The fourth Christmas ghost story by Matt Rasmussen
Pull your London trenchcoat up
Think of 1950-something
Think of all the decades they erased
And the newsreel says
The less you know, the better
The less you know, the better
You touched her face
And now you’re racing to forget her
-Comaduster
“There are people that don’t fit in anywhere, Mr. Cribben. Did you ever think about that? I mean, they won’t live by your ways and mine. Some of them are too good, and some are too bad. Everybody’s growing pretty much alike—nearly everybody—in this age, and the ones that don’t fit in are scarce; but they’re still around.”
-Russell Kirk, “Behind the Stumps”
1
The farmhouse beguiled Keel, riding the limit of his vision upon the distant hillside. It appeared as a ramble of joined-up houses and outbuildings predating the two ephemeral centuries his life had touched. A stand of trees fettered the largest mass, presumably a barn, at one end. The walls were lime white, the roofs orange tile in two shades that didn’t quite agree, like the rooflines. If the tiny, inset windows ever caught the sun, he’d never witnessed it. Maybe there were no longer any window. He was fairly sure he could find the way on his touring bike if he could find the time, but Keel’s time was not his own.
He had a baby now. It was what he’d pined after for so many years, and now it was his, or he its. Only the rocking, crunching flight of the baby carriage–the barnevogn, an expat needed to learn the language–could make the baby sleep. The long walks, at every hour of the day and night, were in a way the freest he ever felt now. The baby came first, second, last, always. This was as it should be, but Keel couldn’t always shake his self-pity, despite the long-ingrained knowledge (his was a late start for a new father) that self-pity is self-abuse.
What of the baby? He was pretty. Not girl or boy pretty, but something entirely its own. Impossibly pretty. Changeling pretty. Somehow he’d never before perceived how variably unnatural babies looked. One neighbor’s child had a face like the rancor. Another’s resembled a grey. Pointed ears, pointed chins, pointed butts… The twins were impossible to describe beyond their rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. Surely the other parents couldn’t properly see what they were pushing in their barnevogner.
The baby gave up his fight with the covers and slept.
Keel turned for home–or the apartment, at any rate. Home was far south in another country. In another sense, home was nowhere, not for years. By the narrowest definition, home was a citadel of new three-story concrete buildings dressed with pre-aged wood (all badly, but each differently) upon an isolated hilltop. Two 19th Century stone barns remained nearby, grand in their partial ruin, girded by chainlink fences. A weathered white brick church marked a waypoint across the big road, surrounded by the bones of a rain-lichened village, barely inhabited if at all. Christmas lights twinkled there throughout the night, but something about their uniformity suggested the contrivance of a town council, developers, or someone else. Seemingly everyone lived in the new developments, which had expanded like a fairy ring until running out of forage in the rocky ground. He knew every way and shortcut by now, every path that could accommodate the barnevogn. The city wasn’t far away, by colloquial reckoning, but it might as well have been in another land.
Flashing its white stripes and blue-black trim in the morning light, a magpie–husskade, he was learning the local names–hopped from branch to bare branch, watching him like an hourly supervisor. Saint Lucia’s day was past. Frosted grass crunched under the wheels.
A meandering fox-run cut through the field, visible now that the hay was cut. Wind-battered chestnut trees clung together in the sandy soil. A stream refused to be diverted by an earthwork, forming a meter square swamp before disappearing into the hill for a stretch and sneaking under the road. Keel’s feel for the dynamism of the landscape kept him engaged through the fatigue. It was something he could neither disentangle himself from nor properly share. He knew it as an inseparable part of him, which suggested a nobility where others found only tedium.
Other displaced fathers pushed carriages along the paths, most lost in the glamour of their phones.
The farmhouse dazzled white and yellow in the frosted distance. Was it inhabited? Empty? A ghost? If a ghost were something impossible to understand, what was a thing impossible to notice? The magpie’s shadow flitted over him.
2
The night walks were not entirely like the days’. The wildlife slept or hid. He’d never been able to pick out his farmhouse among the small constellations of lights across the valley.
Thus unsupervised, his dulled mind surfaced faces from his past. There were nights, he was quite sure, when he fell asleep on his feet, continuing to trace the well-worn paths while spinning vivid dreams. Such moments could feel more real than the days, but that was faint praise. Surely it was normal to think of well-known faces, former lovers at such vulnerable times, thought Keel. (As, surely, it was normal to intellectualize.) Still, he knew he must be touched to picture these women in such verisimilitude: People who must think of him rarely now, if ever, nor should be expected to.
Catherine had been a kind soul when he’d needed one. A better man would have fallen in love with her. There was nothing wrong with imagining her moved back home (as he knew she’d done) to a western island off Ireland, living in a small stone house, sipping tea at a bay window beneath her little girl’s room. Of course Catherine would land just fine in life. One could hope anyway; with someone so open, it was far from certain. Of course her little girl would be just like her, “naughtily” reading books by flashlight under her covers past bedtime. Catherine surely wasn’t old enough to have gone as grey as in Keel’s conjuration (though many do). She looked so like her old self otherwise, in London when they’d both been at a crossroads in life.
Catherine hadn’t been raised dirt poor, but it was clear that her mother had been, and a curse-length line of mothers prior. She’d been the sort to bring teabags to a restaurant, shop secondhand before it was cool again, and walk kilometers in winter to save a subway fare. The first member of her family to attend college, she’d borrowed every textbook. Keel had been a free trial of something she’d never have actually bought: A homeless, landless freedom.
At the time, he’d assumed that neither could ever go with the other. She’d probably agreed, or he’d talked her around. Maybe he’d even been right. It had, however, been an excuse for breaking her heart.
The vision of Catherine’s imagined husband came up and squeezed her shoulders. Picturing himself in her half-neglected, winter-brown garden, Keel seemed to see Catherine look up and squint his way–his oddest fabrication yet.
3
The yellow-white eye of a jackdaw–allike–regarded Keel with unbalanced disapproval as he walked in the not-quite-rain. The chilled droplets soaked into everything, himself and the barnevogn included, but nothing shone wet. The world simply darkened, the browns growing more brown and the greys black. Snug in layers of blankets, the baby slept. Afar, his farmhouse blended into the rising mist amidst a quilt of fields and windbreaks.
That evening, there was too much color. In a random house, almond-headed aliens slunk extra-like across someone’s big screen, cliché except for their pointed Legolas ears. Someone had spent enough money realizing them that Keel was surprised he couldn’t place the media. Meanwhile, a host of sublime girls’ voices overstrained the speaker of a neighbor’s self-inflating elf with painful Joni Mitchell lyrics. The effect was, absurdly, greater than the sum of its parts. Keel found himself pausing, reaching dully for a revelation in the damp air.
The baby began fussing, and he had to move on.
Soon, Keel’s worn subconscious was visiting someone from a not-so-distant life. Not temporally distant, anyway. Sono was a shrine maiden–a miko–in all her orange-robed, billowing-sleeved, Instagrammable glory. (He’d seen her in uniform perhaps twice.) She was the sole heir to a Shinto temple in Gifu, Japan that had apparently undergone some great misfortune beyond producing only a female heir. When he’d first known her, she’d been engaged to resurrect an Orientalist (but genuinely historical) shrine in Geneva. It sounded like a truly monumental amount of administration, completely at odds with the cheerily airheaded attitude she affected. There was a mind behind that prescribed childishness, indecisive at times, but formidable. He was never certain she herself saw it, or wished to.
Only three months they’d been together, corresponding to her time in the city, and another year breaking up. Perhaps if he could have thrown his life wildly into still another direction it could have been forever, but deep down he feared that all the impossible practicalities had served the duel role of polite excuse. Her youthful attention had proved wavering. People often take the step they failed to only with the next serious relationship. He understood that she was married, like him.
Perhaps Keel had been the fantasy of freedom from the land she was connected to, and the role it demanded. Keel wasn’t surprised to find himself walking there again in his half dream. The sky wore the barest hints of morning, but all else was dark around the traditional house deep in a canyoned wood. He’d been there once, an expensive trip when they’d been “on” again. (A week after, she’d wanted to end it once more. It wouldn’t be the final painful cycle.) He remembered the room they’d slept in. The whole place was so distant, but so comfortable. Even her stern, elderly father had made him welcome in his own silent way. Little feet, mice perhaps, pattered busily among the bushes and carved stonework.
The night’s daydream seemed to require him to follow the walkway inside before he could be reminded of Sono’s face. He saw her hair first, feathered blackly across the floor. Soon he noticed there were two figures asleep on mats, accepting with a grim twinge that he’d conjured her husband as a Western man. (Or was that correct?)
Sono awoke, looking up at Keel with sleep-addled recognition. She actually rubbed her eyes. Keel remembered something now that his fancies had apparently forgotten: Sono couldn’t see a living thing without her glasses.
4
They were definitely rooks in the windy churchyard, with those white beaks and black bodies. Råge. Their dramatic nesting conurbations were something he’d never beheld in person. Such colonies were rare enough that Keel wondered at having never seen one marked in this part of the country. They surrounded him on at least three sides, though their interest wasn’t precisely unfriendly. Presumably the barnevogn had an interesting color, or maybe the (mercifully) sleeping baby interested them. He was that pretty.
Over the churchyard wall, the farmhouse darted in and out of view behind a line of willow trees. Bare of leaves and cut back to a polyp, each hideous willow looked uniquely alien.
The rooks had been rising and settling in ones and threes when as legion they took flight. A shape, some combination of big, far and slow passed out of sight behind the double-eved church tower. In an instant, the mind fills in detail. In a second, the mind believes it. In a minute, it doubts.
Surely he’d mistaken someone’s drone, a wayward mylar ballon, or a bit of litter nearer than he imagined. What Keel thought he had seen was a dirigible. Not a modern airship, but something from von Zeppelin’s sketchbook, ungainly, impractical and charcoal dim. A hypothetical airship.
The rooks flapped about, settling back to their willows.
5
That night, he walked again. Strips of light lay on the horizon, NATO installations or alien bases or both. He vaguely recalled a notion that UFO and fairy lore are very much alike, once stripped of their concentric coats of comforting fiction.
Passing an apartment with a lit entryway, he was surprised to see his own name in bold font. On inspection it turned out to be a framed poster of an actual keel, quite elaborately illustrated for such a seemingly utilitarian object. Keel being no sailor, perhaps he lacked the right eyes.
Passing from the lit, inhabited portion of the walk into the utter blackness of the wastes, his gravelly footsteps melted away, and Keel found himself somewhere new. It wasn’t so much a place as the infill between places: An urban necropolis of equally neglected concrete mid-rises on the edge of some city. The sparse cobwebs of mismatched string lights on balconies above the weak streetlamps gave a lustre of the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, although it was only the fourth Sunday of Advent, and this was hardly the third woman he’d dreamed of revisiting.
He was not, in fact, certain who he was conjuring up in this bleak place. Against whom did he retain so much resentment? Keel wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Unnati, who’d devoured his life for two months, only to ghost him when it became “too real?” Wintergreen (Winnie Greene) who had made an online game of Keel’s naive sincerity? The answer was worse in every way.
It was one of those buildings with neither a basement nor a first floor, but everything awkwardly raised a half storey. Craning his neck to the first/second floor, he found her sitting alone at a dinner table. Despite more intervening years than anyone else he’d resurfaced, it was unmistakably Jaqueline.
At a certain age, one responds to a new place by falling harder into one’s known personality, but in youth, being separated from home is a chance to reinvent oneself. (Problematically, in the long term, the primary personality can’t be escaped so easily, but that’s no one’s knowledge or concern at twenty.) There’s a way one can fall in love at that age, eye-opening and all-consuming, airless, like a Maxfield Parrish painting. Keel often wondered at couples who retain that first love. Do they build on its impossible foundation over time, or do they have to break their youthful habits while (somehow) staying together, like rebuilding a plane in flight?
Nights he and Jacqueline had worked the stale, fungal kitchen of a hotel in Iseltwald, but by day they’d rambled the hills above the lake. He could still shut his eyes and recall the exact undulations of the Faulhorn ridge against the summer sky. Jaqueline’s body he’d once known in the same detail, and long forced himself to forget.
A message on her phone, and Jaqueline’s familiar smile returned, only briefly. Against his will, Keel recalled the weird elasticity of her skin, the curiously wide bridge of her nose. Where was she living now? What parking signs he could see were in French. (Wasn’t one supposed to be unable to read in a dream?) Hadn’t she been married, and living in the Netherlands? How old would her children be? He couldn’t remember anything. He didn’t want to. Frankly, he wanted this vision to end. It wouldn’t. He wanted to know that he wouldn’t obsess over her, seek to dissolve himself into her the way he had, could he do it all again. He wanted to know then what he knew now, about life, love, the self, time–about everything but what seemed so presently wrong with him. He wanted to know that his baby’s mother was nothing like Jacqueline.
He wanted her to see him. But Jaqueline didn’t look down.
6
Keel’s foul mood lingered through the 24th. The temperature plunged below normal, and nature outdid herself on theatrics, painting the fallow brown fields unexpectedly white for Christmas. It mattered little inside. The baby was sick. He was sick. There would be no holiday visit with the in-laws this year. No driving on the slick roads. No songs around the candle-lit tree with words he didn’t know. No feast for the baby to throw around. No tiny glasses of liquor.
A few brass rays cut through the clouds late in the day as he roused himself from a not-quite-nap, finding his head somewhat improved, his throat worse, and the baby crying in misery.
So he walked, though still more than half asleep. He circled the block in the picture postcard sunset, feeling something like life returning to him in the sharp-tasting air.
Afar, a pillar of smoke rose against the setting sun. It came from roughly the direction of his farmhouse, which he couldn’t then locate, white in the white fields. He’d initially taken it for that of an ordinary chimney, but the column rose into the winter sky with far too much coherence, blackness and weight. Perhaps someone was taking the opportunity to burn a brush pile. Perhaps it was a worse occurrence for a Christmas Eve.
Passing his building again, there appeared to be two people–two adults–inside his apartment. After a moment’s wavering, he reentered, keyed the elevator and ascended, holding his hand over the machine’s loudspeaker to avoid rousing the baby.
Exiting onto the third-floor terrace, Keel was for a moment certain he was dreaming: A large black bird sat on the roof above the neighbor’s door, which he’d have to approach to see inside his own apartment. It was a raven. Ravn. There was no such bird as large. It was quite unmistakeable at this range. The baby began to fuss as the raven watched him with one bulging eye, then the other. He’d seen them from afar at the Tower of London (famously) but there were none where he grew up. The hole in their range encompassed most of mid-Europe, so otherwise unaccountable he presumed they’d been deliberately expelled in some forgotten era for some forgotten reason. Certainly the bird was imposing enough to do him real harm if it wished, but between nature’s indifferent harms and those of the human world, he’d always preferred the former.
He pushed forward. The baby began loudly waking as Keel looked inside.
There she was. His wife. She was beautiful: wild-haired and willowy. A beauty that mocked artifice. If he weren’t the envy of other fathers, they were too loyal.
She looked miserable.
There too was he: Keel. The Other Keel. Some old, useless thing living in his place. Tired, snappy, lazy, selfish. He lay there arguing with his wife, spread across the couch as if the barest exertion on the baby’s behalf had broken him. Ignoring the wailing from the barnevogn and the raven’s croaking, Keel dropped his gloves and reached for the door handle.
It wasn’t there.
7
As punishment for being a foul patron, the sky opened that night, fog and rain beating the snow back to ground. The cold soil saturated and black water ran everywhere. He’d never experienced strong wind and whiteout fog together, except perhaps inside a cloud high in the mountains. Two sweaters, a raincoat, bicycle pants, hat, gloves and thick hiking boots were not enough to keep him warm, but he was likely running a temperate. The poor baby was so layered and tarped-down the barnevogn might as well have been a lifeboat.
“I can’t do this,” Keel muttered, his voice unbidden. Useless tears threatened. He fought them for something to do besides stir his own misery, feeling weak, subsumed, forgotten, disposable. Feeling anything but a father. Something black blew past in the fog, and Keel momentarily wondered what the corvids did on nights like this.
Descending the steepening part of the hill, he had a notion to just keep walking. A lone streetlight charged the fog, displaying tatters of snow still clinging to the short grass beside the road. Although there wasn’t a better spot in town, it bore no tracks from children’s sleds. Perhaps this really was nothing more than a bedroom development. Christmas Eve meant grandparents’ houses, not small efficient apartments. He wondered if his were the only child on the hilltop that night.
Keel slipped, recovered himself, and was fortunate he did. He jerked the barnevogn back and sideways, kicking the wire brake against the wheels. Below, a vague orange light pulsed through the near opaque night.
Nothing lay ahead.
The pavement slabs upended then ended. The asphalt of the road had broken away, and ahead simply yawned more fog where the remainder of the slope should have been. Keel stood there lost in the sound of the rain on his hood. It was a moment before he realized someone was talking to him.
“Que?” he said, dropping his hood and peeling his hat off to hear.
A man stood behind him in a black jacket. “Washed out, I said,” he repeated. “You prefer Danish?”
“No, I’m rubbish. Worse than English.”
“Same,” said the big man. “I’ve got no ears for it.” It wasn’t just the darkness; he was dark skinned. Enormous. His very eyes were muscular. The man continued: “I called it in. Looks like someone’s reported it already.” He pointed down the slope toward the orange light–which was of course a caution beacon.
“Good good. My phone is junk up here. They really need to rope this off or something.”
“I’m keeping an eye out. Expect they’re having trouble getting in from the other streets. More washouts.”
“I’m lucky, perhaps.”
“Perhaps at that. Good thing you weren’t on a bike.”
8
Two nights later it was under control, or at least the street was closed. Keel reflected that it was still Christmas in a sense: Traditionally a season of twelve days, only beginning on Christmas Day proper. It would be the Feast of Saint Steven, if anyone still marked it. He remained fatigued, though the sickness had settled in his throat. (The baby had recovered miraculously by the end of Christmas Day–little bastard.)
Without preamble, it was early on a clouded morning. Keel had returned to a familiar place. The roof of the shrine rose dark against the lightening forested slope. The air retained a stillness, but the small scrabblings and scratchings in the undergrowth were rising with the day, or in agitation.
Within moments, the door slid open. Sono faced him in her miko outfit, equal parts absurd and quintessential as any sight meant for another era. Gazing unmistakably at him, she removed her glasses, but held his eye. Picking up a drum made ready, Sono fumbled for the stick to beat it, preparing to raise a racket.
“Sono!” Immobile and stern, her father might well have materialized cross the courtyard for all hint of his coming.
Sono hesitated. Her father held her gaze. They spoke–argued–with a deafening silence. Sono opened her mouth to speak, but closed it. It was already over. She put down the drum, defeated. The old man stared at Keel, his message unmistakeable: Leave. Sono made no move. She seemed to wish them both away.
9
Nothing happened, but a week passed. Keel walked with the barnevogn. The year changed. The night came.
Another man was inside Catherine’s house. Their body language was unmistakeable, but Keel could sense an undercurrent. Was this her husband, or was the other? Or was neither?
A wooden bench, half reclaimed by the elements, lay under the eve of the stone house, at the edge of the porch lamp’s glow. On it was a basket with something wrapped in kitchen towels, and a handwritten sign: “Help yourself.” Keel opened the bundle, finding a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a tumbler glass. It was the kind of humble fare he’d subsisted on above Iseltwald. With Jaqueline. The drink proved to be whiskey. Keel ate, and ate more, unaware he’d even been hungry. He couldn’t have expressed the long-buried appeal of this basic food. At the bottom of the basket was half of a baby monitor.
“It is you,” said Catherine. She’d thrown on a sweater and approached without noise or stealth. She seemed neither shocked nor at ease, but the warmth she radiated hadn’t faded with her grey curls. “I’ve seen you out here,” she offered, sitting. “I wasn’t sure it was you.”
“Who’s that man with you?”
Catherine laughed. “That’s your question? You’ve been out with Them a long time, that’s sure.”
“What, the fa-“
“Shh. Fair Folk. Never try and name them. They take whatever they fancy, so you’ve got that feather in your cap, I guess. I’ve never seen them for sure, but my gran’ did. And her gran’ was out with them for some years. It’d happen back then. They called her Biddy Lately. Don’t worry, it’s not a name you should know. Still means something around here though. She did cures. I heard you were a dad.” In her mouth, it became “daa’.”
Keel nodded. “Do I look like it?”
“Hard to say just what you look like. I suppose with twelve strong men, I could bring you back. Or is it twelve good men? I forget. I might be able to round up six of each, truth be told. But…” She took a sip of the whiskey, and handed it back. “You don’t really want that, do you?”
10
The day of Twelfth Night–the Eve of Epiphany–and Keel was out on his bike.
Although the excursion had been requested and agreed to well in advance, something would be wrong upon his return. His partner would be unhappy, and unhappy with him. Had he married within the Gallic world, it would be a fight. In the twilit North, things were more subtle, but more corrosive. He’d be needled with uncanny coldness and expert martyrism until he could ignore it no longer. Lash out with anger, and he failed doubly. (But then he’d had a lot of anger since the baby came–a surprising and troubling amount, by his standards.) Keel wondered how artfully the natives could bleed and dodge one another, and for how many years. He wondered nothing at how much they drank.
Sanity lay in the problems of the road, so it was with these he chose to concern himself. Keel’s legs and lungs felt fifty years out of shape. Time had slackened his cables alarmingly. The roads wound along blindly, little broad enough for one of the native hatchbacks. Under a heavy winter overcast, there was no sun to navigate by, and he refused to interrupt his mood or labored stride (nor see the inevitable text or missed call) by consulting his glass snoop. Keel’s ears were open, earbuds dangling from his helmet, in a state akin to trepanation for the modern man.
Dark birds noised warning cries, rising from the brown landscape as he passed. Downshifting to climb an inexplicably steep corkscrew where three fields met, a stone wall slid past, and there it was.
Around the farm–“his” farm–the road took a broad, dignified arc, inscribed with a long, straight driveway of crushed gravel and mud puddles. There was indeed a barn at one end, large but apparently disused, grown into the copse of chestnuts and larch.
Keel stopped, kicking his stand down uselessly in the soft, too-narrow shoulder between the pavement and the muddy ditch. In darkness or in sunshine, he’d have felt anonymous, but the grey revealed all equally. He reached for his phone, as surely a picture was necessary, if mildly intrusive. Keel felt he was further intruding to park at the verge of the driveway, but there was no sound alternative.
Uncomfortably, a sandwich-board sign stood watch there, its contents or purpose having presumably drawn the clutch of cars parked in the gravel beside the barn. Something wasn’t right. The setting sun crept under the overcast, blurring the scene with a gentle fire. It was difficult to tell whether the archway to the inner courtyard was hung with string lights or merely limewashed to a shine. The sign, now ablaze, suggested something local arts related, per his limited grasp of the language (and by deduction, there being no rack of honor-system potatoes for sale, certainly not at this time of year).
Keel had the urge to remount and flee, although the road beyond the fields exuded dreariness. He found this (he’d have imagined) long-vanquished shyness reasserting itself strange, even pathetic. Newly resolved, Keel again reached for his phone. A picture, at least, would be taken. The soul of the thing could be captured.
Seeing the assemblage of buildings up close, from the opposite angle, the rooflines weren’t merely in disagreement, they were sagging. Black erupted through patches of missing tile where the white ribs of battens and trusses peered out. Was it lichen, or had there indeed been a fire? The flaming west and dim overcast refused to divulge detail.
Someone stepped out of the courtyard and waved genially. God damn: He was caught. Keel raised a hand and lowered his head, trying silently to beg off, but the figure gestured him passionately in. Keel had no time to pretend admiration for a villagers’ amateur pottery, or scenes from King Lear in Old Norse, did he?
But there was no alternative. He pushed his bike up the windy lane.
“Come! Come! You’re just in time.” Impossibly, it was the big man from the washed-out hillside. He was no less imposing in black velvet evening dress.
“Really, I’m just cycling-“
“How is the baby? How is it now?”
“He’s-“ Keel was conveyed through the arch without a touch. He might as well have been thrown.
“Piger! Bringe vores ven derind!” boomed the man.
Three girls–or, really, whatever they should be called, being old enough for college at a minimum–surrounded him, giggling together. Keel had seen sisters who looked very alike. These might truly have been triplets. They were dressed identically in fitting piebald outfits, neither harlequins nor pierettes, but something theatrical he felt he should know. They bustled Keel through the courtyard. Glistening black bricks and missing windows revealed that the house had indeed burned. Keel had a glimpse of his own hilltop through the empty outer windows. (From afar, with its white church and terraces of dun housing wreathing the hillside, it was surprisingly picturesque.) Had he stumbled into a fundraiser to repair the place? Keel had brought no wallet. “Jack!” the girls cried as one, or one cried.
With a final laugh apiece (whatever was the joke) the girls passed Keel to a dour ticket-taker. “Jack” (or “Jacque?”), overlarge, jaundiced eyes peering disapprovingly through a black masquerade mask, ushered Keel on. “Take your seat at the front.”
Keel passed into a mid-sized farm building. From the courtyard, it had appeared untouched. Inside it was gutted. Ash and soot hung in the air as if the smoke itself had frozen. Keel groped down the remains of the aisle, past charred posts that might once have held up a hayloft or balcony. The air cleared as he proceeded. Burned-to-ground pew seating gave way to rows of charred but ever more recognizable folding chairs. A low stage lay ahead, intact, swept clean as a wound. The wall beyond had fallen, making the cloudy sky the cyclorama.
A final man waited in the first row, beside the one truly untouched chair. “Please, do have a seat, Mr. Keel,” he said, with a voice that could have been malicious, or kind, or indifferent. He wore a dark hood, long, drooping sleeves in an iridescent blue, and a black tee shirt with a white circle. “The show is starting.”
Keel settled himself.
One of the triplets swept onstage, gesticulating broadly and posing in-between. “Forever have I pined for this child!” she declared.
“But what of the long nights?” droned Jack.
Another triplet swept onstage, crossing her arms prettily. “I am no child,” she retorted.
Keel knew this play. He knew the subject. He’d hate every minute of it. The other players waited in the wings. And in the sky, black against nothing: crows, crows, crows.
Afterward
A Christmas ghost story, posted in August? Well it is my birthday today. It’s been a long and torturous path to getting this story finished. I’ll write a real afterward when I have some time.
Time…