Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“Maybe it’s genetic,” Mei said. “So if being a ghost runs on your father’s side of the family, and on your mother’s side of the family too, then there’s a greater risk for you. Like heart disease.”

“That would mean Aune and I might be in trouble,” Sullivan said.

“Not me,” Sisi said comfortably. “I’ve never seen a ghost.” She thought for a minute. “Unless I did. You know. The House of Mystery . No. It wasn’t a ghost. How could a whole ship be a ghost?”

“Maureen?” Gwenda said. “Do you know any ghost stories?”

Maureen said, “I have all of the stories of Edith Wharton and M. R. James and many others in my library. Would you like to hear one?”

“No, thank you,” Portia said. “Have you ever seen a ghost, Maureen?”

“How would I know if I had seen a ghost?” Maureen asked.

“One more story,” Portia said. “And then Sullivan will give me a foot rub, and then we can all take a nap before breakfast. Mei, you must know a ghost story. No old people though. I want a sexy ghost story.”

“God, no,” Mei said. “No sexy ghosts for me. Thank God.”

“I have a story,” Sisi said. “It isn’t mine, of course. Like I said, I’ve never seen a ghost.”

“Go on,” Portia said. “Tell your ghost story.”

“Not my ghost story,” Sisi said. “And not really a ghost story. I’m not really sure what it was. It was the story of a man that I dated for a few months.”

“A boyfriend story!” Sullivan said. “I love your boyfriend stories, Sisi! Which one?”

We could go all the way to Proxima Centauri and back and Sisi still wouldn’t have run out of stories about her boyfriends, Gwenda thought. And in the meantime all they are to us are ghost stories, and all we’ll ever be to them is the same. Stories to tell their grandchildren.

“I don’t think I’ve told any of you about him,” Sisi said. “This was during the period when they weren’t putting up any ships. Remember? They kept sending us out to do fund-raising? I was supposed to be some kind of Ambassadress for Space. They sent me to parties with lots of rich people. I was supposed to be slinky and seductive and also noble and representative of everything that made it worth going to space for. It wasn’t easy, but I did a good enough job that eventually they sent me over to meet a bunch of investors and big shots in London. I met all sorts of guys, but the only one I clicked with was this one English dude, Liam.

“Okay. Here’s where it gets complicated for a bit. Liam’s mother was English. She came from this super-wealthy family, and by the time she was a teenager, she was a total wreck. Into booze, hard drugs, recreational Satanism, you name it. Got kicked out of school after school after school, and after that she got kicked out of all of the best rehab programs too. In the end, her family kicked her out. Gave her money to go away. After that, she ended up in prison for a couple of years, had a baby—that was Liam. Bounced around Europe for a while, then when Liam was about seven or eight, she found God and got herself cleaned up. By this point her father and mother were both dead. One of the superbugs. Her brother had inherited everything. She went back to the ancestral pile—imagine a place like this, okay?—and threw herself on her brother’s mercy. Are you with me so far?”

“So it’s a real old-fashioned English ghost story?” Portia said.

“You have no idea,” Sisi said. “You have no idea. So her brother was kind of a jerk. And let me emphasize, once again, this was a rich family, like you have no idea. The mother and the father and brother fancied themselves as serious art collectors. Contemporary stuff. Video installations, performance art, stuff that was really far out. They commissioned this one artist, an American, to come and do a site-specific installation. That’s what Liam called it. It was supposed to be a commentary on the American way of life, the postcolonial relationship between England and the U.S., something like that. And what it was, was he bought a ranch house out in a suburb in Arizona, the same state, by the way, where you can still go and see the London Bridge. He bought the house, and the furniture in it, and even the cans of soup in the cupboards. And he had the house dismantled with all of the pieces numbered, and plenty of photographs so that he knew exactly where everything went, and it all got shipped over to London, and then he built it all again on the family’s estate. And simultaneously, several hundred yards away, he had a second house built from scratch. And this second house was an exact replica of the original house, from the foundation to the pictures on the wall to where each can of soup went on its shelf in the cupboard.”

“Why would anybody ever bother to do that?” Mei said.

“Don’t ask me,” Sisi said. “If I had that much money, I’d spend it on booze and nice dresses for me and all of my friends.”

“Hear, hear,” Gwenda said. They all raised their bulbs and drank.

“This stuff is ferocious, Aune,” Sisi said. “I think it’s changing my mitochondria.”

“Quite possibly,” Aune said. “Cheers.”

“Anyway, this double installation was the toast of the art world for a season. Then the superbug took out the mom and dad, and a couple of years after that, Liam’s mother came home. And her brother said to her, I don’t want you living in the family home with me. But I’ll let you live on the estate. I’ll even give you a job with the housekeeping staff. And in exchange you’ll live in my installation. Which was, apparently, something that the artist had really wanted to make part of the project, to find a family to come and live in it.

“This jerk brother said, ‘You and my nephew can come and live in my installation. I’ll even let you pick which house.’

“Liam’s mother went away and prayed about it. Then she came back and moved into one of the houses.”

“How did she decide which one she wanted to live in?” Sullivan said.

“That’s a great question,” Sisi said. “I have no idea. Maybe God told her? Look, what I was interested in at the time was Liam. I know why he liked me. Here I was, about as exotic as it gets, this South African girl with an Afro and cowboy boots and an American passport, talking about how I was going to get into a rocket and go up in space, just as soon as I could. What man doesn’t like a girl who doesn’t plan to stick around?

“What I don’t know is why I liked him so much. The thing is, he wasn’t really a good-looking guy. He wasn’t bad-looking either, okay? He wasn’t tall, or short either. He had okay hair. He was in okay shape. But there was something about him, you just knew he was going to get you into trouble. The good kind of trouble. When I met him, his mother was dead. His uncle was dead too. They weren’t a very lucky family. They had money instead of luck, or it seemed that way to me. The brother had never married, and he’d left Liam everything.

“When we hooked up, I thought Liam was probably a stockbroker. Something like that. He said he was going to take me up to his country house, and when we got there, it was like this.” Sisi gestured around. “Like a palace. Nice, right?

“And then he said we were going to go for a walk around the estate. And that sounded superromantic. And then he took me to this weather-beaten, paint-peeled house that looked like every ranch house I’d ever seen in a gone-to-seed neighborhood in the Southwest, y’all. This house was all by itself on a green English hill. It looked seriously wrong. Maybe it had looked a bit more solid before the other one had burned down, or at least more intentionally weird, the way an art installation should, but anyway. Actually, I don’t think so.”