Sixteen Ghost Stories

SIXTEEN GHOST STORIES

Nicholas Foster

Published by Nicholas Foster at Smashwords

Copyright 2023 Nicholas Foster

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Chapter One – The Rustling of Silk

We were sitting in a private dining-room upstairs at Rules in Maiden Lane, not a restaurant that I could afford. But Harrington had done very well in the City and when it came to his turn to host our annual reunion dinner, it was to Rules we were invited. And a fine dinner it was, leaving all eight of us comfortable and mellow as we sat with our coffees and port. Eight of us, all now in our sixties, thrown together studying History at that small College more than forty years before. Harrington who had always been pushy and direct, Abigail, by far the most intelligent of us, who’d changed to Law in her Third Year and was now a Supreme Court Judge, Giles the newspaper editor, and the rest of us with our less illustrious careers. All of us taken out of our daily lives and allowed, for this one evening, to put our cares to one side and feel young again.

Unsurprisingly, it was Harrington who destroyed this feeling of trouble-free nostalgia by suggesting that it would be a splendid idea if we were all to tell a story, recount a tale, share some strange or curious event. There were a couple of groans and I saw Abigail half-smile as she looked down at the table. Harrington, however, would not be put off. He’d had an idea and he was going to stick with it. He was proposing to start the ball rolling himself. as he put it, when I surprised myself by interrupting him. Perhaps it was the alcohol or the pleasantness of being amongst old friends. Whatever it was, I’d decided that I might as well be the first with a story.

I have always wondered, I said, why M.R.James never wrote a ghost-story about Cyprus. He worked there, of course, for a short while in 1887 when he joined the excavations at the Temple of Aphrodite at Old Paphos. I think he was responsible for collating the inscriptions they found. I can’t imagine him directing a dig, or even wielding a trowel. It’s odd enough just to think of him at work on a Classical site. We know him now as a Medievalist and it would make more sense to us if he’d been been working with Camille Enlart, studying and cataloguing the medieval Lusignan buildings of Cyprus. I could imagine M.R.James with one of those old-fashioned surveyor’s wooden measures, pacing out the dimensions of the Aghia Sophia Cathedral in Nicosia. I assume he must have visited Nicosia and Famagusta to see the Lusignan Cathedrals and the other medieval churches there. But if he did, for some reason they never made it into his ghost stories.

I was reminded of M.R.James and his brief stay in Cyprus by something I was once told by one of my postgraduate tutors, Professor Somerville, when I moved on from History to Archaeology. For, as a young postgraduate student himself, Somerville had spent a year in Cyprus in the early 1950s, working at the Nicosia Museum. It was before Independence, before the intercommunal fighting and before Partition. It was a time when you could travel anywhere there and Somerville did, and like M.R.James, by bicycle.

Cyprus and the Cypriots had made a huge impression on Somerville. It was his first year in the real world, I guess, and the defining year of his life. Whenever he was happy in all the years I knew him, he’d start to reminisce about Cyprus. And his memories were as sharp, clear and bright as the sea and sunlight of the island. Which, I suppose, is why the story I am going to tell you now is so unusual. For it was a uniquely disturbing anecdote from his wonderful year in the early 1950s. And one that he would probably never have told me had it not been for his first heart-attack at College which came out-of-the-blue and jolted him. I remember going to visit him in a cubby-hole room in hospital where he lay on his back recovering for a week and reflecting on his first and unexpected brush with death.

It was a different Somerville I found that afternoon on a grey, November Cambridge day. There were no jokes or wit, just a sombre thoughtfulness. I remember him smiling as though he was looking at me from a long way off, with an understanding I did not have. He gestured for me to sit down on the chair beside his bed and then unburdened himself, I think that’s the best way of describing it, of a Cyprus story I’d never heard.

He described, or tried to, the afternoon heat of July to September in Nicosia, the way all life stopped, having no choice, the silence of the tired and deserted streets. For it was precisely these dead, afternoon hours when all was in limbo, that he would get on his bicycle and head off to the coolness of the great Lusignan Cathedral, Aghia Sophia, now the Selimiye Mosque with its two minarets added as a victorious after-thought to the great medieval cathedral. Riding past the closed shops with their metal shutters pulled down and padlocked, he could feel as though the town belonged to him alone. It made him feel privileged as well as happy.

Arriving at the mosque, he’d prop his bike against the stone wall of the washing area. At the huge wooden cathedral doors (for this could be nothing but a cathedral), he’d kick off his sandals and put them down in the empty space where the faithful would leave their shoes and then he’d walk into the silent, empty cathedral.

The Lusignan walls, once covered in paintings, were now a uniform expanse of whitewash. The high windows which once held stained-glass were now filled with tracery, allowing the breeze, if there had been one, to blow through. The only sound came from the pigeons on the roof, ruffling their feathers like the quiet rustling of silk on a stone floor. But the cathedral’s stone floor with its few remaining flat, broken tombstones of knights and clerics, was now completely covered with faded but valuable Turkish rugs, laid down any-old-how and overlapping, adding a strangely homely touch to the otherwise austere and looming interior. It was as if the cathedral had been domesticated and was just waiting for the van to arrive with the sofas.

But this was where Somerville would come for coolness in the dry, burning heat of the Nicosia Summer afternoons. And the more often he went there, the more he began to feel the true solemnity of this space, as though the carpets and the whitewash had gone and he was back in the 15th Century in the final years of Lusignan rule before the Venetians secured Cyprus through marriage and then lost it to the Ottomans in violence.

And it was on one of those afternoons when he’d just propped his bicycle against the wash-shed, that he was stopped in his tracks by a shadow against the wall near the cathedral door, for all the world like a short, stocky man sitting in the shade. But the shadow disappeared as soon as he got close to it and there was nothing unusual about his quiet walk inside the cathedral. Just the blankness of the whitewashed walls and that gentle sound of the rustling of silk as the pigeons fluffed up their feathers on the windowsills high above him.

Which was why he was unprepared on his next visit, to see the same shadow by the door rise up from the bench as he approached, putting out its hand to stop him. The man’s strong arms were bare from the elbow, covered in the scars of old knife wounds, a fighting man on his feet now and blocking the path. But, as Somerville stood there uncertain and scared, the man or the shadow were gone. There was nothing there but the blank stone wall and no bench for a man to sit on.

Hurrying inside the cathedral, Somerville realised his nerves were still on edge. For when silently walking on the thick Turkish rugs, he could distinctly hear the same rustling of silk from the pigeons. But this time the noise came from in front of him, not above, and there were no pigeons inside the cathedral. He stood for a few minutes listening to the rustling sound, taking deep breaths to calm himself down as he sought some rational explanation for this trick of the acoustics. He couldn’t find an answer, and he was relieved when he was brought back to reality by the sound of one of the shopkeepers from the hardware stores outside.

The man had obviously decided to re-open early for Somerville could hear the thump as a heavy sack was tossed down onto the pavement from the back of a lorry. Cycling home in the heat, he shook his head at his own stupidity. He had arrogantly thought he was immune to sunstroke and had laughed when his Greek-Cypriot landlady had insisted he should take a siesta like all good people.

For the next week or so he was busy with his work at the Museum. They had a visit from London from the British Museum and Somerville was on-duty every day taking the visitors to Classical sites from Polis to Paphos to Salamis. It was only after a break of ten days that he had a free afternoon and could cycle back once more to the cathedral. He’d compromised with his landlady by wearing a sun hat, although this still didn’t seem to satisfy her. A siesta was a siesta and, in her view, an almost medical requirement. For him, a floppy green bush-hat was a concession in itself and it made him feel more confident as he cycled through the backstreets towards the cathedral.

But the stocky man was there again by the door, his face in shadow, and Somerville could see what he hadn’t seen before. That the man was wearing a tough leather breastplate over his rough cotton shirt and that there was an evil-looking dagger thrust in his belt. Not the distinctive dagger the Cretans still wore, but something long and thin and more lethal. A poniard they might have called it in the Middle-Ages. And once again the man stood up to bar his way, shaking his head as if to confirm that entry was forbidden. Only to fade away as Somerville approached, leaving nothing behind but what looked like a farthing coin under the bench where he had been sitting, had there been a bench there for him to sit on.

Somerville, ever the archaeologist, quickly picked up the coin and ducked into the cathedral. Where he was not alone. For when he turned around when he was half-way across the cathedral floor, he saw an old woman in black, whom he hadn’t noticed when he entered, sitting just inside the cathedral door. At first, he thought she was knitting, but then he could see that she was telling a rosary made of pink glass beads, the kind a young girl would give as a present. But, on second sight, she too was gone and he was left with nothing but the persistent sound of the rustling of silk, like a silk dress trailing across a stone floor. Until that too disappeared, reality returning with the same shopkeeper tossing his heavy sack from his lorry. The only puzzling thing was that, when Somerville left the cathedral, he couldn’t see which shop had re-opened.

He was happy, though, with his ‘farthing’. For the next day at the Museum, Professor Loizides identified it as a sixain of James II, James the Bastard, as he was known, the last Lusignan King. Somerville donated it to the Museum and the small coin was duly catalogued with a note on the card describing it as a gift from C.H.Somerville Esq, found in the dust in front of the Selimiye Mosque. For the Classicists at the Museum, the 15th Century Lusignan coin was more of a curiosity than anything else, but Somerville felt he’d done something of value.

The next time he went to the cathedral, he had to admit that he was nervous. The acoustics and the tricks of the light in the cathedral were unsettling. It was no longer somewhere he could feel at peace. He went back, he guessed, for the coolness and for the chance of finding something else in the dust outside. He was used to kicking up fragments of yellow and green sgraffito ware Lusignan pottery in the empty city of Famagusta, but to find a coin in Nicosia where people had walked for centuries was unusual. It was worth another try.

And he knew he’d made the right decision when he walked up to the cathedral doors and there was no shadow of a man to stop him. It was just a normal, hot afternoon in a sleepy, quiet city with the good people like his landlady all safely taking their siesta.

Inside the cathedral, he took off his bush-hat and tucked it in his belt making that rustling sound as he did so. It seemed that any movement in the cathedral might be misconstrued by the acoustics. But turning around, he could see the old woman was again sitting by the door. This time she stopped telling her pink glass beads and looked at him, or past him at something further ahead. He couldn’t see her face which was lost in the shadow of the black cotton shawl around her head, but the way her hands were frozen in her lap suggested fear.

And her fear communicated itself to him, for he could now hear clearly the rustling of silk and see that it came not from the pigeons but from a young girl, seventeen at most, slowly pacing the cathedral in a fine silk dress which trailed along the stone cathedral floor over the faces of the long-dead knights and clerics. And all around him there was sudden bright colour, as though a real world had rushed in to fill a vacuum. The walls were brightly painted in blues and reds, the colour poured down from the stained-glass windows and the vault of the choir was now Heaven, a brilliant bright blue, studded with golden stars.

Turning around in confusion, he lost sight of the girl until he suddenly heard the rustling behind him and felt the light touch of a thin hand on his shoulder. He heard the words Pardonnez-moi in a young girl’s voice and wheeled round to look into her face, or into the void where her face should have been. He was about to gasp for breath when he heard the same deep thud of the heavy sack being tossed down on the ground outside. This time, however, there were screams, from the girl and from the old woman by the door, but both of them had disappeared by the time their screaming was done.

Somerville raised himself up in the hospital bed and reached out to take a sip from the glass of water on the small table beside him. We sat there in silence for a while staring out of the window at the grey, November sky, a world away from Nicosia in high-Summer and several worlds away from those events in its cathedral.

The historian in Somerville had made him write the story down, however improbable it might seem, however ridiculous it might make him look. He gave me a copy, but he admitted he didn’t have an answer for what had happened.

Years later, when that second manuscript of George Boustronios’s Chronicle resurfaced in a monastery at Mt Athos, an explanation of a sort did appear. Somerville by then was dead, but I’d kept an interest in the period of James the Bastard as a hobby because of Somerville’s strange story. This second manuscript contained additions to Boustronios’s Chronicle and life of James the Bastard, additions written by one Petros Kouklianos, a priest from near Paphos. In the few extra paragraphs he’d added, Kouklianos touched on some more of the scandals of that turbulent period at the very end of Lusignan rule. In one paragraph, he briefly referred to a nobleman’s daughter, married off at fourteen (as was the custom) to a much older man for reasons of family advantage. There were few places a nobleman’s daughter might go with her maid and her bodyguard, but the cathedral was one of them. And it was there that she met a young priest/confessor with whom, in Kouklianos’s polite language, the girl had formed an attachment. The story ended when their secret was betrayed for money by her bodyguard. One day, he left his post at the cathedral door and her husband’s retainers stormed in to drag the priest up one of the octagonal staircases to the roof, taking him out onto the flying buttress from where they tossed him like a heavy sack onto the pavement below. They sent the girl to a nunnery where she gave birth to a boy six months later. They killed the child and threw it down a dried-up well. Kouklianos doesn’t record what happened to the mother.

Dieu pardonne is all one can say. I hope she is at rest.

Chapter Two – The Comrades

I think we’ll have trouble following that, said Abigail, smiling at us as we sat in that upstairs dining-room in Maiden Lane, eight former History students, now in our sixties and still meeting once a year for a reunion and to tell a ghost story or two. The after-effects of the story we’d just heard hung in the room like cigarette smoke and even the normally loquacious Harrington seemed unusually quiet, speaking only to order us another bottle of port.

A good story but a bit erudite for me, said Giles, but then I don’t suppose any of you read my paper. It would be a bit down-market for you, a tabloid. Not that I blame you. But the one thing that working on the tabloids does teach you is how to tell a story, and quickly. You don’t get the column inches of the broadsheets. You’ve got to hook the readers in the first sentence and keep re-hooking them in every paragraph till the brief roller-coaster is over.

The problem, though, like all journalism, is that there are some stories you can’t tell. Not because they’re not well-sourced or because you can’t check them out, but simply because your readers would take one look at them and decide you had a screw loose.

You don’t mind if I smoke, do you? We did but we were all too polite to say otherwise. So Giles brought out a pack of Rothmans, tapped one out and lit up.

My first boss in Fleet Street got me onto Rothmans, he said. In those days the office was just a fug of cigarette smoke, with a deeper cloud in the corner where our chief crime reporter sat with his pipe. My boss, though, was Rothmans and a chain-smoker. It was he that taught me pretty much all I know about journalism and it was he who showed me that, once in a while, there comes along a story you just can’t publish. For your own sanity, I suppose.

My boss had been in on some of the big stories of the Fifties when he first started out in Fleet Street. Sex scandals, spy scandals, the lot. He had a track-record and we all looked up to him. He had a sure grip, sound judgement and a confidence in his abilities that radiated out to the rest of us. He was a real leader and it was a good paper, if not one that any of you, my friends, would have read.

I only once remember him ever looking flummoxed by anything. It was when one of our best reporters took off to Barcelona unannounced with a staff photographer in tow. The latter started phoning back to say something was wrong. My boss got hold of our Madrid stringer and sent him up there to check it out. The stringer got to Barcelona and had a few quiet drinks with the photographer on expenses, as stringers do. The photographer said that he thought the reporter had gone mad. The stringer then spent a day going around with the reporter gently teasing out what was going on. It turned out that the reporter had got a tip-off, from an Archangel apparently, that Christ’s Second Coming was due within the week. It wasn’t clear why Christ had chosen Barcelona, but an Archangel is a pretty good source. Not surprisingly, that reporter never worked in Fleet Street again.

And he was one of my best reporters, said the Boss to me later, shaking his head sadly. It was a week or two afterwards and I was standing with him in his office in those dead hours after midnight when the presses had started rolling. He brought out a bottle and two glasses from his desk and lit up another Rothmans. You think I’m tough, he said, but it always bloody scares me, the fragility of the human mind. And I bet that’s not the sort of phrase you’d ever hear me say, he said laughing. Sit down, have a drink. I’ll tell you about one of my greatest triumphs.

Have you ever heard of the Baxter suicide in the early Fifties? That’s right, the up-and-coming Labour MP who filled his pockets with stones, like some sad wronged woman, and threw himself off Westminster Bridge early one morning just as the sun was rising. There were long columns of speculation in the papers, but no-one ever knew what was behind it. Except me, of course, I got the whole story, neat and tidy and all cross-checked. It was a scoop that could have kick-started my career a lot earlier. But I couldn’t publish it for the simple reason that my Editor would have had me sectioned.

It was before your time, I guess. Baxter was one of those upper-class Englishmen with a glowing war record and a young wife who looked like a film star but who had a lot more going for her. She ran a Charity sorting out housing for ex-Servicemen. She was a real power in her own right. He’d found Socialism while serving in the Army. He’d been with Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia. Baxter and his wife were the great hopes of the Labour Party. He was already set to become a Minister and she looked ready to join him as an MP herself. I think his suicide put an