Christmas Stalkings Read online

  “No more,” I cried. “So this year’s event is to be our last?”

  “Not at all,” said the old Senator. “No one, not even my son, owns the idea of a Christmas ghost tale. If they did, he would have had to answer to the Ghost of Dickens years ago.”

  Robertson Davies looked abashed at this. “Humbug,” he said again.

  “Continue your annual night of stories,” the Old Senator continued, “but, in future, make the stories your own.”

  I had to agree the judgement seemed fair.

  “What’s more,” said the Senator, “our appearance here tonight will furnish a modest tale to get you started. Everyone, of course, will think you made it up, but that is part of the fun. Indeed, we ghosts deliberately behave strangely just to throw mortals off the track.”

  With this, the elder spirit rose, bowed gracefully, said goodnight, and vanished into the still open wood stove. Robertson Davies nodded curtly and then gave me a look which seemed to say that he would be watching from not too far away and, he too, vanished in the manner of his father.

  And as though it had never happened, the house was as it had been before.

  I returned upstairs, followed by my tribe of cats who had, apparently, slept through the whole thing. I replaced my copy of High Spirits on the shelf. “The Ghost Who Would Not Circulate” would not be read this year.

  I sat down at my desk, and began to write.

  Author Notes

  When it became apparent that we would soon run out of Robertson Davies stories to read at our annual event, the idea of writing our own original tales seemed increasingly sensible, if not unavoidable. But moving from all-Davies one year to no-Davies the next seemed artless and might have been confusing to our small number of loyal attendees.

  Thus it occurred to me to finish an evening with one original story that proposed the future plan and gave a spiritually compelling reason for it. And who better to appear as a ghost than the man whose spirits had inspired us in the first place?

  Joyce to the World

  Ken Chisholm

  Of course it would be Christmas Eve when my life would be upended by a visitor from the supernatural realm.

  Besides the most famous example of a Yuletide haunting recounted by the great Dickens, I had three years’ experience of attendance at the Gaudy Night readings at the McConnell Branch of our Regional Library. These tales of the unexplainable in the cozy and bookish rooms of colleges and academics should have been warning enough. But no—I tucked myself in bed that evening, blissfully beyond suspicion of the spectral crisis soon to confront me.

  Inerasable memories from my childhood always came to mind on this particular evening. Memories of Roman Catholic catechism class—or as I somehow remembered it: “cataclysm class”—presided over by Sister Mary Jude Dominica Every December, on the last day before the Christmas holiday, she retold the story of how the beasts sharing the stable with the infant Jesus received the miraculous gift of speech at the stroke of midnight. And because it was a Roman Catholic gift, it was a miracle with a sharp edge as Sister Mary Jude Dominica reminded my classmates, “If a human being, even an ignorant dirty little one like the lot of you, were to hear one single syllable uttered by these blessed beasts, you would drop dead on the spot and be shipped off to Purgatory to work off the heinous load of sins you have ungratefully soiled your immortal souls with. Right, boy-os?”

  “Yes, Sister Mary Jude Dominica,” we dutifully replied.

  But despite all of my foreknowledge of the supernatural powers gathered around Christmas, I still was completely unprepared for the threat already secretly at work in my home.

  As you will see, I blame this disaster on my cat, because, as a rule, cats are to blame for every disaster, particularly those involving the supernatural. Cats, by instinct, are attracted to the supernatural as they are to an open can of tuna fish.

  Roxie, my brown, male, tiger-striped tabby, was still in the throes of feline adolescence. He had resolved that his favourite toy was gravity: with the flick of his paw, he would knock anything he found on a table top or bookshelf or microwave over the edge and onto the floor. Shopping bags, he decided, were also for knocking over and burrowing into for anything edible.

  At night, he would dash through my apartment like a furry pyroclastic cloud before leaping onto my bed and prodding my face as an invitation to get up and play at this unsaintly hour of the night.

  That night, almost one full year ago, though, I was serenely asleep in my bed, contentedly dreaming of Christmas Day turkey dinner at my sister’s home, and indulging in a second (or maybe it was a third) helping of the two types of dressing she thoughtfully provided.

  Somewhere, a clock tolled the midnight hour. I did not hear through my slumbers, but Roxie, ears aquiver, must have because he reacted to the distant sound as if it was a starter’s pistol.

  Off he ran and, like a guided missile, threw himself at a shopping bag full of books, sending them across the floor of my living room. I woke at the “Mrrrhr?” Roxie queried of the mess he had created.

  “Hello,” a soft, lilting male voice replied.

  That startled me into sudden wakefulness. I had an intruder in my apartment.

  Shoving my feet into my slippers, grabbing my robe, I rushed into my living room only to behold the most eerie, most bone-chilling, most perplexing sight I had ever seen.

  A dull green light suffused the length of my living room, casting a ghost-like pallor on my few sticks of furniture and the multitude of books lining the walls, precariously piled on every available flat surface including chairs, tables, and much of the floor space. A low moaning drone hung in the air like the sound from a mossy bagpipe inflated from the lungs of a tubercular baboon.

  The glow seemed to emanate from the male form standing at the center of the room, which I perceived to be slightly bent over, gently stroking Roxie's fur, who reciprocated by rubbing his flank against the man’s trousered leg.

  He was tallish, slim, had a thin moustache. He wore a light-coloured suit and tie showing signs of age, a wide brimmed hat, thick black-rimmed glasses, and held in his hand, to my eyes at the time, a formidable walking stick. In my half-drowsy state, he looked very familiar, but—no, it couldn’t be. There was no way he should be standing in my living room.

  Roxie, seeing my arrival, ceased his rare bout of sustained purring and bounded to where I stood; not, I must add, from a genuine affection, but in the expectation of being fed. “Who are you?” I tremulously asked the glowing man, “and what are you doing in my living room?”

  “A living room,” the man said in a thoughtful manner. I detected what sounded to my drowsy ears something of an Irish accent. “Living...Livia...Livia plume...a livia plume...a livia plum...better,” he said, in a low, contemplative voice. “Would you be kind enough to loan me a pencil and scrap of paper, sir?”

  Well, at least now I knew what he was doing in my living room: composing forced, vaguely-literary puns. But he had not answered my first question, so I repeated it.

  “Excuse me, sir, I am James Joyce, and you are the one who summoned me,” he replied, bowing slightly.

  Okay, the glowing green entity claimed to be James Joyce, author of Ulysses, my absolute favourite novel, and by some unknown process he stood in my living room at midnight Christmas Eve accusing me...me!...of conjuring him as if I possessed the abilities of some sort of cunning man.

  The only thing that convinced me I was not actually dreaming were the painful pricks of Roxie’s claws as they dug through the thin fabric of my pajama legs and into the vulnerable goose bumps of my flesh.

  The pain focussed my thoughts: for the first time, I noticed the sprawl of books spreading from the large Sobey’s shopping bag Roxie had knocked over in his midnight sprint.

  I recognized most of its contents. I had crammed nearly three dozen books into this bag during the final day of the library’s late November book sale. On that day, one could purchase for just five dollars whatever one could
fit into one shopping bag. For a bibliophile like myself, it was like having another Christmas. And having worked in three bookstores in my lifetime, I have acquired the ability to cram the maximum number of books in any size space the way a Prime Minister can pack the Senate.

  But one bulky tome lying prostrate on the top of the pile, I definitely had no recollection of finding at the McConnell book sale: a vintage hardcover edition of Finnegans Wake—the final masterwork of language created by the living embodiment of the sickly green shade that stood before me.

  Although I was more a fan of Ulysses, the other enormous novel of Joyce’s that covered one ordinary day in the lives of Dubliners, I had been on the hunt for a hardcover copy of the Wake to complete my collection of Joyce’s works. They were hard to come by in anything close to my price range. How I could have discovered one at the McConnell book sale and not noticed it defied explanation. Even in the hurly-burly of five dollar a bag day—which made T-bone time at the tiger cage resemble tea time at Buckingham Palace—I would have paused long enough to exult over my find.

  “This is your novel,” I said to the spectral Joyce.

  “It is,” the shade replied with a certain smugness. “You’ve heard of it.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, compelled to examine it both as a printed treasure but also because a premonition gnawed at my fevered imagination this book must have had something to do with the arrival of my ghostly visitor.

  “Excuse me for just one sec,” I said.

  “Await your pleasure,” the shade said amiably. Too amiably, if I had been paying closer attention.

  Tentatively, I picked up the book: it felt surprisingly warm in my trembling hands.

  It was a first edition of the British Faber and Faber 1939 edition, regular trade edition, the dust jacket design familiar from its use on later paperback editions. Inside, the pages gleamed like fresh cream in sunlight. Remarkably for a first edition of the Wake, all of the leaves had been cut, suggesting at least one of its owners had actually finished the notoriously difficult text.

  I checked the title page and there—again I could hardly believe my eyes—was Joyce’s signature in his famously preferred green ink under a dedication: “For my beautiful scourge, Madame Zukov. May your desires be my desires.” It was dated: December 24, 1940, Zurich—just weeks before Joyce’s death from an unsuccessful ulcer operation. Under this odd inscription were three red brown blotches like small representations of exploding stars.

  I was holding in my unbelieving hands a book worth thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars.

  “And would that be enough to purchase me a small glass of wine?” the apparition spoke in a quiet lilt.

  I reddened when I realized I had spoken aloud.

  “My apologies, sir...Mr. Joyce,” I stammered. “I don’t have any wine in the house.”

  “Whiskey? No? Brandy? No? Beer? Ah, another teetotaller,” the ghostly Joyce sighed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said weakly, “I am an enormous fan, though—“

  “Of course, you are.” The spectre had the most enchanting Dublin accent. His ectoplasmic presence suddenly sharpened and grew brighter. “You’ve read the Wake?”

  “Oh, of course, but Ulysses—“ I began.

  “You never finished it, did you?” the ghost grew slightly dimmer.

  “I’m afraid not—“

  If it was possible to sadden a poor creature already quite dead, I had managed the feat.

  “How far?” he looked at me. “How far did you manage?’

  “Page fourteen?” I replied.

  The ghost sighed and my living room took on a sudden chill.

  “It is a tough read,” I said, feeling defensive. “Didn’t you put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it would keep the professors busy arguing for centuries over what you meant?”

  “I said that about Ulysses,” the ghost said, and then breathed a heartfelt moan. “I also said that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality. Ah, Madam Zukov, you beautiful, cruel—“

  “Who is Madame Zukov?” I ventured.

  “The original purchaser of that copy of my work in progress,” the shade replied. “She was another ‘enormous fan’ of my work,” he said with a slight wrinkle of distaste. “But unlike some, being a well-travelled, polyglot charlatan dealing in credulous occultists, she sped through the entire work in under a week. She tracked me down in Zurich and cornered me in a pastry shop and accused me of plagiarizing from her pamphlet on how she communicated with the spirits of the murdered Romanovs—“

  “Did you—plagiarize her, I mean?”

  “Of course, I did,” Joyce’s shade replied, his exasperation getting the better of him. “Have you not read my books like you said? I take commonplace idiocies and make it part of a greater work. Her impertinence caused my ulcer to flare in agony. I told her it would immortalize her along with me. I had done her a favour. Her whole book was ill-composed nonsense. She said so was my work: without plot or characters or anything to hold a reader’s interest—as if I had an interest in achieving any of those commonplaces. And she said my Norwegian puns were not funny. In her agitation, she let her accent slip and I had her. I said my books were not meant for upstart Donegal girls who, because they were dancing around the Lughnasa fire one day and pretending to talk to dead Russian royalty the next, were not fit judges of the quality of my work, especially the Wake. Then she said she wished I stayed on Earth long enough to hear someone read the Wake cover to cover so I could hear what a rotten piece of work it was.”

  “She cursed you!” I exclaimed.

  “I did that myself with that ill-advised dedication,” he said.

  “After all that, you signed her copy?” I asked.

  “She did buy it and read it, after all,” the shade said. “But she sealed the invocation by pricking my hand with her hatpin and drawing three drops of my blood before I had a chance to defend myself. You must be on guard always around those Donegal County creatures, especially when their blood is up.”

  “That was over seventy years ago!” I said. “And you have found no-one to read—”

  “Many have professed their love of my books, all have promised to deliver me from my torment,” he fixed me with a mournful look that broke my heart, “but in the end, all have disappointed and betrayed me. You will be no different.”

  Along with the sting of the passive-aggressive insult to my character, I felt empathy for my personal author hero trapped in literary limbo. And furthermore—and this was the clincher—it was Christmas!

  “I’ll do it,” I said, tightening the sash of my robe. “We’ll start right now.”

  “You’re familiar with the Wake?”

  “Not entirely, but I’ve read Dubliners—“

  “The cat could read Dubliners,” Joyce’s shade said, to which Roxie assented with a thoughtful meow.

  “And the Portrait of the Artist—“

  “And could follow all of the Latin theological allusions—“

  “And Ulysses: more than once!”

  “With a scholarly gloss in your hand each time, no doubt.”

  “Well, if I’m not good enough, you can always hope Madame Zukov will rescind her curse.”

  Joyce’s shade sighed. “Let us begin.” And he sat down next to me on my couch.

  I opened the book. I must admit to feeling a delicious expectation: I saw myself and Joyce enjoying convivial nightly reading sessions as we slowly but steadily made our way through the Wake.

  Yes, it had no real plot except a kind of dream-logic one. Yes, its characters kept changing their names and identities and how many of them there were. Yes, it may be the dream of Humphrey Childers Earwicker ruminating over some indecent, even incestuous, act he was caught performing in a Dublin park. Yes, Joyce chose to tell this thin tale in hundreds of thousands of puns, portmanteau words, mash-up free associations drawn from over six languages.

  I could feel my resolve dissolving. No. I gave my word. Onward.

&
nbsp; But a malicious voice in my head reminded me, He puns in Norwegian.

  Joyce’s shade impatiently shifted on the couch where he sat.

  My resolve re-resolved: Joyce, the Wake, months of fun. Better than having cable TV.

  “‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s—’”

  “What are you doing?” the shade asked testily.

  “Reading the first sentence,” I said. “‘...from swerve of shore to bend of bay—’”

  Joyce’s shade put his ectoplasmic hands up to cover his ghostly ears.

  “Whatever accent you are affecting to read in, please desist,” he said.

  “I’m not affecting any accent,” I protested. “That’s how I normally speak.”

  “There is nothing normal about that accent,” Joyce said.

  I wanted to protest that it was a perfectly acceptable Cape Breton accent but Joyce’s shade cut me off.

  “The Wake needs to be heard spoken in a proper Dublin accent,” Joyce said. “Otherwise, the word play doesn’t work.”

  “‘riverrun’,” I tried again, imitating Joyce’s accent.

  “That is the accent of a music hall Irish washerwoman,” Joyce said. “Listen to me.”

  I listened. I followed his every inflection. It was a disaster.

  “Raheefurruin, pahst Eff and Edam’s,” was the closest I came before he stopped me again.

  Wearily, Joyce’s shade said, “Listen. Repeat. Like a gramophone. And stop thinking.”

  Five hours later or so, I had read the opening sentence to Joyce’s satisfaction. I knew it had taken several hours because I could feel the bristles of my beard rising on my cheeks.

  It occurred to me the sun should be glimmering through my east facing living room window, but outside it remained pitch black. I looked at the wall clock over my desk. With horror, I saw its two hands frozen upright, as if in prayer, still proclaiming it to be not quite one minute after midnight. It was silent, too: its familiar tick tock eerily stilled.

  “What did you do to my clock?”