After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘There was said to be a room in the palace where some creepy, inexplicable things had happened. Although there had been an exorcism there were still some “ghosts” wandering around. One apparition that received a lot of attention appeared to be a skinny, pock-marked man, dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century Scots clergyman.

  ‘One night, a month after Francis arrived in the country, he invited Maxine to his room for a drink and told her he had met the ghost. Its name was Cyril Humphrey. The Reverend Humphrey came from Stromness in the Orkney Isles. He had died in 1779 when poisoned by his housekeeper (the local laird had cut his stipend and he had been forced to reduce her wages).

  ‘Francis was really excited—Maxine told us he was always more disturbing and distracting when he was excited about something than when he was lounging around trying to be seductive. He became all incoherent and elated and just kept repeating that everything happens at once.’

  Kelfie paused, staring at Basil.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Hannah asked in exasperation.

  ‘Basil’s touching his ear like he’s listening to instructions from a hidden microphone.’

  ‘Never mind my ear, just go on with your story.’

  ‘Well—you see Francis didn’t know all his own future; there weren’t enough patches of lamplight on the road. The next thing anyone knew he had locked himself in his room at the hotel, closed the blinds, and wasn’t answering the phone or door. Unfortunately for the government he had rich friends in Sydney who were used to him calling regularly. When they became worried they got onto Foreign Affairs Oz and before long Department underlings were talking to people. Eventually a government official coaxed Francis out of bed, got him to shower and change and arranged an interview with a Red Cross type who could certify that Francis Taylor, Australian citizen, was being neither drugged, brainwashed, nor tortured or “disappeared” by the revolutionary government.

  ‘Frank and his guide then went into the jungle to photograph initiation rites up at the pyramids in the heart of the old Taoscal empire. When he returned to the capital Frank told Maxine what had happened to him that drove him to hide himself. She thought he’d gone crazy, that he’d been trying too many drugs. Maybe he had.

  ‘He told her that one night he had followed Cyril Humphrey along the packed earth path by Democracy Wall—the outside of a wall encircling the palace, where people used to write opinions, slogans and rumours (rumour-mongering being the national sport)—when the apparition suddenly vanished. He kept on walking—then it happened: instead of the hard, dusty road, wet shingle was slipped under his feet, and he stood looking in wonder at his sneakers against smooth, gleaming, water-worn stones, and lifted his head into a cold, salty, peaty wind. He was standing on a stony beach, it was drizzling, a fine chill mist, but the sun was shining through a gap between the horizon and the clouds, under-lighting them. The sea and small strip of clear sky were sulphur-yellow. Behind him were lichen-covered boulders and a rising hillside clad in tough brown bracken. Further along the beach a group of seals lounged on the rocks and rolled in kelp in the waves; watching him curiously and fearlessly. And on the headland opposite him was a stone fortress.

  ‘Francis backed away, and the drizzle, stony shoreline, lapping waves, all disappeared. It was as though he’d had his head submerged and now had lifted his face from the water. The sounds of traffic, tree-frogs, cicadas, filled his ears. His hair and clothes were sprinkled with droplets of rain, and four damp footprints—his own backward steps—lay before him on the dust of the road.

  ‘Shortly after telling Maxine this story, Francis went back to Sydney. The following year he returned to the republic on his own time and then he vanished.

  ‘Maxine said that although he had always seemed sweet to her, his habit of trying to jump into bed with all sorts of people might have got him into trouble. He may have had his throat cut and been dumped in the river, or have gone off into the jungle with only the Indian guide and been shot by Contras. She also said that Francis had made too many jokes about his ability to go anywhere. That he’d talk and act rationally among groups of people, but one to one, in late night conversations with her, he’d start speculating about what he’d do in the Napoleonic Wars, or how he might end up living by picking whelks off the rocks in the Orkneys. And he’d always say, laughing, or sadly, and sometimes anxiously: “I’m not mad.”

  ‘But if he wasn’t mad, then what was he, this handsome, young, educated Westerner, with charm, and options for action, who eventually found a quiet dark lonely stony road leading him away—if only in his head?’

  Throughout his narrative Kelfie’s voice had changed continually; from thoughtful and distant, to animated and flippant—ending in a tone of both quiet wonder and insistent firmness. His voice and what he said made me feel strange. His story was at once too odd to be believable, but too detailed not to be. I said, ‘You don’t expect us to believe that’s a true story?’

  ‘It was told to me as a true story. I don’t know if it is. But maybe this is the answer.’ Kelfie raised his slight hands against the firelight. ‘We are all strung on time. Francis Taylor was strung on time, but he was a magician’s bangle, one of those shining steel hoops a magician slips, whole, off a taut wire.’

  Hannah said, ‘If you ask me, that woman told you a tall story.’

  ‘We understand what’s meant by book-jacket blurb magic: “This story is sheer magic”—“enchanted”—“a spellbinder”. A good story, even a good tall story, should change your mind, and by changing your mind it should change the world—because the world is what our brains make of it.’

  ‘My brain makes something quite different of it than yours, I’ll bet.’

  ‘But you don’t know what I think, Hannah. All I did was tell someone else’s story.’

  Basil said, defiantly, ‘I believe it! Why not? Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Yes, Basil?’ Kelfie smiled at him. ‘Tell us now what stranger things have happened to you.’

  Basil

  While Russell didn’t care whether my story was true or not, Audrey, my friend Scott’s girlfriend—whom I loved, who gave me so much of herself, trustfully, understanding that I honoured everything she felt, but not understanding that I loved her—Audrey was frightened of me. Indulgently laughed at by her parents, emotionally blackmailed by her lover, she was haunted by the phantom of her happy, active, guiltless self—the woman she might have been, given half the chance. Audrey didn’t count on real ghosts, intractable mysteries like my Vanishing House. Her sanity, her sense of justice drew her to me. Sometimes I could see her thinking, ‘At least Basil’s sane.’ When I turned out not to be sane, by her reckoning, she stopped trusting me. She didn’t stop speaking to me, but never really said anything anymore.

  It was only by an effort of will that I was able to watch the others as I told my story. Those five people, all strangers, about whom I should have had no strong feelings. Ellen kept her eyes turned my way (she looked myopic, dreamy, defenceless), Hannah was patient and attentive, Jill frowning, and both Wrathall and Kelfie just listened, their faces unreadable.

  When I had finished, a log cracked in the fireplace and coals tumbled through the grate, light, exhausted, sounding like small scraps of metal. I felt as I had briefly the last two times I made the confession—the luxury of trust, of something having left me that never should have been a part of me.

  I waited, to be humoured, laughed at; I waited for the attempts to persuade me out of my delusive memories, or even for the distance of polite scepticism. Then Kelfie said, ‘I wonder why—’ his voice full of the soft ferocity of desire, regarding me as though I were a puzzle: the high, closed gates of a mansion, a fascinating photograph captioned in a foreign language, an extinguished screen. As though he were about to get up and walk through me, to stand on the crest of that hill, fifteen years and thousands of miles removed.

  ‘What am I supposed to think?’ Jill asked.

  ‘It doesn’t mean any
thing,’ Ellen told her, some struggle going on between them that we could only watch, as from shore watching a lifeguard and panicking swimmer.

  ‘It means what you make of it!’ Kelfie was unduly brutal.

  ‘Basil’s house was never alive—it didn’t get up, eat breakfast and go to school!’ Jill said.

  Kelfie considered this, then flushed. ‘That’s true! It was just something Basil saw’—briefly denying a thing I knew he believed was significant. But pity for Jill checked him only momentarily. In a series of broken, breathless phrases he said, ‘Even if someone did die—suffocated—and hard hands went into their body and shut around their spine—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Ellen said, savagely.

  ‘Jill, someone died for me too,’ I said, ‘but my Vanishing House still existed. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t have to. Hauntings are a problem like—like a lobster pot—you can get in but not out.’

  ‘If you’re a lobster,’ Wrathall said drolly.

  ‘Ghosts aren’t an effect with a cause—they don’t have to mean anything!’ I was back-pedalling gradually, watching Jill’s troubled, infuriated face.

  ‘It meant what it was, and you never knew what it was,’ Kelfie said, composed again, calmly taking my story away from me. He looked at Jill. ‘Don’t take it so personally,’ he said.

  Ellen jumped up, red and swearing, moving towards him, but Wrathall caught her and pushed her back into her seat.

  Hannah had risen to her feet, her face dismal, to protect her friend. But Ellen, after attempting to rise several times against the strength of the hand gripping her shoulder, had become quiet. Wrathall watched both women, his face sleepy, neutral, unmoved. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Just don’t touch him.’ Releasing Ellen, unhurried, unworried, he turned to Hannah, saying respectfully, ‘I haven’t hurt her.’

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Stop threatening each other. I can speak for myself,’ Jill protested. She was crying again.

  ‘There’s no point in talking to someone like him!’ Ellen gestured at Kelfie.

  ‘I’m crying because I’m angry,’ Jill told Kelfie. ‘I always cry when I’m angry.’

  ‘Basil’s house isn’t your child,’ Kelfie said calmly.

  I recognised this as a correct guess. Her child, her daughter, the one she had read Dr Seuss to.

  Jill fought to make herself clear. ‘It’s just intellectual to you. I failed to protect my daughter. But you’re a kid still, so you wouldn’t understand anything like that.’

  ‘You have no idea what I do or don’t understand,’ he said, then added, ‘At least she didn’t survive to hate you for failing.’ He sounded considered and purposeful, as though he intended with one awful sentence to put us all away from him.

  Jill dropped her face into her hands. Ellen cradled her, staring at Kelfie, incredulous.

  He watched them, his expression bland and empty. His cruelty wasn’t a lack of sympathy, but a deliberate withholding or perversion of sympathy. Because it was there, I could sense it, an empathic faculty that went along with his uncanny instincts, his imagination, his ability to manufacture moods. Wilfully withheld empathy; a tremendous, frozen presence, like a looming cliff of snow.

  ‘Why do you do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Say things like that?’

  ‘What do you want me to say? Aren’t you relieved that I believed you?’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant. I’m not interested in you being “on my side”. You were talking about Jill’s daughter, not someone’s theory about ghosts.’

  ‘I’m sure Jill can’t really resent being reminded that nothing’s dependable. None of us can protect, or keep, or ask anything. Ghosts don’t mean anything. Your house denied you; it disappeared. Everything characteristically leaves us.’ His expression was banal, his voice impassive and remote. And still a contained force behind his words, voice, face.

  ‘You mean you notice departures, but not arrivals. Life has both, you know. There is “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together”,’ I quoted.

  ‘No, I mean it is the character of all things to leave us.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ Jill murmured, ‘I’m so tired.’

  ‘You men!’ Ellen growled, glaring from Kelfie, to Wrathall, to myself. ‘Basil, what are you trying to prove? That you’re an authority on hauntings? So you can say this place—this bare, harmless house—is haunted? Do you think we should all leave? Well leave then! Get out!’

  ‘Ellen,’ Wrathall began, but she rounded on him: ‘Don’t take that tone of voice with me! All right, you’ve had a rough time of it tonight—what with your accident—but Jill’s been suffering for months, and between Basil and his fucking ghosts, and Kelfie being a pig—’ She was screaming now, a high, furious sound.

  Wrathall moved towards her. He was obviously someone used to intimidating the anger out of others. But when his menacing figure failed to achieve the predicted effect, he looked momentarily confused and afraid, then said, ‘You stupid woman, hasn’t it ever occurred to you—?’

  ‘What?’ she snarled.

  Next to her Jill had stopped crying and was looking alarmed.

  ‘All I care about,’ Ellen went on, ‘is that Jill isn’t subjected to insensitivity, insults and crazy behaviour!’

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset anyone,’ I protested.

  ‘Well then, why did you persist with your ghosts?’

  Without emphasis Wrathall said, ‘Why don’t you shut up.’

  ‘No, you—’ Ellen yelled, then seemed to lose the power of speech. She pushed Jill roughly aside, as if completely forgetting the cause of her protectiveness. She snatched up the crowbar, which had been lying at her feet, and ran at Wrathall. He wrenched the bar from her hand, shoved her backwards and raised it over his head.

  As I moved forward I saw, blurred, Hannah’s horrified, astonished face on the other side of the struggling figures. Terribly slowly we converged on them. There was a hissing pause; Ellen lifted her arms before her face, our hands flew out, the muscles shifted in Wrathall’s wrist and the reflected firelight began to stream from tip to base of the bar as it descended.

  Then a voice, Kelfie’s, said, ‘Go on, kill her. What’s one more or less?’

  Wrathall froze and Hannah snatched the bar from his hand. We were all still, panting, looking at Kelfie—on his feet between us and the fire. In the same incisive, unimpassioned voice he added, ‘I mean it.’

  Mark

  Dear Emma,

  We have arrived in Sling. We came down by train from Liverpool to Salisbury. Sling in summer is set in hot, bare, almost entirely flat country, and is covered by an uninteresting, milky blue sky. It consists of a vast collection of huts, parade grounds, shooting ranges and so on. And, in our opinion, poorly equipped kitchens and mess halls.

  As soon as we got here there were rumours that the company was to be reorganised. Our CO, Captain Green, had arrived from Egypt and appeared officiating at a kit inspection on our first night. I don’t mind saying, Emma, he’s an odd chap, a Christchurcher, but very English-sounding. We are all impressed by his DCM. I am told he got it fighting off a Turkish raid at Quinn’s. The planned reorganisation turned out to be the acquisition of an English lieutenant, Wilson by name. It appears he lost his place in the Durhams when he was sent back here wounded. We think he would have preferred to return to them; we also feel he’s been put in to keep an eye on us. Fortunately Given is still officer of our platoon.

  It looks like Andy McCauley is going to make corporal so will be shifted out of our section. He’s really smug.

  We are all quietly pleased that things haven’t cooled down on the front since the push in July, and we ought to be over there by September to have a go. There was some unpleasantness in connection with this on our second evening here. We were in the mess hall, eating something unpromising and watery, when an English captain staggered in drunk, and started yelling that there were dangerous doings over i
n ‘the ditch’ and how we would be there soon and ‘before you know it half of you will be dead’. Several of us got up to tell him off, then fortunately some Tommy NCOs arrived and showed him out. Double-barrelled nitwit! As if we have no idea of what we are in for—we have seen the casualty lists.

  I write this at 8:00 pm in our hut. It is still light and the last of the aeroplanes are buzzing back to a nearby airfield. They look fragile and beautiful, yet strangely frightening. Especially if, when one is walking, they fly right overhead and their shadows cross one, that momentary coolness in their shade is so unlike a cloud’s or a bird’s shadow.

  We have two days in London coming up. Alan has an invitation to the home of some of his mother’s people, and has asked me to go with him. We gather that various outings have been organised, including a concert at a cathedral, which Alan with his love of choirs is happily anticipating. Thinking to be clever he has just told me the name of the cantata in German (awake, cries to us the voice). I tell him about Jakob, and that I know a little German.

  Poor old Jakob, I wonder where he is now. I always think of the time Father sent me down from the tops with him, after that early snowfall during the muster when I was eleven. We had a lamb across the horse’s withers in front of the saddle, and he showed me how to warm my hands by burying them in its oily fleece.

  About the farm. Do not let Joe Harper bully you. I think we need to lease another 300 acres. If Clifford is talking of joining up I don’t see how you can persuade him not to. If he resolves to go, then write to Uncle Euan and ask him to come back, I am sure he would if you asked.

  Offer MacVey another shilling a month if that’s what it takes to make him stay, give Baines the push, he will always be a drunk. And let Paku’s family have his quarters. As for Aunt Olive and her ‘clerk’s position in the civil service’—do you really want to live in Wellington? There should always be a Thornton at Patriarch (though I know you think it should be me). If Euan comes then maybe you can go and stay with Olive, if he thinks it’s a good idea.