Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story

by Brian Stableford

  Shit, Kit said—silently, this time. If it isn’t one ghost it’s another. Why can’t they all just leave me alone. Why can’t they all just GET A FUCKING LIFE!

  But that, of course, was the one thing ghosts couldn’t do—not, at least, without resorting to extraordinary measures like reincarnation. Being, as Dad had always insisted, depended on the beer, and ghosts didn’t drink...except that Mum, who had somehow transformed herself into a haunter of sorts, hardly did anything but drink nowadays, and had a miraculous ability to become exceedingly bitter even while quaffing sweet sherry. She was the one, she realized, as her argument doubled back on itself like a striking snake with schizophrenia, and swallowed its own tail, who hadn’t quite, in spite of all her efforts, got a life. It was, after all, she who was here all alone, watching a failed pilot derisively remarketed as a Channel 5 movie.

  But she wasn’t having that. She was a Yorkshirewoman, and Yorkshire folk didn’t do self-pity. She was a bus driver. She had a purpose in life. She had a career. She had the option of getting pally with Mancunian Liz and Liverpudlian May, in spite of the fact that their names were the wrong way round, hopping on a free bus to Utopia a couple of times a week and joining the throngs of Mammonites who sought news of the future at the Oracle every Saturday. She had all the time in the world.

  The ads ended and the movie resumed. The calculatedly-mismatched couple were in the process of discovering a grudging respect for one another, and were presumably no more than five minutes away from hopping into bed, still wearing their underpants the way everyone had to do on TV, so that they could simulate irresistible—and, as things had obviously turned out, hopeless—animal passion.

  She could hear the Electric Hellfire Club again, but they’d moved on from Rose Selavy’s signature-tune. More of an incantation, Stephen had said, and so it was. Notes repeated over and over and over, although she still had no idea whether it was an offer she couldn’t refuse or a taunt.

  Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss...kiss the goat.

  Kit began to regret that Even Stephen hadn’t called, and to wonder whether he would—and, if so, when. Maybe, she thought, he had served his purpose. Maybe the time had come to ride the free bus to Utopia to see if she could pull something a little more mature and a little more down-to-earth than an apprentice art historian—anything, really, except a bus driver. Or maybe another driver would be even more useful, because rather than in spite of the incestuousness of such a liaison and the fact that news of her every fart would probably get to be common knowledge around the depot. She really ought to make more effort to get cliquey with the other women, even though the two who were her nearest neighbors were both Lancastrians. She really ought to get in on their gossip circuit and their girly nights out.

  Anything, after all, was better than having to jack it all in and go home.

  Kit knew, when she reached that possibility—considering it for the first time as something she might have to do if things continued to get on top of her—that she had to do her utmost to put an end to her fearful reverie. Thinking the unthinkable was one thing, but there were limits even in the realm of desperation.

  The thing to remember, she told herself, was that nothing had actually happened to her, except the curtain rail coming away in her hand, which was clearly her own clumsy fault. Nothing had happened and nothing would. Nothing could. Even if the imaginary caress eventually contrived to go all the way, what would it signify? Merely that she had one hell of an imagination. When she was at school she’d known girls who would have given up cosmetics for a fortnight to learn the secret of hands-free self-abuse.

  Anyway, thanks to Even Stephen, she had some leverage now. She had a plan. On her next day off, or maybe even before then, she would start scouting out the street’s ace curtain-twitcher, in search of the lowdown on Rose Selavy the kinky prossie, and the probably-gruesome manner in which she’d met her end. One way or another, she’d find out exactly what she was dealing with—and once she’d figured out how, she’d get rid of her affliction. If it were humanly possible, she’d lay her ghost before her ghost laid her—or, if necessary, afterwards.

  She felt better when she’d thought that out, even though the only thing she’d really achieved was to lose track of the movie. She no longer had the slightest idea who had the stolen money, or which of the hero’s trusted friends would turn out to have engineered the whole dismal fiasco. But as the movie neared its climax and the night wore on and on, the phenomena sneaked back again. The music, the odors, the sensation that something shadowy that was temporarily imprisoned in the wall beside her bed was struggling to get out....

  Time, alas, was not on Kit’s side. Eventually, she had to try to sleep. Even if she kept her clothes on, she had to try to sleep. She watched the end of the movie, even though she couldn’t begin to care who got killed and who got rich and whether anyone involved would ever get another crack at having their own series, but she was on at six and she certainly didn’t want to watch the sex-and-shopping documentary that was due to follow the movie on 5. She got undressed, as was her habit. She didn’t want to make any concessions now she had begun to make progress in identifying and understanding her oppressor.

  If Rose Selavy was distressed about her cover being blown, though, she certainly wasn’t about to let on. Now that she had been outed as a surrealist fiction, in fact, the phantom whore seemed to be determined to make the most of the implication. Kit had never realized that the sense of smell could lend itself to surrealism as well as any other, but she soon had to admit that the way the stink of what might have been fried onions mingled with the odors of fake Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld, sweaty leather and soft rubber, sour semen and something that probably wasn’t cooking oil no matter how far past its use-by date, was way beyond the limits of the comfortably plausible.

  The shadows within the walls began to emerge from hiding again almost as soon as she’d switched off the ceiling light, no longer needing any assistance from the street light that could not be curtained off. Kit turned her back on the wall as well as closing her eyes, but she knew the shadows were there, not quite hidden by the compromised darkness. She knew they were watching her and she knew they were waiting for something, and she knew that the way the underside of the roof slanted over her bed was menacing, even if the painted plasterboard couldn’t actually fall on top of her. She couldn’t quite shake off the suspicion that something with a horribly hairy arse might be clinging to the slope, ever-ready to extend itself to receive a Chaucerian kiss.

  She could still hear the music, not very loud, not very clear and not very real, but definitely there, bidding once again for centre-stage in the private theatre of her soul. The beat was designed for dancing, as Stephen had observed, but it wasn’t like the superfast clubbing music she was used to. It was more sensuous, like a synthesizer-formulated equivalent of voodoo drums: music that might be featured at a disco for the devil’s party, where the dance-floor was surrounded by sofas in the shape of huge pairs of lips: red-glossy, arse-kissing, goat-getting lips. The lyrics that she couldn’t quite make out were doubly frustrating now that she had a clue as to their origin, but the performers seemed to have moved forward yet again to another track...unless, of course, that they had gone back to the beginning in order to run the whole thing past her yet again.

  The particular combination of beat and lilt that had become so familiar as to be recognizable in the overflow of Even Stephen’s discman was now conspicuous by its absence. Kit kept waiting for it, but it never came. Instead, there were a dozen other tracks, as many of them hummed or muttered in an unaccompanied and off-key voice as were crooned or caroled...and all of them were heard as if from a vast distance, flowing from the twin speakers of some other-dimensional sound-system.

  The worst of it, of course, was the palpable litany of increasingly-insistent touch sensations. It wasn’t so much that they tickled and teased like an over-confident lover, although they did, but that they seemed so knowing, like little gestures only a
long-term lover could make, utterly confident of their sensual significance. Kit had never been touched by a whore, and had never found it necessary to imagine exactly what it might be like to be touched by a whore, but she couldn’t believe that it would be like this. Whenever larval fingers brushed her split ends or rested lightly on her shoulder, or when a spectral thigh rubbed up momentarily against her, or when something that might have been a footloose and fancy-free toe-end depressed the duvet as if it were the fabric of a blouse, as if searching blindly for a nipple or a navel, it was impossible to think that it was merely a client thing, a trick of the trade—not because it was too tender to be anything but a gesture of authentic affection, but because it was too intimate, too personal, too specific, too damned familiar.

  And then there was the follow-through, the pièce-de-resistance, the real thing....

  It was, Kit thought, almost as if the ghost of Rose Selavy were fondly anticipating the moment when Kit’s flesh would be hers: when the revenant whore could touch herself in that same mock-hesitant, unhurried and lascivious fashion—although not, perhaps, in exactly the same way, unless she happened to have been a contortionist as well as a cunt-for-hire.

  But almost was the operative word. No sooner had she formed the thought than Kit became convinced that she had got it wrong. Somehow along the line, her train of thought had gone astray. She had lost the route and missed her stop. No matter how much progress she had made with Even Stephen’s help, she was still two ham sandwiches short of a funeral tea. No matter how hard she tried, she still didn’t know what she needed to know in order to figure it out.

  She still couldn’t work out what on earth the ghost might want of her.

  Kit toyed with the idea that screwing Stephen had actually made things worse, by somehow increasing the hold that Invisible Rose had taken upon her luckless flesh, but she soon set that possibility aside. Stephen might be innocent, but he was on her side. She might not want to fuck him again, because he and she really weren’t relationship material and she wasn’t desperate enough to do it simply because it was easy, but if she started thinking that sex might accelerate the worsening of the haunt she was likely to wind up celibate, and she wasn’t about to be dictated to on matters of that kind now that she had finally contrived to put two hundred miles of desolate Midlands between herself and her ever-censorious mother.

  With all this on her mind and in her flesh it wasn’t easy to get to sleep, but Kit succeeded in the end. She woke up, somewhat to her surprise, in time to switch the alarm off before it rang, and feeling moderately refreshed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By the time she came off shift the following day, Kit was impatient to take Stephen’s advice and track down a local busybody. She didn’t suppose that it would be difficult, and it wasn’t. The Asian family running the local newsagents had only been there for seven years, but the garrulous wife who manned the till in the evenings had an exceedingly keen sense of who was who and what was what, and she didn’t have to rack her brains when Kit asked her if there was anyone living near the hostel who’d been there since the year dot.

  “Mrs. Gaunt, in the basement at number 24,” was the confident answer. “You must have seen her. Comes in for the Daily Mail because she’s too mean to pay the delivery. Always complains about the price we charge for milk and Silk Cut, says we’re exploiting her bad feet. Can’t walk into town or catch a bus to SavaCentre in case she can’t make it back again. Been in the house since the war—brought up her family there but had to sell it to pay debts when her husband died and ended up with just the basement flat. Says she was cheated, but everybody else says she was lucky. Children all moved away, but they drop in to see her most weekends. She’ll tell you all about it if you ask her, and if you can bear it.”

  Kit figured that she might as well take the direct route, so she simply marched over to number 24 and down the steps.

  “Mrs. Gaunt?” she said, when the old lady had hobbled to the door and opened it, carefully keeping the chain on. “My name’s Kit. I live across the road, on the top floor of number 21.”

  “Not from round here, are you?” Mrs. Gaunt observed, suspiciously.

  “I’m from Sheffield,” Kit told her. “I came to work on the buses. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about the house? People say that you’re the most knowledgeable person in the street.”

  The compliment wasn’t sufficient to remove the chain. “What sort of questions?” the old lady wanted to know.

  “Personal things,” Kit said. “Confidential matters—just between you and me, if that’s okay. I’d invite you over to my place for a cup of tea, but there’s a lot of stairs up to the attic and I know your feet are bad.”

  “I seen you,” Mrs. Gaunt told her, defensively. “I knew you was on the buses. Wouldn’t open the door to a stranger. To many thieves and buggers selling stuff. Got to be careful.” She still hadn’t released the chain, but Kit could tell that she was only seeking some ritual reassurance before doing so.

  “It’s important,” Kit said. “You’re probably the only person who can help me.”

  That did the trick. Graciousness didn’t seem to be Mrs. Gaunt’s strong suit, but the old lady had watched more than enough TV over the years to know exactly what politeness required in such situations, so she hobbled off into the kitchen to put the kettle on and stick an extra tea-bag in the pot.

  While Mrs. Gaunt was gone Kit studied the layout of the living-room whose window looked out into the well between the wall of the house and the pavement. Both of Mrs. Gaunt’s ancient armchairs were positioned by the window so that anyone sitting in either one could look up through the railings at the people passing by. The angle was such that average-sized people on the far pavement were only visible from the neck up, but there was a good view of the first- and second-floor windows of the houses opposite. Mercifully, the street was just narrow enough for the top edge of Mrs. Gaunt’s window to eclipse Kit’s attic window from any line of sight except one that required the curious face to be pressed right up against the window.

  The room was cramped, over-burdened with furniture that Mrs. Gaunt had presumably been unwilling to part with when she had been forced out of the rooms above. All of the furniture was old, and some of it might even have passed for antique—moderately valuable, if the distress to which it had been subjected over time had not been so transparently authentic. The walls and ceiling were stained yellow by cigarette-smoke, but the carpet had been recently hoovered, the sideboards had been religiously dusted and the knick-knacks in the cabinets were arrayed with quasi-military precision. Mrs. Gaunt obviously had a tidy mind, or deeply-ingrained habits.

  The tea was unexpectedly good, but Mrs. Gaunt didn’t offer her visitor a biscuit. Given that she was gaunt by nature as well as by name Kit guessed that she wasn’t a biscuit person. She had to be at least seventy, but she looked as if she had a good twenty years in her yet, maybe thirty now that living to a hundred was no longer the marvel it used to be.

  “What did you want to ask me about?” the old lady asked, as she settled herself into the other armchair. Back home, no old lady worth her salt would have posed a question of that sort without adding “love” or “ducks”, but this was the south, where people thanked bus drivers as they got off but always reserved their judgments of intimacy.

  Kit had considered coming clean about the haunting, but had decided that she didn’t want to set off that kind of wildfire gossip right on her own doorstep, so she moved smoothly into the subtle approach.

  “The truth is,” she said, “that we get some very peculiar callers over the road. There are only four women in the house, and we have the top floor and the attic, so we ought to be fairly safe, but it’s not just people ringing the buzzer and talking dirty into the intercom—sometimes they get in. The men laugh it off, but it’s not very nice and it’s really rather disturbing. We can’t understand why it’s happening, but we talked about it and decided it might have something to do with the previ
ous occupants of the house. I wondered if you might be able to cast some light on the matter.”

  “This used to be a nice neighborhood,” Mrs. Gaunt told her. “All families. Handy for the station, see. In the old days, people living here mostly worked up in London. It was a nice town in those days, not too big. Not so expensive neither. Gone to pot, it has. All the houses broken up into flats. Too much riffraff. Town centre’s all fancy pubs now—not safe to walk through it of a night. Gone to the bad.”

  “I understand that,” Kit assured her. “You can’t be very happy about the changes you’ve seen. I suppose that number 21 being turned into a bus drivers’ hostel is just a tiny part of the big picture. But what was it before the council took it over?”

  “Not right,” said Mrs. Gaunt. “That sort of thing was all on the other side of the Oxford Road in my day. Now it’s everywhere. Young girls these days. Horrid.”

  “What sort of thing?” Kit prompted, not wanting to lead her witness in case it tainted whatever evidence might be forthcoming.

  “The sort of thing that brings men to the house at all hours,” the old lady snapped back. “If you’ve got one of those intercom things, you must know what they’re after.”

  “We don’t know why they expect to get it,” Kit pointed out. “We don’t know the house’s history, you see.”

  “It wasn’t that way for long,” Mrs. Gaunt was quick to assure her. “We didn’t want that sort of thing coming in here, None of us did. Police wouldn’t do nothing at first, but we kept on. Wouldn’t put up with it. Took three years, but we got rid. Police wouldn’t do nothing about the knocking shop, or the illegal immigrants, but when they was told about the bootleg fags...that was a different thing altogether. The lever, see—and once they started looking into it, well...landlord scarpered, I heard. Back to God knows where. Never went to auction, mind. Council did some shady deal. Not the same since they closed down the one out at Shire Hall and brought in this new lot.”