Ghost
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“A brain tumour,” she said.
Her eyes were smarting.
“Nothing at all to do with secondary smoking,” he observed. “Poor man! Burying his wife and you accusing him of murder in front of everyone!”
“But they were always quarrelling.” It began to sound a little feeble.
“Husband and wives always are,” said the man from Trinidad. “Doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.” Now Marta was sniffling.
“He turned me away from the hospice.”
“He loved you. He wanted you to remember him in his prime.”
“Total nonsense,” she said. “I’ll remember him as a ghost on the stairs who can’t even die. Miserable old sod.” But now she was crying, great big gulps. People were looking.
“Family is family,” he said. “You quarrel and you make up, but not going to a funeral is just not what you do. He was right about not being an actress. You didn’t make a go of it, did you? And as for having a white wedding, come on! You were a mother, not a virgin.”
“Oh stop, stop!” she cried.
“You’d better go down and say you’re sorry,” he said. So she did.
She shone the torch into the pile of rags and the eyes glittered back.
“I’m really sorry, Dad,” she said. “It’s just so easy to blame others.”
It wasn’t a ghost, it was a pile of old blankets and coats. She turned off the torch and the eyes became buttons.
“Heh, heh,” coughed the boiler, or whatever it was. She shook out a blanket and a cloud of tiny moths fluttered away. That was odd: it wasn’t the time of year for moths. When she went upstairs, the Glaswegian said, “Has he gone?”
“I think so,” she said. Midnight struck. Everyone toasted the New Year and sang Auld Lang Syne.
“Just as well,” he said. He went out the front door and came back in, first footing, and handed Griff a piece of coal. Ritual satisfied. Everyone cheered.
In the morning he came round and offered to buy the house. No agent’s fees needed. He was the father of six and needed a large house in London. It would suit him just fine.
“I told you it was Grandpa, Mum,” said Meryl.
GHOST
James Robertson
James Robertson (b.1958) is a poet, novelist, short story writer and editor who writes for children and adults, in English and in Scots. He was born in Kent and grew up in Scotland. Robertson studied history at Edinburgh University. He was first Writer in Residence for the Scottish Parliament (2004). James Robertson’s novels include The Testament of Gideon Mack, And The Land Lay Still and The Professor of Truth.
Another time – any number of other times – she might turn around and nothing would be there. Nothing would have happened. Because that was the thing, it was always over, she never quite saw it. What she saw was the ripple, the vibration, the aftermath. And this was why the experience was never complete. She understood this. She was an unreliable witness, because what she saw was not what she saw but a visual echo of what she might have seen.
She looked through the diningroom window and it was as if a gust of wind, on a day entirely still, had waltzed across the grass and flowerbeds. Along the route of the old brick path that had been there before they redesigned the garden. No cat or bird moved like that. And no gust of wind either, because there was a gauzy kind of shade to it, and a shape. And waltz wasn’t right after all, for something so straight, so pedestrian.
She thought, Did I ever see her when the brick path was still in place? And that was odd, because until that moment she’d never thought of it as female, but there it was: her.
She thought, A day does not exist unless we say so, and even when we say so it requires collective will and individual imagination to sustain its existence. The next day, it’s gone. You cannot capture time and hold it. A date in a diary proves nothing.
She thought, I will go to my grave believing that I saw whatever it was I saw. She was quite shocked at this betrayal of her own scepticism, this undoing of reason, but not as much as she might have been. Because it was not the first time.
She didn’t have a “gift’. She absolutely didn’t believe that about herself. It wasn’t about her, it was about the garden, and who had been there before.
One year in every four, she thought, there is a day after this one that does not exist in the other years. We accept that: it’s an invention. But this was different: a real, unreal thing that had happened, somehow, just before she, somehow, witnessed it.
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Acknowledgements
Extended Copyright
About Louise Welsh
An invitation from the publisher
Acknowledgements
Ghost has been a labour of love. Thanks are due to several people who supported me with enthusiasm throughout the year and a half it took to put the collection together. My agent, David Miller of Rogers, Coleridge & White, suggested the idea of the anthology. I am grateful to him for putting me in touch with Head of Zeus and for sending me on this journey. Dr Christine Ferguson of the University of Glasgow was of invaluable help and encouragement, especially in the early stages of the process when she steered my reading in some interesting and fruitful directions. Katy Hastie provided cheerful and efficient administrative support. She allowed me to concentrate on the texts and ensured that I got my dates right. Madeleine O’Shea has been a patient, flexible and resourceful editor and it has been a pleasure to work with her.
As usual I have neglected my friends and family in favour of books and the blank page. Thanks once again to them for sticking with me. My partner Zoë Strachan shares my enthusiasm for the gothic, but may at times have felt that our apartment was being taken over by ghosts. If she did, she never let on. I haunted several libraries during this process including Glasgow University Library, Edinburgh’s Central Library and the Mitchell Library in Glasgow; lang may their lumbs reek.
Finally and most importantly, thanks are due to the writers, alive and dead, who have allowed me to include their stories in this collection. I hope it will not lead to any unhappy hauntings.
Extended Copyright
Kate Atkinson: ‘Temporal Anomaly’ by Kate Atkinson. From Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson. Published by Doubleday. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
J.G. Ballard: ‘The Dead Astronaut’ by J. G. Ballard as included in The Complete Short Stories: Volume II. Copyright © J.G. Ballard 2001, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Elizabeth Bowen: ‘The Demon Lover’ by Elizabeth Bowen. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen. Copyright © Elizabeth Bowen, 1945.
Ray Bradbury: ‘Mars is Heaven’ by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Copyright © Ray Bradbury, 1948.
Richard Brautigan: ‘Memory of a Girl’ by Richard Brautigan. First published in Rolling Stone (39) August, 1969. Reprinted with permission from Sarah Lazin Books, New York.
Angela Carter: ‘Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost’ by Angela Carter. Copyright © Angela Carter, 1987. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Angela Carter c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN.
Richmal Crompton: ‘The Ghost’ by Richmal Crompton. Published by Macmillan Children’s Books Ltd.
Lydia Davis: ‘The Strangers’ by Lydia Davis. From Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis. Reprinted with permission from Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd.
Tananarive Due: ‘Prologue, 1963’ by Tananarive Due. From The Between by Tananarive Due. Copyright © 1995 by Tananarive Due. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Louise Erdrich: ‘Fleur’ by Louise Erdrich. First published in Esquire, August 1986. Copyright © 1986, Louise Erdrich. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
William Faul
kner: ‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner. First published in Forum, 1930. Reprinted with permission from Curtis Brown Group Ltd on behalf of the Estate of William Faulkner.
Jewelle Gomez: ‘Off-Broadway; 1971’ from The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez. Copyright © Jewelle Gomez, 1991.
Sir Alec Guinness: ‘Money for Jam’ by Sir Alec Guinness. Originally published in Penguin New Writing, 1945. Reprinted courtesy of Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson.
Graham Greene: ‘The Second Death’ by Graham Greene. From Twenty One Stories by Graham Greene. Published by Vintage. Reprinted with permission from David Higham Associates.
Zora Neale Hurston: ‘High Walker and Bloody Bones’ by Zora Neale Hurston. From Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright © 1935 by Zora Neale Hurston; renewed © 1963 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘The Gourmet’ by Kazuo Ishiguro. Copyright © Kazuo Ishiguro, 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author c/o Rogers Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN.
Shirley Jackson: ‘The Tooth’ by Shirley Jackson from The Lottery and Other Stories (Penguin Classics, 2009). Copyright © Shirley Jackson 1948, 1949.
Tove Jansson: ‘Black–White’ by Tove Jansson. Published by New York Review Books. Story copyright © 1971 by Tove Jansson. Translation copyright © Thomas Teal and Sort Of Books.
Franz Kafka: ‘The Hunger Gracchus’ by Franz Kafka. From The Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka, © 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1954, 1958, 1971 by Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Random House LLC. Used by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Jackie Kay: ‘The White Cot’ by Jackie Kay. Copyright © Jackie Kay, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan Books.
Stephen King: ‘The Mangler’ by Stephen King. From Night Shift, published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1978.
D.H. Lawrence: ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ by D.H. Lawrence from The Woman who Rode Away and Other Stories, reprinted by permission of Pollinger Limited (www.pollingerltd.com) on behalf of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.
Kelly Link: ‘The Specialist’s Hat’ by Kelly Link. Copyright © 1998. Originally published in Event Horizon.
Arthur Machen: ‘The Bowmen’ by Arthur Machen. copyright © Arthur Machen, 1914. Reproduced with permission of A.M. Heath Literary Agents on behalf of the Estate of Arthur Machen.
Hilary Mantel: ‘Terminus’ by Hilary Mantel. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © Hilary Mantel, 2014.
Adam Marek: ‘Dinner of the Dead Alumni’ by Adam Marek. Copyright © Adam Marek, 2010. Reprinted with permission from the Author.
W. Somerset Maugham: ‘A Man from Glasgow’ by Somerset Maugham. From Collected Stories: Volume I by Somerset Maugham. Reprinted by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of The Royal Literary Fund.
Yukio Mishima: ‘Swaddling Clothes’ by Yukio Mishima, taken from Death in Midsummer and Other Stories. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. Used by permission of the Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd.
Haruki Murakami: ‘The Mirror’ by Haruki Murakami. From Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami. Published by Harvill Secker. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Robert Nye: ‘Randal’ by Robert Nye. First published in Prevailing Spirits published by Hamish Hamilton, 1976.
Joyce Carol Oates: ‘Nobody Knows My Name’ by Joyce Carol Oates from The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares. First published in Twists of the Tale, edited by Ellen Datlow, Dell, 1996. Copyright © Joyce Carol Oates, 1996.
Flann O’Brien: ‘Two in One’ by Flann O’Brien. Reprinted with permission from A.M. Heath Literary Agents on behalf of the Estate of Flann O’Brien.
Tim O’Brien: ‘The Lives of the Dead’ by Tim O’Brien taken from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright © Tim O’Brien, 1990.
Ben Okri: ‘Belonging’ by Ben Okri. From Tales of Freedom by Ben Okri. Published by Rider. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Phyllis Alesia Perry: ‘Stigmata’ by Phyllis Alesia Perry. Copyright © Phyllis Alesia Perry, 1998. Originally published in Stigmata, published by Anchor.
Annie Proulx: ‘The Sagebrush Kid’ by Annie Proulx. Copyright © Dead Line Ltd 2008. Reproduced by kind permission of the Author and The Sayle Literary Agency.
Ruth Rendell: ‘The Vinegar Mother’ by Ruth Rendell. Taken from The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories by Ruth Rendell, 1976. Reproduced by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of the Estate of Ruth Rendell.
James Robertson: ‘Ghost’ by James Robertson. From 365 Stories by James Robertson (Penguin Books, 2014). Copyright © James Robertson, 2014.
Joanne Rush: ‘Guests’ by Joanne Rush. Copyright © Joanne Rush, 2013.
Helen Simpson: ‘The Festival of the Immortals’ by Helen Simpson. From In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson. Published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
May Sinclair: ‘The Nature of the Evidence’ by May Sinclair. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of May Sinclair. Copyright © May Sinclair, 1923.
Ali Smith: ‘The Hanging Girl’ by Ali Smith. From Other Stories and Other Stories. Copyright © Ali Smith, 1999. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Michael Marshall Smith: ‘Sad, Dark Thing’ by Michael Marshall Smith. Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the Author.
Stevie Smith: ‘Is There Life Beyond the Gravy?’ by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.
Muriel Spark: ‘The Girl I Left Behind’ by Muriel Spark. From The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark. Published by Canongate. Reprinted with permission from David Higham Associates.
Elizabeth Taylor: ‘Poor Girl’ by Elizabeth Taylor. Copyright © Beneficiaries of Elizabeth Taylor, 1975. Originally published in Complete Short Stories published by Virago. Reprinted by permission of the rights holder.
Dylan Thomas: ‘The Vest’ by Dylan Thomas. From Collected Stories by Dylan Thomas. Published by Orion. Reprinted with permission from David Higham Associates.
Rosemary Timperley: ‘Harry’ by Rosemary Timperley. Reproduced by permission of The Agency (London) Ltd © Rosemary Timperley, 1955.
William Trevor: ‘The Death of Peggy Meehan’ by William Trevor in The Collected Stories (London: Viking, 1992). First published as ‘The Death of Peggy Morrissey’ in The Distant Past (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1979. Reproduced with the kind permission of Johnson & Alcock Ltd.
Fay Weldon: ‘Grandpa’s Ghost’ by Fay Weldon. Copyright © Fay Weldon, 2013.
P.G. Wodehouse: ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ by P.G. Wodehouse © P.G. Wodehouse, 1927. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of P.G. Wodehouse c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
About Ghost
Haunted houses, mysterious Counts, weeping widows and restless souls, here is the definitive anthology of all that goes bump in the night. Hand-picked by awardwinning author Louise Welsh, this beautiful collection of 100 ghost stories will delight, unnerve, and entertain any fiction lover brave enough…
Here are gothic classics, modern masters, Booker Prize-winners, ancient folk tales and stylish noirs, proving that every writer has a skeleton or two in their closet. With an all-star cast of authors including Kate Atkinson, Angela Carter, Lydia Davis, William Faulkner, Kazuo Ishiguro, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Stephen King, H.P Love
craft, Hilary Mantel, Haruki Murakami, Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Proulx, Ruth Rendell, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Helen Simpson, Bram Stoker, Dylan Thomas and Oscar Wilde, Ghost is the biggest, most chilling collection of ghostly tales in print today.
Reviews
‘An impressive psychological chiller.’
Sunday Telegraph, on The Girl on the Stairs
‘Feral, frightening and fascinating.’
Val McDermid on A Lovely Way to Burn
About Louise Welsh
LOUISE WELSH is the author of seven novels, most recently A Lovely Way to Burn and Death is a Welcome Guest (volumes one and two of the Plague Times Trilogy). She has written many short stories and articles and is a regular radio broadcaster. Louise wrote the librettos for the operas Ghost Patrol and The Devil Inside (music by Stuart MacRae). She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.
Visit her website: www.louisewelsh.com
Or follow her on Twitter: @louisewelsh00
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The story starts here.
First published in the UK in 2015 by Head of Zeus Ltd.
In the compilation and introductory material © Louise Welsh, 2015
The moral right of Louise Welsh to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The moral right of the contributing authors of this anthology to be identified as such is asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.