Checkmate

The Albatross Hotel stands at the bottom of a lane off Gower Street, wedged between a tobacconist and a building that has been three different banks. It has twenty-two rooms, a lift that apologises when it stops, and a laminated sign on the door of Room 9 that says OUT OF ORDER. It has said so, in one handwriting or another, since 1947. Nothing is wrong with the room, except that it is haunted. I haunt it.

My name is Hesper Ludd. I died on the second floor in 1947 of a chest complaint, very politely. I told the proprietor I was fine and that whatever it was could wait until morning.

The best description I have of being a ghost is a somewhat dull tedium. I can lift very small objects, with a lot of concentration, provided nobody is looking and the weather is damp. For some inexplicable reason it works best at night. I can make a radiator knock by sulking at it. If I stand close enough to someone, they get a chill. I can’t entertain myself with reading, unless I hover over the shoulder of a living person and get frustrated with their speed and attention span. I was seen once by a child, but the parents put it down to an imaginary friend and sent him to therapy. Television was a godsend.

For seventy-nine years I have kept Room 9 empty by the only method available to me. Any guest who sleeps there wakes at three in the morning, chilled, with the radiator knocking out a slow, sarcastic rhythm. Many a handyman has come to fix it. Once a more superstitious manager sent for a priest. He was lovely, but nothing he said had any impact on me whatsoever. In the end the sign went up, and the current manager, Priyanka, tells anyone who asks that the room is flooded. It’s a lovely room with good natural light, but somewhat dusty.

On the desk is a chessboard. Black to move. Black has been to move since 1947.

Black is Augustin Pell, who beat me eleven games in a row. This is the twelfth, and for the first time, I am winning. I would have won already if my dying hadn’t gotten in the way.

Augustin was eighteen and a trainee with the Ordnance Survey, a profession for people who cannot let a hill stay where it is without checking. I was twenty-two and heading to my next posting. The winter of 1947 was the coldest London had known in living memory. The coal ran out, the power went off for hours at a time, and the other lodgers fled to relatives in the country. The fire in the lounge smoked and then gave up. That left the two of us and Room 9, which was his, and had the only radiator in the building that still managed a lukewarm knock, and a writing desk with a chess board on it. 

We played for a week. Twelve games, Friday to Thursday, by candlelight when the power failed, with a pot of tea between us going cold. I lost eleven. He studied the board meticulously, never leaving anything unplanned for. On the Thursday night, in the twelfth game, he got clever, thought he saw a gambit for an early win, but I’d laid out a trap. And I thought I had him. My chest had been bad all week, and I was tired, I said I would finish him in the morning, and went down the corridor to my own room. The proprietor came to check on me, having heard me coughing. I assured the elderly man I was fine, bid him goodnight, and promptly died.

Augustin found out at breakfast. He was solemn and sad, but stoic, we had only known each other a week. He left the board untouched. And the room was paid up for the rest of the month, so no one disturbed it. It was so infuriating. I think it might be why I became a ghost: unfinished business. I first appeared in that room looking at the board. It looked good for me, though I couldn’t have told you then how good. He would move next. I needed to finish that game. By the end of the month I’d already begun my haunting. There were a few touch and go moments with the cleaners, but the board still stood.

The living cannot hear me. They get a draught and a feeling of being slightly interrupted. Augustin got more than most. Whenever he was back in London he took a room in the hotel, and he would pause every time he passed Room 9. I know he was thinking of me. I kept tabs on him, listening to the conversations he had with the other guests and the managers.

In 1955 he went south with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, to map a peninsula that had no interest in being mapped, fixing the positions of mountains that had only ever been sketched from ships. I will admit, because I am admitting things tonight, that I was hopeful. I know how it sounds. But I had been stuck for eight years in a game I could not finish, and the only man who could finish it was out of reach. A dead Augustin could walk through that door whenever he liked, and we could play it out. Of course, it was wishful thinking. Why would a dead Augustin become a ghost, and why would he become one here?

I read the newspapers every morning over the shoulder of the hall porter, who felt it as a breeze on his neck and sometimes checked if the window had been left open. He religiously read the Births, Deaths and Marriages, and I scanned for PELL, A. I saw a Pell, W., a Pell, T. H., and a Pell, Q. I’d just like to know what the Q stood for.

Then, in March of 1957: MISSING ON THE ICE, SURVEYOR A. PELL.

I will tell you plainly that I spun once around the chandelier. Then I stopped, and felt terrible, and sat on the stairs for most of an afternoon. A ghost has little else to do with her feelings. For the next few days I waited hopefully.

His sister held a memorial service at St Pancras. I didn’t really know where that was, or if I could get there. Then months later, to my utter astonishment, Augustin strolled in to the hotel, very much alive. I heard him tell the story to a group at the bar. He had perfected the telling and I am sure it was a little embellished. The vicar had reached the part about Augustin’s love of punctuality and discipline when the church door opened and a telegram boy came down the aisle, looking for the family. Augustin had spent nine days in a crevasse. His expedition had thought him lost and sent a telegram saying so, before amazingly finding him alive and only slightly battered. They had of course sent another telegram in response, which was the one the boy was carrying, and it had arrived about twenty minutes too late to be tactful.

His sister, he said, cried, laughed and was somehow furious all at once. She hit him with her handbag the day he got home, and then hugged him.

“I thought you were dead,” I said, to Augustin, as he laughed with the crowd of listeners. He didn’t hear me.

After that he came less often, and then less often than that. The Albatross changed hands. It was a hotel for coach parties for a decade, then a place for people who liked to be asked nothing, and now it is a place for people who read reviews. The lift began to apologise in the nineties.

I should tell you about my mother’s pears.

She kept them in the cellar in Islington, each one wrapped in its own square of paper so that if one went soft, the bruise could not pass to its neighbour. I do the same with my weeks. I don’t let one week’s loneliness bruise the next. Each week is new, and perhaps something interesting will happen.

That is how I outlasted fourteen managers and a refurbishment that took out every carpet in the building except mine. It is also how, sometime in the nineties, I found out the game was won.

I had spent my nights studying a position I believed was merely good. I had looked at those sixty-four squares for so long, and in 1998 I finally saw it. His king had one square left and his last pawn one legal move. After that move, my rook went to the corner. Mate in one, after his move. I had had him on that fateful Thursday night, completely, I just hadn’t realised then. I think he had noticed straight away. I could have pushed the pawn for him. But I wouldn’t cheat, it was his move.

His last visit was in 2009. He came up the stairs on a stick, and he still paused as he passed Room 9. I wanted very much to tell him I’d worked it out. By 2015 I had decided he must be dead, and I was thrilled, and then furious, because nothing came of it.

On the last Thursday in October, the lane outside was full of people dressed as me. They do it badly. They use a bedsheet. I’ve been stuck in this green dress since my death and I would like it noted that it has a collar.

At twenty past eleven that night, something came through the wall of Room 9.

It was a very old man with no luggage, in slippers and a threadbare dressing gown. He came in shoulder first, because he hadn’t quite worked out how to arrive, and then tried to apologise to the wall. It was him, so much older, but it was obviously Augustin, hiding behind the extra skin and wrinkles.

He looked at the sloping ceiling, and the high window, and the brass bedstead. Then he looked at me, and for the first time since the winter of 1947, his eyes met mine.

“Hesper,” said Augustin Pell.

“I thought you were dead,” I said, smiling broadly.

“I am,” said Augustin. “Since ten past eight this evening. A care home in Hastings, aged ninety-eight, between a crossword and a plate of toast.”

“Was it dreadful?”

“The toast was.” He frowned at his hands, which were fainter than he’d expected.

“It’s your turn,” I said, my voice cracking.

“It is.”

He crossed the floor in three careful steps and stood with his hands behind his back. I watched his eyes travel down the board and stop at the end. His king had one square. His last pawn, a small hopeful thing at the far side of the board, had exactly one legal move.

“Oh, Hesper,” he said softly. “You’ve got me.”

I had.

“You knew,” I said. “You knew in 1947. You could have tipped your king over any time and spared us both.”

“Concede a game?” Augustin looked pained. “A game ends in front of both players, and you were gone.”

“Then move the pawn.”

He reached out. His hand went through the pawn, and through the board, and through the leather of the desk, and came out somewhere near the drawer.

It had been drizzling since four, I could have pushed the pawn for him, but it was his move.

We both laughed. I laughed until I cried. Downstairs, Priyanka, who had been about to lock up, said “Oh, you’re restless tonight” to the ceiling, and put on a cardigan.