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Being a historian that can see ghosts is not always the advantage you might think; they always know more than you do, they are impossible to cite as sources and no one tells you at eighteen, when you’re picking your degree, that if you get hit by a car in your thirties you might wake up in hospital with history staring back at you.
Nevertheless, Alistair Reid copes.
He’s been mostly content at the tiny local museum he’s worked at for ten years and since they got Heritage Lottery funding to move to a newly built, modern facility the number of spectral colleagues he has to deal with has dropped dramatically. He keeps his head down, works quietly in the archive and tries very hard not to visit the rolling stacks in the dark.
His life isn’t especially exciting but that’s just how he likes it.
It’s on a particularly dull Thursday that his boss tells him they might have a new project for him to really get his teeth into and Alistair’s heart sinks.
‘Little trip for you, Alistair,’ she says, shoving some printed out emails in his face, ‘Button House. Only down the road but still.’
Button House has been on the radar for sometime, slowly crumbling away the next parish over, and now the new owners have been moved in a while the museum trustees are keen to get in there and see if there’s anything worth having. Alistair’s boss called it requisitioning, Alistair thinks most people might call it daylight robbery.
To be fair, Mrs Cooper’s email to the museum did ask if anyone would be able to help them with valuations for insurance and mentioned she might be happy to get some of the ‘piles of old rubbish’, as she’d called it, off her hands.
Unusually for a historian Alistair tends to avoid places with too much history, or anywhere ghosts might congregate, and sticking to the archive means he’s mostly dealing with bits of paper but maybe his life has been a bit too monotonous of late. Some new faces, dead or alive, might make for a nice change.
He smiles at his boss and ignores Rupert, the civil war soldier who haunts the office, sticking out his tongue behind her back, ‘sounds great, happy to.’
*
Mrs Cooper is in the driveway when Alistair pulls up to Button House. It certainly is impressive, for a house inherited almost by accident, and so far he hasn’t noticed any movement in his peripheral vision that might alert him to ghostly activity. Still, he thinks to himself, mustn't get complacent, experience has taught him they could be anywhere.
‘Hello! I’m Alison,’ says Alison cheerily, wiping her hands on her dungarees as he gets out of his car.
‘Alistair, nice to meet you,’ Alistair keeps his eyes on her face as he shakes her hand and tries very hard not to let them wander to anywhere a ghost might be hiding, ‘what a wonderful house.’
‘Thanks, yes. So, I inherited it from a quite distant relative and I’m not sure anyone’s thrown anything away for 500 years,’ says Alison as they look up at the façade, ‘it would be great if you could give us a general idea of what’s worth keeping.’
She doesn’t seem particularly inclined to bring him inside and in one of the upper windows Alistair thinks he catches the corner of a sleeve disappearing eerily past the frame. As far as he knows Alison lives with her husband and no one else and while it would be naive to think there won’t be any ghosts here he had hoped to avoid them for as long as possible.
He clears his throat, ‘well, we don’t really offer a valuation service but I can certainly make recommendations if there’s anything that appears to be of significant value.’
Alison shrugs, ‘you’re the expert. Right, shall we go inside?’
When Alistair risks a look back up to the window it’s empty but he still feels wary as he follows, ‘lead the way,’
Alison glances at him cautiously, frowning slightly, her eyes sliding off his face and up to the window but there really is nothing there. Alistair would know.
*
Inside Alistair can’t help but be slightly overawed. Despite the place being a bit rough around the edges, a generous description at best for its state of decrepitude, he can already tell there will be some interesting finds here. The house is old enough to have accumulated plenty of archival material as well as a few ghosts and he's hopeful he can get through the former without too much interference from the latter.
‘Do you want to start in the library? That’s where most of the papers are. Or I can give you a bit of a tour first,’ Alison doesn’t sound especially enthusiastic about that last idea. They’ve not been here long but perhaps she’s got bored of showing overeager strangers around already.
‘The library sounds perfect,’ says Alistair, ‘I am an archivist, after all.’
Generally speaking, sticking to one room in houses like this, waiting for the ghosts to find him, tends to work best and saves him from any nasty spikes in blood pressure. The walk from the front door to the library is managed largely without incident although Alistair does spot a body without it’s head wandering aimlessly through a distant room on their way past the stairs and it’s only down to his years of practice that he doesn’t jump out of his skin at the sight. He just hopes he doesn’t come across the head anywhere unusual.
The library is mercifully empty of any spirits and the table in the middle of the room is piled with ledgers and files and there are stacks of paper on the floor around it. There’s enough here to keep him entertained for months, if he really committed to it, and he’s already pulling his white, cotton gloves from his pocket, prepared for the handling of anything delicate.
‘Here you are, then,’ Alison says with a flourish, ‘I put some of it out on the table for you. There’s more in the attics and in every room, actually, this is just what was in here. We don’t expect you to sort it or anything it’s just to give you an idea of what we’ve got.’
‘Depending on what you have, this may make for an interesting archival project. There’s funding you can get for that, students and so on, and we have the facilities at the museum if there’s anything of significant public interest you would be interested in loaning or, or selling,’ Alistair says, inching toward the table with barely restrained excitement.
Alison perks up at the mention of selling, as they all do, ‘right, well, um, do sit down and have a look. Can I get you a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, thanks. Milk, no sugar.’
Alison disappears out of the library with a thumbs up and a smile and Alistair pulls the first pile of papers towards him. Haunted or not he can already tell Button House is going to be an interesting place to spend some time.
*
Alison sneaks her way across the house but no ghosts materialise to accost her in the kitchen, in fact they’ve been quiet since she left them all in the TV room earlier, watching Yes, Minister at Julian’s request.
Alistair seems like an alright sort of bloke and keen on the documents so Alison is happy to leave him to it for now. Technically he’s only supposed to be popping by to have a quick look but she can already tell from the gleam in his eye that she’ll be hard pressed to pull him away from the mess in the library. She just hopes he doesn’t expect her to pay him for any work he does today, the archaeologists were expensive enough, but these people do it for the love of it, right, and her and Mike are drowning in bits of paper that probably ought to be in a museum. The house itself feels like enough of a responsibility at the best of times, along with keeping the ghosts happy, and all that paper just seems like a fire risk in the long run so at least it’s a step towards getting that sorted. Mike had been hoping that some of the paintings might be worth something but Fanny has been cagey about them every time Alison has asked, not jumping to boast about brushwork or the significance of the artists, like she knows if they’re worth anything they’ll be up for auction before you can say Sotheby’s.
Alison sets the kettle to boil, going over her mental checklist of things that need doing today, praying that this moment’s peace lasts long enough for her to get through some of them.
*
It isn’t long before ghosts start materialising, as they were always going to. Alistair tries not to react as he continues reading a document detailing improvements made to the plumbing in the 19th Century. These people likely haven’t spoken to anyone but each other for centuries and he doesn’t want to encourage them or be caught by Alison having a conversation with thin air.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watches as a WWII soldier, a scoutmaster, with, Christ , what looks like an arrow through his neck, and two women in Georgian and Edwardian dress emerge through the bookshelves on the far wall. Alistair has never been especially good at dating historical clothing, which might seem ironic, but if the person wearing it can just correct you it never really matters.
‘I told you someone new was here,’ says one of the women, the feathers in her hair shaking.
‘We didn’t disbelieve you, Kitty,’ the scoutmaster says as he rolls up onto the balls of his feet to peer at the papers on the table.
The soldier comes round to Alistair’s side of the desk, clicking his heels together when he comes to a stop, his moustache twitching, ‘now, what’s all this then? Inventory is it?’
Alistair sits back in his chair, holding the paper in front of him to better watch the ghosts without it seeming like that’s what he’s doing. The dead so rarely expect the living to be able to see them, unless you’re really obvious about it, so he can glance at them under the pretext of reading about the drainage in the East wing, which was put in in 1894.
‘Alison really should stop letting tradesmen into the house when Michael isn’t here,’ says the older of the two women, looking at Alistair with disapproval.
‘Don’t be silly, Lady B, he’s an academic,’ the scoutmaster points to Alistair’s gloves and Alistair immediately wants to thank him, tradesman, indeed.
Kitty, who has sat down in a seat by the window says, ‘what do you think he’s here for?’
‘Researching the house, probably,’ says the soldier and Lady B, the Lady Button from the portrait Alison showed him in the hall, Alistair guesses, says, ‘impertinent,’ with such distaste he almost apologises.
She glares at him as if expecting him to argue and then sweeps out of the room with her nose in the air and Kitty follows, wringing her hands as she goes.
The scoutmaster watches them leave, torn, it seems, between following and staying to watch Alistair, ‘we should go after them.’
‘Yes, I’ll catch you up, Patrick.’
They're quiet as Patrick looks across the table at the soldier, a shrewd look on his face, but he resettles his glasses on his nose and heads out the door, regardless, with a cheery, ‘right you are, Cap.’
There is an almost imperceptible shift in the soldier’s demeanour once the rest have left the room. He drops his shoulders and loosens his grip on his swagger stick but he only watches Alistair pretending to read for a few more moments, his eyes darting over the documents spread out on the table, before he too marches out of the room.
*
‘Shh, shh, shh, one at a time ok!’ says Alison, stirring milk into Alistair’s tea and hoping he won’t mind it’s gone a bit cold by the time she’s made it back up to the library.
‘Who is that man you’ve allowed into the house to paw through my private things!’ says Fanny, pointing so violently behind her she almost takes out Pat’s eye.
‘They’re aren’t just your things, y’know,’ says Humphrey from under the dresser and everyone mostly ignores him.
‘Yes, well, they’re mostly mine,’ Fanny draws herself up to her full height, face sour with disapproval.
‘Guys, guys, he’s just an archivist, from the museum,’ says Alison by way of explanation until she looks back from putting the milk away in the fridge and sees their bemused expressions, ‘there’s a museum in the next town and they might be able to help us sort out some of the papers and things.’
‘That could be interesting, to find out more about the history of the house,’ says Pat and Alison is grateful for how often he’ll take her side.
Fanny rolls her eyes, ‘we are the history of the house.’
‘There could be important stuff up there and they can look after it better than we can and, hey, you never know he might find something you’d forgotten about.’
In the corner the Captain clears his throat awkwardly and Alison realises all over again what it must be like for them, not able to hide themselves from history but unable to participate in the present either. It would have been so easy for her to look up the history of the house when they first arrived, find the details of everything from Humphrey’s execution to the Captain’s first name but she hasn’t because these people are real to her, not just figures from the past, long since buried, and those are their stories to tell. Can she really let a random stranger uncover it all instead?
She looks at them crowded round her, faces a mixture of concern and anticipation, but she can’t kick Alistair out totally unceremoniously either. They do need help with this, if they’re serious about hosting events, and there must be a compromise that keeps everyone happy.
‘Sorry, we’ll talk about it properly later, ok? Try to keep an open mind about it and remember what we talked about? How to behave when there are guests in the house?’
There’s a general hum of agreement, although they don’t sound convinced, as Alison heads back to the library. She’ll gently encourage Alistair to leave now and properly consider the implications of letting a bunch of students into the house later. The ghosts may yet come round to the idea and maybe there isn’t anything important to be found in any case.
*
Alistair has just finished reading the fascinating inventory of a feast held for Henry VIII when Alison reappears with his cup of tea.
‘How’s it going?’ she says, putting his mug down carelessly on a 17th Century document detailing witch trials in the area.
Pulling off his gloves, he picks up the tea and steps back from the table, resolutely avoiding looking at the assembled ghosts behind her, who are all eyeing him with suspicion but otherwise keeping quiet for now.
‘Great, yeah, you really do have stuff here going back to the 15th Century which really ought to be -’
Alistair is cut off by the ringing of Alison’s phone which she pulls out of her back pocket apologetically, ‘sorry, I really should take this, um, carry on with...whatever.’
‘Hi, Martin, did you get news on…’
Her voice fades quickly as she disappears off into the house and Kitty leaps up to follow her, they’re of an age, or at least much closer in age than Kitty must be to the other ghosts, so perhaps she likes to be around a young woman, even if they can’t speak to each other. The remaining ghosts stay standing, looking at him in silent judgement, as Alistair surveys the piles in front of him. He’s itching to get it all out of here and away from people who might casually bring hot liquids into contact with delicate manuscripts but there are protocols and funding options, he needs to speak to his boss and the head of archival studies at the university, he can’t get carried away already.
He sits down in a chair well away from anything valuable, getting out his phone to draft an email to the board that might subtly influence them to put him in charge of the project. There are only four ghosts here, five if you count the headless figure he saw on his way in, that’s manageable so long as he’s steadfast in ignoring them and it’s too good of an opportunity to miss. He sips his tea and lets his mind wander to the papers he might write, conferences that could be organised. If he plays his cards right he might be able to finally finish his PhD and this is just the sort of untapped archive that would make a perfect case study.
‘Never have I witnessed anything more tedious,’ says Lady Button, speaking so loudly and so suddenly that Alistair almost startles but manages to cover it by uncrossing and recrossing his legs.
‘Yes, I had thought it might be a bit more interesting than this,’ says Patrick, ‘maybe he’s waiting for Alison?’
‘Well, I don’t have time to wait around all day,’ says Lady Button, ‘far better things to do than watch tradesmen lollygagging, I ask you.’
She sweeps out of the room as haughtily as before and Patrick seems to deliberate for a beat before he looks over to the soldier again, ‘I might head off as well. Captain?’
‘What? No,’ says the Captain, as if he had been in as much of a daze as Alistair, ‘someone needs to stay to keep this chap in line.’
Patrick regards the Captain with the same look on his face from earlier, worry tinged with understanding, before he too dematerialises through the wall, leaving Alistair alone with the ghost of a WWII captain and the entire history of Button House spread out before him.
Alison appears to have been waylaid for longer than she was expecting and Alistair isn’t in any hurry to get back to the office and in the silence, as he sorts through papers and ledgers, flipping through photographs and letters, it’s almost possible to forget he’s being watched.
The ghosts at the museum talk to him as he works and he knows them all well enough now that the feeling at the back of your neck that you’re not alone in a room is almost comforting. Unfamiliar ghosts in new places will sometimes talk as well, with no expectation that he might be able to hear them, and it’s difficult, often, to ignore them but he’d never get anything done if he answered back to every excitable spirit he comes across.
The Captain seems entirely content with the silence, holding himself still, standing stiff as a board, until Alistair’s hand hovers over a nondescript manilla folder and then he steps a single pace forward and says, ‘ don’t.’
Alistair snatches his hand away like it’s been burned, his eyes flicking up to the Captain’s face and it’s impossible, in that moment, to deny that he can see him, that he heard him speak in a voice so quiet and wounded, a plea rather than an order.
‘Sorry. Sorry ,’ Alistair murmurs, stepping back to pick up his bag and his empty mug and hurrying from the room without so much as a backwards glance at the distraught look of surprise on the Captain’s face.
*
In the kitchen, which Alistair finds after several wrong turns and an awkward dance to avoid walking through the headless Tudor, Alison is still on the phone, mercifully alone.
‘Hang on, Martin, one second,’ she presses her phone to her jumper and raises her eyebrows at him as if to say, yes?
‘I’ve, ah, got to get going. But drop us an email if you’d like any help, it really is a wonderful archive and house, so yes. Anyway. Bye.’
Alistair is aware he's babbling as he sets his mug down on the table and Alison looks bemused, already turning back to her phone call, waving goodbye as he dashes away, with a half-hearted, ‘see you?’
This is always the risk of leaving his comfortable routine in the archives and the familiarity of the ghosts he sees everyday. Everyone has their secrets, even the dead, especially the dead and it’s not his place to go exposing old wounds. Skeletons in the closet are one thing, skeletons that can shout at you for opening the door are quite another.
*
Alison doesn’t think much about Alistair after his first visit. Her and Mike have so much to do getting the house ready for bookings, there hasn’t been time to give it a second thought although the ghosts who saw him were fairly animated about it once he’d left and the rest had to make sure to get their opinions heard, even if they weren’t in possession of all of the facts. Thomas had vacillated back and forth on whether he would be pleased to find any of his poems and Robin made it pretty clear he thought writing things down was a fad that would soon be out of fashion.
The Captain has been quiet about it, she’s noticed, disappearing out of the room whenever the topic comes up and after all the drama with the unexploded bomb Alison has a pretty clear idea why. As ever with him the best tactic is to wait until he comes out with whatever’s troubling him rather than trying to force it out of him.
On this particular occasion, he’s been loitering in the garden all day as her and Mike get some weeding done, peering over shrubbery and marching away everytime she catches his eye.
‘Ghost trouble?’ says Mike as he deliberately tries to step on a rake so it swings up and hits him in the face instead of bagging up dead leaves like he’s supposed to be doing.
‘Not really. Maybe it’s the shape of the rake, it’s too curved, you need one of those straight ones. I think the Captain wants to speak to me but he’s being all Captain-y about it.’
‘Would it help if I went away do you think?’ Mike says, his eyes scanning the air several feet above her head, ‘do we have any other rakes?’
Alison looks at him fondly, ‘in the shed.’
‘Alright,’ he grins at her, ‘rakes and hoes here I come.’
Mike wanders off and Alison carries on nonchalantly scooping up leaves and ignoring the fact that she can see the Captain doing unnecessary lunges behind the birdbath.
He disappears from her eyeline between one bin bag and the next and then he’s suddenly standing right beside her.
‘Alison, I need to speak with you.’
She only jumps very slightly, before she recovers herself, ‘what can I do for you, Captain?’
‘I think, that is, the others and I think it would be inappropriate to have that young man back here, getting underfoot when we’ve so much to do to get the house ready for weddings and so on.’
‘Which young man is that?’ Alison knows precisely which young man and she also knows that Alistair and the Captain are probably about the same age, give or take 70 or so years.
‘The, ah, archivist? Yes, archivist,’ the Captain prevacates, as usual, and Alison knows where this is going and while she has no desire to make him uncomfortable they’ll get where they need to be quicker if she heads him off.
‘The thing is, Captain, there’s so much stuff in there and me and Mike don’t know what’s important or valuable, it should be in a museum.’
The Captain looks at her with his favourite look of baffled indignation, ‘I know Fanny is uncomfortable with strangers going through her papers and, well, Kitty really wouldn’t want all and sundry looking over her correspondence.’
‘Is that right?’
Kitty has already provided Alison with a list of things related to her family she’d like to see again. Even Fanny has come round to the idea, after it was suggested there might be photos of her children, and more importantly, Dante to be found. Pat and Humphrey are both keen and while Julian and Robin aren’t especially fussed they aren’t about to raise any serious objections to the project. Mary and the plague ghosts aren’t likely to be particularly well represented, except in general terms, but Alison has checked with them and they’re fine with it. They definitely miss the archaeologists in the basement and archive students in the library is an exciting prospect in their otherwise repetitive routine.
‘How about, before I invite him back, we take anything out of the library we don’t want him to see? I won’t look at it, you can just tell me and I'll move it to your rooms, ok?’ Alison says gently and the Captain looks like he wants to argue but it’s a neat solution. If he’s ever ready to tell her anything about his life, or his death, she’ll be ready to listen but for now this will have to do.
‘Yes, yes, I believe that could work. One at a time sort of thing. I’ll let you organise it with the others. Thank you, Alison. Jolly good.’
He starts to back away before turning on his heel and marching off so Alison has to shout after him, ‘I’ll come find you when it’s your turn.’
He doesn’t respond but the line of his shoulders seems to relax ever so slightly.
*
Alistair isn’t expecting to hear from Alison again after he left Button House so suddenly and he isn’t really sure he should go back. Presumably the Captain has told all the other ghosts Alistair is able to see them and they’ll be much harder to ignore if they try to interact with him directly.
It’s also been on his mind as to why the Captain should have instinctively tried to stop Alistair looking at specific documents with no certainty he would be heard. His colleagues are always saying they’re looking for the personal history in their research, to make it more real, more human. Alistair has never had this problem, quite the opposite, if you can talk to someone long dead about their life and their secrets, they might tell you they don’t want them shared.
In the end it’s the lure of all that fantastic material and the fear that something important might be about to meet a soggy end under a well meaning cup of tea that has him agreeing to come back and run through some suggestions. That and the pressure from the museum trustees once he’d told them some of the things he’d found there.
And if some of the folders go undiscovered, well, that’s hardly Alistair’s fault.
*
This time when Alison greets him at the door, she is surrounded by ghosts and all of Alistair’s certainty that this is a good idea begins to evaporate. He tries not to look too obviously at the figures crowded around them but out of those he doesn’t remember from last time one of them looks familiar and isn’t wearing any trousers, one of them is a caveman, one of them has a bullet wound and one of them is singed and smoking slightly.
They are all speaking at once.
‘Welcome back to Button House!’
‘If I detect even a hint of impropriety…’
‘This is him then? What a nerd. Ape, game of chess?’
‘Yeah, yeah, in minute.’
‘We know he is learned on the subject of cataloguing and research but what understanding does he have of poetry!’
‘How do we know he be not a witch! Does he know of alchemies? Herbalisms?’
‘Mike’s making us some tea,’ says Alison stiffly as they head into the house, ‘he’ll join us in a sec.’
Alistair tries to keep his voice level over the din, ‘great, thanks for inviting me back. You must be busy this time of year. With weddings and so on.’
‘Not really, a bit,’ says Alison, somewhat obliquely, ‘you think we might have some stuff here that’s worth researching then?’
‘Definitely, you were right that no one’s thrown anything away for 500 years.’
As they reach the door to the library the ghost with no trousers, who Alistair is fairly certain used to be a politician, marches off up the stairs with the caveman and Alistair tries not to follow them with his eyes. It thins the crowd a bit but he does still feel a bit like he's standing in a noisy carriage on a commuter train.
Alison nods abstractedly, ‘just what we like to hear.’
In the library the Captain and Kitty with, oh god, the severed head in her arms, are already waiting for them. It was only a short walk from the front door but it felt endless to Alistair, trying to pick out what Alison was saying from all the overlapping voices she couldn’t hear around them. Eccentricity is expected from people in his line of work so he’s hoping he got away with it and it is at least comforting to see some ghosts he recognises.
‘Oh, wonderful, he’s back!’ says Kitty, clapping her hands and dropping the head to the floor in the process, ‘sorry, Humphrey!’
‘No, it’s fine,’ comes the muffled reply where it, he, has rolled under a chair.
‘Quiet now, everyone. Settle,’ says the Captain, coming to stand behind Alison, regarding Alistair warily.
The ghosts who haven’t wandered off gather around Alison as if waiting for Alistair to say something profound. Apparently, the Captain hasn’t revealed that he can see them but the feeling of being faced with an audience never really goes away and Alison is looking at him just as expectantly as her ghostly housemates.
‘Here we are, cup of tea for the Professor,’ says a man in the doorway who can only be Mike, carrying a teatray and grinning, filling the silence and breaking the tension.
Alistair hurries to clear a space on the table just in case Mike is as careless around valuable historical artefacts as his wife.
‘I’m not a professor, just an, oh -,’ he looks towards Alison, ‘you had some papers here, from the 40s? When the house was used by the army? Where have they gone?’
‘Oh, well, yes, sorry, you see I made a promise to a, um...friend that some of the newer stuff would stay private for now.’
‘Of course,’ Alistair turns to face her, to face the Captain, whose eye he catches over Alison’s shoulder, ‘I quite understand, we don’t have to look through anything until you’re ready.’
Mike looks bemused and Alison bounces slightly on the balls of her feet and grins, ‘great!’, already moving to pour the tea.
The Captain smiles almost imperceptibly and Alistair smiles back, turning it into a grin when Alison hands him a mug, ‘so, where would you like to start?’