Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story

by Brian Stableford

  The townscape was becoming clearer now. The more distant buildings were hewn out of colored shadow, with windows so dark that their interiors were infinite voids, but the nearer ones were polished stone, their faces reflecting the glare of electric street-lights while their windows were ablaze with an inner light that seemed both benign and ethereal. The streets that separated the blocks seemed to spiral round in helter-skelter fashion, the upward helices continually metamorphosing into downward chutes, but for the first time it seemed to Kit that they might at least support a vehicle, even if they would not condescend to guide it to a terminus.

  “That’s good,” Stephen said, as the bus hit the bottom of the impossibly long hill and moved into the town itself: into streets lined with buildings that were tall enough to blot out the sun and the greater part of the disturbingly intense sky; streets that forked and curved around with oppressive insistence, forbidding her to hold a straight course.

  Within minutes she was utterly lost. The brickwork of the walls to either side of the bus wasn’t nearly as fancy as the other Reading’s, but the displays in the windows of the shops more than made up for any lack of inventiveness. In any case, the sheer bulk of the walls compensated for their lack of definition. If only the side-streets hadn’t afforded her occasional glimpses of impossibly-intersected planes Kit was sure that she would almost have been able to figure out what was which, who was how and where why was, if it were anywhere at all...but she felt as if she was getting nowhere fast, so she changed back down to second.

  Through the mirror Kit could see the dead staring sideways at the wonders of the world into which she had brought them. There was not the slightest trace of their former diffidence; their reactions varied between vividly excited and utterly rapt. They had no money, but the window-displays seemed to be suggesting more than mere opportunities to buy. Lifestyle fantasies were obviously cheap here—perhaps free, inconceivable as that thought might seem to a denizen of a county whose motto spoke of the equivalence of muck and brass.

  Even the thinnest of the dead, who had boarded the bus with such metaphorical weight on their inadequate shoulders that they might have been strays from Lowryland, seemed animated now—not by emotion, but by something else: something more refined, as befitted their status as the dead of modernity. Some had seemed near to tears before, unable to weep only by virtue of their advanced desiccation; others had seemed anguished in spite of their dignified politeness—but there was something in all their expressions now that Kit had never seen in human faces before; something, perhaps, that only the dead could manifest.

  Kit realized that not one of them had believed Michael’s promises until now. They had responded to his urgings because they found a certain novelty and comfort in being urged, not because they had even dared to hope that the bus might take them to somewhere new, somewhere they might belong. Even Rose Selavy—perhaps Rose Selavy most of all—had never dared to expect, or even to dream....

  But they were all dreaming now.

  They had all lost the knack of sustaining illusions for a while, but none of them had entirely forgotten how. All they had needed to bring it back to them was a helping hand.

  Unlike Kit, of course, the dead didn’t have perspective. They weren’t going forwards, navigating their way to the heart of the labyrinth by means of the vanishing point. They were looking sideways, into a dimension that no earthly painting had ever had, no matter how thickly the palette-knife had plastered on the paint. Only imagination could allow a viewer to look sideways into a work of art; only a skilful illusionist could actually go that way.

  Was that, Kit wondered, why the lingering dead had so much difficulty escaping their self-inflicted prison? Was that why they needed free passes to some form of public transport if they were ever to get away? Well, they were dreamers now. Rather, they were dreamers again. They had rediscovered the ability to be—not to live, with all life’s attendant liverish aches and twinges, but to be, in a way that was authentically new and strange and quintessentially intoxicating.

  Here, it would not be possible to do the things that living people did, or think the things that living people thought, or like the things that living people liked, or want the things that living people wanted—but none of that would matter, because the dead, at the end of the day, were the dead, and not merely the ghosts of the living. Here, they had their own existence, their own status, their own weight, their own authority. Here, they could be more than echoes. Nor would they have to submit to judgment by any deity or any censorious opinion of their former peers.

  Here, they could be free.

  “There’s a stop on the bridge,” Stephen murmured on her ear—and so there was. There was a bridge, and there was a bus stop on the bridge. There was a river flowing beneath the bridge, but it was a river like a convoluted rainbow, whose sluggish yet wave-laden flux drank in all the lunatic colors of the fragmentary sky. There were birds on the river: phoenixes and halcyons, whose technicolored pinions flourished into smoke as they ran along the water in advance of taking off, in a flock so vast and hectic that Kit barely caught a glimpse of something dark in amongst them that might have been a black swan, or a gargantuan bat, or a flying shark, or a winged goat with an arse like polished jet, propelled by a jet like a polished arse.

  A dozen passengers stood up as soon as the bus had rolled to a halt. They disembarked unhurriedly, without any rush-hour jostling. As they filed past Kit they turned, one by one, and spoke to her for the first and last time.

  “Thanks,” they said—every last one of them.

  They didn’t smile, because they knew that she was only doing what she did, following her vocation, and that because their fares were paid they didn’t actually owe her anything at all—but they thanked her anyway, because it was the thing to do.

  As they passed into the luminous atmosphere outside the bus the dead lost their stiffness, and their thinness became more flexible. They lost the hard edges that life had stamped upon them, and became blurred: beautifully and brilliantly blurred. One or two began to dance, exhilarated by a new-found ability to pirouette and entrechat into the fourth and fifth dimensions. They scattered as they moved off, looking around inquisitively, like a herd of third- or fourth-generation muntjaks transported to a foreign land setting off to search for sustenance they had never actually encountered, but for which they yearned nevertheless.

  Kit couldn’t help wondering, for a fleeting moment, whether they’d be happy, but she caught herself up almost immediately, remembering that the dead were beyond mere matters of happiness now—that even if they hadn’t quite managed to move beyond such matters before, they had definitely done so now.

  “How many more stops do you suppose there’ll be?” Kit said to Stephen, who seemed to be the relevant expert now.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he told her, frankly. “But it’ll be interesting to find out, won’t it?”

  Kit put the bus into gear and moved off again, moving up smoothly from first to second, and then, albeit tentatively, from second to third. There was no longer a clearly-demarcated bus lane to guide her and the traffic was getting much heavier, but Kit was no longer worried. Even though she’d never driven the route before she had a bus driver’s instinct; she knew now that all she had to do was relax, and let inspiration guide her. Unlike historians and astronomers, bus drivers had never had a muse of their own, but that didn’t mean that their work was without artistry or inspiration. She would never have relied on inspiration alone to guide her through the streets of Reading, but this was a much more obliging locality. Here, an ounce of artistry was worth a whole pound of maps. And how could she lose her way, now that she had glimpsed the spiders in the sky, spinning the fabric of creation?

  The second stop was the railway station, as garish and crowded as only a railway station could be. It was dark and light at the same time, perhaps because the city itself was unable to determine whether it was a city of dreadful night or a mere town becalmed by the
kind of midday sun that only mad dogs and cowardly Englishmen could bear. While Stephen was muttering something about Delvaux another six ghosts got off, each one saying “thank you” as he or she stepped down. Kit was mildly surprised that there were only six, but she figured that even they were unready, as yet, to go travelling far.

  Kit always made it a point of principle not to pay too much attention to the traffic while she was driving. She had to be conscious of the mass and velocity of other vehicles, of course, but there was a certain advantage in thinking of them in the abstract rather than as concrete examples of particular species. Even in Sheffield or Reading it wasn’t a good idea to start spotting models and reading number-plates, because it crowded the mind with undesirable trivia. This, she now discovered, was an excellent habit to carry into an alien world, because it prevented her from being overwhelmed by the sheer exoticism of the vehicles whose traffic-stream she was entering and exiting at irregular intervals. It wasn’t so much their forms as the quasi-symbolic ways they manifested their style and speed, although they could not have done so had not the environment been so remarkably free of traffic lights and roundabouts. In any parallel place on Earth there would have been a continuous roar of engine-noise, punctuated by impatient horns, but Kit hadn’t yet been able to tune her ears to the frequency of the world of the dead and the only throbbing sound she could her was the engine of her own bus, whose rhythm kept pace with the beating of her own heart.

  Best to keep my eyes on the road and my mind on the job, Kit thought, carefully. Mustn’t forget that I’m a stranger here. It’s not my place. Let the dead become accustomed to it. Let the dead figure out what it’s capable of signifying. I’m going home when the shift ends. I mustn’t forget that, or get into a state of mind from which there’s no way back. Let Stephen do the sight-seeing. He’s had the practice; he’s got the educated eye. Best if I stick to what I’m good at, Best if I just drive the goddam bus.

  But it wasn’t that easy. There was too much paradoxical light, too much texture in the fabric of space, too much illusory movement, too much ingenious deception, too many roads that went up and up without ever getting any higher. Even with her eyes directed firmly forward, Kit couldn’t help seeing the signs, whose promises were never fulfilled.

  Mercifully—or so it would probably have seemed to a cowardly Englishman—Kit’s bus couldn’t get any closer to this world’s Oracle than a mysterious underpass, although she released another batch of grateful passengers on the edge of the pedestrian precinct. She did try, momentarily, to make out what was actually in one of the seductive window-displays, but as soon as she had it in focus its curtains flowed together to form a mirror, in which she saw her bus as the lumpen monstrosity it was: a quaint tourist vehicle from some dimly-remembered land of legend, which would disappear if you blinked.

  The only other bus Kit saw while she made her way through the make-believe metropolis was a free one to Utopia, but she didn’t feel more than the slightest hint of regret as she watched it pass silently by, even though she knew that its homeward trip wouldn’t be cursed by innuendo or emetic convulsions. She was briefly tempted to follow it, but suppressed the urge. She had her own route to follow, her own perspective to find and keep, her own duty to fulfill. She still had more than a dozen passengers to unload, and they got off in ones and twos wherever they felt that they belonged.

  In the end, Michael and Rose Selavy were the only passengers left on the bus. Kit figured that her job was done—or the part that Michael had planned, at any rate. It wasn’t until that point was reached that she felt the necessity to look round and say: “What about you two? Where do you want to go?”

  It was Rose who said: “All the way.” Michael seemed uncertain. Kit could guess why. He hadn’t been sure that his plan would work, so he hadn’t thought this far ahead. He’d never actually got around to making up his mind whether this was to be a one-time-only one-way journey or the first conducted tour of many. He needed more time.

  “Okay,” Kit said, to Rose. “The terminus it is.” She figured that if she didn’t stamp too hard on the accelerator Michael would have ample opportunity to figure things out. It wasn’t as if there were any limiting factors to confuse and confound his ambition. Here, and now, he had all the time in the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Almost as soon as she moved off again, Kit realized that it wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought to reach Rose Selavy’s terminus. Rose had already had the opportunity to figure things out, because she hadn’t had to bother with the possibility of taking the return trip. Rose didn’t want to return to the interstices of the land of the living. What, after all, awaited her there but a pokey, lonely attic and a bus driver’s bed? She had been grateful, after her fashion, for the sensations that Kit had contrived to lend her, but she had never been under any illusion that that kind of parasitic half-life was a fit fate for a wholehearted whore like her. Rose might be in far better shape than the lost, homeless and hopeless ghosts that Michael had determined to help, but she knew full well that she was dead, and that the land of the living would look a hell of a lot better looking back than it ever had when she’d had nothing else to which to look forward. Rose Selavy knew that she had to get off here, and soon—but she wasn’t about to hurry for anyone else’s sake, any more than she was about to get off where any of her fellow ghosts got off. Rose was a non-conformist, and stubborn with it.

  For the most part, Kit knew, non-conformists didn’t do too well in the land of the living. No matter how good they were at stepping out of line they tended to end up battering their heads against the brickwork until their brains were bloody. But this world was different. Here, it wasn’t at all difficult to step out of line, and non-conformity was virtually compulsory—but that only made Rose Selavy want to try just that little bit harder. Rose was a very modern girl—or perhaps, considering that she was well and truly dead, a very post-modern girl.

  Kit knew, because she could feel it in the steadfast beating of her heart, that Rose’s terminus couldn’t be far away—but she wasn’t sure that distance was an appropriate measure of the extent that the bus might have to go in order to reach it.

  “You can sit down now,” Kit said to Stephen. “I think we’ve come as far as history can take us. I think it’s my business now. I don’t know why I’m so tired—it isn’t as if I have to bear the weight the damned bus on my own shoulders—but it’s me who has to make the effort. You’ve done your bit.”

  Stephen probably didn’t agree with her, but Kit was driving the bus and he had to know that the driver of a bus was in a position of no less authority than the captain of a ship, even though she had never actually heard of anyone asking a bus driver to perform a marriage ceremony. Stephen sat down.

  Rose Selavy came forward again to take the place that he had usurped.

  “Anywhere you like,” Kit said.

  “I don’t like the look of this place,” was Rose’s answer. “Pedestrians everywhere.”

  There were, indeed, pedestrians everywhere. Kit didn’t notice pedestrians while she was working, except when they stepped in front of her and threatened her accident-free record. Pedestrians belonged to a parallel world with its own laws of nature. There was, of course, a theoretical sense in which pedestrians and passengers were the same—just as there was a theoretical sense in which the living and the dead were the same—but the process of metamorphosis that turned one into the other was a categorical transfiguration.

  She had always known that pedestrians were numerous, but she had always viewed them as a collective, like a hive of ants or termites, uninteresting in any individual sense. She had, of course, been a pedestrian herself. Everybody had—except, so rumor had it, people who were famous or lived in Los Angeles. But when she had been a pedestrian, Kit had never thought of herself as a pedestrian; she had always thought of herself as herself. It was only when viewed from a bus that pedestrians actually became visible as pedestrians, describable only by tha
t term and no other.

  “You needn’t be afraid,” Kit told Rose Selavy. “As soon as you step down from the bus, you’ll be yourself. You’ll be true to yourself. This isn’t life. It’s better than life, from the viewpoint of the dead. Life is for the living.”

  “You want to be rid of me,” Rose observed, perceptively. “Well, maybe it’s not that easy. I fucked you before the boy did—not to mention during and after. He knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

  “It’s the other way around, love,” Kit told her, not ungently. “I lent you my flesh, my comeuppance and my heartbeat, and you don’t have anything right now that isn’t partly mine. I know what I need, and I know what you want. This is where we part. You can step down into inexplicability, impossibility or sheer perversity, and be welcome to it, but you will step down before I turn this damned bus around. And I am going home. Unless you can persuade Michael to go with you, you’re going alone.”

  Rose wasn’t impressed. “Underneath,” she said, savoring the word, “you’re a slut. I could have you any time I like. Not just now, but forever. How are you ever going to tie yourself down to local hops, now that you’ve been the distance?”

  “I’ll manage,” Kit promised.

  Outside the bus, inexplicability, impossibility and sheer perversity were competing to be noticed, apprehended and misunderstood. The light was no longer bright, and every single line was crying out to be stepped out of. It wasn’t madness, and it wasn’t chaos, but it was seriously surreal. There wasn’t a burning giraffe to be seen, nor a sofa shaped like lipstick-laden lips, not a torso with an inbuilt chest of drawers, nor even a crystal world in the wake of a corrosive deluge, but the world of the dead was playful and becoming even more so. It was a birth process that delighted even in its own insincere refusals, its own false denials, and its own shameful guiltlessness. It was a world fit for Rose Selavy, even though it had not been made for her—and that, presumably, was why she finally found herself thrust out of character.