6. AN ESCAPE FROM THE NIGHT

“Well look at you!” squealed a happy girly voice behind or in front or above Elaine, it was hard to tell which.

Elaine looked to see who was speaking and couldn’t help thinking the woman was surely the prettiest creature she’d ever seen, though it was hard to know why seeing that nobody had any particular shape. But T***y did. That was her instant name for the beautiful blonde or brunette or ginger apparition that had greeted her.

“Hello,” she said, “aren’t you just too lovely for words?”

“I can’t be if you’ve said it,” came the instant reply, followed by a charming giggle.

“But I don’t think I know you,” added Elaine, and she would have been frowning but for the fact she had no face with which to form any kind of expression, not even a frown.

“Oh, you might have seen me about back in the bad old days of life and living,” replied T***y with another giggle, “I was the tart who lived at the end of your street, the one who your young man used to cavort with before he married you, and…” she paused and twinkled, “once or twice afterwards.”

“You mean William?” sniffed Elaine who had decided that her husband (she wondered if was he still her husband now that she was dead and he wasn’t?) had a preference for other men.

“Ah. William. Of course I mean him. Your husband. Not that he was much of a charmer, and he argued about my charges once too often.”

“Your charges?” queried Elaine.

“Of course! I was what was euphemistically called a lady of the night, though in my book I was a prostitute plain and simple. Not that there was much very plain about me, my make-up saw to that, or simple, come to think of it!”

“You were?”

“It was your William who sent me here,” sighed T***y (though that had probably not been her name in life).

“He did?”

“Surely he did. Come on, let’s call on him and make him jump! The two of us! He’ll be dead chuffed to see us together, the woman he cheated and the woman he killed. And you.”

“He killed me too,” murmured Elaine.

“That was decent of him. Truly it was. But come on!”

And somehow Elaine and T***y found themselves hurtling through space and time or something like that as they tumbled into the portal that seemed to join the mundanity of day to day life with the Past.

“I like this,” murmured Elaine as they emerged from a puffy white cloud and stepped onto the richly carpeted floor of William’s bedroom.

“I chose that carpet,” whispered Elaine, “I got it cheap in the January sales, and nobody else wanted it because it’s got a black line through the pattern.”

“A pretty black line,” acknowledged T***y, “in fact, I never did see a cuter black line. You must have been so clever!”

“Not really, but I was skint?” smiled Elaine.

William was in bed, lying on his back. He was snoring and the very sound of it made the curtains vibrate.

“Not a pretty sound,” murmured T***y, “let’s wake him.”

“Can we, with us being ghosts?” asked Elaine.

“Just you watch me,” grinned T***y, “I learned some tricks before he strangled me!”

Then she somehow drifted until she was actually on the bed, and squatted on him with one non-existent leg either side of him. Then she blew up his nose. At least, it looked as if she was blowing though Elaine had never managed to create any movement of the air since her arrival in the Past and didn’t know how she did it. But William became aware of it and his snoring hesitated and then stopped.

After a moment or two his eyes flickered open and he obviously saw something because he leapt out of bed and pulled the sheet around him in order to hide his nakedness.

“He always was shy,” whispered Elaine, “especially about his wedding tackle, as he liked to call it.”

“I barely noticed,” grinned T***y, and she put the faint outline which was all Elaine could see of her face as close to William’s as she could.

“”Well, lover boy,” she breathed into his face. Or it looked as if she breathed and Elaine could quite plainly hear the whisper of her words.

“You’re … you’re dead!” hissed William, and then, “under the patio behind your French windows…”

“Little me,” grinned T***y, “I’m betting that you didn’t expect to see me again! You tight-fisted little inadequate. Look here, look who’s with me, watching you squirm like the wretched little weed you are…”

And Elaine found herself next to T***y and quite incapable of stopping the words “why, hello lovely William, light of my life,” from escaping from her lips that weren’t there.

“And you’re dead too…” snarled William, “what in hades is going on here?”

“It’s called a haunting,” smiled T***y, “a good old haunting to remind you how you had your rather inadequate way with me that night when your lovely wife was visiting her mother in Croydon because she was ill and needed comforting, and you turned to me for comfort for yourself, but didn’t like my charges.”

“I didn’t have the right change,” muttered William, his voice lacking any trace of the confidence that it might have had.

“So instead you decided to squeeze my neck,” smiled T***y, “you squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, and then you let me fall to the ground, and hard concrete ground it was too, but that didn’t matter because I was beyond feeling anything.”

“It was your fault!”

“What? For being a lady of the night whose only income was what I could make lying on my back?” demanded T***y in a voice that had morphed from being gently taunting to harsh and accusing.

“For charging too much!” snarled William.

“Then you dug that hole by the French windows and laid me to rest inside it, knowing I was having a patio put there the next day because, and here’s the spooky coincidence, you were going to lay it for me! And your own prices were far from reasonable, come to think of it!”

“I had a wife to look after!”

“Little me,” whispered Elaine, “and looking after me was something you were loath to do. Don’t forget you had your boyfriend David. He need caring for, didn’t he? What did you and him get up to when my back was turned? When I was in Croydon that weekend? After you’d murdered and buried your lover? Shall we get the police to dig her bones up? Shall we see what evidence they can find, evidence that puts you with your pants down and a spade in your hand?”

“Go away! Who are you, anyway? You’re not my wife and the w***e, and you can’t be ghosts, I don’t believe in ghosts…”

“Then we’ll see what a nice policeman believes in,” murmured T***y, “what say you, Poopy”

Elaine realised that Poopy was what T***y called her in the strange land of the Past, and grinned at her.

“Let’s,” she said, “and the daft moron doesn’t believe in ghosts!”

“He will, though,” laughed T***y, “come on Poopy, there’s work to be done!”

And the two of them left in a fractured instant, leaving William still kneeling on his bed and holding the sheet around his own midriff as though all hell would be let loose if he didn’t.

And maybe it would.

© Peter Rogerson 28.08.21

...