The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

by Peter Haining

  “It is, indeed.” Ashland nodded and moved away from the bar. The feverish little man smiled after him, toasting his departure with a raised glass. Ashland found himself sweating.

  Who was his host? Who had invited him? He knew most of the Village crowd, but had spotted none of them here . . .

  A dark, doll-like girl asked him for a light. He fumbled out some matches.

  “Thanks,” she said, exhaling blue smoke into blue smoke. “Saw that worm guy talking to you. What a lousy bore he is! My ex-husband had a pet snake named. Baby and he fed it worms. That’s all they’re good for, unless you fish. Do you fish?”

  “I’ve done some fishing up in Canada.”

  “My ex-husband hated all sports. Except the indoor variety.” She giggled. “Did you hear the one about the indoor hen and the outdoor rooster?”

  “Look, miss—”

  “Talia. But you can call me Jenny. Get it?” She doubled over, laughing hysterically, then swayed, dropping her cigarette. “Ooops! I’m sick. I better go lie down. My turn-turn feels awful.”

  She staggered from the party as Ashland crushed out her smoldering cigarette with the heel of his shoe. Stupid bitch!

  A sharp handclap startled him. In the middle of the room, a tall man in a green satin dinner jacket was demanding his attention. He clapped again. “You,” he shouted to Ashland. “Come here.”

  Ashland walked forward. The tall man asked him to remove his wristwatch. “I’ll read your past from it,” the man said. “I’m psychic. I’ll tell you about yourself.”

  Reluctantly, Ashland removed his watch, handed it over. He didn’t find any of this amusing. The party was annoying him, irritating him.

  “I thank you most kindly, sir!” said the tall man, with elaborate stage courtesy. He placed the gold watch against his forehead and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. The crowd noise did not slacken; no one seemed to be paying any attention to the psychic.

  “Ah. Your name is David. David Ashland. You are successful, a man of big business . . . a producer . . . and a bachelor. You are twenty-eight . . . young for a successful producer. One has to be something of a bastard to climb that fast. What about that, Mr. Ashland, are you something of a bastard?”

  Ashland flushed angrily.

  “You like women,” continued the tall man. “A lot. And you like to drink. A lot. Your doctor told you—”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” Ashland said tightly, reaching for his watch. The man in green satin handed it over, grinned amiably, and melted back into the shifting crowd.

  I ought to get the hell out of here, Ashland told himself. Yet curiosity held him. When the host arrived, Ashland would piece this evening together; he’d know why he was here, at this particular party. He moved to a couch near the closed patio doors and sat down. He’d wait.

  A soft-faced man sat down next to him. The man looked pained. “I shouldn’t smoke these,” he said, holding up a long cigar. “Do you smoke cigars?”

  “No.”

  “I’m a salesman. Dover Insurance. Like the White Cliffs of, ya know. I’ve studied the problems involved in smoking. Can’t quit, though. When I do, the nerves shrivel up, stomach goes sour. I worry a lot – but we all worry, don’t we? I mean, my mother used to worry about the earth slowing down. She read somewhere that between 1680 and 1690 the earth lost twenty-seven hundredths of a second. She said that meant something.”

  Ashland sighed inwardly. What is it about cocktail parties that causes people you’ve never met to unleash their troubles?

  “You meet a lotta fruitcakes in my dodge,” said the pained-looking insurance salesman. “I sold a policy once to a guy who lived in the woodwork. Had a ratty little walk-up in the Bronx with a foldaway bed. Kind you push into the wall. He’d stay there – I mean, inside the wall – most of the time. His roommate would invite some friends in and if they made too much noise the guy inside the wall would pop out with his Thompson. BAM! The bed would come down and there he was with a Thompson submachine gun aimed at everybody. Real fruitcake.”

  “I knew a fellow who was twice that crazy.”

  Ashland looked up into a long, cadaverous face. The nose had been broken and improperly reset; it canted noticeably to the left. He folded his long, sharp-boned frame onto the couch next to Ashland. “This fellow believed in falling grandmothers,” he declared. “Lived in upper Michigan. ‘Watch out for falling grandmothers,’ he used to warn me. ‘They come down pretty heavy in this area. Most of ’em carry umbrellas and big packages and they come flapping down out of the sky by the thousands!’ This Michigan fellow swore he saw one hit a postman. ‘An awful thing to watch,’ he told me. ‘Knocked the poor soul flat. Crushed his skull like an egg.’ I recall he shuddered just telling me about it.”

  “Fruitcake,” said the salesman. “Like the guy I once knew who wrote on all his walls and ceilings. A creative writer, he called himself. Said he couldn’t write on paper, had to use a wall. Paper was too flimsy for him. He’d scrawl these long novels of his, a chapter in every room, with a big black crayon. Words all over the place. He’d fill up the house, then rent another one for his next book. I never read any of his houses, so I don’t know if he was any good.”

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Ashland. “I need a fresh drink.”

  He hurriedly mixed another Scotch at the bar. Around him, the party rolled on inexorably, without any visible core. What time was it, anyway? His watch had stopped.

  “Do you happen to know what time it is?” he asked a long-haired Oriental girl who was standing near the bar.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said. “None at all.” The girl fixed him with her eyes. “I’ve been watching you, and you seem horribly alone. Aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t I what?”

  “Horribly alone?”

  “I’m not with anyone, if that’s what you mean.”

  The girl withdrew a jeweled holder from her bag and fitted a cigarette in place. Ashland lit it for her.

  “I haven’t been really alone since I was in Milwaukee,” she told him. “I was about – God! – fifteen or something, and this creep wanted me to move in with him. My parents were both dead by then, so I was all alone.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Moved in with the creep. What else? I couldn’t make the being-alone scene. Later on, I killed him.”

  “You what?”

  “Cut his throat.” She smiled delicately. “In self-defense, of course. He got mean on the bottle one Friday night and tried to knife me. I had witnesses.”

  Ashland took a long draw on his Scotch. A scowling fellow in shirt-sleeves grabbed the girl’s elbow and steered her roughly away.

  “I used to know a girl who looked like that,” said a voice to Ashland’s right. The speaker was curly-haired, clean-featured, in his late thirties. “Greek belly dancer with a Jersey accent. Dark, like her, and kind of mysterious. She used to quote that line of Hemingway’s to Scott Fitzgerald – you know the one.”

  “Afraid not.”

  “One that goes, ‘We’re all bitched from the start.’ Bitter. A bitter line.”

  He put out his hand. Ashland shook it.

  “I’m Travers. I used to save America’s ass every week on CBS.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Terry Travers. The old Triple Trouble for Terry series on channel nine. Back in the late fifties. Had to step on a lotta toes to get that series.”

  “I think I recall the show. It was—”

  “Dung. That’s what it was. Cow dung. Horse dung. The worst. Terry Travers is not my real name, natch. Real one’s Abe Hockstatter. Can you imagine a guy named Abe Hockstatter saving America’s ass every week on CBS?”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  Hockstatter pulled a brown wallet from his coat, flipped it open. “There I am with one of my other rugs on,” he said, jabbing at a photo. “Been stone bald since high school. Baldies don’t make it in showbiz, so I have my rugs. Go ahead, tug at me.”


  Ashland blinked. The man inclined his head. “Pull at it. Go on – as a favor to me!”

  Ashland tugged at the fringe of Abe Hockstatter’s curly hairpiece.

  “Tight, eh? Really snug. Stays on the old dome.”

  “Indeed it does.”

  “They cost a fortune. I’ve got a wind-blown one for outdoor scenes. A stiff wind’ll lift a cheap one right off your scalp. Then I got a crew cut and a Western job with long sideburns. All kinds. Ten, twelve . . . all first-class.”

  “I’m certain I’ve seen you,” said Ashland. “I just don’t—”

  “ ’S’awright. Believe me. Lotta people don’t know me since I quit the Terry thing. I booze like crazy now. You an’ me, we’re among the nation’s six million alcoholics.”

  Ashland glared at the actor. “Where do you get off linking me with—”

  “Cool it, cool it. So I spoke a little out of turn. Don’t be so touchy, chum.”

  “To hell with you!” snapped Ashland.

  The bald man with curly hair shrugged and drifted into the crowd.

  Ashland took another long pull at his Scotch. All these neurotic conversations. . . He felt exhausted, wrung dry, and the Scotch was lousy. No kick to it. The skin along the back of his neck felt tight, hot. A headache was coming on; he could always tell.

  A slim-figured, frosted blonde in black sequins sidled up to him. She exuded an aura of matrimonial wars fought and lost. Her orange lipstick was smeared, her cheeks alcohol-flushed behind flaking pancake make-up. “I have a theory about sleep,” she said. “Would you like to hear it?”

  Ashland did not reply.

  “My theory is that the world goes insane every night. When we sleep, our subconscious takes charge and we become victims to whatever it conjures up. Our conscious mind is totally blanked out. We lie there, helpless, while our subconscious flings us about. We fall off high buildings, or have to fight a giant ape, or we get buried in quicksand . . . We have absolutely no control. The mind whirls madly in the skull. Isn’t that an unsettling thing to consider?”

  “Listen,” said Ashland. “Where’s the host?”

  “He’ll get here.”

  Ashland put down his glass and turned away from her. A mounting wave of depression swept him toward the door. The room seemed to be solid with bodies, all talking, drinking, gesturing in the milk-thick smoke haze.

  “Potatoes have eyes,” said a voice to his left. “I really believe that.” The remark was punctuated by an ugly, frog-croaking laugh.

  “Today is tomorrow’s yesterday,” someone else said.

  A hot swarm of sound:

  “You can’t get prints off human skin.”

  “In China, the laborers make sixty-five dollars a year. How the hell can you live on sixty-five dollars a year?”

  “So he took out his Luger and blew her head off.”

  “I knew a policewoman who loved to scrub down whores.”

  “Did you ever try to live with eight kids, two dogs, a three-legged cat and twelve goldfish?”

  “Like I told him, those X rays destroyed his white cells.”

  “They found her in the tub. Strangled with a coat hanger.”

  “What I had, exactly, was a grade-two epidermoid carcinoma at the base of a seborrheic keratosis.”

  Ashland experienced a sudden, raw compulsion: somehow he had to stop these voices!

  The Chinese gong flared gold at the corner of his eye. He pushed his way over to it, shouldering the partygoers aside. He would strike it – and the booming noise would stun the crowd; they’d have to stop their incessant, maddening chatter.

  Ashland drew back his right first, then drove it into the circle of bronze. He felt the impact, and the gong shuddered under his blow.

  But there was no sound from it!

  The conversation went on.

  Ashland smashed his way back across the apartment.

  “You can’t stop the party,” said the affable fat man at the door.

  “I’m leaving!”

  “So go ahead,” grinned the fat man. “Leave.”

  Ashland clawed open the door and plunged into the hall, stumbling, almost falling. He reached the elevator, jabbed at the DOWN button.

  Waiting, he found it impossible to swallow; his throat was dry. He could feel his heart hammering against the wall of his chest. His head ached.

  The elevator arrived, opened. He stepped inside. The doors closed smoothly and the cage began its slow, automatic descent.

  Abruptly, it stopped.

  The doors parted to admit a solemn-looking man in a dark blue suit.

  Ashland gasped “Freddie!”

  The solemn face broke into a wide smile. “Dave! It’s great to see you! Been a long time.”

  “But – you can’t be Fred Baker!”

  “Why? Have I changed so much?”

  “No, no, you look – exactly the same. But that car crash in Albany. I thought you were . . .” Ashland hesitated, left the word unspoken. He was pale, frightened. Very frightened. “Look, I’m – I’m late. Got somebody waiting for me at my place. Have to rush . . . He reached forward to push the LOBBY button.

  There was none.

  The lowest button read FLOOR 2.

  “We use this elevator to get from one party to another,” Freddie Baker said quietly, as the cage surged into motion. “That’s all it’s good for. You get so you need a change. They’re all alike, though – the parties. But you learn to adjust, in time.”

  Ashland stared at his departed friend. The elevator stopped.

  “Step out,” said Freddie. “I’ll introduce you around. You’ll catch on, get used to things. No sex here. And the booze is watered. Can’t get stoned. That’s the dirty end of the stick.”

  Baker took Ashland’s arm, propelled him gently forward.

  Around him, pressing in, David Ashland could hear familar sounds: nervous laughter, ice against glass, muted jazz – and the ceaseless hum of cocktail voices.

  Freddie thumbed a buzzer. A door opened.

  The smiling fat man said, “C’mon in fellas. Join the party.”

  Underground

  J. B. Priestley

  Location: Northern Line, London Underground.

  Time: December, 1974.

  Eyewitness Description: “Through the gap, he saw for the first time a small figure sitting down. It had the face of an old-looking boy or rather a young-looking dwarf. He stared at this creature, who then met his stare with a widening of the eyes, old eyes, yellowish . . .”

  Author: John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984) was another of the 20th century’s most popular novelists and playwrights whose work, like that of A. E. Van Vogt, was influenced by the theories of J. W. Dunne. Initially a critic and journalist, he enjoyed a great success with The Good Companions (1929), a picaresque novel about English life and then broadened his output to include fantasy, science fiction and the supernatural. Two of his major plays, Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways (1937) utilized Dunne’s theories with “timelines” opening up destructive events. He took the idea further in The Other Place (1953) and a non-fiction discussion, Man and Time (1964). Priestley’s novel, Benighted (1929) about a young couple forced to seek refuge in a haunted mansion, was made into a classic movie, The Old Dark House, in 1932, starring Boris Karloff and directed by James Whale of Frankenstein fame. It, in turn, inspired a whole series of “old dark house” films set in isolated rural properties plagued by ghosts. Priestley wrote several short stories with supernatural themes, including “Mr Strenberry’s Tale” (1930), “The Grey Ones” (1953) and, perhaps most unnerving of all, this next story written in 1974 about a ride on the underground that turns, inexorably, into a living nightmare.

  Ray Aggarstone took the Northern Line from Leicester Square. It was some time since he had gone anywhere by Underground. Either he had used his car or had taken taxis for shorter journeys. But now that he was almost ready for what he liked to call, to himself but not to anybody else, the Big Ge
taway, he had sold his car for just over four hundred quid. Just showed you how useful it could be to chat somebody up, in this case that stupid sod who was always in the Saloon bar of the King’s Arms. While waiting on the crowded platform at Leicester Square, Ray told himself once again that he was careful as well as very clever. For instance, after that car deal and with a few drinks inside them, some fellows would have boasted about the Brazilian setup and the flight to Rio, but not Ray – not on your life! He had told this stupid sod exactly the same story he had told his mother and his wife, Cherry, now waiting for him somewhere near the end of this Northern Line. “Going to France, old man – Nice actually – where I’ve bought into a very promising property deal. Smart work, if I may say so.”

  But of course he hadn’t shown him the letters he’d concocted to show his Mum and Cherry, now ready to part with eight thousand between them, about all they had. They were both so excited about his plan for them to join him at Nice within the next two or three weeks, like a pair of idiotic kids, they left business entirely to him, Mum’s clever handsome son, Cherry’s dominating, fascinating if occasionally unfaithful husband. Serve them right when he vanished with the two cheques he was going to collect – the silly cows!

  No train yet but more people arriving on the platform. He changed his place, bumping and shoving a bit, if only to show these types what he thought about them. A run-down lot in a running-down country! He could never come back of course, not after those two women finally decided he’d robbed them blind, but he didn’t want to anyhow. He’d had it here all right – finish! He couldn’t blame Rita and Karl for sneering and jeering, even though now and again they got his goat, specially Karl. But that was early on, before they began to talk business.

  The train came along, already more than half full. And because he hadn’t stood near the platform edge, though he pushed and shoved as hard as anybody, perhaps a bit harder than most, of course he didn’t get a seat – not a hope! So there he was, standing and swaying, wedged in with a lot of fat arses, smelly underclothes and bad breath. Looking around, disgusted, he couldn’t imagine now what had made him come down here when he might have hired a car, travelled in comfort and also impressed Mum and Cherry. So, to stop cursing himself, he began thinking about Rita and Karl again. After all he’d be meeting them in Rio in two or three days, and he began to wonder how things would work over there. Every time Karl, who was her husband all right, had gone to Manchester or Leeds and had stayed the night, he’d had Rita, a hot brunette if there ever was one, who’d start moaning if a finger touched a tit. Did Karl know, just guess, not care – or what? Anyhow, what Karl, a real businessman in the German-Swedish style, did know was that his friend, smart Ray Aggarstone, would be shortly financing most of the deal they’d worked out. Moreover, there must be plenty of hot moaning brunettes in Brazil.