“Hello, Mr Wran,” said the night elevator man, a burly figure in overalls, sliding open the grille-work door to the old-fashioned cage. “I didn’t know you were working nights now, too.”
Catesby stepped in automatically. “Sudden rush of orders,” he murmured inanely. “Some stuff that has to be gotten out.”
The cage creaked to a stop at the top floor. “Be working very late, Mr Wran?”
He nodded vaguely, watched the car slide out of sight, found his keys, swiftly crossed the outer office, and entered his own. His hand went out to the light switch, but then the thought occurred to him that the two lighted windows, standing out against the dark bulk of the building, would indicate his whereabouts and serve as a goal toward which something could crawl and climb. He moved his chair so that the back was against the wall and sat down in the semidarkness. He did not remove his overcoat.
For a long time he sat there motionless, listening to his own breathing and the faraway sounds from the streets below: the thin metallic surge of the crosstown streetcar, the farther one of the elevated, faint lonely cries and honkings, indistinct rumblings. Words he had spoken to Miss Millick in nervous jest came back to him with the bitter taste of truth. He found himself unable to reason critically or connectedly, but by their own volition thoughts rose up into his mind and gyrated slowly and rearranged themselves with the inevitable movement of planets.
Gradually his mental picture of the world was transformed. No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. The new picture illuminated with dreadful clarity certain general facts which had always bewildered and troubled him and from which he had tried to hide: the inevitability of hate and war, the diabolically timed mischances which wreck the best of human intentions, the walls of willful misunderstanding that divide one man from another, the eternal vitality of cruelty and ignorance and greed. They seemed appropriate now, necessary parts of the picture. And superstition only a kind of wisdom.
Then his thoughts returned to himself and the question he had asked Miss Millick, “What would such a thing want from a person? Sacrifices? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?” It had become a practical question.
With an explosive jangle, the phone began to ring. “Cate, I’ve been trying everywhere to get you,” said his wife. “I never thought you’d be at the office. What are you doing? I’ve been worried.”
He said something about work.
“You’ll be home right away?” came the faint anxious question. “I’m a little frightened. Ronny just had a scare. It woke him up. He kept pointing to the window saying, ‘Black man, black man.’ Of course it’s something he dreamed. But I’m frightened. You will be home? What’s that, dear? Can’t you hear me?”
“I will. Right away,” he said. Then he was out of the office, buzzing the night bell and peering down the shaft.
He saw it peering up the shaft at him from the deep shadows three floors below, the sacking face pressed against the iron grille-work. It started up the stair at a shockingly swift, shambling gait, vanishing temporarily from sight as it swung into the second corridor below.
Catesby clawed at the door to the office, realized he had not locked it, pushed it in, slammed and locked it behind him, retreated to the other side of the room, cowered between the filing cases and the wall. His teeth were clicking. He heard the groan of the rising cage. A silhouette darkened the frosted glass of the door, blotting out part of the grotesque reverse of the company name. After a little the door opened.
The big-globed overhead light flared on and, standing inside the door, her hand on the switch, was Miss Millick.
“Why, Mr Wran,” she stammered vacuously, “I didn’t know you were here. I’d just come in to do some extra typing after the movie. I didn’t . . . but the lights weren’t on. What were you—”
He stared at her. He wanted to shout in relief, grab hold of her, talk rapidly. He realized he was grinning hysterically.
“Why, Mr Wran, what’s happened to you?” she asked embarrassedly, ending with a stupid titter. “Are you feeling sick? Isn’t there something I can do for you?”
He shook his head jerkily and managed to say, “No, I’m just leaving. I was doing some extra work myself.”
“But you look sick,” she insisted, and walked over toward him. He inconsequentially realized she must have stepped in mud, for her high-heeled shoes left neat black prints.
“Yes, I’m sure you must be sick. You’re so terribly pale.” She sounded like an enthusiastic, incompetent nurse. Her face brightened with a sudden inspiration. “I’ve got something in my bag, that’ll fix you up right away,” she said. “It’s for indigestion.”
She fumbled at her stuffed oblong purse. He noticed that she was absent-mindedly holding it shut with one hand while she tried to open it with the other. Then, under his very eyes, he saw her bend back the thick prongs of metal locking the purse as if they were tinfoil, or as if her fingers had become a pair of steel pliers.
Instantly his memory recited the words he had spoken to Miss Millick that afternoon. “It couldn’t hurt you physically – at first. . . gradually get its hooks into the world . . . might even get control of suitably vacuous minds. Then it could hurt whomever it wanted.” A sickish, cold feeling grew inside him. He began to edge toward the door.
But Miss Millick hurried ahead of him.
“You don’t have to wait, Fred,” she called. “Mr Wran’s decided to stay a while longer.”
The door to the cage shut with a mechanical rattle. The cage creaked. Then she turned around in the door.
“Why, Mr Wran,” she gurgled reproachfully, “I just couldn’t think of letting you go home now. I’m sure you’re terribly unwell. Why, you might collapse in the street. You’ve just got to stay here until you feel different.”
The creaking died away. He stood in the center of the office, motionless. His eyes traced the coal-black course of Miss Millick’s footprints to where she stood blocking the door. Then a sound that was almost a scream was wrenched out of him, for it seemed to him that the blackness was creeping up her legs under the thin stockings.
“Why, Mr Wran,” she said, “You’re acting as if you were crazy. You must lie down for a while. Here, I’ll help you off with your coat.”
The nauseously idiotic and rasping note was the same; only it had been intensified. As she came toward him he turned and ran through the storeroom, clattered a key desperately at the lock of the second door to the corridor.
“Why, Mr Wran,” he heard her call, “are you having some kind of a fit? You must let me help you.”
The door came open and he plunged out into the corridor and up the stairs immediately ahead. It was only when he reached the top that he realized the heavy steel door in front of him led to the roof. He jerked up the catch.
“Why, Mr Wran, you mustn’t run away. I’m coming after you.”
Then he was out on the gritty gravel of the roof. The night sky was clouded and murky, with a faint pinkish glow from the neon signs. From the distant mills rose a ghostly spurt of flame. He ran to the edge. The street lights glared dizzily upward. Two men were tiny round blobs of hat and shoulders. He swung around.
The thing was in the doorway. The voice was no longer solicitous but moronically playful, each sentence ending in a titter.
“Why, Mr Wran, why have you come up here? We’re all alone. Just think, I might push you off.”
The thing came slowly toward him. He moved backward until his heels touched the low parapet. Without knowing why, or what he was going to do, he dropped to his knees. He dared not look at the face as it came nearer, a focus for the worst in the world, a gathering point for poisons from everywhere. Then the lucidity of terror took possession of his mind, and words formed on his lips.
“I will obey you. You are my god,” he said. “You have supreme power over man and his animal
s and his machines. You rule this city and all others. I recognize that.”
Again the titter, closer. “Why, Mr Wran, you never talked like this before. Do you mean it?”
“The world is yours to do with as you will, save or tear to pieces,” he answered fawningly, the words automatically fitting themselves together in vaguely liturgical patterns. “I recognize that. I will praise, I will sacrifice. In smoke and soot I will worship you for ever.”
The voice did not answer. He looked up. There was only Miss Millick, deathly pale and swaying drunkenly. Her eyes were closed. He caught her as she wobbled toward him. His knees gave way under the added weight and they sank down together on the edge of the roof.
After a while she began to twitch. Small noises came from her throat and her eyelids edged open.
“Come on, we’ll go downstairs,” he murmured jerkily, trying to draw her up. “You’re feeling bad.”
“I’m terribly dizzy,” she whispered. “I must have fainted, I didn’t eat enough. And then I’m so nervous lately, about the war and everything, I guess. Why, we’re on the roof! Did you bring me up here to get some air? Or did I come up without knowing it? I’m awfully foolish. I used to walk in my sleep, my mother said.”
As he helped her down the stairs, she turned and looked at him. “Why, Mr Wran,” she said, faintly, “you’ve got a big black smudge on your forehead. Here, let me get it off for you.” Weakly she rubbed at it with her handkerchief. She started to away again and he steadied her.
“No, I’ll be all right,” she said. “Only I feel cold. What happened, Mr Wran? Did I have some sort of fainting spell?”
He told her it was something like that.
Later, riding home in the empty elevated railway car, he wondered how long he would be safe from the thing. It was a purely practical problem. He had no way of knowing, but instinct told him he had satisfied the brute for some time. Would it want more when it came again? Time enough to answer that question when it arose. It might be hard, he realized, to keep out of an insane asylum. With Helen and Ronny to protect, as well as himself, he would have to be careful and tightlipped. He began to speculate as to how many other men and women had seen the thing or things like it.
The elevated slowed and lurched in a familiar fashion. He looked at the roofs near the curve. They seemed very ordinary, as if what made them impressive had gone away for a while.
The Ghost
A. E. Van Vogt
Location: Agan, Gatineau Hills, Ottawa.
Time: August, 1942.
Eyewitness Description: “Was this alien creature a mind reader as well as a seer and ghost? An old, worn-out brain that had taken on automaton qualities and reacted almost entirely to thoughts that trickled in from other minds . . .”
Author: Alfred Elton Van Vogt (1912–2000) was among the group of young writers in the Thirties who transformed fantasy and science fiction into a new “Golden Age” of imaginative writing – “the literature of ideas”, as it has been described. Born in Canada, Van Vogt moved to America where, with other authors like Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury, he used his talents to explore new avenues of supernaturalism. His novels cut new pathways with their variety from Slan (1940), featuring a small boy able to read minds, to The Weapon Shops of lsher (1942), about a retail chain store operating inter-dimensionally. With Asylum (1942), he offered an adroit new twist on the vampire theme. Van Vogt turned his attention to ghosts after reading An Experiment With Time by J. W. Dunne – originally written in 1927 and revised several times – in which the English engineer and author expounded his theories about the nature of time to justify his conviction that dreams are often precognitive. From this came the brilliantly complex “The Ghost” – which acknowledges Dunne – and it was introduced on first publication in the August 1942 Unknown Worlds by editor John W. Campbell as, “One of the most unusual tales of haunting and ghosts we’ve read – and one that might explain what ghosts really are.”
“Four miles,” Kent thought, “four miles from the main-line town of Kempster to the railwayless village of Agan.” At least, he remembered that much.
He remembered the hill, too, and the farm at the foot of it. Only it hadn’t been deserted when he saw it last.
He stared at the place as the hotel car edged down the long hill. The buildings showed with a curious, stark bleakness. All the visible windows of the farmhouse itself were boarded up. And great planks had been nailed across the barn door.
The yard was a wilderness of weeds and – Kent experienced an odd sense of shock – the tall, dignified old man who emerged abruptly from behind the house, seemed as out of place in that desolate yard as . . . as life itself.
Kent was aware of the driver leaning toward him, heard him say above the roar of the ancient engine:
“I was wondering if we’d see the ghost, as we passed; and yep, there he is, taking his morning walk.”
“The ghost!” Kent echoed.
It was as if he had spoken a key word. The sun burst brilliantly from behind an array of dark clouds and flooded the valley with warm light. The blaze of it illuminated the drab old buildings – and wrought changes. The over-all grayness of the house showed in that bright illumination as a faded green.
The old man walked slowly toward the gate that led to the main highway. Nearer now, he seemed taller, thinner, a gaunt caricature of a human being; his black frock coat glinted in the sun.
Kent found his voice. “Ghost!” he said again. “Why, that’s old Mr Wainwright. He doesn’t look a day older than when I left this part of the world fifteen years ago.”
The old, square-fronted car ground queasily to a stop before the farm gate. The driver turned. It struck Kent that the man was smugly enjoying the moment.
“See that gate?” the fellow asked. “Not the big one; the little one. It’s padlocked, eh?”
Kent nodded. “What about it?”
“Watch!”
The old man stood fumbling at the gate less than ten feet away. It was like gazing at a pantomime, Kent thought; for the man paid no attention to the padlock, but seemed absorbed with some simpler catch.
Abruptly, the patriarch straightened, and pushed at the gate. Kent had no real sense of alienness. Without having given the matter any thought, he believed it was the gate that was going to open, and that it was some unusual aspect of the opening that he had been admonished to watch.
The gate didn’t. It did not so much as stir; not a creak came from its rusty hinges. It remained solid, held in position by the uncompromising padlock.
The old man walked through it.
Through it! Then he turned, seemed to push at some invisible counterpart of the gate and, once again, stood there, as if manipulating a hidden catch.
Finally, apparently satisfied, he faced the car again; and, for the first time, saw it and its occupants. His long, finely wrinkled face lighted.
“Hello, there!” he said.
Kent hadn’t expected speech. The words caught him like a blow. He felt a chill; his mind whirled with a queer, twisting motion that momentarily wrecked the coherence of his thought. He half leaned, half fell back against the seat because his muscles wouldn’t support him.
“Ghost,” he thought finally, dizzily. Good heavens, what was going on here?
The world began to right itself. The land and the horizon straightened; and there was the house and the barn, an almost colorless, utterly lifeless background to the beanpole of an old, old man and the magic gate through which he had stepped.
“Hello!” Kent said shakily. “Hello!”
The old man came nearer, peered; and an expression of surprise flitted across his face. “Why, it’s Mr Kent. I thought you’d left the Agan Hotel.”
“Eh!” Kent began.
Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the driver make a sharp movement with one hand. The man whispered hastily:
“Don’t act surprised at anything the ghost says. It confuses him.”
Ghost! There it was again.
Kent swallowed hard. “Am I mad?” he thought. “The last time I saw this old fellow was when I was twenty. He didn’t know my name then. How—”
The old man was speaking again, in bewilderment: “I distinctly remember Mr Jenkins, the proprietor, informing me that you had found it necessary to leave at once. He said something about a prophecy coming out exactly to the day, 17 August. People are always talking to me about prophecies. But that was the date he said it was, 17 August.”
He looked up, unscrewing the frown from his thin, worn face. “I beg your pardon, young sir. It is very remiss of me to stand here mumbling to myself. May I say that I am glad that the report was untrue, as I have very much enjoyed our several conversations.”
He raised his hat. “I would invite you in for tea, but Mrs Carmody is not in the best of moods this morning. Poor woman! Looking after an old man must be a great trial; and I dare not add to her afflictions. Good morning to you, Mr Kent. Good morning, Tom.”
Kent nodded, unable to speak. He heard the driver say:
“S’long, Mr Wainwright.”
Kent watched, as the tall, frail figure walked slowly across the road behind the car, and moved unhurriedly across the open pasture land to the south. His mind and gaze came back to the car, as the driver, Tom, said:
“Well, Mr Kent, you’re lucky. You know how long you’re staying at the Agan Hotel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr Jenkins will have your bill ready for you 17 August.”
Kent stared at him, uncertain whether he ought to laugh, or – what! “You’re not trying to tell me that the ghost also tells the future. Why, today’s only 8 July, and I intend to stay till the end of Septem—”
He stopped. The eyes that were staring into his were utterly earnest, humorless: “Mr Kent, there never was anyone like Mr Wainwright in the world before. When he tells the future, it happens; it was that way when he was alive, and it’s the same now that he’s dead.
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories Page 61