Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  “No, wait!” he cried. “What town is this?”

  She looked him up and down. “What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know the name?”

  The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. “We’re strangers here. We want to know how this town got here and how you got here.”

  “Are you census takers?”

  “No.”

  “Everyone knows,” she said, “this town was built in 1868. Is this a game?”

  “No, not a game!” cried the captain. “We’re from Earth.”

  “Out of the ground, do you mean?” she wondered.

  “No, we came from the third planet, Earth, in a ship. And we’ve landed here on the fourth planet, Mars –…”

  “This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, “is Green Bluff, Illinois, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on a place called the world, or, sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-by.”

  She trotted down the hall, running her fingers through the beaded curtains.

  The three men looked at one another.

  “Let’s knock the screen door in,” said Lustig.

  “We can’t do that. This is private property. Good God!”

  They went to sit down on the porch step.

  “Did it ever strike you, Hinkston, that perhaps we got ourselves somehow, in some way, off track, and by accident came back and landed on Earth?”

  “How could we have done that?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. Oh God, let me think.”

  Hinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way. Our chronometers said so many miles. We went past the Moon and out into space, and here we are. I’m positive we’re on Mars.”

  Lustig said, “But suppose, by accident, in space, in time, we got lost in the dimensions and landed on an Earth that is thirty or forty years ago.”

  “Oh, go away, Lustig!”

  Lustig went to the door, rang the bell, and called into the cool dim rooms: “What year is this?”

  “Nineteen twenty-six, of course,” said the lady, sitting in a rocking chair, taking a sip of her lemonade.

  “Did you hear that?” Lustig turned wildly to the others. “Nineteen twenty-six! We have gone back in time! This is Earth!”

  *

  Lustig sat down, and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The captain said, “I didn’t ask for a thing like this. It scares the hell out of me. How can a thing like this happen? I wish we’d brought Einstein with us.”

  “Will anyone in this town believe us?” said Hinkston. “Are we playing with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?”

  “No. Not until we try another house.”

  They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. “I like to be as logical as I can be,” said the captain. “And I don’t believe we’ve put our finger on it yet. Suppose, Hinkston, as you originally suggested, that rocket travel occurred years ago? And when the Earth people lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then threatened insanity. What would you do as a psychiatrist if faced with such a problem?”

  Hinkston thought. “Well, I think I’d rearrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road, and every lake, and even an ocean, I’d do so. Then by some vast crowd hypnosis I’d convince everyone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.”

  “Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track now. That woman in that house back there just thinks she’s living on Earth. It protects her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay eyes on in your life.”

  “That’s it, sir!” cried Lustig.

  “Right!” said Hinkston.

  “Well.” The captain sighed. “Now we’ve got somewhere. I feel better. It’s all a bit more logical. That talk about time and going back and forth and traveling through time turns my stomach upside down. But this way –…” The captain smiled. “Well, well, it looks as if we’ll be fairly popular here.”

  “Or will we?” said Lustig. “After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be too happy to see us. Maybe they’ll try to drive us out or kill us.”

  “We have superior weapons. This next house now. Up we go.”

  But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. “Sir,” he said.

  “What is it, Lustig?”

  “Oh, sir, sir, what I see –…” said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and shaking, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if at any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. “Look, look!”

  “Don’t let him get away!” The captain broke into a run.

  Now Lustig was running swiftly, shouting. He turned into a yard halfway down the shady street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof.

  He was beating at the door, hollering and crying, when Hinkston and the captain ran up behind him. They were all gasping and wheezing, exhausted from their run in the thin air. “Grandma! Grandpa!” cried Lustig.

  Two old people stood in the doorway.

  “David!” their voices piped, and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him. “David, oh, David, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy; how big you are, boy. Oh, David boy, how are you?”

  “Grandma, Grandpa!” sobbed David Lustig. “You look fine, fine!” He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinking at the little old people. The sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood wide.

  “Come in, boy, come in. There’s iced tea for you, fresh, lots of it!”

  “I’ve got friends here.” Lustig turned and waved at the captain and Hinkston frantically, laughing. “Captain, come on up.”

  “Howdy,” said the old people. “Come in. Any friends of David’s are our friends too. Don’t stand there!”

  *

  In the living room of the old house it was cool, and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern, and iced tea in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue.

  “Here’s to our health.” Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth.

  “How long you been here, Grandma?” said Lustig.

  “Ever since we died,” she said tartly.

  “Ever since you what?” Captain John Black set down his glass.

  “Oh yes.” Lustig nodded. “They’ve been dead thirty years.”

  “And you sit there calmly!” shouted the captain.

  “Tush.” The old woman winked glitteringly. “Who are you to question what happens? Here we are. What’s life, anyway? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions asked. A second chance.” She toddled over and held out her thin wrist. “Feel.” The captain felt. “Solid, ain’t it?” she asked. He nodded. “Well, then,” she said triumphantly, “why go around questioning?”

  “Well,” said the captain, “it’s simply that we never thought we’d find a thing like this on Mars.”

  “And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.”

  “Is this Heaven?” asked Hinkston.

  “Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told
us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?”

  “A good question,” said the captain.

  Lustig kept smiling at his grandparents. “Gosh, it’s good to see you. Gosh, it’s good.”

  The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in a casual fashion. “We’ve got to be going. Thank you for the drinks.”

  “You’ll be back, of course,” said the old people. “For supper tonight?”

  “We’ll try to make it, thanks. There’s so much to be done. My men are waiting for me back at the rocket and –…”

  He stopped. He looked toward the door, startled.

  Far away in the sunlight there was a sound of voices, a shouting and a great hello.

  “What’s that?” asked Hinkston.

  “We’ll soon find out.” And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, running across the green lawn into the street of the Martian town.

  He stood looking at the rocket. The ports were open and his crew was streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered, and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were hurrying, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay empty and abandoned.

  A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, “Hooray!” Fat men passed around tencent cigars. The town mayor made a speech. Then each member of the crew, with a mother on one arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street into little cottages or big mansions.

  “Stop!” cried Captain Black.

  The doors slammed shut.

  The heat rose in the clear spring sky, and all was silent. The brass band banged off around a corner, leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.

  “Abandoned!” said the captain. “They abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins, by God! They had orders!”

  “Sir,” said Lustig, “don’t be too hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends.”

  “That’s no excuse!”

  “Think how they felt, Captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!”

  “They had their orders, damn it!”

  “But how would you have felt, Captain?”

  “I would have obeyed orders –…” The captain’s mouth remained open.

  Striding along the sidewalk under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes amazingly clear and blue, came a young man of some twenty-six years. “John!” the man called out, and broke into a trot.

  “What?” Captain John Black swayed.

  “John, you old son of a bitch!”

  The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him on the back.

  “It’s you,” said Captain Black.

  “Of course, who’d you think it was?”

  “Edward!” The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston! My brother!”

  They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then finally embraced. “Ed!” “John, you bum, you!” “You’re looking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what is this? You haven’t changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six and I was nineteen. Good God, so many years ago, and here you are and, Lord, what goes on?”

  “Mom’s waiting,” said Edward Black, grinning.

  “Mom?”

  “And Dad too.”

  “Dad?” The captain almost fell as if he had been hit by a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and without co-ordination. “Mom and Dad alive? Where?”

  “At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.”

  “The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amaze. “Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”

  Hinkston was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was laughing. “You see, Captain, what happened to everyone on the rocket? They couldn’t help themselves.”

  “Yes. Yes.” The captain shut his eyes. “When I open my eyes you’ll be gone.” He blinked. “You’re still there. God, Ed, but you look fine!”

  “Come on, lunch’s waiting. I told Mom.”

  Lustig said, “Sir, I’ll be with my grandfolks if you need me.”

  “What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”

  Edward seized his arm and marched him. “There’s the house. Remember it?”

  “Hell! Bet I can beat you to the front porch!”

  They ran. The trees roared over Captain Black’s head; the earth roared under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush forward, the screen door swing wide. “Beat you!” cried Edward. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re still young. But then, you always beat me, I remember!”

  In the doorway, Mom, pink, plump, and bright. Behind her, pepper-gray, Dad, his pipe in his hand.

  “Mom, Dad!”

  He ran up the steps like a child to meet them.

  It was a fine long afternoon. They finished a late lunch and they sat in the parlor and he told them all about his rocket and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it thoughtfully in his old fashion. There was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing on. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back and exhaled his deep satisfaction. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of pink light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the street came sounds of music, pianos playing, doors slamming.

  Mom put a record on the Victrola, and she and Captain John Black had a dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music. “It’s not every day,” she said, “you get a second chance to live.”

  “I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be in my rocket, in space, and all this will be gone.”

  “No, don’t think that,” she cried softly. “Don’t question. God’s good to us. Let’s be happy.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  The record ended in a circular hissing.

  “You’re tired, Son.” Dad pointed with his pipe. “Your old bedroom’s waiting for you, brass bed and all.”

  “But I should report my men in.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No, none at all. They’re all eating or in bed. A good night’s sleep won’t hurt them.”

  “Good night, Son.” Mom kissed his cheek. “It’s good to have you home.”

  “It’s good to be home.”

  He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open, and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college and a very musty raccoon coat which he stroked with muted affection. “It’s too much,” said the captain. “I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.”

  Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. He slid the window up and let the night-blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.

  “So this is Mars,” said the captain, undressing.

  “This is it.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck.

  The lights were out; they were in bed, side by side, as in the days how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the scent of jasmine pushing the lace cu
rtains in upon the dark air of the room. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was playing softly, “Always.”

  The thought of Marilyn came to his mind.

  “Is Marilyn here?”

  His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window, waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning.”

  The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Marilyn very much.”

  The room was square and quiet except for their breathing.

  “Good night, Ed.”

  A pause. “Good night, John.”

  He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the first time the stress of the day was moved aside; he could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the familiar faces. But now…

  How? he wondered. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose? Out of the goodness of some divine intervention? Was God, then, really that thoughtful of his children? How and why and what for?

  He considered the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, turning, throwing out dull flashes of light. Mom. Dad. Edward. Mars. Earth. Mars. Martians.

  Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been the way it was today?

  Martians. He repeated the word idly, inwardly.

  He laughed out loud almost. He had the most ridiculous theory quite suddenly. It gave him a kind of chill. It was really nothing to consider, of course. Highly improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.

  But, he thought, just suppose… Just suppose, now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and saw us inside our ship and hated us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earth Men with atomic weapons?

  The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory, and imagination.

  Suppose all of these houses aren’t real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians, thought Captain John Black. Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions. What better way to fool a man, using his own mother and father as bait?