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
