This was inspired by my mum actually.  She has a ghost in her house which is starting to get on her nerves.  I was thinking the ghost would be OK as long as it didn't start having baths, eating her food and drinking her wine.  Then she'd go mad.  And that's where this story came from.  Not that my mum is remotely like Susan.  OH no!

Taking Liberties

By Elizabeth Phillips

Susan Brooks was particular.  She loved the little house she’d been able to afford after her painful divorce a year ago.  Having no children and a job with an undemanding boss that left her plenty of free time, she kept her home immaculate.  It had been hard enough living with Derek’s careless habits and constantly having to tidy up after him.  Susan liked things just so.  She was much more comfortable living alone.  It was good to come home every day and know, as she turned the key in the lock, that everything would be just as she had left it, nothing out of place.

It had taken weeks of hard work, redecorating by herself, to get the house just as she wanted it.  It was beautiful now, with its soft white walls and ceiling, the uplighters that cast their gentle, unobtrusive glow over the walls, and her elegant, antique furniture.  She looked with pleasure at the Chesterfield, a hundred years old and recently re-upholstered in a soft apricot hue that warmed up the sitting room and saved it from looking stark in its whiteness.  Susan loved coming home; she had a sense of perfect freedom here, of isolation from a world of which she wanted no part.  After the pain and upheaval of the last few years, her life now could hardly have been more perfect.

She wandered contentedly through into the dining room and stopped to look at the pictures on the wall.  She became vaguely aware of a smell, like cheap perfume, heavy and sweet, rather tasteless, wafting past her nose.  Then it was gone and she forgot all about it.

It took Susan a few weeks to realise that the smell of the cheap perfume was becoming rather a regular visitor.  She sniffed the furniture, the curtains, in fact all over the house, searching for the source of the offensive odour, but she couldn’t track it down. 

The same night, Susan was woken from deep sleep in the early hours of the morning by the annoying sound of someone humming.  Groggy with sleep she stared around the room in irritation.  The sound couldn’t be coming from next door.  The houses were all detached in the Close and the walls were thick.  The humming went on, rather unmelodious, a series of notes like a fragment of a bar out of context.  After a few minutes it stopped and Susan sank gratefully back into the heavy folds of sleep.

The following Sunday afternoon, as Susan sat in perfect peace and contentment reading her book, an irritated sigh broke the peaceful silence.  She looked up in alarm.  It had come from the corner of the room, where she had placed a white painted rocking chair.  Susan stared at the chair in dread, willing it not to begin rocking by itself.  It remained perfectly still, as if watching her and waiting.  

“There’s a ghost in my house!” Susan thought, despairingly.  She continued to stare at the chair, forcing herself to stay outwardly calm and unruffled.  After a few minutes she returned to her book and stared unseeingly at the page for what felt like forever.  She almost shuddered when she heard the sigh again but she said nothing and slowly turned the page of her book.   The sigh came once more, louder, then a waiting silence that gradually thinned into disappointment.

What was she to do?  For the next few days Susan crept nervously about the house, sniffing the air like a dog, jumping at every sound.  It took almost a week for her to relax and conclude that her imagination had been running wild.  The fact that she knew herself for a pragmatic individual, interested in solid facts and figures and wholly unimaginative, did not occur to Susan and several weeks went by before she was troubled again by her unseen guest.

She arrived home early from work, bent to pick up the post from the mat and froze in shock.  The television was blaring.  Susan forced herself to walk through to the sitting room.  She half expected to find a ghostly figure sitting in the rocking chair drawn up to the television, but all was as it should be.  The rocking chair was motionless in its usual corner, the television screen looked back at her in blank silence.  All was undisturbed, except for the almost imperceptible electricity in the air, a charged sense of waiting.   Susan looked round the room.  She felt stupid but she could almost feel someone’s breath on her hair, someone standing close behind her.  She whirled round, frightened, to confront – empty space.  Trembling she walked slowly into the kitchen and reached for the kettle, then snatched her hand back.  The kettle was hot, as if it had recently been boiled.

She checked the rest of the house. Nothing was amiss.  Everything was in its place, just as she had left it.  Maybe there was something going on with the electric supply?  Maybe the kettle had just switched on and boiled before she got home?  Maybe that was why the television had been on when she came through the door, but not when she reached the sitting room?  Her pounding heart began to slow down and she decided to have a long, relaxing bath.

Her bathroom was one of her favourite rooms in the house, although each room was her favourite at one time or another.  Its soft pallor lent itself easily to relaxation and Susan could feel the tension ebbing from her body as she walked into the bathroom.   But someone had been here before her.  There was no doubt.  She looked at the unmistakeable ring of soapy scum around the bath, and then at her favourite bottle of bath foam, almost full this morning, now empty and discarded on the floor.  Its delicate fragrance still perfumed the room but Susan had the feeling it had been too delicate for her unwelcome guest, not nearly powerful enough.  Feeling numb, Susan picked up the bottle and took it downstairs to the recycling bin, then went back up to the bathroom and began mechanically cleaning the bath until it was sparklingly, impeccably clean.  

Over the next two weeks Susan became almost used to the signs of the unseen presence in her home.  Food supplies were almost as rapidly depleted as she could replenish them.  Dirty crocks and utensils were left lying over the units.  She even found her clothes strewn over the bedroom floor as if someone had been trying them on and had not bothered to put them away.  Some of them were torn as if the person had been too big for them, most of them had food or make up stains on them.  Susan felt close to tears as she picked them up and sorted them for washing, repair or to be discarded where they were too badly damaged.  

“Why are you doing this to me?”  she whispered. 

She knew her trouble.  She was too timid, too cow-hearted to assert herself.  She simply did not know what to do.  She felt embarrassed and humiliated at the thought of admitting to anyone that she had a ghost in her home, much less such a slob of a ghost.  It must have been a real pig when it was alive, she thought.  She simply had to get rid of it – but how?

Susan went to the library on Saturday and made a beeline for the shelf on spiritual and supernatural matters.  Nothing really helped although much of it was quite interesting.  She left disappointed, and made straight for the parish church.  She called at the vicarage but was directed to the church itself by the vicar’s wife.  There she found the vicar, shamefacedly confessed her problem and asked for help.  Within half an hour she was letting herself and the vicar into her house.  She followed him, watching doubtfully as he intoned phrases from a book and flicked water in each room, instructing any spirit to depart in peace.  

When he had left, there was an eloquent but disquieting silence throughout the house.  Exhausted, Susan went to bed early, sinking into the cool, white pillows.  Sleep came easily, but it seemed hardly any time before she was woken by an explosion of noise.  The television at full volume competed with the stereo blasting out “Me and Mrs Jones” – the song Susan hated most in the world.  She sat up in bed, suddenly boiling with rage.  She ran down the stairs, furiously bellowing “Get out of my house!  Get out of my house!”  Like an avenging warrior woman she swept through the house, spitting hot, red fury into every corner, somehow instinctively chasing the presence as it fled before her, doors flying open before her thundering feet and fists could even reach them.  Finally the front door opened and banged shut by itself, but it was several minutes before Susan’s harangue abated, leaving her spent and exhausted on the cold tiles of the hall floor, hearing the old silence of simple, uncomplicated absence, returning like an old and much-missed friend.

She opened the front door and stood on the step, her nightgown blowing in the night wind.

“Don’t ever come back,” she whispered, “Or I’ll kill you.”  Her words were blown back at her with the autumn leaves swirling up the steps, but she shook her head. “I will kill you,” she repeated.

Then she closed the door quietly, locked it, and climbed wearily back up the stairs to bed.