Ghosts Know

by Ramsey Campbell

  Shilpa blinks as her lips part. They remain open while she manages to stop blinking and gazes at me. “Graham, she isn’t with us any longer.”

  “I always knew there was more to her. Where’s she working now?”

  “No.” I can’t judge if the word is meant to silence me or to serve as some kind of answer until Shilpa says “She’s gone.”

  I won’t believe what someone unlike me—one of Jasper’s flock, for instance—might assume Shilpa is trying to convey. “Gone where?”

  Her eyes grow full of sympathy, close to overflowing with it With a visible effort she contains it and says “She was coming to see you, Graham. She had something she wanted you to hear.”

  It seems safest just to ask “What?”

  “She didn’t tell anyone, but Trevor thought she’d copied part of one of your shows. Some argument you had with a caller she’d recognised from somewhere else.”

  It must have been Goodchild. She realised who he was before I did; perhaps all the playbacks I searched through caught up with her. I hear my voice complaining or confessing “She never came to me.”

  “She only got as far as the Palace. She was crossing the road.”

  I’m hoping at least not to have to ask, but Shilpa falls silent. “What happened?” I blurt.

  “You know you have to watch out when you’re crossing there. People said she was in a lot of hurry and didn’t look. They said she couldn’t have known—” Shilpa’s determination falters, and she glances past me at the lifts as if hoping to be rescued. With a further effort she says “It was very quick.”

  I’m not far from demanding why I wasn’t told, but I’m too aware of not having listened to Waves for weeks or read a newspaper. Before I can find words Shilpa says “The bus ran over whatever she was bringing.”

  I don’t care about that, but perhaps Shilpa is using it to bring her emotions under control. I don’t suppose I help by asking “When?”

  ‘Just a few days after you were attacked by the canal.”

  At first I’m too confused to speak. “That can’t be right. I’ve seen her since then. She was in her flat and the gym.”

  Shilpa blinks and runs a swift finger under her eyes. “It must have been someone else, Graham.”

  I won’t argue. I’ve left that behind, but I know if I took a polygraph test it would find in my favour. Shilpa lets me stay silent for a few seconds and then says “Would you like me to tell anyone you’re here?”

  “There’s nobody who needs to be told.”

  I thank her, though I’d be unable to sum up why. I’m at the lifts when she says “Graham…”

  I’m not sure I want to hear. I step into the lift before I turn and hold the door open. “She only did a few shows with Derek,” Shilpa says. “I think she was missing you.”

  “Thanks,” I say again, more vaguely still. The shrunken metal cage sinks down the shaft while I do my best not to think of a box being lowered into the earth. Even Kylie Goodchild’s funeral seems like an omen now. On the ground floor Vince appears to have run out of words, and I’ve none. As I step onto the pavement it occurs to me that he must know about Christine. Very possibly he thought I did.

  The street looks little more than two-dimensional, not just for my lack of an eye. When I head towards the Palace a wind breathes down my neck. It feels like a reminder of autumn if not of winter. As the wind moves onwards a stray page of newspaper lifts its head on the pavement in front of me. The printed sheet puts me in mind of a poster, but before lean make out the headline the pretence of life subsides, and the page slithers into the traffic. I’m making for the junction when my eye is caught by a word on a poster outside the Palace.

  Is it Christine? Surely it can’t be Goodchild. No, it’s Good Times, the tide of a production that means nothing to me. People are strolling like sightseers along Oxford Street and Oxford Road, past the Palace and the Palace. Here’s where someone poked Graham Wilde’s eye out, and here’s where they ran over Christine Ellis. I loiter at the crossing, no matter how many people scowl at me whenever the pedestrian lights turn green. I don’t know what I’m expecting: to identify where Christine died, or to glimpse her in the crowd? I’ve done neither and very little else when a car halts at the lights with its radio on loud. It’s tuned to the news, and Sammy Baxter says that Robert Goodchild has been charged in connection with his daughter Kylie’s death.

  It feels like some kind of liberation, and I’ve only one way to celebrate—one person left to do it with. I cross the road once the lights have made it safe, though I feel disloyal to Christine for waiting. The gust of wind that follows me into the Dressing Room turns over a beer mat like a card trick on the table nearest to the door. Benny’s on his own, and looks uncertain whether to welcome my company. “Buggeration, Mr Wubbleyou,” he cries, perhaps because he thinks there’s only me to hear. “What have you gone and done to yourself now?”

  “Nothing. I can’t live with. Give me the usual, Benny. A drink and a joke. Tell me one about a blind man.”

  Benny fills a wineglass from a bottle in a refrigerator beyond the footlights and faces me again. “I can’t think of any, Mr Wubbleyou.”

  “A man goes into Frugoptics and asks them what’s up with his eyes. When they try to explain he says don’t blind me with science.” Once Benny has given a tentative laugh, whether out of nervousness or because he isn’t certain he’s heard the punch line, I say “Want to know the best joke? You’re looking at him.”

  “You shouldn’t think like that, Mr Wubbleyou.”

  “It’s true, though. It’s conclusive. I should have been able to see it with half an eye.” I swing around, nearly spilling the drink, and raise my glass to Jasper’s poster. “Here’s to a real psychic.”

  “You’ve changed your mind about him, then.”

  “Not about our Frankie. Not while I’m alive,” 1 vow and turn back to the bar. “Me. People kept saying I was psychic but I couldn’t see it. I can now.”

  Benny struggles not to appear wary, but the footlights won’t let him. “What can you see, Mr Wubbleyou?”

  “What I’ve lost and never knew I had.”

  He looks more doubtful than ever, and all at once I hear myself. I sound like one of Jasper’s followers, exactly the kind of evangelising proselyte I wouldn’t want to be alone with in a bar. I think of telling Benny I’m drinking for two if not three, but it mightn’t strike him as humorous. “Don’t look so serious, Benny,” I tell him. “It’s just my story. It’ll be my novel.”

  Perhaps it will. As I take my drink to a booth I see myself dodging from mirror to mirror. Not just the eye-patch and the stitches that resemble stage make-up, but the spotlights as well, give me the look of a performer, even if I can’t decide what sort. Is the world ready for a psychic who makes jokes? My spine doesn’t ache much now, and I rest it against the wall in a corner of the booth. While I can’t predict the future, if Hannah Leatherhead should turn up I might pitch a different kind of show to her. The notion prompts me to lift my glass, and Benny manages to come up with a grin. He must think I’m raising the glass to him, since he can’t see anybody at my back. Nevertheless I seem to feel both of them at my shoulders, laying a hand there for less than a breath.

  Acknowledgements

  Jenny helped as always, not least by being my first reader. John Llewellyn Probert advised on mutilation. Back in the seventies Julie Davis, one of my editors at Millington, suggested a way of reconceiving The Face That Must Die to make it more emotionally involving. Though I didn’t take her advice, there’s a sense in which Ghosts Know develops the theme she thought I should have made central to the earlier novel. An episode of Derren Brown Investigates gave me useful insights into the methods of stage psychics, and the Merseyside Skeptics web site (www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk) helped too. Once again Gert Jan Bekenkamp sustained me with food and wine and music. While Graham Wilde isn’t based on Roger Phillips, his show often echoes Roger’s phone-in on Radio Merseyside, the station where
I reviewed films for nearly forty years until the BBC saved themselves the price of a pizza.

  Speaking of food as I so often do, and having as usual invented the odd eatery for the purposes of the tale, let me list a few favourite Manchester restaurants: East Z East and the Spicy Hut (Indian), Red N Hot and the Red Chilli (Szechuan), the Middle Kingdom (Szechuan and Hunan), the Yang Sing, Pearl City and the Rice Bowl (Cantonese), the Bern Brasil (Brazilian), the Chaophraya and Koh Samui (Thai), and the Armenian Taverna.

  I worked on the first draft of Ghosts Know at the fine Matina Apartments in Pefkos, Rhodes. Passages were also written at Hypericon in Nashville, Fantasycon in Nottingham, the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester, Mythoscon in Phoenix and the Days Inn Hotel in Shoreditch.