remains. He closed his eyes, and after a while, for the first time since he’d stood stunned in the driveway and watched his family leave, he cried.
Afterward he lay and waited.
She came in the night.
Three days later, in the late afternoon, a battered truck pulled down into the driveway and parked alongside the car that was there. It was the first time the truck had been on the road in nearly two years, and the driver left the engine running when he got out because he wasn’t all that sure it would start up again. The patched front tyre was holding up, though, for now.
He went around the back and opened up the wooden crate, propping the flap with a stick. Then he walked over to the big front door and rang on the bell. Waited a while, and did it again. No answer. Of course.
He rubbed his face in his hands, wearily, took a step back. The door looked solid. No way a kick would get it open. He looked around and saw the steps up to the side deck.
When he got around to the back of the house he picked up the chair that sat by itself, hefted it to judge the weight, and threw it through the big glass door. When he’d satisfied himself that the hole in the smashed glass was big enough, he walked back along the deck and around the front and then up the driveway to stand on the road for a while, out of view of the house.
He smoked a cigarette, and then another to be sure, and when he came back down the driveway he was relived to see that the flap on the crate on the back of his truck was now closed.
He climbed into the cab and sat a moment, looking at the big house. Then he put the truck into reverse, got back up to the highway, and drove slowly home.
When he made the turn into his own drive later, he saw the STOP sign was still there. Didn’t matter how many times he told the boy, the sign was still there.
He drove along the track to the house, parked the truck. He opened the crate without looking at it, and went inside.
Later, sitting on his porch in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the wind moving through the tops of the trees all around. He drank a warm beer, and then another. He looked at the grime on his hands. He wondered what it was that made some people catch sight of the sign, what it was in their eyes, what it was in the way they looked, that made them see. He wondered how the man in the big house had done it, and hoped he had not suffered much. He wondered why he had never attempted the same thing. He wondered why it was only on nights like these that he was able to remember that his boy had been dead twenty years.
Finally he went indoors and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He did this every night, even though there was never anything there to see: nothing unless it is that sad, dark thing that eventually takes us in its arms and makes us sleep.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar
ROBERT SILVERBERG IS A multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004.
He began submitting stories to science fiction magazines in his early teens, and his first published novel, a children’s book entitled
Always a prolific writer — for the first four years of his career he reputedly wrote a million words a year — his numerous books include such novels as
“I am not, of course, noted for writing ghost stories,” Silverberg admits, “but I have had a life-long interest in them, going back to my discovery of the classic Wise & Fraser
“My unsurprising favourites have been, all these years, Machen, Blackwood, and M. R. James, whom I have read and re-read many times.
“Another favourite of mine since childhood has been Kipling; and so, when Nick Gevers and Jack Dann invited me to contribute to an anthology of modern ghost stories paying homage to the British masters, I fell immediately on the idea of doing a Kiplingesque ghost story for them.”
WHAT HAPPENED TO Smithers out there in the Great Indian Desert may seem a trifle hard to believe, but much that happens in Her Imperial Majesty’s subcontinent is a trifle hard to believe, and yet one disbelieves it at one’s peril. Unfortunately, there is nobody to tell the tale but me, for it all happened many years ago, and Yule has retired from the Service and is living, so I hear, in Palermo, hard at work on his translation of Marco Polo, and Brewster, the only witness to the tragic events in the desert, is too far gone in senility now to be of any use to anyone, and Smithers — ah, poor Smithers—
But let me begin. We start in Calcutta and the year is 1858, with the memory of the dread and terrible Mutiny still overhanging our dreams, distant though those bloody events were from our administrative capital here. That great engineer and brilliant scholar Henry Yule — Lieutenant-Colonel Yule, as he was then, later to be Sir Henry — having lately returned from Allahabad, where he was in charge of strengthening and augmenting our defences against the rebels, has now been made Secretary of the Public Works Department, with particular responsibility for designing what one day will be the vast railroad system that will link every part of India. I hold the title of Deputy Consulting Engineer for Railways. Our young friend Brewster is my right-hand man, a splendid draughtsman and planner. And as my story opens Brewster has come to us, looking oddly flushed, with the news that Smithers, our intense, romantic, excitable Smithers, whom we have sent off on a surveying mission to Jodhpur and Bikaner and other sites in the remote West, has returned and is on his way to us at this very moment with an extraordinary tale to tell.
“Is he now?” Yule said, without much sign of animation. Yule is a Scot, stern and outwardly dour and somewhat fierce-looking, though I am in a position to know that behind that grim bearded visage lies a lively mind keenly alert to the romance of exploration. “Did he find a railroad already in place out there, I wonder? Some little project of an enterprising Rajput prince?”
“Here he comes now,” said Brewster. “You will hear it all from the man himself.” And an instant later Smithers was among us.
Smithers was fair-haired and very pink-skinned, with gleaming blue eyes that blazed out from his face like sapphires. Though he was somewhat below middle height, he was deep-chested and wide-shouldered, and so forceful was his physical presence that he could and did easily dominate a room of much taller men. Certainly he dominated his friend Brewster, who had known him since childhood. They had been to university together and they had entered the service of the East India Company together, taking appointment with the Bengal Engineers and making themselves useful in the Public Works Department, specialising in the building of bridges and canals. I could best describe the lanky, dark-complected Brewster as timid and cautious, one who was designed by Nature as a follower of stronger men, and Smithers, who in his heart of hearts looked upon himself as part of a grand English tradition of adventurous exploration that went back through Burton and Rawlinson and Layard to Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, was the man to whom he had attached himself.
“Well, Smithers?” Yule asked. “What news from Bikaner?”
“Not from Bikaner, sir,” said Smithers, “but from the desert beyond. The Thar, sir! The Thar!” His blazing blue eyes were wilder than ever and his face was rough and reddened from his weeks in the sun.
Yule looked startled. “You went into the Thar?” A reconnaissance of the vast bleak desert that lies beyond the cities of Rajputana had not been part of Smithers’ immediate task.
“Only a short way, sir. But what I learned — what I have heard—!”
