Ruth and the Ghost Read online

  Ruth and the Ghost

  W.R. Gingell

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Find more of W.R. Gingell’s books at wrgingell.com

  Cover art by Covers For Romantics | https://coversforromantics.wix.com/book

  Also By W.R. Gingell

  Find more of W.R. Gingell’s books at wrgingell.com

  Cover art by Covers For Romantics

  https://coversforromantics.wix.com/book

  When Ruth first saw the ghost, she thought it was one of Cora’s jokes. It was a boy, floating behind the chandelier and smirking at everyone as they milled in the hall with the boxes and furniture. Ruth didn’t appreciate the smirk, wishing that Michael hadn’t insisted on carrying her up the stairs (after all, she could still walk, for pete’s sake!) and she stuck her tongue out at the pretend ghost, who looked very surprised.

  The second time she saw him, Ruth wondered if she really was dying, as Cora insisted she was. This time it was certain that he was a ghost: he was still stuck in mid-air, which could have been some kind of a trick, but now she could see straight through him. It hadn’t occurred to her that the new house would have a ghost. She was on her way to dinner, doggedly managing the stairs before someone could offer to carry her down, and so she only had enough breath to say: “You don’t wail at night, do you?”

  “Hah! I thought so!” said the ghost, sounding satisfied. “You were being rude to me.”

  “Only because you were first. Don’t talk to me, I have to go in to dinner.”

  When she finished dinner he was still there, only this time he was hanging on the door, cravat askew and curls rumpled, staring at her.

  “They’re poisoning you, you know,” he said.

  Ruth narrowed her eyes at him but didn’t comment because Michael was behind her, and so were Cora and Rhoda. They already thought she was odd enough. This time she let Michael carry her upstairs without being annoyed at him, watching the ghost thoughtfully over his shoulder.

  She asked Michael: “Did anyone else die in this house?” and caught the brilliant smile the ghost gave her.

  “A boy was murdered,” said Michael shortly. “Eighteen-hundreds. And you’re not dying!”

  “He’s wrong,” said the ghost, still trailing behind.

  When Michael left, the ghost stayed, reclining elegantly on one end of Ruth’s bed while she huddled in the window-seat, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders to ward off the chill from the cold glass.

  “You really are dying.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, I’m bored, and you’re being poisoned. It seemed a reasonable excuse to follow you to your bedchamber. Are those your family? Do you all dress like that?”

  “Rhoda’s my step-mum. Cora’s my little rat step-sister.”

  “Who is the footman?”

  “The what?”

  “The one who carries you everywhere.”

  “That’s Michael. He’s my friend.”

  “Oh. Well, what are you going to do about the poison?”

  “Sneak in my own food, I suppose,” Ruth said. At least that way she’d be certain. She’d suspected for quite some time now that Rhoda was trying to kill her. Not silly, dramatic ‘you’re ruining my life’ step-child stuff, but a real, deep coldness that had come after several nearly-bad accidents.

  The ghost looked dissatisfied. “It won’t help, you know. If someone’s determined to kill you they will, some time or other.”

  That was certainly a nasty thought, decided Ruth. Waking up to find creepy little Cora staring at her was bad enough. “What do you think I should do?”

  “You could always beat them to the punch.”

  “Kill myself, you mean? How would that help?”

  “Being dead isn’t so bad, you know. I’ve got the run of the house and the grounds, and no bed-time. Besides, I suppose if I’ve got to have company you don’t seem so bad: there was an awful lot in the house about a hundred years ago. I had to scare them all away to prevent their dying here. One of them still got through, though, blast it! Don’t go dying somewhere else, will you? You’ll be stuck there.”

  “I’m not going to kill myself just to keep you company,” said Ruth, ignoring the ghost’s toplofty tones.

  He looked offended. “Why not? I’m clever, witty, and reasonably good-looking. You could do a lot worse, you know.”

  Ruth flicked a cold look at him and said: “Go away, I’m busy.”

  The ghost did go away, but she could hear him making snide comments as he faded, and he came back the next day when Michael arrived. Michael had researched the dead boy for her, knowing her interest in the macabre, and he sat down almost exactly where the ghost had yesterday to tell her about it.

  “His name was Augustus George Merriweather. His uncle murdered him a few weeks before he inherited this estate.”

  “Everyone calls me George,” said the ghost. “Except my uncle, of course. The only exciting thing that top-lofty old crow did was to murder me. Look, can you tell the footman to move? He’s sitting in my spot.”

  Ruth only gave him a disinterested look, which made one of his eyebrows lift in surprise. She wasn’t really disinterested, however; and so, while Michael talked and George sulked out the window, she spared another look at the ghost. He was tall, taller than Michael; and with a mop of curls on top of his head and short back and sides, he only just escaped being too pretty by possession of a long, clever face. His mouth was what they used to call ‘sensitive’, she thought, and he knew far too well how to pout. He was wearing what she vaguely knew were nankeen trousers, with a waistcoat and full-sleeved shirt but no coat, and his cravat was tied in a dizzying array of complicated folds. It was all very nineteenth century, really.

  When Michael had gone, George pointedly stretched out in his former spot, unnecessarily loosening the cravat, and said: “Well, now that the footman has gone, are you going to talk to me? I could carry both sides of the conversation, but my falsetto isn’t terribly convincing.”

  Curiously, Ruth asked: “Why do you want to talk to me, anyway?”

  “Who knows? Sheer boredom, most likely. Are you likely to die soon, do you think?”

  Ruth snuffled a laugh into her dressing-gown. “Not if I can convince Michael to bring me food, I suppose.”

  “Ah. Pity.”

  Since she didn’t particularly want to spend the rest of the afternoon listening to a ghost trying to convince her that she ought to commit suicide, Ruth plugged her ipod into the speakers and drowned him out with Ivan Rebroff’s huge, booming voice. George eyed her balefully but didn’t try to shout over the music. Ruth thought, grinning faintly, that he disliked looking anything but cool and suave. She didn’t stop playing her music for the rest of the afternoon, and when she wriggled into bed, kicking rudely through George’s legs in her vigour, he said: “You’re a shrewish little girl, Ruth.”

  “Yes,” agreed Ruth, closing her eyes. “And I’ve got lots more music, too.”

  “Very well, then. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  To Ruth’s surprise, George took a violent liking to the Archies. Whenever she put the needle down on a record, he was certain to be somewhere in the vicinity, floating dramatically. His shirt-points became pointier, too, and she was almost certain his nankeen trousers had widened into bell-bottoms. His shirts were undoubtedly more colourful, and before long he’d stopped wearing a cravat. Ruth supposed, somewhat sarcastically, that he thought he was dashing.

  He made her explain ‘Sugar, Sugar’, too, smirking at her red-faced attempts to translate ‘pour a little sugar on me, honey’ into nineteenth century parlance. All in all, Ruth was so embarrassed that she would have stopped playing any of her music when he was around
, if he hadn’t somehow learned how to turn on her ipod, which he insisted on calling her magic music box. Before long she grew used to hearing music wafting down the halls, and to finding George sprawled out languidly on her bed when she returned from the dinner table.

  Ruth took Michael into her confidence after they’d been in the house a month. It was just too hard to keep scavenging for food, and George refused to help. Much to her surprise, Michael had been trying to find a way to suggest the same thing, and they parted better friends than ever, with Ruth’s stomach considerably fuller than it had been in weeks.

  After that, she began recovering slowly. George was disapproving and a little bit sullen, and when she tried to comfort him by reminding him that she would die, some time or other, he said sulkily: “That’s no good to me. You’ll be old and boring by then.”

  And she was almost certain that it was George and not Rhoda who arranged for the skateboard at the top of the stairs and the huge potted plant from the top story window that barely missed dashing her brains out. Ruth found that she wasn’t cross at these evidences that George was trying to kill her. It was a very different thing to have murder attempted on her person because a ghost wanted her company permanently than it was to have murder attempted in order to inherit her money.

  After a while it became more obvious to her when George was in a murderous mood, since he tended to float constantly in an attempt to appear angelic whenever he was more dubiously occupied. Ruth knew to be more careful when the mood was on him, and though he never admitted the attempts, she thought he began to see it as a challenge, because the traps began to be more cunning as time passed. Ruth could only be thankful that Rhoda seemed still to think that she was still at death’s door, as it saved her from another series of ‘accidents’. George’s attentions were enough to keep her and Michael quite busy as it was.

  As the effects of the poisoned food wore off, Ruth spent many mornings out in the garden, escaping Cora’s glittering black gaze and the dangers of the house alike by wandering the overgrown shrubberies. George floated along beside her, pretending to walk with his insubstantial feet whispering through the grass, and together they discovered an old, half-covered well that was alive with ivy. Ruth was fairly certain that George had known about it all along, but since his endeavors to convince her to climb down it were half-hearted at best, she was able to persuade herself that he wasn’t making an attempt upon her life, and they sat happily on its crusty old edges for hours on end, talking about nothing in particular. Ruth thought she’d be sorry to go back to school when she really got better.

  Perhaps she forgot to pay attention. There hadn’t been an accident in several days, and George hadn’t been floating more than usual, either. There was always an undercurrent of menace in the house that had more to do with Rhoda and Cora than anything else, but Ruth was used to that, and hadn’t paid attention to it since she’d first suspected Rhoda was trying to kill her.

  Whatever the reason, she wasn’t expecting the attack when it came. She was waiting for George by the old well, wondering impatiently just what it was a ghost could be doing to make himself late, when a shadow moved hard and fast, and two sharp, sudden hands shoved her onto the rotting, half-covered well. Ruth clutched at the broken timber as she fell, but it didn’t help, and pieces sprinkled about her in the air, gritting in her eyes. One jutting stone caught at her hand and she at it, and for a moment the dizzying descent stopped with a painful jerk. Ruth bit at the whimper trying to escape her lips, her fingers strained and slipping, and screamed for George.

  He was there in a second, and although she wasn’t sure, with her hair in her eyes and a cold sweat on her brow, whether it was excitement or concern gleaming in his eyes, she saw the curve of his lips as he said: “Well, don’t hang about, Ruth.”

  Ruth let one finger slip off the rock to desperately try to fit some fingers from the other hand, but found it didn’t help.

  “Cora pushed me, the little maggot! I was sure it was Rhoda. George, do something!”

  “Shall I call for help, or pull you up?”

  It was anticipation, Ruth decided, looking hopelessly into his glittering eyes. He was still smiling.

  “Don’t be an idiot!” she said, clinging with fingers that were becoming very quickly numb. “How far away is the opening?”

  “Too far to reach. Let go, Ruth: it’ll only hurt for a moment, I promise. The well is very, very deep.”

  “Uncle push you down here, did he?” panted Ruth, lacking the breath to be anything but short.

  “Very perspicacious of you. That little termagant is coming back, you know: I think she’s got the broom-handle to push your fingers off.”

  “Are there any other hand-holds?”

  “No. It’s all very undignified, you know: being poked at with a pole while you’re down a well. You’ll feel better when you relax. I’ll catch you, I promise.”

  Ruth gave a snort of a laugh that was nearly a sob.

  “You know what I mean. I’ll be waiting right here for you.”

  “Not letting go,” said Ruth, through her teeth. Then her fingers slipped.

  George was right: it did only hurt for a moment. But for that moment pain was all that existed, and it was a relief to wake up and find an unusually corporeal George hovering over her, his eyes dancing and his cool fingers tapping lightly against her cheeks.

  “Wake up, Ruth! It’s all over now.”

  She faintly heard someone calling her name, and when she looked up at the mouth of the well it was to see Michael’s face, faint and wavering. She wondered if she could have held on just long enough if she’d known it was him instead of Cora.

  “You’re such a liar!” she told George. He looked too pleased with himself, tossing back his curls, and she punched him in the shoulder.

  “Well, you were being tenacious. Be reasonable, Ruth! Don’t you feel better now?”

  “Michael shouldn’t have had to find me. And Cora shouldn’t have got to win.”

  George shrugged. “Money waxes and wanes. We stay forever, Ruth: be a little bit glad! Besides, if we get too bored, we can always kill someone else.”

  “You didn’t kill me,” Ruth said, feeling as though he needed taking down a peg or two. “I slipped.”

  “Nuance,” George said airily. “Only don’t kill Cora, we don’t want her here forever. And we’re not killing your footman, either; he’d only get in the way. Ow! Are you going to keep hitting me?”

  “Probably,” said Ruth. “Are you going to keep talking?”

  “Probably. Come along, Ruth; let’s go play with your magic music box. We’ll have them frightened away in no time.”

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  W.R. Gingell, Ruth and the Ghost

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