by Jack Dann
‘You’re a ghost,’ Charles said.
‘That’s more like it.’
‘You don’t seem very frightening.’
‘They all say that at first. That’s the come-on, see. Start out easy. Build up to it. They never tell you about that in ghost stories. What it really involves.’
‘Like what?’ Charles asked.
‘How we adjust the mind, the feelings. Being in charge of something means everything. That’s what it’s all about, living or dead.’
‘I never knew.’
‘See? It’s the thing that matters most. It’s like a work of art really, judging the moment, bringing up the disquiet, the dread. Hard to believe it right now, I know, Mr —?’
‘Ratray. Charles Ratray. Charles.’
‘Good, Charles. Always try for first names. That’s part of it. I’m Billy. Billy Wine. See, much less threatening. They’ll tell you about me in town.’
‘Then you should let them do that. I’ll ask around. Do this another night.’
‘Too late, Charles. Charlie. Had your chance. They should have told you about Billy Wine already. Bad death. Awful death. Five people at the funeral. Disappointing all round, really.’
‘So now you’re making up for it.’
‘That’s it exactly. Hey, I like you, Charles. You’re quick. You’re interested.’
‘That won’t change anything.’
‘Not a bit. Not at all. You took this road. But no one told you? No one at the pub? No one at the dairy?’
‘About the road? No. Haven’t been here long. Will I survive this?’
‘Probably not. But you have to understand. I don’t get many along this road so I like to draw it out. Sometimes I misjudge the heart business. Scare folks too much.’
‘I thought ghosts just gave you a quick scare and that was it.’
‘That’s the quick shock approach. The public relations side of it. We can do far more. That name you said. Fooly. We like to bring the victim — the subject — the scaree — to the point where they’re not sure if it’s real or in their heads. You get much more panic once you get to that point.’
‘Maybe you could just give me a quick scare now and I can come back tomorrow night.’
‘Hey, you’re a real kidder. You wouldn’t, of course. Surprised no one told you about me though.’
‘Maybe you had something to do with that.’
‘Boy, you’re quick. Charlie, I really like you. Where are you staying?’
‘Out at the Dickerson place. Six-month lease.’
‘Well, there you go then. That explains it. They probably figured you for a relative of old Sam Dickerson. Shutters would’ve come down the minute you said.’
‘Or maybe you did something to stop them telling me.’
Billy Wine grinned. ‘That too. Lots of things are possible.’
Charles smiled to himself, at least meant to. It was actually rather pleasant walking in the night; windy, blustery really, but cool, not cold. The grass was soughing on the verge. The trees were tossing. There were house lights far off to the right — and more behind when he glanced back, the homes of people he didn’t know yet, and right there, the patch of light where Kareela sat in the night, like the glow of a ship at sea.
He kept alert for the fear, the thinnest edge of terror, but felt nothing. Perhaps he was immune. Maybe it didn’t work for him.
‘Should be feeling it soon,’ the fooly said. ‘Your senses will go a bit, bring in weird stuff. You smelling the sea yet?’
Charles couldn’t help it. He sniffed the wind.
And he did. He could. The salt tang, impossibly far away but there. Charles smelled it.
Billy Wine’s eyes glittered, a paring of smile beneath. ‘Seabirds?’
They were barely there, thin, far-off, wheeling four, five fields away, but there.
‘Why the sea?’ Charles asked.
‘Always loved the sea,’ Billy Wine said. ‘You hearing trains?’
Trains, yes! Nowhere near as surprising; there was a station at Kareela, after all.
‘But steam trains!’ the ghost of Billy Wine said, anticipating.
And that’s what Charles heard, chuffling, snuffling, stolen back, there and gone, there and gone.
‘Circus!’
A calliope whooped and jangled in the night, forlorn, distant, dangerous.
‘Weeping!’
And, oh, there was. Full of ocean-lost, clown-sad, missed-train sorrow, desolate on the wind. Billy Wine brought it in. Made Charlie do the bringing.
‘Getting you ready, Charlie, my man! Think now — all the things you’ve had taken from you. All the things you never got to say. All the bitter.’
Not bitterness. Bitter. Billy had the way of it, the ghosting knack, sure enough.
Charles kept walking. ‘What can I give? What can I trade?’
‘Trade? Don’t need souls. Nothing to hold ‘em in. Old fooly joke.’
‘Fooly?’
‘Just using your terminology, Charlie, my man. Don’t get excited! Maybe an invitation to the Exchange. That’d be worth something.’
‘I can go back. See what I can do.’
‘You wouldn’t. You couldn’t. They don’t see you. They served you up.’
‘You did that,’ Charles said. ‘Stopped ‘em warning. Tweaked their minds.’
The eyes glittered. The paring of smile curved up.
‘Taking care of business,’ Billy said. ‘It’s what you do.’
‘I’m nearly home.’
‘You’ll never get there.’ The smile sharpened. ‘Walking’s getting harder, isn’t it?’
It was. Suddenly was.
Charles felt so heavy. His legs were leaden, wooden, twin stumps of stone. This was feeding Billy, Charles saw. The power. The finesse.
Billy read the moment. ‘Time for a flourish. Look how scary I’ve become.’
And he had. Oh, how he had, Charles saw, felt, knew.
That awful darkness. That blend of glitter-gaze, crimp-step and pared darkling smile. In spite of everything, knowing it was coming, Charles saw that Billy was the same but not the same. Never could be.
The wind was slippery now, pushing, coddling, blustery and black-handed. The grass blew, hushed and blew again, reeling them in. No, not them. Him. Him.
Billy Wine lunged, strode, tottered, stayed alongside yet flowed ahead, all at once. He was sharps, dagger edges, razor-gaze and guttering grin. The dark of him was too much, too close, too stinking hot.
But mostly it was the gut-wrench suicide cocktail inside Charles Ratray, three parts dread, two parts despair, one blossoming nip of revulsion slipped in sideways.
Charles could barely breathe. He staggered, breath to breath, inside and out, fighting to remember what breathing was, what walking was, what self was.
This deadly, crimp-stepped Billy truly was good at what he did.
Close up, there was his sudden, awful intimacy, while out there, oceans closed over ships, birds plucked at eyes, calliopes screamed into the fall of colliding trains, and Katie was denied, denying, again and again.
Charles screamed and stilted and propped, fought to breathe. No part of the night was satisfied to hold him. It pushed him away, hurled him from itself back into itself, made panic from the stilting, flailing pinwheel he had become. He screamed and yelled because Billy wanted him to.
Though Billy knew to stop, of course, to relax and savour, to settle for shades and ebb and flow. He had a whole night, a whole splendid, new-to-town Charlie Ratray to teach the last of all lessons.
But Charles managed to keep his sense of self through it all, did manage, and he let the Dickerson house be the focus, off in the distance, its single yard light showing where it was.
‘I made it,’ Charles said, knowing how Billy would respond.
‘Did you? Have you? Are you sure?’
The house swept away, one field, two, road threading between, single yard light jiggering, dancing off like a small tight comet.
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‘Too bad,’ Billy Wine said. ‘We’re almost at the end of it.’
‘We are?’
‘It’ll be quick. You’ll be fully aware.’ Billy sounded gleeful.
‘But it’s still early —’
‘I know. And do be disappointed! That bad death I had. Only five people to see me off. It makes you hard.’
‘But you have the whole night. Surely there’s more fear? More dread?’
‘No need. All that’s just window dressing anyway. Absolute clarity is best. Just the anguish. The disappointment. Enough despair. You go out knowing.’
‘Billy —’
‘No more, Charlie. Time to go. It’ll hurt just a bit. Well, quite a bit. Well, a lot actually, pain being what it is. But maybe you’ll get to come back. Some do.’
‘Maybe I already have.’
And Charles Ratray was gone, spiralling away as a twist of light on the wild dark air.
‘Hey! What? What’s that?’ Billy Wine demanded, but knew, had even imagined the possibility, though had never ever expected it.
For who else watched the watchmen, hunted the hunters, haunted the haunters?
Who else fooled the foolies?
All that remained of Billy Wine stood on the dark windy road and felt the ache of disappointment tear at him again and again.
AFTERWORD
There’s a scene in Ridley Scott’s fine 2000 film Gladiator when, with grudging admiration, Derek Jacobi as Gracchus remarks on Commodus’s shrewd PR move of staging over a hundred days of gladiatorial games and says: ‘Fear and wonder. A powerful combination.’
That’s what constantly motivates me as a writer: delivering fear and wonder for all sorts of useful, straightforward, sometimes very important reasons as someone living in the early twenty-first century. Like many writers in the field, I never set out to be a horror writer per se, or any sort of genre writer for that matter, seeing such things as fixed prices on variable goods and useful only to marketing departments, booksellers and librarians.
But quite early in my career I saw that I was being constantly drawn to what can usefully be called tales of unease, to this constant braiding of fear and wonder. As part of this, I found myself fascinated by the nature of ghosts and hauntings, and the very human preoccupations and perceptions of reality that keep bringing us back to these things. Terror (in its potent, original, pre-1980 meaning) has always been infinitely more powerful than horror, so I’ve rarely been that interested in the easy shocks of gore and gross-out. I guess I’ve always sensed, intuitively, that the power of the very best horror writing lay in that careful and splendid hesitation between the thrill of the disquieting moment, the disturbing situation for the human mind experiencing it, and its resolution, often with the too easily given ‘oh, is that all’ of the inevitable supernatural explanation. I sensed that the supernatural is rarely terrifying once it’s shown for what it is, that the real chills, the real creepiness, lay in all that precedes its arrival. Such a simple realisation: that the real impact, the real punch, be given in the mood, the feel, the staging. The nifty ending is still the sine qua non, of course, but the getting there is just as important and often much more so.
From the beginning, I found myself — sometimes successfully — exploring the time-honoured tropes and traditions of the ghost story in tales like ‘The Bullet That Grows in the Gun’, ‘The Daemon Street Ghost-Trap’, ‘Scaring the Train’ and ‘One Thing About the Night’. In the light of these tales, ‘The Fooly’ seems an inevitable companion piece, a small story built around an idea so simple that it was quite irresistible. Once again it let me consider what ghosts are and exactly how and why they do what they do, this time with a touch of Bradbury (always pay your dues, Terry D.), a touch of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (pay ‘era, you hear!) and a touch of the tall tale that’s really quite Australian. I’m inordinately fond of ‘The Fooly’. Part of me kept wanting to make it larger, have it stay around a bit longer, but small things can read large and every time I re-read this one it feels bigger than it is. And just maybe, to recall Derek Jacobi’s words, the combination is there enough to work the spell.
— Terry Dowling
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NEVERLAND BLUES
ADAM BROWNE
Author and young Turk ADAM BROWNE, with tongue firmly in cheek, humbly describes himself as ‘the love child of Henry Darger and Virginia Woolf, raised under the foster care of Mozart and Flannery O’Connor, tutored by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, L Frank Baum, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells, and allowed to run the streets with pals Mervyn Peake, Lewis Carroll, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hieronymus Bosch, William Gibson, Cyrano de Bergerac, and certain of the performers from the cabaret of pre-World War II Berlin.’
He is the recipient of the Aurealis Short Story Award and has received an Australia Council Emerging Writer’s Grant for his novel-in-progress Phantasmagoriana.
‘Neverland Blues’ showcases Browne’s pyrotechnical talent. He writes that ‘it is a tale about space travel and reaching for the stars, a story that proves that no matter how far some celebrities rise in their careers, they will always want to get just that little bit higher…’
Michael Jackson bobs mothsoft and white in the North African night sky.
His many eyes tic and tick. Expensive lenses shiver into place, swivelling down. He takes in the view.
Morocco. Tangier; the Kasbah; so beautiful, an Aladdin’s Carpet a thousand metres below him.
Wanting to see more, Michael Jackson twitches an aileron. But he’s still clumsy in this body, and the movement is too emphatic. He spins, the city revolving under him, the souk a disordered whirl, the Old Mosque glimpsed then gone, the Oriental Quarter a flash of red and gold …
Remaining calm, he gently corrects, then corrects again, slowing the spin; and soon enough it settles down. The Ibn Batouta Spaceport drifts into view, and he gazes at the exotic vessels on the launch apron, alien designs echoing the Moroccan architecture — pale blue extraterrestrial prows and instrument bays like minarets and holy domes.
His sensitive hull thrills with longing.
He wants to be where those ships have been, visit their worlds, fly the clean spaces between the stars. He wants to swim the lavender vacuum of the Crab Nebula, hear the tolling of the bell-moons that hang among the purple suns of the Great Bear. He wants to witness the blackholes at the centre of the galaxy — so massive, he’s heard tell, that not only light, but also black cannot escape them — blankholes fizzing invisibly at the White Hot Core of the Vast All-Thing …
But he can’t, not yet. Space is lonely, almost definitively so. He needs a friend for the journey, a passenger. Someone like him, a brighteyed innocent with no reason to miss the world.
In recent weeks, he believes he’s found just the boy.
Michael Jackson has been busy since then. He’s been putting steps in place, measures, ways and means. Various of his proxies — some human, some not — have weaved a web of bribes and other inducements to steer the boy closer. And tonight is the night when it all comes together, or falls apart.
Now a subroutine pings an alert: the boy is on the move. Michael Jackson brings his focus down, lenses converging on the city — a fuzz of pixels clearing — highgain cameras finding the boy in the Medina, tracking him. Files pile up. There, the boy’s characteristic skintones glancing from the shiny bowl of a hookah — there, the boy negotiating with another urchin, a dance of sharp quick hand movements — and there again, his crow-coloured hair, his follicular scalp-pattern visible between awnings as he hurries along an alley older than the Christian religion.
Michael Jackson tenses. The boy is approaching the teahouse. He pauses at the entrance. The wait lasts four seconds, an agony for Michael Jackson.
The boy enters.
If he had a mouth with which to do so, Michael Jackson would smile with relief.
Salim, who has a keen sense for such things, knows he is being watched. A gendarme? He think
s not. Another thief, more likely, aiming to steal what Salim has stolen.
Or perhaps one of Uncle Baba’s boys. Or worse, the Uncle himself.
He picks up his pace, doing what he has always done to avoid observation: strategies he took in with his mother’s milk. He pauses, alters his gait, flits into a crowd, out again; deftly navigating the secret trails and inturning alleys of the souk; through strawberry clouds of shisha tobacco; past stalls and pickpockets and tourists …
He glances back several times, hoping to catch out his pursuer. But because he does not think to look into the sky for the beautiful machine that was once the American popstar Michael Jackson, he sees nothing suspicious.
Reaching the teahouse, Salim scans the street once more. Again, nothing: An old Voltswagen petit-taxi, engine compartment sparking; a Nigerian woman drifting along with a bright bundle on her head, her body long and thin and swaying, like someone’s shadow at sunset.
Salim turns and enters. Yellow tiled walls, cool marble floor, ceiling-fans whupping. The music generator is set on Arabic pop — slow yodels, ululations, lovelorn warbles.
Salim smells coffee and lemon juice and frying lamb. His stomach aches yearningly.
He reads the room with a glance. Aliens here and there; monsters and monstresses sitting at tables; a squad of feverdreams lounging by the bar … Salim is unsurprised. Tangier has always been a haven for outlanders. Descended from nomads, Moroccans have a proud tradition of extending lavish hospitality to travellers.
He walks further in, passing a table of sentients from the Large Pathetic Galaxy. Then a thing sitting alone, as hideously beautiful as a deepsea nudibranch, sipping mint tea with a damp slithe of mouthparts. Then another thing like a cross between a gibbon and a flea, poised on a stool, primed, waiting.
He skirts a group of humans; Berbers in djellabas and dusty black head scarves. The clack of dominoes, the resinous stink of kif… One of the men looks at Salim, at the boy’s soft hair and liquid eyes, and mutters to the others. They laugh as Salim walks by.
