Alison Littlewood’s latest novel is Mistletoe, a winter ghost story. It follows The Crow Garden, a tale of obsession set amidst Victorian asylums and séance rooms. Her other books include A Cold Season, Path of Needles, The Unquiet House and The Hidden People. Alison’s short stories have been picked for several year’s best anthologies and she has won the Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction. Alison lives in Yorkshire, England, in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls, with her partner Fergus, two hugely enthusiastic Dalmatians, and a growing collection of fountain pens. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.
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Mistletoe
A Ghost Story
Alison Littlewood
Chapter One
There was something in the snow. Leah sensed it even before she shifted her eyes from the sagging wreck of her barn and scanned the white fields. She didn’t know what it was, but she felt it waiting, almost recognised it – life, as she wanted to live it? The future, or something else? It was hidden in the spaces between snowflakes, almost visible through their flicker and dance. She couldn’t reach it, not yet, so instead she tilted her head back and relished the snow’s cold kisses on her face, the numbness that spread across her skin.
It was almost Christmas. She had escaped the city, the gaudy shop windows, the ever-repeating chirp of carols, the cheerfulness of her colleagues that faded when they saw her watching. She couldn’t bear the constant advice: you shouldn’t, mustn’t, can’t, not when you’re . . . You’ll regret it. The standing-room-only trains and jostling pavements. The nights that drew in too soon. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind those long nights, though, not here at Maitland Farm. When it grew dark, she would nestle closer to the fire and tell herself that this was not the end, the remnants, the ashes; it was a new beginning, and this was her first day.
A farmhouse, a barn, an apple orchard and a single field were all that remained of a once-prosperous farm. The original boundaries had suited the land, but they had stopped suiting the people who lived within them and the fields had been sold off, piece by piece, to other farms, those who could still make them pay. Eventually even the house was lost to the family, at least until now. Leah smiled with satisfaction. The place might be a shadow of what it had been, but it would suit her. A dry-stone wall enclosed the pasture that stretched away from the yard up an undulating slope. She could see no other buildings from within her little hollow and that sense of being alone, cut off from everyone and everything, met some need within her. She even liked that it didn’t look like a home, not really. The darkened stone was dour and unwelcoming and there was no garden, no frivolous bright colours to suggest loitering and leisure. It was businesslike. It would keep her focused. She wanted to create something new, and she would; the farm would rise again, becoming the living, lovely image of a perfect country life.
She turned towards the farmhouse with its narrow leaded casements, all of them dark, except for the lowering sun glaring redly from their panes. Despite its two storeys, the house looked low and hulking, crouching under the cleanness of the falling snow. The roof was already blanketed, hiding the prized slate the estate agent had been quick to point out. Leah’s incongruously bright red car, parked on one side of the yard with the haulage trailer unhitched next to it, was also in the process of being buried. Forgotten, she thought, without quite knowing why.
She tried to picture the farm in the light of summer, the fields turned to green, the sky an innocent blue with little scuds of cloud, and as if conscious that she was trying to banish it, a breath of cold wrapped itself about her. She felt the silence rising at her back like an exhalation from the land. It had been farmed for centuries and was now in abeyance. Was it too waiting to see what it would become? She had intended to walk around her land, beating the bounds, as they might once have called it, planning for that future, but now she couldn’t bear to do it, didn’t want to step into the empty field and mar the pristine glistening surface.
It was growing late. The sun would soon sink below the horizon, taking any vestiges of heat and life with it. Chill water had seeped into her boots and tomb-cold air snaked down the back of her neck. Her coat was speckled with white and she imagined it accumulating until she too was covered.
Telling herself that there was no rush, she had plenty of time to review this place she had bought, Leah made her way back across the narrow yard, her feet slipping on the irregular cobbled surface beneath the snow.
She tried to ignore the feeling that something was watching her leave.
Inside, once she’d pulled off her boots and wet socks, she found the stone-flagged floor was hard as iron and just as cold. The chill was radiating upwards, making her shiver, so she hurried to don some slippers before going into the living room – or just ‘the room’, as the estate agent had called it. It was the largest space in the house, the ceiling high and crossed with beams rife with woodworm holes – an old infestation, the surveyor had assured her, long since dead. The dark grey flags continued in here, mottled by years of use, chipped paler in places, stained darker in others. Someone had once papered the walls in dull hues of mustard and olive green, although thankfully great swathes of it had peeled off, revealing plaster that was in turn crumbling away from the laths beneath. Leah envisaged exposed stone and whitewashed walls, generous sofas and warm rugs, a blazing fire on the hearth – which for now was empty, without even a supply of logs for burning.
The room was largely bare of furniture, with nothing to make it feel cosy. An ugly coffee table had been left by the previous residents, along with a wing-back seat in a light brown velour that made her think of mice. The nap had worn bare along its arms, while the back was darkened with grease, or perhaps hair oil. Leah already knew she wouldn’t be able to sit there without wondering what was happening behind her, what shadows were gathering in those empty corners. Instead, she perched uncomfortably on the only decent piece in the room: an ancient wooden settle that looked like it had always been there. The seat was barely softened by a long, threadbare cushion.
If there was little to make it comfortable, there was less to make it hers, but in time it would be both. In the New Year, Leah planned to have her own furniture brought over from Manchester; she had brought only the bare essentials for now, along with tools, clothing and food supplies. She had told herself this was deliberate, that she wanted to live with the place for a while before filling its empty spaces, although she would admit that it had been a relief not to have to deal with removal men. She didn’t think she was ready to face their questions and curious glances.
And there had been a kind of satisfaction in packing up her life and letting it all go. In the end she’d done it quickly, as she had with Josh and Finn’s things – as if their clothes and shoes and books and toys had belonged to people only remotely connected with her. But each item still summoned such memories, and she had been clinging to too many of them: Josh’s warm woollen sweater; Finn’s teddy bear, the first they ever bought for him; his fire engine, though the siren supplied by his voice was now for ever silent; the tattered plush puppy he had chosen himself.
When Leah had packed up her own things there were no such feelings, nothing she could connect with anything else, and when she’d finished she stared at the sealed boxes as if they belonged to a stranger. And perhaps that was what she’d wanted. She couldn’t even remember what half of them contained, but that was all right; she was here to look forward, not back.
Now, catching sight of the fireplace again, she shifted on the hard settle. It was cavernous, edged by stone slabs and topped by a broad wooden beam greyed by time and cracked by centuries of heat. There were scratches in the surface, patterns she couldn’t quite make out: witch marks, intended to keep evil at bay, maybe, or some other message from the past – or nothing at all? When she went over to examine them, peering as if they were a language she couldn’t read, she realised they were only notches where some hard object had repeatedly struck the wood. She ran her finger over them, deliberately not raising her eyes to the objects she had placed on top of the beam, the first things she had brought into her new house. She could still see their shapes at the edge of her vision. The two urns were of carved marble, one a little larger than the other, just objects, and yet the voice at the back of her mind started up again with the question she couldn’t bring herself to answer: didn’t she understand what was in there? Didn’t she know?
She shook herself, shifting her gaze to the mirror above the mantelpiece, something else left by the previous occupants. Its face had been left turned to the wall, a mark of respect when someone died, or maybe just superstition. It was apparently supposed to prevent the spirit of the deceased from being trapped in the house.
It was time to let that go too. Leah reached up and grasped the frame so she could free the creaking wire from the solid brass hook on the picture rail, then turn it and rehang it mirror side out. She peered around the frame at the foxed and clouded glass, seeing in its reflection the blank wall – and something else; a pale shape that glimmered, there and then gone.
She started back with a cry, letting the mirror crash back into place and sending fragments pattering to the mantelpiece. Leah examined it in dismay, expecting to find shards of broken glass everywhere, but there were only crumbs of plaster.
She put a hand to her heart and let out a dry laugh. What was wrong with her, spooked by what must have been her own reflection? She turned to look around the room, trying to push away the thought that it couldn’t have been, that the angle hadn’t been right, and instead she replayed the words her friend Trish had said to her when she’d waved her off.
‘Lots of luck, Leah – not that you’ll need it. You’ll smash it!’
Well, at least she hadn’t smashed the mirror; she certainly didn’t need that kind of luck. She left it as it was, facing the wall, and sat down again. To distract herself, she reached out and grabbed the estate agent’s pack from the table. As she started flipping through the pages, the phrases lingered: A rare opportunity . . . historical Yorkshire farmhouse, parts dating back to the seventeenth century . . . secluded position along a private track, unspoiled view. Solid timber doors and staircase . . . A stone-built barn, ripe for conversion.
They made it sound like a story she’d once been told – but then, it always had been, hadn’t it? A fairy-tale spun by the man she loved, a dream she could almost step into . . .
No matter how desirable the agent had made it sound, the reality was very different. The farmhouse had been a vacant possession – indeed, on that first viewing, it had looked abandoned, its rooms scattered with a miscellany of furniture, as if the occupants had up and left at a moment’s notice and might suddenly return and reclaim it all. But no one had lived there in months. It had lingered on the market for a long time until Leah had come along. Lucky for you, the agent had crowed, although it hadn’t felt so much like luck as Fate: the house had still been there for her when she’d needed it; when she was ready. And why not? After all, her ancestors had once owned this farm and the land surrounding it.
Leah closed her eyes, remembering the day she’d first seen it.
Josh had been at home, on the laptop, although she didn’t know when he’d stopped working – since he’d been made partner he’d grown sick of running the business, juggling problems with staff or the office or some other crisis and rarely able to spend time on the legal work he loved. He’d kept hinting that he wanted to make something instead, to withdraw the money he’d invested in the firm to buy bricks and mortar, to do up a property and turn it into a living.
‘Oh my God – I’ve seen the future, Leah . . . Look at this!’
She’d grinned at his excitement. ‘Are you a soothsayer now?’ she’d said, and laughing, leaned over his shoulder. Her smile had faded at the sight of a neglected room, everything dark and cast into shadow.
‘It’s just the other side of the Pennines. Isn’t it perfect?’
She hadn’t understood what was so wonderful. He scrolled down, exclaiming over the potential, pointing out the period features. He was even enthused by the acres and acres of space all around it – acres and acres of nothing, as Leah privately thought.
‘And this – see, Leah? Can’t you just see Finn playing there?’ He called up an image of a rough field and placed his fingertip on the screen before trailing it downwards, as if describing their son’s haphazard route as he ran through the meadow.
He turned and grinned at her, bubbling over with excitement at the picture he was painting, his story of the future for the three of them, but she had felt only a growing dismay.
‘It’s perfect – isn’t it perfect, Leah? Just imagine . . .’
She hadn’t wanted to imagine. It was all too much work – it was too remote, too far from home. She had her job, her friends. She even remembered thinking, I have my life. She had not known then how easily it could all be snatched away.
She reached over his shoulder and scrolled back up, looking for the asking price. Surely the cost would be too high? It must be . . .
And instead she’d seen the name: Maitland Farm.
Josh had let out a whoop of triumph as the cursor lingered on the title. ‘You see? It was meant to be!’
What would the estate agent have said if he’d known? She imagined he’d barely have been able to contain his excitement if they’d told him that Maitland was her maiden name, or that her family had hailed from this very part of Yorkshire, that they’d been landowners who’d lost their birthright . . .
Her mother had told her something of it once, although Leah hadn’t really been paying attention. Her mother always did love to tell her stories . . . but it had all seemed to fit. In response to the questions she’d tried to present as idle curiosity, the agent informed her that the farm had been in the Maitland family for years before they’d lost it, and after that, no one had ever settled here long enough to make a real go of it.
When she’d first seen the name at the top of the computer screen, however, Leah had given a dismissive laugh, declaring it a coincidence, distancing herself from the idea that it might mean anything at all.
Now she was a landowner, and she’d done it in spite of her friends’ well-intentioned warnings: that she shouldn’t leave her job, shouldn’t leave her home and everything she knew, shouldn’t make any big changes, not while she was grieving. They’d been so certain that this was no time for her to be alone, no time to take on the biggest challenge of her life.
She didn’t care for any of that. This was what Josh had wanted, something Finn would have loved. They couldn’t be part of the story any more but she could finish it for them, couldn’t she? Leah could no longer build the perfect family, but she could build the perfect house for a family to live in. After Josh’s death she’d taken the money from the business and ploughed it into his bricks and mortar, and it had felt right. There would be clean air, good hard work and the satisfaction of making something better.
And after all, she was a Maitland.
Trish was the first person Leah had told, but to her surprise, her closest friend hadn’t told her, ‘You’ll smash it!’, not then. Instead she’d wailed, ‘But you can’t! It’s almost Christmas . . .’
And that immediately triggered images of laden plates, piles of presents, paper hats and crackers and happy children, living children with ruddy cheeks and brightened eyes; pictures that came around every year and yet depicted a reality she knew was as fragile as tissue paper ripped from a parcel. She’d scarcely thought about it – she hadn’t wanted to – so it had come as a relief when Trish’s husband announced he wanted to escape Christmas too. Although in their case, it wasn’t so much escaping it as running headlong towards it. Curt wanted to take Trish and their daughter Becca to Lapland, to see Father Christmas and Rudolph and ride on a real sleigh over real snow.
When Trish remembered she wouldn’t be there for Leah, she had been stricken, insisting in a quavering voice that she would stay – or even better, that Leah must join them.
‘Of course you have to go – it’s going to be brilliant,’ Leah said. ‘I’m thrilled for you – you’ll love every second of it! And I’ll think of you when I’m slaving away on the farm.’ She’d winked at this last and laughed before insisting that she really would be too busy. She would spend the winter clearing the house, making a clean sweep and deciding what to do with it next, planning the new start she would make in the New Year.
‘Seriously, it’ll be good for me,’ she’d added, and when she picked out a gift for Becca, she chose a toy farm, complete with wooden sheep and cows and horses.
Leah smiled, thinking of Trish and Curt and Becca having fun in Lapland, and set aside the papers. The bright prose – a rare opportunity – belonged to the future, while the farmhouse lingered in the past. Still, the place echoed something inside her, right down to that turned mirror, the windows that had been shuttered against the light.
She made her way up the creaking staircase – beautifully carved, fine workmanship – to her bedroom. She had not chosen the largest, the one at the back of the house overlooking the orchard; that’s the one that she would have shared with Josh. Nor did she take any of the smaller rooms that might have been claimed by Finn. She’d decided on the second double room, which also might have been meant to be, since it was already furnished with another remnant, a heavy old wooden bedstead. Her possessions were stacked in a corner, largely still in their boxes. They looked a little like Christmas presents, but instead of the new, they held only the old.
She ran her hand across the closed lids, thinking of unpacking, and opened the first, pulling out T-shirts and old jumpers and ripped jeans, all the clothing she’d need for the dirty work ahead of her. She hung the clothes neatly on the cheap clothes rail she’d set up to keep her going until she furnished the place properly. Outside, it was full dark. The window casements were framed in stone, the glass leaded into diamonds, and if it hadn’t been for the snowflakes stroking the panes, brightening momentarily in the light of the room’s single naked bulb, she would have seen nothing at all.
Leah put her face up close to the glass, noticing the flaws in the panes. There was an icy aura, as if the air outside was leaking straight through the imperfect glazing. When she’d looked around earlier she’d heard distant traffic on the road, every sound reaching her easily, the thin window glass providing no barrier, but now there was nothing. There was no trace of another house, not even a light, but when she peered through one of the clearer diamonds she realised it was not entirely dark after all. She could make out the field in the gleam of the moon, ending in the suggestion of a stone wall with trees jutting from it. Indeed, the sky was strangely pale, pregnant with snow, made of snow, and flakes hung in the air, motionless as the picture on a Christmas card. Each one was fat and white, a child’s idea of what snow should be.
For the first time, Leah felt a thread of disquiet. This snow wasn’t going to stop any time soon. It wouldn’t be melted by the heat pulsing from a city’s tightly packed buildings or scattered by numerous tyres on busy streets, turning filthy grey before it vanished. This snow would cover everything, pushing it all deeper and deeper, like memories; like secrets. It would soften detail and steal away colour, changing the world into something new and strange.
Leah told herself again that it was magical and beautiful, trying to shake off another, more insistent thought: that this was her new start and it was already in a shroud.
(C) Alison Littlewood 2019