Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story

by Brian Stableford

  “I suppose,” Kit said, trying to keep her tone light, “that she must have been murdered. Not in my bed, as such, but pretty much where my bed is. Natural position, see—under the slanting ceiling.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said—but he didn’t have anything to put in place of the conventional assumption. He hesitated for ten or twelve seconds before adding: “If she was murdered, you should be able to find out. Even if she wasn’t, you should be able to find out whether she actually existed. Do you want another pint?”

  “Haven’t finished this one,” she said, knowing that he’d only asked because he’d felt a sudden urge to find a harmless question. “You really ought to get into beer, you now. Tastes vile, I suppose, but that’s not the point—in today’s world, you are what you drink, and no matter what the TV ads try to tell you, cider’s strictly for Granny Smith.”

  “In Sweden,” Stephen observed, obviously glad that she’d followed his lead and taken the conversation on to more solid ground, “you can get pear cider. It’s low-alcohol, though. Like watered-down Babycham.”

  “Best bitter,” Kit informed him, “is character-forming. It does exactly what it says on the can.”

  “Yours came out of a bottle,” he pointed out, getting braver by the minute. “But I suppose that’s better, you-are-what-you-drink punwise, than coming out of a barrel.”

  Kit let silence fall again. The problem with her haunting, she thought, was that it wasn’t sufficiently unserious to be put aside. The questions raised by the answers she’d found, with the boy’s help, were even more disturbing than the ones she’d started with—and for all his reluctance to engage with them, he obviously knew that she knew it, and he was bright enough to be sensitive to her anxiety.

  “What do you suppose she wants?” Kit said, baldly, addressing the question as much to herself as to him.

  “What do you think she wants?” Even Stephen countered, warily.

  “Given that she seems to have been a devil-worshipping whore,” Kit said, trying with all her might not to sound in the least serious but not even coming close to succeeding, “I suppose, one way or another, she must want my body.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Having voiced that party-pooping thought, Kit realised that she didn’t want to drag that particular thought any further into the open. She decided that she needed time to take stock of what she’d learned before jumping to any ominous conclusions. She tried to steer the conversation away from touchy topics like the plausibility of common-or-garden ghost stories and the likelihood that the new career options open to the spirits of the dead included dispossessing the spirits of the living as well as returning to corporeality as flesh-eating zombies. Unfortunately, that proved more difficult than she’d anticipated. Somehow, the aftermath of the discussion they’d already had didn’t seem to be a suitable interval for exchanging life-stories or asking one another whether they’d seen any good movies lately. By the time half past eight rolled around Kit had restless legs and a bad case of creeping embarrassment. She thanked the student kindly and told him that she had to go. Strangely enough, the creeping embarrassment had left her quite unprepared for Even Stephen’s gallant offer to see her home.

  “It’s not necessary,” she pointed out. “It’s still light, and you’d only have to come all the way back again afterwards.”

  “It’s no trouble,” he assured her.

  If he’d been more insistent she’d have reacted against the pressure, but he wasn’t being pushy at all, and maybe not even hopeful. After five or ten seconds of awkward hesitation, Kit decided that as he’d been so helpful, and given that she’d told him as much of the story as she could bear to divulge, she might as well show him the stage on which the ghost of the pseudonymous Rose Selavy was supposedly strutting her posthumous stuff.

  In theory, he ought to have paid his bus fare even though he was with her, but the driver winked at her and waved them both through. Kit led the way to the upper deck

  Stephen was distinctly nervous now that they were on the move, and his nervousness increased as the bus zoomed across Cemetery Junction. He obviously hadn’t the slightest idea how lucky he’d got, or might yet get, and Kit knew that he had to be conscious of the fact that it would be a long walk home if he missed the last bus back—which, in these parts, was about eleven o’clock. He didn’t dare ask straight out whether he might get to see the inside of the haunted room, but Kit didn’t see any point in keeping him in that much suspense, so she told him that even if Rose the phantom hooker didn’t put in any kind of appearance that he could perceive he could at least deliver an expert judgment on the decor. She didn’t make any promises about anything else he might get to see.

  “I’ve just taken my finals in art history,” he said, more nervous than aggrieved. “I’m not that well up on the Dulux range.”

  “What sort of a job will you get with that, then?” she asked, taking advantage of the fact that now they’d made an actual appointment with the ghost they didn’t have to mention her again until they got to the place where she might or might not make herself heard or felt.

  “No idea,” the student admitted. “Maybe nothing relevant—but a degree’s a degree, and Reading’s smack in the middle of the UK’s very own Silicon Valley. You don’t have to be a ready-made computer geek to go into the business round here—you just have to demonstrate that you catch on quickly.”

  “Well, you seem to do that all right,” she said. “And if all else fails, they’re crying out for bus drivers.”

  “I can’t drive,” he admitted.

  “Nor can most of them,” she said. “Security guards too—drastic shortage, apparently, since they started weeding out the ex-cons.”

  “Since they realized that it’s the security guards do most of the thieving, more like,” he said, cynically.

  “They don’t mind that,” she told him, rejoicing in her worldliness. “The increase in company insurance premiums if they don’t have guards is a lot more than the shrinkage. Anyway, they have CC-TV cameras to keep tabs on the security guards. You’re right, though—when you get your bit of paper, you’ll be able to do much better, especially round here. Not like me. I’m a bus driver for life.”

  “Until you get married and have kids,” he said. At least, she thought, he’d said “and”, not “or”.

  “No chance,” she said. “Married to my work, I am. It’s a sort of vocation. Like being a nun, but with a slightly sexier uniform. Not that I’ll be bouncing back and forth through this dump forever. I’ll get back on the long distance when I can. Did you know that our lot do day trips across the Channel? Calais and Boulogne by ferry, Bruges and Lille through the tunnel...weekends in Paris, sometimes. Might graduate to a serious hire firm one day—tours all over Europe. Not much of that back in Sheffield, if you discount day trips to York and Scarborough.”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  Kit judged that he was being kind rather than condescending. All things considered, he wasn’t a bad lad at all—but she had no real confidence, as yet, in his ability to see, hear or feel, let alone exorcise, ghosts. Until that test was passed she couldn’t bring herself to imagine him as relationship material. A one night stand, perhaps—but given that her ghost had become the most embarrassing feature of her present existence, his chances of lasting through tonight, in any capacity whatsoever, had to be intimately bound up with the way in which he came to terms with that.

  “This is our stop,” she said, as the railway bridge hove into view ahead of the bus. Her head reeled slightly as she got off, because she’d hurried three pints into an empty stomach and was somewhat out of practice. “There’s a chippy on the corner if you want to get some in,” she told the boy. “It’s not real fish and chips, of course, this being a hell of a long way south of Otley, Ilkley and Batley, but it’s just about edible.”

  Stephen hesitated, maybe because he was thinking about his budget again, but he nodded his head when he’d thought it over. She didn’t offer
to buy them for him, and he didn’t offer to pay for hers; she figured that was probably as it should be, given that he was still just somebody with a discman she’d happened to meet on a bus.

  Although it wasn’t dark yet and the rain had stopped the sky was a grey pall of uninterrupted cloud. The twilight hereabouts always seemed to be dingy, even by comparison with the Dearne Valley, which Kit had previously thought of as the dirtiest place in Creation. Reading didn’t have the same kind of air-pollution as Rotherham, but it was just as oppressive in its way.

  The street where the hostel was situated was certainly gloomy enough to be a plausible location for a haunting, she thought, as they turned the corner. The terraced houses had been built in 1888—there was a plaque on one of the buildings to say so, seemingly placed there because the distinctive brickwork elevated the three-storey terraces a little beyond the ordinary. Kit couldn’t really see that mixing a few fawn bricks in with the grey ones to make elementary geometrical patterns really constituted art-work, but she preferred rough-cut black stone anyway, with slates on top instead of red tiles. Stephen was used to that sort of thing, of course, so he wasn’t impressed either.

  “Are you allowed to take visitors up to your room?” the student asked, as he looked up at the slightly-dilapidated frontage of the hostel. The houses on either side were still split into flats, so their single-glazed windows had wooden frames that hadn’t seen a lick of white gloss in seven years, but the plastic frames the council had put in when they’d had the hostel double-glazed were so bottom-end-of-the-market that they didn’t convey any real cosmetic advantage. Three of the flats had window-boxes that were just now coming into flower, which certainly didn’t amount to a touch of class but did suggest that the neighboring residences were a bit more homey than the hostel.

  “It’s not a nunnery,” Kit reminded her companion, as she tried to get her key into what suddenly seemed to be an unnaturally narrow slit. “I can do what I like.”

  She managed to get the front door open in the end, and was careful to make sure that it was properly shut once they had both passed through it. The advantage of having left the Rifleman more than two hours before closing time was that the hostel’s corridors were still deserted and almost entirely free of the reek of kebabs. In spite of what she’d said about being able to do whatever she liked, Kit was glad that there was no one on the stairs to see what she was bringing home with her cod and chips. She could imagine the sort of knowing looks she’d have got from Liverpudlian May and Mancunian Liz, whose natural rivalry had been somewhat overridden by the arrival of a new girl from the far side of the Pennines.

  Once he was in the haunted attic, Stephen-the-art-history-student seemed to feel that he had to make a big show of inspecting it. Kit turned the light on to help him. Although the longest day of the year was only a couple of weeks away, the street-lights had come on half an hour before, and the one outside the window opposite the bed was making the interior of the room seem dark by contrast. Kit was glad that she kept the place reasonably tidy, because she hadn’t made any effort to prepare it for potential visitors before she’d set off for the pub. The bedsit had been painted less than a year ago, in primrose-yellow one-coat emulsion, so it looked reasonably cheerful even though the paint seemed to be a trifle blotchy. Mercifully, the boy had taken the precaution of going to the bog before they’d left the pub, so he didn’t need to visit the bathroom right away and there wasn’t any dirty linen on view in the bedsit itself.

  Remembering her inspirational moment in the pub, Kit stared at the wall by the bed in the hope of making new sense of the blotches, but they were too faint. Once she’d explained what she was looking at, and for, Stephen took a considerable interest in the same expanse of wall, but if he came to any immediate conclusions he didn’t feel inclined to share them.

  The boy’s imagination must have been all revved up—hopefully on account of the fact that the room was allegedly haunted, rather than the presumption that it once been a Satanist tart’s boudoir—because there was an evident disappointment in the way his eye ran over the single bed, the threadbare settee and the ex-kitchen-table-and-chairs that the council’s parsimonious buyer had probably acquired for next-to-nothing from one of the house-clearance cowboys on the Oxford road.

  Kit could tell that Not-Steve was equally unimpressed by the microwave oven and the toaster sitting side-by-side on the empty trunk, the dented electric kettle that shared a power-point with both of them, and the portable TV with the indoor aerial whose eleven inch screen rose far-from-majestically out of the clutter on the chest of drawers. He seemed even less impressed by the CD collection scattered among the aforementioned clutter, such as it was. Alanis Morisette, the Corrs and three non-consecutive volumes of Now That’s What I Call Music obviously didn’t meet his standards of taste and sophistication. He barely glanced at the paperbacks that she’d piled on the floor for lack of a bookcase—which was a shame, because she was sure that they would have given him a more accurate and less unflattering impression of her intelligence and taste. Unfortunately, because Dad hadn’t been able to come up with a little extra space in a southbound load, she’d had to travel light when she came down from Sheffield on the train, so she’d had to leave at least five hundred books at home. The volumes she’d so far picked up in the local Charity shops and the second-hand dealers in Merchant’s Place hadn’t yet aggregated into anything capable of compelling Stephen’s respect, let alone attracting his admiration.

  There wasn’t the slightest hint of music in the air, nor any out-of-the-ordinary odor, but Kit hadn’t expected that it would be showtime the moment they walked through the door. She was curious to know whether it would be showtime at all, given the presence of a male person whose polite fascination with her tales of the unexpected couldn’t quite conceal the fact that he didn’t believe a single word of them. She hadn’t made her mind up yet whether she ought to be relieved or annoyed if the ghost gave the Electric Hellfire Club a miss for once. She hadn’t even made her mind up when or whether to throw the boy out, although she knew that by the time he got around to mentioning that it might be time for him to go home—which he was bound to do, partly because he was too polite not to and partly because she obviously intimidated the hell out of him—she would probably be all agog to see how the experiment of his presence worked out, apparition-wise.

  “Do you want coffee with your chips?” she enquired, plugging the kettle in.

  “As long as it’s instant,” he replied, smiling in anticipation of the joke to come exactly as her Dad used to do in times gone by. “I don’t like it real. Like you say, you are what you drink.” The balmy night air seemed to have stirred his intoxication enough to encourage him to exercise his wit, although he obviously still needed practice. The mention of chips prompted him to sit down at the table and begin unwrapping his supper.

  “I’d offer you a proper drink,” Kit said, “but if I keep booze here it never lasts five minutes, so I don’t.”

  “That’s okay,” he assured her.

  The overcast sky had been patient while they were making their way back across town, but now they were indoors the rain evidently felt free to start falling again, albeit in a rather desultory fashion. Because there was nothing but glorified cotton wool and plasterboard between the primrose paint and the roof-tiles the rattle of the drops must have sounded unusually loud to Stephen’s unready ears.

  “No,” Kit told him, before he could ask. “I’m not reading a disco beat into the rainfall. The summer’s not been as bad as all that—it’s dry at least five nights out of seven.”

  “That’s not the point,” the student countered, perhaps having decided that it was permissible to challenge her assertions now that they were actually in the allegedly-haunted room. “All kinds of sounds are bound to seem different in an oddly-shaped space like this. It’s not just the peculiar combination of textures—tiles, roofing felt, plasterboard. The geometry of the space affects the acoustics, and being at the
top of a multiple-occupancy house is bound to produce an unsteady trickle of muffled noises, not to mention an unsteady permeation of odorous compounds.” He was looking down at his feet, but that was because he was inspecting the frayed and ill-fitted carpet, not because he was worried about the stink that might emerge if he managed to get his shoes off, or because he was ashamed to be spouting a load of pseudointellectual bullshit.

  “Even if it’s all in my mind,” Kit pointed out, as she poured just-boiled water into the two mugs she’d set on the floor beside the trunk, “it’s still a problem. If all it took was pulling myself together, I’d do it. We don’t do hysteria where I come from. Or prozac.”

  “You do John Smith’s,” he observed.

  “I wouldn’t, if three lousy pints started me seeing ghostly shadows in the walls. And no, I didn’t do enough E and acid in my clubbing days to fry my brain. Nor am I missing all the old boyfriends I left pining away up north. If my mind had to compensate for any kind of withdrawal, I’d be dreaming of moors on the horizon and scallops, not goat-kissing working girls, okay?”

  “You’ve thought about this quite a lot, haven’t you?” he said, grudgingly.

  “It’s getting on my nerves,” she admitted. “It’s the pattern, see. Every day, in every way, it’s not getting any better. Where’s it going to end?”

  “You could move. Another room, if not another place. If blokes don’t have any trouble up here, let one of them have the room. Or are you afraid that she’ll follow you downstairs?”

  “I don’t run away,” Kit said, tersely. She meant it. Coming down here wasn’t running away, no matter what Mum might think. “I don’t want to get into any bad habits just because I’m down here in the decadent south, a mere thirty-five miles from New Sodom.”