The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

by Peter Haining

  The memory of that first exhilaration did not leave him until they returned with the baby. Then he saw how pale and tired his wife was, how bright and plump his son – in that respect, at least, the infant already resembled Vera whose energy had redoubled as that of her daughter began to fade. In sympathy with Claire, Kevin began to feel very tired as well. “Is there,” he said, “anything I can do? Shall I boil some water?”

  “Kevin, darling, what on earth would we need boiling water for? This isn’t the 19th century. Why don’t you be a poppet and see to Claire’s things?”

  “I only thought. . . .” He looked enquiringly at his wife, who was presenting the child to Vera. Then she said, “Mummy’s got it all arranged”.

  The telephone rang and, in his confusion, Kevin picked it up without saying anything. There was someone talking faintly at the other end, and he heard the word “joy” or “toy” before putting down the receiver. “There must be a crossed line,” he told them, almost apologetically but they were not listening to him. Vera was holding the baby in the air while Claire gazed at it solemnly. So my child, he thought, has become one more reason why they can ignore me.

  The dusk of early winter cast its thin gloom over Kevin as he tried without success to read Benjamin Spock’s The First Year of Baby’s Life, and when the telephone rang he rose to answer it with a certain relief; his mood of pleasurable anticipation changed to one of incredulity, however, when he heard Vera saying softly but quite distinctly, “It’s a boy. It’s a lovely boy . . .” It was the fact that she was whispering which really disturbed him. “Vera?” The dialling tone returned and he was already blushing when he called her back. “Vera?”

  “Kevin, angel. I’m already out of the door. Tell Claire to wait.”

  “Did you just talk to me?”

  “Of course not. Why should I talk to you?” But she added: “Is there anything the matter with the baby?”

  “No. Nothing’s the matter. I’ll tell Claire to expect you.” When he put down the telephone he crept to the foot of the stairs, and listened intently as his wife whispered to the child.

  As the rockets of Guy Fawkes’ Day exploded above his head Kevin hurried home through the darkness, worried in case his wife already missed him; when he opened the front door he heard the telephone ringing. He raced towards it and, with his coat half-falling from his shoulders, picked it up to hear Vera shouting at him, “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” With a sudden rush of anxiety he slammed down the receiver, and stood panting in the middle of the room.

  He climbed the stairs slowly, as if in pain, and found Claire lying on the bed beside the baby’s cot. “I thought it must be you,” she said without rising to greet him. “What were you doing?”

  He was still breathing heavily. “I think I was talking to Vera.” She immediately raised herself into a sitting position, and piled the pillows around her. “Oh, what did Mummy want? Did she get that book on breastfeeding?” He was about to explain what in fact had occurred when a bell rang – for one moment Kevin thought it was the telephone again, and gave a start which was perceptible to Claire. But it was the front door, and when he went down to open it Vera was waiting for him on the threshold, dangling some keys. “Oh, Kevin, darling, can you be an angel and get Claire’s book from the car for me? You can’t miss it.”

  “Of course.” He could not look at her, but stared down at his shoes as she passed in front of him and went upstairs to her daughter. With a nervous gesture he examined his watch: it was now 6.15. And when he returned with the book he lingered in the bedroom doorway to scrutinize Vera; she was laughing, her head deliberately thrown back as if the world were being asked to witness her good humour, but she seemed neither ill nor deranged. And yet she must have telephoned him just before coming to the door. “There, there,” she was saying now as she took the infant from its cot. “Come to lovely Vera. She could eat you, you’re so gorgeous.” And the baby, apparently fascinated by this sudden access to his grandmother’s face, stuck his tiny fingers in her open mouth.

  It was an evening in late November. Kevin was turning on the television at six o’clock when the telephone rang; and as he watched the screen fill with light, casting vague shadows upon the walls, he picked up the receiver and heard Vera shrieking, “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!”

  “Vera, I’m sorry if this is a joke but . . .”

  “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” To Kevin the voice now seemed hysterical, with an additional ferocity which both alarmed and angered him. He was about to shout back in panic when he looked up and saw Vera’s face at the window, her mouth flattened against the glass and rendered a luminous grey by the light from the television. He dropped the telephone. “Let me in, darling!” she was saying. “Your bell isn’t working!” He stared at her. “Kevin, darling, have you gone deaf?” And as he looked at her grey mouth he wondered whose voice it was he had heard, a voice which in memory no longer seemed human at all.

  A week later, at the same time, he heard it again; he had thought of little else except those disembodied sounds, and he wanted to test his theory that Vera had somehow arranged a recording. He was quite calm but, when he picked up the receiver, his calmness disappeared. “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” He remembered what he had to say. “Can you repeat that, please?” There was a slight pause. “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” So there was someone there, listening to him, hearing his quick breathing and the sudden intake of that breath. He put down the telephone and hurried upstairs; for some reason he now feared that some terrible harm might befall either Claire or the child.

  She looked defiantly at him as he entered the bedroom. “Mummy told me to rest, so I’m resting. It’s good for my milk.” But she was clearly puzzled. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “It was the phone.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” The baby gave a fat gurgle of satisfaction from the cot beside her.

  He went downstairs and, in order to calm himself, noted down the time and day of this latest call. But he did not need to look at his own scrawled handwriting to know that the telephone always rang at six o’clock on Tuesday evenings. This was the time when Vera had originally called him from the hospital with news of the birth. And who could have known that? Only Vera and Claire, naturally. He put his hands to the sides of his head. Then, he thought, perhaps the baby knew . . .

  When the following week the telephone rang again he snatched up the receiver and shouted, “Who are you? Who put you up to this?” There was a pause, almost out of politeness, and then it began again, “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” It seemed to Kevin that these harmless words had become threatening, even sinister, like an incantation designed to raise the dead. The voice seemed about to break into laughter: he could not bear the thought of that, and slammed down the receiver just before Claire entered the room. She looked at him curiously, and in that moment they realized how ill at ease they had become with each other.

  “I thought I heard voices.”

  “It was the phone.” He dared not look down at it, but pointed his finger.

  “Oh? I didn’t hear it ring.”

  “They rang off quickly,” he replied without thinking about what he was saying.

  “Who were they?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just the usual.” She said nothing, but he noticed that she was biting the inside of her mouth as she stood uncertainly in the middle of the room.

  When she left him, he sat down sighing – only to spring to his feet with the thought that perhaps the telephone had never rung, that the voice was only within his own head. All at once he saw himself as the centre of an illness which might infect his wife and child. He went over to the telephone and began minutely to examine it; he did not know what he was looking for, but he wanted to feel its weight and bulk in his now trembling hands. Then suddenly it rang again and with a yell he dropped it to the floor; from the spilled receiver he co
uld hear Vera’s voice oozing out. He wanted to scream abuse at it but instead he carefully picked it up, holding it a little way from his ear.

  “Kevin, poppet. What is the matter? What was that bloody noise?”

  “Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “It’s just the phone.”

  But apparently she had not heard him, since she began hurriedly to discuss the arrangements which she had made for them all at Christmas. Oh God, he thought as she talked at him, will I be able to endure all this until Christmas?

  On the following Tuesday, at six o’clock, it rang again; but he remained seated and would not answer it. Claire and her mother were shopping for presents, and the noise of the bell seemed to fill the house. But he sat very still.

  When at last it stopped, he went to the cupboard under the stairs, took out a can of paint, a brush, and then began solemnly to daub the telephone until it was entirely blue – a bright blue. For some reason this exercise calmed and satisfied him. It had become a battle of wills, the next round of which would be fought on the following Tuesday, which was Christmas Eve.

  They were all sitting together on that day, Vera rocking the baby in her arms, Claire watching her, and Kevin pretending to doze. At six o’clock, the telephone rang. He looked up at them quickly to see if they had heard it, too, and when Claire muttered, “Now who can that be?” he got up from his chair in relief. “It may be for you,” he said to his mother-in-law, “Why don’t you answer it?”

  “Don’t be silly, darling, with a baby?”

  “Could you get it then, Claire?” He coughed. “I’ve got a frog in my throat.”

  She glanced at her mother before slowly picking up the telephone. And then there came the voice again: “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” Kevin stiffened and stared down at his infant son, not daring to say anything. But Claire laughed. She handed the receiver to her mother: “Oh Mummy it’s you!” Vera listened as the baby tried to grasp the telephone and the voice came again. She laughed also, but clearly she was abashed. “I didn’t realize,” she said, “how military I sound. I’m sorry.”

  Kevin was astonished at their response, and even more so when his wife walked forward to embrace him. “What a wonderful Christmas present! I knew you wouldn’t forget baby’s anniversary! Is it like a singing telegram?”

  “No.” He didn’t really know what to say. “Not exactly.”

  Vera was smiling at him. “So that’s why you painted the phone. We thought you were going dotty, darling.”

  And Kevin laughed with them, for all at once he realized that the voice had been neither menacing nor inhuman. His suspicions had been absurd; the only evil had resided in his own fear. It was Vera’s voice, but, somehow, it had never left the telephone and had become an echo of that joyful mood he had experienced at the first news of his infant son. “So you don’t mind?” he asked his wife.

  “Why should I mind? I was waiting for you to show some sign.”

  “Sign?”

  “You know.” It was her turn to become abashed. “About little Tom.”

  Tom was laughing now, and Kevin took him from Vera’s arms to hold him up to the light. The two women rested the telephone between them, listening once more to the refrain, “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” as Kevin realized that these words also represented the spirit of Christmas itself. And at each Christmas they returned.

  7

  Haunting Times

  Tales of Unease

  Smoke Ghost

  Fritz Leiber

  Location: Chicago, USA.

  Time: October, 1941.

  Eyewitness Description: “I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings.”

  Author: Fritz Reuter Leiber (1910–92) deserves the accolade as the writer who introduced the ghost of the tough city centre. His stories postulated a modern post-industrial aesthetic of horror, emerging spontaneously from the urban landscape. In a 1940 essay he argued: “The supernatural beings of a modern city would be different from the ghosts of yesterday, because each culture creates its own ghosts.” The son of a noted Shakespearean actor, Fritz toured with his father’s road company for several years and secured parts in a few films before turning to authorship in the Forties. He hit a rich vein of form with tales about the supernatural in contemporary America, notably Conjure Wife (1943), about witchcraft in a modern university, and a series of short stories, “The Automatic Pistol” (1940), “The Girl With Hungry Eyes” (1949) and “Smoke Ghost” (1941) with its grimy phantom. He later reworked this concept into a novel, Our Lady of Darkness (1977), set in San Francisco and proffering reasons why so many of the city’s coterie of writers, including Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, had met such tragic deaths. Several critics regard this work as Leiber’s homage to the horror of Edgar Allan Poe and the supernaturalism of M. R. James. Here, though, is the original short story that created a new niche for the ghost story.

  Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, “Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?” And she had tittered nervously and replied, “When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when I slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things.” And he had said, “I don’t mean that kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books.” And she hadn’t known what to say.

  He’d never been like this before. Of course he might be joking, but it didn’t sound that way. Vaguely Miss Millick wondered whether he mightn’t be seeking some sort of sympathy from her. Of course, Mr Wran was married and had a little child, but that didn’t prevent her from having daydreams. The daydreams were not very exciting, still they helped fill up her mind. But now he was asking her another of those unprecedented questions.

  “Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like, Miss Millick? Just picture it. A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the uneasy resentment of the striker, the callous opportunism of the scab, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns. Each one overlying and yet blending with the other, like a pile of semitransparent masks?”

  Miss Millick gave a little self-conscious shiver and said, “That would be terrible. What an awful thing to think of.”

  She peered furtively across the desk. She remembered having heard that there had been something impressively abnormal about Mr Wran’s childhood, but she couldn’t recall what it was. If only she could do something – laugh at his mood or ask him what was really wrong. She shifted the extra pencils in her left hand and mechanically traced over some of the shorthand curlicues in her notebook.

  “Yet, that’s just what such a ghost or vitalized projection would look like, Miss Millick,” he continued, smiling in a tight way. “It would grow out of the real world. It would reflect the tangled, sordid, vicious things. All the loose ends. And it would be very grimy. I don’t think it would seem white or wispy, or favor graveyards. It wouldn’t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?”

  Miss Millick giggled nervously. There was an expression beyond her powers of definition in Mr Wran’s ordinary, flat-cheeked, thirtyish face, silhouetted against the dusty window. He turned away and st
ared out into the gray down-town atmosphere that rolled in from the railroad yards and the mills. When he spoke again his voice sounded far away.

  “Of course, being immaterial, it couldn’t hurt you physically – at first. You’d have to be peculiarly sensitive to see it, or be aware of it at all. But it would begin to influence your actions. Make you do this. Stop you from doing that. Although only a projection, it would gradually get its hooks into the world of things as they are. Might even get control of suitably vacuous minds. Then it could hurt whomever it wanted.”

  Miss Millick squirmed and read back her shorthand, like the books said you should do when there was a pause. She became aware of the failing light and wished Mr Wran would ask her to turn on the overhead. She felt scratchy, as if soot were sifting down on to her skin.

  “It’s a rotten world, Miss Millick,” said Mr Wran, talking at the window. “Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It’s time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear. They’d be no worse than men.”

  “But” – Miss Millick’s diaphragm jerked, making her titter inanely – “of course, there aren’t any such things as ghosts.”

  Mr Wran turned around.

  “Of course there aren’t, Miss Millick,” he said in a loud, patronizing voice, as if she had been doing the talking rather than he. “Science and common sense and psychiatry all go to prove it.”

  She hung her head and might even have blushed if she hadn’t felt so all at sea. Her leg muscles twitched, making her stand up, although she hadn’t intended to. She aimlessly rubbed her hand along the edge of the desk.