The Ephemera (15 page)

As he was getting into his car, Grieve treated me to one of those looks. Eventually he said, "You're lucky, you know that?"

I raised a hand to the back of the speeding vehicle, and then Grieve was gone.

Gulls argued noisily over the lake and its salt-spoiled shores. Whatever was left behind of Jayne Randall—whatever eroded, polished vestige of dead love—she had what she wanted. Harrowfield was a drowned place. She was welcome to it.

Grieve's parting remark snagged in my thoughts. At first I thought he had been referring jealously to my interaction with Jayne Randall's—I suppose he would call it—'spirit'. But that was being more than a little uncharitable. Perhaps he meant something else entirely.

I fished my mobile out of my pocket, dialled carefully.

"Christine?" I said. "It's me. No, nothing's wrong. I just wanted to talk."

~

Cards on the table. I wanted to do a contemporary MR James homage. I wanted an old house, with ghosts, and that sense that if you pry too closely you will regret what you find. Hopefully, I succeeded.

The Apparatus

Let me tell you about ghosts. I don't believe in them. In my youth I saw too much fakery where the spirit world was concerned to have any doubts. Even if I choose the supernatural explanation of what we saw that last time, and take as more than coincidence what followed, I still require further evidence. And no matter how hard I have prayed for it over the years since, it has never come.

Séances, in those days, were the talk of the steamie, and Glasgow had a level of spiritualist activity approaching a small industry. It had been three years since the end of the Great War, and the nexts of kin were still groping around in a sort of muddled communal grief for a clue, a hint, an inkling to the whereabouts of all those husbands and fathers and sons who had disappeared in the muddy fields of Europe, turning to whatever means they could find to provide them with something approaching closure. The ones who came back were little use, cold and iron-faced men who preferred to batter their frustrations like bullets into the rivet holes of the great ships or scribble their memories on plate steel in hot, unreadable welds. The kirk offered comfort only for those who knew for certain the fate of their men. So, it was to the spiritualist churches, the travelling mediums on their borough hall tours, and the furtive parlour séances that many turned in search of their ghosts.

My sister was one such lost soul. Her husband, John, was one of the thousands who simply never returned from the Somme, and in the inconclusive limbo that followed, while the rest of the country picked itself up and went forward, Margaret developed an unhealthy addiction to séance meetings. To begin with I attended a few of these evenings. They were entertaining enough in their own way, but the novelty quickly wore off. I don't know which I found more distasteful: the obvious parlour tricks employed by the various practitioners she invited to the house on Partick Hill, or the sincerity with which she and her cronies professed to believe it all. That they were truly able to converse with their lost ones in the spirit world. A frustratingly vague practice it was, a fog of mystery threaded through with just enough teases and glimpses to feed the needy audience. It was easy to see how the table-knockers and conjurers kept the repeat business coming.

It was no coincidence that I began visiting my sister less often around the time I fell in love with Helen. Helen was the perfect antidote to the post-war depression. She was bright and beautiful, and filled with an optimism for the future that, if others could not quite see yet what she founded it on, they could still not help but be infected by it. By comparison, Margaret's stubborn adherence to the past was dispiriting to say the least.

As it happened, the day we visited her to announce our engagement, she was having yet another of her séances.

"You will stay?" Her face was pale enough against her sombre dress that it occurred to me that her obsession with the spirit world was drawing her nearer to the wraiths than them to her. "This Mr Gilfillan has a new technique that is said to work wonders."

I was disappointed, and perhaps a little angry, that she chose to indulge her obsession than help us celebrate our good news. I was of a mind to curtail our visit, but Helen's eyes brightened at the mention of a séance.

"Oh, please, Bert," she said. "I've always wanted to try this. Please, let's stay."

It was difficult to tell whether Margaret found such vibrant enthusiasm appropriate, but I could see that it was important to her to have me there. After all, I was the only other person that had known John well enough to be able to corroborate his appearance, should such a miracle transpire.

So it was that an hour later we found ourselves sitting around the dining room table. The other guests that had arrived in the interim, Margaret's hard core séance circle, perched among us like a flock of dapper crows, each with a thimble of fino and a funereal air that made me want to scream.

The odd assembly was completed by the figure at the far end of the table. In the unhealthy glow of the low-turned gas lamps, he looked to me like nothing more than a door-stepping tinker. His worsted wool suit may have been his best, but I had observed a flap of unstitched lining, a button dangling on its thread. Not for this Gilfillan the velvet cape or the crass soubriquet. He was not
that
kind of charlatan at least. Nor had he come with the usual bag of tricks employed by his contemporaries to enliven the business of talking to the dead. No, he sat there, ruddy faced and irritable, like a man wondering where his next pint was coming from.

Despite myself, I admit I was intrigued. In addition to Gilfillan my attention was also taken by the bulky, velvet-draped object that sat in the centre of the table, and I knew that this was not going to be the usual cut-rate
son et lumiere
.

"Good afternoon," the man said in a slovenly, antipodean drawl. "I sense that many of you have sought communion with the spirit before, and who knows, perhaps a few of you have made some sort of a connection. A few words of comfort from a loved one, a telling fact that convinces you that it's them talking to you from the other side." Around the table a number of heads nodded. "Well, it's a lie," he said. "A charade founded on mumbo-jumbo and wishful thinking."

The exclamations of puffed-up, put-on distress made me smile.

"What we think of as spirits," Gilfillan went on with an erudition belied by his appearance (I was beginning to think of him as perhaps a university professor fallen on hard times), "are simply echoes of personalities trapped in dislocated pockets of time. Usually the result of a sudden, unexpected death—unexpected most of all by the victim—these partials are semi-aware, but no more than a sliver of the person they once were." Margaret and her ladies were nodding sagely, even though the Australian's bunk practically equated to 'there are no such things as ghosts'. To my right, Helen disguised a snigger behind a sneeze.

"To effect a genuine communication with these spirit remnants," Gilfillan droned on, "requires them to be local in both the temporal and the spatial dimensions." His head swivelled as he regarded his audience. "Have any of you suffered a recent loss, I wonder?"

"I lost a good cashmere mitten last week," Helen said sweetly.

Margaret fired us a look, and I squeezed Helen's hand, both in gentle admonishment and in admiration.

"Well, I really would love to find it again," she murmured in my ear. "I mean, what use is a single mitten to anybody?"

Around the table a number of lace-gloved hands had gone up.

Gilfillan ignored the interruption. "Of course, by
recent
, I should specify, within the last week or so."

The hands went down again.

"Very well," Gilfillan said. "We shall just have to see what happens. But I will not guarantee the specificity of the results." He leaned across the table and whipped away the cloth.

The apparatus was assembled mostly of a framework of drilled struts fixed together with odd bolts, wing-nuts and washers. Within this framework was cradled a bakelite box with no features apart from the cluster of terminals that connected it to a good sized electrical motor via a ripped knitting of kinked and twisted wires. The remaining space was taken up by a large battery cell.

"What you are about to witness," the Australian declared, "is no
Ouija
, no
ectoplasm
, no
moving table
or any other such tricks. Stripped of mysticism, divorced from religion, this is nothing less than science. The science of temporal co-planar collocation."

You had to give him his due. He made this baffling drivel sound impressive.

From the speed that he went about making his apparatus actually do something, however, I surmised that this must have been the bit of his spiel that patrons usually started asking for their money back. With a shower of fat, acrid-smelling sparks he connected the motor to the battery and it emitted a whirring sound, quickly winding itself up into a whine that vibrated the table and rattled the drops of the chandeliers.

Then I felt a tugging sensation, a lurch similar to that felt on a train that is leaving a station. One of the ladies gave a small cry.

"No worries," Gilfillan half-shouted above the din. "We're just getting up to speed so that the apparatus can locate the nearest available spook."

I felt the lurch again and it seemed to me that I must have been straining my eyesight in the dim light for too long because I began to see gold sparkles, similar to the bright dust motes that get illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. Only, there was no such light in the dining room's brown gloom.

Before long the room was filled with cascading showers of the golden sparks.

"Ooh, pretty." I heard Helen murmur, but her voice seemed disorientatingly distant.

The whine of the motor rose in pitch and I felt that lurch again, stronger than before, a yank to the guts that made me feel dizzy and quite nauseated.

And then the apparatus ceased. Someone gasped in the vacuum, a sort of wordless sigh of surprise.

"Ah," Gilfillan said. "Here we are now."

I suppose, that was the moment that I could have done something. Disconnected the machine, whatever, just made it stop. I was certainly no longer enjoying the experience, and I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take Helen by the hand and leave. If I choose to believe Gilfillan's explanation of the theory of his machine, it would have made no difference to what was to follow, but I can never escape the feeling that I allowed it to happen.

The sparks faded from the air, and in their place a bright figure coalesced above the table: a shining blur, accompanied by a sound that to me, even without the knowledge of hindsight, was like the hiss of heavy rain. The apparition dazzled too much to be able to make out more than that its shape was female, and that it was as frightened as all hell.

"Who are you, spirit?" Gilfillan asked it.

I saw Margaret lean forward in her chair, face lit with wonder, although she must have known that this was not John.

Its voice was a whisper, and even though the rain sound masked it, I recognised it instantly. It was the voice that whispered love in my ear in the flickering darkness of the Salon cinema. The voice that had lit up with delight, and said, 'yes, yes, I will.'

"Nelly," it said.

My Helen
? Only
I
called her 'Nelly'.

Close by, I heard a muffled sigh, a bump, a thump, and only then realised that Helen had fallen to the floor.

I carried her out of the dining room. I knew it was probably unwise to move her, but I wanted her away from that apparatus, and the inexplicable thing it had conjured. Lying her on the settee in the parlour, I feared the worst when I saw how pale, how still, she was... and I hugged her with relief when she finally responded to my fevered pinching with a spirited, "all, right! I've not passed over yet!"

To Margaret's credit, she cleared the house of guests and spiritualist alike and made Helen comfortable until she recovered sufficiently from her faint for me to take her home. The apparition was mentioned only by Helen, who later miraculously rationalised the whole affair.

"Well he was getting his own back on me, of course," she told me a day or so later as we wandered through a frosty Kelvingrove. "Putting the wind up the unbeliever. Very effective too. That'll teach me to cross swords with a spiritualist. Decent piece of mimicry too, don't you think? Sounded just like me."

It had sounded far too like her. For a horrible minute that piece of mischievous ventriloquism had convinced me of the impossible. But I could feel the heat of her hands through her new cashmere mittens. My Helen was no ghost, and we went home that day to begin planning our wedding.

Then she was killed.

Went out for messages in a rainstorm. Slipped on loose cobbles on the Broomielaw and drowned in the Clyde.

Simple as that. It was ten days since she and I had seen her ghost hovering above Gilfillan's
Time Machine
. What else would you call that apparatus? A device that searches for the nearest sundered spirit. Nearest in time. Backwards or forwards.
Past or future.

I have said that I don't believe in ghosts, but over the years there have been times... There are times
still
, when I visit the house on Partick Hill, and Margaret lays the board out on that same table, and we dim the lights and place our two paper-thin hands on the planchette. And we take turns asking our questions of the night, but no-one is there to answer.

~

I went through a Weird Engineering phase a few years ago. For this story I started with the idea of a machine that could conjure ghosts, and that naturally suggested the post-war boom in séances, spiritualism and charlatans.

The Bennie and The Bonobo

George Bennie watched the future glide to a halt on the track above his head. He smiled. Waiting at the foot of the gantry stairs as the invited dignitaries and potential investors disembarked from his gleaming railplane, he grinned. And he beamed at the excited chatter that he could hear over the purr of the fore and aft prop screws easing down to a lazy birl.

He was going to be vindicated. Applauded. Rich.

It was 1930 and, with the wounds of the Great War beginning to heal at last, the country was ready to move on. And what better way to do that than replace the ponderous, dirty railways with this sleek, elevated wonder? People had a right to travel in speed and comfort.

The queue of passengers reached him. Hands pumped his, faces glowed, lips spilled excitable platitudes.

Such a smooth ride.

Bennie felt the charge off them, the genuine thrill.

The stained glass windows are darling.

And every single one of these people had influence, would carry away the message that the Bennie Railplane was the mode of tomorrow, and anyone not on board with a sizeable investment would be left behind in the past.

Imagine, Glasgow to Edinburgh in twenty minutes.

And all this from a public demonstration in a sidings in Milngavie. There was so much more he could do to refine the design. The engines for instance, now just a pair of standard, noisy diesels...

"It'll never happen."

The voice—soft, female, American—snapped him out of his thoughts. The rest of the passengers, having made their congratulations were now trudging back towards the offices, leaving a lone figure: really no taller than a child, shawled and bonneted so that her face could not be seen, and hands in a muff, which Bennie though odd for July. Mentally he scanned the passenger list—of course, it was the widow from New York, the late addition: Mrs... Mrs...
Blanchflower
, that was it.

It seemed she alone had not been impressed by the railplane's demonstration. Well, that was hardly surprising for an American. They were never impressed by anything they hadn't made themselves.

Bennie adopted his most reassuring tone. "I guarantee you, Madam, the concept is sound, and the vehicle perfectly safe."

"Oh, I know it is," replied the voice from the bonnet. "But even still your dream will be strangled. You will die a broken and destitute man."

With that outburst, the tiny woman hirpled away, as if plagued by bad joints, in the direction of an open workshop door. Bridling, but beginning to suspect this antagonism as that of a competitor's investor come to inspect the opposition and finding it frustratingly superior, Bennie followed. It took a moment to spot her in the dimness, but there she was, in the lee of a stripped-down engine block.

"I should warn you," he began, "that my designs are fully patented—"

She removed a hand from her muff, holding it up to stop him. He stared at the hand. It was long-fingered and covered in thick black hair.

The hand loosened the ties of the bonnet, slipped it back. If she had not silenced him, the face which was revealed would have left him speechless anyway. Huge chocolate eyes under bony brows, a toothy mouth, wide nostrils, and more of that strange hair.

In his astonishment Bennie couldn't help himself. "You're a mon— "

The visitor bared impressive teeth with a soft growl.

Bennie realized his taxonomical mistake. "Sorry, a chim— "

"If I had been a '
chim'
, I'd have bitten your testicles off at '
mon'
." She sighed. "The word you are looking for, George, is
bonobo
. Other side of the Congo River from the
chims
. Look, we don't have time for lengthy explanations, but I can see you will need an explanation of
me
before we can progress to the matter at hand." The ape stroked the hair under her chin, as if choosing her next words with care. "In the future," she said, "humans will find ways to make modifications to the body that would make your hair stand on end. Literally, if that's what you desire."

Bennie's hand went reflexively to smooth his receding Brylcreemed hair.

"Where I come from, they can—and you'd better believe they do—boost and alter any physical human attribute you can name."

The obvious question dutifully formed on his lips. "Then you're not really a mon...?"

She was ready for it. "A
bonobo
," she repeated. "Yes, I am.
Of course
, they had to experiment on someone else before they were allowed to go to town on human bodies, didn't they? I may be fourth-generation enhanced, but I'm still one hundred per cent bonobo, thank you."

Bennie, not yet close to appreciating any of the bewildering volley of concepts that had been hurled at him in the last few minutes, did manage to catch the inference in this. Four generations of radical genetic experimentation must have produced a lot of dead-ends before they got it right. "I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't be," she said matter-of-factly. "I'm more intelligent than the average human. And I've got my own apartment in the East Village, not to mention a research grant. I've even got the vote, although given that it's still only white human males that ever make it to the election platform it's frankly no use to me at all. They'd be better off with chimps."

"Did you say, the
future
?"

The bonobo scratched her nose. "Catch on fast, don't you? How else would I know that your beautiful railplane is doomed to failure?"

"Please don't keep saying that." Bennie felt unwell. His head was light and his stomach was hollow, and he felt as if, just as he had been gathering momentum down the gleaming railway track of his life, someone had switched the points and diverted him into a most peculiar siding. In such circumstances there was only one thing for an engineer to do: throw the vehicle into reverse, and back up carefully to rejoin the main line.

"Well, Mrs Blanchflower," he said. Ignoring the disturbing question of who
Mr Blanchflower
might be, he smiled more brightly than he felt able and took one step, two, back towards the door. "Many thanks for coming to my little demonstration. I'm sorry you've come so far only to be disappointed. However, you will understand that I have a number of other guests, who I seem to be neglecting—"

"Nineteen fifty-seven."

"I'm sorry?" The ape had the rather irritating habit of blowing up the tracks in front of his train of thought.

"I didn't mean to put it so bluntly," she said softly, "but that's the year you will die. Having spent all of your money on travelling the world looking for investors in the railplane, you eventually give up and take over the running of a small shop to make ends meet. The year before you die, this demonstration track, along with the carriage that sits on it right now, which will have been rusting flake by brittle flake among the gorse bushes and weeds for more than twenty-five years, will finally be dismantled. That's when the dream that has been worn down to a hard nugget inside your heart will finally wear so thin that it'll break and vanish. You won't live another year after that."

Part of Bennie's brain had been aware all along that he really shouldn't be standing talking to an ape in a dress, especially one with such an eloquent—even lyrical—turn of phrase, but that part was overruled by the part that took umbrage at the decidedly insulting tone to her speech. "I'm sorry, madam," he said stiffly. "The evidence is to the contrary. I have a number of
very firm
expressions of interest already, and..." His composure broke. "
By Christ
, did you see the looks on their faces? Did you hear what they were saying? They're up at my office right now, stuffing themselves with French canapés and waiting to throw money at me."

The bonobo simply shook her head, a sort of mournful look in her soft, brown eyes.

"Well, give me a reason then," Bennie blustered. "What's to stop them?"

"There's a war coming."

"Ha!" Now he knew what this was: A prank! His visitor was nothing more than an actress in an ape costume—a very convincing one, granted—her acting, however, was far more persuasive than her grasp of world affairs. "A war indeed. Who put you up to this? It's barely a decade since we won the war to end all wars. There will be naught but peace and prosperity for the rest of our lifetimes."

"So you say," she replied, unfazed, "but nevertheless, there is one coming, and before the decade is out. And what's more it'll be worse than the last one."

"Nonsense." In the face of her calm conviction, this didn't even sound convincing to his own ears.

"And it's not just the war. The railway owners will call in favours with persons of influence. With all this apparent peace and prosperity you're talking about, business is looking good for them. The last thing they need is a cheaper, faster, altogether better alternative to the train."

"When the railplane network is in place there will still be a role for the traditional railways," Bennie protested, but he'd used that argument so often that, true as it was—the railplane would only ever be suitable for express passenger conveyance—it sounded glib even to him.

"George," the bonobo blinked, and wiped at her eye in such a natural and non-human fashion that Bennie's brief fantasy about the actress in the ape suit was blown apart like a dandelion head in the wind. "Do you really think they'll be content with
goods haulage
?"

The logical part of Bennie's brain gained the upper hand then: and it found her argument, if not persuasive, then at least coherent. Even likely.

Bennie pulled up a three-legged stool and sat on it, clasping his hands in front of his eyes. Was it really possible that all his bright plans would come to nothing? He felt warm fingers, soft as leather gloves pat his head. A gentle squeeze of solidarity.

"Very well," he said at length. "Assuming that I take you at your word—that you are an intelligent ape that has come from the future to ruin my entire life just at its happiest moment to date. But I have to ask you: Why? What have I done that you should hate me so much?"

"That's complicated, George."

A muffling of her voice made him open his eyes and look. She was nowhere to be seen.

"I certainly hated you at one point," she continued. The voice was coming from behind a row of lathes and pedestal drills. "Or at least hated you in
principle
. In much the same way as pretty soon you'll grow to hate the railway owners." There was a grunt of effort and the sound of something heavy being dragged on the floor. "But now I know how things are, I empathize." As Bennie approached the bank of machines, the ape's head suddenly popped up.

She smiled in a not particularly wholesome fashion. "We're the same, you see? So, I've not come to ruin your life, but to offer you ... something which should help." Mrs Blanchflower ducked down again, and apparently did something that began a noise like rice grains being dropped onto a skillet.

Bennie didn't see. How he could be considered in any way the same as this perplexing creature, he had no idea. Then, as he got a clear sight of what was behind the lathes, a glimmer of understanding was finally lit.

Mrs Blanchflower had dragged a rusting bogey assembly into an empty area of the floor. She looked up from a device cradled in her hairy hand. "You don't need this, do you?" She indicated the scrap.

Bennie shook his head.

"Good, iron is about as good as we could hope for here for a substrate."

Something was happening to the old bogey. The metal was flowing, beading like condensation and dripping to the floor in a rattling rain of spherules that bounced and rolled in all directions. Mrs Blanchflower tapped at her device and the skittering balls underwent a miraculous change in direction, reversing and converging on a structure that, as he watched, was rapidly rising from the floor.

Bennie watched with admiration as balls flowed together into strands that entwined, becoming cables that rose up like charmed snakes and met at the top to form a shape recognizable as a doorway.

"What's this then?" he asked.

"This?" the ape said, stepping over what was left of the pile of scrap to inspect the completed arch. "This will take you to any point on the planet, and as I discovered by accident during the development phase, any point in history."

Bennie peered at the iron archway. This was what she had meant when she said they were the same. The ape was an engineer. "You designed this ... process?"

She bobbed her head. "Indeed. You just tell it where you want to be, and there you are. It's the transport of the future." She paused, looked at him in a curious fashion with her unreadable, inhuman eyes. "Or at least
a
future."

"What do you mean by that?"

"It's best if I show you."

"It's
best
if you tell me," Bennie replied. As far as he could see, the archway was only that. Standing a little off true, and with something of a kink near the apex, it resembled modern sculpture more than any mode of transport he had seen. Yet, close to it, there was a charge in the air, a potential, that made him cautious.

Mrs Blanchflower sighed, looked at the floor. "I have a confession to make," she said.

"Yes?"

"The reason I came here was to stop you. Stop the railplane before it ever got developed. Originally, I mean."

Bennie shook his head. "I thought you said the whole project was doomed to failure?" he said, bitterly.

"For the most part, yes it is." She shuffled, less confident now than she had been earlier. "George, I didn't know until I came back, but my future is one of the very, very few where you did succeed."

"Your future? You mean there's more than one?"

She shrugged, an odd gesture he thought for an ape. "Potentially infinite futures. But it turns out most events coalesce towards one probable outcome. I've been to 1957—dozens of times, by dozens of routes—and the outcome's always the same. You should have been designing a new kind of engine then that was going to give the bennie a real edge over the train, but all I found was a rusting heap on the sidings and a disillusioned inventor."