The Woods in Winter

The third Christmas ghost story by Matt Rasmussen

“I tell these things as accurately as I can, and with no theories to blur the history. Theories are poor things at the best, and the bulk of mine have perished long ago.” -W. B. Yeats

Where the houses ended, the woods began. Neither had a name. The houses didn’t merit one, and the woods could not be encompassed by one. The woods were not merely deep–one might think, endless–but defied one’s sense of scale and order. Wonders were meant to cease. Down the very first path lay a cathedral of pines, tall, solemn and breathless, forever dissolving into the faintest haze. Not far along, three chattering falls met like a fleur-de-lis to run laughing away down a narrow, secretive gorge. Above, a hillside rose, so vast and even that the trees seemed to grow sideways. At the top, a great ledge of quartz split apart to form a silent, mossy inner sanctum. Wander deeper and discover more. The wood’s imagination was never exhausted. The only limits were endurance, and how much one’s heart could hold. Spring, summer and fall, all walked the woods as if in a shared dream. But in winter, no one entered the woods.

In winter, when the shadows of the trees stretched toward them even at midday, the houses became lighted bastions. Visits were begun by early dusk, and lasted until the late light of morning. Candles burned in windows all night long. Snug and warm, these were the hilights of the children’s year, the winter sleepovers with cousins and friends. Good things were exchanged: Principally sweets for the kids, knitwear for babies, and alcohol for adults. Parents stayed up late to sing and toast. If snow fell overnight, it was a good sign for the turning of the year.

Martin and his family didn’t live in one of the old houses, whose small-paned windows scraped the very edges of the forest. Their sashes were of wood, not iron. Their walls were plastered brick, not lichened stone. A boy his age needn’t duck under heavy timbers to move from room to room. The path up their garden bore only a single loop, long overgrown. A hawthorn could be found above the hedge gate, but it was only a carving.

Several houses (which his father called new) faced the roundabout, inside of which had grown up a small stand of beech trees, sparse enough that the lights of the facing houses showed clearly through their paper-white trunks. Whether it was a wood or not, it was here that Martin had first seen her.

She was white, pale as the frost on the grass. “I’m your sister,” she’d said. Her breath didn’t show in the cold.

“I don’t have a sister.”

That’s what he would have said, but Martin knew she’d have shot back, “Are you calling me a liar?”

“Why is your face painted like a fox?”

This, too, he hadn’t asked, but it was just as well. “It’s NOT painted,” she’d have replied.

So little had passed between them. Had he said anything at all? He could remember almost nothing. Questions had been answered without being asked.

A boy other than Martin might have wondered how this could be. A boy other than Martin would have been afraid, or cautious, or at least intrigued. A boy other than Martin would have hesitated to tell his mother.

“You shouldn’t have been out past dark,” she said.

“I wanted to find my bat.”

“It’s in the kindling bin,” said his mother. “You broke it last week.”

She had that tired look. One of her phases was starting. She’d be no threat for a while.

Martin turned to go.

“Just a moment.”

Martin turned reluctantly.

“Best not to tell your father. And don’t go out again at night.”

She was in no state to stop him, so he promised. By that night she was bedridden, and, as he had two promises to break, he told his father.

“Did she say her name? This girl?”

Martin thought back, without result. “I don’t have a sister, do I?”

“You could have had one.”

“So she’s the sister I didn’t have?”

“Martin, you’re asking me things no one knows the answer to, although your mother thinks I don’t understand winters at all here. Did you tell her?”

“Yeah. Mom said not to tell you.”

“Of course. She’s right about one thing: Promise you won’t talk to the girl again.”

“Why?”

That night, Martin remembered his father’s answer. “What did dad mean, our position here is tenuous?” He was outside the garden, where the hedge chewed apart the house’s glow. The girl stared at the carving above the gate, slightly dazed. “Dad did that picture. Mom says it’s wrong. The wrong kind of hawthorn, or something.” The girl managed, after some tries, to pull her eyes away from it, and fix on him. “You’ve still got that makeup on,” he said.

She chuckled.

“You look younger than me.”

She snorted, and tipped her head behind her. At the edge of the trees, lit up as if in headlights, stood another girl, much taller.

“Is she my not-sister too?”

Rolling her eyes, the girl turned and gestured Martin to follow.

“I’m not going with you. I don’t care if it isn’t the real woods.” More white figures were moving among the beeches, nearly one for each tree. “I’m going back inside. This is stupid.”

She bared her teeth, and for an instant, he thought they were too long. The teeth he’d seen or imaged couldn’t fit inside her minute head. He banged backward through the gate. She followed, with only a glance at the carving above. Up and up the path she backed him. Martin’s mind moved slowly. None of his usual instincts were helping him. 

He tried to push her back, but whether he touched anything, he could never say.

He almost cried out-

“Mom!” but the girl did instead. Martin found he’d lost his voice. “Can I come in, since you won’t join us?”

Then, with irritation, she turned left. She walked around the loop in the garden path, crunching through the overgrown, frosted weeds. Her foot shifted the bricks where the ground was muddy. When she came back to the junction, she took the loop again. As she started around a third time, throwing blacker and blacker looks at Martin, he tripped over the front step.

He wasn’t aware he’d still been backing away. He fumbled for the doorhandle, pushed it and tumbled into the brightly lit entryway, slamming the door behind him. The candles leapt in the changing air. Mom or someone else had changed them since he’d noticed.

***

He didn’t like Christine very much. She was almost two years younger than him, and acted it. She lay in her sleeping bag beside Martin’s bed, eyes wide, attentive but unseen in the shadows of the two candles on the windowsill. Her family lived in one of the other houses on the roundabout. They’d brought candy, which was the one upside to the affair. Without the sugar, they might have been asleep by then. He’d been telling her in low tones about the girl from the small woods.

An adult looked in, and they feigned sleep.

“Yup, they’re down,” Martin’s dad called softly, closing the door. “She dotes on him, and it’s as if- What? Yes, absolutely!” A bottle was opened on a stone countertop, the hall door closed, and the sound was lost.

“You really went out at night? In the winter?” Christine whispered.

“I do what I want,” said Martin. It was more of an aspirational statement, but Christine wouldn’t know–and it didn’t matter what she thought anyway. Blazing like gold threads in the orange light, the rim of her eyebrow was diverting. He rolled onto his back to interrupt this line of study.

“Do you think she’s there tonight?”

“Dunno.”

“I heard Mrs. White one time say something. Something that you said reminded me of it. She said- Well, she said- And she lives in one of the oldest houses, on the main road, remember-“

“Hurry it up.” Martin knew Mrs. White only as an occasional, very severe substitute teacher. In her career, she’d had his mom in class, and all of his uncles. Maybe his grandparents. More than a generation, anyway. Why everyone insisted on regarding her so well, he couldn’t fathom.

“She said you can be brave without being right. She said you have to have fear–the fear, she called it, I think–the fear of-“

“I’m not afraid.”

“No! I know you aren’t.”

“Get up.” He wanted neither to get out of his warm bed, nor to keep this conversation going, but felt on all counts compelled. “Come to the window.”

Cold radiated from the glass behind the candles. A seep of fresh air met his nose. Her sleeping bag rustled as Christine slipped out, padded over and knelt beside him in her pajamas. He could feel the warmth of her shoulder.

“Ready to blow out the candles?”

“We’ll get in trouble!”

“It’s just for a minute.”

The lighter lay on the windowsill, against the glass. Christine recoiled as he picked it up, as if the glass itself were about to grab him. He handed it to her, and, with a clatter, she dropped it. Martin hushed her. They listened. Their dads and Christine’s mom were singing an old song for the season, the one about the three girls who vanish, one winter, and the next, and the next. Christine picked it up again.

“One…”

Christine’s grip tightened.

“Two…” 

She nodded to herself.

“Three.”

Simultaneously, they blew the candles out.

Christine shut her eyes. As Martin watched, several things happened very rapidly.

The garden became visible, without, apparently, any wait for his eyes to adjust. It was just there, cold and pale, stabbed by a wedge of shadow from Martin’s window. As if a white sheet were caught in the wind, there was a whirl, and the fox girl was there, pressed against the panes. She pushed. Her face began to come through the glass. Where it passed into the room, her makeup disappeared. She was as real, as apparently living, as Christine. Her eyes screwed shut in concentration, Martin could see the fine veins of her eyelids. She began to push a hand through the glass, reaching for Martin’s wrist.

Click!

The girl was gone.

The flame of the lighter danced before Christine’s clasped hands. She appeared almost to be praying.

Her hands trembled. She made no move. Martin grabbed them (which made her tremble all the more) and relit both candles. He thought, somehow, that the tapers sat higher now. Indeed, he was all but certain these weren’t the candles they’d blown out. The flames danced in his eyes late into the night as he tried to fall asleep.

In the morning, the adults were in high spirits. A dusting of new snow coated the garden. Martin’s mom was back up and about, none the worse for wear. She sat at the dinner table chatting with Christine’s parents. His father was apparently still in bed. Empty bottles had sprung up all around the kitchen.

After breakfast, (Martin’s father was still a no-show) with creeping fingers of sun giving the snow an oddly matte appearance, Martin and Christine were sent out to play. A smell of chimey smoke hung heavily over the garden. Christine began to pack a snowball. She stopped. The ball fell apart.

“It’s not snow,” she puzzled, holding up blackened palms. “I think it’s, like, ash.”

The neighbor’s house appeared entirely clean. “Let’s walk,” said Martin. He couldn’t help glancing at the muddy patch in the path loop, where the stones were still depressed into the mud. The opposite house came into view around theirs, also without ash. By comparison, his house looked like a powdered winter diorama, without the flecks of glass.

They passed out at the gate. The Macken twins were playing in the birch trees. The ashfall ended irregularly a couple feet into the street.

“Should they be playing there?” whispered Christine.

They started down the road, passing house after house, none of them ash-dusted. Christine absently snapped an orange-leafed twig from the hawthorn that grew over a neighbors’ gate. Where the roundabout rejoined itself, there was a single, tall stone house, in neither the old nor new styles, that had been empty as long as Martin could remember. Ahead, the road crossed a marshy gully containing a handful of tall, bare pines, before meeting the main road. There, the old houses huddled in the shadow of the forest.

A flash came from the old house.

“Martin?”

“There’s someone in there.”

Several adults ran past, in the direction they’d come. Distracted, Martin only noticed one of the other fathers from the roundabout.

“No, Martin, look…”

He realized his mistake. The low sun caught a second window, winking blindingly for a moment before the glare moved on.

“Martin, what’s wrong with the sky?”

He turned. The sun hung orange and vague behind a thin, troubled overcast, low over the long miles of forest. It was moving, visibly. While it should have been morning, the sun was rapidly setting.

They watched, half blinded, as something eclipsed the sun. A great shadow, like a figure. Thin. Hunched. Towering. Impossibly so. Towering over the forest like a mountain towering above another mountain.

They stood, unable to see but unable to look away. The sun blazed back into view, then sunk behind the tallest trees.

Christine shrieked. “Something brushed my hand!”

The world was dark to Martin’s blotted eyes. In the gully below, beside each bog pine, white shapes were beginning to lift themselves, hazy and rustling. Some had begun to resemble human forms.

A white almost-shape clung to the hawthorn in Christine’s hand. She flailed about, screaming.

Martin started running. Down into the gully. Past the pines and the light smudges on the dark gray world. He wasn’t thinking of Christine. He wasn’t thinking of going home, not yet. He was thinking of something Christine had said, someone, whose house lay up ahead.

Soon, he reached the old gate, with its hawthorn trained across the trellis. Lights were coming on in all the surrounding houses. He bolted up the path, past the three well-maintained loops. Light flooded the entryway ahead. Martin thought he was expected until he hurtled inside, slamming the door closed, and turning to meet a very startled Mrs. White.

“Well what are you standing there for?” she said. “We need light in here.” The inside of the house smelled like all the old houses: Fresh hawthorn, old beams, paraffin smoke, and a tang of berries canned on the stove. Mrs. White lit the candles beside the door. Martin didn’t move.

Mrs. White’s doorknob rattled. There came a frantic knock. With an assessing glance, she threw the bolt. Inside spun Christine, colliding with Martin and then the door again, panting and quaking as it shut behind her in the bright entryway. “Don’t bother with the bolt again,” Mrs. White said. “They can’t come in that way.” Martin wasn’t aware of having locked it, but knew he must have. “Christine, help me get the house lit, please.”

She and Christine shuttled around the big room, lighting wicks and pressing switches, until everything was comfortably illuminated. Martin still felt the sun burned into his eyes.

“What about the other room?” Christine asked.

“Martin. Martin!”

He moved, finally, crossing to the door to what appeared to be a bedroom. In the dark inside, a shape moved. He kicked the door shut. “There’s something-“

“Something’s come for you, yes.” Mrs. White took down a big candle from the kitchen island and placed it on the floor before the inner door. She withdrew from it slowly, as if the candle bore some unexpected trace.

Martin watched, expecting the handle to turn, or the door to rattle in its rustic frame, but the stillness was worse. Even the gentle scuffing sound could well have been the echo of his and Christine’s hard breathing.

“It touched me. It touched me! Mrs. White, it-“

“Did you see its eyes? Did you talk to it?”

“It didn’t have eyes!”

“Then you’re fine, dear. Why don’t you put on the kettle for us?” Christine nodded, setting to work mechanically.

After a moment, Martin asked, “Are we going to die?” Christine fumbled the kettle, banging it on the stove.

“What do you think, Martin?” replied Mrs. White. “As this clearly isn’t an accidental visit, you’d better tell me what happened.”

Ugh, teachers. Martin was forced to invent a plausible enough version of events, with certain additions and omissions calculated to place him in a better light, based on what he now knew and might infer. Christine loyally nodded along to his telling. Too loyally, perhaps. Martin had the sense that she was, somehow, giving the whole thing away.

Locking the door when he entered was the one detail Martin couldn’t quite make work. Mrs. White didn’t allow him to omit it. Christine turned so red one would think she’d done it herself. Martin now knew the story was wrecked, but he’d have to stand behind it. He was back in familiar territory, ready to face down Mrs. White, but what she said made a mockery of his resolution.

“And now, something’s come into my home, because of you. The question is whether or not I let it have you.”

“You wouldn’t do that!”

“Our position here is on a knife’s edge. We haven’t lost a child–not for certain–since your mother was a little girl. It hasn’t walked the day since I was a girl myself.”

“This isn’t my fault! I just want her to go away.”

“What we want is like the forest, Martin: Neither friend nor foe, but very, very dangerous.”

“How do I fix this?” The room had grown very hot.

“You’ve known your whole life how not to stir the hornet’s nest. But you’ve done it anyway. Every story, every song, every small ritual… You think everything is eternal because you haven’t seen it break, in your brief life. What is the meaning of this season, Martin? Fireside cocoa and dancing flames? The wonder of childhood, that you can’t be expected to think much of for the next few years? How else could we manage the dark season? Childhood should feel safe. There’s more at stake than you, and your pigheadedness. Knowing what may come next–for you, or for all of us–I think you need to realize: I could handle the guilt of slaking these lights.”

***

“She’s wrong, you know, Martin,” said Christine. It was again plain day, about the time it should have been. Nothing walked over the forest. Indeed, despite a few flakes of snow aloft, the birds, the very day seemed muted. “It wasn’t your fault.” They walked back through the gully, empty and colorless as before.

When they got back to Martin’s house, many people were there. Someone rushed up to them immediately.

“Martin, I have to tell you something,” his mother said. “Something I hoped I’d never have to tell you.” Martin couldn’t process the fact that his father was dead. “After all,” his mother continued, “he’s been sick for such a long time.”

The End

More in this series.

The Meeting House: A Christmas Ghost Story

More in this series.

A frosty Christmas eve
     When the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone,
     Where westward falls the hill
And from many a village
     In the water'd valley,
Distant music reached me
     Peals of bells a'ringing
The constellated sounds,
     Ran sprinkling on earth's floor
As the dark vault above,
     With stars was spangled o'er.

-Robert Seymour Bridges
"Noël: Christmas Eve 1913"

Only once, in all that I’ve spent away from home, have I heard church bells ringing over a town on the night of Christmas Eve. It was in Denmark, and I had been deposited at a stop on the main road. A small village snaked through the dark fields below me, from which rose those clear bells. I was to be the guest of strangers, as often before. It couldn’t have been late. Night comes early there, even in the low north.

Ironically, the acquaintance I was to meet had been made at the height of summer. I recall sitting with three men, pleasantly drunk, not at all following a hushed conversation in Danish, or perhaps dialect. The one English speaker remembered my name well enough: “Geoff with a Gee!” I don’t remember his, having scratched it down only as “J.” It was near 11, but the orange sun hung sluggishly above the horizon, shining through the trunks of a distant copse of trees to inflame the cigarette-stained window of the ancient pub. At some point, I’d mentioned the possibility (then remote) of finding myself that way again at Christmas. My acquaintance had invited me along, in more and fewer words, should the case arise. The men before me were all shadows.

The Meeting House was the second I’d passed, meandering down into the village. As befitting the local agriculture, the new heir to the title had been, effectively, a human pig shed: a low, metal-roofed concrete slab, full of white plastic chairs. The old Meeting House was in every way a contrast. It wasn’t large, but rose to two storeys, with masonry arches above the well-framed windows, and a steep tiled roof. Though also built of greying brick, its age versus the surrounding houses and their large flat expanses was evident at a glance.

A mailbox and wet path up the front yard suggested that the sturdy little building had been subdivided into at least one pensioner’s apartment, but I confess I saw no evidence of this later, and the path may well have led somewhere around behind. Within the privacy glass and drawn blind shone a handful of christmas lights, red and yellow. Someone moved within, momentarily interrupting the pleasant glow. I’ve always been struck by these momentary winter night glimpses into the private lives of others.

But no. The yellow lights were the trick of an approaching car’s headlights. The red were from another that had just passed. The whole effect, including the glow inside, was a confusion of the frosted glass and vinyl blind. The pensioner’s apartment was quite empty, Herr Something-or-other having no doubt gone to his child’s house for the holiday. The other, larger section, showed no signs of life whatsoever.

I continued past the old Meeting House into the village proper: A cluster of houses, garages, a grocery kiosk, and a stone church in the distance. Nothing more. Before the shut-up kiosk, I found my acquaintance with two other men. We were to return up the hill to the Meeting House. He recognized me (“Geoff with a G!”) but I confess I didn’t recognize him. Perhaps he’d shaved his beard, or I was confusing him with another of the drinkers.

Imagine my pleasure when, long before reaching the pig shed, we turned up the damp walkway to the old Meeting House. A rap at the door revealed a clamorous party inside, athough it couldn’t have been 20 minutes since I’d previously passed.

There were candles, though I don’t think they provided all the light. Food covered more than one table. (Rye bread, fish, pickled vegetables, and other things the Danes somehow thrive on.) And of course there was “snaps” in abundance–home infused flavored vodka.

All ages were in attendance, from an old man evincing neither sight nor hearing, to a small baby. The old man sat on a bench by the window, lost in a private rapture. The baby alternately slept and eyed me greyly.

An upright bass was passed my way, dusty but in tune, in contrast to a fiddle which, on striking up, seemed to have degenerated through out-of-tune into something entirely novel. I can’t recall even mentioning I’d played once. The music reared to life, and soon it was all I could do to keep up with the chords of the unfamiliar tunes. The fiddler, for all his instrument’s deathless vigor, appeared himself three-quarters in the grave, sunken eyes aged terribly beyond years less than mine. Another man drummed, white haired despite a youthful face. In my concentration, I was surprised to notice that a game had begun.

At the center stood a tallish man in an unadorned dark cloak, with horns of some kind on his head, masked into apparent blindness–some parish Mari Lwyd type figure. The children ran and danced around him, trying to evade his arms as he turned dizzily, sweeping forth but making little attempt to actually catch them.

A pigtailed young girl grinned at me as she capered past. Struggling as I was with finger memory, it’s likely that it wasn’t her very next pass when I saw her again, but it seemed no time. The eyes I met belonged to an entirely different child. Hard eyes that had never known trust gazed in accusation–not at me personally, but against the very world. The next pass, she was her previous gleeful self. Children are fickle. To this day I’m not certain whether it were twins or the same girl. I can reconcile neither option.

My doubts regarding the blindness of the Mari Lwyd-man were enhanced by his frequent snatches at a particular girl, older than the rest, but wild and ingenuous in the midst of the game. I could presume her age exactly, in fact, by the white Confirmation dress she wore. Fourteen is the age of Confirmation there, and while I take it the pretty ensemble is meant to be rather special, I’ve never thought much of the notion that a dress should only be worn to one celebration.

The game ended, and I needed a rest and a toilet. I gathered that there were no indoor facilites for this (or at least none usable) and was waved out to the pleasantly chilly back yard. The stars had gone, though a glow suffused the clouds. At the fence, the fellow in the antlers had apparently gone on the same errand. He still wore his mask. After all these years, I’ve never figured out what kind of antlers or horns he wore–reindeer I thought, but books show me otherwise. I couldn’t tell (and didn’t want to precisely look) but he seemed continually to be facing away, though we stood at the same fence. Equally, I couldn’t even say whether he was at his business. I’m only certain he didn’t return my vague grunt of greeting. He was still there when I left. Sometimes it takes a while.

The remainder of the evening I can tell you nothing about. Not until the end–or the end for me. Maybe the end for much more.

I found myself sat on a bench against one wall. A woman, much older than me then (and indeed now), handsome but not kindly, sat grandly to my right, in a chair that could have been borrowed from Hamlet. What she was speaking about, I couldn’t tell you. Everything was subtext, and innuendo. She thought she was tempting me. In a way she was: Her imperiousness was draining. I had only so much energy. Of details about her, I remember nothing but a scarf. It draped around her, bright red in a way that should have been festive, but instead evoked crushed berries and blood. She wore it not as a shawl, but wound around her like a snake.

To my other side perched the Confirmation girl in her pressed whites. She’d somehow, in the chaos of the party, gained a crown of winter greens from one of the tables. If during the game she’d slipped down one side of adolescence, she was now insistently trying to climb the other, competing for my attention. I felt her take my arm once or twice, but in truth I was miles away.

My task, the one task I could set what remained of me to, was to count and re-count the people in the room. No count ever agreed with the former. Surely twelve people couldn’t fill even such a modest Meeting House, but each time I tallied something near that. Then it occured to me. The deaths-head and his grey drummer were playing as wildly as before, but there was no music. Light suffused each table, but not a single candle remained lit. The old man sat by himself still, blissful in his insensibility. Everyone was silent, still, heads drooping into shadows. The old man turned toward me.

It was the sharp dig of a fingernail into the skin of either arm that jolted me wildly to my feet. The old woman and the girl both clutched at me. I shrugged away, not daring to face them. The Mari Lwydman was at the back door. He was at the window. He was beside the old man. As I stumbled for the door, he was outside both windows, looking in. Others crowded behind him, craning their blindfolded heads. A touch at my back, and an antler came into the corner of my sight.

My hand reached the doorhandle.

Suddenly, I was on the road. It had begun to drizzle. The weather had turned much colder, and the pavement was icing over. The slick asphalt was blacker than darkness. I slid as much as ran along the void of a road out of that village, aware that I could be in serious trouble if a car came on a blind turn, or I went down and couldn’t get up. No one would even know why I’d been there, save a terse entry in my book with an address for a shuttered kiosk.

Houses, some with one or two windows lit, bobbed slowly past as I struggled to keep my feet. An infinite gulf of sadness stood between us, these people I’d never know nor even glimpse again, behind their lighted windows in the depth of a winter’s night. In one house rambled an indistinct man who could have been my aquaintance. Two more men were visible in the subsequent houses. In the fourth, at a table, sat the old man–the very same old man–listening perhaps to the radio, or else bent to the revelations in his own silent ears.

Pink lights suggested a baby’s room, at the end of an old farmhouse, with a blanketted bundle in a crib. A worm-eaten man paced by the window of the next house. A white head brushed his teeth, preparing for bed, in the subsequent. A tall shadow with antlers stood in the lighted glass door of the next, and I ceased looking about. The houses could consume their occupants.

Somehow, eyes down and thoroughly exhausted, I found my way to a bus later in the night, in what would have been morning elsewhere. I rode out of that place, and indeed out of the country. It was a long time before I returned.

The remainer of this series maybe found here.

The 12 Ghosts of Christmas

The first came to say you were loved once
The second to say you never were
The third came to say you were loved, only once
The fourth came to break your heart
The fifth was like looking at the sun
The sixth was a tatter, hanging from a chimney in the fog
The seventh lurks outside every now
The eighth knew what you really were
Nina was disloyal
The tenth you failed, and others
The eleventh is a life and death’s secret
The twelfth is a winter night’s stars

It Was His Time to Go

A fragment of a dream. This was the new normal. Everyone seemed so resigned to it. Maybe it was indeed the time appointed to the man, somehow, as someone said afterward, but he was panicking as they lifted him out the window. Arms came out of the ocean–long, brightly colored arms, with sticky, webbed hands–amphibian hands–pulling the terrified man right off the subway car. His friends tried desperately to hold him, but there was no resisting. He was already suffocating, head wrapped in those rubbery fins, as he disappeared beneath the leaden waves.

I wonder what the arms were connected to. Why did we stay near the ocean? Was it futile to leave? How long had we been living like this? How many of us were left?

A Christmas Ghost Story

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What do you do the night of Christmas Day? When all the presents have been unwrapped, the food eaten and the visits made? There's an old tradition, predating M.R. James and Charles Dickens, and even the author of Gawain and the Green Knight. I think we should bring it back: The telling of ghost stories.

Cantwell had never taken the time. Another version of her would have assumed that she knew what a ghost was. The present Cantwell was rarely the type to bother with abstractions. What a ghost was cost her no more concern than the question of what a friend was. Were either real? Her friends demonstrated fealty on the right apps and were present in person when circumstances required. This sat comfortably enough in place of a definition. Likewise were ghosts considered by some influential people (and what other kind existed–meaningfully existed?) to be a thing one could accept as “real.” Our alternate Cantwell would have said that a ghost was what remained when a person had otherwise died. They symbolized the inevitable loss of beauty and influence that preceeded the grave by so many years (for those who couldn’t contrive to go out on top) but were otherwise nothing more and much less than a person on this side of the ground. The thought of meeting a ghost hadn’t crossed Cantwell’s mind since she had been very, very small, and understood very, very little.

This Cantwell, the present Cantwell, got by with surface glosses in place of understanding. Understanding was a thing that lived in a stillness she simply didn’t inhabit. She felt naked without a constant crush of attention from all sides, like some deep sea chamber that would rupture if brought to the surface.

It came to pass, however, that she found herself in just such an unaccustomed stillness passing the canal opposite Christiansborg. Her devices were as silent as the unseen water below. Given their use during the day’s brief sunlit hours, this was not mysterious, though car headlights somewhere in view would have been more usual. The silence ate at her much more than the darkness and the cold. Thoughts echoed that didn’t feel like hers.

She was not precisely in her right mind, if one can ever be said to be. An unsettled mind is usually crosscrossed between past conditionals and possible futures, in Cantwell’s case none more than 48 hours in either direction, but hers was also occupied with several alternate presents where others had granted or withheld one thing or another.

Cantwell had a place and time to be, and was hating it as much as the remainder of the present void. The city could be any city of sufficient cachet to her; she didn’t speak the language and didn’t care to, for they spoke hers. Places were backdrops, set dressing. The bare black stage around her was growing intolerable. It was, in fact, the longest night of the year.

There was another, opposite her. A ghost.

Cantwell noticed her, and had the unacustomed jolt that noticing her was her first and most fatal possible mistake. In the way that one knows a greyness under a lamp is a human shape, and that a blank oval near its top is a face looking at us, Cantwell saw it out of the corner of her eye. She pretended, unconvincingly, that she hadn’t. Normally, she pretended so effortlessly and so totally that she herself believed it. Truth was, to Cantwell, what others would follow, and the strongest opening move in affecting a truth was to believe it herself. There were fallbacks, of course, on the vanishingly rare occasion of being trapped in a “lie:” crying, screaming, inversion… But belief could only take one so far. Her skills were deserting her, and would not save her.

Across the canal, behind the low railings, the figure matched Cantwell’s pace. There was a sound of footsteps on stone. She knew it was a woman, as she knew it was a ghost. The figure followed. The canal turned, and the figure didn’t. It forded the air at a calm walking pace, at an angle to meet Cantwell’s path. The silence echoed more loudly than the noise. Had it passed through the railing? Apparently. Even looking wouldn’t tell her, and Cantwell was absolutely not going to look. In another context, it could have been a school friend or a colleage from some job quickening step from across a street to trade commonplace words. Here, however, nothing could be commonplace. The grey-black mass took up more and more of Cantwell’s peripheral vision. A second set of footsteps began on the cobbles to her right, matching rhythm. The ghost walked along beside her.

“Aren’t you going to-“

“No!” Cantwell snapped, equally surprised to hear her own voice.

“You can’t know how much I hate you,” remarked the ghost, also not making eye contact. Cantwell hustled on, saying nothing. People, other people, would save her. Her silence, far from rallying strength like usual (stillness could also be used offensively as a weapon) resulted only in a gently lengthening sense that she was making herself an object of pity, drawing out the inevitable.

“I don’t need this from you,” said Cantwell, eyes set straight ahead. Her piteousness rose to something like self flaggelation.

“Tonight’s not about what you want. Tonight is about what I want.”

What was this? Was she going to be hurled–hurl herself, but not really–into the canal? Float to be found at late morning light an ugly corpse? Self-killed (so it would appear) without a mark of respectable violence?

“No,” said the ghost.

“What do you want?”

Nothing happened. She wasn’t transported, or overwhelmed with a sudden hallucination. To be truly overwhelmed with something is a rare gift in life, and this was not the night for gifts. Cantwell was no less aware of the cold air up her skirt or the trouble of negotiating each increasingly slick paving stone in her high boots. It was as if a smell from long ago triggered a sudden memory. Cantwell’s emotions were once again in a tiny room overlooking another city. Nana was baking macaroons. Some were red, some were white, and some were yellow. A bowl of blue batter remained. She had done nothing to help, just sat at the table kicking her feet and eating. It didn’t matter. The halo of something was in the air. Little her didn’t understand why everything was good, and didn’t care. Why would a child?

“Shut up!” yelled the ghost. Cantwell was startled, and almost looked over. There was no one else there, but the ghost didn’t seem to be addressing her.

She saw a window. A small, far off, lighted window, on a third floor, looking warm as the finished wood inside, all of it seeming to glow. Was this the only lighted window in view? The last one in the world? “I don’t understand,” she began, but was cut off again.

“Never! Ikke nu, ikke hver,” continued the ghost, to whom- or to whatever. Cantwell seemed to be momentarily forgotten.

“You’re not real. It isn’t real.”  Tears pricked at Cantwell’s eyes. They served no purpose. They weren’t going to move the ghost. There was no one else to help–that much was increasingly clear. Cantwell wanted to control them, but with a dropping feeling found that she absolutely couldn’t.

She still hadn’t looked at the ghost. She wouldn’t. It was the only fight she hadn’t lost. The figure seemed in appearance about her age. A woman. Dressed in something colorless, perhaps warmer, or maybe older. It could have been her doppelganger. It could have been anyone else.

“Wouldn’t you like to know where I’ve been, before I was here?” They walked on in silence for a moment. “I wasn’t an ugly corpse. I know how that matters to you.”

Cantwell couldn’t form the words, but the ghost did for her:

“What do I know about you? No, this isn’t your night for questions.” It scratched its nose. “Not even the rhetorical kind. You tell me: Why were you at your Nana’s?”

“Mom was ripping the apartment up.”

“Right.”

“She was all cut up about some man cheating on her.”

“Her moods are extreme.”

“He wasn’t even my father. It’s not like I cared.”

“I’m taking that away from you.”

“That man? I barely even remember him.” Cantwell stopped herself. It wasn’t that memory the ghost was taking. It wasn’t any memory the ghost was taking. Worst of all, it wasn’t her life either.

“What am I?” the ghost asked.

“You’re a ghost. You’re just a ghost.”

“And what is a ghost?”

“Don’t do this.”

“I thought you didn’t try to understand things. Just the surface, remember? Stay in the flow. It’s the silence that scares you. I’ll bet right about now you’re wishing you were stupider. There are things you don’t understand, but then there are things you can’t understand. That’s what I am. That’s what your ghost is.”

“Please!” Cantwell looked, but there was nothing there. “Please!” The memory was just as fresh. The moments in that kitchen. True to her word, the ghost hadn’t taken the memory. Cantwell could remember every detail with painful accuracy. Only the feeling was gone.

At some point it had begun to snow. Cantwell continued on to her appointment, in that wooden room on the third floor.

The remainer of this series maybe found here.

IMDB Trivia for “Hoof-Town” (2002)

One of Disney’s last traditionally animated (2-D) films, with the exception of all characters’ photorealistic CGI hands.

Ranked #5 on AFI’s 50 Most Based Movies.

A third act was completed, but cut from the final film.

Besides the nine credited screenwriters, several Disney senior managers were personally involved in rewrites well into the final week of production. This allegedly explains the otherwise incongruous exchange during the Blowhole Beach chase where Lilly and Mulligan say: “Fuck you, Brent.” “Fuck you, Christine.”

Nominated for the 2003 Best Animation or Musical Oscar, but lost to Dreamworks SKG’s “Captain Hookworm” (2002).

The first and, to date, only film produced in Disney’s proprietary 17:1 “Hyper Widescope” format. Following negative reaction in theaters, the film was heavily cropped for home video release, explaining why most action and dialogue take place offscreen.

Work on the film was fully rebooted and all prior work scrapped after one of the original directors failed to properly kowtow to chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Princess Boneable was created specifically to add a new Disney Princess to the roster. She has no lines, but to date is the only Disney Princess to kick another character in the face without apparent provocation.

The running joke about Dr. Grooventein being back to “Teabag Iz’ey’s balls” was not scripted, but the result of clever audio editing around David Ogden Stiers’ constant improvisational muttering in the recording booth, often over other actors’ lines. No one named “Iz’ey” appears in the script, nor is Ogden Steirs known to have been officially hired for the film.

Body count: 56, and one undead boat.

According to co-co-Director Sam Marshall, Lilly Pikachu is not a fox but an Antarctic explorer from the human world in an elaborate, anatomically-correct costume.

Held the record for most co-directors on any Disney film at 18. (Soon bested by “Salmon” (2004) with 93.)

Most of the artists with traditional hand drawing skills were fired as production neared completion, often forcefully while still at work. See Goofs: Sudden vertical lines/characters disappearing.

The song “Suck My Kiss” was later recorded by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Produced under the title “Tuesday I’m Eating” as a lower cost “B” project alongside the  expected box office smash then titled “Hoof Town.” When the original “Hoof Town” performed poorly, the titles were switched to the confusion of most moviegoers, in order to chalk it up as a win on quarterly financial statements. (The original “Hoof Town” was later released on home video as “Monkey Spanks: Private Eye”.) This explains why neither a single hoofed animal nor a town appear in the film.

Drew the ire of many Conservative Christian parents’ groups for being a movie.

Feature film debut of singer Sasha Turpworth. Turpworth was discovered at a dick sucking contest in Miami Beach, FL.

As a result of contractual obligations and poor timing, the requisite Broadway adaptation opened the same day as the theatrical release, resulting in an infinite recursion of royalty payments between the two Disney divisions. Still ongoing to this day, these payments make it both the highest grossing and greatest financial loss of any Disney film.

First bulimic character in a Disney animated movie. (“Herbie: Fully Loaded” was a live-action film.)

Foreign titles: “Animal Feet Amok” (France), “The Wacky Animal Village” (Germany), “Hoofs: Being an Exploration of Numerous Amusing Things That Happen to Several Anthropomorphized Animals Near a Somewhat Tasteful Bus Depot” (Brazil), “Tits” (Finland).

Howard Pauls, key animator on Spunky Sally, has not been seen by any current member of the Walt Disney animation staff. The last of Walt’s famed Nine Old Men, Pauls exchanges work through a gap under his locked office door. Some suspect he is long dead and it is the room itself producing the drawings.

“Truundelhorn” is a real brand of Hungarian truck, although they have not been sold with anti-Semitic slogans on the hood since 1993.

Similarities have been noted between the plot and that of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” in that neither has one.

Roger Ebert admitted that he was high on mushrooms while reviewing the film, but did not feel it altered his opinion meaningfully.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus delivers the second-longest racist tirade by a former “Seinfeld” cast member in a Disney movie, and the third longest in any animated movie. (See Trivia for “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996) and “Bee Movie” (2007).)

Musician Morrissey was brought in to give the film “some indy cred,” but was replaced by Alan Menkin when it was realized Morrissey had died in Paris in 1998. He was not rehired when it was discovered that he had not died in Paris in 1998.

Reunites actresses Annie Potts and Elizabeth Perkins for the first time since “Lesbian Sorority Blood Inferno Part 5” (1982).

Hidden Mickey: Beneath the word “SEX” in the underwater rave scene.

David Schramm recorded all of the lines for Based Barry in March of 2001, before being ordered whacked by Disney management in November of that year. Reginald VelJohnson was brought in as a last-minute replacement.

George Clooney, David Thewlis, George C. Scott, William H. Macy and Linda Carter were all considered for the role of the ottoman.

Daveigh Chase, Colm Meaney, Nicolas Refn and Jaden Smith were all considered for the role of Peter Pubgoer, which eventually went to all of them.

Spaceships

If you don’t have artificial gravity, science fiction starts to look more like the age of schooners. To get from place to place in the solar system it’d be necessary to accelerate halfway, turn around and decelerate for the rest of the trip. Accelerating or decelerating at more than the equivalent rate of Earth gravity (9.8m/s) would be difficult for the crew to withstand for long. Jupiter is about 983 million km from Earth at its nearest point. If I’m doing the math right (and I’m probably not) accelerating halfway at 9.8m/s would take 158 hours — about 6½ days. The full trip would take two weeks.

Laser weapons are a must. You’d only be able to see them when they shoot through gas or dust, but when it comes to shooting from one moving platform and hitting another on a logarithmic scale you won’t get much time to aim. A projectile would deliver more energy with less expended, but a powerful lazer would be able to vaporize or nudge it out of the way. Opponents would basically joust on a split-second timeframe, trying to pass momentarily close enough for their computers to shoot. Ships would be no more than specks to one another, usually less. Forget about human combat.

Until someone tells me what exactly an “energy shield” would be, we’ll have to assume that surviving a lazer attack means thick, dense plating all over the ship. If a lazer can vaporize a few cubic meters of hull in one shot, you’d better have a lot of hull to spare. It should be shiny too. Getting hit with a lazer might lead to some pretty refractions.

One last thought: Get used to the solar system. It takes light from the sun (which doesn’t have to accelerate) eight minutes to reach Earth, four hours to reach Neptune, and four years to reach the nearest star — itself a burnt-out red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.

Blowing some of the cobwebs out of scifi tropes, fiction begins to slip into unfamiliar grooves.

“South Sea Company and Pan Am”

“Evacuate Earth! We have fucked up. Evacuate Earth! We have fucked up…” vibrated every molecule from the core to the froth.

Pan Am had been born in the molten publics ten miles below seal-evil and had worked his way up through the Swiss Ocean to one of the hands below Upafrica. On a tip, he spent a month hiking through SkyMollRestaurant to 521248t8884, arriving days after the bottom fell out and being forced to keep climbing through the magnetosfear. He emigrated up a cable with a few million others when the crane attached to a rivet on its way to the new Jupiter trane, and found work partway up the arm joining pritses in a balancing trace.

South Sea Company was from the high froth above Captured, a weeliweil with braids in her hair. How she had ended up in the arc-overs with a depressing view of Zeeland, barely 7% in debt at age 22, was an even more confusing and picaresque story involving an older man and a broken heart. About a year later, she rode a claw down the north wall of the crane, made her way across, and began digging herself back up with an almost full time job leafing tops in the neighborhood below Pan Am’s.

They made an unlikely couple, but it was an unlikely day.

By flashing the slosh tank the night before, Sears had managed to annihilate the business district. Part of the team from his shift had then cut away the remaining stays with hand explosives. As the nearby spires of Gibraltar painstakingly collapsed into the rising sea of flame, they — 29 crane ports, a winchfield and part of the vessel under construction — had become a free-floating lifeboat. They had no clippers or lift-sixes to get them to Mars, just a handful of strangers. It would be a perilous journey of several weeks, if the strangers worked at all. For some reason, everyone was still looking to Sears and his makeshift crew to decide what to do. He tried not to think about how many were dead, but he had a head for numbers: 64% of humanity already, with the chain reaction still burning its way upward into the froth. Every real ship had long since evacuated. Orbit was a snowstorm of shrapnel halfway out to the moons.

“Stress cracks are opening up everywhere,” Sears announced. “Be ready. Everyone who hasn’t, get as far inside as you can.” His plan was unlikely to succeed. Their strangers were the cheap kind used in construction. They had only been used once, and only been meant to be used once. Something exploded.

“Someone try to vent the puffers,” said Sears.

“I’m on it,” said Kalashnikov.

“Captain Sears-“

“Very funny, Temple of Athena.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Me,” said a young woman in the doorway, holding up her hand. It was South Sea Company. Her other hand held Pan Am’s.

“Not now,” said Sears, adding up their rate of tumble. “Flip the strangers,” said Sears. The acceleration stopped. “Wait until we’re facing away, then get ready to flip them again. We’ll do something about this offcenter spin when we’re clear of the arc-overs.”

“Captain-“

“Do NOT call me that, South Sea Company.”

“That was me, actually,” said Kalashnikov. “One of the strangers just nuked Point Pleasant. Fourteen fatalities.”

“638,529 people left aboard then,” said Sears. “Left alive, rather.”

“Aboard is fine,” said Temple of Athena.

“We don’t have running lights,” said Tea Lagoon.

“What are you talking about, running lights?”

“There.” Tea Lagoon switched on a red light at one end of their bulk and a blue light at the other. “Now we’re legal.”

“Legal for what?”

“Captain Sears…” South Sea Company began again.

“Will you stop calling me that?”

“We want you to marry us,” said Pan Am.

South Sea Company smiled and nodded, squeezing his hand.

Sears turned to face them. “What is the matter with you? We’re drifting for dear life through a wreckage field-“

“With proper lights,” said Tea Lagoon.

“You should do it, captain,” said Temple of Athena, tapping her hands against her chin.

“I am not a captain! This is not a vessel!”

“Well what would you call it?” asked South Sea Company.

“Ooh, what should we call it?” said Kalashnikov.

“Just stop, everyone.”

“Somebody has to give her,” said Temple of Athena. “Hey hey, can I?”

“Does somebody have to give him too?” asked Tea Lagoon.

“Seems fair,” said Kalashnikov.

“I’ll do it then,” Tea Lagoon volunteered.

“Flip on my mark,” said Sears. “Flip!” A groan echoed through the walls as momentum began to build again.

“Shit! Cut that stranger off!” said Kalashnikov.

“What happened?”

“Strangelets everywhere. Thing went inverse, just like that.”

“Watch for gammas. They won’t all spike before they invert, but it’s the best we’ll get.”

“Roger,” said Kalashnikov. Everyone watched tensely for the next several minutes as material fatigue made itself heard. “They’re ready to flip.”

“Flip.”

Silence.

“Don’t you need a witness, too?” asked Temple of Athena.

“I don’t remember,” said Pan Am.

“Stop. Just stop…”

“I’ll witness,” said Kalashnikov. “I was waiting for something to do.”

Standard Oil and his team returned. “We’ve got Mu Mu welded down.” He looked at Pan Am and South Sea Company. “What’s going on?”

“A wedding!” said Kalashnikov. “The captain’s doing a ceremony.”

“Oh. Explains the running lights, in a roundabout sort of way.” Standard Oil turned to Pan Am. “You the guy? Good show. I thought you two were fighting.”

“It seems kind of silly now,” said South Sea Company, twining her arm around Pan Am’s.

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Standard Oil looked distant for a moment. “Crew! Get in here. We’ve got a wedding!”

“Like a real wedding?” Standard Oil’s people crowded in, shaking Pan Am’s hand and kissing South Sea Company’s hair.

“Excellent. Lets get started,” said Temple of Athena.

“I don’t…” Everyone watched Captain Sears expectantly. “I don’t even know the…”

“I found them,” said Kalashnikov, passing the words to him. He read through them, stalling for time in the light of the boiling Earth.

“Fine, fuck it. ‘Dearly beloved…'”