Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  Preston apologizes as he cuts sideways through the crowd, towards a group of four younger men in gowns. One of them has some kind of colourful juggling equipment, and the others are gathered around him, examining it. Their conversation stops as he approaches, and their mouths open slightly when they appreciate his size. Preston hunches in the way that he does.

  I’ve forgotten my invite, he says. And my gown. I’ll give you two hundred quid for a loan of one of yours.

  I don’t get undressed for less than five hundred, the juggler-boy says laughing outrageously at himself. And I don’t think it would fit you anyway. The laughter of the other boys spills all over the pavement, splashes against Preston who stands as still as a lighthouse, his face ignited. He retreats back into the queue, a full head taller than anyone else.

  *

  On the ground, Aleister Crowley’s mouth is at the neck of his man, whispering incantations over his neon moles. This couple is insensible of footsteps and the heavy pendulums of carrier bags. Aleister’s spell unwraps itself, a mischievous gift, something from the other side, loosening the screws of gravity.

  *

  Preston’s fantastic height has caught the attention of the porter at the gate. Preston has seen him note the pink collar of his shirt – so alien among the starched-white-on-navy of the fellows’ uniforms. Far ahead, through the arches of the fountain, climbing the stone steps to the Hall, is the candy-striped woman. She is now wearing a gown, and the fabric swishes about her, revealing slivers of her wonderful stripes.

  Now the queue has narrowed at the mouth of the entrance. There are only three people ahead of Preston. Fear floods his system with something radioactive, something that burns at his joints. Fear of being turned away, and fear of never knowing whether this woman was the one.

  The fear turns to energy and energy turns to action. To the amusement of the fellows around him, Preston steps straight over the barrier and runs.

  The porter calls out stop. Gives chase. Other porters come. Other men in gowns pursue him. But Preston is a daddy long-legs, each of his strides covering three of a normal man’s. He pounds across the lawn, past the fountain. Those behind him cannot keep up, and those ahead of him stand aside for fear of the violent strength such a giant could command.

  For the second time today, a path clears for Preston.

  He leaps up the stone steps in a single bound, into the corridor, past the ghosts of Newton and John Dryden and Francis Bacon who stand before their portraits imitating their own expressions.

  He ducks low through the entrance to the Hall, and two hundred faces all turn towards him.

  *

  Trinity Street is awash with gowns and chatter, and in this confusion, Yolanda has lost sight of Libby. She imagines someone, some dribbling, broken-toothed paedophile putting pawprints on her white dress and over her mouth. Faced with this terrifying vision she stops and gathers up everything she has inside her. Her yell is so fierce it moves through the crowd like a shockwave. Ankles, unbolted by Aleister Crowley’s tongue, betray their owners. Yolanda’s ululation fells everyone. Every knee, every hip, every elbow and every shoulder on Trinity Street, in one great wave hits the pavement. There is a collective groan as the force of the fall pushes air from the lungs of more than three hundred people.

  At the end of her scream, Yolanda’s teeth sing like a tuning fork.

  Before the fallen pick themselves up, while they are too shocked to even apologise to those they have scratched and groped as they fell, the only person standing is Libby, and an orchard of ghosts who stand rooted to the stones, staring at Yolanda. The force of her howl against their backs was a delicious sensation worth all of those numb decades.

  Amongst them, Libby is staring at her smashed keyring aquarium, crying.

  *

  In the rafters, the mallard watches the colossus step into the room, and is suddenly airborne. Its wings are moulded firmly to its sides and all attempts to flap are futile. It watches the room turn around it, sees far above, its former perch and behind it, AA Milne and Jawaharlal Nehru high-fiving each other in delight. And then it crashes to the ground.

  *

  This isn’t how Preston wanted this moment to be.

  Standing in the middle of Trinity’s fellows, ten feet tall and clutching a Waterstone’s bag, sweaty from the pursuit, he scans the room and finds his girl. The timing of the duck’s fall is so precise that there is a common misperception that he has knocked his head against the rafters and dislodged it.

  The porters have waited moments while they gathered together in enough numbers to tackle this monster. Eight of them move in on him. Preston sees the girl, sitting on a bench close-by. One leg is crossed over the other, revealing a bare knee so smooth that his gaze can’t settle upon it without sliding down her shin.

  His insides are a-shiver. Closing the gap between himself and Kelly in two great strides, he takes in all of her. He can imagine the weight of her curls against his face, the plush smothering smack of her lips.

  She recoils as he approaches, sliding her bottom along the bench, but already he is there. For the first time he is able to read the rest of her name badge: Dr Kelly Campbell, Dept of Physics.

  It will all make sense in a moment, he tries to say, but he is panting and his words come out all mashed into one. He could never have imagined that this moment of revelation, which should be spectacular for them both, would have happened with an audience. But somehow it is fitting.

  Preston reaches out and wraps his long fingers around Kelly’s wrist. She tries to pull away, and even stands up, but it is too late. The magic is already happening.

  The sensation begins simultaneously in Preston’s balls and his feet, rocketing through his insides, hormonal fireworks fizzing against the underside of muscles and curling round bones, making his titanic cartilage groan with pleasure.

  He is compelled to close his eyes, to fully savour the fanfare that is boiling in his underpants, but he does not. Something is wrong.

  Kelly is still trying to wrestle free from his grip. Her face shows no sign of supernatural ecstasy. Only horror.

  Preston is coming alone.

  It is too late to stop. Even if he let go of her now. His insides are on fire and the fire will not stop until he is all ashes. He has never felt an orgasm like this before. Hidden fuses throughout his systems flare and blow. Cells chime against cells. The pleasure is uncontainable, and his terror makes it even sweeter. Terror because now he sees all around him the blue faces of Trinity’s past. Lights obscure his vision. His knees crumple. He is unmade.

  Even knelt like this before Kelly, he is still taller than her. And her expression is one of revulsion.

  Porters have his collar, have his arms, grab his fingers and force them to relinquish Kelly. Yank him backwards with such velocity he is forced to run on his heels. Men and women gather round Kelly, healing her with their murmurs, and block her from Preston’s view.

  As the orgasm, the most tremendous orgasm in the universe, subsides, a sense of abjection washes in to fill the space it has left.

  The porters drag Preston down the stone steps, across the lawn, to the front gate where queuing fellows still wait. For the third time today, the crowd divides to allow him through.

  *

  When Yolanda reaches Libby, the shoppers have stood up and are brushing themselves down, looking around to see what has happened. Maybe they suspect a bomb has gone off. But as soon as the first person has resumed shopping, the others follow, and within seconds, it’s as if Yolanda’s utterance never existed.

  Libby is on her knees, sobbing, picking up the fractured pieces of her Sea Monkeys keyring from the ground. In between cobbles, the little brine shrimp twitch their tails, their segmented legs working the meniscus of their spilled environment.

  Yolanda sets Daniela down on the ground. And now that the adrenaline is retreating back into the caves of her body, she feels all the muscles she has pulled in her pursuit. Something holding her spine st
raight has snapped. Something in her thigh is burning. She is conceiving Libby’s punishment when among the crowd of strangers she sees Preston. His walk is weird and hobbled.

  I’m sorry, he says.

  Yolanda starts in with the where have you beens and I’ve been going crazy I’ve just had to chase our daughter through the street do you have any idea what… and then she stops because Preston is wearing a familiar expression which she can’t quite place.

  I don’t feel so good, he says.

  Why are you walking funny? What the hell happened to you?

  Preston needs time to concoct an explanation. I’m okay, he says. Let’s just go home.

  But this is not acceptable to Yolanda, and she shifts tack on the questions and suggests scenarios to Preston to which he must reply yes or no. Have you been attacked? Have you had an aneurysm? This method of elimination is unlikely to reveal the exact circumstances which have led Preston to be standing here, concealing a sticky patch of semen from the world with a carrier bag, but Yolanda is relentless.

  *

  In the Hall, Preston’s fingerprints have faded from Kelly’s arm. The mallard has been set upon the head table beside a basket of rolls. The gravy is thickening in the pot. The singers are back on the bank. Byron’s bear is cavorting unseen in the river. Aleister and his mate lay on their backs looking up through the people at the blushing sky. They are breathless. The master of Trinity tings his glass three times with a teaspoon. This dinner of the dead alumni has begun most memorably.

  SAD, DARK THING

  Michael Marshall Smith

  Michael Marshall Smith (b.1965) was born in Knutsford, Cheshire. He lived in Illinois, Florida, South Africa and Australia before his family settled back in England in 1973. Marshall Smith studied Philosophy and Social and Political Science at Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights. He has published five novels as Michael Marshall Smith and seven under the name of Michael Marshall. He lives in Santa Cruz, California with his wife and son.

  Aimless. A short, simple word. It means “without aim”, where “aim” derives from the idea of calculation with a view to action. Without purpose or direction, therefore, without a considered goal or future that you can see. People mainly use the word in a blunt, softened fashion. They walk “aimlessly” down a street, not sure whether to have a coffee or if they should they check out the new magazines in the bookstore or maybe sit on that bench and watch the world go by. It’s not a big deal, this aimlessness. It’s a temporary state and often comes with a side order of ease. An hour without something hanging over you, with no great need to do or achieve anything in particular? In this world of busy lives and do-this and do-that, it sounds pretty good.

  But being wholly without purpose? With no direction home? That is not such a good deal. Being truly aimless is like being dead. It may even be the same thing, or worse. It is the aimless who find the wrong roads, and go down them, simply because they have nowhere else to go.

  *

  Miller usually found himself driving on Saturday afternoons. He could make the morning go away by staying in bed an extra half-hour, tidying away stray emails, spending time on the deck, looking out over the forest with a magazine or the iPad and a succession of coffees. He made the coffees in a machine that sat on the kitchen counter and cost nearly eight hundred dollars. It made a very good cup of coffee. It should. It had cost nearly eight hundred dollars.

  By noon a combination of caffeine and other factors would mean that he wasn’t very hungry. He would go back indoors nonetheless, and put together a plate from the fridge. The ingredients would be things he’d gathered from delis up in San Francisco during the week, or else from the New Leaf markets in Santa Cruz or Felton as he returned home on Friday afternoon. The idea was that this would constitute a treat, and remind him of the good things in life. That was the idea. He would also pour some juice into one of the only two glasses in the cabinet that got any use. The other was his scotch glass, the one with the faded white logo on it, but that only came out in the evenings. He was very firm about that.

  He would bring the plate and glass back out and eat at the table which stood further along the deck from the chair in which he’d spent most of the morning. By then the sun would have moved around, and the table got shade, which he preferred when he was eating. The change in position was also supposed to make it feel like he was doing something different to what he’d done all morning, though it did not, especially. He was still a man sitting in silence on a raised deck, within view of many trees, eating expensive foods that tasted like cardboard.

  Afterward he took the plate indoors and washed it in the sink. He had a dishwasher, naturally. Dishwashers are there to save time. He washed the plate and silverware by hand, watching the water swirl away and then drying everything and putting it to one side. He was down a wife, and a child, now living three hundred miles away. He was short on women and children, therefore, but in their place, from the hollows they had left behind, he had time. Time crawled in an endless parade of minutes from between those cracks, arriving like an army of little black ants, crawling up over his skin, up his face, and into his mouth, ears and eyes.

  So why not wash the plate. And the knife, and the fork, and the glass. Hold back the ants, for a few minutes, at least.

  *

  He never left the house with a goal. On those afternoons he was, truly, aimless. From where the house stood, high in the Santa Cruz mountains, he could have reached a number of diverting places within an hour or two. San Jose. Saratoga. Los Gatos. Santa Cruz itself, then south to Monterey, Carmel and Big Sur. Even way down to Los Angeles, if he felt like making a weekend of it.

  And then what?

  Instead he simply drove.

  There are only so many major routes you can take through the area’s mountains and redwood forests. Highways 17 and 9, or the road out over to Bonny Doon, Route 1 north or south. Of these, only 17 is of any real size. In between the main thoroughfares, however, there are other options. Roads that don’t do much except connect one minor two-lane highway to another. Roads that used to count for something before modern alternatives came along to supplant or supersede or negate them.

  Side roads, old roads, forgotten roads.

  Usually there wasn’t much to see down these last roads. Stretches of forest, maybe a stream, eventually a house, well back from the road. Rural, mountainous backwoods where the tree and poison oak reigned supreme. Chains across tracks which led down or up into the woods, some gentle inclines, others pretty steep, meandering off toward some house which stood even further from the through-lines, back in a twenty-or fifty-acre lot. Every now and then you’d pass one of the area’s very few tourist traps, like the “Mystery Spot”, an old-fashioned affair which claimed to honour a site of “Unfathomable Weirdness” but in fact paid cheerful homage to geometry, and to man’s willingness to be deceived.

  He’d seen all of these long ago. The local attractions with his wife and child, the shadowed roads and tracks on his own solitary excursions over the last few months. At least, you might have thought he would have seen them all. Every Saturday he drove, however, and every time he found a road he had never seen before.

  *

  Today the road was off Branciforte Drive, the long, old highway which heads off through largely uncolonised regions of the mountains and forests to the south-east of Scott’s Valley. As he drove north along it, mind elsewhere and nowhere, he noticed a turning. A glance in the rearview mirror showed no one behind and so he slowed to peer along the turn.

  A two-lane road, overhung with tall trees, including some redwoods. It gave no indication of leading anywhere at all.

  Fine by him.

  He made the turn and drove on. The trees were tall and thick, cutting off much of the light from above. The road passed smoothly up and down, riding the natural contours, curving abruptly once in a while to avoid the trunk of an especially big tree or to skirt a small canyon carved out over millennia by some small and bloody
-minded stream. There were no houses or other signs of habitation. Could be public land, he was beginning to think, though he didn’t recall there being any around here and hadn’t seen any indication of a park boundary, and then he saw a sign by the road up ahead.

  STOP

  That’s all it said. Despite himself, he found he was doing just that, pulling over toward it. When the car was stationary, he looked at the sign curiously. It had been hand-lettered, some time ago, in black marker on a panel cut from a cardboard box and nailed to a tree.

  He looked back the way he’d come, and then up the road once more. He saw no traffic in either direction, and also no indication of why the sign would be here. Sure, the road curved again about forty yards ahead, but no more markedly than it had ten or fifteen times since he’d left Branciforte Drive. There had been no warning signs on those bends. If you simply wanted to people to observe the speed limit then you’d be more likely to advise them to “Slow”, and anyway it didn’t look at all like an official sign.

  Then he realised that, further on, there was in fact a turning off the road.

  He took his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward down the slope, crunching over twigs and gravel. A driveway, it looked like, though a long one, bending off into the trees. Single lane, roughly made up. Maybe five yards down it was another sign, evidently the work of the same craftsman as the previous.

  TOURISTS WELCOME

  He grunted, in something like a laugh. If you had yourself some kind of attraction, of course tourists were welcome. What would be the point otherwise? It was a strange way of putting it.

  An odd way of advertising it, too. No indication of what was in store or why a busy family should turn off what was already a pretty minor road and head off into the woods. No lure except those two words.

  They were working on him, though, he had to admit. He eased his foot gently back on the gas and carefully directed the car along the track, between the trees.