You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  (7) THE GUESTS AT THE AMBIENTE HOTEL

  A reader from Leicestershire asks, Why are guests seen so rarely at the hotel? Reader, there are plenty of guests, but you only see them when you first arrive! The rest of the time they are stored in humane conditions. Deployed primarily in the dining room and the lobby, the guests in this picture are for the most part kept underground. Of the guest problematic, AE Funnel has written recently: ‘Their hold on reality is tenuous. Although there is a sadness to their voracity and yearning, the behaviour of guests is determined by the same mathematics as that of any other school, swarm or murmuration. They pour constantly through a given room even though there is only one of them resident at a time. To the long term habitues of the hotel,’ she concludes, ‘they don’t seem very robust.’ For this reason, never address a guest seen in a corridor late at night.

  (8) A HOTEL CHRISTMAS

  The permanent residents at the Ambiente Hotel will be looking forward even more keenly than usual to both Christmas dinner in the Function Room and the traditional Boxing Day immanence vs transcendence debate (taking place this year in the downstairs back bar). Best of luck to everyone! Left: Alyssia Fignall is seen discussing the Christmas menu with an unnamed member of the Architectonics Committee. Below: A view of the Function Room windows, as viewed from the pavement in Codmorton Street.

  (9) THE GUEST IN ROOM 444

  K, who for some years has lived on the fourth floor rear corridor of the hotel’s retirement wing, attributes an unremitting depressive disorder to (a) birth at the outset of the ‘atomic age’, (b) secondary school food in 1957, (c) the decaying John Calder publications which even now take up sixty percent of the bookshelves in Room 444. But the event that most shaped his view of the world was, indirectly, the death of Sacheverell Sitwell. Faced with the incompleteness of Journey to the Ends of Time, K’s intellect – such as it was – became trapped forever in the first and only volume, a book he can’t remember except by its dustjacket, which featured the layered colours of a dull yet ferocious sunset.

  (10) PHOTOGRAPH DISCOVERED UNDER A HALL CARPET

  This picture, apparently taken on a 1980s Polaroid format in Oaxaca in the late 2000s (microchemical analysis pending), shows (a) ornamental metal grille over a street door (b) adjacent exterior wall painted with the head of a laughing man in a hat, both viewed from the front seat of the modified WW2 Jeep which occupies the foreground of the image. A team led by Lisi Fearnall has established that the painted head, rendered in high contrast black and white, can still be found on the wall and displays ‘gains and losses of clarity’ on a twelve day cycle. (‘Though it is always sharper and brighter,’ Fearnall reported to a private session of the Steering Committee, ‘whenever a vehicle is present.’) Fearnall, emphasising the complexity of the physics, dismisses the view that the subject of the image is actually confined in the wall.

  (11) THE LIBRARY AT THE AMBIENTE HOTEL

  For some years a sub-basement beneath the hotel’s parking facility was used to store texts generated by the guests. These, ranging from thin volumes of verse to literary horror novels the thousand pages of which might be read in any order, were discovered in predictable circumstances: an immaculately tidy room with 50 years of stored nail clippings and a mysteriously opened window; urgent written or recorded warnings against reading or even turning the pages of the manuscript; the death, wandering off or unexplained evaporation of the writer in circumstances which suggested they too had been an item in a text. During the pre-War period, the Theory Cadre threw open this library three times a year, but though its contents drew visitors from most major universities, no scholarship emerged and in May 1946 the sub-basement, along with the passage that leads to it, was sealed. Pictured below: Elements of the Closed Architectonics Committee of the Theory Cadre visit Le Tourniquet, circa 1930.

  (11A): BROKEN SYMMETRIES

  The historian K’s function in the Cadre has been debated since the 1940s. Was he a member? Was he in fact, as RI Gaines suggests in issue 7 of Wall Mart, a founding member? The appearance in the Library of K’s magnum opus after the sub-basement door was sealed (see left) suggests otherwise. But Alexia Ficknow puts it best when she writes: ‘In those days a door might be sealed by the Architectonics Committee, but no door was ever sealed to the Architectonics Committee.’ And we are left with the following tantalising passage from the manuscript itself: ‘Project “Trap” was never completed. “Soul Gem” was a project to collect “evidence-free innuendo”. Soul Gem was wound down in 1945 upon the death of the resource (see notes). Several similar projects wound down naturally with the resource itself. “Eat Cake”, a hardened version of “Soul Gem 2”: the Eat Cake abstract promised abjection, violence, denial. Eat Cake was unlisted. Various other projects: “Project Nineteen” (see appended material). “Mex Lite”, “Max Eight” and “Lite Core” were clean product generated during varied initiatives and test runs. “Initiative B” ran successfully until 1978, when it was replaced under the Dark Stork programme. Project “Veil Grain” was an unsuccessful add-on to the Main Stem series. “Vague Heart”: Project Vague Heart remains partially operational but is identified under recent initiatives as “2014”. Resource appears to have retained motility & limited function. Project “121” is the shadow of something much larger.’ [Italics & heavy underscore AF.]

  Recovering the Rites

  The last time I went there it was a late Friday afternoon in October, coming on dark. The key took time going in the lock. As soon as I was up in the room I could see something had been there before me. As I entered, it was still disappearing, like an oily residue mixing in water. The air was almost as cold as the street outside.

  I went to the window and pulled the blind. People were leaving work, walking quickly past with their heads down. Up and down the road the neon signs were going on one by one. October totters into November. London draws round itself for a second or two and seems comforting.

  I looked along the street at the smear of light under the railway bridge. It was a place I would now do anything to avoid. It was a signal from the dead. It was all they had to say. They remembered being alive, they remembered a slick of light on old tiles on a wet day, the pavement becoming wetter and blacker as people tracked the rain into it. They remembered the cold draughts under the bridge there.

  I rang the first number I could think of and said, ‘We live in the thinnest of worlds, between the past and the future. They occupy more space than that. We never see the whole of them.’

  The voice at the other end said, ‘Jake, is it happening again?’

  Everything becomes more itself, or what people have understood it to be. Under the bridge the dead are a cultural force. ‘Even when they’re perfectly still,’ I said, ‘they seem to us to be moving. We only see them moving through.’

  ‘Jake?’

  Anti-Promethean

  That whole enterprise was a let-down. The star drive proved useful, but there was a war or two in consequence and when, after some centuries’ travel, we reached the mysterious object at the edge of the universe, it turned out to be an advert for hair gel.

  Animals

  In late June, Susan rented a cottage for a fortnight. It was tucked away at the seaward end of a lane; beyond it there was only flat light on the sand dunes and open beach. The paperwork required her to collect the keys from a Mrs Lago, who lived at the other end of the lane where it joined the road. Mrs Lago turned out to be sixtyish, frail-looking but active, with watery blue eyes, bright red lipstick and a selection of cotton print dresses two generations too young for her. During the summer her grassy front garden, across which had been scattered some round white plastic tables, did duty as a café. She was in and out all day, carrying trays of cakes, fitting umbrellas into the sockets in the centre of the tables to keep the rain off. In the evening the onshore wind blew everything about, and it lay in the rain looking shabby.

  Susan called as instructed and found the garden full of sparrows. They gathered round her
while she waited for the keys, cocking their heads right and left. They ate cake crumbs, first from the ground, then the chairs, then the very edge of the table. Then they took off all at once and one of them flew through the open door into the house, where it fluttered inside the window just above the sill among the china ornaments and little vases. Its panic was terrible. Mrs Lago went inside and after some reckless stumbling about appeared with it in her hands at the door. It was squawking and cheeping miserably. As soon as she let it go it shot off across the garden.

  ‘I thought it was going to break my lucky horseshoe,’ she said, looking at Susan in a vague but excited way. ‘It’s been broken once before.’

  ‘Has it?’ Susan said.

  You were always the junior partner in a conversation with Mrs Lago, your responses limited to, ‘Yes. No. Isn’t it?’ and, ‘I did!’ Listening to yourself make them was a bit like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. She had a curious lurching or sloping walk. She owned two or three dogs that sometimes got out and ran up and down the lane, surprised by a freedom they couldn’t seriously exploit.

  Susan got up early and walked by the bay. She enjoyed the light on the waves. Every morning at six, rain showers rustled in off the sea, tapping on the windows like old women in a cheap seafront hotel. Susan, who ate her breakfast standing up in the kitchen where it was warm, stared out at the small ill-kept lawn. It filled her with nostalgia on behalf of the previous occupants of the cottage, whom she imagined as an active, kindly, but not very successful middle-aged couple a little surprised to find themselves still happy with their life after so many years.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she imagined them saying to one another, ‘the year we planted the daffodils and nothing came up? What a laugh we had over that!’

  In the same spirit she lived with their shopping lists, and the cardboard boxes full of Sunday newspapers stowed under the stairs. They had left behind a shelf or two of paperback books, dusty and stained with cigarette smoke – Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson. Though she never managed to reconcile this library with the wallpaper in the kitchen, she felt as if she was looking after these things for them; as if, when she picked the cottage from the bewildering number offered by the internet, she had taken them on for a fortnight too.

  After a few days Susan began to find the idea less friendly. The cottage could be quiet, especially in the early evening, when the lane, with its fringe of trees against the setting sun, filled up with shadows. She heard what she thought were movements, half drowned by the sound of the radio she kept in the kitchen, even in the day. ‘It must be the central heating,’ she thought, but soon it became clear that these sounds were actually voices. Whatever room Susan was in, she heard them somewhere else. They were the voices of a man and woman who, chafed by their circumstances, had became as fractious as children. At night in bed, for instance, discussing the house they would buy when the money came through, a really good lump sum rather than these stupid little dribs and drabs they kept getting, Alex would say:

  ‘And no curtains in the study!’ I want all the light I can get now, pouring in over the books.’

  She would laugh offhandedly at this, and so would he. ‘Anyway,’ he’d say, ‘curtains are vulgar. Or they were in Virginia’s day – it’s in her diary. Only the lower middle classes had to have curtains in every window.’

  He always called Katherine Mansfield ‘Katherine’ and Virginia Woolf ‘Virginia’. It often irritated her, but now she was amused.

  ‘Alex, what snobs you three are!’ she said.

  ‘You will have some plants, though?’ she asked anxiously after a moment. ‘Just one or two of my best?’

  ‘I don’t want –’

  ‘Oh, I won’t fill up your precious window sills,’ she said. She smiled. ‘I won’t need to, with the garden I’m going to have! Oh, it’ll be fantastic just to have some room. Vegetables. A greenhouse. Everything!’

  ‘A conservatory,’ he said, ‘with an old grey deal table to work on when it’s too cold outside.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘A walled garden, where I can get away and sunbathe and not hear anything or think about anything. With the light pouring down like a post-Impressionist painting –’

  ‘It will have to face south,’ she said.

  He writhed away from her suddenly and jumped out of bed.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Susan jumped up too and went for a walk along the coastal path. She stood on one headland looking across at the next. They aren’t the people I expected, she thought. Clouds blew in from the sea, and by ten o’clock the whole peninsula was locked in drizzle and mist.

  On a wet day you could visit either the cathedral with its decaying and profitless stone stairs, or the aquarium. The aquarium was the more interesting of the two because at least its occupants were alive. In the main tanks, dogfish and small sharks circled endlessly in the hard light, which seemed, as much as water, to be their proper domain. Visitors shuffled round and round too, stopping to nose at a side tank, shoaling briefly around the interactive display. The children were excited, but their parents looked exhausted, and as if they weren’t quite sure how they found themselves there.

  Just before lunch, the rain stopped and everybody left. Susan walked up through a warren of steep streets until she came out on the hill above the town, where you could fly a kite from the bald patch of grass in front of the old chapel or sit on a bench with a view of the harbour composed along all the most formal curves: the sides of the stubby lighthouse on the granite mole; the bows of the fishing boats blue and white, red, green, yellow; an apostrophe of sand the exact colour of the coffee served in the Tudor Rooms. By then the tide was up: she could make out the surfers waiting in the calm water behind the long shallow silver waves. They stared out to sea with all the patience of primitive fishermen or pilgrims bathing, then in a brief, desperate flurry of activity tottered into the spume blown off the top of the first worthwhile wave and vanished. Further out in the bay two or three quite large ships, moored pointing west, seem to hover in the mist and blowing rain, not quite connected to sea or sky. Surfing here seemed as exotic and strange a gesture as the local TV ad for an Indian restaurant, of which Susan had caught only the words, ‘the Ganges at Milford Haven’, telling herself, Ah: so that’s where it reaches the sea.

  Walking back to the cottage after lunch, she considered the aquarium sharks again. They were less like the sisters of Jaws than of a whippet – small, quick, unassuagable. What distinguished them was a quality of patience, a Devonian strength of character no whippet – no mammal – could ever possess. When she got in she stood for a minute or two in the hallway, listening.

  ‘It’s a cranefly!’ Alex said. ‘Christ! How did that get in? I asked you to close the windows!’

  It was clattering round the small untidy room dragging its legs and bumping against the wall. He missed it several times with a sheaf of rolled-up papers. It staggered into his books, fell, flew towards him suddenly so that he dodged back in spite of himself. ‘Christ!’ He hated them so much he could hardly get close enough to kill them. It had got down behind the desk among the box files and piles of old newspapers.

  ‘It’s dead now,’ she said. She wanted to laugh.

  She pulled the sheet over her mouth.

  ‘I can still hear it buzzing,’ he said. ‘I shan’t sleep if I know it’s in here.’

  He stood there in his pyjamas, breathing heavily, his eyes quite vacant. After a moment the poor cranefly lurched out into the air again and he hit it against the wall until it was a smear.

  ‘You have to get their rhythm,’ he said, throwing down the papers.

  Now the wind turned southwesterly and blew onshore; several wet days followed in a row. Despite the weather, Susan felt like spending less time in the cottage. When the Oceanarium failed as an interest, she turned to the secondhand bookshops, in one of which she bought a volume entitled simply, ‘Seashore’. This she took to the Tudor Rooms, an old fas
hioned place with faux leather banquettes, waitress service, and oak veneer to shoulder height. To feel comfortable in there, she felt, wasn’t to live in the past, or, really, feel any kind of nostalgia; it was only that she understood its values better.

  In an alcove at the back sat a couple in their fifties, who had with them their clinging, rather silent grandchild. The child moved its sickly eyes over the menu and couldn’t make up its mind.

  ‘He’s panicking,’ said the woman, ‘because he thinks he won’t be able to eat it all.’ After that she began to talk about someone called Jonathan. ‘There’s something about Jonathan. For me he’s like a sort of brother figure or something.’

  Susan opened her new book.

  ‘When waves break diagonal to a beach,’ she read, ‘material is pushed sideways by the swash before flowing down in the backwash, and is carried in this way along the beach, in a series of sawtooth movements called ‘longshore drift’. The groyne – symbol of the Victorian middle-class bathing beach – traps and stabilises this sand. Left to itself it would only drift slowly along the line of least resistance and, at the dictates of the pleasure principle, form the strange thin hooks and curves which decorate the coastline lower down.’