The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

was someone there, listening to him, hearing his quick breathing and the sudden intake of that breath. He put down the telephone and hurried upstairs; for some reason he now feared that some terrible harm might befall either Claire or the child.

She looked defiantly at him as he entered the bedroom. “Mummy told me to rest, so I’m resting. It’s good for my milk.” But she was clearly puzzled. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It was the phone.”

“Anyone I know?”

“No. I don’t think so.” The baby gave a fat gurgle of satisfaction from the cot beside her.

He went downstairs and, in order to calm himself, noted down the time and day of this latest call. But he did not need to look at his own scrawled handwriting to know that the telephone always rang at six o’clock on Tuesday evenings. This was the time when Vera had originally called him from the hospital with news of the birth. And who could have known that? Only Vera and Claire, naturally. He put his hands to the sides of his head. Then, he thought, perhaps the baby knew . . .

When the following week the telephone rang again he snatched up the receiver and shouted, “Who are you? Who put you up to this?” There was a pause, almost out of politeness, and then it began again, “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” It seemed to Kevin that these harmless words had become threatening, even sinister, like an incantation designed to raise the dead. The voice seemed about to break into laughter: he could not bear the thought of that, and slammed down the receiver just before Claire entered the room. She looked at him curiously, and in that moment they realized how ill at ease they had become with each other.

“I thought I heard voices.”

“It was the phone.” He dared not look down at it, but pointed his finger.

“Oh? I didn’t hear it ring.”

“They rang off quickly,” he replied without thinking about what he was saying.

“Who were they?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just the usual.” She said nothing, but he noticed that she was biting the inside of her mouth as she stood uncertainly in the middle of the room.

When she left him, he sat down sighing – only to spring to his feet with the thought that perhaps the telephone had never rung, that the voice was only within his own head. All at once he saw himself as the centre of an illness which might infect his wife and child. He went over to the telephone and began minutely to examine it; he did not know what he was looking for, but he wanted to feel its weight and bulk in his now trembling hands. Then suddenly it rang again and with a yell he dropped it to the floor; from the spilled receiver he could hear Vera’s voice oozing out. He wanted to scream abuse at it but instead he carefully picked it up, holding it a little way from his ear.

“Kevin, poppet. What is the matter? What was that bloody noise?”

“Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “It’s just the phone.”

But apparently she had not heard him, since she began hurriedly to discuss the arrangements which she had made for them all at Christmas. Oh God, he thought as she talked at him, will I be able to endure all this until Christmas?

On the following Tuesday, at six o’clock, it rang again; but he remained seated and would not answer it. Claire and her mother were shopping for presents, and the noise of the bell seemed to fill the house. But he sat very still.

When at last it stopped, he went to the cupboard under the stairs, took out a can of paint, a brush, and then began solemnly to daub the telephone until it was entirely blue – a bright blue. For some reason this exercise calmed and satisfied him. It had become a battle of wills, the next round of which would be fought on the following Tuesday, which was Christmas Eve.

They were all sitting together on that day, Vera rocking the baby in her arms, Claire watching her, and Kevin pretending to doze. At six o’clock, the telephone rang. He looked up at them quickly to see if they had heard it, too, and when Claire muttered, “Now who can that be?” he got up from his chair in relief. “It may be for you,” he said to his mother-in-law, “Why don’t you answer it?”

“Don’t be silly, darling, with a baby?”

“Could you get it then, Claire?” He coughed. “I’ve got a frog in my throat.”

She glanced at her mother before slowly picking up the telephone. And then there came the voice again: “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” Kevin stiffened and stared down at his infant son, not daring to say anything. But Claire laughed. She handed the receiver to her mother: “Oh Mummy it’s you!” Vera listened as the baby tried to grasp the telephone and the voice came again. She laughed also, but clearly she was abashed. “I didn’t realize,” she said, “how military I sound. I’m sorry.”

Kevin was astonished at their response, and even more so when his wife walked forward to embrace him. “What a wonderful Christmas present! I knew you wouldn’t forget baby’s anniversary! Is it like a singing telegram?”

“No.” He didn’t really know what to say. “Not exactly.”

Vera was smiling at him. “So that’s why you painted the phone. We thought you were going dotty, darling.”

And Kevin laughed with them, for all at once he realized that the voice had been neither menacing nor inhuman. His suspicions had been absurd; the only evil had resided in his own fear. It was Vera’s voice, but, somehow, it had never left the telephone and had become an echo of that joyful mood he had experienced at the first news of his infant son. “So you don’t mind?” he asked his wife.

“Why should I mind? I was waiting for you to show some sign.”

“Sign?”

“You know.” It was her turn to become abashed. “About little Tom.”

Tom was laughing now, and Kevin took him from Vera’s arms to hold him up to the light. The two women rested the telephone between them, listening once more to the refrain, “It’s a boy! It’s a lovely boy!” as Kevin realized that these words also represented the spirit of Christmas itself. And at each Christmas they returned.

7

Haunting Times

Tales of Unease

Smoke Ghost

Fritz Leiber

Location:  Chicago, USA.

Time:  October, 1941.

Eyewitness Description:  “I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings.”

Author:  Fritz Reuter Leiber (1910–92) deserves the accolade as the writer who introduced the ghost of the tough city centre. His stories postulated a modern post-industrial aesthetic of horror, emerging spontaneously from the urban landscape. In a 1940 essay he argued: “The supernatural beings of a modern city would be different from the ghosts of yesterday, because each culture creates its own ghosts.” The son of a noted Shakespearean actor, Fritz toured with his father’s road company for several years and secured parts in a few films before turning to authorship in the Forties. He hit a rich vein of form with tales about the supernatural in contemporary America, notably Conjure Wife (1943), about witchcraft in a modern university, and a series of short stories, “The Automatic Pistol” (1940), “The Girl With Hungry Eyes” (1949) and “Smoke Ghost” (1941) with its grimy phantom. He later reworked this concept into a novel, Our Lady of