Ghosteria Volume 1: The Stories (Ghostgeria) Read online

  “Wait? No. There is no more need of waiting.”

  The vase was in his hand. Sapphire flashed, and then went out as the dusk enclosed him.

  The dragon heaved itself, with brass creakings, upright and abruptly aloft. Lunaria, rooted to the ground, watched Subyrus vanish into the sky above Vaim.

  5. In Solitude

  Somewhere in the hollow hill, a lion roared. It was a beast of jointed electrum, the seventh of the Mechanicae, activated and set loose by Subyrus on his return. Its task: to roam the chasm of the hill, a fierce guardian should any ever come there in the future, which was unlikely. It was unlikely because Subyrus, descending, had closed and sealed off the entrance to the hill by use of the eighth mechanism. The stone pavilion had folded and collapsed in unbroken and impenetrable slabs above the place. The periodic, inexhaustible roar of the lion from below was an added, really unnecessary deterrent.

  And now Subyrus sat in his darkened hall, in his quartz chair. The fire did not burn. One lamp on a bronze tripod lit up the vase of blue crystal on a small table. The stopper lay beside it, and beside that a narrow phial with a fluid in it the colour of clear water.

  Subyrus picked up the phial, uncorked, and leisurely drained it. It had the taste of wine and aloes. It was the most deadly of the six deadly poisons known on earth, but its nickname was Gentleness, for it slew without pain and in gradual, tactful, not unpleasant stages.

  Subyrus rested in the chair, composed, and took the rose-opal stopper in his hand, and fixed his look on the vase.

  He had exhausted the possibilities of the world long since. His intellect and body, both were sick with the sparse fare they must subsist on. There was no height he might not scale at a step, no ocean he might not dredge at a blink. No learning he had not devoured, no game he had not played. Thus, it had needed Lunaria to hold his horrified tedium in check, something so common and so ugly as a harlot’s sneer to keep him vital and alive.

  When the gate had opened, he had not seen it. He had nearly by-passed it altogether. He had sought a gift for Lunaria, then he had sought to trap her in the crystal, making her irrevocably his property and denying himself of her forever. Lunaria – he scarcely recalled her now.

  Concentration on the minor issue had obscured the major. At the last instant, the truth had come to him, barely in time.

  He had exhausted the world. Therefore he must find a second world of which he knew nothing. A world whose magic he had yet to learn, a world alien and unexplored, a world impossible to imagine – the microcosm within the vase.

  Like a warm sleep, Gentleness stole over him. Primed to catch his ghost, the blue vase enigmatically waited. Perhaps nightmare crouched inside, perhaps a paradise. Even as the poison chilled it, Subyrus’s blood raced with a heady excitement he had not felt for two decades and more.

  In the shadows, a silver bell-clock struck a single dim note. It was the ninth of the Mechanicae, striking to mark the hour of the Magician-Lord’s death.

  And Subyrus sensed the moment of death come on him, as surely as he might gauge the supreme moment of love. He leaned forward to poise the rose-opal stopper above the lip of the vase. As the breath of life coursed from him, and the soul with it, unseen, was dashed into the trap of the crystal, the stopper dropped from his fingers to shut the gate behind him.

  Subyrus, to whom existence had become mechanical, the tenth of his own Mechanicae, sat dead in his chair. And in the vase –

  What?

  Lunaria Vaimian had climbed the hill alone.

  Below, at the hill’s foot, uneasily, three or four attendants huddled about a gilded palanquin, dishevelled by cool winds and sombre fancies.

  Lunaria wore black, and her bright hair was veiled in black. She regarded the fallen stone of the pavilion. Her eyes were angry.

  “It is foolish of me,” she said, “to chide you that you used me. Many have done so. Foolish also to desire to curse you, for you are proof against my ill-wishing as finally you were proof against my allure. But how I hate you, hate you as I love you, as I hated and I loved you from the beginning, knowing there was but one way by which I could retain your interest in me; foreknowing that I should lose you in the end, whatever my tricks, and so I have.”

  Leaves were blowing from the woods in the wind, like yellow papers.

  Lunaria watched them settle over the stone.

  “A thousand falsehoods,” she said. “A thousand pretences. Men I compelled to visit me, (how afraid they were of the Magician-Lord), only that you might behold them. Gifts I demanded, poses I upheld. To mask my love. To keep your attention. And all, now, for nothing. I would have been your ghost-slave gladly. I would have let you slay me and bind me in the vase. I would have –”

  The electrum lion roared somewhere beneath her feet in the hollow hill.

  “There it is,” Lunaria muttered sullenly, “the voice of my fury and my pain that will hurt me till I die; my despair, but more adequately expressed. I need say nothing while that other says it for me.”

  And she went away down the hill through the blowing leaves and the blowing of her veil, and never spoke again as long as she lived.

  The Ghost

  (in Two Letters)

  The Ghost walked into the elaborate Dining Room of The Black Lion Hotel at exactly thirteen minutes past 7p.m. He was fashionably late.

  He knew nobody there, he thought, apart from the ‘Happy Couple’. Burn (was that an abbreviation of Bernard – or Burning? the Ghost had never known) was expansively greeting people by the free bar, under the coloured lights. Dinner itself was scheduled for eight o’clock. But where was she – for an anxious moment the Ghost could not quite recapture her name. But of course, it did come back. He was, after all, haunted by it, her name, the Ghost. Jolinda Franken, as it had appeared in the theatre programme; Joli for short. He didn’t like ‘Joli’, he thought now. And did he like her? No, he thought. He only loved her. And there she was. In a silky orange outfit, presumably her ‘Wedding Dress’. Dark hair streaming to her waist, honey-colour eyes wide with excitement and mascara. Cool and hot.

  She had not seen him. But presumably she, not Burn, had sent the invitation.

  The Ghost took one of the glasses of quite decent champagne from the edge of the bar. He was glad, even in the state he was in, he could grip the glass. Yet, when he sipped and swallowed a couple of times, the drink seemed flat and pale to him, a worn-out taste... He set the glass aside half consumed.

  All the while, his eyes having located her, followed her – Jolinda, Joli. Was she beautiful? Was she what he had taken her for? Did he love her, even now?

  Puzzled, he frowned, and someone in the adjacent crush of guests noticed him. “Hi! Cheer up! It’s a wedding! I’m Steve – and you?”

  “Matthew,” he said, thoughtless. Yes. He was Matthew.

  But “Hi, Matt!” abbreviated the idiot, swigging back his full and foamy glass and reaching for a refill. “Who is it you know? Burny, or Joli?”

  “Oh,” he said vaguely, “both.” Lies. He knew neither of them.

  “He’s a lucky fuck, isn’t he, old Burn?”

  “Yes,” said the Ghost, reflectively.

  “I mean, she’s a looker – and an actor – I admit, never seen her in anything myself. But I don’t do theatre much. Have you?”

  “Yes,” said the Ghost.

  He did not add he had acted opposite Joli only last year, in that strange production in Edinburgh, The Talking Street. A silly play, badly written – except, almost annoyingly, for its radiant middle section. He had saved himself each night, he felt, making do through all the first half hour, just being - what was it? Professional – until you hit the buffers and exploded, three quarters of an hour before the interval. And that explosion had been his big scene with her. With Joli – Jolinda. Actors often got tangled up ‘romantically’ because passion had to burst out between them in a blaze, on stage, or in front of the camera. And presumably that was what had happened with them. From the tussle and fir
eworks on stage they were eventually decanted into the real sex scenes in his bed, there in the canny grey windings of that Scottish town. She knew it was nothing, really. The ‘perfume and suppliance of a minute’. But for him it had meant rather more. Lovers, Matthew and Jolinda, Matt and Joli. (The twat with the abbreviation-fix had wandered off by now; the Ghost was alone again in the heart of the crowd.) Interesting, so much raucous festive life, and at its core, his deadness.

  Was that then what finally he felt about her, his lover?

  Only deadness? She did not seem, certainly, as he recalled – vulnerable, inflammatory, tender – other. No, this sexy young woman in her orange silk – and silk it was, for Burn, with his IT business, could afford it – she looked to the Ghost... only like – a memory.

  Does it always come to this? Did I have to come to this to see the bitter truth of it, a tissue of lies, and like all tissues easily sodden with tears, or blood?

  And now they were all to sit down to dinner. He moved, will-less, to the long tables, among the rest. Maybe there was a place marked for him? No, they hadn’t gone that far. You simply sat where there was room. He took a chair way down from the cross-wise main table where Burn and she had sat. He could see her better from here. That was, she was farther off and so, oddly, clearly to be focussed on. Outside the tall windows the sun had started its long English set. The hotel garden, with its flowers and nicely-shaped tame trees, filled with shadow. The sky was pinkly gold, toning well with the orange dress; probably ordered, the sky, beforehand. And candles were being lit in here by the hotel staff.

  There was perhaps a danger he would come to see, in the cameo of the candlelight, and after the sun’s long fade, only her. Well, why not? She was why he had come here.

  “Oh, hello,” said a plump young woman to his left. “I’m Susie.”

  “Matthew,” he said.

  “Sorry, what? Andrew did you say?”

  “Hey,” (male voice), “Andrew, could you pass that wine carafe along, mate?”

  He wondered if actually he could, but taking hold of the glassy jug, although his chilled fingers seemed to sink into its side as if into a cold jelly, he did make it move. That was love, then. Love could move a wine carafe, even now, just as Dante told you it moved the sun and the other stars.

  His thoughts grew disorganised again. He wondered if he would be able to see that celestial movement, see the sun, for example, sinking inch by inch... But really, no doubt, he couldn’t. All he would see was that dark-haired girl, beautiful in the most ordinary way, and shining with an almost painterly candle-ine lustre, as she clasped the hand of her husband. Burn.

  Obviously, Matthew didn’t know Burn. Only of him. But that was enough. Matthew stared. Burn was ugly, wasn’t he? Was he? He was a creep with too-short hair and a fat mouth. In a couple more years he’d be fat. Or he’d work out in the gym and get muscle-bound. Or somebody would kill him for being the dubious business type Matthew had assumed Burn was.

  The Ghost recollected when Jolinda first mentioned Burn. The recreated moments fell like thin cold slates into the Ghost’s mind. It was when he and she came back from Edinburgh. The small part that had been mooted for him at the National had fallen through, as they so often did. His agent was talking about securing him work on a commercial – “Okay, Matthew, I know it isn’t sixteenth sword-porter in Lear, but you’ll get good money –”

  “Off which you’ll take your fifteen percent,” Matthew added, so they had parted lukewarm to frigid. And then, going back to his room, Jolinda had gone out. And later she called him, “Sorry, Matthew. Someone I have to see. I’ll be back – oh, midnight. Don’t wait up, love.” As if he were her bloody mother. She didn’t come back anyway. (People always called each other, just ‘met’ – so direct. More honest – or more crass?) And next day they did meet, in the wine bar off the Strand. “Look, Matthew, I haven’t been quite straight with you. I’m really sorry. It’s just –”

  It turned out she had been seeing Burn, (Bernard? Burning?), for some months before the Edinburgh stint. “I didn’t know I’d meet someone like you... Oh, love,” she added, sorrowful, acting her guts out, he was sure. “I’ve been a bitch. I couldn’t resist. You’re so tempting. And we’ve had a great time, haven’t we? I couldn’t have got through that crappy run if I hadn’t been with you –”

  “But now you’re with him.”

  “Well, you see...” She paused, and drank down all the wine in her big glass – as if she desperately needed it, or more likely she wanted to finish it before she made a bolt for a taxi, Hampstead and Burn. “You see... he and I – we sort of – we may get married. I mean, not yet. In the summer. And so I can’t go on seeing you, can I? I mean, it wouldn’t be fair to him.”

  “Were you fair to him in Edinburgh?” he had asked her, deadly.

  “No. Nor to you. Nor me. But – these things happen.”

  These things.

  Before she could make her bolt for freedom he himself got up and left.

  Yes, people always called, or texted each other, or emailed if you could afford a computer. Or they just met. He did try once, twice, to write to her, a letter. But he tore both of them up. Wasted paper.

  She though had called him twice, since then. Once she was high – booze, or something, she liked her spliff. She seemed to be saying during these calls she would really enjoy one last sex session with him. Conceivably, he later thought, even after she got roped and tied with Burn, she might still like the occasional off-leash frolic with Matthew. But he wouldn’t do that. They said women were the ones that got hurt, couldn’t let go, made themselves miserable, died inside. Christ, what fucking rubbish. He had died, inside, the Ghost. You couldn’t help where you loved, even if it was some illusion, some flake of candle-gleam, some echo of a once-off kiss or cry, a body smooth and soft as fur, a laugh you would know in blind darkness, the lamp of a golden eye that, for all those single seconds, saw only you.

  He would always have to love her. He could let go – but love wouldn’t let go of him. Love, which could move a wine carafe and the sun, had him firmly by its poisoned fangs and was shaking him to and fro. He would always love that stupid, brainless, ordinary scrap of flesh – a rag, a bone, and a hank of brunette hair –

  “Are you done, sir?”

  He glanced. A waitress leaning to him. There had been – still was – something uneaten on his plate – paté, he guessed, a whisker of purple and green salad.

  Am I done? “Yes,” he said, “quite done.”

  And away it went, and here was something else. He stared at it, as he had stared at her, and could not translate what it was – meat? Pasta? – as he could not, any more, make out what she was.

  The sun had gone down. A dark blue vitreous box covered the garden, with the twinkle of city lights beyond, the ever-reassuring pretence of mundane reality.

  The Ghost reached for his glass. Found now he had neither the will nor the strength to raise it. But he would have to, he thought, because look, Burn and Joli were kissing in a sloppy adolescent way no actor, surely, would ever disgrace themself with in public. And then there was going to be a speech – the Best Man – who the hell was that? – oh, that grinning twot with a beard – and the Ghost too would be expected to clap and perhaps whistle, and lift and gulp champagne, and where had the second or third course gone?

  The plump woman to his left was reaching right across him to take a chocolate from the thin woman on his right...

  How bright the candles. But she, Joli, had not taught them their torchlike brightness. Her hair was dull and spoiled with the expensive treacle of hair products. Her eyes were dull as lead.

  The audience laughed at the Best Man’s best joke. God knew what it had been.

  The Ghost remembered finding the invitation to this reception. It was in the hall of the flats. He saw it just after his agent called, on the crackling mobile that was running out of money, to say the commercial for the Energade Health Boost Drink had gone to another.
/>   (A disco had started by now and figures flooded the dining room floor. He was partly conscious of their gesticulations, and the softly pulsating lights. And a clock sounded, or only a loud novelty watch – midnight, was it?)

  ‘Love to welcome you,’ the invite had said. ‘This happy celebration’ ‘Our valued Guest’–

  Why had she sent it to him? Or had it been Burn? Either of them – why? To torture? To gloat, to hurt and harm worse? To dance on his grave to the tune of the Wedding March, or the Death March: Here comes the Died –

  “Is anyone sitting here?” somebody asked, under the laborious syntho base and drums.

  “No,” said the Ghost. As ever, he recognised his cue. He knew exactly when to leave. Invaluable, that, in an actor, perfect timing.

  “That’s the bloody weird part,” said one uniformed man to another. “Several people apparently saw Haine. At least, early on, even three or four hours later. One girl said he had a really cool white shirt – and she described this shirt – and it was the one he was wearing. I saw it on him myself.”

  “Yeah,” said the other uniform, “And that guy – Stephen something – he said he really liked Haine’s wrist-band, asked him where he got it, but never had a reply.”

  Their drank their coffee. (The canteen never did it quite right, too frothy, not strong enough. Thank God in a few more hours there was a chance at Starbucks.)

  “Well, what I think,” said the first uniform, “he went to the reception, and then nipped home and finished up.”

  “Yeah but – well, they’re hushing all this up, aren’t they? The SOCO, he was in a right state. Never saw him like that – and the T.O.D. –”

  “It can’t be anything else, can it?” Flat as one more cold slate, these words. “And a wedding – all of them drinking. People see what they expect to. Even she –”

  “Yeah. Ms Franken.”