“We’re still living with it,” said Morrison. “It’s with us when we get up in the morning, when we give up at night. Sometimes I think I see a clue there, the way he would have seen it, but then I lose the thread and we’re back where we started.
“We tried watching the old reruns, hoping they had something to tell. But they were empty. It was like nothing important was going on in this country back then.”
“Tell him about the tracks, Bob.”
“I’m getting to it… Anyway, we waited. I let my job go, and we were living off our savings. It wasn’t much. It’s almost used up by now. But we had to have the answer. Why? Nothing was worth a damn, otherwise…
“Then, a few months ago, there was this article in TV Guide. About the television programs, the way they make them. They take the tracks—the audience reactions, follow?—and use them over and over. Did you know that?”
“I—I had heard…”
“Well, it’s true. They take pieces of old soundtracks, mix them in, a big laugh here, some talk there—it’s all taped inside a machine, an audience machine. The tapes go all the way back. I’ve broken ’em down and compared. Half the time you can hear the same folks laughing from twenty, twenty-five years ago. And from the sixties. That’s the part that got to me. So I rigged a way to filter out everything—dialogue, music—except for the audience, the track.”
“Why, he probably knows all about that. Don’t you, young man?”
“A lot of them, the audience, are gone now. It doesn’t matter. They’re on tape. It’s recycled, ‘canned’ they call it. It’s all the same to TV. Point is, this is the only way left for us to get through, or them to us. To make contact. To listen, eavesdrop, you might say, on what folks were doing and thinking and commenting on and laughing over back then.
“I can’t call ’em up on the phone, or take a poll, or stop people on the street, ’cause they’d only act like nothing happened. Today, it’s all passed on. Don’t ask me how, but it has.
“They’re passed on now, too, so many of ’em.”
“Like the boys,” said Mrs. Morrison softly, so that her voice was all but lost in the hiss of the swirling blue vortex. “So many beautiful boys, the ones who would talk now, if only they could.”
“Like the ones on the tracks,” said Mr. Morrison.
“Like the ones who never came home,” said his wife. “Dead now, all dead, and never coming back.”
One minute to six.
“Not yet,” he said aloud, frightened by his own voice.
As Mr. Morrison cranked up the gain and turned back to the set, the young man hurried out. As Mrs. Morrison opened her ears and closed her eyes to all but the laughtrack that rang out around her, he tried in vain to think of a way to reduce it all to a few simple marks in a new pointless language on sheets of printed paper. And as the Morrisons listened for the approving bursts of laughter and murmuring and applause, separated out of an otherwise meaningless echo from the past, he closed the door behind him, leaving them as he had found them. He began to walk fast, faster, and finally to run.
The questionnaire crumpled and dropped from his hand.
Jack, I loved you, did you know that? You were my brother. I didn’t understand, either. No one did. There was no time. But I told you, didn’t I? Didn’t I?
He passed other isolated houses on the block, ghostly living rooms turning to flickering beacons of cobalt blue against the night. The voices from within were television voices, muffled and anonymous and impossible to decipher unless one were to listen too closely, more closely than life itself would seem to want to permit, to the exclusion of all else, as to the falling of a single blade of grass or the unseen whisper of an approaching scythe. And it rang out around him then, too, through the trees and into the sky and the cold stars, the sound of the muttering and the laughter, the restless chorus of the dead, spreading rapidly away from him across the city and the world.
COME, FOLLOW
by Sheila Hodgson
M.R. James (1862-1936) is recognized as The Master of the traditional ghost story. In an essay, “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” James described a number of “stories which have crossed my mind from time to time and never materialized properly. Never properly: for some of them I have actually written down, and they repose in a drawer somewhere… Let me recall them for the benefit (so to style it) of somebody else.” One of several writers to try a hand at building a story from James’ suggestions is Sheila Hodgson.
Born in London, Sheila Hodgson began her career in the theatre before joining the BBC in 1960 as a staff writer. Six years later she turned free lance, writing for both commercial television and the BBC in addition to working extensively for radio. She has had some twenty radio plays and two stage plays produced, and, while basically a dramatic writer, has had short stories published in New Writing and in various English magazines, and has had one novel. Inspired by M.R. James’ above-mentioned essay, Hodgson talked BBC into doing a series of six radio plays based on his story ideas. She wrote four of these plays herself during 1976-77, and adapted two of these for publication in 1978 in the venerable Blackwood’s Magazine (for which she also wrote an article on James). “Come, Follow!” based on another of James’ suggestions, was to have appeared in Blackwood’s also, but that magazine ended its century and a half of publication before the story saw print. Fortunately, editor Rosemary Pardoe rescued Hodgson’s story for Ghosts & Scholars, an annual homage to M.R. James. I think James would have nodded his approval of Hodgson’s development of his bequest.
It is a matter agreed upon among all right-thinking persons that Christmas should be spent in the bosom of the family; the picture conjured up by Mr. Charles Dickens has entered into the catalogue of English myths, a vision compounded of log fires, merry laughter and snow-bound countryside—all this despite the fact that the log fire may smoke, the snow prove nonexistent, and the company be rendered speechless by indigestion. Moreover, it will rain.
“It will rain,” said Mr. George Markham.
“What a dismal fellow you arc, George!” His companion jerked on the bridle; they were riding in a light trap down the empty Sussex road. “My uncle is the only living relative I possess and I must, I positively must, call on him at Christmas.”
“Why? The shops have a capital collection of greeting cards. Just send the old boy a robin. Or a picture of Santa Claus, signed Your Affectionate Nephew.”
“That’s ungenerous!” Paul Bernays laughed; they both laughed, for they were young men up at Cambridge in this year of 1896 and confident of their position. “He’s got no money and no prospects, he lives with some dreary cleric of his own age.”
“Worse and worse! My dear Paul, what are we going to say to a couple of elderly country bores?”
“Happy Christmas!” For some reason this struck both of them as an excellent joke; the barren hedgerows shook to their mirth, they slapped each other on the back and chortled with glee while the horse slowed to a walk and, yes, it began to rain. To either side the sepia downs curved against a wintry sky; a single bird rose above their heads and vanished over the hill.