Duplicity (3 page)

His sister opened the envelope, read the card and passed it over to her mother and William felt a great weight descending on him They didn’t like the name -they would have said something if they did.

Then his mother said, ‘What does it mean, William?’

He looked down at his slippers,, his face scarlet. ‘It’s my gift to the baby,’ he said, doggedly. ‘It’s a name for it.’

‘But why?’ Mary was obviously puzzled.

This was when the boy decided to tell the whole truth, so he stood up and looked her straight in the eyes. ‘Well, Mum and you don’t seem to like it, and nobody ever gave it any presents, not until Santa came last night. Babies should get gifts, like the Baby Jesus. And it didn’t even have a name.’

Mary ran out of the room at that, but before he could say anything, his mother followed her. He looked across at his father, who signed to him to sit down and eat his breakfast. Each mouthful of cereal tasted like sawdust to him, and he was just about to excuse himself from the table when the two women came back. He stared at them in surprise; they had their arms round each other and were laughing and crying at the same time.

Mary stretched out her free arm and pulled him to her. ‘Oh, William, it’s a lovely gift, and you don’t know how much it means to me.’

‘It wasn’t for you,’ he objected. ‘It was for Angel Gabriel.’

His mother patted his cheek. ‘I’m afraid we can’t call her Angel Gabriel, darling, because that was a man, but it was a really good idea, just the same.’

He swallowed to get rid of the lump in his throat, but couldn’t trust himself to speak. His mind was a jumble of confused thoughts. They didn’t like the name he had so carefully chosen. There couldn’t be a man angel, he’d never heard of that before. All angels were beautiful girls, he had always believed. But his mum knew everything, and she was always right. That meant that his gift to the baby was useless.

Mary saw the bitter disappointment in his face and wished she could comfort him. He had gone to a lot of trouble to try to make the family happy. ‘I know, William!’ she cried suddenly, as an idea occurred to her. ‘We’ll call her Gabrielle for short. But we’ll always know she was named after an angel, and that it was your idea.’ She watched him anxiously as a teardrop spilled over and trickled down his cheek.

After a moment or two, however, his face cleared. ‘Gabrielle?’ he whispered.

Oh, yes, he thought, it sounded nearly as good as the name he had chosen. ‘Gabrielle,’ he repeated. It sounded better the more he said it. His gift was a success after all.

***

Word count 2506

Published in
Woman’s Way,
December 1973

This magazine stopped being published not long after this story was printed, and I sincerely hope that I wasn’t the cause of its demise …

The Night Before Christmas
 

Whooo-ooo-ooo! The whistling of the wind coming in round the window frame was annoying rather than frightening, and the two slight figures huddled by the fireplace were suitably annoyed.

‘Why has somebody not done something about the window before this, Archie?’ the younger one said mournfully.

‘How would I know? It’s a damned disgrace after all this time. I remember when I was a laddie …’

‘Ach, not again man. I’m tired of hearing about when you were a laddie. It’s the same every winter, like the cold did something to your brains.’

‘Oh, well I’m very sorry.’ Archie, the elder by a good number of years, sounded quite offended. ‘I was only saying …’

‘I know what you were only saying, but I’m saying …’

Whooooosh!! They both jumped back as a fluff of soot came spewing down the chimney.

‘Ach, the wind’s changing.’ Archie shook his head in disgust. ‘I suppose you’ll be saying next that somebody should block up the lum.’

‘There’s no need for you to be sarcastic.’ Fergus was offended now. ‘We shouldna have to freeze like this every winter.’

Archie was silent, his white head hunched into his shoulders, his arms clasped round his middle, while Fergus regarded him sadly. ‘It’s bad enough the rest of the winter, but to be as cold as this on the night before Christmas … it doesna seem right.’

‘Whisht, man.’ Archie lifted his head as a distant clanking came to his ears.

‘What is it, Archie? Are you hearing something?’

‘I would be hearing something if you didna keep speaking.’

They both strained their ears for a few moments, but the noise was not repeated. ‘What was it you thought you heard?’ Fergus persisted.

‘I didna
think
I heard something, I
did
hear something,’ Archie snapped.

Realising that he was getting nowhere, Fergus changed his tactics. ‘If you would tell me what you
did
hear, seeing your hearing’s apparently better than mine, we might be able to settle down again.’

Archie was only slightly mollified by the back-handed compliment. ‘It was chains rattling,’ he volunteered.

‘Ch … chains? Ghosts, d’you mean?’ The younger man was very agitated now.

‘Huh!’ Archie snorted. ‘There’s been nothing like that in this place for as long as I’ve been here.’

‘That doesna mean to say …’ Fergus was stopped by a malevolent glare.

‘I thought I could hear something else, man. Would you just keep your big mouth shut for a while? You never stop blethering.’

Fergus grimaced and said no more, but he looked even more alarmed at the sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor outside. His head jerked up, but Archie motioned to him to be still. The footsteps drew nearer.

‘We’d better get out of sight,’ Archie whispered. ‘We don’t want anybody to know we’re here. We’ll just have to wait and see who they are and what they do.’

They stood up noiselessly, and went to crouch behind the dilapidated sofa by the far wall. In a few seconds, the door creaked slowly open.

‘I canna see a thing in here,’ a deep voice said, peevishly. ‘Hold up the lantern, Sandy.’

An arc of pale light swept round the room, growing brighter as the bearer advanced, and Archie had to hold Fergus back from poking up his head to have a look.

‘It’s an awful big room, Donald,’ said another voice with less resonance.

‘It is that, and just look at that fireplace. It’s big enough to roast an ox.’

‘You’d never want to roast an ox, surely?’

‘It’s just a saying.’ Donald sounded rather exasperated. ‘And that couch. It could seat six, I wouldna be surprised.’

The lantern now illuminating the area around their hiding place, Archie and Fergus remained absolutely motionless until the beam swung away again. They had been unable to look before, but with the light not focused in their direction any longer, they took the chance to peep over the low back of their shield. At first, all they could see was the lantern, because everything behind it was in darkness, but as the light moved round, they could see two shadowy shapes. One was round and small, but the other was huge.

They looked at each other in dismay, and with his mouth against Fergus’s ear, Archie whispered, ‘We’ll have to scare them away.’

Fergus turned his head and put out his hand to find the other man’s olfactory organ. ‘You canna scare them away, if they’re ghosts,’ he muttered into it.

Archie gave him a push, and started to moan softly.

‘What was that, Donald?’ One of the newcomers stood still to listen. ‘Did you say something?’

‘I thought it was you, Sandy.’

Both voices held a deep note of apprehension, so Archie moaned again, a little louder this time and Fergus joined in, an octave higher, more a screech than a groan.

There was dead silence when they stopped. The two figures in the middle of the room stood as though transfixed. ‘It sounds like g … ghosts,’ Donald said at last, his voice low and quivering.

‘You never said nothing to me about the place having ghosts,’ Sandy said, nervously.

‘Nobody never said nothing about it to me, either, and I’m not paying good money for a haunted castle, even if it is cheap. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

To convince them, Archie moaned again. He didn’t fancy strangers moving in and upsetting their placid existence.

‘I thought it was cheap because it was needing a lot of repairs,’ Sandy observed slightly unsteadily, as they moved towards the door, ‘and I was quite willing to give you a hand to fix things up and get rid of the draught there would likely be, but …’

The door closed behind them with a loud click, their footsteps echoed along the corridor and died away, then the heavy portal clanged and there was the sound of chains and lock being secured.

‘You see what you did?’ Archie exclaimed, accusingly. ‘If you hadna been so sure they were ghosts, they’d have bought the castle and fixed things up, and we’d have been warm every winter instead of near freezing into snowmen.’

‘It was your idea to scare them away,’ Fergus said, childishly, ‘for I thought the little one might be Santy Claus, and I’ve aye wanted to see him, ever since I was …’

‘For any sake, man! It’s your brains that get touched wi’ the cold, I’m thinking.’

‘You’re as bad!’ Fergus retorted, trying to have the last word for a change. ‘If they
had
been ghosts, they wouldna have been frightened of other ghosts, now would they?’

‘You were,’ said Archie dryly, and walked through the wall.

***

Word count: 1138

This ghost story was written in February 1977 for a school puppet show and was very well received. Because of its theme, and also because I had no idea where to send it, I did not attempt to have it published.

Monte Meets The Conquistadores
 

Monte watched his grandmother expertly turning the cakes which she was baking on the flat stone in the heart of the fire outside the house.

‘No one in all Mexico can make such tortillas as my grandmother,’ he boasted.

Marilia, his friend ever since they could crawl, was sitting beside him, marvelling at the deft way the old lady used her hands to flatten and shape the cakes. The girl wanted to see everything, to learn how to be as quick as Monte’s grandmother. She was to marry Monte in two years, when they both reached the age of twelve, and she wanted to be a good wife to him.

In a few minutes, the old lady piled the tortillas on to a flat wooden platter. ‘That will be enough,’ she said smiling, as she handed the plate to Monte, who took two, giving one to Marilia and biting hungrily into the other.

‘Grandmother, tell us about Montezuma, King of all the Aztecs,’ he begged. He loved to hear about their king, the greatest king who had ever lived, after whom he had been named.

‘I have told you many times,’ the old woman said. She was now sitting cross-legged, like the children, on the ground.

But the boy knew that she liked to tell about the journey she had made as a young woman - over the mountains to see Montezuma’s Palace in the lake city of Tenochtitlan. ‘Please, my grandmother, tell us again.’

‘We Aztecs are blessed by our gods to have such a good king,’ she began. ‘His palace is within the city’s walls, next to the Temple of the Humming Bird. It is large, very large.’ Her brown wrinkled face had a faraway look as she recalled the wonder she had felt when she had seen it, so majestic in the waters of the lake.

‘How many bedrooms did it have, Grandmother?’ prompted Monte, although he already knew the answer. He never tired of listening to her tale.

‘Over a hundred, each one with a stone bath and running water.’ Her tone was hushed in reverence.

Overcome by the thought of such magnificence, Marilia asked, ‘Was the palace the only large building, Old One?’

‘Oh, no. There were many temples, each to a different god, and another palace that had belonged to Montezuma’s father. There were streets, and canals, and fountains, and many, many wonderful houses. There were other buildings also, where young ones like you could learn how to read, and write, and count. All those things were started by the great Montezuma himself, and the houses he built for his lords were all made of stone.’

The grandmother rose and brushed the dust from her long black skirt. ‘Go now, Monte, my boy, and gather some wood for the fire, before your father comes back from the fields.’ She pulled her embroidered shawl back off her head, bent down and passed through the low open doorway of the mud house which was their home.

Marilia accompanied her friend to help him gather the wood, and they made their way down the steep mountain path. ‘What a great king Montezuma must be,’ she whispered as they stepped carefully through the stones. ‘Building all those beautiful places and caring so much for his people.’

‘My father says that he is not always so good,’ Monte told her. ‘He says that the gods the king worships are cruel and they have to be fed with human hearts. He sends out his tax-gatherers and any person who cannot pay his taxes is taken back to Tenochtitlan and given to the gods as a sacrifice.’

Marilia shivered. ‘He does not sound so good after all, this Montezuma.’

‘He is good in all other things. It is only his religion that is cruel. Father says the king lives in fear of the god Quetzalcoatl - the feathered serpent - who was driven out of the kingdom by the other gods hundreds of years ago. The sacred books foretell that he will come back to claim the city in the year of One Reed.’

Turning pale, Marilia grabbed his arm. ‘But this is the year of One Reed. I heard my father say so.’

Monte nodded. ‘That is why the king is so afraid. The traders and the men at the market have told my father that there is news of a great army coming to capture Tenochtitlan.’

She looked at him with pride. He knew everything that went on in the world, but she did hope that what his father had heard was not true.

They were alarmed at that moment by the sound of someone shouting, although it was difficult to judge how far off the person was because of the echoes from the surrounding mountains. To their relief, a moment later a man came running round the bend in the path.

‘Father!’ cried the boy, but the terror in the man’s eyes made him add, ‘What is wrong?’

It was some time before his father could find enough breath to tell them, and Marilia felt herself starting to shake in fear at the thought of what he might be going to say.