I pointed out of the window towards the motorway, where traffic whisked to and fro, intermittently visible through a screen of purpose-planted roadside vegetation. Triple glazing reduced the massed vehicle roar to a low, determined thrum.
“A driver wasn’t paying attention,” I went on. “They came off the slip road and their car got rear-ended by an articulated container lorry going at eighty-five miles an hour. My wife was catapulted through the windscreen and landed on the verge about a hundred feet away. My daughters were crushed. The car was totalled, of course. Nobody survived.”
“That’s awful,” he said sincerely. “My condolences. So you come here as a sort of pilgrimage, then?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, look, I’m sorry to have bothered you.” He drained his coffee and wolfed down the last of the Danish, then rose to go. “It was nice meeting you.”
“There’s no need to be embarrassed,” I said. “People never know how to react when I tell them about the accident. You can stay a little longer if you want. I’d be happy to hear more about your ghost hunting.”
He hesitated. Conflicting emotions played across his face.
“I could do with another coffee,” he said at last. “Even this ditchwater’s better than nothing. You want one? My treat.”
“That’s kind. No, thank you.”
He returned a few minutes later after joining the long queue to be served. This time he added sugar to his coffee straight away. There was no point assuming the second cup was going to taste any better than the first.
“You don’t mind?” he said.
“Chatting with you a while longer? Of course not.”
“It’s just, mine’s a fairly lonely business. All those all-night vigils in the dark. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
“Same here,” I said.
“I’ve just been on one of those, as it happens.”
“An all-night vigil?”
“Yeah, up Sheffield way. An old terraced cottage, classic two-up, two-down. Allegedly the coalminer who used to live there died in a firedamp explosion in the late nineteenth century, and his spirit has lingered around the house ever since. You’re supposed to smell methane first. That’s what firedamp was, an escape of methane gas in the mine. Then you’re supposed to smell burning and hear distant screaming. Then, if you’re really lucky, or unlucky, the miner himself appears, all charred and horrific.”
“And did he, for you?”
“Take a wild guess,” my interlocutor said with a mirthless laugh. “I sat on a badly upholstered settee in that front room for ten hours solid and didn’t smell or hear anything unpleasant, except when the homeowner’s cat used the litter tray in the kitchen.”
“Have you ever come close to seeing a ghost?” I asked. “I mean, has there ever been a moment when you’ve had just the tiniest tingle, the slightest hint of something unnatural?”
He thought about it. “Maybe once or twice. There was a time when I stayed at a B&B in an old Cornish pub. It was an upstairs bedroom where, supposedly, the ghost of a witch comes to you while you’re sleeping and rakes her fingernails through your hair. Around one in the morning, when I was doing my best not to doze off, I thought I heard footsteps. They were in the corridor outside and then they were inside the room itself, or seemed to be. I had the bedside light on and there was nobody in that room but me, and the footsteps got closer and closer, then just stopped. But it was a very old building, and old buildings have floorboards that creak spontaneously. Something to do with the drop in temperature after the central heating goes off.”
“So it could just have been that.”
“It could just have been that, and most likely was.”
“Any other occasion?”
“A glimpse of a shape darting past an open doorway,” he said. “This was at a girls’ boarding school that had closed down and was due to be demolished to make way for a golf course and clubhouse. The school was said to be haunted by the spirits of three pupils who, back in the seventies, made a suicide pact. They hanged themselves in a dormitory using dressing-gown cords. Girls who slept in that dormitory afterwards always complained they could hear these wet, gurgling, rattling sounds, like people being throttled, and would sometimes wake in the middle of the night gasping for breath, as though someone had been strangling them. The teaching staff dismissed it as hysteria, but eventually the dormitory was turned into a classroom, because no one who knew of its reputation was willing to sleep there.”
“And this shape you glimpsed…?” I prompted.
“Could well have been just a shadow. It was a windy night and clouds were racing across the moon. The windows were all uncurtained, letting in the moonlight. I can’t swear it was anything other than that. I certainly didn’t hear any throttled-throat noises or feel as though I was being strangled.”
“You sound disappointed,” I said. “Most people would be relieved.”
“But that’s just it,” he insisted. “I want to see those impossible things. I want there to be unexplainable mysteries and supernatural occurrences and something, anything, other than mundane reality. Look at all this bollocks.” He meant the café, the customers, the bad food, the shrieking children, the scolding parents, the whole raucous, teeming mess. His voice grew impassioned. “It’s all so ordinary, so banal, so fucking tawdry. If this is all there is, then, well, that’s pretty rubbish, don’t you think? There has to be more. Otherwise what’s the point?”
“A rather depressing philosophy.”
“Yeah, it is. No wonder I do what I do. It’s that or get so despondent about the world that I top myself.”
He flapped a hand dismissively in front of him.
“Ah, pay no attention to me,” he said. “I’m tired, and I get grumpy when I’m tired. I just want to get home and sleep. Then I’ll edit the footage I took at the miner’s cottage, stitch it together into a narrative, add a voiceover and a few pieces to camera, and post it. Yet another ghostly non-event. Yet another bit of content for the White Queen’s Dictum for subscribers to comment on.”
“What do they say, your subscribers?”
“Usually they say, ‘Where’s the ghost?’ They want there to be ghosts as much as I do. Some of them get a creepy thrill out of the investigation itself, even if nothing comes of it. Some of them, the self-professed rationalists, like it that I seem to be debunking hauntings and the whole notion of ghosts. Mixed bag, really, but as long as they keep watching, I don’t mind.”
“Could it be,” I said, “that you set your sights too high?”
He frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“You expect a haunting to be spectacular, chilling, exciting, full of horror and dread. You’re hoping for witch’s fingernails and burned miners and hanged schoolgirls. What if hauntings just don’t live up to that? What if hauntings are, in fact, just as ordinary, as banal—as fucking tawdry, to use your own words—as this motorway service station and all the people in it?”
He pondered the idea, his eyes narrowing.
“No,” he said in the end. “I can’t accept that.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason I can’t accept the world being as dull as it is. If hauntings are boring, why bother with them? If they’re no more interesting than, say, doing up your shoelaces or taking a piss, then they might as well not happen at all.”
“I just thought I’d suggest it,” I said.
He, however, did not take kindly to my attempt at giving him a new perspective on his vocation. As far as he was concerned I was trying to knock the legs out from under him, or at the very least dishearten him.
“Don’t you wish,” he said, somewhat peeved, “that the souls of your wife and daughters live on? That they survive somehow, in some non-physical state?”
“What I wish,” I replied, “is that they had never been killed.”
“You must admit, surely, that part of the reason you’re here is that you want a kind of reconnection w
ith them. That’s what’s brought you to this dismal, godforsaken dump where no one in their right mind would come voluntarily. You want to feel near to them again.”
“Your point being…?”
“I’m trying to help you—you and people like you—by showing that there’s a possibility of an afterlife. That’s the aim with my videos. One of these days I’ll capture proof on camera that your instinct is justified, that some residue of your wife and daughters remains in this spot.”
I paused, then said, “Maybe one of these days you will.” I was reluctant to argue with him any further. Our interaction had soured, and I was eager to preserve the note of cordiality it had started on.
He seemed to feel the same. “Well, I really do have to go now. I’ve got a hundred more miles ahead of me before I’m home. Thanks for letting me bend your ear.”
As he stood, he extended a hand towards me to shake.
I did not take it.
He frowned. “That’s how it’s going to be, is it?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
“I see. If I caused offence, I didn’t mean to.”
“No, it’s all right.”
But he was ashamed, and hurried off with some mumbled apologies and a curt “Goodbye”.
I watched him thread his way between the tables, becoming lost amid the clamour and bustle. I pictured him returning to his car, getting behind the wheel, starting up, heading back out onto the motorway to rejoin the ever-rolling streams of traffic.
“Take care on the slip road,” I murmured.
A little later, I myself got up and drifted outdoors. I wandered over to a break in the verge which afforded a view of the motorway junction. Vehicles merged and converged and overtook like dancers in some infinitely complex piece of choreography.
I thought of the driver whose inattention had caused the deaths of my wife and daughters.
I thought, too, of the hapless haulier who hadn’t been able to stop his lorry in time and had gone ploughing into the back of our family car.
I wished I had been more careful on the slip road. I wished I had taken a look in the wing mirror rather than pulling out blithely, unthinkingly into the slow lane. I longed to move on from that incident, and from this place.
Perhaps someday I would.
Until then, it would remain a yearning for an impossible thing.
Temp Work
LILITH SAINTCROW
THROUGH THE MIRROR
A small slice of ancient, fly-spotted glass was pasted to the trailer’s curved wall, its silvering faded at the edges. On the far end of a small shelf an ancient hotpot and equally tiny T-screen both made soft noises. A slight, long-legged figure moved through the trailer’s dim interior, ducking under the small ship-tidy cabinets, knees loose against the wallowing movement of travel, zipping and pressing the hotseal buttons of a scratchy, starched uniform. Short black skirt, tiny frilled apron, the stacked-heel boots—someone had a fantasy, and wanted even the temporary staff to play along.
That was fine. She liked dress-up. Alise’s fingertip lingered just over the T-screen’s volume button, and a scratchy, tinny talking head’s babble rose from the torn speakers.
“—no word from the East Coast, where containment of the Quitasol digiplague is being attempted. At least two cities have gone dark. Martial law has been declared in every corporate city above R-rating, and all civilian travel has been summarily curtailed.”
She jabbed at the button again, and the thin, filmy T-screen choked into muteness. A burst of static crawled through the picture from bottom to top, and Alise’s oculars picked out a few subtle threads of datapattern in the snow.
Everything was going well. And just as she decided that, there was a shuddering series of blows against the front partition. It was her partner Mocque Tuttle’s signal, as he drove peering through a cloud of flying dust, goggles hiding his large dark eyes and his head well wrapped against flying silica particles even inside the sealed cab, his extra limbs tucked out of sight.
It was time to play make-believe. She was extra staff, hired in a job lot for a corporate party. There was a bubbled estate shining among a sea of rust-colored slums, and even the pittance paid for a day’s servant-labor could make the difference between survival and starvation for anyone who hadn’t been able to buy or study their way into the protective blanket of a corporation’s ownership.
The estate was a blister on the horizon, decorative red towers glittering under a hard sun and a very expensive dome-shield holding poverty and the creeping, infectious dust away from sloping green lawns, fantastical white-barked trees with fleecy crimson leaves, and shimmering, jewel-bright ponds.
Alise, humming the soft refrain of a currently popular vocaloida song about faithless love and corporate-place bling, zipped the dust-shroud over her new, stolen uniform.
THE W HITE RABBIT
The estate’s service entrance was in a cavern, a wall of shimmering electroseal zapping dust and other particles from metal and glass; the bubble-truck from Raleigh’s walled scramble disgorged a single swathed figure who hurried for two featureless steel doors, not even pausing to glance at the catering company’s van. The truck, not waiting to see if its fare would be accepted into the bowels of the red estate, backed out into the howling storm and soon vanished behind veils of flying particles. The slum hunched under tiers of silica dust, every shelter crammed full; any exposed piece of skin would be honeycombed with digiplague within minutes.
Obviously, this latest estate visitor hadn’t paid for a return trip. Or maybe she had no means of doing so.
A gloved hand pressed a card-key to the square reader; the light flashed green. One door popped loose with a chuk-hiss of sealant and a fog of chembath; she stepped smartly through and the scans began.
A green bar showed over the featureless, steel interior door and she stepped through again, her shroud rustling, into another smaller chamber. On the other side of impact-proof clearpane was a genesplice with thistledown hair in a purple suit with knife-sharp creases, his cleft lip and high, large, pinkish ears all twitching. It was just like a high-rated corporate queen to have a splice as a butler, a flagrant expense much more amenable than even a desperate, fully human employee. And more loyal, too. So far, though, Alise was under-impressed by the estate’s security. Still, she held herself stiffly, playing her part.
“You’re late.” The splice’s nose twitched, his voice coming water-clear through round, high-end speakers. His cheeks were almost too plump for him to speak and he’d been built sleek and portly, but those pink-rimmed eyes and pale hair just covering oddly shaped ears could hardly be called aesthetic.
Her dust-shroud hit the floor, and she stepped free in her black-and-white uniform, one leg turned for optimal onlooker pleasure. “Riots in-city.” Alise let the scanners tingle over her. The nice thing about military-grade ’ware was the ease with which you could feed corporate-level scanners what they wanted to hear.
Another soughing sound was the new, extremely expensive plague-deterrent, a wave of skin-crawling as a flood of nanobots swarmed her. She stood patiently as they crawled over her face and hands, and her oculars returned a stream of baselines in the lower left corner.
It was a good idea, using the little bastards to search in crevices and taste micro-molecules of sweat. Her own inner colonies, well hidden, tried to come online to deal with the intruders, but she kept them reined in until the tiny, almost purely psychological tickles passed and the invaders withdrew.
“Everyone else is already here.” The splice clicked his tongue against his teeth, the front two prominent enough to peep out behind the perpetual smile his buyer had molded onto plastic flesh during the choose-your-animal phase. “The Red Lady would fire you if she knew.”
So this splice was high-status, and liked all the temporary help to owe him something. Alise tried a smile with an edge of desperation. “I couldn’t help if the riots closed the South Gate right after the other bus went through. I paid to com
e out in a bubble, that counts for something, right?”
“Yes, yes. But you’re late, and the Lady doesn’t like tardiness.” He scrubbed his white-gloved paws against each other. Most splices were engineered to anxiety, eager to please but wearing out quickly from the strain. You could extend the lifespan of a particularly faithful splice if you had the cash, but most of the time it was just cheaper to arrange transit to a reclamation center for a rebate on their organic matter while you shopped for a new one.
You could even get the new one arriving as the old was shipped out, so there was no lag in service.
“Well, maybe we could not tell her?” Alise did her best not to bat her eyelashes. “I’m all ready, I’m even in my uniform. It’s starched, like it said on the job sheet.”
“Well, at least you read the sheet.” The butler hit a button out of sight, and the bar over the innermost door lit with a pale pink glow. “Through there. I hope nobody else is late.”
“Me too,” Alise murmured, but he wasn’t listening. There was work to be done.
After all, in a few hours there would be guests.
THE TEA PARTY
A glass-walled conservatory stuffed with strange gene-spliced fancyplants and nodding crimson-leaved saplings filled with rufuous sunglare. Alise lifted a heavy silver tray of pink-frosted cupcakes, freezing in place as two guests ambled laughingly past. The short round one with a large, floppy, velvet hat and filthy fingernails was Hatter, the head of Oscorp intel; the other listened intently as they strolled.
“I can’t do that, Hal,” the tall, gaunt man in Banercorp colors finally said, rather gently. “Creighton will never go for it.”
“Oh, Creighton’s on the way out. Our lovely hostess is on the way in.” Hatter’s cheeks bunched rather like the spliced butler’s when he smiled, but the butler in his sober, spotless purple would never look so satisfied or well rested. “You heard about Old Wilmington.”
“Catastrophic failures in all the estates, who hasn’t heard?” The Banercorp death’s-head made an elderly tsk-tsk noise, tongue against the pale pink gum-hill behind expensively veneered teeth. “There’s a rash of it. Enough to make you fire all your security.”
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