In Competition No. 3208 you were invited to submit a short story whose first or last line is: ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ The given line opens Walter de la Mare’s slippery, haunting, much-anthologised ‘The Listeners’ and many entries echoed the 1912 poem’s supernatural theme.
An honourable mention to George Simmers and David Shields, and £30 each to the prizewinners below.
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller.
‘“Asked” would be better.’
‘Or “enquired”?’
‘Too ornate. Keep to your authorial voice.’
Laura. Sacked from her academic post for the unacceptable views in her paper ‘Narrative Queerness – A Neostructuralist Critique’ and reduced to giving Creative Writing courses to amateurs like me. Laura, as short and plain as her prose style. Laura, with her Iris Murdoch hair, Agatha Christie teeth and Toni Morrison earrings. I adore her. I love her arid criticism and occasional droplets of praise. I adore it when she tells me my writing is awash with adverbs. How she enjoys pronouncing those ‘A-’ words, awash, abeam, athwart, akimbo, even ‘anent’. How I should love to go a-shopping for groceries with her!
I continued reading. ‘There was no reply. Yet the Traveller felt himself reaching out, reaching out desperately, compelled by a dry little kernel of hope within him…’
Frank Upton
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller.
The Clairvoyant bridled at the role appropriation but, before she could manifest the basilisk stare upon which her authority rested, a chorus from the Other Realm filled the darkened room with a deafeningly whispered ‘Yes.’
The Traveller, stunned into rare silence, listened as the Clairvoyant outlined his credentials: 91 countries glancingly visited, as many travelogues sold to transatlantic glossies, his request to visit and chronicle one last Undiscovered Country.
‘Tourist!’ spat the combined dead of the Earth, their chill ectoplasm materialising to drench the Traveller where he sat.
Was it insult or shock that killed him? The Clairvoyant couldn’t immediately know, their circle of two broken by his expiry. Only much later, petitioning the dead for some television adventurer eager to impose his own ego on their impossibly far shore, did she catch, amid the cacophony, the Traveller’s voice, half a beat behind.
Adrian Fry
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, tugging his greatcoat close. The utter desolation shocked him; how long had they been holed up here, their wagons trapped in the blizzard drifts? Sierra Nevada’s mountains were no joke. He lifted his voice, shouting. ‘Hello? Anybody?’
An emaciated form appeared in a doorway. ‘Oh, ma’am,’ he said, removing his hat. ‘We couldn’t get through the pass – wondered how you were faring.’
‘We’ve been waiting a long time,’ she said. He smelled rotting ox-hide, and gangrenous flesh. He tried not to retch.
‘Apologies, ma’am. Nothing we could do.’
‘Come in for supper,’ she said. He saw a long knife on the table. Dark stains.
‘Very kind of you, ma’am, but I can see you haven’t much –’
‘You’re more than welcome,’ she said, closing the door behind him. ‘We Donners know how to make a meal out of what’s available.’
Janine Beacham
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, setting down his samples case. The outline of the building was indistinct in the semi-darkness. No one had answered his knock.
He cursed his luck. Huckstering farm supplies in the sticks had been a painful descent from managing an Audi dealership, but the booze and the women…
Sad memories were interrupted by ‘Ain’t nobody here but us chickens!’ uttered from behind the big house followed by arpeggios of shrieking laughter.
The corn that proved the old ones weren’t the best. But it meant a chance of a sale. With his phone for illumination, he found a tall side gate and used it, tripping a circuit that switched on floodlights.
And there were the chickens. The smallest of them must have been six feet tall, and in their eyes was the fierce, unappeasable anger of powerful monsters whose sleep had been disturbed.
Basil Ransome-Davies
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller.
Of course it didn’t actually speak. Traveller XXIII was a highly sophisticated space-probe which projected its question in a series of computer-generated electronic pulses such that any advanced civilisation could decode it. The probe itself was the new intergalactic type, designed to traverse the entire universe. It blasted off from Cornwall, being a British mission, and was technologically brilliant, very expensive, and probably pointless.
Centuries passed, along with three major global conflicts which reduced the human population considerably. Food became more important than astrophysics. A few centuries more, and the base from which Traveller had left, though still there, was now just a mysterious historical site. A few people were visiting it when Traveller returned, as it had been programmed to do nearly a millennium before. Curious, someone pressed a button on the shell, and this time Traveller really spoke.
It said: ‘No.’
Brian Murdoch
No. 3211: Chamber music
You are invited to submit a song suitable for inclusion in a parliamentary songbook. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 August.
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