“That is my best ghost story, yes. Until now, of course. What do you have?”
She is quiet for a while before answering. “No, nothing even as good as that, I’m afraid.”
“Not even a bad dream or two to keep you awake at night?”
“Oh, bad dreams, yes. I had a good spell of nightmares for a while. Or night terrors, I guess. I once saw a man standing over me at the side of the bed, his hands all stretched out to try and strangle me. And I saw a hatch open up in the bedroom ceiling one time, and a face staring down at me from it.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It was. But they were just dreams. Or something like that. They came on quickly and then disappeared as soon as the light came on. They were nothing like this at all. This is much worse. Whatever you think this is, it’s real and its happening. It doesn’t care whether the light is on or off. It’s there. You hear it too. It’s really there.”
#
If it happened every night it would be unbearable. It would break them, they’d lose their minds through lack of sleep and fear and poisonous anxiety. Worse than that, they’d take it out on each other. They’d lash out and fight about it. They’d turn that anxiety into words and arguments. They’d twist themselves into furious, senseless, spiralling battles that would go nowhere and never end. They would not cope with it. Something unthinkable would happen. One way or another it would be the end of them.
But it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, it comes intermittently. Sometimes nightly for a week or two. Sometimes it is quiet for as long as a month or more. Sometimes it comes one night, then not again for several. So unpredictable is the ebb and the flow that they think there must be, hidden somewhere, a pattern to it all. There must be some thing they can point to that causes the visits, as they have come to call them, to rise and to fall in frequency and in intensity. This is a rational world they live in, they think, and there must be some detail, hidden in the random chaos, they can study and understand and use to their advantage. But nothing emerges. No matter where they look, they can see no pattern. In truth, they accept in the end, the visits come when they want to and go whenever they choose. There is nothing they can to do cause it and nothing they can do to stop it. This is the heart of the matter for them. Theirs is a misery they have no control over. This, finally, may be the hardest fact of all to which they must reconcile themselves.
#
“Sometimes it is an animal,” she says one night. “Sometimes I imagine it as a cat. An old black cat caught in the corner of the room or under the bed. Something sad and trapped and calling out to us. That’s what I’m thinking about lately when I’m listening to it.”
“Yes,” he says. “It’s small and its helpless. It’s reaching out to us. It’s asking for something, but we don’t know what it wants. We don’t understand. How can we help it if we don’t know what it needs?”
“But not always. Sometimes,” she says “it has no shape at all. It is a shadow. Or something darker than a shadow. It’s on all sides of us. It’s around us and inside us. It’s a part of us, already. Do you understand? Sometimes I feel like it’s too late. It’s inside us already and there’s nothing we can do anymore.”
“I don’t know that it means us any harm, though,” he says, sitting up in bed and turning towards her. “Do you? I mean, I never feel threatened. I don’t ever remember thinking it was actually going to hurt me. Sometimes I don’t think I even really feel afraid of it, not properly. I feel horror. And dread. And sadness, as though there is something deeply horrible happening and I can’t escape it. I feel all of that, but I never feel as if I’m going to come to any actual harm. Does that make sense?”
“It’s not quite like that for me.” The words come quickly and quietly, almost involuntarily. She’s been listening carefully, but with her eyes turned down. For some reason she doesn’t seem to want to look at him directly. There is a long pause in which neither of them says anything.
“How is it for you?” He says eventually.
“It doesn’t want to hurt me, but it’s going to.” She says. “It is some dark, horrible thing waiting there for me in the night. Every time I hear it I wonder if this is the time, is this the time it’s going to come for me. I can’t do anything to stop it and it’s always there, no matter what I do. I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but one day it is going to hurt me. That’s what I feel when I hear it. That’s what I’m thinking about.”
#
They are grown up, modern people and they try to approach the problem logically. This is not a movie or a television show they’re living through, so they don’t try to find a priest or do an exorcism or dig around in the building’s basement for lost spirit boards or forgotten graves. They don’t even speak to the neighbours or tell any of their friends about it. It all seems too private a thing for that, too personal to involve anyone else. To anyone outside the two of them this would seem like an adventure, a sensation, when really it is anything but. They treat it seriously, but quietly and with care.
They do try to change things. They sleep with the lights on and with the windows open, but that makes no difference. They burn incense and essential oils in the room all day. They clean the room, and the rest of the house, from top to bottom, brushing away all the dust and dirt, polishing each surface as clean as it can be. They throw away the bedclothes and buy new ones. They strip the wallpaper and redecorate the room entirely, new paint on all the walls, new curtains, new carpets, until the whole space feels like an entirely different room altogether. But that still makes no difference. When things get bad, they take sleeping pills, get roaring drunk on wine and whisky, falling into bed in a stupor in their attempt to get through the night without disturbance, but it does not work. It makes no difference. No matter what they do, they will still find themselves awake in the middle of the night, listening into the darkness for the soft breathing and hacking cough of their quiet, cold companion.
Eventually they give in and move their bed into another room. This feels like a failure, like they have admitted defeat, abandoned a portion of their home to this invisible intruder, something they promised themselves they would never do, but which seems unavoidable in the end. There does not seem any other way to escape the quiet, persistent sounds that intrude on them during night. So they make the change, move their furniture and close up the bedroom door behind them.
For a while this seems to work. Their new bedroom is quiet and peaceful. Whatever has been bothering them does not follow them and they sleep, for the most part, well and undisturbed. For a while, at least. Because in the end they realise that there is no way to escape, no way to be free. In the middle of a cold winter’s night some weeks after their move, he wakes and feels she is not lying beside him anymore. He looks at the clock and knows immediately where she must be. He gets up and goes through to the other room and finds her there, curled up, head to the wall with tears running down her face. Somewhere in the darkness the sound of low sobbing is coming back at her. He puts his arms around her and holds her tightly.
“I couldn’t stay away,” she whispers between tears. “I knew it was here and I couldn’t stay away.”
#
Months go past and the situation does not change. They talk about moving house, but rule it out. It doesn’t seem like a problem they can just run away from. “Besides,” she says. “How can we be sure it would really change things anyway. Who’s to say it wouldn’t come with us? Who’s to say it wouldn’t get even worse?”
#
“Do you think it was here when we moved in?” he asks her. “Do you think anyone else in that room would hear the same things we do?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t know.”
#
So they stay in the house and with all the sounds that live in it and as the years pass their relationship with this strange, subt
le haunting shifts and changes, just as they themselves change and age. At times the intensity of the sounds grows and at times it fades. Sometimes months can pass with barely any sounds coming at all, sometimes it seems they are visited every night, each visitation more upsetting, more vivid than the last. No matter how familiar they become through the years, the sounds do not lose their power to move, to horrify or frighten them. Neither do they ever become dulled or desensitised. Each time they wake they sit and listen, just as they did on those first occasions, with just the same combination of fear and dreadful fascination in their hearts.
It seems hard to comprehend anyone coping with such a horror over so many years. If either of them, in those early months of the haunting, had imagined it lasting unchanged for so long, that thought alone would have been perhaps more horrifying than anything the sounds themselves offered. And yet, the human mind is a flexible muscle, capable of accepting to almost any pressure, and they do find a way of enduring through these night-time visits, so much so that they become part of their routine, part of the rhythm of their lives together. So much so that they scarcely ever speak of them anymore, scarcely ever speculate as to what they are and what they mean. Only when their spirits are low and the sounds especially upsetting do they turn to each other for comfort and ask the questions – “why is this happening to us?” and “when will this ever end?” and “what have we done to deserve this?” At these times, whenever they do talk about it, it is his suspicion that she knows or understands more than she is willing to reveal to him. Certainly he is sure that she thinks more often about the visits than he does. More often and more deeply and is less inclined to cast the problem aside as unsolvable and therefore not fit for consideration, as he tries to. Whatever conclusions she has drawn, however, she does not tell and neither does he ask. Whatever answers she has found, he suspects, they have not provided her with any comfort
#
In the end, of course, the mystery solves itself. On precisely the day and in precisely the manner it had always intended. They have by this time grown old together, an old man and an old woman sharing their last days in the home they built for themselves so many years ago. They have resisted all efforts, all the persuasion of their families and their doctors to move out of the house and into something smaller, more suitable to their old bones. When his hip became a problem and her heart gave concern some years ago they did consider such a move, but could never quite make the decision. It feels too late for that now, as though the opportunity has passed and all that is left is to stay and watch their story here play out its final act.
As always, it is late at night when it happens. He wakes beside her. She has been feeling off colour these past few days. Nothing serious, but not quite right. Now he wakes beside her in the middle of the night and she is struggling to breath, straining to get enough air into her tired lungs. Each breath she takes, shallow and rasping, triggers a coughing fit. It is a dry, hacking cough that rattles and chokes her. He tries to lift her, to help her sit up and find a more comfortable position, but he can’t move her and she doesn’t seem able to move herself. Her eyes roll in her head and he cannot be sure whether or not she understands what he is saying to her.
He takes a phone from the bedside table and calls for an ambulance. While they are waiting, he takes her hand and presses it to his lips. The coughing is slowing now, but the breaths do not seem to come any more easily. They wheeze slow and shallow from her throat, the gaps between them becoming longer and longer with each breath. As he sits and waits he realises that he is losing her, that this will be the last moment they have together. He begins to cry, an involuntary sob crawling from the pit of his stomach and moaning out into the darkness. As he does so, his eyes widen in horror. Echoing through the room beside them comes the same sound he has been listening to and recoiling from for so many years. It comes through the darkness just as it always has. It is dreadful and appalling and comes this time not from some invisible visitor but out from between his very own lips.
Ghost Story (not scary)
You are leaning over the railings at the back of the boat. It’s a long way down and you’re scared about leaning too far and falling over, which just seems such a stupid thing to worry about. I tell you this and you say, “I’m a coward. We know this. It’s the way I was made. Too late to change now, I think.”
You gather up your courage and lean a little bit further. “I can hear them, but I can’t see anything yet.”
“Let me show you,” I say. I climb over the railing, hanging on with my arms stretched out behind me, bending forward as far as I can go, my feet hooked around the metal posts at the bottom of each rail, my skirts whipping around my legs in the stiff sea breeze.
“Look,” I shout, because the wind is roaring now and the noise from the engines gets louder the further over the edge you lean, “Like this. There they are. Five of them. Six, maybe.”
And so there are. A family of dolphins are racing each other through the surf that rolls out behind us as we plough our way through the ocean, jumping and diving around the great wake we’re leaving behind us. “Wow,” I hear you say. You’ve climbed over too and are standing behind me, looking down just as I am into the churning sea below us and the strange, dancing creatures that live in it.
The wind is wrapping my hair around my face and I push it away with my hand, smiling at the alarm on your face when you see me let go of the railing. I want so much to hold your hand, but I know there’s no way you’re going to let me so I just shuffle a little closer to you instead and snuzzle my face into your shoulder. The dolphins keep jumping. They nod their heads up at us every time they leave the water, as if they’re trying to say hello or they want us to rub their grey, shining heads for them.
“They look so odd, don’t you think?” I say. “Like aliens or something. Like they don’t belong in the same world as we do. Don’t you think?” You don’t say anything.
After a while you’ve had enough and begin to climb back over the railings. I roll my eyes at you and follow. “I know it’s stupid,” you say, “but I still get scared. I can’t help it. I see the big propellers spinning around down there and I imagine them chopping me up into tiny pieces. It’s ridiculous, I know, but there it is.”
“You’d be ok,” I tell you. “If you were in any danger, the dolphins would save you. That’s what they do.”
“Ah, now,” you say, raising a finger in the air. We’re back on deck now and you’re back to your normal self, strutting around trying to impress me with all the clever things you know. “That’s actually interesting. I read something somewhere about dolphins. It said that lots of people who are thought to be victims of shark attacks might actually have been killed by dolphins. They can be really vicious when they need to be, apparently. And all this business of saving drowning sailors is nothing but a just an elaborate cover?”
“To lull us into a false sense of security and hide their true, terrible nature?”
“That’s it. Clever buggers, aren’t they?”
“That…is such, such rubbish.”
“Sounds plausible to me, that’s all I’m saying.”
#
We are dead, of course. Both of us. Have been for ages and ages. So long that we can’t even remember anything else. Whatever we were, where we lived, what we did, all of that is forgotten. None of it matters anymore. It’s all gone. We live here now, strolling up and down the deck of this ship, watching the passengers come and go, watching the staff work through their shifts. We see their little intrigues, their dramas, their day to day routines, but mostly we don’t pay them much notice. They don’t see us and, most of the time, we hardly even notice they’re there either. We keep to ourselves, you and I. Walking the deck. Shooting the breeze. Killing time.
“It bothers me a little,” I said to you once, “that I don’t remember how it happened. The dying thing, I mean.
The moment of it. What caused it. I don’t remember anything.”
“Me neither,” you said, shrugging your shoulders. “But so what? Why worry about it? Why dwell on morbid things?”
“We are morbid things,” I said, getting a small laugh from you.
“Surely it’s important, though? Don’t you think? It seems like it should be an important, defining event in our existence, but I don’t remember a thing about it.”
“I don’t remember being born either, but I know it happened. Maybe it’s the same thing.”
“Maybe. It feels like it should be different, that’s all.”
#
It’s mid morning and the deck is busy with passengers filling all the sun loungers, even though it’s not particularly sunny, and peering through expensive binoculars up on the observation deck. Not that there’s anything very exciting to observe, so far as I can see, just wave after wave rising and falling all the way to the horizon and beyond. To me it looks much the same as it did an hour ago, much the same as it did yesterday and, I’m fairly sure, much the same as it will in an hours’ time. Grey. Wet. Rising and falling. Still, they all seem fascinated. It keeps them happy. This is what they came on board for, I suppose.
How we ended up on this boat, I don’t know. So far as I can remember, we have always been here. Or, at least, I don’t remember us being anywhere else. This is another thing that bothers me a little. I want to know what we’re doing here, what happened to us, how long this will go on for, but you don’t seem to be too concerned about it. Or, if you are, you’re good at not letting it show. You have this thing you do whenever I ask you about it. You slip into ‘adman voiceover’ mode and you say: “Lively and glamorous, Oceana is a cruise liner that’s full of personality. Her impressive atrium creates that holiday feeling as soon as you step on board. With deck bars, restaurants and 750 luxury staterooms, she is the perfect cruise ship for every climate.” It’s a blurb piece you’ve memorised from the on-board literature. You have it off by heart and you’ve done this so many times now that I don’t even bother to interrupt you. When you’ve finished you grin at me and say “I always say that to all my friends. I just like the sound of it.” This last being in a different voice, rolling your tongue around the words in a way that I know means you’re quoting from some book or film or other, but I don’t know which and, again, I don’t bother to ask.