#catesbywran

Had he actually seen in silhouette the upper part of a head of some sort peering over the parapet? Nonesense, he told himself. And even if he had seen something, there were a thousand explanations which did not involve the supernatural or even true hallucination. Tomorrow he would take a good look and clear up the whole matter. If necessary, he would visit the roof personally, though he hardly knew where to find it and disliked in any case the idea of pampering a whim of fear.

It’s a rotten world, Miss Millick,” said Mr. Wran talking at the window. “Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It’s time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began to rule of fear. They’d be no worse than men.

Have you ever thought what a ghost of our times would look like, Miss Millick? Just picture it. A smoky composite face with the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restlessness of the person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker, the sullen resentment of the striker, the callous viciousness of the strike breaker, the aggressive whine of the panhandler, the inhibited terror of the bombed civilian, and a thousand other twisted emotional patterns? Each one overlaying and yet blending with the other, like a pile of semitransparent masks?” Miss Millick gave a little self-concious shiver and said, “My, that would be terrible. What an awful thing to think of….. “Yet, that’s just what such a ghost or vitalized projection would look like, Miss Millick,” he continued, smiling in a tight way. “It would grow out of the real world. It would reflect all the tangled, sordid, vicious things. All the loose ends. And it would be very grimy. I don’t think it would seem white or wispy or favor graveyards. It wouldn’t moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleevd. Like a sick, surly ape. What would such a thing want from a person, Miss Millick? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?

Of course, Mr. Wran was married and had a little child, but that didn’t prevent her from having daydreams.

I don’t mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world of today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinary in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books.