Ghostly: Stories

  ‘The owner polished the counter, became expressive. He said that the guy, Otensky, didn’t drink. He just ordered tonics with Rosie’s and read books about quantum mechanics. He bragged that he was smarter than most men, though he’d never been to college. He was a rabbi’s son. The bar owner told me that after the accident, before the radiation affected him, he said, “I can do what God tells us we can’t. Do you know why?” When the owner asked why, he said, “Because there is no God. There’s only matter, energy, subatomic particles, and vectors.” He told the owner that man could do almost anything he wanted through physics, and that thought and matter were intertwined. He said that a person’s whole spirit could be contained within one bit of flesh from the inside of his cheek.

  ‘The owner leaned forward. “He got crazy,” he said. He shrugged. “He claimed that through a combination of”—he paused—“quantum entanglement, infrared energy, crystals, and welding tools, he’d welded a piece of himself into the stone in his ring, and that he was going to mail the ring to his fiancée. He told me that he was going to write to her, “I’m going to try to come back to you,” and tell her to take the ring and find a man she liked, and tell him to put it on.’

  ‘I said that was crazy, which it was.

  ‘The owner smiled. “Guy had a big head,” he said. “Brilliant man, kinda crazy, big head.”

  ‘I was at the door when the owner said, “The wife had a weird name. Emeralda. Topaz, something like that.” ’

  The people at the dinner table stared blankly at one another.

  The crime-noir novelist said, ‘Was the name Erendita?’

  The woman nodded.

  The novelist pushed his dessert plate away. ‘So, the fiancée had the same name as the woman your ex-boyfriend married,’ he said. ‘But that’s just coincidence.’

  The people at the table yawned. They felt that the story was overlong, and unsatisfying.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ a painter said.

  ‘Let’s see if I got this,’ the fantasy writer said. ‘You and your boyfriend liked each other at first. After living together, you got sick of each other and treated each other like shit. Then you broke up. That’s all relationships. Isn’t it?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ the crime-noir novelist asked. ‘Are you saying this guy melted, hung around as a ghost in a lawn chair in Syracuse for thirty years, somehow took possession of your boyfriend, and persuaded you to be his paying escort back to Nebraska? So he could get with his old lady?’

  The woman shrugged.

  ‘Hmm,’ the crime-noir novelist said. ‘It’s kind of a stretch.’

  Two painters chatted rapidly in Portuguese. They laughed. One turned to the woman and smiled. She said, apologetically, ‘Stupid story.’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘And the ring?’ the crime-noir novelist said. ‘The stupid elephant ring? What was the deal with that?’

  The woman didn’t know. After she gave it to Paul, she said, he always wore it.

  ‘Interesting,’ the crime-noir novelist said. ‘I guess.’

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ the woman said. ‘He published a novel this summer. That’s why I can’t tell you his real name. It’s been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.’

  ‘Guy’s a writer,’ the crime-noir novelist said.

  ‘It’s good,’ the woman said. ‘I’m happy for him. But the prose is odd. It’s like the writing of someone who didn’t go beyond eighth grade. Short, simple sentences. Very declarative.’

  The crime-noir novelist raised his eyebrows.

  ‘But every hundred pages or so—’ she looked up forlornly—‘there’s one sentence that goes on for three pages, full of modifying clauses and gerunds.’

  The fantasy writer laughed. ‘Now you’re saying—what? Two authors, one body?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Say it’s possible. The original owner. And a guest.’

  The journalist smiled. ‘So, if there was a ghost, the ghost didn’t choose you.’

  The fantasy writer spread his hands. ‘Trivial crap,’ he said. ‘It’s pointless to unpack these things. Every man makes his own path. This guy, Paul, fucked up by sleeping with you. Excuse my honesty. Sure, he got depressed. No man really wants to find out his girlfriend’s a ho-bag. But what’s to worry about? He wrote a best-selling novel. So what if he had to pump old pussy to do it? Even if a man gets half of what he was meant to get, and becomes half of what he was meant to be, that’s good. Who cares how it happens? I hope some dead fuck helps me get where I’m going, too.’

  The people at the table sighed and shifted in their seats. The night outside was still—the rain had stopped—but in the nearby trailer park a mutt howled. In the yard, the dark stubby shapes of three javelinas trotted through a stand of prickly-pear cactuses. One grunted softly and kicked an empty can, and in the lights of the bungalow’s porch it flashed like a star.

  ‘AUGUST 2026: THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS’

  RAY BRADBURY (AMERICAN, 1920–2012)

  First published in 1950 in Collier’s magazine. In the original version the day described in the story is 28 April 1985.

  Perhaps this is not a ghost story at all, but I like to think it is. It is a story of the ghost of a house and the ghost of a civilisation. It is a warning and a parable. Of all the stories in this book, it is the most possible. We don’t usually think of Ray Bradbury as a realist, but as time passes, his work acquires unfortunate shadings as reality catches up with it. His own house in Los Angeles was recently demolished, alas.

  AUGUST 2026: THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS

  Ray Bradbury

  In the living-room the voice-clock sang. Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

  In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interiors eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny-side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

  ‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, ‘in the city of Allendale, California.’ It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. ‘Today is Mr Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.’

  Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

  Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: ‘Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today …’ And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.

  Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.

  At eight-thirty the eggs were shrivelled and the toast was like stone. An aluminium wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.

  Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.

  Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were a-crawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their moustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

  Ten o’clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

  Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The w
ater pelted window-panes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

  The five spots of paint – the man, the woman, the children, the ball – remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

  The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

  Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace! How carefully it had inquired, ‘Who goes there? What’s the password?’ and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

  It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!

  The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

  Twelve noon.

  A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.

  The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

  For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall-panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.

  The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.

  It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odour and the scent of maple syrup.

  The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlour for an hour.

  Two o’clock, sang a voice.

  Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown grey leaves in an electrical wind.

  Two-fifteen.

  The dog was gone.

  In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.

  Two thirty-five.

  Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing-cards fluttered on to pads in a shower of pips: Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.

  But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.

  At four o’clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the panelled walls.

  * * *

  Four-thirty.

  The nursery walls glowed.

  Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon colour and fantasy. Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminium roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot, still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aromas of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm, endless sky. The animals drew away into thornbrakes and water-holes.

  It was the children’s hour.

  * * *

  Five o’clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.

  Six, seven, eight o’clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft grey ash on it, smoking, waiting.

  Nine o’clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.

  Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling: ‘Mrs McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?’

  The house was silent.

  The voice said at last, ‘Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random.’ Quiet music rose to back the voice. ‘Sara, Teasdale. As I recall, your favourite …

  ‘There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

  The swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

  And frogs in the pools singing at night,

  And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

  Robins will wear their feathery fire,

  Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

  And not one will know of the war, not one

  Will care at last when it is done.

  Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

  If mankind perished utterly;

  And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

  Would scarcely know that we were gone.’

  The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

  At ten o’clock the house began to die.

  The wind blew. A falling tree-bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

  ‘Fire!’ screamed a voice. The house-lights flashed, water-pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: ‘Fire, fire, fire!’

  The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat, and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.

  The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water-rats squeaked from the walls, pistolled their water, and ran for more. And the wall-sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.

  But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.

  The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon the Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

  Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colours of drapes!

  And then, reinforcements.

  From attic trap-doors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.

  The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear, cold venom of green froth.

  But the fire was clever. It had sent flame outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.

  The fire rushed back into every closet and felt the clothes hung there.

  The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying
in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.

  In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing colour, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off towards a distant steaming river …

  Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock-shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film-spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.

  The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.

  In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

  The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlour. The parlour into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, arm-chair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.

  Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

  Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:

  ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is …’

  AUDREY NIFFENEGGER is the author of the international bestsellers The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry. She has also published four illustrated books: The Three Incestuous Sisters, The Adventuress, The Night Bookmobile and Raven Girl. She lives in Chicago and London.