Ghosts and Other Lovers Read online

  Table Of Contents

  Introduction: Real Ghosts

  In Jealousy

  Mr. Elphinstone’s Hands

  From Another Country

  The Walled Garden

  Lucy Maria

  The Extra Hour

  Where the Stones Grow

  White Lady’s Grave

  Soul Song

  Food Man

  Manskin, Womanskin

  Turning Thirty

  Haunts

  Ghosts and Other Lovers

  By Lisa Tuttle

  ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  GHOSTS AND OTHER LOVERS

  Copyright © 2001 by Lisa Tuttle. All rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 1-930815-29-8

  ElectricStory.com and the ES design are trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  These stories are works of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

  Cover art by and copyright © 2001 Cory and Catska Ench.

  eBook conversion by Lara Ballinger and Robert Kruger.

  eBook edition of Ghosts and Other Lovers copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com.

  For our full catalog, visit our site at www.electricstory.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “In Jealousy”: First published in Obsession, ed. Sarah LeFanu and Stephen Hayward, Serpent’s Tail 1995.

  “Mr. Elphinstone’s Hands”: First published in Skin of the Soul, ed. Lisa Tuttle, The Women’s Press 1990.

  “From Another Country”: First published in Night Visions 3, ed. George R.R. Martin, Dark Harvest 1986.

  “The Walled Garden”: First published in Hidden Turnings, ed. Diana Wynne Jones, Methuen 1989.

  “Lucy Maria”: First published in Xanadu, ed. Jane Yolen, Tor 1993.

  “The Extra Hour”: First published in Destination Unknown, ed. Peter Crowther, Borealis (White Wolf) 1997.

  “Where the Stones Grow”: First published in Dark Forces, ed. Kirby McCauley, Viking 1980.

  “White Lady’s Grave”: First published in Tombs, ed. Peter Crowther and Edward Kramer, White Wolf 1994.

  “Soul Song”: First published in Interzone, May 1997.

  “Food Man”: First published in Crank!, December 1994.

  “Manskin, Womanskin”: First published in By the Light of the Silvery Moon, ed. Ruth Petrie, Virago 1994.

  “Turning Thirty”: First published in The Time Out Book of London Short Stories, ed. Maria Lexton, Penguin 1993.

  “Haunts”: First published in Dark Terrors 5, ed. Stephen Jones and David Sutton, Gollancz 2000.

  Introduction: Real Ghosts

  I’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

  In Jealousy

  I’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. Ph
ysically, 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 recreating 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.

  This may sound horribly naïve, but at that point I still hadn’t realized why we’d stayed behind together, why we were there in my room. I was so interested in his life, in his past, that I was waiting for still more revelations about Jane. I thought we would go on talking forever.

  I took a sip of my drink and smiled at him expectantly. He took the glass from my hand and set it down beside his on the bedside table. Then he placed his hands very gently on the sides of my head, over my ears, tilted my face up to his, and kissed me on the mouth.

  I was astonished and flattered. That must sound odd. It wasn’t that men had not found me desirable before — even during my marriage there had been the occasional proposition — or that this conclusion to our growing intimacy should have been so unexpected. But I had come to think of David, as a lover, only in connection with Jane. Jane, the unknown other, whom he called “genuinely beautiful.” This was not a phrase anyone would ever use about me. “Not bad,” “quite attractive,” even “cute,” but never beautiful. Yet he wanted me, this man who had loved a beautiful woman.

  Did I want him? I’m not sure. I wanted something, but it was Jane I thought of as he pressed me back on the bed. In some ways I felt I knew Jane better than I knew David. I didn’t know her as I knew other women, as a friend, but rather as her lover had known her. I perceived her only and entirely through David, and tried to imagine him through her eyes. I don’t know if I identified more with David or with Jane, but I scarcely felt like myself at all as we made love for the first time on the bed in the posh hotel room in Shanghai. Outside it was raining, had been raining since the afternoon. The window was partly open and the damp coolness and sound of the rain came into the room along with the smell of rain-wet city streets, and the omnipresent sour-sweet fecal smell of China.

  After we had made love, after it had grown dark, to the sound of the rain still hissing down, we talked. Or, rather, he talked and I listened. The subject, as always, was his affair with Jane. It was over, we both, we all knew it was over. He said he no longer loved her, no longer cared if he ever saw her again. He didn’t say that he loved me, but the implication was that my company and understanding, and this shared act of love, had finally cured him of her. Although I didn’t say so, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a kindness he was trying to do me, trying to make me feel that I mattered more than I did, or to salve my jealousy, when it really wasn’t necessary. I knew it would be a while yet before he got over Jane. She was too wonderful, and she’d been too important to him. His hurt was too raw, his obsession too intense, for a single sexual encounter to heal. I understood, and it didn’t matter to me; I wasn’t jealous, only grateful to be involved in something new, taken out of myself and the pain of my broken marriage. I didn’t say that, though; I didn’t want us to argue, and anyway, there wasn’t time. We would have liked to spend the night together, but our roommates would be returning soon, so he had to leave.

  That night I had my first dream about Jane. She looked a little like the actress Jane Seymour and a little like my mother twenty years ago. Smiling and kind, she told me she was so glad David had found me, that she knew I would be good for him. I basked happily in her approval.

  All the next day we were discreet, yet discreetly let a few others on the tour understand how our relationship had changed. The day after that, as we left Shanghai, we arranged with the tour leader to share a room. The trip had been transformed, as holidays always are by romance. I still feel a little annoyed with myself sometimes that I experienced so little of China, allowing my inner life to dominate everything. At first everything was colored by regrets and mourning for my marriage, then the affair with David became everything. We might as well have been in Manchester for two weeks, going from one Chinese restaurant to another and spending all the time we wanted in bed. Sexual satisfaction kept me from seeing anything very clearly. Sometimes I look at the pictures I took and can’t believe mine was the eye behind the camera. Only the ones with David in them remind me of anything. Yet at the time I wanted nothing else, and certainly he was a better cure for what ailed me than half a dozen foreign countries could have been.

  The first test of our relationship did not come until we were back home in London. We were apart for a couple of days, recovering from jet lag, and then we’d arranged to meet in a West End wine bar, neutral territory. I was nervous, wondering what would happen. Would we seem like strangers to each other? Would he want to end it? Although he had told me he loved me, I knew that something said in bed, in a foreign country, could be as worthless here as the pretty paper money I had kept as a souvenir. If he treated me coldly I would feel miserable, yet I knew it would be a misery quickly overcome. What we’d shared had happened so far away that it would not be difficult to leave it behind, in the past, in China, and get on with my life alone, refreshed and renewed.

  I’ll always believe that David had meant to break things off with me, but that my attitude, the mental distance I kept, made him fall in love with me. He had told me how emotionally self-sufficient Jane seemed to him, and how irresistible he found her; sensing a similar attitude in me would have hooked him.

  Once he became part of my real life, no longer just a story I was reading or a game I wa
s playing on holiday, I was hooked, too. Everything changed. I had been interested in Jane formerly; now, I was jealous.

  Yet I had no reason to be jealous anymore. He seldom spoke of her now, thought of her only rarely and in a different way. The talking cure had worked: he was over her and in love with me.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about her, even if he could. I wanted to talk about her, I wanted to see her. I convinced myself that if we met my jealousy would vanish. I would stop dreaming about her. We might even become friends. I suggested to David that he invite her over for dinner, or take both of us out.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Why not? You’re still in touch with her.” He had told me that once they’d both realized their affair was definitely over, and had both cooled down a little, they had agreed to stay in touch, to try to construct a friendship out of the ruins of their love. He had even written to her from China.

  “We’ve kept in touch, but we never meet.”

  “Well, surely you can’t be friends if you never meet.”

  “Maybe someday. But not like that. She wouldn’t thank me for that, inviting her over to meet my new girlfriend!”

  “Why not? How do you know? You didn’t leave her — she’s the one who told you it was over. That’s what you told me. So maybe she’d be glad to see you’re settled with somebody, she doesn’t have to feel guilty—”

  “You don’t know her. And you don’t want to know her, believe me. You wouldn’t like each other; I don’t mean she’s unlikable, or that you are, only that you’re very different. You’ve nothing in common.”

  “Except you. Why don’t you want me to meet her?”

  “There’s no reason for you to meet her,” he said impatiently. “It’s all over between us. Don’t you believe me? Are you jealous? Is that the problem? You don’t have any reason to be jealous. She hardly ever crosses my mind. She’s in the past. I have no wish to see her, and I don’t know why you should.”

  It stung, to be told I had nothing in common with this “genuinely beautiful” woman who had been — as he had told me once and never since altered or denied — the one, great, passionate love of his life. I wondered why he loved me, if he did, when we argued so much and had so little in common.