Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story

by Brian Stableford

  “We don’t know that she isn’t doing that as well,” Stephen pointed out. “Maybe she’s haunting half a dozen different people and places. After all....”

  “She did her fucking wholesale,” Kit finished for him. “But we’ve already covered that one. If every dead whore started haunting on that sort of scale...and it’s not as if she has anything to hold against me.” She hadn’t realized what an unfortunate turn of phrase that was until she’d come out with it, but Even Stephen didn’t even notice. He was just playing games, humoring her. He didn’t believe that she was being haunted at all—except, perhaps, in her imagination. “But it’s not just imagination,” she added, swiftly. “The name might be an alias, but I got it right. She was real. She still is.”

  “You got the name from someone muttering into the intercom on the door,” Stephen reminded her. “All you got from the ghost itself is a tune that might or might not be the Electric Hellfire Club.”

  “Might or might not be?” Kit echoed, laying down an explicit challenge to his skepticism.

  “All you’ve heard so far is leakage from a discman,” he pointed out. “You might have made a mistake. Why did you ask me to bring the CD, unless you’re not certain yourself?”

  He certainly was a clever boy, for an art historian, Kit thought—but she knew that she still had the power to wipe that smile right off his face, if she chose to exercise it. He was the one gagging for it, not her.

  “I suppose we’d better make certain, then,” she said. “As it’s technically your round, though, you can chip in for half of a six-pack at the corner shop. We might both need it, if playing the Electric fucking Hellfire Club out loud gets Rose all excited.”

  “Sure,” he said, smoothly. He was still playing along with her, but she could tell that he was completely unable to believe that there was anything in her attic except the wayward produce of an over-active imagination, whose engine was much closer to Hull or Halifax than anywhere more exotic.

  Well, she thought, we’ll see. And that, really, was the heart of it. If they did both see, then it really must be real—but if they didn’t, because Even Stephen genuinely couldn’t, that would be a different matter. Now that he was in, he was the acid test. From now on, it had to be we that would see, or there’d be more than enough proof that she was barking mad.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It would have been cheaper if they’d gone halves on a six-pack, as Kit had suggested, but Stephen was insistent that he didn’t want to graduate to the real thing just yet, so they ended up with three loose cans of beer and two of cider and they split the bill sixty-forty. That wasn’t quite as mean as it might have seemed on the student’s part, though, because he’d paid for the light-bulb himself.

  Kit hadn’t been expecting the crimson-tinted light-bulb, and she had to suppress a flash of irritation when he first produced it from the box that had been in the paper bag.

  “Actually,” he said, “ultra-violet might be the most revealing light, but they don’t do UV in hardware stores. As you said that you saw the figures just as it was getting properly dark, I figured that red would probably do the trick.”

  “Trick?” she echoed, ominously.

  Stephen turned off the light that she’d switched on when they came through the door. The room was still reasonably well-lit by the light from the street-lamp streaming through the recently de-curtained window.

  “That street-light opposite is the kind that glows pink for a few minutes before it goes yellow,” he told her, as he stood on the bed and reached out a handkerchief-clad hand to remove the bulb from the ceiling light-fitting. “Add that to the reddish twilight we’ve been getting lately, thanks to the clouds and the air pollution, and the fact that the window faces west, and you have a very different light from the instant yellow-white of a standard hundred-watter, or even the vivid yellow of the warmed-up street-light.” He handed the light-bulb he’d removed to Kit. It was warm, but she didn’t need to protect her hand as he’d protected his; they hadn’t been in the room very long and it had cooled down in a matter of seconds.

  “So what?” she said.

  “That one-coat emulsion always looks beautiful on the TV ads,” he went on, “but it’s really not that efficient, especially in unfavorable light. This primrose yellow looks okay by the kind of light it’s best-equipped to reflect—your ceiling light—but light of a different wavelength will expose its translucency, especially if there’s something behind it that reflects the different wavelength preferentially. The blue end of the spectrum is further away from the yellow part than the red, but if any of the shapes behind the paint are red in color it’ll probably be just as effective to go the other way. Switch it on—unless I’m making a utter fool of myself you’ll see what I mean.”

  Kit flicked the switch by the door. For a moment, while her eyes were adjusting, she couldn’t see what he meant—but then she did.

  She saw the shadows in the walls—but now that she knew what they were, she could see that they really were shadows in the walls, and nothing more.

  In the days when Rose Selavy had plied her trade here the wall beside the bed had been painted—really painted, with a picture. Parts of the mural were still capable of reflecting light through the overlay of yellow emulsion, especially if they were properly stimulated.

  The shapes were too complicated and indistinct to allow Kit to make out exactly what the picture on the wall and slanting ceiling above her bed had depicted, but it seemed to contain several humanoid figures and others with bat-like wings. Some of the winged figures hovered over the bed, like predators about to fall upon its occupants, but most of the humanoid figures were on the vertical wall. One, more massive than the rest, might well have been a centerpiece about which the others were cavorting.

  The blurred central figure had only one discernible feature: horns like a goat’s. Kit had never seen the form clearly, no matter how pink the street-light had glowed or how crimson the sunset had painted the sky, but now that she had some inkling of what she was looking at she was seized by the suspicion that she had already brought the awareness of its presence and nature almost to the brink of consciousness. If there was a goat to be kissed hereabouts, this was it—but it was just a cartoonish picture that had been painted over in one-coat emulsion: a garish illustration adding an extra hint of naughtiness to a kinky tart’s place of business.

  “Fuck,” she said, quietly. Kit knew that she ought to be grateful, for more reasons than one, but she couldn’t help grinding her teeth at the thought of having been such an idiot as not to have taken the last little jump that would have brought her to this conclusion without Stephen’s help.

  “The Electric Hellfire Club,” Stephen murmured.

  “Sure,” she said, still controlling her irritation. “Put it on and let’s get it over.”

  “Not the CD,” he said, still speaking in a slightly hushed tone. “The picture.” He still had a way to go in sealing his triumph, in showing off his cleverness. “I can’t be absolutely sure, but isn’t it a party scene? The party scene: the witches’ sabbat, with the devil himself in the middle and his imps doing aerobatics over the Queen of Sin’s bed. Assuming, that is, that Rose had her bed where yours is. It’s the logical place, after all.” He was covering his arse, in case she thought he was calling her the Queen of Sin, but Kit wasn’t bothered. Now that he had confirmed her own impression, she was certain that they were reading the mural correctly. It was a witches’ sabbat. Although the devil was probably looking out into the room he must be looking over his shoulder to do it, because he was also extending his arse towards the bed, at a kissable height.

  Rose Selavy must indeed have placed her bed where the council’s decorators had placed Kit’s. Rose’s would have been a double rather than a single, with a red or black mock-silk coverlet rather than a yellow-clad duvet, but the height would have been exactly the same.

  Who kissed the goat? Kit wondered, silently. Rose? Her clients? Was it part of her ritual, par
t of her dominatrix act?

  “A Hellfire Club in miniature,” Stephen observed. “Reduced admission in the afternoon, I dare say. Have you ever been to Medmenham? It’s only a few miles up the river—that’s where Dashwood’s Hellfire Club used to meet. A much better class of orgy than she could put on here, I suppose, but a little imagination goes a long way.”

  “Hell, Hull and Halifax,” Kit muttered, grimly. She had to raise her voice, though, when he cocked an inquisitive eyebrow “I always wondered where the third leg of that particular triangle was. If you draw it on the map it so that all three sides are equal it comes out as Mansfield or Darlington, although it’s somewhere way down below the deepest pit-shaft if you imagine it vertical—but maps can be treacherous, and there aren’t any volcanoes in Yorkshire. Or Lancashire. Maybe she came back here to do her haunting because this was always her idea of Hell. Maybe she always wanted to join the dancers in the wall, even when she wasn’t high. And maybe that ghostly smell isn’t onions frying after all. But that doesn’t explain what the fuck she wants with me, does it? What’s with all the groping?”

  Kit remembered as she said it that she hadn’t told the student about the groping, but he didn’t query it. He probably assumed that she was speaking metaphorically, suggesting that any kind of haunting could be seen as a kind of perverse assault.

  Now that he’d done his party-piece, Kit fully expected the student to break cover and tell her straight out what he’d always secretly believed: that the whole thing was a product of her over-active imagination, caused by subliminal perception of the painted-over scenes—but the lad was full of surprises. “I thought about that,” he said. “And what you said in the Rifleman was wrong—I think.”

  She looked at him frostily, and saw him wilt a little. “What was wrong?” she asked.

  “Given that she seems to have been a devil-worshipping whore,” he quoted, “I suppose, one way or another, she must want my body. But it’s the other way around, surely. She was a whore because people wanted her body. What she needed from them to turn their fantasies into hard cash was all in the mind: a capacity to get excited by the signals she put out and the environment she provided. Including the pictures on the wall, and the music, and whatever else....”

  He left the rest to her imagination—which, Kit had to admit, was more than capable of filling in further details. A capacity to get excited, she repeated to herself, with the kind of scorn she sometimes used when she caught sight of herself in a mirror and didn’t like what she saw. The bitch is fucking with my head. She’s not trying to bring me off, just to wind me up. It’s not just a question of what she wants from me, it’s also a question of what she wants me to want from her—or what she can get me to want.

  Kit cracked a can and took a long, deep swig of best bitter. She could taste the bitter, but the best wasn’t quite there. If she were to become what she was drinking, she’d have to try a little harder. At least, she thought, it wasn’t cider. She had no wish to be an apple, given what one of those had done to Eve. Anyway, Stephen might think she was Golden Delicious for the moment, but that was because he was desperate; when the bloom wore off, she’d just be a gaunt Granny Smith, if she let him hang around that long.

  “Okay,” she said. “Put the fucking CD on. Let’s find out just how sick or stupid I am.”

  “I didn’t mean...,” he began.

  “I know,” she said. “Just put a CD on. Any one will do—save the big one for later, if you like. I suppose I ought to find out whether there’s anything else in your pockets I can recognize. Is it all Satanist disco music?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, “but it’s in much the same genre. This is my other Electric Hellfire Club CD—the one that came before Kiss the Goat. I don’t have the later ones.” He passed her the orange-colored box. There was a pentacle on the back, and the name of the CD: Burn, Baby, Burn! In a different frame of mind, she might have thought it a witty gesture. He slipped the CD into the slot on her mini-hi-fi system and pressed PLAY.

  The moment the music began to pour from the speakers Kit felt a thrill of instant recognition. She didn’t know whether to be pleased or scared by the far-from-unpleasant quality of the thrill; it was a hell of a long way from being a orgasm, but it was no mere nervous shock.

  “Do you recognize it?” Stephen asked, a little nervously. He wasn’t nervous because he was anxious about the answer he might get but because he already knew that it would be meaningless. Recognition wasn’t evidence. In a pinch, it could be written off as auditory déjà-vu. Not that she intended to get into a pinch. She wasn’t about to take her haunting to Fortean Times. It was far too intimate for that. She listened patiently through tracks called Age of Fire and Psychedelic Sacrifice, but then her attention began to falter. She realized that she’d emptied the can. She opened another and got stuck right in, even though Stephen’s first still seemed to be half-full—or, of course, half empty.

  Kit sat down on the bed, put the CD case beside her in the spot where Stephen might otherwise have sat down, kicked off her shoes and studied her toes carefully. She didn’t look up again until the CD player reached a track that the case identified as When Violence is Golden, an all-too-familiar track backed by the sound of synthesized whipping—at which point she figured that it was worth conjuring up another blush.

  “You like that sort of stuff, hey, Steve?” she asked the boy. “Gets you going does it?”

  He didn’t answer, taking the understandable view that two could play at the toe-contemplation game. His blush wasn’t easy to make out in the scarlet light, but Kit knew that it was there. She wondered whether there was a slight blush on her own cheeks, given that the track seemed at least as familiar to her as it must have been to him. She looked more closely at the CD case, noting that the copyright date was 1993. How could she be sure, she wondered, that she hadn’t heard the album before? Maybe it had been on some club DJ’s playlist back in her wilder days. Maybe one of her old boyfriends had owned it, maybe even played it to her while her conscious thoughts were otherwise occupied. If her subconscious mind had seen and recognized the sabbat behind the primrose censorship, maybe it had also soaked up the substance of a dozen or a hundred CDs she couldn’t remember hearing.

  The bitch is just fucking with my head, she repeated, defiantly. Rose Selavy is fucking with my head. She’s haunting her own little Hell, because she kissed the goat once too often and shot herself up with too much heroin, and can’t find her way to Hull or Halifax. But what does she want from me?

  The effort of standing still had begun to bother Stephen, who had put his half-empty can of Strongbow down on the floor. He was emptying his pockets on to the bedspread now, showing her the other trophies of his far-from-misspent youth, acquired for their insistent beat and trivial shock value.

  “The Marionettes,” he said, naming the bands even though she could read them perfectly well. “Midnight Configuration. My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. Inkubus Sukkubus. Athamay. And Kiss the Goat, of course.”

  The last phrase was, of course, a title rather than the name of a band. The illustration on the back of the CD was a witches’ sabbat, with the shadowy figure of a goat-headed Satan in the background, hardly distinguishable against a black-and-crimson sky. Evil Genius was track seven. Track one was called Invitation to your Damnation. Kiss the Goat itself was track thirteen.

  It was all rather silly, Kit knew, but it had got inside her somehow. It was making suggestions to her, and making demands of her. Even if it was nothing but music, remembered from some innocuous earthly source, it had taken on a new meaning inside her head, and it wasn’t going to let up until she could find a way to make it let go. There was as much seductive invitation as bullying threat in the haunting, but that didn’t make it any the less insistent. It wasn’t really real, but it was really there, and it wouldn’t go away unless she could find an answer to it.

  When the first CD finished, Stephen’s hand hovered over the others, as if waiting for a cue
to guide his choice. Having heard Burn, Baby, Burn! and found it all too familiar Kit didn’t think it was worth pissing about, so she swept the others on to the rug, leaving him no choice but Kiss the Goat.

  “Maybe I’ll recognize the others and maybe I won’t,” she said, “but if we’re going to go all the way, we might as well get on with it.”

  She put the CD on herself, and then she started taking Stephen’s clothes off.

  He didn’t resist—in fact, he’d obviously been looking forward to it. Kit didn’t know if it would help or not, but if it was what the Queen of Sin wanted, she was prepared to take her on. Until thirteen weeks ago she’d never been further from home than Chesterfield or Pontefract, but she was a driver by vocation, and it didn’t really matter to her how far from home she was, as long as she had access to a vehicle. She was prepared to drive to Hell and back if she had to, if that was what it would take to unfuck her head.

  The music on the CD was all familiar. She had sort-of-heard it all before, and not just sort-of-heard it but actually absorbed it into her memory. She had made it a part of herself, even though she had never actually heard it the way she was hearing it now, loud and clear and issuing from her miniature speakers in stereo. She was as sure of that as she was of anything. She was being haunted, by a devil-worshipping whore who wanted something, even if it was only to be wanted one more time, to add her particular brand of spice to one more life, even from beyond the grave.

  The music was coming to Kit now fully-laden with associations: associations which could be played out in other ways, in sight and scent and touch. They could even have been played out, after a fashion, if Even Stephen hadn’t been there, although they played out much more readily as a fleshy duet while they moved to the rhythm on the bed, and lost themselves in lustful sensation.