“I still had to escape from this place. And to do so, I would have to turn my back. I believe this is the most courageous thing I have ever done.
“I turned and walked away, loudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer. As I knew they would not, the ghosts did not rush at me from behind. I was too strong for that, and they knew me for their better.
“But I heard barks of laughter, horribly close to human sounds of mirth. As I plunged into a bank of thickening fog, returning I hoped to the world of the living, my cheeks burned with an inexplicable embarrassment. The ghosts mocked me, jeering at my back, possessed by a cruel hilarity that cast me out of their region as surely as my feet carried me away, into the fog again.
“Now, I was running almost, at least walking briskly. I began on the psalms. After some interval, I collided with a police constable in Farringdon Road and was able from there to make my way home.”
The Reverend Mr Weeks nodded sagely, and Colonel Beauregard scowled in sympathy. I felt as if I had myself been transported beyond the rational world, into Ernest Virtue’s hellish half-city.
“I thought, that night as I prepared for my bed, my horrible experience was at an end. I imagined this moment, when I would retell it to good friends within a room of stout oak and know I was beyond the reach of those ghosts. I slept soundly, untroubled by what had occurred. The world was back as it should be, and my place in it was fixed and secure.
“But that laughter had followed me.
“Three days later, in the street outside the Exchange, I heard that laughter again. I looked about, startled, rudely breaking off a conversation. It was broad daylight, if overcast. A great many brokers stood about in groups, discussing the day’s business. Amid so many frock coats and top hats, it was hard to catch a glimpse of the tattered cloak. But it was there, I was sure. The quality of the laugh was not human. It came from the beyond.
“That was not the only incident. I have been certain, always when outside, when on the street, that I have seen a shadow or heard a cry which could only betoken the presence of one or more of that ghostly crew, escapees from that dreadful place abroad in the city of the living. Have they followed me back? Or have they always been among us, unseen by the many, maddening the few cursed souls who have awoken to their presence?
“I have been touched again. Their hands sometimes grip the skirts of my coat as I pass. Their fingers poke and prod. My watch is lost to them. I don’t know when it was stealthed away, but when I found it was gone, I also found a blue bruise on my belly, where the watch must have pressed.
“They love us not, these ghosts. They envy the life we have. They are needy, with a hunger we cannot understand. They would take everything from us if they could. And if they can not have what we have, they will tear us down and destroy all we hold dear, out of spite. I must be strong, must remain strong. Else the world will spin out of its orbit and be lost in the darkness.”
“Now, now, old man,” said the Colonel. “Chin up.”
“Yes, Colonel. I keep my chin up. I keep my back straight. I keep my heart closed. I can resist.”
I expected our clergyman to have something to say, but the Reverend Mr Weeks had nodded sagely off to sleep. In itself, that gave me a chill none of the stories had raised.
“For a while, it was dreadful,” Virtue continued. “Even in broadest daylight and in the most respectable thoroughfares, I was aware of them. They slouch among us, clinging to their gutters and alleys, boldly meeting our glances, trying with their guttural noises to harry our minds. London is thick with these monsters. I was woken up to their presence, and wondered what spell had been cast over me so that I should be cursed with the power of seeing those things that should decently remain invisible. They are parodies of life, loathsome and pitiable, despicable and damned. Their corruption is complete, and yet they yearn even as we do, for the light, for the warmth. I know you must find this hard to credit, for had another tried to persuade me of this before my experience in the fog I would have deemed him mad. But these ghosts are among us. All the time.”
An excitement, almost a rage, had built up in me as Virtue spoke. I had expected one of the others to cut him off, to rend apart his strange misconception. And yet it fell to me.
“Surely,” I began, “your ghosts are nothing supernatural. The place you have described is simply a slum. Sadly, many such are to be found in London. Your ghosts are just the poor, no more.”
Virtue’s eyes fixed me like the lights of a hostile gunboat.
“The poor!” he exclaimed. “The Poor!?!”
There was a terrifying force inside him.
“The unfortunate,” I continued. “Beggars and wastrels, no doubt. The human detritus of our city, those who through birth or inclination have found themselves settling on the bottom.”
“This is London,” Virtue said, with a ferocious certainty. “The most prosperous city in the world. No such creatures exist, not naturally. My dear friend, of this I am sure as eggs is eggs. For me, the curtain has lifted and I have seen a hellish world beyond.”
I was horrorstruck by something new in Virtue’s tone. A spark of pity, for me that I could be so deluded as to believe his phantoms to be people like ourselves.
“Colonel Beauregard, Mr Weeks,” I appealed.
Neither worthy - for Mr Weeks was now awake again - joined my position.
“This is a case of spectral persecution,” Virtue insisted. “It will be resisted. If you ignore them, I have found, they go away. For I am winning my private war. This last week, they have been fainter presences. I can still see them, but I have to weaken and direct my gaze at a fixed shadow to be sure. I have been successful in willing myself free of persecution. By ignoring the ghosts, I deny them substance. Within days, I shall have banished these apparitions entirely. Oak panels are my armour. My mind is my sword.”
Somehow, his conviction swayed me. I came to see his experience as he did himself. I still held in my mind my original assumption, but in my heart I knew I relied too much on my mind.
There were ghosts. This city was spectre-plagued. Mr Ernest Meiklejohn Virtue was haunted.
I added my own story to the collection, to conclude the evening. It was hurried, I confess, a confection of hooded monks and a hook-clawed madman, with lovers united beyond the grave and a villain harried over a cliff by the bloodied floating faces of his victims.
The company broke up, and departed the club to the quarters of the compass.
It was not a foggy night, but it was moonless. I watched Virtue stride off vigorously, down a street ill-lit by faint gaslight. He marched almost, swinging his cane like a lance, looking straight ahead and not into any of the alleys that fed into the street, whistling a hymn that spoke of the rich man in his castle and the poor man at the gate, He made them high and lowly and ordered their estate. In some of the alleys were huddles that breathed and stretched out empty hands. He walked past, unseeing.
For Virtue, the haunting was almost over.
But a horror worse than all the crawling severed hands, floating green shrouds, chattering skulls and ambulant scarecrows pitched in together clung to the stones of this prosperous city, impinging when it had to on the main thoroughfares but festering always in the shadows beyond the gaslight, wrapping the hearts of men and women like you and I in a misery more profound than the sufferings of any wailing spectre bride or seaweed-dripping wrecker’s revenant. I remembered Virtue’s convictions, of his own rectitude and of the strength of oak panels.
I resolved to model myself on him, and walked home, holding my breath in the darks between the pools of lamplight, arriving safely at my own oak-lined fortress.
That night, I saw no ghosts.
<
* * * *
BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS
The Dead Boy at Your Window
It’s been a good year forBruce Holland Rogers. His ghost story “Thirteen Ways to Water” (from the anthology Black Cats and Broken Mirrors) won the 1999 Nebula Award from
the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the following story was the winner of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award.
The author contributes a regular column to the writing magazine, Speculations, about meeting the spiritual and psychological challenges of full-time fiction writing, and he is currently working on a collection of short-short short stories with the support of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the state of Oregon.
About “The Dead Boy at Your Window”, he recalls, “This story began with a writing exercise I assigned myself: Write a story about a lie. I was quite surprised to discover the consequences of this particular lie.”
* * * *
I
n a distant countrywhere the towns had improbable names, a woman looked upon the unmoving form of her newborn baby and refused to see what the midwife saw. This was her son. She had brought him forth in agony, and now he must suck. She pressed his lips to her breast.
“But he is dead!” said the midwife.
“No,” his mother lied. “I felt him suck just now.” Her lie was as milk to the baby, who really was dead but who now opened his dead eyes and began to kick his dead legs. “There, do you see?” And she made the midwife call the father in to know his son.
The dead boy never did suck at his mother’s breast. He sipped no water, never took food of any kind, so of course he never grew. But his father, who was handy with all things mechanical, built a rack for stretching him so that, year by year, he could be as tall as the other children.
When he had seen six winters, his parents sent him to school. Though he was as tall as the other students, the dead boy was strange to look upon. His bald head was almost the right size, but the rest of him was thin as a piece of leather and dry as a stick. He tried to make up for his ugliness with diligence, and every night he was up late practicing his letters and numbers.
His voice was like the rasping of dry leaves. Because it was so hard to hear him, the teacher made all the other students hold their breaths when he gave an answer. She called on him often, and he was always right.
Naturally, the other children despised him. The bullies sometimes waited for him after school, but beating him, even with sticks, did him no harm. He wouldn’t even cry out.
One windy day, the bullies stole a ball of twine from their teacher’s desk, and after school, they held the dead boy on the ground with his arms out so that he took the shape of a cross. They ran a stick in through his left shirt sleeve and out through the right. They stretched his shirt tails down to his ankles, tied everything in place, fastened the ball of twine to a buttonhole, and launched him. To their delight, the dead boy made an excellent kite. It only added to their pleasure to see that owing to the weight of his head, he flew upside down.
When they were bored with watching the dead boy fly, they let go of the string. The dead boy did not drift back to earth, as any ordinary kite would do. He glided. He could steer a little, though he was mostly at the mercy of the winds. And he could not come down. Indeed, the wind blew him higher and higher.
The sun set, and still the dead boy rode the wind. The moon rose and by its glow he saw the fields and forests drifting by. He saw mountain ranges pass beneath him, and oceans and continents. At last the winds gentled, then ceased, and he glided down to the ground in a strange country. The ground was bare. The moon and stars had vanished from the sky. The air seemed gray and shrouded. The dead boy leaned to one side and shook himself until the stick fell from his shirt. He wound up the twine that had trailed behind him and waited for the sun to rise. Hour after long hour, there was only the same grayness. So he began to wander.
He encountered a man who looked much like himself, a bald head atop leathery limbs. “Where am I?” the dead boy asked.
The man looked at the grayness all around. “Where?” the man said. His voice, like the dead boy’s, sounded like the whisper of dead leaves stirring.
A woman emerged from the grayness. Her head was bald, too, and her body dried out. “This!” she rasped, touching the dead boy’s shirt. “I remember this!” She tugged on the dead boy’s sleeve. “I had a thing like this!”
“Clothes?” said the dead boy.
“Clothes!” the woman cried. “That’s what it is called!”
More shriveled people came out of the grayness. They crowded close to see the strange dead boy who wore clothes. Now the dead boy knew where he was. “This is the land of the dead.”
“Why do you have clothes?” asked the dead woman. “We came here with nothing! Why do you have clothes?”
“I have always been dead,” said the dead boy, “but I spent six years among the living.”
“Six years!” said one of the dead. “And you have only just now come to us?”
“Did you know my wife?” asked a dead man. “Is she still among the living?”
“Give me news of my son!”
“What about my sister?”
The dead people crowded closer.
The dead boy said, “What is your sister’s name?” But the dead could not remember the names of their loved ones. They did not even remember their own names. Likewise, the names of the places where they had lived, the numbers given to their years, the manners or fashions of their times, all of these they had forgotten.
“Well,” said the dead boy, “in the town where I was born, there was a widow. Maybe she was your wife. I knew a boy whose mother had died, and an old woman who might have been your sister.”
“Are you going back?”
“Of course not,” said another dead person. “No one ever goes back.”
“I think I might,” the dead boy said. He explained about his flying. “When next the wind blows . . .”
“The wind never blows here,” said a man so newly dead that he remembered wind.
“Then you could run with my string.”
“Would that work?”
“Take a message to my husband!” said a dead woman.
“Tell my wife that I miss her!” said a dead man.
“Let my sister know I haven’t forgotten her!”
“Say to my lover that I love him still!”
They gave him their messages, not knowing whether or not their loved ones were themselves long dead. Indeed, dead lovers might well be standing next to one another in the land of the dead, giving messages for each other to the dead boy. Still, he memorized them all. Then the dead put the stick back inside his shirt sleeves, tied everything in place, and unwound his string. Running as fast as their leathery legs could manage, they pulled the dead boy back into the sky, let go of the string, and watched with their dead eyes as he glided away.
He glided a long time over the gray stillness of death until at last a puff of wind blew him higher, until a breath of wind took him higher still, until a gust of wind carried him up above the grayness to where he could see the moon and the stars. Below he saw moonlight reflected in the ocean. In the distance rose mountain peaks. The dead boy came to earth in a little village. He knew no one here, but he went to the first house he came to and rapped on the bedroom shutters. To the woman who answered, he said, “A message from the land of the dead,” and gave her one of the messages. The woman wept, and gave him a message in return.
House by house, he delivered the messages. House by house, he collected messages for the dead. In the morning, he found some boys to fly him, to give him back to the wind’s mercy so he could carry these new messages back to the land of the dead.
So it has been ever since. On any night, head full of messages, he may rap upon any window to remind someone - to remind you, perhaps - of love that outlives memory, of love that needs no names.
<
* * * *
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Ra*e
Ramsey Campbell is someone elsewho enjoyed a good year in 1999. No sooner had he travelled to Atlanta, Georgia, to collect the Grand Master Award at the ninth World Horror Convention, than he was back in Los Angeles receiving the Horror Write
r Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement.
Recent books by the author include the novels The Last Voice They Hear, The House on Nazareth Hill, The One Safe Place, The Long Lost and the forthcoming Silent Children, plus such collections as Waking Nightmares, Strange Things Stranger Places and Alone With the Horrors.
“ ‘Ra*e’ was another tale written to an order that proved less firm than it had promised to be,” reveals the author. “Jeff Gelb and Lonn Friend, editors of the Hot Blood series of anthologies, asked various people to write a long story about one of the seven deadly sins. You will have guessed which attracted me. Alas, for whatever reason, the project failed to find a publisher, and so although I completed the first draft of the tale in early 1996, I saw little point in revising such a lengthy piece to be touted elsewhere. For a while a second volume ofDark Love seemed imminent, and apparently both editor Nancy Collins and her publishers wanted me in it, but it too faded and vanished. The story finally appeared in my latest collection, Ghosts and Grisly Things, published by Pumpkin Books.”
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