Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story

by Brian Stableford

  How many ghosts have I seen without ever realizing that they were ghosts? Kit wondered. How many of them might have reached out to me, if I’d let them? How many times have I turned away, without even realizing that I was doing it? How many deals could I have made with the dead, if I’d only known how?

  Apart from the words he’d spoken, Michael hadn’t made the slightest sound, but there was a rustling in the bushes after he’d gone. Kit leapt to the conclusion that the dog had come back, and she stiffened instinctively—but it wasn’t a dog. It wasn’t any kind of animal she had ever seen before, but she knew that it couldn’t be a unicorn because it had two horns. It was like a miniature deer. It stopped as soon as it caught sight of her, but it didn’t immediately turn away. It seemed to sense that she was a friend of the dead, whose presence here was more appropriate than its own. As soon as she moved, though, it turned and ran, vanishing into the shadowy thicket.

  When Kit left the cemetery she ran into a couple of drunken young men making their way across the junction from the Jack-in-the-Box. One of them tried to bar her way, not because he had any real evil intent but because he’d had enough to drink to persuade himself that he was immune from any responsibility to control himself. He was a cheerful drunk; whatever he’d been drinking, he hadn’t yet turned to bitterness.

  “Whatcher doin’ in there?” he asked.

  Kit didn’t deign to reply. She didn’t need to tell him that she’d been making a deal with the godfather of the local dead, or that she was under his protection now. All she had to do was look him in the face, coldly and stonily.

  He got the message, and got out of her way. He even said sorry, although he didn’t mean it.

  She had to walk all the way home, because there were no buses to be had, and it was beneath her professional dignity to call a taxi.

  Nobody bothered her, even though she was alone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rose Selavy was waiting for her, not on the settee but in her bed. She wasn’t in her working clothes this time—except, in a way, that she was, because unlike Kit, Rose Selavy had the option of working in the nude. Not that what followed Kit’s return was work, or even sex, in spite of the result. It certainly wasn’t any kind of rape and it didn’t seem to Kit that it could possibly qualify as necrophilia, given that she was no longer wholly committed to the land of the living herself. Nor was Rose cold, as Michael had been; if anything, she was slightly feverish...unless, of course, she was all fever, material only in the sense that she was perceptible rather than in the much narrower sense that she’d have made an impression on the bathroom scales.

  Kit wouldn’t have said, afterwards, that she’d enjoyed it particularly. It wasn’t really a matter of enjoyment, but it wasn’t a matter of whoring either. It wasn’t business, or charity, or something that just had to be done. Intercourse with the dead didn’t fit any of those categories. It was something else entirely. It wasn’t Satanism any more than it was hedonism. Even the Electric Hellfire Club, Kit realised, hadn’t quite got a grip on what it meant to kiss the goat, although they were probably doing the best they could given that they and their fans were so determinedly alive. The image of Satan had always been confused with the Great God Pan, else there’d never have been a goat to kiss, and what she was doing—had done—was perfectly natural, in a way, albeit by defiantly unnatural or supernatural standards. Maybe it wasn’t exactly making love, but that was a stupid phrase because love ought not to need making, especially between lovers.

  The dead, Kit knew—or was, at least, convinced—couldn’t go to Hell any more than they could party eternity away in Heavenly Ecstasy. The dead no longer had the equipment necessary to feel pain or pleasure. They could borrow equipment from the living, if only for a few fugitive moments, but they couldn’t make them a basis for lifelong motivation because they weren’t alive any more. Their bodies were rotting in the ground, their ashes huddling in urns, more-or-less-slowly fading away into molecular anonymity. The ancient dead were no longer even relics, having been entirely reabsorbed into the routine chemical transactions of the biosphere. They were distributed through the meat and grain the living ate, the beer and cider the living drank...even the clean and polluted air that the living breathed. They were everywhere and nowhere.

  What Kit actually said to her dead lover, afterwards, was: “I don’t understand why. I don’t understand what you wanted, what you felt. Was it just for old time’s sake—a last farewell to the fictions of the flesh?”

  “In a way,” Rose Selavy replied. “I died young. Not as young as Michael, but young enough to know how much I’d missed out on.”

  “Surely that was the one thing you didn’t miss out on.”

  “You really don’t understand, do you? It’s hard enough to find someone who can see, and just being seen is next to nothing. To find someone who can feel...to have that kind of effect. You have no idea how popular you could be if the word got around—even in a place like this, at a time like this. If there were a war on, or even an epidemic, you’d be out of your mind in no time. There are advantages to living in the twenty-first century, for someone who can commune with the dead. You don’t need to worry, though. If I couldn’t keep you to myself, introducing you to Michael was the next best thing. You’ll find out one day, though. You’ll walk the Earth far longer than me, perhaps longer than Michael. You know too much, you see.”

  Kit had been thinking hard, trying to make some sense out of the whirlpool of paradoxes. “So the ones who get stuck are ones who died young?” she queried. “It really is a matter of having had unfulfilled lives that keeps them here, lurking in the shadows hoping to be seen, trying to make their presence felt.”

  “Not exactly,” Rose told her. “The innocent don’t linger, although I wouldn’t dare to presume that where they go is bliss. Who’s to say what counts as unfinished business in the ultimate reckoning? Far fewer die content than go on...and the dead who remain are no more alike than the living.”

  “But where do they go on to, if not to Heaven or Hell? Is it really just a matter of finding the white light, becoming one with the white light?”

  “You know it’s not,” Rose Selavy said, sympathetically but not sadly. “You know what we need from you. If you don’t know why, you’ll either work it out or find it out when the time comes. You can see, you can feel...you can imagine. You have to want it too. In a way, you have to want it for us as well as for yourself, because what we can want is limited by our condition...but you felt that for yourself, just now. I can supply the imaginative stimulation, but you’re the one who supplies the urge, the need, the sensation...all the fabulous fictions of the flesh. Don’t open your eyes....”

  But Kit had already opened her eyes, and found herself alone. Was she more confused than before, or less? She couldn’t tell. Making contact with the dead was like that; there was no easy way to tell whether you were learning or regressing, becoming stronger or weaker. Was the assertion that she too would be a ghost one day, and one that would linger far longer than most, a threat or a promise?

  She couldn’t tell. She didn’t even know whether it made sense to ask the question. But she knew that Rose was right about some things. She knew that Rose was right about it being hard enough, even for the living, to find someone who could see you, someone in whom the sight of you stimulated feelings, someone on whom you could have a measurable effect. Because it wasn’t just the dead who had problems with people refusing to remember them, writing them off as something unworthy of being properly committed to memory. It wasn’t just the dead whose places in the world were neglected, left to retreat into wilderness. It wasn’t just the dead who knew the meaning of loneliness. It wasn’t just the dead who loitered unable to find their way to where they had to go because they didn’t know where it was they ought to be going. It wasn’t just the dead who needed the gift of other people’s attention, other people’s fervor, other people’s bodies in order to animate the fabulous fictions of the flesh. It was
n’t just the dead who could look into mirrors and see no reflection, because there was nothing to reflect but emptiness.

  She stopped herself then, because she was becoming a trifle maudlin. In any case, she had made a deal, not with the Devil but with the dead. She had made her own terms, and now had the authority, as well as the power, to put an end to her haunting. She did want to put an end to her haunting. She didn’t want a long-term relationship with Rose Selavy, not because she had any principled objection to a kind of liaison that was not, after all, lesbian necrophilia, but because she had a life to lead among the living, a home to make away from home, a vocation to follow wherever it might lead. She was glad that she had met Michael, because it had helped to clarify matters. She was glad that Stephen had been able to point her in the right direction, even if he had chickened out. Everything was okay. Everything was going to be okay. She had a deal, and it would all be sorted. Not tomorrow, or the next day, but soon. She was full entitled to sleep the sleep of the just—just what? Dad had always added, way back when. but it was only a rhetorical question—and she did.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kit had no idea whether Stephen would ring, and she didn’t want to get hung up on anticipation. She’d been there before, and knew what it was like to have doubt eating away at her. But that was the good thing about being on the buses, going back and forth along precisely-measured routes, stopping at all the stops, collecting all the fares and counting out all the change. Driving a bus wasn’t like driving a car or an artic, because if you were driving a car or an artic your journey had a beginning and an end. You put yourself into the stream of traffic and you stayed there until you got out again, or at least did your level best to stay there until it was time to get out. In a bus, on the other hand, you were forever inserting yourself into the traffic stream only to ease yourself out of it a couple of hundred yards further on. In a bus you were in and out of the stream all the time, but never a part of it, even on routes where there weren’t any bus lanes to emphasize your independence. And bus routes never ended, even if they weren’t actually defined as circulars, because the termini were just places where you turned around in order to come back again.

  There were shifts, of course, but they only defined when you got on the bus and when you got off, and when you switched from one route to another. The beginning of a shift wasn’t the same as the beginning of a journey, even if you had to collect the bus from the night-garage and set it on the road, and the end of a shift wasn’t the same as the end of a journey even if you had to take the bus back to the night-garage and put it away for the hours of deepest darkness. It was all just part of the same routine: the eternal cycle, the irresistible timetable. It was a routine in which you could absorb yourself and lose yourself, surrendering the duty of anticipation and the curse of doubt. It was a cycle in which you could immerse yourself, abandoning all sense of the idiosyncratic and the unusual, like life without angst, or like consciousness without the perennial awareness that it would eventually have to end. It was a vocation, not a job, because it was a way of life and also a way of being, and even a way of taking yourself a little way outside of life and outside of being, and perhaps winning free of anxiety, fear and dread.

  It wasn’t possible for Kit to decide, afterwards, whether Friday had been a good day or not, whether she’d enjoyed it or not, or even whether she’d really lived it or not, but in the end, when it was gone, she had a certain sense of satisfaction in having endured, performed and survived it.

  On the way home she was accosted in the street by Mrs. Gaunt, who seemed to be determined to haunt her even though she wasn’t yet dead.

  “I asked around,” Mrs. Gaunt lied. “I found out more about your Rose. Do you fancy a cup of tea?”

  “I can’t right now,” Kit said, feeling guilty because she knew that she had built up Mrs. Gaunt’s hopes and that Mrs. Gaunt would be right to feel cheated. “I’m expecting a phone call. Another time.”

  And, as it happened, Stephen did ring—not that she cared much by then, one way or the other, or had made even the sketchiest plans as to what she was going to say when he did. She was, after all, at least five years older than he was, maybe six, and certainly wasn’t an adolescent any longer.

  “Kit,” he said, when Liz had fetched her from her room. “It’s Stephen. I’m free again. Do you want to meet up in the Rifleman—or I could come over to the Fox and Goose, if you prefer?”

  What she actually said in reply, surprising herself a little, was; “I saw something really weird in the cemetery last night.”

  “Really? What?”

  “A strange animal, like a tiny little deer.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, ever the student, ever the smartarse. “I heard about those. Urban deer. They’re muntjak, imported from the far east by some Arab who bought one of the big country estates between here and Henley. They roam all over the place, maybe in the hope of finding the kinds of bushes they used to graze on back home—except that they must be third- or fourth-generation by now, so they probably don’t even know what they’re looking for. Was that a yes or a no to meeting up? I can show you the campus if you like. We have lots of rabbits. And rats, unfortunately. Can’t pick and choose. The rats eat almost all of the annual duckling crop, but the geese are fierce enough to protect their chicks, and the grebes live way out in the middle of the lake, so they do okay too.”

  Kit was tempted to say “Not tonight—I’ve got something on” but it would have been a lie, and there was still a chance that Stephen might be able to help her out with the dead. Even though he still didn’t believe in ghosts, in spite of what he’d seen, he still had something to contribute. It wouldn’t matter, in the end, how much he eventually had to write off on the assumption that he’d been dreaming or deluded. He could still use his intelligence to help her negotiate a route, and his clinging to the conviction that he was merely moving through a dream might actually be a help, in some ways, because it would liberate him from all the anxiety, fear and dread he’d have been obliged to feel if he’d realized that it was all real.

  “I’ll meet you at the gates at Cemetery Junction,” she said. “I can probably get there by seven-thirty if the next 17 runs to schedule. That’ll give us a couple of hours of useful daylight.”

  “You want to look for Violet Leverhulme’s grave?”

  “Not hers, his. I already know who she is.”

  “Whatever,” Stephen said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic—but he hadn’t dumped her, and he didn’t seem to be ready to. Maybe he’d needed time to think in order to reach that conclusion, but it was a result of sorts. “Okay,” he added. more positively. “I’ll be outside the gates at seven-thirty. We can take it from there.”

  He was as good as his word, although she was ten minutes late, because it was Friday. The rush hour slowdown on a Friday lasted from four till eight in the evening, because of additional rituals associated with the weekend, and the buses couldn’t keep to the timetable even with the aid of the bus lanes.

  “Whose grave are we looking for?” Stephen wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” Kit confessed. “He said I could call him Michael, but that might not have been the name he was born with—or died with.”

  “So how are we supposed to find it, if it’s even here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll feel a connection. Maybe I won’t—but I ought to look. I want to look. Wanting’s enough of a reason, while we’re alive. Might as well make the most of it—we’ll be a long time dead, and if we get stuck here as ghosts it won’t be easy to get by without being able to want.”

  “I thought your ghost did want something. I thought you thought that she was rather insistent about it.”

  “It’s not as simple as that. I think perhaps she has to borrow a little of my wanting in order to have some of her own. I don’t think she really wants to go on any more than she really wants to be here, but she thinks that she ought to want to...or, at least, that she ought to want some
thing. That’s why she turned to Michael as well as to me. He’s been dead a lot longer. If anyone in these parts understands what being dead is all about, it’s probably him. If they had students among the dead he’d probably be just coming up to graduation.”

  “So what is he—an Art Historian?”

  The question was deliberately fatuous, but Stephen was still playing along with her, after a fashion. “Maybe so,” Kit said, by way of reply.

  Stephen laughed, as if it were a joke. “Well,” he said, “I suppose that even if the dead have to leech their phantom feelings from the living, they must have aesthetic sensibilities of their own. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist at all in any meaningful sense.”

  “I know what aesthetic sensibilities are,” she told him, as he hesitated over the final full stop, as if wondering if she’d actually got the joke. “I may be a bus driver, but I’m not fucking stupid.”

  “I know,” he said, slightly tight-lipped.

  Kit led the way to where she’d seen the miniature deer. It was far more obvious in daylight that most of the graves in this part of the cemetery were badly overgrown, even though there was clear residual evidence of an annual cutback. In the parts of the cemetery that the bushes hadn’t yet invaded the occasional once-over with a strimmer was obviously adequate to keep unwanted herbage at bay, and the gravel paths must have been periodically soaked in weed-killer, but way back here there was too much woody material in far too many aggressive stems for the strimmers to accomplish much more than flaying the superficial foliage, and there were no paths to scour. Many of the gravestones had fallen over; no one buried here had descendants who cared enough to compensate for the council’s lack of effort. There were monuments here that dated back to the nineteenth century, and there was no way to count the anonymous dead whose markers had been made of perishable wood.