Things have been closing down around here for a while now. First it was the bank, then the post office – next, I suppose, it’ll be the supermarket. After that we’ll just be left with a dairy and a petrol station. If that.
The one which really made an impact on me was the video store. I can get on a bus and cruise over to the next suburb if I want to do some banking or pay my bills. Returning an overnight DVD that way is a little less convenient, though.
The day of the great closing down sale was quite a sight to see. Everyone in town seemed to be there, though admittedly a lot of them were just kids looking for playstation games.
Us more serious types were left rummaging through the shelves of westerns and horror movies – particularly (in my case) the latter. First-run DVDs were $5, but everything else had been reduced to $2. Movement along the shelves was difficult, though, so you were pretty much confined to the first place you ended up at when the doors opened!
Why horror movies, you ask? I don’t really know. They just seem to speak to me somehow. I don’t watch the ones with people mutilating each other with chainsaws and hooks and chopping off each other’s feet: Leatherface and Freddie Kruger and stuff like that. My preference is for the more ghostly ones, with a bit of psychology and lots of menace thrown in.
A good ghost story is hard to find, so I did have a few in mind to look for going in. Luckily it turned out that my tastes were a little bit out of the ordinary: Lake Mungo, Wind Chill, Insidious ... I ended up with a whole armful of my favourites.
And there they sat, in a corner of my room, for quite some time after that. I knew that I should watch them to make sure they weren’t scratched or otherwise damaged. If I waited too long to check, I wouldn’t be able to get them cleaned up by the people in the shop, who’d said they were planning to stay open right up until Christmas.
The trouble was that I’d watched so many of them already, that it was awfully hard to sit through them again. Accordingly, I kept on putting it off till one particularly grey and rainy afternoon a week or so before Christmas.
I don’t like to watch movies during the day as a general rule. The trouble with not having a regular job is that it’s easy to get slack about things like that. I have to have my days all planned and plotted out to stop me giving into such temptations.
But, hey, what the heck, rules are made to be broken, right? I couldn’t even remember half the stuff I’d got: I was shovelling them into my bag so fast I was hardly looking at them after a while.
There must have been 50 movies in that pile. A lot of them were old standards – The Exorcist, Ring – but surely there must be something there I hadn’t seen.
There was, as it turned out. At some point I must have drifted over to the documentary section, since the pressure of punters was least apparent over there, because there appeared to be a number of interesting-looking ‘true ghost story’ DVDs in my stack as well.
There was one called Spooked, about an old deserted sanatorium in Kentucky (which turned out to be pretty silly: more about special effects than anything anyone had actually seen).
There was also an old made-for-TV film called The Haunting, based (allegedly) on a ‘true story’ about a household haunted by a demon. There was something just so matter-of-fact and circumstantial about it that I found it weirdly compelling. It was as if there was no natural arc to the story, no imposed three-act structure, which had the effect of lending it a kind of verisimilitude.
The whole thing began, I recall, with the mother of the family down in the basement. She heard someone calling out her name in what she thought was her mother-in-law’s voice. On going upstairs, she found the mother-in-law denied it vehemently. She was quite upset herself, though. It turned out (as she subsequently admitted) that, at the same time, she’d been hearing what she thought was her daughter-in-law’s voice shouting out obscenities.
And so it went on. On and on. Once, when the family were all away from home, the neighbours complained about a loud party taking place in their house. There were lights, shouting voices, crashing crockery. Nothing was out of place when they returned, however.
It went on for years: well over a decade, I think. Every twist and turn was documented in the film, and the sheer dreary intensity of it gave you something of a sense of what it must be like to be haunted yourself.
The next day, out of curiosity, I looked up the title of the film online, at the local library: nothing. There were quite a few films with titles containing variations on The Haunting – An American Haunting, The Haunting in Connecticut, etc. etc. This particular one had, however, left no obvious record of itself in any of the usual places: the Internet Movie Database, Wikipedia – you know the drill.
While this is, I suppose, not impossible for a made-for-TV film, the fact that it had actually made it to a video release seemed to imply that it should have left some traces.
I suppose that you’re anticipating that when I got home I found that the disc was gone: Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Spooky! No such luck. It was there, all right, with the useful appurtenances of hokey cover art and garish blurbs. There was a distinct absence of information about the production company, actors, date and other details one would usually expect to see – though that’s not so unusual with fly-by-night companies putting out cheap materials in knock-off editions.
So I started to watch it again.
There weren’t any phone calls telling me I had seven days to live – nor did any arms come out of the screen and try to pull me in. There was something a little odd about the whole thing, though.
It’s always a bit difficult to remember the exact sequence of events in a film, even one you’ve just seen. And while it had a main page, this disc didn’t seem to have any separate list of scenes or chapters which one could use for reference. It did seem to me that not all of the things I remembered as being in the film were in it this time – while there were one or two sequences I didn’t remember at all (one in particular, where a swinging door on a cupboard revealed a reflected face, gave me quite a nasty start – it looked so much like someone I know: once knew, I should say).
But that’s not evidence; of course it’s not. You don’t always watch something with your full attention: you might go wandering out of the room for a moment or two without remembering it later, so these extra bits and pieces didn’t perturb me too much.
It was the absences that concerned me most. It’s one thing not to notice things in a film: it’s quite another to remember scenes that simply don’t seem to be there any more.
Descartes was right: one must have method. (He also said that the silence of infinite spaces frightened him – or was that Pascal?) I think, therefore I am.
There were chapter numbers on the video display, even though there wasn’t a separate page listing the scenes. So I made my own breakdown of each of the film’s sections: there were seventeen in all, counting the title and the credits.
Skipping from one to the next, timing them, adding them up, gave me a most satisfactory feeling of control. How can anything random enter into this mechanised universe of the video display? No, the video was purely and simply a puppet: the only wild card in the deck could be my own perceptions of what I’d seen.
And so matters rested. For a while.
•
I do have friends. Just not a lot of them, that’s all. And a number of them have moved away over the years.
It is a bit harder to find people to talk to when you get to my age, though – and as for inviting them round to the house, well, people who know that you’re a bachelor and you live alone tend to expect that your housekeeping is going to be a bit on the sketchy side.
But I wanted to show the movie to someone – just to see if they saw the same things I did, if you understand what I mean. So I invited this young guy I’d talked to in the library a few times, one of the librarians, to drop round for a drink.
He was an intensely enthusiastic guy: always congratulating me on my choice of books and films to watch (the library rents those, too), so it hadn’t been hard to get him into conversation – more the other way round, in fact.
That was the main burden of his remarks when he did finally turn up at the house, in fact: the difficulty of finding people to talk to when you’ve just moved to a new town. I had to agree with him there, though in my case that still applies despite the fact that I was born and brought up here.
He wasn’t, he told me, a great fan of horror movies, being more into bio-pics and other more ‘educational’ stuff like that.
‘It’s not that I mind being scared,’ he confided. ‘Just that I’d rather stick to what’s real, y’understand?’
I did understand. The movie I was proposing to show him had both things going for it, I claimed (somewhat mendaciously). As well as being a pretty frightening story, it also had the virtue of being true.
‘Really? I mean, I hadn’t really meant to stay …’
‘Oh, come on! Look, I’ve got beer; I’ve got potato chips. It’s not that long a film! Come on, live a little.’
‘All right!’
Talking to him was a little like entering the mind of a California surfer. The long and the short of it was that he agreed to stay.
And so I put it on again. The move to the new house; unpacking; the voice in the basement; the misunderstanding with the mother-in-law; the visit from the psychic who saw all the ghosts in the house, including the ‘dark one’ she couldn’t properly make out, the one who was manipulating all the others, the one she thought was a demon …
I must have watched it three or four times by then, and every time I kept notes on the exact sequence of events, the material included in each numbered section of video. I’d found that once I wrote them down, they had a tendency to stay put (a conclusion very satisfying to my Cartesian sense of logic, of the impossibility of bridging the soul-body divide).
This time was no exception. All was as I remembered it. Everything came on cue, as the numbers unfolded on the DVD display. Quite a relief, really. I must have been a bit tired the first couple of times I watched it. There was, in fact, no other explanation.
He seemed strangely subdued after the screening, insisting on getting his coat and preparing to go even as the final credits were rolling. No ‘one more for the road,’ no light banter: just off into the rain, with some perfunctory thanks for the chips and the beer.
I thought nothing of it. It was kind of late by then, after all, and – while the incidents were now as familiar to me as events from my own life – I could understand someone else finding them a bit upsetting.
He seemed to avoid me after that. Even when I went up to get books issued from the counter, his conversation was most perfunctory – not at all the ready banter I’d become accustomed to from him.
Again, I thought nothing much of it. Perhaps he’d thought I was planning to make a move on him – perhaps he’d even wanted me to? Who can say? If you’re a bachelor who lives alone, whether by choice or happenstance, you get used to the fact that just about nothing you do can be regarded as unsuspicious.
But then I noticed that the other library assistants (mostly young women; some still at High School) had started to whisper among themselves when I came in, hushing when I came near, then starting up as soon as I was out of earshot. Had he told them something about me? If so, what? What exactly was wrong with watching a video and drinking a beer with a new acquaintance?
I honestly couldn’t think of anything I’d done to merit such suspicious and hostile glances. But then, I guess that’s the problem with living alone: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not all out to get you.
I got a bit sick of it after a while, and lay in wait for him at the end of his shift.
I came up to him while he was undoing the chain on his bike, bike-clips already attached round his ankles.
‘Hi there. Long time no see.’
‘Oh, hi! Look, I’m in a bit of …’
‘A hurry? I know. I feel as if we haven’t talked since you came over that time. I’ve been meaning to ask you how you liked the movie?’
‘The movie? Oh yeah. Well, not too much, actually. Look, I have to …’
‘I know, I know, you’ve got to go. It’s just – I feel like you’ve been kind of avoiding me since that night, and I just wanted to know why? I mean, was it something I said?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. I’ve just been kind of busy. You know.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘It’s just that. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but … I just don’t feel that comfortable talking to you now, after …’
‘After what? After I invited you over to watch a movie?’
‘That’s just it. After you invited me over to …’
‘But what’s wrong with that? I mean, if you didn’t like the movie you only had to say something.’
‘Didn’t – like – the – movie …’
‘Yeah. What was wrong with it? I mean, I know it’s no blockbuster, low production values, made-for-TV.’
‘Try no production values …’
‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘Look, I don’t want to talk about it any more. And I’d thank you not to try and speak to me again.’
‘How do you mean? Stop coming to the library?’
‘No, I don’t suppose I can ask you to do that, but you don’t have to come up to me when you do.’
‘But what did I do? Was it something in the movie? I’ve noticed it isn’t always the same every time …’
He stared at me, incredulous. ‘There was no movie.’
‘What do you mean there was no movie?’
‘I mean just that. You put on the disc, and then we just sat there, in the dark, watching nothing but a blank screen.’
‘Oh come on … if you couldn’t see anything at all, why didn’t you say something?’
‘Say what? What do you say when someone puts on a film, and starts talking about the scenes, and what’s going down in this bit and that bit, and you can’t see anything at all? What do you say? At first I thought it must be some kind of art film, a whole lot of blankness people can see what they want to in. Then I started to wonder if there was something wrong with my eyes. It wasn’t a blue screen, you understand: nor was it completely dark. Once or twice I felt that I saw a kind of a swirling motion in it, but maybe that was just the result of sitting there for so long.’
‘But … I could see …’
‘I know what you could see in it. You kept on saying. There were ghosts, family arguments, all sorts of stuff. But none of that was there. Not for me, anyway.’
‘So you think I’m crazy.’
‘Well, duh! At the very least I’d say you need help. But it ain’t going to be me that provides it.’
And with that he wobbled off, his crash helmet still hanging from one hand, and his bag in the other. I didn’t call out after him.
•
This afternoon I thought I’d get round to clearing out the basement of a lot of useless stuff I’ve been storing down there. Some of it was old books and furniture belonging to my parents; there were still a few boxes of clothes and crockery belonging to my ex that I’ve been meaning to send to her, though. I don’t have her new address, but I imagine I can send it care of her family.
While I was down there I heard a voice calling out to me.
It sounded like her, anyway.
When I climbed back up the stairs there was nobody there. It’s a shame, really. In some ways I could do with the company.
Still, better luck next time.
Hengshan Jin, ed.: An Encounter in the Global Village (2016)[12/9-24/11/2015]
[2910 words]
[Published in An Encounter in the Global Village: Selected Stories from the 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English (English-Chinese). Ed. Hengshan Jin (Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2016), 366-77;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 61-68.]
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