Free An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman

comment, but she suspected depths. The only men in the book were absent fathers or ghosts. Even the Nazi spies were teenage girls. Whenever Gillian argued with Miss Haller or the After Lights-Out Gang, it was as if Louise Teazle were talking to herself.
    The world of the book seemed real to her. An evening had slipped away as she read. It was dark outside her window. She looked at the West Tower of the Hollow. The light was on in her parents’ room but Tim’s window was dark – he must be asleep already.
    Ghosts, she wondered. Were there ghosts?
    * * *
    S omeone to see you, Mum,’ her daughter announced.
    Kirsty looked up at Jordan. She was filling out her simple summer dress a little more. Her bare arms and legs had lost the anatomy-diagram stringiness that had been cause for concern. Her skin was the pale gold of not-yet-ripe eating apples.
    A set of white filigree lawn furniture had been discovered in one of the spare rooms. Steven had put the tables and chairs out on the crazy paving where Kirsty liked to sit.
    Jordan stepped to one side and let the visitor come through the French windows.
    ‘You must be Mr Wing-Godfrey?’
    ‘Bernard, please.’
    The president of the Louise Magellan Teazle Society was a middle-aged brown man. Brown hair, eyes, suit, shoes and socks. And brown skin, though he wasn’t Indian or Middle Eastern. He was just a brown Englishman.
    ‘Would you care for some tea, Mr Wing-Godfrey?’ asked Jordan, a perfect miniature hostess.
    ‘As for nectar, my dear.’
    ‘I’ll fetch some, then. Mum?’
    Kirsty declined. She had been drinking iced lemon tea all morning.
    ‘What a lovely girl you have, Mrs Naremore,’ said Bernard. ‘Shows the Drearcliff spirit, I’ll be bound. I see you’ve been doing your homework.’
    Books were piled on the lattice table, the Weezie stories and the first of the school series,
A New Girl at Drearcliff Grange
.
    ‘I’ve been cataloguing the library.’
    Bernard’s eyes gleamed as if Kirsty had mentioned a treasure trove. For him, Louise Teazle’s library must seem a pirate’s cave: first editions of all her books, of course, along with foreign and reprint editions – Kirsty couldn’t recognise all the languages Louise had been published in – and the books she had loved herself. If there were unpublished manuscripts, early drafts or personal journals, they had not shown up so far. Kirsty expected real treasures would be hidden, perhaps guarded. When the Hollow wanted her to find anything, she would be led to it.
    ‘And I’ve been reading again, refreshing my memory.’
    ‘You read Teazle as a girl?’ asked Bernard.
    Kirsty shrugged. ‘Didn’t everyone?’
    ‘Most girls, a few boys, until, say, twenty years ago. Even since then, there has been a great deal of interest. She has always been in print. Specialist presses keep her work alive. I have been on television, several times, talking about the Society. Our members are very active.’
    Jordan came back with tea and withdrew into the house.
    Bernard let out a satisfied ‘Ahhh’ with his first swallow.
    ‘Didn’t your school friends give you a hard time for liking Louise?’ asked Kirsty. ‘I’d have thought boys even then thought she was soppy.’
    ‘I came to Teazle late in life, Mrs Naremore. She meant a great deal to me at a trying time. I was confined, against my will, far from home. Her books were, quite literally, my lifeline.’
    Kirsty wasn’t fazed by Bernard’s odd admission. She felt she understood this man.
    ‘Have you been here before?’ she asked. ‘When Louise was alive?’
    ‘It was not my place to impose on Miss Teazle.’
    Even Bernard’s fingernails were brown. Not dirt, not bad health, not even stained. ‘Only now have I, as it were, plucked up the necessary courage.’
    ‘I hope you’re not disappointed.’
    He looked at the orchard. Tim was hidden in there somewhere, as green as Bernard Wing-Godfrey was brown.
    ‘Our members are most envious that you