A little while ago, I published a one of my ghost stories here. It was quite well received. I’ve been writing ghost stories for years now. I have a few ‘finished’, but not quite finished enough to show anyone – if you know what I mean. I have many others half-written, or begun, or abandoned. I have lots of ideas for more, including some with quite detailed notes. I’m thinking about making a concerted effort to write and finish enough to publish in a collection. I’ve been joking about this for a while but recently I’ve started to think ‘why not?’
Here’s one I finished recently. In fact, I came back to a story that had been sitting partly written in various versions for ages, and I completed a ground-up rewrite in a couple of nights. It was all a matter of finding the right tense. Turned out the story needed to be written in ‘third person present’ in order to achieve the effects I was after. Sometimes these things can hold you up.
Anyway, here it is. I should probably warn you that it goes to some very dark places involving sexual abuse.
*
The Doves
She gets the call a few days after Christmas.
“He’s dying,” they say. “It won’t be long. He asked for you.”
“He has other family,” says the woman. “I’m his granddaughter. His son, my father, is still alive.”
“Just you,” they say.
She goes. She wonders why she is going. She wonders why he asked for her.
She sits by his bed.
He wakes.
He sees her.
He reaches out.
She withdraws from his touch.
She wonders if he means to ask forgiveness.
She realises she came to see him die.
“Feed the doves,” he says.
“The doves are all dead,” she tells him.
“Feed the doves,” he says.
“You killed the doves,” she says.
“Feed the doves,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, “I will.”
When he slips away, she feels no pleasure, no victory.
She inherits his house, his money. She wonders if it is some gesture of restitution.
When her parents hear, they will rage.
She leaves without telling her boyfriend. The flat is still wrecked, and her body still bruised, from his Christmas Day fury.
The house is long and low and white, curving around on itself like a great bleached pelvis. It sits alone in a valley, surrounded by trees.
“You could commit a murder out here and nobody’d know it,” says the taxi driver who drops her off.
She carries her suitcases up the drive, refusing the driver’s offer of help. She walks around the house to the courtyard at the back, her footsteps crunching on the gravel path that surrounds the house.
She passes a structure she doesn’t recognise. A detached garage. He must have built it after the last time she came. He was always a builder.…
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