The Ghosts of Peckham Rye

No, you definitely couldn't see the cemetery from here. If the glass
had been able to bend under the pressure from my head, I might have
been able to see the tops of the trees around the graves out of the
corner of the kitchen window's eye. The bedroom window faced in the
right direction, but there was a house in the way. This block was newer
than the others, and it was at an angle to the rest of the road.
I unfolded my legs from their cramped position on the counter by the
sink, and climbed down to the floor. The view from the window returned
to normal, and for a moment I watched raindrops flopping off the
privet. Still no going outside, which meant even more time to
contemplate my unemployment before Claire came home.
Thinking about the cemetery was a morbid diversion, I admit, but there
was nothing else. I'd tried to watch the cricket, but that was just
coverage of the covers on the pitch - something that common sense
should have told me. The Oval and Peckham Rye aren't very far apart. I
picked up the London A to Z from the sofa, and flicked it open at the
loose page, our page, with grubby fingermarks pointing out Rye Hill
Park, our road.
We'd gone to the cemetery the weekend before. On Friday night we'd
both crouched on the floor looking on the map for some green spaces.
"I'm sick of looking at bloody roads and people," Claire had said. I
didn't much care. I'd spent the week looking at the inside of the flat.
It might seem silly that we were searching for green spaces when
Peckham Rye Park was at the bottom of the hill, but we both associated
it with carrying the shopping and waiting for buses. What was daft,
though, was that I noticed for the first time that we were between
greennesses - the Park and Nunhead Cemetery. It didn't feel like a
moment of realisation when I saw it. I just put my hand on its shape on
the page and traced the circling paths inside with a nail. "Let's go
there," I said.
"Don't you think it'll be a bit weird?"
"For God's sake! It's green isn't it?" I apologised, but we were still
going.

Claire was right. The gate into the cemetery was set in a long dark
wall, with trees on its other side, keeping it out. Once we were
inside, everything changed and there was sunlight, and the grass shone
along the ground. The gravestones were all new and marble, well tended
and loved. We explored for a while, not really knowing what we were
looking for. Then I remembered the trees along the wall. The graves
filled open space around us, but beyond that there was what looked like
woodland. That would be worth having a look at.
But as we drew closer to the trees, we saw that the graves didn't stop
where the grass stopped. They stretched on into the shade. You could
see them crowding between the leaves and thick trunks as far back as
the outer wall by the road. The paths marked in the A to Z cut left and
right through the woodland, and I followed one at random, with Claire
following. I was suddenly desperate to see all the lost graves, and
wondered how they had come to be so bound up with the trees.
The more I looked, the more I realised that what looked at first like
a harmony of green and stone was really a kind of strangulation. Each
time I pushed back the brambles on a grave to see the Victorian dates
and the family names huddled under lichen, I saw that the tree roots
had crushed the stone. Everywhere great holes appeared like black eyes
onto what was underneath.
What I saw seized me like an illness. By the time we got to the
roofless carcass of the chapel in the middle of the cemetery, my heart
was swelling with the effort of beating and the birdsong was like a
whirlwind. Claire stopped me falling.

With the rain spattering like sand on the window and the A to Z open in
front of me, I thought about the cemetery. About the nod of the
stonemason as he passed some new statue: "That's one o'mine", and the
way, three generations later, the family would have trouble finding the
plot. Then the trees came and cracked the graves, and there was no one
to mind them. The idea that those who had gone unwillingly to their
deaths now had a means to leave their resting place kept creeping into
my mind. I couldn't stop it.

The curtains were still. They filtered the light from next-door's porch
so that all the things in the room seemed to be thick clouds. Nothing
was out of place, but there was something wrong. I lay there for a
second or two, trying to make sense of why I was awake. Probably just a
dream that had stretched until after I'd opened my eyes. Claire was
still asleep.
Then someone stepped on the gravel outside the window. I sat up. The
window was well away from the road. There was no reason for anyone to
be there. I listened, but my ears heard sounds made from the silence
itself. No more steps. But - there was breathing, outside, as though an
old man had his head pressed to the glass. A foot shifted loose stones
and they clicked maliciously together. I got to the window, my fingers
swiping at the curtain and missing. At last I peered out at the metre
of ground between the wall and the wire fence that bordered the
neighbours' driveway. Everything in the light was made of stark lines -
I could see every stone, every leaf of the weeds that straggled up
between them. No one there. Of course not. Anyone would have had plenty
of time to move on. I imagined some creep sniffing at all our windows
one by one with a long nose until he found at way in. I let the curtain
fall, about to rush round the house checking that everything was
secure. Then there was the sound of a foot on the stones again. The
breathing wheezed in my mind, and then I know that although the sounds
were outside, there was something in here.
My breath shuddered in and out, and I stared round the room again -
the rack of clothes, Claire asleep, the tiny lamp under its shade. The
thing was somewhere inside. It sent out waves of presence that met my
ears like the heartbeat someone contemplating murder.
To the kitchen and back. We had to get knives to defend ourselves. I
had to get back before anything could happen. The presence didn't stop
me leaving the room - it didn't stop me coming back. It knew what I was
doing and it waited, breathing the charged breath of a stalker, moving
its feet over the gravel in excitement.
"What are you doing?" Claire was still too sleepy to look up and see
me, but I saw myself standing in the doorway naked, with the sweat from
my limp hand running down the light on the blade of the bread knife.
There was nothing else unusual here. Claire rolled over and went back
to sleep. I stood in the cold while the sweat dried off me. Nothing to
see, nothing to hear.
At last I felt tired again. I got back into bed, laying the knife on
the floor under the bed.
Next morning it was only the knife that reminded me that I really had
woken up. Still, I didn't mention anything to Claire while she dressed
and went out to work, nor when she came back in the evening. In
between, I spent a while in the rain, looking at the gravel outside the
bedroom window. There was nothing unusual about it. The rest of the day
I spent in the idle way I'd got used to. The only difference was the
prickling on the back of my scalp when the memories of the night
ambushed me.

That night, and the nights following, I couldn't sleep. I was all right
in the day, but as soon as we went to bed I began to get the feeling
that my spine and shoulder blades were exposed, no matter how hard I
pressed them into the mattress or wrapped them in the duvet. I'd lie
there hour after hour, with the memory of the presence and its fevered
breathing only broken up by images of the hole stretching for ever
under the shattered gravestones.
If I had been six years old again I would have been able to creep
across the treacherous landing to my parents' room and say as loudly as
I dared: "I'm scared." There would have been biscuits and milk, and the
fear would have gone back into the corners. But I was twenty-one, and
it was impossible to touch the person lying next to me because I
shouldn't be scared and she had work in the morning.
Claire noticed that I wasn't myself, of course, but I just said I was
bored to death of doing nothing and fed up. She sat down in front of
me. "You need to get out of the house more. You look like a sock that's
been down the back of the radiator for a year."
I did try, but I ended up spending most days asleep. I wasn't just
lying there at night - my whole body was so tense it could have burst
at any time.

I thought I heard the front door close. Claire going to work. I
squinted up at the curtains, trying to feel good that the sun had come
out. It filled the room with good-humoured light that seemed to ease
the cramps in my muscles. I put my face into the pillow to rest my
eyes, and immediately fell asleep.
I was on my back when I woke. The sun shot through the curtains and
lit the whole world. I raised my hand to my eyes - no - what was this?
I was frozen, or paralysed, neither word is right. It was like
restraint, but without force. And she was there, just inside the
bedroom door.
There was no before or after her arrival. She was there, unmarked by
one instant or another. The sunlight shaped her and she sent out her
own light. Where light fell on her, her dress and skin were translucent
white. Where there was shadow, the graves gaped under the trees. She
stared and me and I looked back, unable even to blink. She wore
Victorian evening dress, and her hair was intricately curled. Her eyes
were completely unreadable. Although I was defenceless, she wanted
nothing from me, nor did she want to communicate anything. She just
looked at me, and I looked back. The sunlight blazed on her as though
making up for five or six generations of darkness. Her thin figure, set
up on her skirts' wide pedestal, occupied reality and illusion with the
same weight. I felt no fear. Whoever she was, she was not who had come
before.
Then I was in the kitchen, making tea, with the precision of what had
happened already sliding out of reach, along with the fears that had
kept me awake. The sun was outside drying the world out. I was alone in
the house, and I could think of whatever I wanted. I don't know how
long the woman had stood there, and I had no sense of her leaving. She
never came back.
Five months later, Claire and I moved out, having seen nothing else
like either visitation. I have no explanations.