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

  Silence fell then, for more than a minute, while they used their fingers to cram soggy chips and pieces of fish into their mouths. The silence was unbroken even by the murmurous sound of the Electric Hellfire Club; Kit didn’t know whether to be glad or ashamed of its absence. What if it started up loud and clear, she thought, and Stephen couldn’t hear a thing? What if hers turned out to be a private and exclusive madness after all? What if there never had been a whore named Rose Selavy living here? What if Rose Selavy were her own alter ego, conjured up by too much wondering about what Mum might think of her being here instead of safely imprisoned at home?

  “If you are what you drink,” Stephen said, eventually, “you might think about switching to Gold Blend. There’s instant and instant, and this is the bottom end of the range.”

  “I might,” she agreed, dismissively, although she thought it was a bit of a cheek for him to start slagging off her instant coffee when he’d already admitted that he didn’t like it real. “This isn’t your idea of a haunted room, then? You don’t think anything nasty could ever have happened in a place like this—not even to a prossie whose clients liked to listen to Satanist disco music while they sated their vile and unnatural lusts? Did you say something before about the fetish scene?”

  That made him blush, as she’d intended. “I don’t know from experience,” he said, defensively, “but I suppose the Electric Hellfire Club is likely to be the kind of thing they play in S-and-M clubs. I saw a TV documentary about one once, and they actually had the Marionettes on stage. I love the Marionettes. The Electric Hellfire Club tracks that aren’t about Satan or sex are about drugs and serial killers. As I told you, it’s all a matter of shock value. Fun and spice. If there was any whipping going on here in the old days, though, your Rose was more likely to be handing it out than soaking it up. It’s a business much like any other, I guess. I don’t know what goes on in Sheffield, but down here Miss Whiplash stands for by-elections—rumor has it she took the Inland Revenue to court because they wouldn’t let her tax-deduct her dungeon apparatus.”

  “How would we find out if something did happen here?” Kit wanted to know.

  The student was quick enough on the uptake to guess what she meant. “Something that got the knocking shop closed down permanently? Something gruesome? In the movies they always go to look through the files of the local newspaper, but if it were me, I’d just butter up the local busybody. There must be someone who’s lived in the street since the Blitz, and has every atom of local scandal off by heart. Anthropologists always go to the oldest inhabitant for cultural and historical info. Do you think it would actually help to know who your ghost was, and what happened to her, if anything? It always helps in the movies, I guess—but that’s because a movie has to have some semblance of a plot, and a compass to steer it by. Real ghosts rarely have that much sense of narrative responsibility, according to the tales I’ve heard.”

  “Yes, I think it would help,” Kit said. “Me, that is—not her.”

  Stephen had finished his fish and chips, having eaten them quickly enough to give himself indigestion if luck wasn’t with him. He chased the food down by draining his coffee-mug. “I still can’t hear anything,” he said.

  “That makes two of us,” Kit told him. “She can’t be shy, if she really was a whore, so I guess she’s just playing games. Maybe she doesn’t want you to believe me.” And maybe, she thought, she’s just saving her party-piece for later.

  “Maybe I ought to be going home,” the boy said, with a slight quiver in his voice that might have been as much expectation as anxiety, but was probably mostly hope.

  “Maybe you ought,” Kit agreed, after a moment’s reflection, “but don’t you find it boring, doing what you ought to all the time?”

  He didn’t catch on immediately, but when he did he tried really hard not to look as if all his Christmases had arrived at once. He hadn’t had enough practice to pull it off, but she appreciated the effort.

  “You think the ghost might show up later?” he said, a trifle warily, just in case he’d misunderstood.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But if you’re what’s keeping her away, I might settle for that, just for once.”

  He was still in doubt, though not about the nature of her invitation. “There really is a ghost, isn’t there?” he said, dubiously. What he meant was you really do believe it—you’re not just pulling my leg along with the rest of me?

  “I don’t need to make up stuff to get lads up here,” she told him, flatly. “And if I did, I wouldn’t make up stuff like that, or pick on lads like you. If there isn’t a ghost then I’m hearing things, and smelling things, and feeling things...and even seeing things, after a fashion. But I’m not spinning a yarn, let alone a spiderweb. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

  The last sentence as pure provocation. He wanted to all right, and they both knew it. He was apprehensive and he was awkward, but there was no lack of desire. Kit would have taken his enthusiasm as a compliment if she hadn’t been around the block long enough to know that lads his age would bang birds with paper bags over their heads and vomit all over their spangly tops, in an alley or a public toilet, just to get their ends away.

  For that reason, among others, she wasn’t expecting much in the way of performance, but it turned out that he wasn’t that bad. Once he’d settled, he was in no particular hurry, and he had the beginnings of a knack.

  There was no music—no music at all—but that didn’t seem to be a bad thing. For once, it was nice to be able to feel her heartbeat without having to wonder exactly what was driving it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kit half-expected the music to start up as soon as the boy had fallen fast asleep, but it didn’t. For a while, as she lay awake in the darkness in the narrow space beside him, there was nothing at all. He was nearer to the enigmatic wall, wedged so tightly against it that he would have fallen off the edge without its support, while she was on the outside, actually having to concentrate to avoid falling out, but she preferred it that way round. This way, he was the one who seemed trapped, while she was free to think—and, when necessary, to move.

  Kit didn’t know whether to be glad about the failure of the ghost to show; her feelings were confused. Somewhere along the line she had begun to worry about what Stephen might think of her, even though he was just some stuck-up southern student—and one of the things she definitely didn’t want him thinking was that she was just some batty slapper from Sheffield who couldn’t even get laid in an ex-brothel full of bus drivers. On the other hand....

  She was tempted to use her own fingers to get in ahead of the ghost, but that seemed like cheating. Given that there hadn’t been any music, or any hint of perfume, there might be no reason to expect any phantom touch sensations either, but now she knew what manner of ghost she was dealing with Kit was utterly convinced of what she had previously shied away from believing: that the ghost’s touch was the real heart and substance of the haunting. She had to admit to herself, now, that she had only focused so intently on the music because she was reluctant to face up to the true suggestiveness of her hallucinations.

  The touch, she had previously felt sure, was ninety-per-cent imagination—but so was masturbation, if it actually got her to where she was going. Thus far, the ghost never had—but Kit now had no idea at all whether that was due to the phantom’s impotence or her own refusal to become fully aroused. Now, in the aftermath of the boy’s not-entirely-inexpert attentions, she was closer than she’d been for quite some time, and she didn’t know whether to be heartened or sickened by the thought that if she only put her mind to it a little, she might actually be able to get something out of the ghost’s teasing attentions....

  What difference did it make, Kit wondered, that the ghost was, or had been, a whore? She had never been under the impression, even for an instant, that the ghost might be a man, so she had always thought of the touch as something more or less than natural in more ways than one. Anyway, it
wasn’t as if she were being asked to pay?

  Or was she?

  That, she realized, was the most uncomfortable thought of all. A ghostly seducer was one thing, even if the seduction in question was lesbian in kind, but a ghost that might expect a price to be paid for the rewards of seduction was something else.

  Kit remembered what she had said to Stephen in the pub, as sarcastically as she could: Given that she seems to have been a devil-worshipping whore, I suppose, one way or another, she must want my body. That was as close as she had come to telling him about the touch, or at least about the nature of the most insistent aspect of the touch. He hadn’t taken it seriously, and she didn’t want to take it seriously either, but the question still needed to be asked and answered. Why was the ghost touching her up? What did it hope to achieve—and if the immediate answer to that was obvious, what was the ghostly whore expecting in return for favors granted? Was it mere coincidence that “wanting her body” might have a literal as well as a metaphorical meaning for a ghostly succubus?

  Kit had told the truth when she had informed smug Stephen, sharply, that although she was a bus driver by vocation she wasn’t stupid. She knew what the word succubus meant. She knew, too, that in theory, succubi were supposed to visit male dreamers, leaving female ones to incubi—but the theory in question had been drawn up by monks in the Middle Ages. In the twenty-first century, a certain additional versatility could easily be conceded to personifications of lewdness. Kit had always thought of herself as dead straight, but if she really were dealing with the dead, straightness was probably not even an issue. Given the inherent perversity of attempted intercourse between the living and the dead, gender issues could safely be deemed a minor matter...except that all that was just intellectualizing bullshit, by which means she was trying yet again to distract herself from the insidious horror of her situation.

  Why me? she wondered, for what must now be the fiftieth or sixtieth. Why, of all people, me?

  Reflexively, she put the imaginary reply into Even Stephen’s voice.

  Why anybody?

  Even so, tonight—for the first time in a week—the touch did not come. The fact that Stephen had got into the breach first, with no less success than the ghost had so far contrived, seemed to have interrupted the process of spectral seduction. Or maybe Rose Selavy was just biding her time, challenging Kit to make the next move, with or without Stephen to lend a little bit more than a hand.

  Kit could think of worse reasons for starting a relationship—but she could think of better ones too.

  She shook Stephen awake. “This place isn’t big enough for the both of us,” she said, meaning the single bed. “Not for sleeping comfortably, at any rate. If you want to stay all night, one of us had better use the settee—and it’s not going to be me, ducks.”

  She gave him the choice of staying on the settee because she knew that he’d missed the last bus, but she didn’t expect him to take it. He was bright enough, or sensitive enough, to realize that, so he pulled his clothes on. By the time he was dressed he was wide enough awake to say: “Can I see you again?”

  “Sure,” she said. “There’s a payphone on the next landing down—the number’s next to the earpiece. You’ll probably get Liz or May, but don’t worry about it. Just ask for Kit. Don’t leave it too long, though. I might be on late shift next week.”

  He didn’t have to ask her for a pencil. He was a student, after all. He had a pen in his pocket, and a diary too. He tore an unused page out of January and scribbled down a number. “My mobile,” he said. “If it’s switched off, leave a message on my voicemail. Or you can text me, if you’ve got a mobile yourself.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I haven’t.” Kit stuck the piece of paper under her pillow because she didn’t want to get out of bed to put it on the table or the trunk.

  She was half-afraid that once he’d gone she’d have to repeat the whole charade of waiting and thinking, but whatever else he’d failed to achieve he’d managed to tire her out. Once she had the bed to herself again, and was securely ensconced in the middle, she drifted off without further disturbance—and so far as she could remember when she awoke the next morning, her sleep was dreamless.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On the following evening, as Kit sprawled fully-dressed on the bed, watching the Channel 5 movie—which had obviously been made as a pilot for an aborted TV series—the pattern reasserted itself in no uncertain terms. As soon as the slowly-accumulating darkness within the room was suddenly split as the street-light outside the window came to life the expanse of wall beside the bed underwent a subtle sea-change. The shadowy blotches marring the paint-job took on a sinister aspect, for no good reason that Kit could grasp. They didn’t become any more distinct, and they didn’t move, but it seemed that they acquired an ominous significance that they hadn’t had before.

  At the same time, behind the lush and stringy sound-track of the movie, Kit caught the strains of a very different song. It was the beat that caught her attention first, as it always had. As before, it seemed to seep into her own heartbeat, not by matching it but by formulating a strange counterpoint: an urge suggesting not only that her pulse ought to increase its pace but that she ought somehow to produce the emotion that would normally generate such an increase. Lust, perhaps, or fear.

  Positively esoteric were the words that Stephen had used, with pride, to describe his favorite band, and the other names he’d dropped hadn’t rung any bells with Kit. While she’d thought that the tunes she kept hearing might be entirely imaginary there had been a certain fugitive pleasure in wondering whether she might have hidden creative depths, but now that she knew that the music was merely the produce of bands she’d never heard of, that had presumably never had a hit record, it seemed mocking as well as irritating.

  “Fuck this,” Kit said, aloud.

  She leapt up from the bed and went to close the curtains that would block off the direct view of the insulting street-light. Unfortunately, the gesture was a little too assertive. The plastic curtain-rail—newly provided by the council’s ultra-cheap interior decorators—was fixed to the wall by screws whose plastic rawl-plugs were loosely embedded in carelessly-drilled mortar rather than honest brick, and it only required a careless wrench to pull one of them out. Once the rail was no longer supported at one end the weight of the curtains was easily adequate to pull the other rawl-plug free, with the screw still tightly embedded within it. Kit ended up with the whole assembly in her arms.

  “Shit!” she said.

  She dropped the curtains on the floor, went to the door to turn the light on, then returned to the bed to find the TV remote, intending to turn up the sound to drown out the phantom music. Unfortunately, the rucked-up bedclothes had contrived to swallow the remote and it wasn’t in sight. She had to pat the folds down with her hand, searching—and as soon as she started doing that she was possessed by the illusion that the bedclothes were reacting to her touch, responding to her advances. She knew that it had to be an illusion, but she couldn’t help the reflex that made her snatch her hand away.

  Instead of getting louder, the sound-track of the movie became quieter, presumably because the plot had moved into a more contemplative phase, developing the relationship between the carefully-mismatched couple who would have been the lead characters in the TV series that had never been made. The background music was gone and even the voices had sunk to a whisper, as if they too were surrendering to the gentle but insistent pressure of Kit’s music, becoming tacitly enrolled in the Electric Hellfire Club.

  On previous occasions there had been little to the music but the beat and the melody. There had been no discernible lyrics—but now, thanks to Stephen, she knew a single phrase of the chorus of one of the songs on the album, and knowing it allowed her to hear it. It told her, over and over again, that Rose Selavy was the evil genius, the queen of sin. It wasn’t an earnest or threatening assertion. It was a taunt, a joke, a tease—but that only made it worse, in a way, because
it implied that Kit’s ghost wasn’t even taking the business of haunting her seriously, that she was easy to haunt, that she was some weak-minded little slapper of a ghost-seer who could be relied on to see phantoms promiscuously, in every ambiguous shadow and every narrow corner. It implied, if the notion were extrapolated, that she was so easy, so childish, so soft, that she didn’t even warrant the attention and effort of an ectoplasmic dick or a full-blown nightmare, to get her het up enough to be....

  To be what?

  Excited? Preoccupied? Intimidated?

  Not terrified, at least—not yet. And certainly not consumed by supernatural ecstasy; wherever she was supposed to be going, she had not yet come. In the end, she ripped the duvet off the bed and shook it. When the remote clattered to the floor she snatched it up and flicked through the channels in search of something clamorous. She’d gone all the way from five to one and back again to where she’d started before the irrepressible logic of the schedulers came to her aid and the movie she’d been watching gave way to the ads.

  The ads were always loud, always insistent. Whether an ad was pushing the latest model of Renault, Daz or Tampax it was not about to be upstaged by an imaginary Electric Hellfire Club, or any kind of stray thought whatsoever. Channel 5, fortunately, was even more hospitable to ads than ITV and channel 4.

  Equilibrium restored, Kit put the duvet back on the bed and smoothed it down. Then she put the remote down on the floor, positioning it very carefully so that she would be able to snatch it up at a moment’s notice.

  For some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she remembered the old TV—Mum’s TV in Sheffield. She remembered watching Countdown and Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which were Mum’s favorite programs, and how, over the years, Mum’s pride at having a daughter who could answer so many questions on Blockbusters had turned into a competitive resentment of always being revealed as the weakest link.