The first ghost is always a subject of interest, no matter how ghoulish and unsettling it may be.
There is, you say, early on in dinner as the broken clock on the stairs chimes out the wrong time, a bit of a story about this house.
The salad and the soup courses have already gone, and the keenest edge is off your guests’ hunger. Look down and you’ll see the tablecloth spattered with microscopic dots of sauce. Look up and you’ll see tear-shaped drops of molten wax crying down the candlesticks. In the kitchen, they are carving the roast for the next course, but at the table there is a momentary and delicious lull.
What sort of story is it? asks one of your guests. Is it a terribly dreadful one?
But of course it’s dreadful, and that’s exactly what’s wanted. It’s Christmas Eve, after all, and that’s the perfect time for ghost stories. So you pause for effect as you refill your wineglass and invent a couple of embellishments to ensure that this one will be grisly enough.
Two hundred years ago, two twin brothers had equal claim to the title to this house. But one of the brothers was overseas when their father died, and by the time he returned a new will had been produced that entirely cut him out. For months, the unfortunate brother stewed in resentment, until the fortunate brother fell drunk one Wednesday night and blew his own head off while cleaning his gun. Since then, the bloodstain appears every Wednesday night, on the wall in the library, just next to the chimney. It’s a reminder, so the story goes, that this brother never cleaned his guns except on Sunday, and for that reason it can never be scrubbed away.
Someone will ask to see the spot, and you’ll promise to show them after dinner even though it’s not a Wednesday so there’s nothing to see. But that won’t matter. It’s still only the first ghost, and it’s always a subject of interest–at least until the roast and potatoes finally appear.
The second ghost, on the contrary, is somehow suddenly uncouth.
Would anyone like to hear, you ask, over the cold and congealing remains of the roast, another story that I have heard told about this house?
But ghost stories on a full stomach are never very successful: there’s something about the supernatural that seems to upset the digestion. Perhaps it’s an awareness of the jealousy of the departed at the satisfaction of the living, or perhaps it’s just the dulling of hunger’s edge. Either way, your guests’ desire for shocks has already been sated, and you can see them each looking away as you try to catch their eyes.
Two ghosts in one house? says one with a nervous laugh. Even on Christmas Eve, that really is a bit excessive!
And you agree, of course. No one knows better than you just how excessive it is. But it’s also simply the truth, and if you mention the first ghost then you feel compelled to include the second one as well. Even so, you can easily feel the change in the temperature of the room: the distinct drop in interest. So you downplay the telling and reassure your guests that this one is hardly much of a ghost, and really no trouble at all.
It was just the governess, or so the story goes. About a hundred years ago, she threw herself off the north tower: ruined, they say, though no one can agree on which man was to blame. She’s only ever been seen at the top of that tower, and only on a single night each year. Even in death, she’s a model employee, and quite easy to miss if you don’t wish to meet her. Supposedly she died on midsummer night, so it’s hardly likely she’ll make an appearance now, in the winter. Hardly likely that we’ll need to think twice about her!
You don’t mention, of course, that you do think about her. That should go without saying. After all, you live year round in this house, and not just on Christmas Eve. On tenterhooks, you wait hopefully for any opening to say more about the second ghost, but then dessert arrives and the subject quietly dies.
The third ghost you don’t even bring up, because the time for such tales has already long passed.
I forgot to mention, you would never say, over coffee in the library next to the glowing embers of the spent Yule log, another strange story that my grandmother told me once as a child.
Just imagine the reaction if you really attempted such a thing! Anyone could see that your guests have had their fill of refreshments. They only picked at their tarts and nibbled their ice cream, more out of politeness than from curiosity or hunger. If the servants suddenly appeared now with yet another course, your guests would protest that they were being made fun of.
Surely this house isn’t as old as that, someone would be likely to say. Who can all these ancient ghosts be that you keep dredging up?
Then you’d have to get out the Bible and unfold the front pages with the family tree. Then perhaps take them from hall to hall, in each wing of the house, pointing to the dates engraved on the cornerstones. Are three ghosts really any more impossible than one? It seems so, alas! Or perhaps, three are only more tiresome than one. But again: nobody need tell you that.
His are the wet footprints you might find in the hall, if you get up after midnight when nature calls. You might think nothing of it, even if you slipped in one of the spectral puddles he trails in his wake. The roofs in these old houses do leak, after all. But it’s not raining tonight, so it must be the gardener’s boy Reginald, who died just before my grandmother’s time. He was drowned in the pond after my granduncle dared him to take out the forbidden sailing skiff in a gale. For years, no one knew the part my granduncle had played. Not until he confessed on his deathbed, and then the family understood: for the wet footprints always led to his room, and still do.
But this is too much. No one would stand for it. The skeptics will indulge one ghost in the spirit of the season, then roll their eyes when presented with a second. But if you try a third, someone is bound to say that it’s long past time to talk of pleasanter things.
The fourth ghost you don’t even believe in yourself, for of course you live in rational times.
I don’t like to mention it, you wouldn’t even say in your own bedroom alone, but there’s yet another story that I read once in a family history but could never find again.
You wouldn’t say it, and you don’t, but it’s why you leave the electric light on your bedside table burning all night. It’s why you sit up too late, the covers pulled up to your throat, while the wind howls in the battlements and rattles the shutters. Not even you have the patience for more stories of family woes. Not even you can believe in this extravagant fourth ghost who devours your sleep.
If there are four ghosts, there might as well be a thousand, you would argue to the silent night air. And if every brick and every nail is to have its own pathetic moaning spirit, I might as well sell the house and move into a flat.
But even flats have their own ghosts, and houses aren’t so easily sold as that. Especially not houses that are drafty with unresting souls. No: it’s your burden to bear and the inheritance that you’ve accepted, woven into your bones, and accumulating interest with each passing generation. So why fight it? Why struggle? Just accept what it is. But you need not believe in every old legend. For the sake of your sleep, you need not count up them all.
It’s just branches scratching the casement, or the house settling on its bones. It’s just a light from the street, reflected weirdly through the glass. Even the book that always falls off the library shelf is so easily replaced, and the words that appear in the steam on the mirror are so easily smudged out. What are a couple of chairs that mustn’t be sat in, or a couple of cupboards that mustn’t be opened? It’s easier that way, and it doesn’t take much. We do what we have to do and go on with our lives.
After all, you’re tired. You’re always so tired! You don’t want any of these ghosts, but you don’t know how to banish them. No one will listen, not to the whole catalogue. Yet, all any ghost wants is to have its story told. So if you can’t even do that, then far better to just pretend they don’t exist.
In the middle of the night, the clock on the stairs chimes the wrong hour again. Four doleful chimes, the same number as always: for as long as you’ve lived here, for your whole wretched life, no matter how late or how early the real hour might be.
No doubt something happened under this roof once at four o’clock in the morning, but you’ve never asked for the story and no one has offered it. And you’ve long since forbidden the handyman to ever open the clock’s guts: let broken gears lie, if that’s what they are. Better that than to know for certain that it really is yet another ghost in the house.
For at least that old clock never says anything new, you reassure yourself. At least that old clock won’t ever count higher than four. At least that old clock knows when to stop!
A broken clock may not tell you how much longer until dawn. But you’ve long given up hope that dawn makes any difference at all. So let it strike, always the same hour!
DONG-DONG-DONG-DONG
Whatever horrible crime those chimes really mark, at least there’s a kind of cold comfort in knowing that they are always the same!
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M. Bennardo lives in Kent, Ohio, in a house which seems to be so far unhaunted. He is the writer of stories that appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Future Fire, Neon, and others. Although he cannot currently confirm any number of his own ghosts, this is his third appearance in Kaleidotrope. |