leapt to his
feet.

“Yes, that’s it! You’ve got it in one. We only
think
we’ve seen her – just like
you
thought
you saw those skeletons
in the chapel on my computer – she isn’t really there – or here. Or
whatever. She only exists in a sort of virtual reality. Ghosts are just virtual
people.”

“What?”

“Don’t you see?” Hal said excitedly, as he warmed to his new
theory. “A ghost is like a computer virus, but instead of affecting computers
it gets inside our brains and affects our senses – it makes us
think
we’ve seen or heard or touched
someone who isn’t
really
there. The
one we’ve caught is the ‘Margaret’ virus. It made you think you held her hand
in the same way that a virtual glove would make it feel as though you had.”

Hal stopped enthusing for a moment and looked straight at his
cousin. He could see that she was trying hard to find fault with his argument. He
carried on.

“It also explains why each of us saw her dressed differently.
The virus had to delve into our memories to find clothes for the virtual image
to wear – it pulled out different outfits from each of our data banks.”

Jan gaped at her cousin in utter disbelief.

“I don’t understand you, Hal,” she said, waving the booklet
in front of him. “Why can’t you simply accept that Margaret is a ghost? Why do
you have to come up with all this computer virus nonsense? Can’t you see? She’s
not
a virtual person – Margaret’s
a
real
person whose spirit cannot
rest.”

“That’s all very romantic,” retorted Hal, “but it’s hardly
logical.”

“And your explanation is, I suppose?”

“At least it’s an explanation.”

“No it’s not. It doesn’t explain
why
her spirit can’t rest,
why
she haunts St James’ churchyard.”

“I’m not bothered about the ‘why’. It’s the ‘how’ that
interests me. The computer virus idea explains…” Hal suddenly broke off and
rushed over to his computer. “Oh, no!
A
virus…
” he muttered to himself. “She was touching my computer.”

He bent over and stabbed frenetically at the keyboard,
staring intently at the images that flashed past on the screen.

“Phew, thank goodness,” he sighed explosively after several
seconds. “Everything seems to be OK. Hold on, what’s that?”

He pulled the chair across and sat down without taking his
eyes off the screen. He focussed fixedly on a single point as his right hand
moved the mouse in all directions, clicking its buttons frantically.

“Shift, damn you – shift, shift, shift,” he cursed with
frustration.

Jan pretended to be indifferent to his frenzied behaviour,
but the silence that followed his expostulation was too intense for her to
bear. She wandered over to her cousin as casually as she could.

“Don’t tell me,” she said calmly, as a prelude to the sarcasm
to follow. “Margaret’s ghost has suddenly appeared, popping up out of the
ground in the chapel.”

“Margaret’s ghost – of course!” Hal turned toward his
cousin, wide-eyed with excitement and quite oblivious to her cutting wit.
“You’ve got it in one – again. That’s twice in ten minutes.

“Here, look at this,” he said. The screen was displaying a
map of Wickwich. Hal was pointing at a small circle – a white annulus
with a fine black outline – at the centre of the plan of old St James’
churchyard. “What does that look like to you?”

“It’s the cursor, isn’t it?” answered Jan.

“No, this is the cursor.” Hal moved his right hand around,
causing a white arrow to fly erratically about the screen. “No,
that’s
something else. Something that
wasn’t there before. What did you say Margaret’s ring looked like?”

“It had a circle on it. That doesn’t make that her ghost.” Jan
attempted a laugh to indicate the absurdity of Hal’s implied suggestion.

“Let’s check your theory out.”

“
My
theory?” Jan
protested, but Hal’s excitement was infectious and she watched attentively as
he scrolled down the map on the screen. “What are you doing?” she heard herself
asking.

“I’m going to look at the spot where this house is on the map
– or, more precisely, this bedroom. Yes, there – look, look!”

Jan looked, and saw a small white cross at a point on the
screen that – she had to accept Hal’s word for it – was his
bedroom. She glanced down at her half of Margaret’s double-ring. The cross it
bore was identical to that on the screen. Hal entered a couple of commands on
his computer and the cross grew as the software zoomed in on the image.

“Walk about a bit,” Hal instructed without looking at his
cousin. Jan was so intrigued that she did not question his request but went
over to the door and back again. As she returned she could see that the cross
was moving slowly down the screen.

“That’s incredible,” Hal exclaimed, “it’s actually plotting
your movements!”

Jan was totally perplexed.

“How is it doing that?” she asked.

“I don’t know – but either your friend Margaret is real
and I caught her entering some new instructions on my computer
or
my theory’s correct and she’s a
virus, a ghost in my machine.”

“So it’s
your
theory now, is it?”

“Yes, since it’s such a good one.” Hal turned to Jan and gave
her an enormous smile. “We could test it further tomorrow. You could go down to
the chapel, while I stay here and check whether your symbol appears there on
the map. I wonder what would happen if the two symbols…”

“Hold on,” Jan interrupted. “
I
might not want to go down to the chapel tomorrow.”

“You’re not frightened, are you?”

“Frightened,” Jan laughed again, this time in genuine
contempt at her cousin’s insinuation. “Ghosts don’t frighten me – and I’m
certainly
not
afraid of virtual
people.”

Jan was standing inside old St James’ church.

She was certain of that – even though her eyes had not
yet grown accustomed to the gloom – and what little she could see was not
as she remembered. There was stained glass in the windows, for a start, and the
light that entered through it shone on painted walls.

Jan moved silently to the side to take a closer look. Every
inch of every surface was covered by a pattern or a picture. Simple portraits
of saints and angels, painted straight on to the stone, were framed by shafts
and arches that had been elaborately decorated in the most brilliant of hues. The
quality of the painting was not particularly good, Jan noticed, but the colours
were so strong and their combinations so vibrant that she felt herself
bedazzled. When illuminated by the pools of pure light that filtered through
the windows, and viewed through the hazy film of candle smoke that pervaded the
old chapel, the whole placed seemed ethereal. Jan had a sense of
otherworldliness.

The vision shimmered. The candles guttered. Jan felt a gentle
breeze upon her cheek.

She turned. The north door stood ajar. Had someone left
– or entered? She did not move. She dared not move in case someone should
hear her. But no, the church was empty. The only sound was total silence; the
only sight was the open door. It seemed to fill her field of vision. It
certainly monopolised her thoughts. What lay beyond it, waiting for her? Who
was on the other side?

The compulsion to pass through it overwhelmed her. Jan moved
forward like a moth toward a flame. The slice of daylight opened wider, wider,
then engulfed her.

Once again, her eyes had to become accustomed to the light
– this time to its brilliance. Then, out of the blinding whiteness, her
surroundings began to materialise as though emerging from a dazzling mist. First
the edges and then the surfaces came into focus and resolved themselves into a
graveyard, a low stone wall and a distant row of cottages.

It was not quite the scene Jan was anticipating, but part of
her was not surprised. The 19th-century parish church was missing, and the
cottages might better be described as thatched sheds with thin walls daubed
with mud. But the horizon, looking north, was every bit as flat and featureless
as she had expected. Below it, all was marshland. Above it, all was sky.