You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  When you arrived, Balker said, and sat in front of the keyboard, you could bet that four of the screens would be full of interference. Three would be blank. Until you looked at them closely, the rest seemed to be showing a blurry grayscale image of the room itself, from the point of view of a cheap webcam mounted high up in one corner. But things weren’t entirely right with the wallpaper; and the person sitting there wasn’t you. After a moment or two, someone else seemed to come into the room. Then everything vanished and those screens showed interference too. For a moment the air smelt only of dust recirculated by the system’s cooling fans, as if the drive towers had briefly cooked. In all the time he spent there, Balker found only one interesting item. This was a loose-leaf journal in a black leather cover – squared paper, handwritten in coloured inks, each entry carefully timed and dated – which always lay open in a different position in the dust and tangled wires between the monitors. He would leaf through it while he waited for the drug to wear off and snap his connection to that world.

  ‘The future doesn’t make sense,’ it began. ‘I know that because I’ve seen it. In some way, to some extent, I’ve seen the things that happen. They make no sense.’  Then, a few evenings later: ‘The original figure always turns its head slowly and begins to stand up, perhaps in some kind of clumsy welcoming gesture.’ Among these observations, queerly personal statements were interspersed. ‘I moved back into this house twenty years ago. By then both my parents were dead.’ And: ‘When the work isn’t going well, sleep becomes tiring and I dream I am dead.’ Balker could make nothing of this. When he reported it no one seemed interested. It was the screens that interested them, they said: he should concentrate on the screens.

  He often thought of adding something to the journal himself, to see what would happen; but though he found fresh entries whenever he went there, he never found a pen.

  In the end, it didn’t work out for him. He didn’t have quite the talent they were looking for. Sometimes, as the high came groaning and roaring along his upper spine and into the amygdala, he looked along the darkening rows of beds and counted fifty or a hundred people dreaming at the top of their game in the motionless gloom. They were arriving at the house, flowing through it like a gusty breath, a flock of bats: they were making sense of the things they saw, taking notes on what they found. Balker didn’t have that kind of travel. He knew he wasn’t up with the best. He suspected his friend Alan would have done better. By then he had understood that the test-destinations weren’t the issue anyway. All those travellers were being prepared to enter the Square Mile – not physically, but on the astral plane, the way the iGhetti themselves occupied it.

  As far as you and Balker were concerned, that didn’t last either. You made a stab at it, moved into a flat in Shepherds Bush together, but he turned out to be seventeen not twenty seven as he said, and after his staffie/mastiff cross, which he was looking after for a friend, bit two fingers off your ex’s left hand when he came back from an oil-exploration contract in one of the ‘stans – you forget which one – he fitted all the lights in the house with blue bulbs while you were out then tried to commit suicide in your bath in an excess of adolescent self-disgust. It was a cry for help. That had to be the end of that. Balker went back to the street. Jane and Jack searched for him for a month or two, Jane especially has been cold towards you since. Later you heard he was with a grindcore musician in Peckham. You were glad, although you missed his smell, which was instantly exciting; and his dysfunctionality, which you remembered as ‘character’. And the sex was tremendous, if a little full on and tiring.

  That was it for perhaps two years, perhaps three. Although their influence spread from primary nodes in New York, Dubai and especially the great Chinese banking cities, in London the iGhetti seemed content to be contained by the Square Mile. You had the sense they were focussed on other projects. New buildings began to appear, for instance – vast, not entirely stable parodies of Noughties vanity architecture which lasted a week or a month before toppling slowly away into a kind of dark blue air. For Londoners, things went downhill during that time. It was a different world. Life was patchy. Whether people could rescue anything from their individual circumstances depended very much on how determined they could be. It was a different kind of existence. You welcomed the challenge; it was the arrival, finally, of your teenage fantasy. Then one day you took two steps into a house by the river in Barnes, and there was a face, white, with skin like a layer of enamel paint, thrust in close to yours. It was breaking up with some emotion you didn’t recognise. A voice was saying, with a kind of meaningless urgency:

  ‘It’s me! It’s me!’

  He was shaking, whoever he was. You couldn’t process it: you had come expecting a party. You were thinking, ‘I must have had a stroke on the way here and not noticed, and this is what the world’s going to be like for me now.’ Then the face was just a boy you once knew, wearing a cheap Paul Smith summer suit looted from some outlet in Twickenham.

  ‘Jesus, Balker,’ you said, shoving him away.

  You didn’t want to be important to him any more. You didn’t want him in this part of your life. You wanted him tidily in the part labelled ‘the past’, where he had never had much time to be a player anyway. He bumped into a wall and slid down it slowly. No one was eating much, that summer. They all had estuary fever, but Balker felt like a bag of sticks. His condition was further along than yours, and that should have been a warning in itself. You pushed him out of the hallway and watched him stumble off along the street.

  Music came from somewhere at the back of the house, dance hits from the mid 90s. It seemed distant, then someone opened a door on to the terrace. A hot evening, a wedding party. The river stank. Bright flashes in the sky, heavy, muted thuds off in the north around Camden Town. You leaned on the balustrade and stared down into into the space between the house and the river, a dark strip of trampled turf – littered with discarded paper plates, beer cans and discarded condoms – where the bride, oblivious to everything but her own happiness, was dancing alone, skipping and spinning, dipping and bending, trailing her arms. It was, depending where you stood, a simple expression of joy or a complex expression of nostalgia for a time when all such moments were fuelled by money, aspiration, and a true, fully functional narcissism, a performative sense of self only hinted-at by the Twentieth Century – days when it was still possible to see yourself as a great silent beautiful blossom opening up to the economic light.

  An hour after you sat down, Balker came in again, wiping his mouth as if he’d only recently thrown up. By then the party had retreated indoors, folded itself into the warm reek of beer and smoke. Shadows, beats, weird coloured light. Everyone’s hyperactive kids like a billowing curtain around the dance floor. You could see what was going to happen. You made sure the two of you stayed at tables on opposite sides of the room. You kept the dancers between you. You made sure you were always talking to someone. But finally he came over anyway and tried to speak.

  ‘For fuck’s sake not here,’ you said. ‘On the terrace.’

  ‘I only came to talk –’ he said.

  ‘Talk? Jesus, Balker. You should have stayed where you were.’ You meant, ‘in the past.’ You meant, ‘forgotten’. You didn’t really mean anything else, but there was always more to Balker than that.

  You took him by the elbow and half-led, half-pulled him out there. ‘Before you know it,’ people used to say, ‘the worst has already happened.’ We think of extreme events as abrupt in that way, but they’re always the result of more than one border being crossed. An action that feels instant and seamlessly impulsive is actually very graded. By the time you got Balker out on to the terrace you knew you were going to hurt him. In the end you didn’t need to square it with yourself: you were pushing him about, whispering, ‘For God’s sake, what do you think you’re doing here?’ or something like that, when his coat fell open and you saw what had happened to him.

  ‘What’s this?’ you said. ‘What�
�s this?’  You were frightened, but not, it turned out, for yourself.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m not in any pain.’

  ‘There’s something coming out of your chest.’

  He looked hard away from himself. The tendons in his neck stood out. He moaned. ‘Don’t tell me any more. I’m not in any pain.’

  ‘It’s like a cauliflower, but bigger.’

  He made pushing motions with his hands. ‘Please don’t tell me any more,’ he said.

  ‘I’m just trying to tell you how it looks. It’s like a wart.’

  Whatever it was, it was grey and pink colours, very muted and toned. ‘A wart,’ you said. ‘Or broccoli. Like pink brocolli.’ Balker thrashed around for a moment then passed out. You dragged him first into one corner, then another. You didn’t know what to do. He woke up and screamed, ‘Pull it out!’ You got a good grip of it in both hands and pulled. It seemed to come out easily, as if it was coming out of not muscle and bone but something soft and unstructured, but then stopped. There was no blood. You could see tight red runners, like wires, attached to it, radiating out into Balker’s chest. It was made out of damp, slick fibres. You wouldn’t say ‘woven’. It looked fibrous but not woven: it was nothing so organised as that. You were afraid if you pulled any harder, they might rip something else out of him, something he couldn’t do without.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ you said, ‘It won’t come any further.’

  Balker shrieked. ‘Why is this happening to me?’ he called. Then he whispered:

  ‘I went in there. They sent me in on foot.’

  You let his head fall back. ‘Oh god, you idiot, you idiot,’ you said.

  ‘They were losing all their good people,’ Balker said. ‘In the end they were sending anyone who’d taken the tests.’

  ‘Balker –’

  He looked confused, he wasn’t sure what was happening to him. Neither were you. You noticed a kind of shadow around him, cobalt blue, blue almost to black. Out of that, small white feathers seemed to be spilling, as if someone had burst a pillowcase.

  ‘Nothing‘s changed in there! Inside it’s still perfect. It’s only from our side of things that it’s a war. The iGhetti don’t see it like that. They just don’t notice. Inside, it might be six o’clock on a Sunday morning in summer. I could hear the artillery and the bombers outside the zone, but nothing disturbs them in there. I never saw one. Only the ‘blue effects’ that told me one of them was near.’ He groaned. ‘I’m still there,’ he said, clutching at you. ‘In some way I’m still in there.’ The air around him became syrupy and glutinous. That panicked you and you began to ask him questions, but it was too late. ‘Everything’s just such a nuisance,’ he said conversationally. ‘You know? When all you want to do is go to sleep?’ By then he was sitting on the floor with his legs out straight and his hands between them; his voice seemed both thick and distant. ‘I feel odd to be honest,’ he said. My eyes feel odd. My face feels odd. I feel odd.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I feel tired.’ After a pause he added: ‘I’m sorry, Alan.’ A minute or two later you saw he was dead.

  ‘Jesus,’ you said.

  So that was it as far as Balker went, and now you sit over the one-bar electric fire in your rented room. Perhaps you think about him, perhaps you don’t. As soon as you feel recovered from the commute you’ll boil some potatoes on the gas ring, then, three minutes before they’re done, drop an egg into the same water. You can hear the family downstairs laughing at something, some dressed-up cats or something, on the internet. It’s minus ten outside tonight and you have no idea what’s happening on the old housing estates by the river. ‘Welcome to London,’ someone in the office said today. That got a laugh. ‘Welcome to the managerial classes.’ All he really meant was that like everyone else he would do anything to look after himself, stay this side of the line and not have to make the kinds of choices Balker made.

  The Theory Cadre

  (1) THE THEORY CADRE IN SNOWDONIA

  In its earliest years, the Ambiente Hotel’s shadowy but powerful Theory Cadre committed itself to a regime of Crowleyism, mechanical engineering and systemic self-doubt. The accompanying docufictional image restages a crucial moment from the 1948 May Day Phenomenology Camp: an anonymous member of what was then little more than a clique retreats down the Watkins Path from ‘a sudden organic lurching movement half-glimpsed along the lowering ridgeline’. ‘Several hanging cubical structures,’ AE Fenell was later to recall, ‘were observed briefly during a lightning storm around the isolated peak of Yr Aran.’ On the same day some younger members of the Camp, tragically decoding a shopping list as an instruction, became disoriented and committed political suicide by simultaneously immersing each other in one of the deeper pools of the Afon Cwm Llan. [Photograph and text courtesy Alice E Fennel, both from her forthcoming monograph ‘Actioning the Optimal: The Theory Cadre in Wales’.]

  (2) MORE ON THE THEORY CADRE

  B writes, of my recent blogpost, ‘The Theory Cadre in Snowdonia’, ‘Mike, although a ‘docufictional image’ is mentioned, there’s no picture here.’ Yes, B, there is a picture. But the Theory Cadre, unwilling to give away anything of itself even in such a deliberately revelatory document, has encoded it as text. Another way to look at this is that while the image exists, but is not present, ‘AE Fenell’ does not, and yet is. Pictured [left]: In 1979 someone calling herself ‘Alicia Feignall’ addressed the guests at the Ambiente Hotel from this location in the old kitchen garden.

  (3) ROOM 121 AT THE AMBIENTE HOTEL

  While endeavouring to stamp down the cracked and buckled lino in the first floor corridor I heard voices from Mrs Decateur’s old room, number 121. When I put my ear to the door, they stopped. It was Tuesday, and the wind was rattling the balconies on that side of the building, bringing with it the sound of a siren, the faint yellow wail of a saxophone from one of the Parton Street bars. Flipping the cover off my uncle Mario’s tarnished old silver hunter, I turned it so that its dial caught the 40 watt light: exactly 2:19. Ah, I thought, so the rumours are unfounded. The Theory Cadre was back. I made my way quietly down to the lobby and later sent Fleur, the girl who works in the back bar, up to 121 with a bottle of 60 year old British sherry and as many clean glasses as she could find. At midnight the lobby phone rang three times. I let a minute go by, then picked it up and said, ‘Hello, Alice.’

  (4) OCCUPANT OF ROOM 121

  Few medical procedures are neccessary to maintain an occupancy once it is established. A bucket of disinfectant every two days, one or two injections of penicillin. The wiring, the other technical procedures, even the selection of the original subject all seem to have a preservative effect. What is meant by this? Well, not simply that the more durable guests are chosen. In fact, the reverse can be said: being chosen actually confers a quality of spiritual endurance the guest may not have possessed in ordinary life. Of course a certain physical toughness is also necessary, and guests can often surprise in that respect. Some won’t survive the first two or three days; those I always recognise, and dispose of quickly. But others seem so frail and last so long.

  (5) ‘WINDOWS’ IN THE 121/125 STUB CORRIDOR

  Elements of the Theory Cadre believe that the structure of the hotel is rather older than appears. Speculation centres on the short corridor behind rooms 121 to 125, which is reached at one end from the rear stairwell and from the other by a flight of five descending stone steps, themselves perhaps the remains of a wider, older staircase. While this corridor is presently windowless, two or three tall, incomplete framelike structures can be detected beneath the plaster of the inner wall. ‘Is it possible,’ Alyssia Fignall asks, in the 42nd edition of Wallpaper, the Architectonics Committee Journal, ‘that the 121/125 stub once gave on to a courtyard?’ Unless this proves to be the case, she continues, the opposite conclusion – that an internal wall once looked outward – is ‘as inescapable as it is impermissible.’ Meanwhile, within the Architectonics Committee, a closed group consisting mainly of
materials-technology students has already begun to discuss the possibility that an entirely different building occupied the ground as recently as twenty years ago.

  (6) THE TRAFFIC OF THE SPECTACULAR

  Narrative structure, AE Fennel has always believed, is the trunk route of the spectacle. Free flow of the spectacular is as necessary to a well-built secondary world as it is to the neoliberal state. Therefore, in every ‘story’ we tell, our ambition should be to achieve a calculated failure of service, a single perfect interruption of traffic. ‘Failing that,’ AE advises the Wednesday evening creative writing workshop in the refectory of the Ambiente Hotel’s Cultural Wing & Conference Centre, ‘do at least try to dig a hole in the road.’

  (7) A KEY EVENT IN ROOM 121

  Incidences of telekinesis disturb the hotel at night, rearranging small objects, papers, items of clothing. A pair of shoes moves an inch to the left. A cupboard door is rattled so quietly that no one wakes. Bunches of keys, placed on their hooks in Reception in the early evening, are discovered under a breakfast table at 8am. Some objects are moved once, others several times across two or three nights. ‘An intellectual history founded on anthropocentrism,’ writes Alicia Fennec in the Theory Cadre journal, ‘encourages us to think of telekinesis as caused. In fact these events occur without agency, intent or telos. They are not communications. They do not support a narrative.’ Tiny changes of air currents are recorded at the base of the kitchen range. A computer, switched off at eleven, is switched on again by seven. A brief flash of light is observed to have occurred in an empty fourth-floor bathroom. For several weeks, waves of improbability ripple nightly along the corridor outside Room 121 and, meeting the back bar staircase, which seems to act as a barrier, disperse.