Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story
Page 19
“Where did it all go wrong, chuck?” Violet Leverhulme asked, by way of acknowledging her own incongruity. “Where did it all go wrong?”
“I don’t know, love,” Kit replied. “I don’t suppose anyone does.”
Violet Leverhulme turned to Michael then, and said: “Coming, ducks?”
Michael got up. “I ought to go back,” he said—but the way he said it made it perfectly clear that he was only fishing for reassurance.
“You might as well go,” said Stephen. “You’ve done your time.”
Michael walked forward, shedding his own imposture as he did so. When he reached out to take Violet’s proffered hand, he was a Stephen: another Stephen, but a Stephen nevertheless. He’d found a vanishing point, and he knew its value to a dead but aged child like himself.
Kit put the brakes on, knowing that she had finally reached the heart of Chiaroscuro City, the place where all destinies intersected, the corner of eternity, the circular square.
“But there’s nothing out there,” Kit’s Stephen—Stephen Carraway—said to Violet, never having said a truer word even though there was everything out there, and all of it within view. “You do understand that, don’t you? This isn’t Heaven. It isn’t even Hell. You’ll have to make your own way to go anywhere at all, and in order to do that, you’ll have to find yourselves first.”
“That won’t be difficult,” his doppelgänger assured him, “given that we’re not actually lost.”
“You’re the ones who have to find themselves, ducks,” said Violet Leverhulme. “But it’s easier than you think, so long as you remember that a rose is only a rose is a rose indeed, until it becomes something else.”
The two ghosts stepped down from the bus then, although only one of them looked back to offer a silent gesture of thanks with his wide and innocent eyes.
Kit was certain by now that there really was nothing outside the bus, even though she could see everything. The trick now, she thought, would be to lose the vanishing point that she had found, and to collapse her panoramic viewpoint into something more scenic. She had to find the seed of a better way of seeing before alarm bells began to ring, in obedience to the ancient principle that stories with happy endings needed to be sown instead of tolled. It was time to get away from the impossible and the perverse, even if the way back led through pitch darkness and sketchy shapelessness.
She moved off, aiming not for the ceaseless stream of traffic but for the shadows. Hereabouts, she knew, nothing wasn’t such an awful absence as it was back home; it had potential. Already, she could hear the faint strains of distant music rising above the purr of her engine and thunder of her heart. It was neither the Electric Hellfire Club nor the Marionettes, but something just as rich, powerful and adventurous.
As soon as she met the shadows the glare of the bus headlamps was swallowed up as completely as the leakage of the interior lights, but that digestion was no longer a matter of protecting her from a sight that her eyes and mind might not be able to bear.
Kit was perfectly sure that she’d be able to find her way home from the terminus, because the terminus of a bus route was really only a place to turn around. It didn’t matter that there was nothing here that could be clearly illuminated, whatever kind of light seeped into it. All she had to do was turn the bus around.
“And that’s the whole point,” she muttered, as much to herself as to the boy who had followed her to the end of the Earth and beyond. “That’s how the likes of us find our way to where we need to be. The dead shouldn’t turn around, because they get caught and held if they do. The living have to, because that’s what life is all about. They have to turn around and look at where they’ve been, but they also have to go on, and they have to get off at the stop that’s right for them. They don’t have to go all the way back, if that means that they’ll never be able to go forward. It’s just a matter of finding the right route.”
Kit realized then than she was a lucky woman, even if she had been christened Clementine by a Mum and Dad who’d turned into the alcoholics from Hell. When most people asked Why me? they had to go on and on and on without even the ghost of an answer—even the ones who were psychologically incapable of taking life or death as they found it—but she’d always had the luxury of being a dreamer.
She put the single-decker into reverse, and described a scrupulously neat three-point turn in the middle of nowhere. Then she headed back towards the regions of infinity where order was ready-, if roughly, made.
Kit was glad, as she steered the bus back to the night garage, that she had been able to be of service to the dead—especially to Rose Selavy, to whom she had owed a debt. Rose Selavy, as a fully paid-up member of the Electric Hellfire Club, had known what shock value was worth, and had educated Kit in its economics. Rose Selavy had known what it really meant to kiss the goat. What she had got in return for her kiss was the balls to be a ghost and a half, and then some—and in the end, that had been her victory and not her defeat. Maybe it hadn’t been what she expected, and maybe it was far more or far less than Violet Leverhulme deserved, but who was Kit to judge?
Who, indeed, was anyone?
Stephen was still peering out of the window as the bus moved off in its new direction, almost as if he expected to see Violet and the other Stephen still standing there, waving them off. Or perhaps, instead of anything so meekly benign, he expected to see something gruesome detach itself from the womb of uncertainty and reach a clawed hand through the carcass of the bus to rip the heart from his startled breast. Either way, he was working his lips as if he expected to have to use them. Now the hard part was over he couldn’t quite believe that he’d got away with whatever it was he thought he’d got away with.
“It’s okay,” Kit told him. “That sort of thing only happens in bad movies. And maybe, once now and again, in real life. Not here. We’re done here. We can go home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was still dark when they got back to the night-garage. The door was still open when she arrived, but Kit was careful to shut it before she left. As she and Stephen walked away she heard the sound of a dog barking, but she knew that they had nothing to fear from a bitch that had failed her guide-dog exams.
When they got back up to her room Kit switched the light on, so that they could both see that everything was in its place, possessed of all the solidity that anyone could possibly have desired. The walls were primrose yellow. The bed was unmade. The toaster was beside the microwave. God was in his Heaven, Mrs. Gaunt was in her basement and the alcoholics from Hell were in Sheffield and Spain.
“You were right,” Stephen told her, humbly. “It was haunted—but I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble. If you check with your employers, they’ll probably let you slap another coat of paint on the walls. Green is supposed to be a restful color. Apple green might be nice—spearmint’s a little too vibrant. I’d be glad to help with the painting, if you like.”
“I really admired the way you weren’t terrified,” she said. “I won’t say that I couldn’t have done it without you, but I was really glad you were along for the ride. It helped.”
“I’m an art historian,” he reminded her. “To me, it was all just one more surrealist joke, one more coup de l’oeil. I didn’t even have to tell myself that I was dreaming. Well, not very often. What’s your secret?”
“My name’s Clementine,” she said, as if that were an explanation as well as the truth.
“Well,” said Stephen, pensively. “I suppose I really ought to be going. My results are due out this afternoon. I’ll be a B.A.”
Kit thought he ought be going too. He needed to know his result. There would be time aplenty to figure out whether he might be relationship material, and even if the calculus of probabilities held good—in which case he either wouldn’t be up for it or wouldn’t be up to it—it couldn’t possibly be a total loss now that they had been to nowhere and back. “Look,” she said, carefully. “I’ll promise not to call you Steve again
if you promise not to call me Clementine or make any daft jokes about herring boxes without topses. On that sort of basis, I think we might chance another pint or two. Your end of town or mine—I’m not fussy. I never have to pay my fare.”
For one horrible moment, she thought he might say no even to that, on the grounds that although she was neither mad nor bad, she was still a little too dangerous to know. But he was a lad, after all, and at not-yet-quite-twenty-six she was still best bitter, not Granny Smith or Mrs. Gaunt or shrinking Violet or second-hand Rose.
“Might as well,” he said. “If we have to find ourselves, we might as well look together.”
Kit saw him to the door of the bedsit and watched him go down the stairs. Then she closed herself in and went over to the window to draw back the curtains and let in the blue morning light. The sky was still pink around the edges and as flat as flat could be, but its blue was infinite and benign. When she looked up as high as she could, she could still imagine the celestial spiders hard at work, spinning the fabric of creation.
“It’s not hard to find yourself,” she quoted, remembering one of those silly jokes that her father had been so fond of telling her, long, long ago, when she was young and he was home and sober. “All you have to do is remember where you were last time you put yourself down. Then you pick yourself up again, and you carry on where you left off.”
She knew that it was true. She was her father’s daughter. And although there were people she knew who didn’t reckon much to the fact that she was a bus driver, she wasn’t fucking stupid and she hadn’t gone to the Devil after all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.
ALSO BY BRIAN STABLEFORD
Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations
The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales
Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica
Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales
Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies
The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy
The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future
The Eleventh Hour
The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)
Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future
Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions
The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)
The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions
In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story
Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses
The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania
The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future
An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels
The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)
The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine
Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)
The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession
The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas
Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)
Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies
The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism
The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below
Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY BRIAN STABLEFORD