Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ someone up there,’ said my father. He snatched the poker and ran upstairs. Thrilled, I snatched the fire-tongs and followed close behind.

      There was no one in the bedroom, except for my sister fast asleep in her bed. The metal-frame window remained closed. My father investigated the walk-in linen cupboard – how I was to fear that cupboard later – and found nothing. Eventually, we returned downstairs.

      ‘It must have been old Bessie,’ said my mother.

      And we laughed. We had a ghost. And it had a name. Old Bessie.

      ‘We never did anything but good for Old Bessie,’ said my mother. ‘So she won’t harm us.’

      Well, it is true that Bessie did us no harm. But she was ever active. Most ghosts are content to live on their reputations, or reappear once a year. Not Bessie. She was always about the house. Cats would not stay with us.

      The focus of the trouble was always that room with the linen cupboard, where Bessie had died, where my sister slept. I occupied the other front bedroom across the landing, while my parents slept at the rear of the house, overlooking the garden. In a very short while, my sister was bursting out on the landing in the middle of the night, screaming and crying. A lady carrying a lamp had come out of the linen cupboard, or from behind the wardrobe, to stand over her bed. So my sister always told us. A fierce lady with a lamp.

      An ideal solution was discovered to this dilemma. My sister and I should change bedrooms. After all, I was by this time at boarding school, and did not sleep at home most of the year.

      So I inherited the room with the linen cupboard. When you opened the linen cupboard door, drawers and lockers confronted you on two sides. On the third side was a window without a curtain, leaving the place vulnerable to the night. I always fell asleep with my gaze directed towards that ominous cupboard.

      Did Bessie visit me? She did. I cannot remember whether she frightened me. I do know that I understood that here was ideal subject matter for school where, in the little dormitory, I made the nights terrible as I told them the story of Old Bessie. Boys hid their heads under the blankets in fright.

      Living with Old Bessie became increasingly difficult. We told nobody in town about her. She was a disgrace, nudging us like a bad conscience.

      When she started to visit us downstairs, it all got too much.

      One October evening, at about four o’clock, when the dusk begins to fall with peculiar intensity in Withburga Lane, when farmers go mad from melancholy and shoot their dogs and their wives, my mother was alone in the house. My sister and I were at school. My father had not yet returned home.

      Mother was in the kitchen at the rear of the house, baking one of her famous cherry cakes, when she heard someone walking about the bathroom overhead. Assuming that my father had returned early, and surprised that he had not at least called out to her, she went through to the hall.

      As she removed her apron, she looked up the stairwell and spoke his name. ‘Bill?’

      No response, although she still heard the footsteps. It was dark up there.

      ‘Bill. Is that you? Are you there?’

      The footsteps came out on to the upper landing.

      ‘Bill? Who is it? Who’s there?’

      The footsteps began to descend the stairs.

      She stood petrified as they passed by her eyes. Still descending. She could not leave the stairwell. The footsteps came down to hall level. They turned and came towards her.

      It was then that she found the power to scream. She dropped her apron and rushed out of the front door into the lane. There she stood, as it grew dark, and waited for half an hour before my father returned. He had to coax her into the house.

      ‘If Bessie’s coming downstairs, I’m leaving,’ said my mother.

      We sold the house. Nobody selling property mentions the fact that it is haunted. Ghosts do not increase the saleable value. We left Withburga, and shortly after that came the family row which exiled us from Norfolk forever.

      Mrs Skinner and her ladies listened to the story with intense interest, peering at me through the hatch.

      Immediately I had finished, they burst into excited talk. ‘There you are, what did I tell you?’ ‘So Old Bessie’s still about then ….’

      Each of them had a tale to tell. They had heard spooky noises. One of them had had to come back at night and had been too frozen with fear to go in. Another had heard footsteps which seemed to walk through the cubicles upstairs. The girl at the hatch, not to be outdone, said, ‘And when you come in of a morning, there’s always – oh, you know, a kind of sinister something … I’ve never liked working here.’

      Mrs Skinner told me that she had come back one evening after the offices were closed to do some work for her boss. She had gone upstairs to his room – the very room where Bessie had died – and was working there when she heard someone downstairs. Thinking it must be her boss, she had called out. No answer. When the steps began to come up the staircase, she grew alarmed and went to see who it was. The footsteps kept coming. She saw no one. She represented herself as a lady not easily upset – and indeed I believed it – but she had been so frightened that she had run downstairs and out into the lane, where she had waited until her boss arrived.

      As she finished speaking, Mrs Skinner and I both realized at the same time the congruence between her story and my mother’s. We stared at each other.

      And as we stared, I saw her expression change from one of a kind of quizzical amusement to one approaching fear. Her lips parted. She could not cease staring through the hatch at me.

      Perturbed myself, I said, ‘I must disappear … go and join the funeral party.’

      I shut the hatch. I stood there alone. The corridor was chill and empty; its hostility closed in upon me.

      As I hurried down the corridor into the open, as I left Withburga, as I moved rapidly down the lane, I knew exactly what the expresion on Mrs Skinner’s face implied. She had become, in that instant, certain that she was talking to the ghost itself.

      Back at the hotel, our party was ordering its second round of gin-and-tonics.

      ‘Bessie’s still in residence,’ I told my sister. Even as I said it, a thought occurred to me which I will leave with you. It had been our asssumption that the haunter of Withburga was Old Bessie. But we could have been wrong. The tormented spirit which still wandered in its imprisoned limbo was possibly much older than Bessie – older and more malevolent.

      Is this a true story? I don’t know. I still cannot bring myself intellectually to believe in ghosts.

      This second section consists of articles on major contributors to the SF field whose work I admire greatly.

      They run as follows: Mary Shelley, to whom all SF writers owe a debt, Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick, James Blish, and Harry Harrison.

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