Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2005, 2011 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kit knew that the boy was a student because he got on at the stop next to the playing-fields a hundred yards past the end of Green Road, which was the nearest stop to the Halls of Residence in the south-west corner of the Whiteknights campus. He had no other distinguishing marks—all the males in these parts who were significantly younger than she was seemed to have near-shaven heads and earrings, whether they worked on building-sites or in libraries—but he was wearing an earplug connected to a discman in his anorak pocket.

  She might not have heard the leakage from the discman if the boy had tendered the exact fare, but he gave her a two-pound coin for a 95p fare and she had to go into her pocket to get the pound to add to the 5p piece she extracted from the tray. It was while she was fumbling for the pound that she felt the sudden shock of recognition. She looked at the boy more intently then, and saw him flinch slightly under the unexpected stare. He dropped his eyes immediately, embarrassed even though he had no idea why. The haircut was obviously just for show; it was the fur-hooded anorak he was wearing that was the more telling detail. If he was studying machismo at the university, he obviously wasn’t in line for a first.

  If there hadn’t been a queue tailing back into the rain Kit would have interrogated the boy about the music there and then, but the fact that the rain was little more than a drizzle didn’t make the waiting crowd any less anxious to get aboard and get on. To make matters worse, it was eight forty-five and the bus was already six minutes behind schedule. Kit knew that she’d be lucky not to lose another five before reaching the town centre, bus lane or no bus lane. Any further delay would be a minor disaster for anyone who had to clock in at nine—assuming that people in town-centre jobs in this part of the world had to clock in the way people back home did. Anyway, she didn’t want to be fobbed off with the kind of stubbornly uninformative answer that young men seemed to be addicted to. It was all too easy to imagine:

  “What’s that you’re playing on your discman?”

  “A CD.”

  Kit was desperate, in more ways than one, so she threw herself in at the deep end.

  “You know the Rifleman up at the crossroads?” she said, as the boy moved off after accepting his £1.05. There wasn’t much he could say to that but “Yes”, so she didn’t even bother waiting for the reply before saying: “I’ll meet you there tonight at seven. Don’t be late.”

  She’d already reached out for the next passenger’s fare, and the boy was being moved down the bus by the fervent pressure of the impatient queue, so he didn’t have time to protest or cross-examine her. Kit knew that he’d have plenty of time to mull it over before they hit the town centre, even if the bus lane carried them all the way without obstruction, but she figured that he’d be up for it, even though he’d have given careful consideration to the strong probability that she was at least five years older than he was, the definite fact that she was possessed of a “northern accent”—being an effete southerner he wouldn’t be able to tell Yorkshire from Lancashire—and the inescapable inference that she really must be a bus-driver by profession rather than an undercover agent for the DSS keeping tabs on dodgy claimants. He was bound to be up for it, in fact, merely because she was female and under thirty. The fact that he was at university meant that he had to try just that little bit harder to prove to himself that he could pass for a red-blooded babe-magnet in a suitably dim light.

  Kit had time to think about it herself while she was stuck at the lights at Cemetery Junction, and it wasn’t until then that she began to wonder whether she’d made a terrible mistake. Demanding dates from kids barely out of their teens wasn’t exactly her style, but Dad’s visit had unsettled her in spite of her determination to be unaffected by his pleas. He’d only been able to stay for an hour because he was taking a load all the way down to Barcelona and the tachograph was mapping out his pauses with robotic efficiency, but that hadn’t stopped him from mounting a major assault on the “come home, all is forgiven” front.

  “She needs you,” he’d said, over and over again. “She can’t cope without you. We both need you. We can’t cope without you.” But the trouble with Mum was that she couldn’t cope with Kit, any more than she could cope without her, and Kit’s presence or absence wasn’t going to make a damn of difference to the relentless progress of her liver cirrhosis and assorted other ills. And the simple fact was that whatever her Mum could or couldn’t cope with or without, Kit couldn’t cope with her, although she was coping very well without.

  “I know you’re making more money here than you did back home,” Dad had gone on, belatedly trying to master the art of reasonableness, “but this pokey little place must cost you more than living with us, and it’s not much more than a glorified cupboard, what with the slanting ceiling and all. And you had to leave all your books at home too.” But he’d realized, in the end, that economic arguments cut no more ice than fine words buttered parsnips, and he’d had no alternative but to unship his Exocet missile. “She loves you, Kit,” he’d said. “I love you. We want you to come home.”

  Kit understood—and knew that Dad knew that she understood—how difficult it was for a Yorkshireman to make a declaration like that, especially if he was the kind of Yorkshireman who drove HGVs and insisted on keeping wicket in spite of the fact that his eyes were shot, but it didn’t alter the central fact that she was free and intended to stay free, no matter how much guilt she had to carry or how resistant her “pokey little place” might be to her determination to make it feel like a new home as well as merely being one.

  “She’s dying, Kit,” was the shape that the final and most desperate assault of all had taken. “Your being down here is only speeding the process up. You don’t even phone. It’s not right, Kit. She’s your mother. She may be a drunk, and she’s sure as hell got a mouth on her, but she’s still your mother. I can’t do anything, not with being away so much and the way she goes on when I’m there. Without you, she’s got nothing. I know it was difficult, but this is killing her. You have to come home.”

  But she didn’t. The simple fact was that she didn’t, and she wasn’t about to be driven to it—not by Dad, and not by anything else that malicious circumstance could throw at her. She was twenty-five years old, and should by rights have left home years ago. If Mum didn’t like having nothing, she should have been a damn sight more careful to treat what she had with a little more kindness and respect. And if Mum didn’t want to drink herself to death, all she had to do was stop. It couldn’t be that difficult. Dad stopped every time he was due to take a load out, and whether he was taking it to Taunton or Timbuktu he didn’t start again until he got home. If he were only prepared to show a little more restraint when he was home, even Mum might begin to glimpse new possibilities. None of it was Kit’s fault. None of it was Kit’s responsibility. Dad knew that, deep down.

  Even so, it had been a profoundly unsettling hour. There was no way around that. It was to avoid such disturbances that Kit never phoned home—that and the fact that the chance of finding Mum coherent and capable of conversation were about a hundred to one against. It was all very well for Dad to play the “come home, all is forgiven” card, but the reality on Kit’s side was that nothing was forgiven, or ever would be. She, after all, had to face her own problems without any support whatsoever—and she was doing it! She was making progress, in spite of the apparent intractability of the mystery that had somehow inveigled her into its unwelcome embrace. Sh
e had spotted the tune leaking out of the discman—how cute was that? And she had demanded a date with the discman’s owner, knowing that she had the power, the authority and the sexual magnetism to make the demand stick. He would come. Kit was sure of that. She hadn’t made a mistake. Anyway, a date was only a date, and even if it didn’t help to solve her troublesome little puzzle it would get her out of the hostel without having to yield the point of principle that put the other drivers out of bounds, datewise.

  But that, she realized, as she waited at the lights on Queen’s Road, wasn’t the problem she ought to be addressing. The problem she ought to be addressing was that she’d have to admit, not merely to him but to herself, that something was not merely puzzling but actually wrong: something not merely weird but potentially ominous. It wouldn’t matter much whether some anorak-wearing student thought she was crazy or not, but it would matter a lot that once she’d actually spoken about the haunting to another person she’d have to give some serious thought herself to the question of whether she really was crazy.

  Fortunately, the light changed to green before she had time to ask herself whether the worse possibility was that she really was crazy, or that she wasn’t, and was therefore being really haunted. Once she had rounded the corner opposite the Prudential she had to stop again to let the first batch of impatient workers get off, and was further delayed by the fact that four people got on—which was slightly unusual this close to the town centre—thus forcing her to devote her entire attention to the serious business of collecting two 65p fares, neither of them tendered exactly, and squinting at two weekly tickets to make sure they weren’t out of date.

  As soon as the bus was back in gear again, though, Kit relaxed, and reminded herself of all the reasons why Reading was a great place to work, in addition to being the best part of two hundred miles way from Sheffield. On the very first day she’d arrived at the railway station her trained eye had spotted a notice advertising a FREE BUS TO UTOPIA, which had seemed to her to be an omen—and still seemed to her to be an omen of sorts, even though it had been explained to her soon enough that Utopia was a tacky night club some way out of town, and that although driving the free bus to Utopia was usually a trouble-free trip, driving it back again at two o’clock in the morning was something else entirely, unless you happened to be a fan of crude sexual harassment and the stink of vomit. On the same day, perhaps in the very same glance, she’d been equally delighted to see road-signs pointing the way to THE ORACLE, and that had seemed a positive indication too—and still did, in a way, even though she had discovered soon enough that the Oracle was not actually the residence of a visionary Pythoness but a huge shopping mall...which, when one really thought about it, only made it a more accurate indicator of the shape of things to come than it would probably have been had its name been less misleading. In Reading, many things were not quite what they seemed—even the town’s name, which was pronounced to rhyme with bedding and wedding although its spelling suggested that it ought to rhyme with kneading and pleading—but it only required a minor adjustment of attitude to understand that there was a certain quasi-metropolitan panache in its quirky deceptiveness that the stubborn bluntness of Yorkshire towns like Sheffield simply did not possess.

  As he got off at Jackson’s Corner so that he could walk straight on into the pedestrian precinct—while the bus had to lurch forward for another fifty yards before turning left to make its journey along the edge of the sprawling Oracle—the boy looked at Kit curiously, his do-I-dare-to-believe-it expression tinged with stupefaction. He had waited until the crowd cleared before getting up, so there was nobody behind him, but he knew that the bus couldn’t hang around while half its remaining passengers were still avid to get to the stop behind the mall, and he obviously didn’t know what to say in any case. He opened his mouth to ask whether he had actually heard her say what he thought he’d heard her say, but he couldn’t even get the question out because its implications seemed so obviously surreal. Kit had all the time in the world to repeat the essentials.

  “Seven o’clock in the Rifleman,” she said. “Don’t be late.”

  His mouth was still hanging open, but he managed to nod.

  “Well, go on then,” she said. “If I don’t catch that green light, an extra dozen people will be late for work.”

  Meekly, he got off. Kit closed the doors and put the bus back into gear, then rolled it across the junction just as the light flicked back to amber.

  That’s it, then, she thought. Next stop the Exorcist, or Fortean TV.

  CHAPTER TWO

  He wasn’t late, and neither was Kit. If it had been a real date Kit would have given it an extra ten minutes so that she could be fashionably but not unreasonably late, but she figured that a genuine soon-to-be-certified intellectual might be a little too quick making up his mind that the whole thing had been a wind-up. She didn’t want to get there and find that he’d already stomped off back to the Hall of Residence, kicking himself for being such a fool. Mercifully, there were plenty of tables free, so she was able to steer him to one in the corner where they wouldn’t be too conspicuous and wouldn’t be in danger of being overheard. Even more mercifully, he had left the anorak in his room, even though it hadn’t quite stopped raining.

  “What’ll you have?” she said.

  “Strongbow,” he answered warily. “Just half.”

  She bought him a pint. She didn’t want him making excuses and leaving as soon as she’d revealed the agenda for their meeting. In any case, she’d have felt a bit uncomfortable supping a pint of John Smith’s while the bloke she was with trifled with a half of something he ought to have been drinking through a straw.

  “I’m Kit,” she said, as she plonked the cider down in front of him. “Not short for Christine, but I never give away my full name on a first date.”

  “Stephen,” he said. “Not Steve. Stephen.” Two syllables per sentence appeared to be his limit for the moment, but Kit figured that even Strongbow ought to loosen him up by the time his glass was half-empty—or, of course, half-full in the unlikely event that he turned out to be an optimist. Even Stephen, she thought—but she didn’t say it out loud in case he felt obliged to reciprocate. Most of the things that rhymed with Kit were inherently uncomplimentary when placed in tandem with it.

  “I expect you’re wondering whether I do this sort of thing all the time,” she said, “and what it was about you, whether I do or not, that attracted my attention to you.”

  “Yes,” he said, casually spurning the opportunity to exercise any wit he might possess. That put the ball firmly back in Kit’s court, ruling out the possibility of getting comfortable before she had to cut to the chase.

  “I don’t,” she said. “Not down here, at any rate. Haven’t got used to the local customs yet. Where I come from, people aren’t much given to thanking bus drivers when they get off—even female ones—but if half of what they say in the garage is true they aren’t nearly as likely to smack you round the head and steal your change on a Friday night. Actually, it was your taste in music.”

  The sudden change of pace left him completely wrong-footed, which might have been a good thing if it had been a real date, but was probably a mistake in the present circumstances. “Music?” he echoed, helplessly, still staying resolutely to his self-imposed quota of syllables-per-sentence.

  “When you got on my bus this morning you were listening to a CD on your discman,” Kit reminded him. “I recognized the tune from the leakage, and I need to know what it is. I know it sounds a bit weird, but I really do need to know.” And it’ll sound a lot weirder when I tell you why, she added, silently, to herself—but she did intend to tell him why. She’d stopped at a hell of a lot of traffic lights since eight-fifty-seven and she’d had plenty of time to make up her mind, change it, and make it up for good. It was time to bite the bullet. She had to tell someone, or she’d go crazy—assuming, of course, that she wasn’t already crazy—and she certainly didn’t want to tell someone who m
ight spread it around the depot.

  Not-Steve was already looking at her as if she might be a little bit mad, but he was probably prepared to put it down to the fact that she was from up north. His own voice suggested that he might well be one of those selectively-travelled oafs who knew where Val d’Isère was but thought that Hadrian’s Wall had been built to plug Watford Gap. It wasn’t the sort of look he’d have been giving her if he thought she might really be mad in a not-so-nice way. She knew what that sort of look looked like because she’d seen it in a mirror.

  “Well,” she said, when he didn’t say anything more. “What was it you were playing?”

  Until she pressed him he hadn’t even bothered to make a serious attempt to remember, but now he struggled to make up for lost time. Then he blushed. He was obviously the kind of person who thought that a boy’s relationship with his discman was an essentially private matter. He’d never thought that the slight leakage of bass’n’drum was something that was likely to give him away and expose his unclean soul to total strangers. It took him some time to get his answer together, not because he couldn’t remember but because the revelation required far more than two syllables. Mercifully, he and the Strongbow managed it in the end. “The Electric Hellfire Club,” he said, with only a slight stammer. “Kiss the Goat.”

  It was her turn to be silent.

  Kiss the Goat? she thought. I’m being haunted by a record called Kiss the fucking Goat? Well, maybe the Devil does have all the best tunes, and more besides.

  “An American band,” the suddenly-loquacious Stephen added, when it became obvious even to him that further information might be helpful. “Softish but insistent technorock—almost disco, in a way. Sort of Depeche Mode plays Marilyn Manson. Hedonistic Satanism rather than the let’s-all-go-burn-down-the-local-church black metal stuff. The lead guy used to be in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, but he had a different name then.”