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

  Kit had never thought of herself as an unworldly person, but it took her a good fifteen seconds to figure out that My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult must be the name of anther band. “Satanism,” was the word she eventually filtered out and echoed incredulously. “Satanists really have their own rock music?”

  “Not Satanism as in black magic and child abuse,” He was quick to say. “Satanism as in the Church is a collection of neurotic killjoys on a guilt trip and we just wanna have fun. Hedonism....”

  “I know what hedonism is,” she told him. “I may be a bus driver but I’m not fucking stupid.”

  He winced slightly at that, although she hadn’t said it as vehemently as she usually did. This was Reading, after all. People in Reading had misconceptions about people from up north.

  “Kiss the Goat,” she murmured, letting the words become audible even though she was speaking to herself. “Is that an invitation, or a command?”

  “More an incantation,” he told her. “The album’s framed by a couple of tracks that represent it as a kind of ritual, but it’s not really. It’s just a bunch of songs. In a spirit of mockery. Why did you want to know what it was?”

  His curiosity was only natural. Kit reminded herself that she was supposed to be a blunt, no-nonsense, down-to-earth, devil-may-care Yorkshirewoman, and managed by that means to pluck up just enough courage to tell him the truth, albeit not the whole truth—or, for that matter, anything he was likely to recognize as the truth. “It’s been haunting me,” she said.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, weakly. “Sometimes tunes do that.”

  “No,” she said, having decided far in advance that once she was in for the penny she had better not pause before blowing the whole pound. “I don’t mean that I heard it once before and caught an earworm. I mean literally haunting me—or the room where I’m lodging, at any rate. And no, before you ask, it isn’t playing in the room next door or the house across the road, and it isn’t being mysteriously conducted up from the ground floor along the old lead pipes. It’s actually in my room, or at least in my head while my head is in my room. It’s real—I mean, it’s not real, but it’s actually there. The room is fucking haunted, okay?”

  “By the Electric Hellfire Club?”

  Put like that, it did sound unlikely.

  “Maybe by someone who used to play the Electric Hellfire Club a lot when he or she was alive,” Kit said, making what seemed to be the natural assumption. “Popular, are they?” My God, she thought, I’m turning into my mum. Twenty-six-years old, at least for a few more weeks, and I have to ask a twenty-year-old student what’s in and what’s out, musicwise.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Rather esoteric, in fact. That means....”

  “I know what esoteric means,” she snapped back, this time unleashing the rebuke in all its customary fury. “I may be a bus-driver from Sheffield but I’m not fucking stupid.” She repented it immediately. It wasn’t his fault that she was on edge, and she still needed more information from him if he had any more to give.

  “That’s not what I was going to say,” the student said, in so hurt a tone that he obviously wasn’t just covering his arse. “I was going to say, that means that your haunter was probably a certain kind of person—but if I had, I’d probably have got embarrassed again when you asked what kind and I had to start mumbling about Goths and the fetish scene, given that I’m sat here in a denim jacket and off-white Primark chinos and was actually wearing a bloody anorak when you first saw me, because it was raining so hard when I set off and I was only going into town to get some shopping in, and wasn’t thinking about my image at all. I like the music, okay, and I like playing it in Hall because of the shock value of the lyrics. The campus Christians are a real pain around exam time, you know, and I only sat the last of my final papers yesterday, so I’m feeling a little bit...aftermathy. Do you want another?”

  Kit could tell that he was nervous. He’d even contrived to finish his pint before she’d finished hers, and she didn’t usually like to let that happen. “Aye,” she said, downing the rest of the John Smith’s in one. Somehow, it didn’t taste quite the same down here, perhaps because it didn’t travel well, or more likely because the folk back home only sent the crap down south. Dad had always told her, long before the possibility ever became real, that there was no point in Yorkshiremen and women seeking their fortunes down south, because the beer was no good. “Being,” he would say, as if it were the profoundest of puns, “depends on the beer.” The more usual formulation, of course, was that life depended on the liver—as Mum’s certainly seemed to do, if the doctors weren’t just flattering her hypochondria.

  Not-so-Even-Stephen bought her another pint, but he only got himself a half. Kit had to remind herself that he was probably on a tight budget and that the campus bars were probably a bit cheaper than the Rifleman. It was a long-established pub, not one of those godawful chain things that were colonizing the town centre, and the prices reflected the landlord’s desperately hopeful belief that people might be prepared to pay for authenticity.

  “Where is this haunted house of yours?” the student wanted to know, when he’d sat down again. He’d collected himself while he was at the bar, and Kit figured that the conversation would probably go more smoothly from now on. He wasn’t looking at her as if she were mad, which was a plus—and he hadn’t pronounced the words “haunted house” with acidic contempt, which was even better.

  “Other side of the town centre,” she said. “It’s a three-storey-plus-roofspace-extension mid-terrace the council bought to use as a drivers’ hostel. It’s handy for the night-garage but there’s not much else to recommend it. The bus company needs it because it can’t recruit enough people locally on the wages it pays. The way it was explained to me is that there’s more than full employment here, especially since they built the Oracle and turned the pedestrian precinct into a boozer’s paradise. Everyone’s getting hooked on the idea of a twenty-four/seven society, it seems, and a twenty-four/seven society requires services. The fact that London’s only half an hour away by train puts a further strain on local employment. So, to get an adequate supply of bus drivers the council’s talent-scouts have to go way up north, and to accommodate the ones they manage to lure away they have to buy three-storey Victorian monstrosities with a fourth floor added, courtesy of sixties-converted roof-space, and let the rooms out at below-market rates. Because we’re in a minority, females get the top two floors in the one I live in, and because I was the last one in I got the bit that isn’t really a floor at all. It’s bigger than the other rooms floorspace-wise, although it’s only a bedsit with kitchenette and shower-room, but the way the overhead space slants makes it seem smaller and it’s way too hot when the sun shines even though it faces west. In winter, if I can stick it out that long, it’ll probably be freezing. And like I said, it’s haunted.”

  “The whole house, or just your room?”

  “Just my room, so far as I know. Nobody else has said anything. Mind you, nor have I—until now.”

  “Haunted by music—just by music?”

  Kit couldn’t help shuffling uncomfortably as she hesitated over that one. “No,” she admitted. “The music’s the most obvious thing, but there are others.” She hesitated again, knowing that the pause would be a bit of a giveaway, but she’d planned it all out in advance and she knew well enough where the boundary of her confession had to be set. She had enough evidence of something strange, even without the most disturbing symptom of all. “Other sounds,” she eventually went on. “Odors too—not altogether nasty, but definitely not mine. Even the occasional touch, like someone brushing past.”

  “That’s quite a lot of manifestations,” he said. “Is the phantom music very loud?

  “No,” she conceded, defensively. “But loudness isn’t the problem. Yes, I’ve tried to tape it, and no, it didn’t tape. Yes, I’ve asked other people if they can hear something, and no, they don’t seem to be able to, even when it seems as clear as a
bell to me. But it’s there. Even if it’s in my head, it’s really there. And it’s real. It’s the Electric Hellfire Club. It’s Kiss the Goat. It’s not something I made up, or something I remembered. It exists. It can be played on a discman.”

  “Have you seen anything?” The probing was becoming relentless, but Kit didn’t take offence. At least he was interested. It would have been terrible if he hadn’t been.

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, sort of.”

  Stephen was sipping his half slowly this time, not racing as he had with the pint—but Kit had already finished her pint.

  “Sort of?” he echoed—but not derisively. He was skeptical, but definitely interested. Fascinated, even.

  “So far, I’ve only seen things while the last light’s fading from the sky,” she told him. “Which, mercifully, is getting later every day. The way the shadow-forms seem to loom up inside the walls is seriously disconcerting, but it doesn’t last long. That’s only the beginning—the music doesn’t start up till later.” And the rest later still, she didn’t add.

  “Shadow-forms?” he queried.

  “Okay,” she said, “maybe they’re nothing more than lingering evidence of a sloppy paint-job, although I’m not sure I want to be there if and when they start coming out—but the music is distinct. The rest could be imagination, but not that.”

  “Have you told anyone else about it?”

  “No. It’s bad enough being a woman from up north in what used to be the exclusive territory of local males, without seeing ghosts and turning chicken. I need to deal with it, if I can. I had figured that I’d just have to make a more determined effort to ignore it, until I heard that song playing on your discman and realized that there might be another way to get to grips with it. I need to deal with it soon, before it gets to be unbearable, and now I know what the song is...well, at least I’ve got something to get a grip on.”

  She felt strangely relieved when she’d finished that speech, because admitting that she had to deal with it in order to prevent it getting on top of her was a lot harder than merely describing the phenomena. Now, it was just a matter of finding out whether Even Stephen could tell her anything else that might be useful, and whether he might actually be able to help.

  “Has it been getting worse, then?” he asked.

  He sounded sympathetic as well as interested. Ordinarily, Kit would have been able to tell whether he had decided to play good listener merely because he thought it might be an easy way into her knickers, but she wasn’t at her best tonight and this was a fishing expedition, not a real date, so she wasn’t sure exactly where he was coming from—and she didn’t have a clue, as yet, where they might end up.

  “Oh aye,” she confirmed. “It’s getting worse all the time. The local freaks don’t help. It’s mostly just comedians pressing doorbells and muttering into the intercom, but sometimes they actually get in. They aren’t supposed to be able to, but the blokes on the bottom two floors aren’t as careful as they might be with the main door. You’d think they’d want to keep the other undesirables away from us, to make the most of their own admittedly-remote chances, but they can’t be bothered. Liz and May downstairs get some of the rubbish—obscene whispers, drunks in the corridor knocking on the door—but there’s something about the top room that seems to attract the worst of them. When three or four of them had asked for Rose I figured out that there must have been a former tenant of that name, but the woman in Human Resources at the bus company said they’d never had a Rose in there. Used to be all men for the first couple of years, she said, until they took a batch of three women back in February—I was the fourth, moved in a couple of weeks later. Never been any trouble, she said, or any reports of anything odd. I even got a surname once from some nutter who sounded the buzzer and muttered into the intercom, but I checked it in the phone book and there’s no one of that name listed anywhere else in town, unless there’s a way to spell it I didn’t think of. Do you want another?”

  Stephen looked down at his unfinished glass of cider, as if realizing for the first time how far behind he’d fallen. “Only a half,” he said. “Really—only a half.”

  She figured that he didn’t need any further loosening up, and that she ought to respect his caution, so she bought him a half. The pub was filling up and it took her a good five minutes to get served, so he’d had plenty of time to digest the story by the time she got back.

  “What was this surname the nutter gave you?” he asked.

  “Selavy,” she said. “When I said there was no Rose there he said Rose Selavy, as if he couldn’t believe that she wasn’t there. I tried it with one L and two, and with an I instead of a Y, but there was nothing like it.” There was a funny look on the boy’s face, so she stopped and said “What?”

  “I think it’s a joke,” he said. “It’s not a real name.” There was a hint of a blush on his cheeks again.

  “What do you mean, it’s not a real name? What’s unreal about it?”

  “Rose Selavy is a name the surrealists made up. Duchamp used it in the titles of some of his paintings and assemblies. Selavy is a corruption of the French c’est la vie, and Rose is an anagram of Eros, although they sometimes used to double up the R in Rose to confuse the issue. The whole thing means Love is Life—or something like that.”

  Kit didn’t speak French, but she knew what Eros meant, and why “love is life” was only “something like that”. She didn’t know much about surrealism, either, although she knew that Salvador Dali had once made a sofa in the shape of a pair of bright red lips—but that didn’t seem to matter much, because the rest of it had just slipped into place in her head and she was too busy cursing herself for not having figured it out earlier. She realized that the impulse that had made her tell the student to meet her had been a stroke of genius, although the inspiration would surely have dawned on her eventually even without his help.

  “She was a whore,” she said, wonderingly. “I’m being haunted by a fucking whore.”

  “What?” Even Stephen wasn’t keeping up.

  “Before the council bought it the house was split into flats. It must have been a knocking-shop. That’s why it attracts so many freaks with addled memories. Like you said, it’s a joke. Rose Selavy must have been her working name. Maybe that’s why there was never any hassle before, when the house was all men. Maybe she didn’t bother to haunt them. Maybe she was waiting for a woman. I’m being haunted by a fucking prossie. A Satanist prossie.”

  “Ah,” said Stephen, with the air of a man who’d just slotted in another piece of the jigsaw. The lad was turning out to be a treasure-trove of useful insights..

  “Cough it up,” Kit demanded.

  “The Electric Hellfire Club,” he said.

  “What about them?”

  “The track that was playing when I got on your bus is called Evil Genius. The hook-line goes I’m the evil genius—the Queen of Sin. There’s also once called Bitchcraft. And on their earlier album....”

  “I get the picture,” Kit said, realizing with a slight flash of inspiration that there really might have been a picture, even if it had been painted over. “A certain kind of person. Music to get your rocks off to. My, what hidden depths you have, Stephen.”

  This time, he blushed scarlet. “The best-known My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult track is Sex on Wheels,” he revealed, defensively. “There’s also Sexplosion and The International Sin Set.” He seemed to realize then that she had got the idea and was probably ready to skip the fine detail, so he switched tack. “Glad I was able to help,” he said, attempting a friendly smile.

  “Just because I’m being haunted by a whore,” Kit observed, more sharply than she should have intended, “doesn’t mean that I am one.”

  “I d-d-didn’t...,” he spluttered. The blush now looked as if it had been painted on, so deftly that the momentarily-cocky youth behind it had been totally eclipsed.

  Somehow, though, the momentary comic relief wasn’t quite as satisfying to Kit as i
t might have been if she hadn’t been a haunted woman. She realized that the jigsaw pieces that were slotting themselves into place had a darker side to them. She really was being haunted. Not by some nineteenth-century leftover but by someone much more recently alive and much more indecently active. A few minutes earlier her worst fear had been that she might be mad, and that Even Stephen would somehow manage to prove it. Now, she had to look more closely at the possible consequences of her being entirely sane. She was being haunted—by a prossie with kinky tastes in music. Now she had to ask the questions which lay beyond that startling conclusion. Why? What did Rose Selavy want? Was Kiss the Goat an instruction or an invitation?

  “I know you didn’t,” she told the boy, a little belatedly. “You’ll have to cut me a bit of slack. Being a stranger whose never been away from home for three whole months before is bad enough, without having a ghost in your bedsit. I don’t suppose you know a lot about ghosts, do you? Not on the syllabus, I dare say.”

  “Not the Art History syllabus,” he conceded, tersely. He was bracing himself for an imminent dismissal, because he figured he’d told her everything she’d wanted to know—but Kit realized that she didn’t actually want to call a halt to the evening just yet, whether he’d told her everything he could or not. Anyway, she was only half way through her third pint.

  “It’s difficult to figure out what they might be hanging around for, you see,” she said, settling her tone into a groove that might just pass for amiable banter. “Ghosts in general, not just the one that’s stuck on me. It’ll be just my luck if the local priest doesn’t do exorcisms.”

  “It’s an interesting question,” he agreed. “I’ve met people who claimed to have seen ghosts before, of course, but there was never any back-story. Yours might well be the only one in England who’s an Electric Hellfire Club fan. Mind you, given that far more people have died this century than in any other, you’d expect ghosts to be getting more common all the time—and you’d expect to find a lot more Bing Crosby and Vera Lynn fans than ever get reported. Not to mention Gilbert and Sullivan.” He was babbling a bit, but the blush had gone. He seemed to have found a comfortable level of discourse.