by Hughes, Rhys
“You will avoid my attentions,” he mockingly explained, “not for the full span of your existence. Seventy years are our allotted time on earth, a figure determined by the religion and healthcare of our society. So that’s the length of your hell. Oh ho!”
The incessant shock ruined the nerves of Sidney Fudge, turning him into a quivering wreck of a man who dribbled uncontrollably and made so many mistakes on the production line that his wages were cut to the bare minimum as a punitive measure.
One afternoon he decided to run away.
He requested permission to empty a bladder, presumably his own, then abandoned his position at the conveyor belt and hastened in the direction of the communal bathrooms.
His absence was noted half an hour later and the manager sent for, but Pincher was also found to be absent. There was no ambiguity about what this meant. The bully had anticipated the escape bid of his victim and had gone to intercept him. The workers grinned to themselves and shook their heads and puffed their cheeks in admiration of Pincher’s prescience. Truly he was the perfect oppressor!
Sidney recalled his school predilection for climbing boundary walls, scaled the factory fence and hurried over a dark wasteland littered with a decadent civilisation’s premature fossils. Discarded bedsteads and broken washing machines impeded his progress, used nappies and condoms vied for dominance of tar pits, the blackened chassis of a stolen car smoked in the drizzle and our unfortunate hero used the oily vapours as cover for his flight, gibbering as he ran.
Genuinely he believed he was heading into freedom, and his mind was unable to confront the inevitable fact that his fate was his own at no point but belonged to Pincher Gottlieb.
He reached the lip of an embankment that sloped down to a motorway and frowned as he regarded this impassable river of moving steel, a visual scream that deafened his eyes, blinded his ears, did other mixed up things to his other bewildered senses.
He would have to turn back and find some other route. At that instant he felt damp sardonic breath on the nape of his neck and time froze into jagged blocks of chronic ice that scraped their way through his organism one by one. Pincher was right behind him, had been behind every step of the way. He realised that now.
A mouth fixed itself to his ear and a clawed whisper more awful than any shout plucked his nerves so utterly they would have vibrated forever had they been given the chance.
“Oh ho! Fancy meeting you here. Oh ho!”
Sidney did not turn but slid and rolled down the embankment. The oncoming vehicles were part of the bullying, or so it seemed, in league with Pincher, a stream of giant bullets aimed at his entire existence. He would never make it alive to the other side. Then he noticed a speeding ambulance and a desperate hope seized him.
If he had to be run down by a vehicle, an ambulance was a fine choice. An ambulance would contain people who knew how to save his life, if any spark of it remained, and it would also be in a position to hurry him to hospital for further treatment. He might as well throw himself in front of it before it went past. Yes. So he did.
The screech of brakes, the sickening thud, the slick of blood, the grin of Pincher far away, the voices, the rough manhandling into the back of the vehicle, all these elements and more became clues in a riddle that he attempted to solve as he lay on the stretcher and stared at the equipment and medicines around him.
At last the answer came. He was still alive.
That was the solution to the riddle! He was alive! In fact his injuries were minor, a few bruises and cuts, a tender spot on the side of his skull, blurred vision in one eye. His desperate stratagem had worked and he had outwitted Pincher in grand style.
A figure loomed above him, clearly a medic.
“How far to the hospital?” Sidney inquired. “And may I have a room all to myself, with a television?”
“Such matters aren’t my concern,” came the reply.
“Indeed? And why is that?”
“Because I’m not a member of the ambulance crew.”
“Then who are you, pray?”
“The ghost of the last person to die in this vehicle.”
“Your answer isn’t one that pleases me to any extent. I assumed I was finally in a location of safety.”
The ghost chuckled darkly and said:
“Did you not stop to wonder, before they lifted you inside, how many people have died in this small space, right here, on the way to hospital? The same holds true for every ambulance, of course, but this one has an especially poor track record.”
“What do you intend to do with me?” asked Sidney.
“Scare you to death, I’m afraid.”
“But why? I have done nothing to you. My injuries are mild and not life threatening. The nastiness of your avowed intent is thus gratuitous and I must ask you to reconsider.”
“Your request is denied. But let me tell you something about myself to help you understand my bitterness.”
“Thanks. I would welcome that,” said Sidney.
“Well, I too had only minor injuries when I was lifted into the back of this vehicle. Then the ghost of my predecessor appeared and frightened me so badly I died. Turned out he had gone through the same thing years before, and his predecessor too, and his, and so on all the way back to the first person to die inside this ambulance, who was actually the only one of us to expire from natural causes.”
“What an ironic causal chain of spooky anger venting!”
“Certainly is. Now I thirst for vengeance and intend to slake it on you. Wouldn’t be fair for you to escape what I had to endure, would it? But my fury and hatred are purely cerebral because I have no nervous system to embody them. Does that help?”
“To a degree so miniscule I must shake my head.”
The ghost sighed. “Sidney Fudge, your time on earth is done. You will reach the hospital as a cadaver. The process of scaring men to death takes between five and ten minutes.”
“Will I lose control of my bowels?”
“You already have…”
It is perhaps better to skip the details of the concentrated haunting that followed. The ghost was a professional and even if Sidney had wanted to defend himself he would have found it futile to do so. Then suddenly the fear was gone and he felt calm, collected, but still unhappy. He inspected the prone form below, realised it was his own corpse, but felt no shock or nausea at the sight, just detached curiosity. The older ghost had vanished, having satisfied its pallid craving for getting its own back on this unfair world. Sidney was therefore the new ambulance phantom and presumably it was now his obligation to take his own revenge on the next patient with minor injuries who came inside.
But Sidney made a resolution to break the chain and end the process of misdirected spectral retribution. Instead of avenging himself at a tangent by discharging his trauma and misery onto an innocent victim, he would focus his attention exclusively on Pincher, harrying only the one who had harried him. “The bullying buck stops here!” he declared, a statement that might have occasioned sarcastic mirth among the young aggressive male deer in the vicinity, had there been any with exceptional hearing abilities who understood his language.
Some stags did live in the woods, and the woods bordered the hospital, but Sidney decided to vacate the ambulance while it was still moving on the motorway. He recapped the essentials of his resolution. Do not carry on bullying in an endless chain. Oppress only the one who oppressed him. Haunt Pincher. That was his agenda and it necessitated his floating over the landscape until he found his target.
Pincher Gottlieb was returning to the factory and had just skirted the final tar pit when Sidney caught up with him. For an atheist like Pincher, the appearance of icy invisible fingers around his throat accompanied by mouthless laughter was a deeply unpleasant spiritual jolt. He wriggled out of the choking embrace and ran for the safety of the factory, but Sidney appeared ahead of him, herding him away from the boundary fence and back over the foul wasteland.
For many hours P
incher dodged and twisted and sought to escape but found it impossible to elude his pursuer, who more often than not waited at the precise spot where Pincher hoped to find refuge, inside the chassis of a wrecked car, for example, or in the depths of a mutant pram designed to hold four or more underclass brats. The only reason Sidney eventually desisted and allowed Pincher to escape was to extend his sport to the next day. He wanted the game to last many moons, for his list of grievances was a document of considerable length.
As for Pincher, he concluded he must be unwell and went home to bed and shivered under extra blankets all night. In the morning his confidence returned, strapping fellow that he was, and he dismissed his ordeal as an unusual consequence of food poisoning. He simply did not realise that his own purgatory had just begun.
He rose, stretched himself, yawned, took a quick shower, but preferred not to dress himself just yet, wrapping his waist in a towel before going in search of coffee and croissants.
Sidney was waiting for him in the kitchen.
After Pincher was made dramatically aware of this fact, he ran out of the house with a squeal, but the ghost was unavoidable and Pincher had to endure a full day’s haunting on an empty stomach. Wherever the bully went to seek sanctuary, Sidney lurked already. Then the towel fell off and Pincher became an object of shocked amusement to the pedestrians of the town centre, which is where Sidney herded him, up and down the busiest streets. A policeman was alerted and Pincher was chased and caught in a more conventional fashion.
At this point Sidney decided to leave off and resume the fun when the bully was alone once more. An hour later, Pincher was released from the police station with a caution and a spiritually refreshed Sidney pounced and fixed his extinct lips like a cold leech to his enemy’s neck and sucked out the last vestiges of Pincher’s reason and calmness. The bully threw up his arms and emitted a sound so inhuman that even Sidney was startled. Then Pincher leaped sideways, ran full tilt into a lamppost, got up again and accelerated down an alley.
Sidney floated high and calmly observed the progress of the terrified bully through the labyrinth of backstreets that led nowhere in particular. Able to descend at will to any point, the phantom appeared around every corner that Pincher turned, a harrowing game that continued through the afternoon and into the evening. The setting sun turned to blood the sweat on Pincher’s brow and the rising moon spread evil butter on his pale skin until he resembled an especially unpleasing open sandwich. A snack of panic. A midnight feast of fear.
The following day passed in a similar manner, and the one after it, and the one after that, and these days slowly turned into weeks, until Pincher had ingested so many drops of his own medicine that he was cured of any semblance of courage or sanity.
One night Sidney chased him into the school.
How it happened they ended up here, in a place resonating so strongly with Sidney’s pain and indignity, is not presently within the grasp of easy understanding. Maybe it was an accident. Sidney certainly did not want to return to this particular locale, for the memories it evoked were too grim and upsetting even for use as an automatic goad for vengeance. But into the school they went nonetheless.
In the middle of a courtyard was the disused well. For some reason the seal was broken and the hole gaped wide. Perhaps workmen were in the act of filling the shaft with cement and had managed to complete only the first stage of the project, the pit’s exposure, and no other. So the mouth of darkness yawned large and horrible.
One moment Pincher was stumbling on the cobbles with Sidney’s icy fingers tickling him under the ribs, the next he had vanished. There was a faint plop but no piercing scream.
Sidney frowned. What had happened? He studied the ground. When he realised the truth, he permitted himself a shallow smile. A shame his revenge had been cut short just as he was beginning to become an expert at cold vindictiveness! No matter. He could finally relax and spend the remainder of his afterlife in easy retirement. So he turned to drift gently away in the direction of the moon.
A voice hissed at his back and the sluggish ectoplasm in his spectral veins turned solid and glacial, but his anguish still lacked real emotion and remained an awkward travesty.
The voice repeated itself. Sidney quivered and gasped.
A third time it came: “Oh ho!”
And now Sidney turned to watch his nemesis float out of the well and approach with fluttering eyelids.
The ghost of a victim may be more than a match for a bully, but when the bully also becomes a ghost the old relationship will return to exactly the same state as when both lived.
“Oh ho! What do we have here? Oh ho!”
A man can be bullied for the entire span of his life, seventy years on average. In the same manner, a ghost can be bullied for the entire span of its afterlife, a period of time rarely less than five hundred years and often as long as two thousand. All spectres do fade eventually, but not quickly enough for Sidney Fudge. He flees through every level of the astral plane, the nastiest ghost imaginable cold on his heels. His existence is no longer a living hell but far worse than that.
(2008)
Loneliness
I turn the key in my door and enter my flat. Two small rooms connected by a corridor in such a manner they almost bear no relation to each other. The layout is certainly odd. The bathroom is part of my bedroom and the kitchen occupies half the living room, everything is unbearably cramped, and yet that connecting corridor is very long and high, an immense length of wasted space that represents nothing domestic. It is like a segment of an unhappy journey brought indoors, or part of a sculpture of a lonely walk without a walker, which naturally makes it more lonely, more itself. I have no affection for that corridor. Once I tried keeping a bicycle in it but that only made matters worse, for it gave the impression the bicycle had been abandoned in a place nobody ever went and consequently I felt guilty mounting it, like a thief. So the corridor is empty again and I have no plans to fill it with anything else.
After firmly closing and bolting my door I stroll along that corridor to my living room as rapidly as possible, the same as always, a voyage on foot that never feels heroic, though perhaps it should, passing the door of my bedroom near the start of the journey but refusing to acknowledge it with a nod or glance, because those actions always seem to slow matters, though really I am sure they do not.
When I finally reach my destination and leave the corridor somewhere behind, set the kettle to boil, struggle out of my coat and collapse into my easy chair, I am suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of loneliness. Too difficult to put into words the sheer power of the sensation, the wrenching deep inside my gut, the apparent unwrapping of that bone bandage called a skull to expose my mind to the vast disinterest of the cosmos. I know at once I am the loneliest man alive.
To be lonely is nothing new for me. I am shy of my own reflection in mirror, spoon and shiny shoe, have no family or friends, and no talent for conversing with strangers, yet I regard myself as perfectly normal and unworthy of pity or special regard, for each of us has felt extreme mental and spiritual isolation at one time or another. All varieties of loneliness have enough aches and pangs in common to bind a victim closely to his fellow sufferers, so in shared loneliness we are one, together, united. This curious truth resembles an escape clause in an insurance contract but is more palatable to those who sell no insurance, for on this occasion we are the beneficiaries of the perversity.
So much for ordinary loneliness, but the loneliness I now experience is different, far more intense, so excruciating I am forced to twist, shrug and blink furiously in my chair as the bleakness envelops me. Immediately I fail to understand how emptiness can be a tangible force, how an absence can be a presence, how a negative can be so positively damaging that my deepest desire is to have enemies, anybody at all to keep me company, to protect me from the utter void.
Yes, my solitude is total, and a conventional lack of friends and family is certainly not enough to account for the magnitude of
my despair. There must be more to it than that, something unbelievable, unhinged, dramatic but subtle. And soon enough, without even needing to jump up and ruffle my hair, I shockingly realise the truth. My apartment is not haunted. That is the wild fact of the weird matter. Not haunted, nor has it ever been. No ghost has drifted along that improbable corridor since the dawn of death, not one. I share my living space with no malignancy. Unwatched, I dwell in the exact middle of seclusion.
This peculiar situation is possibly unique in the present century. As the world slowly grows older, ghosts thicken on the continents, crammed into houses and spilling onto streets, shifting, ebbing, heaving like exasperated sighs on currents powered by jostling insubstantial elbows. The cities and spaces between cities are overcrowded with spectres, young, old, bad and good, shapeless, elaborate, thin and obese. On each step of every staircase they crouch or sit, under every table.
The cure for my loneliness becomes apparent. To encourage a ghost to move in with me. To be haunted.
I understand why no spectre has taken residence in my apartment. Not just a question of anyone failing to die between my walls. Perhaps whole families were murdered here. No, the plan of the place, the layout itself, is the problem. When a ghost drifts down a simple passage in an ordinary building, the quiet understanding is that something worth floating for can be found at one end or the other. But not where I live. My corridor is too abnormal for that, more important than the rooms it leads to, a destination in its own right. It can go nowhere because it already is somewhere. The rooms are less than afterthoughts.
And what ghost would choose to patronise such an absurd situation? They are not without pride, I hear.
I must spend my evenings praying for a ghost to come from outside, to occupy my hideous hollowness, take the place of my old bicycle, disturb my sleep, rattle cups, make me less lonely, to drift with gaping mouth up and down that horrid passage. In return I will do anything to increase its standing in the supernatural realm, to enhance its reputation as a force to be reckoned with, sleep with it, paint it, suckle it on whatever shadows it prefers, anything at all, shameless.