The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Anyway, I felt better straight away. I said it looked as if we’d neither of us been dreaming even if what I’d seen couldn’t be reconciled with what she’d seen, and she agreed. After that we rather dropped the subject in a funny sort of way. We decided not to look for the cross I’d thrown at the Green Man. I said we wouldn’t be able to find it. I didn’t ask Jane whether she was thinking what I was thinking, that looking would be a waste of time because she was wearing it at that very moment. I’ll come back to that point in a minute.

We packed up, made a couple of phone calls rearranging our appointments, paid the bill and drove off. We still didn’t talk about the main issue. But then, as we were coming off the Mill Hill roundabout, that’s only about ten minutes from home, Jane said, What do you think happened? – happened to sort of make it all happen?

I said, I think someone was needed there to destroy that monster. Which means I was guided there at that time, or perhaps the time could be adjusted, I said; I must have been, well, sent all that stuff about the Green Man and about Allington and the others.

To make sure you recognized the place when you got there and knew what to do, she said. Who did all the guiding and the sending and so on? she said. The same, the same chap who appeared in my book to tell Allington what he wanted done. Why couldn’t he have fixed the monster himself? she said. There are limitations to his power. There can’t be many, she said, if he can make the same object be in two places at the same time.

Yes, you see, she’d thought of that too. It’s supposed to be a physical impossibility, isn’t it? Anyway, I said probably the way he’d chosen had been more fun. More fun, Jane repeated. She looked very thoughtful.

As you’ll have seen, there was one loose end, of a sort. Who or what was it that had taken on my shape to enter that bedroom, talk to Jane with my voice, and share her bed for at any rate a few minutes? She and I didn’t discuss it for several days. Then one morning she asked me the question more or less as I’ve just put it.

Interesting point, I said; I don’t know. It’s more interesting than you think, she said; because when . . . whoever it was got into bed with me, he didn’t just go to sleep.

I suppose I just looked at her. That’s right, she said; I thought I’d better go and see John before I told you. (That’s John Allison, our GP.)

It was negative, then, I said. Yes, Jane said.

Well, that’s it. A relief, of course. But in one way, rather disappointing.

Another Fine Mess

Ray Bradbury

Location:  Vendome Heights, Los Angeles.

Time:  Midsummer, 1995.

Eyewitness Description:  “At first there was only a creaking of wheels down in the dark, like crickets, and then a moan of wood and a hum of piano strings, and then one voice lamenting about this job, and the other voice claiming it had nothing to do with it, and then the thumps as two derby hats fell . . .”

Author:  Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920—) was born in the small town of Waukegan, Illinois, but later moved with his family to Los Angeles where much of his fiction has reflected his interest in rural life and the wonder-world of films. His early stories were written for the legendary horror magazine, Weird Tales – several featuring the supernatural – but he later turned to Science Fiction to create the books that made his name, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1951) and The Illustrated Man (1951), all of which have been filmed with varying degrees of success. Few writers have better captured the magic of film making in Hollywood on paper than Ray, although his own experiences as a scriptwriter with producers and directors in trying to bring his imaginative words to the screen have often been fraught. His love of old movies and their stars is evident in many of his books and short stories, but rarely more deeply felt than in this ghost story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April 1995. The title of Ray’s story all but gives away the stars of this little comedy masterpiece – though nothing will prepare you for its moving and poignant finale.

The sounds began in the middle of summer in the middle of the night.

Bella Winters sat up in bed about three a.m. and listened and then lay back down. Ten minutes later she heard the sounds again, out in the night, down the hill.