As he waits for sleep he keeps the window-ledge scene in mind; but when he drops off—and it has been taking him longer and longer to fall asleep each night—some other dream always comes, some dream of jeopardy, of course, but always a new one, as though the supply of these nightmares is infinite and none will ever recur. He is caught by surprise each time by the new surroundings in which the dream is set, unable to move himself into the right position to be helpful, unable to take the necessary steps to effect the desired rescue.
A month goes by, two, three. The sunny days of summer give way to the first rains of autumn.
And then, one night, the dream-state comes over him moments after he reaches his pillow and he realizes that at last he has been granted the recurrence of a dream. It is one in which the man is floating in a huge bottomless pool of chilly black water, unable to direct his own movements, simply drifting helplessly from one side to another across the face of that watery abyss like some bit of flotsam while sleek glossy monsters of the deep with gaping jaws and yellow eyes circle hungrily about him, closing in for the kill.
This is not a new dream. He has had it before, and he knows exactly what he must do. There is a stout coil of rope lying in a neat stack on the far side of the pool. The last time he dreamed this dream, the rope had been there also but he had simply remained where he was, watching as though in a stupor as the beasts unhurriedly closed in, surrounded their victim, toyed with him, and finally, in a frenzy of thrashing flukes, fell upon him and devoured him. This time he fights away that stupor. He wills himself around to the other side of the pool, crossing the great distance separating him from it with the speed of thought, and seizes one end of the coil of rope in a tight grasp, and, pivoting sharply, flings the other end far into the water.
“Quick!” he calls. “Grab hold of it!”
The man in the pool looks up, startled. Sees the rope; swims to it and seizes it; lets himself be drawn toward the edge of the pool. The man standing on the shore has no doubt of the other’s face, now. The features are his own.
He reels the other in.
“Here,” he says, kneeling by the water’s edge, reaching his free hand down toward the other.
He extends his hand into that dark abyss, makes contact, grips and braces himself and pulls. Yanking with all his strength, he draws the other to him, draws him up and out and through, and in that same moment he feels a snap and a twist and a twirl of reciprocity, as though he is standing upon a moving turntable that is swinging him around into the mysterious realm beyond. He struggles to resist the force that is catapulting him onward; but resistance is impossible. He is powerless against that unyielding pressure. He is hurled through that invisible wall.
On the far side he finds himself alone in a soundless world.
And then he is sprinting frantically up some bright windy beach from the edge of the surf, the cold rising tide licking at his heels, desperately trying to reach the dark rockpile at the foot of the nearby cliff where he can clamber up above the rapidly rising water.
SMITHERS AND THE GHOSTS OF THE THAR
I am not, of course, noted for writing ghost stories, but I have had a lifelong interest in them, going back to my discovery of the classic Wise & Fraser anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural when I was eleven or twelve years old. My unsurprising favorites have been, all these years, the stories of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, and Oliver Onions, whom I have read and re-read many times. A mere reference to a story title (“The Beckoning Fair One”…“O Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”…“The Willows”) summons up memories of rainy evenings curled up in my chair, agreeable shivers, pleasingly uneasy dreams afterward.
Reading ghost stories has always been a sort of guilty pleasure for me. In my own life I am relentlessly logical, rational, sensible. I don’t believe in ghosts or other sorts of supernatural manifestations. But a writer needs to know how to induce the willing suspension of disbelief in his readers, and I know how to induce it in myself as well. So I’m quite capable of a belief in spooks of various kinds for the duration of a story I’m reading, and perhaps for a little while afterward. And as the list of my favorite ghost-story writers indicates, I’m a bit of an Anglophile with a love for Victorian and Edwardian atmosphere: fog, carriages, the nineteenth-century architecture of London. The stories don’t have to be set in London, though, so long as they have the right period flavor. Another favorite ghost-story writer of mine, from approximately the same period as Blackwood, Machen, James, and Onions, is Rudyard Kipling. Most of his best stories take place not in London but in India, but they have that Victorian-Edwardian swing to them as well, and for me they provide a somewhat different but closely related sort of delight.
I haven’t written ghost stories because no real market has existed for them over the past fifty years. I did dabble in the horror-story genre for a bit in the 1980’s, and a couple of the things I wrote, like the Mexican-based “Not Our Brother,” could probably be considered ghost stories. But that market, so far as I know, has gone away now, and I’ve written nothing ghostly in a couple of decades.
But when Nick Gevers and Jack Dann, an editorial team with one member based in South Africa and the other in Australia, asked me to contribute to an anthology of modern ghost stories paying homage to the British masters, the suggestion struck me exactly the right way and almost immediately I found myself sketching out a Kiplingesque tale of supernatural doings in remote and still mysterious Great Indian Desert, the Thar. I wrote the story in December of 2009 and it appeared in the 2011 anthology Ghosts by Gaslight.
——————
What happened to Smithers out there in the Great Indian Desert, may seem a trifle hard to believe, but much that happens in Her Imperial Majesty’s subcontinent is a trifle hard to believe, and yet one disbelieves it at one’s peril. Unfortunately, there is nobody to tell the tale but me, for it all happened many years ago, and Yule has retired from the Service and is living, so I hear, in Palermo, hard at work on his translation of Marco Polo, and Brewster, the only witness to the tragic events in the desert, is too far gone in senility now to be of any use to anyone, and Smithers—ah, poor Smithers—
But let me begin. We start in Calcutta and the year is 1858, with the memory of the dread and terrible Mutiny still overhanging our dreams, distant though those bloody events were from our administrative capital here. That great engineer and brilliant scholar Henry Yule—Lieutenant-Colonel Yule, as he was then, later to be Sir Henry—having lately returned from Allahabad, where he was in charge of strengthening and augmenting our defenses against the rebels, has now been made Secretary of the Public Works Department, with particular responsibility for designing what one day will be the vast railroad system that will link every part of India. I hold the title of Deputy Consulting Engineer for Railways. Our young friend Brewster is my right-hand man, a splendid draughtsman and planner. And as my story opens Brewster has come to us, looking oddly flushed, with the news that Smithers, our intense, romantic, excitable Smithers, whom we have sent off on a surveying mission to Jodhpur and Bikaner and other sites in the remote West, has returned and is on his way to us at this very moment with an extraordinary tale to tell.
“Is he now?” Yule said, without much sign of animation. Yule is a Scot, stern and outwardly dour and somewhat fierce-looking, though I am in a position to know that behind that grim bearded visage lies a lively mind keenly alert to the romance of exploration. “Did he find a railroad already in place out there, I wonder? Some little project of an enterprising Rajput prince?”
“Here he comes now,” said Brewster. “You will hear it all from the man himself.” And an instant later Smithers was among us.
Smithers was fair-haired and very pink-skinned, with gleaming blue eyes that blazed out from his face like sapphires. Though he was somewhat below middle height, he was deep-chested and wide-shouldered, and so forceful was his physical presence that he could and did easily dominate a room of much tal
ler men. Certainly he dominated his friend Brewster, who had known him since childhood. They had been to university together and they had entered the service of the East India Company together, taking appointment with the Bengal Engineers and making themselves useful in the Public Works Department, specializing in the building of bridges and canals. I could best describe the lanky, dark-complected Brewster as timid and cautious, one who was designed by Nature as a follower of stronger men, and Smithers, who in his heart of hearts looked upon himself as part of a grand English tradition of adventurous exploration that went back through Burton and Rawlinson and Layard to Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, was the man to whom he had attached himself.
“Well, Smithers?” Yule asked. “What news from Bikaner?”
“Not from Bikaner, sir,” said Smithers, “but from the desert beyond. The Thar, sir! The Thar!” His blazing blue eyes were wilder than ever and his face was rough and reddened from his weeks in the sun.
Yule looked startled. “You went into the Thar?” A reconnaissance of the vast bleak desert that lies beyond the cities of Rajputana had not been part of Smithers’s immediate task.
“Only a short way, sir. But what I learned—what I have heard—!”
Yule, who can be impatient and irritable, made a swift circular beckoning gesture, as though to say, “Aye, out with it, man!” But Smithers needed no encouragement. Already a story was tumbling from him: how in the desert city of Bikaner he had fallen in with an itinerant Portuguese merchant newly returned from a venture into the Great Indian Desert—the Thar, as the natives call it, that immense waterless void 150 miles in breadth that stretches northeastward for some 400 miles from the swampy Rann of Cutch. Breathlessly Smithers retold the tale the Portuguese had told him: an unknown valley far out in the Thar, the sound of strange voices floating on the air, sometimes calling alluringly, sometimes wailing or sobbing, voices that could only be the voices of spirits or demons, for there was no one to be seen for miles around; the eerie music of invisible musicians, gongs and drums and bells, echoing against the sands; and above all a distinct sensation as of summoning, the awareness of some powerful force pulling one onward, deeper into that valley. The Portuguese had resisted that force, said Smithers, for he was a hard-nosed trader and was able to keep his mind on business; but from villagers at an oasis town the man had picked up fragmentary anecdotes of an entire ancient city hidden away in that valley, a lost civilization, a land of ghosts, in fact, from which that potent summons came, and into whose mysterious realm many a traveler had vanished, never to return.
I saw what I took to be the unmistakable glint of skepticism in Yule’s eyes. He has never been a man to suffer foolishness gladly; and from the knotting of his bristling brows I interpreted his response to Smithers’ wild fable as annoyance. But I was wrong.
“Singing spirits, eh?” Yule said. “Gongs and drums and bells? Let me read you something, and see if it sounds familiar.”
He drew from his desk a sheaf of manuscript pages that were, we already knew, his translation of The Book of Ser Marco Polo—the earliest draft of it, rather, for Yule was destined to spend two decades on this magnum opus before giving the world the first edition in 1870, nor did he stop revising and expanding it even then. But even here in 1858 he had done a substantial amount of the work.
“Marco is in the Gobi,” said Yule, “in the vicinity of the desert town of Lop, and he writes, ‘The length of this desert is so great that ’tis said it would take a year and more to ride from one end of it to the other. Beasts there are none, for there is naught for them to eat. But there is a marvelous thing related of this desert, which is that when travelers are on the move by night, and one of them chances to lag behind or to fall asleep or the like, when he tries to gain his company again he will hear spirits talking, and will suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveler ofttimes be led astray so that he never finds his party. And in this way many have perished.’”
“It is much like what the Portuguese told me,” said Smithers.
Yule nodded. “I will go on. ‘Sometimes the stray travelers will hear as it were the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of road, and taking this to be their own company they will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that a cheat has been put upon them and that they are in an ill plight. Even in the daytime one hears those spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums.’”
Smithers said, and his face grew even redder, “How I long to hear those drums!”
“Of course you do,” said Yule, and brought out the whisky and soda, and passed around the cigars, and I knew that look in Yule’s formidable glittering eyes had not been one of skepticism at all, but of complete and utter captivation.
He went on to tell us that such tales as Marco Polo’s were common in medieval travel literature, and, rummaging among his papers, he read us a citation from Pliny of phantoms that appear and vanish in the deserts of Africa, and one from a Chinese named Hiuen Tsang six centuries before Marco that spoke of troops with waving banners marching in the Gobi, vanishing and reappearing and vanishing again, and many another tale of goblins and ghouls and ghostly dancers and musicians in the parched places of the world. “Of course,” said Yule, “it is possible to explain some of this music and song merely as the noises made by shifting sands affected by desert winds and extreme heat, and the banners and armies as illusions that the minds of men traveling under such stressful conditions are likely to generate.” He stared for a moment into his glass; he took a reflective puff of his cigar. “And then, of course, there is always the possibility that these tales have a rational origin—that somewhere in one of these deserts there does indeed lurk a hidden land that would seem wondrously strange to us, if only we could find it. The great age of discovery, gentlemen, is not yet over.”
“I request leave, sir, to look into the Thar beyond Bikaner and see what might be found there,” Smithers said.
It was a daring request. Smithers was our best surveyor, and the entire subcontinent needed measuring for the system of railways that we intended to create in its immense expanse, and nobody was planning to run track through the desert beyond Bikaner, for there was nothing there. Plenty of urgent work awaited Smithers between Delhi and Jodhpur, between Calcutta and Bombay, and elsewhere.
But Yule rose with that glitter of excitement in his eyes again and began pulling maps from a portfolio under his desk and spreading them out, the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map and a smaller one of the Frontier, pointing to this place and that one in the Thar and asking if one of them might have been the one of which that Portuguese had spoken, and we knew that Smithers’s request had been granted.
What I did not expect was that Brewster would be allowed to accompany him. Plainly it was a dangerous expedition and Smithers ought not to have been permitted to undertake it alone, but I would have thought that a subaltern or two and half a dozen native trackers would be the appropriate complement. Indeed, Brewster was a strong and healthy young man who would readily be able to handle the rigors of the Thar, but an abundance of work awaited him right here in Calcutta, and it struck me as remarkably extravagant for Yule to be willing to risk not one but two of our best engineers on such a fantastic endeavor at this critical time in the development of the nascent Indian railway system.
But I had failed to reckon with two traits of Yule’s character. One was his insatiable scholarly curiosity, which had drawn him to the close study not only of Marco Polo’s huge book but of the texts of many another early traveler whose names meant nothing to me: Ibn Battuta, for example, and Friar Jordanus, and Oderic of Pordenone. We were living at a time when the remaining unknown places of the world were opening before us, and the discovery—or rediscovery—of strange and marvelous regions of Asia held great fascination for him. Though he himself could not leave his high responsibiliti
es in Calcutta, Smithers would serve as his surrogate in the far-off Thar.
Then, too, I had overlooked Yule’s profound complexity of spirit. As I have already noted, he is not at all the grim, stolid, monolithic administrator that he appears to a casual observer to be. I have spoken of his irritability and impatience; I should mention also his bursts of temper, followed by spells of black depression and almost absolute silence, and also the—well, eccentricity that has led him, a man who happens to be color-blind, to dress in the most outlandish garb and think it utterly normal. (I have in mind his brilliant claret-colored trousers, which he always insisted were silver-gray.) He is complicated; he is very much his own man. So if he had taken it into his mind to send our highly valued Smithers off to look for lost cities in the Thar, nothing would stop him.
And when he asked Smithers what sort of complement he thought he would need, Smithers replied, “Why, Brewster and I can probably deal with everything all by ourselves, sir. We don’t want a great silly crowd of bearers and trackers, you know, to distract us as we try to cope with those musical specters in the desert.”
Quickly I looked at Brewster and saw that he was as amazed as I was to find himself requisitioned for the expedition. But he made a quick recovery and managed a grin of boyish eagerness, as if he could think of nothing more jolly than to go trekking off into a pathless haunted desert with his hero Smithers. And Yule showed no reaction at all to Smithers’ request: once again he demonstrated his approval simply through silence.
The Millennium Express - 1995-2009 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Nine Page 56