After a couple more drinks he went over and introduced himself. Her name was Catherine and she worked at the university. They got married eighteen months later and though by then – his business having taken off in the meantime – he could have afforded anywhere in town, they hired out the Crow’s Nest and had the wedding party there. A year after that their daughter was born and they called her Matilde, after Catherine’s mother, who was French. Business was still good and they moved out of his place on East Cliff and into the big house he had built in the mountains and for seven years all was good, and then, for some reason, it was no longer good any more. He didn’t think it had been his fault, though it could have been. He didn’t think it was her fault either, though that too was possible. It had simply stopped working. They’d been two people, and then one, but then two again, facing different ways. There had been a view to share together, then there was not, and if you look with only one eye then there is no depth of field. There had been no infidelity. In some ways that might have been easier. It would have been something to react to, to blame, to hide behind. Far worse, in fact, to sit on opposite sides of the breakfast table and wonder who the other person was, and why they were there, and when they would go.
Six months later, she did. Matilde went with her, of course. He didn’t think there was much more that could be said or understood on the subject. When first he’d sat out on this deck alone, trying to work it all through in his head, the recounting could take hours. As time went on, the story seemed to get shorter and shorter. As they said around these parts, it is what it is.
Or it was what it was.
Time passed and then it was late. The scotch was long gone but he didn’t feel the desire for any more. He took the glass indoors and washed it at the sink, putting it on the draining board next to the plate and the knife and the fork from lunch. No lights were on. He hadn’t bothered to flick any switches when he came in, and – having sat for so long out on the deck – his eyes were accustomed, and he felt no need to turn any on now.
He dried his hands on a cloth and walked around the house, aimlessly at first. He had done this many times in the last few months, hearing echoes. When he got to the area which had been Catherine’s study, he stopped. There was nothing left in the space now bar the empty desk and the empty bookshelves. He could tell that the chair had been moved, however. He didn’t recall precisely how it had been, or when he’d last listlessly walked this way, but he knew that it had been moved, somehow.
He went back to walking, and eventually fetched up outside the room that had been Matilde’s. The door was slightly ajar. The space beyond was dark.
He could feel a warmth coming out of it, though, and heard a sound in there, something quiet, and he turned and walked slowly away.
He took a shower in the dark. Afterward he padded back to the kitchen in his bare feet and a gown and picked his scotch glass up from the draining board. Even after many, many trips through the dishwasher you could see the ghost of the restaurant logo that had once been stamped on it, the remains of a mast and a crow’s nest. Catherine had slipped it into her purse one long-ago night, without him knowing about it, and then given the glass to him as an anniversary present. How did a person who would do that change into the person now living half the state away? He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he had so little to say on the phone to his daughter, or why people sat and looked at views, or why they drove to nowhere on Saturday afternoons. Our heads turn and point at things. Light comes into our eyes. Words come out of our mouths.
And then? And so? Carefully, he brought the edge of the glass down upon the edge of the counter. It broke pretty much as he’d hoped it would, the base remaining in one piece, the sides shattering into several jagged points.
He padded back through into the bedroom, put the broken glass on the nightstand, took off the robe, and lay back on the bed. That’s how they’d always done it, when they’d wanted to signal that tonight didn’t have to just be about going to sleep. Under the covers with a book, then probably not tonight, Josephine.
Naked and on top, on the other hand . . .
A shorthand. A shared language. There is little sadder, however, than a tongue for which only one speaker remains. He closed his eyes, and after a while, for the first time since he’d stood stunned in the driveway and watched his family leave, he cried.
Afterward he lay and waited.
She came in the night.
Three days later, in the late afternoon, a battered truck pulled down into the driveway and parked alongside the car that was there. It was the first time the truck had been on the road in nearly two years, and the driver left the engine running when he got out because he wasn’t all that sure it would start up again. The patched front tyre was holding up, though, for now.
He went around the back and opened up the wooden crate, propping the flap with a stick. Then he walked over to the big front door and rang on the bell. Waited a while, and did it again. No answer. Of course.
He rubbed his face in his hands, wearily, took a step back. The door looked solid. No way a kick would get it open. He looked around and saw the steps up to the side deck.
When he got around to the back of the house he picked up the chair that sat by itself, hefted it to judge the weight, and threw it through the big glass door. When he’d satisfied himself that the hole in the smashed glass was big enough, he walked back along the deck and around the front and then up the driveway to stand on the road for a while, out of view of the house.
He smoked a cigarette, and then another to be sure, and when he came back down the driveway he was relived to see that the flap on the crate on the back of his truck was now closed.
He climbed into the cab and sat a moment, looking at the big house. Then he put the truck into reverse, got back up to the highway, and drove slowly home.
When he made the turn into his own drive later, he saw the STOP sign was still there. Didn’t matter how many times he told the boy, the sign was still there.
He drove along the track to the house, parked the truck. He opened the crate without looking at it, and went inside.
Later, sitting on his porch in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the wind moving through the tops of the trees all around. He drank a warm beer, and then another. He looked at the grime on his hands. He wondered what it was that made some people catch sight of the sign, what it was in their eyes, what it was in the way they looked, that made them see. He wondered how the man in the big house had done it, and hoped he had not suffered much. He wondered why he had never attempted the same thing. He wondered why it was only on nights like these that he was able to remember that his boy had been dead twenty years.
Finally he went indoors and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He did this every night, even though there was never anything there to see: nothing unless it is that sad, dark thing that eventually takes us in its arms and makes us sleep.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar
ROBERT SILVERBERG IS A multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004.
He began submitting stories to science fiction magazines in his early teens, and his first published novel, a children’s book entitled Revolt on Alpha C, appeared in 1955. He won his first Hugo Award the following year.
Always a prolific writer – for the first four years of his career he reputedly wrote a million words a year – his numerous books include such novels as To Open the Sky, To Live Again, Dying Inside, Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle. The latter became the basis for his popular “Majipoor” series, set on the eponymous alien planet. His most recent book is the seventh volume in his Collected Short Stories from Subterranean Press.
“I am not, of course, noted for writing ghost stories,” Silverberg admits, “but I have had a life-long interest in them, going back to my discovery of the classic Wise & Fraser Great Tales of Te
rror and the Supernatural when I was ten.
“My unsurprising favourites have been, all these years, Machen, Blackwood, and M. R. James, whom I have read and re-read many times.
“Another favourite of mine since childhood has been Kipling; and so, when Nick Gevers and Jack Dann invited me to contribute to an anthology of modern ghost stories paying homage to the British masters, I fell immediately on the idea of doing a Kiplingesque ghost story for them.”
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 defences 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 taller 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, specialising 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’ 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 a hundred and fifty miles in breadth that stretches north-eastward for some four hundred 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 civilisation, a land of ghosts, in fact, from which that potent summons came, and into whose mysterious realm many a traveller had vanished, never to return.
I saw what I took to be the unmistakable glint of scepticism 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 nought for them to eat. But there is a marvellous thing related of this desert, which is that when travellers 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 traveller 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 travellers 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 scepticism 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 be
fore 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 travelling 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.
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