Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  Heber rose to his feet like a lion in anger.

  “It is Sunday today,” he said, “you must all go to church.”

  “I make it Thursday,” said Tiny. “What do you make it, Celia?”

  Celia answered in German, with a strong North German accent, finishing up with her aggravating laugh: “Bei mir ist’s Montag um halb sechs.”

  “No, no,” said Tiny, “it is Thursday.” He smiled in an infatuated manner upon Celia and pointed to the lake that could just be seen from the kitchen window where they had set the table, “C’est le lac de jeudi,” he said, “for, you see, it is Thursday today.”

  Cas, who was getting rather restless, said, “Heads Sunday, tails Thursday.” The coin came down heads.

  “So long, Uncle,” they said.

  When they got to the church the service was already over, so they turned back along the grass path bordered with poplar trees. The weather had cleared again and it was hot and fine.

  “I am afraid we shall not be able to get our church stamps for attendance,” said Celia.

  “I’m sorry about that,” said Tiny.

  “I thought our uncle’s sermon was extremely to the point,” said Cas.

  “Quite affecting,” said Celia.

  “I always think that is one of his best sermons,” said Tiny with a generous smile.

  “I enjoyed the hymns so much,” said Celia.

  “I thought Mr Sparrow’s voluntary on the harp was in excellent taste,” said Cas. “Was I right in detecting a slight flaw in one of the strings?”

  The white butterflies flew round their heads in the hot sunshine and the tall flowers, red, white and blue, waved against their shoulders as they walked along.

  “Marguerites, cornflowers, poppies,” drawled Celia, pressing the stalks in her hands.

  “Don’t pick the flowers, Celia,” said Cas. “Do you wish to raise the devil?”

  “How tall they grow,” said Celia.

  “Very fine,” said Cas, with his eye still upon her.

  “They would make a nice bouquet for the lunch-table,” said Celia.

  “Don’t pick the flowers,” said Cas and Tiny together, edging nearer to their cousin.

  Celia now looked down at her clothes and found that she was dressed in a pink-and-white-striped sailor suit, white socks and black strapped pumps. She took off her hat to look at it and to ease the discomfort where the elastic was biting into her chin. It was a large floppy leghorn hat trimmed with cornflowers and daisies and a white satin bow.

  “Do you realize, boys, that you are both wearing Eton suits?” she said, and took them by the hand.

  “Why, look,” said Tiny, as they came up the drive to the rectory, “there is old Sir Sefton standing in the doorway with our uncle.”

  “Howdedo, little girl?” said Sefton, pressing a bar of Fry’s chocolate cream into Celia’s hand. “We’ve put the hare in the fridge,” he added in a confidential aside.

  Celia shook hands with Sir Sefton, and gave a little nick of a curtsy.

  “Celia has recently returned from her school in Potsdam,” explained Cas, who was rather embarrassed by the curtsy.

  “She has become quite Prussian,” said Tiny.

  Cas trod on his toe. “Shut up, Tiny,” he said.

  “Well, well, well, very nice, I’m sure,” said Sir Sefton, who had not quite taken it in. He gave a large coloured ball to Tiny.

  “I bought a model motorcar for you, my lad,” he said, turning to Cas, “but it has not come yet.”

  “Oh, hurrah,” said Cas. “Oh, thank you so much, sir.”

  “Are they going back to school after the holidays?” Sir Sefton inquired of Heber.

  “Well,” said Heber, “that depends.”

  Cas and Tiny and Celia sat in the long, cool nursery.

  “That depends…” said Tiny, with a rather fearful look at Celia. “Oh, Celia, I do hope we do not have to go back to school.”

  “Not likely,” said Cas; “nothing more to learn.”

  “Cas is awfully smug,” said Celia, putting her arms round Tiny, who was beginning to cry. “Cheer up, Tiny, you won’t have Augustus, anyway.”

  “I was flogged twice through Homer at Eton,” said Cas, with an ineffable smug smile.

  Celia began to print a sentence in coloured chalks in her copy-book, there was a different chalk for each letter. Cas looked over her shoulder and read out what she had written: “Is there a life beyond the gravy?”

  “It’s an ‘e’,” he said, “not a ‘y’.”

  At this moment there was a black shadow across the open window and a large, dark, fat boy fell into the room. He picked himself up and swaggered over to where Tiny was crouching beside Celia.

  “I couldn’t make anyone hear,” he said.

  Then he looked round the room with a sneering expression. “Crumbs,” he said, “what a place, and what smudgy beasts you look! Why, Celia, the ink is all over your dress. There’s no life here,” he said; “you people simply don’t know you’re alive.”

  It was Augustus.

  Cas came over to him and stood threatening him with the heavy ruler he had snatched from Celia’s desk.

  “You don’t know you’re dead,” he said.

  “It’s better to know you’re dead,” said Tiny.

  “Oh, much better,” said Cas.

  “There’s no room here for anyone who doesn’t know he’s dead,” said Celia.

  They took hands and closed round Augustus, driving him back towards the window. He climbed on to the windowsill.

  “We’re all dead,” cried the three children in a loud, shrill chorus that rose like the wail of a siren. “We’re all dead, we’ve been dead for ages.”

  Tiny rushed forward, breaking hands with the others, and gave Augustus a great shove that sent him backwards out of the dark shadowed window.

  “We rather like it,” he said, as Augustus disappeared from view.

  MARS IS HEAVEN

  Ray Bradbury

  Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) incorporated his childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois into some of his short stories and novels, where it symbolised a place of safety. He grew up during the depression, and was too poor to go to college, so educated himself via libraries. Bradbury’s writing often contains a keen sense of social awareness. His best known novel, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian depiction of a society where books are outlawed, can be interpreted as an allegory about McCarthyism.

  The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great flowers of heat and color and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!

  Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient Moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

  “Mars!” cried Navigator Lustig.

  “Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.

  “Well,” said Captain John Black.

  The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood a tall brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze
. At the summit of the house was a cupola with diamond leaded-glass windows and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see a piece of music titled “Beautiful Ohio” sitting on the music rest.

  Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.

  The rocket men looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale.

  “I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers. “I’ll be damned.”

  “It just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.

  “Lord,” said Captain John Black.

  There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is thin for breathing. But there’s enough oxygen. It’s safe.”

  “Then we’ll go out,” said Lustig.

  “Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “How do we know what this is?”

  “It’s a small town with thin but breathable air in it, sir.”

  “And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Hinkston, the archaeologist. “Incredible. It can’t be, but it is.”

  Captain John Black looked at him idly. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”

  Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded-glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like a piano and probably is a piano; and five, if you look closely through this telescopic lens here, is it logical that a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, ‘Beautiful Ohio’? All of which means that we have an Ohio River on Mars!”

  “Captain Williams, of course!” cried Hinkston.

  “What?”

  “Captain Williams and his crew of three men! Or Nathaniel York and his partner. That would explain it!”

  “That would explain absolutely nothing. As far as we’ve been able to figure, the York expedition exploded the day it reached Mars, killing York and his partner. As for Williams and his three men, their ship exploded the second day after their arrival. At least the pulsations from their radios ceased at that time, so we figure that if the men were alive after that they’d have contacted us. And anyway, the York expedition was only a year ago, while Captain Williams and his men landed here some time during last August. Theorizing that they are still alive, could they, even with the help of a brilliant Martian race, have built such a town as this and aged it in so short a time? Look at that town out there; why, it’s been standing here for the last seventy years. Look at the wood on the porch newel; look at the trees, a century old, all of them! No, this isn’t York’s work or Williams’. It’s something else. I don’t like it. And I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”

  “For that matter,” said Lustig, nodding, “Williams and his men, as well as York, landed on the opposite side of Mars. We were very careful to land on this side.”

  “An excellent point. Just in case a hostile local tribe of Martians killed off York and Williams, we have instructions to land in a further region, to forestall a recurrence of such a disaster. So here we are, as far as we know, in a land that Williams and York never saw.”

  “Damn it,” said Hinkston, “I want to get out into this town, sir, with your permission. It may be there are similar thought patterns, civilization graphs on every planet in our sun system. We may be on the threshold of the greatest psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!”

  “I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain John Black.

  “It may be, sir, that we’re looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of God, sir.”

  “There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”

  “I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a town like this could not occur without divine intervention. The detail. It fills me with such feelings that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  “Do neither, then, until we know what we’re up against.”

  “Up against?” Lustig broke in. “Against nothing, Captain. It’s a good, quiet green town, a lot like the old-fashioned one I was born in. I like the looks of it.”

  “When were you born, Lustig?”

  “Nineteen fifty, sir.”

  “And you, Hinkston?”

  “Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks like home to me.”

  “Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I’m just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and through the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years, knows how to make some old men young again, here I am on Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me. It’s too much like Green Bluff.” He turned to the radioman. “Radio Earth. Tell them we’ve landed. That’s all. Tell them we’ll radio a full report tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Captain Black looked out the rocket port with his face that should have been the face of a man eighty but seemed like the face of a man in his fortieth year. “Tell you what we’ll do, Lustig; you and I and Hinkston’ll look the town over. The other men’ll stay aboard. If anything happens they can get the hell out. A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens, our crew can warn the next rocket. That’s Captain Wilder’s rocket, I think, due to be ready to take off next Christmas. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next rocket to be well armed.”

  “So are we. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”

  “Tell the men to stand by the guns then. Come on, Lustig, Hinkston.”

  The three men walked together down through the levels of the ship.

  It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the green branches, and the blossom scent drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town someone was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was “Beautiful Dreamer.” Somewhere else a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’,” sung by Harry Lauder.

  The three men stood outside the ship. They sucked and gasped at the thin, thin air and moved slowly so as not to tire themselves.

  Now the phonograph record being played was:

  Oh, give me a June night

  The moonlight and you…

  Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.

  The sky was serene and quiet, and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree shadings of a ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.

  “Sir,” said Samuel Hinkston, “it must be, it has to be, that rocket travel to Mars began in the years before the First World War!”

  “No.”

  “How else can you explain these houses, the iron deer, the pianos, the music?” Hinkston took the captain’s elbow persuasively and looked into the captain’s face. “Say that there were people in the year 1905 who hated war and got together with some scientists in secret and built a rocket and came out here to Mars –…”

  “No, no, Hinkston.”

  “Why not? The world was a different world in 1905; they could have kept it a secret much more easily.”

  “But a complex thing like a rocket, no, you couldn’t keep it secret.”
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  “And they came up here to live, and naturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought the culture with them.”

  “And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the captain.

  “In peace and quiet, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, enough to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped for fear of being discovered. That’s why this town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing, myself, older than the year 1927, do you? Or maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world centuries ago and was kept secret by the small number of men who came to Mars with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.”

  “You make it sound almost reasonable.”

  “It has to be. We’ve the proof here before us; all we have to do is find some people and verify it.”

  Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had been in a small town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.

  They set foot upon the porch. Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked to the screen door. Inside they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfield Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice in a lemonade pitcher. In a distant kitchen, because of the heat of the day, someone was preparing a cold lunch. Someone was humming under her breath, high and sweet.

  Captain John Black rang the bell.

  *

  Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hall, and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black uncertainly. “But we’re looking for – that is, could you help us –…” He stopped. She looked out at him with dark, wondering eyes.

  “If you’re selling something –…” she began.