A Persistent Ghost

You ask me if I believe in ghosts and I say that I do not. The word 'belief' implies a certainty I do not have. I can, however, pinpoint the moment when I ceased to disbelieve.

I was at the beginning of my career, working as IT support and general dogsbody at a Quantity Surveyors in Fitzrovia. At the time the majority of my work was the digitisation of records – for which read Data Entry. I did this with one other: Jaroslav, junior archivist and general dogsbody. We worked mostly alone in a semi-basement office with the feet of Londoners passing by above our heads, and we were only occasionally bothered by the quantity surveyors. We worked sometimes hard, and often late, and being of a similar age became, if not friends, then firm comrades. We lost contact when I left the company. I do not know if he is even still in London.

This story, though, starts with another Czech. Mr Drobny was my upstairs neighbour. I knew him only through his name on the mailbox and when he would nod as we passed each other at the building door. He was an old man with a stern face, and thin scratchy white hair over a discoloured scalp.

One Sunday morning in January, he knocked on my door, a thing he had never done before.

My flatmate was away so I answered.

"Hello," he said. "You are... Jim." He spoke slowly in a thick accent, struggling with the English. "I have... I must tell you...." He stopped, and then knocked his knuckles against the open door. "This good door."

I agreed it was a good door.

"It has window? For see?"

The door did not have a window.

"Small. With eye. Door closed."

"Oh," I said, and indicated the spy hole. "This?"

"Yes," he nodded. "Maybe night time... You see man with hood. This is right word, hood?"

"Hood," I said, and mimed pulling one over my head.

"Yes, hood. You see man with hood. Not this." He jabbed at the spy hole with his narrow glasses and shook his head. "No."

"You don't want me to look?" I asked. I was fairly certain I had taken his meaning but it did not make any sense.

"Yes, do not look."

This was back in the time when there was some tabloid hysteria over hoodies. There were certainly kids in the street who wore their hoods up, and, like anywhere in London, there was degree of crime, but I was not aware that there had been any particular problems.

"Thank you," I said. "I'll watch out."

"No," he said, "not watch." He gestured again to the spy hole in the door. "Not this!"

He was becoming agitated and, frankly, I was resenting my Sunday morning being interrupted so I smiled, and said okay, and then gently closed the door on him. I do not think he was very satisfied.

It was not with any particular motive that I described this encounter to Jaroslav on Monday, but Jaroslav, perhaps seized by notions of brotherhood among the Czech diaspora, immediately offered to come round and translate. I accepted, as much because the evenings alone were dull as to solve the mystery of what Mr Drobny wanted, and offered to cook him dinner. And so, late that evening, for we both preferred to work late, we bought some beer and a jar of pasta sauce and rode the bus back to Hammersmith together.

At the flat we went upstairs and I introduced Jaroslav to Mr Drobny, the former wincing at my pronunciation of the latter's name. Jaroslav said something in Czech and Mr Drobny's face lit up and the two of them began to talk. He invited us in and we sat down on the small sofa while he sat on a dining chair. I could only watch them in polite silence. I did not understand a word.

Mr Drobny was clearly in the process of packing to move out. His bookshelf was empty and a cardboard box was taped shut beside it. Another full of framed photographs sat on the dining table. In the kitchen I could see a third containing tin cans.

The conversation slowed and both Jaroslav and Mr Drobny dropped their voices. Mr Drobny handed Jaroslav a newspaper and showed him an article. Jaroslav glanced at it and passed it to me. It was one the London free papers and the article was about footprints in the mud by the river Thames. They were seen early in the morning either coming from or heading to the water but, and this was the odd thing, never both. The man who spotted them was pictured on the tow-path with his dog and there was a rather uninspiring close-up of a footprint.

When I looked up Mr Drobny was leaning forward and offering to shake my hand. A conclusion appeared to have been reached.

Jaroslav told me what was said while I cooked the pasta. I will not list my interjections, which began with expressions of incredulity, passed through shock and alarm, and ended up at incredulity again.

"He said he is being hunted by someone," Jaroslav said. "A man with a hood who wants to kill him. He said that if this man finds him he will walk past your flat and you must not look, because if you see him he will kill you too. This man has been looking for him for a very long time, from when he was in Czechia. He had thought that he would be safe in England and for years he was but now this man is in London. A long time ago he and his friends did something bad. He would not say what but I think very bad. And this is... revenge is not the word. The consequence of the thing they did. All his friends who did this thing were killed, but because they fled it took time, The last was his brother over ten years ago. His brother had gone to Germany. He said he did not dare go to the funeral. He says he is going to leave and then you will be safe, but he has not got much money and it is difficult to arrange, but he will go soon. He says that you should put tape over the spy hole in the door so you are not tempted to look, and if there is a knock you must ask who it is before you open the door. The man will know from your voice that you are not him and leave."

I brought two plates of pasta and sauce to the table and asked about the newspaper article.

"This man who hunts him is not a man. I do not know if there is a word in English. It is like a ghost but not a dead person. It is a thing of rivers. Of the mud at the river's edge. It is a thing that comes normally when the rivers are low in the summer but where a river has the tide it can come and go all year."

The following day I did not see Jaroslav till the afternoon. When I finally descended to our basement he immediately rushed me over to his computer.

"God bless the Germans they are so organised," he said and showed me a web page from a German newspaper.

He translated it for me. "His brother's name was Jan and see, here it is, 'the dead man was identified as Jan Drobny from Tschechische Republik.' He said more than ten years ago and here: July 1991. And the rest: the man was seen to be running as if in fright. Witnesses said a hooded man was following."

He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head.

"What happened to him?"

"He was hit by a lorry."

"Do you believe all this?" I noticed that the stack of folders by his computer was unchanged since the previous day.

"The Thames is tidal only to Twickenham. If it is searching in the west, in Hammersmith, Twickenham is where it must start. Low tide is at eleven tonight. We can go there and find out if it is real or not."

We found nothing. We followed the river from Twickenham to Teddington Lock, the western extremity of a loop. Both of us waving torch beams over the mud and the muddy water as we went. We stood for a while on the footbridge at Teddington Lock before heading back.

"I want to believe," Jaroslav said. "A monster from Czechia come into the heart of London under the noses of the English."

I said I thought Mr Drobny was just a crazy old man all alone in the world inventing stories to feel important.

We walked back, casting our torch beams with less enthusiasm, and went our separate ways at Twickenham station.

The following morning Jaroslav came in late – later than usual. He started to say something but noticed a surveyor searching for a file in the racks.

He whispered: "it followed me home."

"Cigarette break?" I suggested.

Outside, in a misty drizzle, Jaroslav told me his house-mates had woken that morning to find the front door forced. He lived in a large shared house in Archway. Nothing had been taken but there were muddy footprints in the hallway and up the stairs to his bedroom door.

"I lock it," he said. "Always. There was mud on the handle and the carpet was wet. It was black, this mud, and it smelled very bad. Not like shit. Like something rotting." His eyes were wide and he was already chaining a second cigarette. 

"If you are having me on," I said. "You are a good actor."

"You cannot go home," he said. "If it followed me it might follow you and..."

Jaroslav went on at me not to go home that night until I told him he was being foolish. He stopped talking to me after that and we sat there silently in the basement, neither of us having any other job to do but to type up old files. The day turned grim and wet, the rain hammering down relentlessly outside our little head-height window. At lunch I ran to the shop for sandwiches and ate them at my desk. Not long after Jaroslav slapped me on the shoulder.

"What?" I said.

He put his fingers to his lips and pointed up toward the window. Outside, standing facing the building, was a man in a pair of old and extremely muddy boots. Slowly, without making a sound, we both stood up and edged nearer so as to get a better look. Above the boots were mud-caked trousers, and above that the dripping hem of a long, mud-caked coat.

Then we saw movement, the weight on the feet shifting as if the person in the boots was slowly bending down to look through the window. We both sprinted out of the little office to where we could not be seen and stopped and listened. We heard nothing. After a moment I peered round the corner and the boots were gone.

I cannot justify why I ran. Jaroslav was obviously already jittery and maybe his nerves rubbed off on me. I felt foolish afterwards, embarrassed, but I agreed not to go home that night. I rang a friend in Nunhead and made up a story about my flatmate needing my room. He offered me his sofa and the loan of a clean pair of socks.

On the bus there I kept close notice of the other passengers. It was a bus with a CCTV screen and I sat on the lower deck where I could watch it and also keep an eye on the doors. The bus nearly emptied at Peckham Rye and then two stops after that the only other person on the lower deck, a woman with a large shopping bag, disembarked.

The screen cycled slowly through the different cameras. The driver and front entrance. The area around the exit door. Upstairs; a woman and child at the front, the child standing on the seat. The view back; a pair of plasterers, overalls splattered, one holding a two-meter level. And then the lower deck with me on the right hand side near the exit, and on the rear seat, two rows behind, a man with his hood pulled up, his face entirely in shadow.

There was a smell too. Feint but distinctive. It was a smell I recognised from when my father had drained and cleared his garden pond. Slightly sweet. Foetid and rotting.

I sat stiff as a board, listening for any movement behind me, watching the camera cycle slowly round again. For two cycles of the camera, perhaps three or four minutes, I was gripped by an absolute terror. I had no notion that it might be just an ordinary man behind me. I do not think I could have turned and looked at him even if I wanted to. The thought of seeing his face petrified me. I did not have any idea what his face might look like -I still do not- but I knew it would be more than I could bear.

Then I noticed the bus was about to pass the next stop and I stabbed the bell just in time and sprinted out onto the pavement. I was not followed. I caught a glimpse of the figure still on the back seat as the bus pulled away. I decided to double back on myself. From Peckham Rye I knew a different route to my friend's house by foot. I walked quickly, glancing behind me at ever opportunity and arrived sopping wet and, my friend said, pale as a ghost.

It took me a long time that night, laying on his front-room sofa, watching the shadows from the street on the curtains, before I fell asleep.

The following day I arrived at work to find the door of the office open and a police car outside. Inside there were muddy footprints running through the foyer. Our HR manager, standing at the reception desk, saw me and immediately asked if I knew anything about it. It took a moment to work out why. The footprints ran up to her office on the first floor. There the filing cabinet lock had been broken and my employee file removed. It lay open on her desk, a muddy thumbprint on it, my address clearly visible. I made an excuse and ran for the bus stop.

The journey home was the longest of my life. When I arrived I found footprints up and down the stairs and the door forced to every flat in the building. Mr Drobny's, mercifully, was empty. My post box had been torn open and a letter lay open on the floor. He had left late the previous night.