Read Ghosts and Other Lovers Online
Authors: Lisa Tuttle
Ghosts and Other Lovers
HOSTS AND
O
THER
L
OVERS
Ghosts and Other Lovers
copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Obsession
, ed. Sarah LeFanu and Stephen Hayward, Serpent's Tail 1995.
Skin of the Soul
, ed. Lisa Tuttle, The Women's Press 1990.
Night Visions 3
, ed. George R.R. Martin, Dark Harvest 1986.
Hidden Turnings
, ed. Diana Wynne Jones, Methuen 1989.
Xanadu
, ed. Jane Yolen, Tor 1993.
Destination Unknown
, ed. Peter Crowther, Borealis (White Wolf) 1997.
Dark Forces
, ed. Kirby McCauley, Viking 1980.
Tombs
, ed. Peter Crowther and Edward Kramer, White Wolf 1994.
Interzone
, May 1997.
Crank!
, December 1994.
By the Light of the Silvery Moon
, ed. Ruth Petrie, Virago 1994.
The Time Out Book of London Short Stories
, ed. Maria Lexton, Penguin 1993.
Dark Terrors 5
, ed. Stephen Jones and David Sutton, Gollancz 2000.
Real Ghosts
'm fascinated by ghosts, and entertain all sorts of theories about what they really are. That hauntings are caused by the uneasy dead, by spirits unable to find rest, seems to me the
least
likely explanation, about on a par with the idea that, down through the ages, people have merely imagined, rather than experienced, the phenomena we call ghosts.
A few years ago I read a newspaper article about some experimenters in England who found that the effect of low-frequency sound waves on human subjects was to make them feel shivery and frightened. More than that: the sound waves caused their eyeballs to vibrate, giving the impression of a blurry
something
glimpsed from the corner of the eye. The experimenters speculated that low-frequency standing waves might be produced by wind and other natural effects in old buildings, resulting in ghostly sightings and the notorious "cold spots" in haunted houses. Obviously, the next step (it seemed to me -- not the researchers!) would be to construct a "haunted" house by using low-frequency sound waves to prove it. Not having the funds for such a project, I decided to write a story about someone who did. The result was "Haunts."
I don't think that discovering a physiological explanation for ghostly effects diminishes the mystery or the wonder of ghosts. Explaining why some houses might seem to be haunted doesn't explain why people are haunted.
That's what really interests me, and that's what these stories are about: the relationship between people and their ghosts. Ghosts can be memories or obsessions, and, as in "Turning Thirty," the single resolutely non-supernatural horror story included here, certain types of memory can be literally devastating, as powerful as any malign spirit. Saying that something is "all in the mind" is no kind of explanation at all; there's no straightforward dividing line between the thing that happens and how that thing is interpreted by the people it happens to.
"Haunts" started out almost as a science-fiction story, an attempt to suggest a rational explanation for ghosts -- but ghosts won't be pinned down so easily. Block off one exit and they will ooze -- or explode -- through another. No matter how much is rationalized or explained away, a core of mystery always remains.
In my teens, like the narrator of "Haunts," I hung out with a group of friends all eager to see a genuine ghost or UFO, make contact with the other side, or somehow
prove
the supernatural was, or was not, for real. We huddled around my Ouija board for hours, haunted graveyards, and drove off in pursuit of a mysterious "ghost light" in south Texas. No, we never proved anything; I've still never seen a ghost, despite living for many years in England and Scotland, both countries with a much higher spook count than Texas. I'm no longer quite so eager to see one in real life, but I remain fascinated by ghosts in fiction, my own as well as others'.
How people react to the unexplained tells you a lot about them; every bit as much as their relationships with other people. For me, the idea of a small group of people in a haunted house has always been much more suggestive than Jane Austen's favorite formula of "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village." My literary influences, as far as I'm aware of them, include M.R. James, Robert Aickman, and Shirley Jackson.
As I looked through my previously uncollected work to decide on the table of contents, I noticed the way certain situations, themes, and ideas reappeared. These stories, most of them written in the early 1990s, are nearly all "relationship" stories -- and mostly about love affairs. The title announced itself as inevitable: here are stories about strange relationships -- with ghosts, with lovers, and with ghostly lovers.
Despite the thematic link, the stories are different enough, I hope, to be enjoyed not only one at a time but also as a sequence. Some are romantic; a few even have happy endings; but most, in the great ghost story tradition, are meant to disturb and unsettle, rather than comfort, the reader.
--
Lisa Tuttle
Torinturk, Scotland
June 2001
've always liked ghost stories without believing in them. But this one I believe, because it happened to me.
In 1985 I went to China on a tour organized by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). I went not so much because I was deeply interested in China as to get away from London where everything reminded me of my estranged husband. Even after six months I couldn't stop brooding about what had gone wrong and how I might have handled things differently and saved the marriage. I had just finished a book, and I had a little money, courtesy of my ex, so I decided to go somewhere far away and utterly different.
It was mostly couples on the tour, which I hadn't thought would matter as I wasn't looking for a new partner, but it did matter -- there seems to be a powerful instinct in human beings toward pairing off, and if you don't do it yourself, others will do it for you. David and I were the only singles under fifty, so we kept getting put together on the tour bus or at table.
Under other circumstances we would not have been drawn together. He was in the catering trade, wholesale side, with no interest in my kind of literature. Physically, he wasn't my type: very tall, big-boned, pale-skinned, with that faintly raw look you see in some Scandinavians. He wasn't Scandinavian: his father came from Scotland, his mother from Manchester, and he was a Londoner by birth and choice. He had big teeth and his blue eyes showed a lot of white. He was gloomy but witty, politically conscious and opinionated, and his reason for going on the tour was similar to my own.
He had been involved with a woman called Jane for nearly four years, the same length of time as I'd been married. It was over, she had ended it, finally, by refusing to see him again, and, fed up with glooming around their old haunts in London, mourning what was lost, he'd decided to try to get her out of his system by doing something completely different.
Yet neither of us really wanted to forget. What we wanted, and what we found in each other, was a sympathetic, non-judgmental listener to give us the chance to talk about our feelings.
We became very close very quickly, in the way that people sometimes will in a new environment, away from the usual cautions and distractions. China itself, so overwhelming and strange on first experience, faded into the background, of less importance than the old, London-based events we were re-creating for each other, of less interest than the internal drama which was developing, the intimate heat drawing us closer and closer.
Did he listen as closely to me as I did to him? I thought he did, but maybe, while his blue eyes were fixed so attentively on my face, he was mentally rehearsing his next revelation about Jane. Or maybe he took it in at the time and then jettisoned all that unnecessary information. He must have had a greater talent for forgetting than I do, to judge from his later behavior, or maybe, being a man, he was able to do what men are always advising women, to listen, to understand, but not take it personally.
We became lovers in Shanghai, on an evening when we should have been at the theater, watching acrobats. We'd both cried off on grounds of ill health. Some sort of tummy bug had been sweeping the tour so this was a readily accepted excuse, but I felt guilty, certain that the disease would strike us for real now that we had invoked it. David laughed at me for my superstitions; he claimed to have none himself. He believed in neither ghosts nor gods.
In Shanghai we had rooms in a very posh hotel, far more elegant than anywhere else we went on the tour or than anywhere I'd ever stayed before. Nixon had stayed there during his visit to China. Staying there made me feel very grand and yet uneasy, as if I'd strayed into someone else's life. When the others had departed for the theater, David came down the hall to the room I shared with Miss Edith Finch -- it was all shared rooms; his roommate was another pensioner -- flourishing a bottle of Vodka. We giggled like naughty children as we mixed the Vodka with some of Edith's orange and toasted each other.
