Christmas Stalkings Read online

  Author Notes

  Part of the fun of writing this style of ghost story—for me at least—has been incorporating aspects of my real life into the fantastical, and vice versa. At the time of “A Chat with the Master” I was deeply involved in competitive spelling (as an official) and a ghostly spelling bee seemed like an excellent premise. It did mean invoking the notion of a dead child, but the nice thing about fictional ghosts is that we quickly forget about their deaths and see them as characters in their own right.

  I am particularly proud of the ending of this one.

  No Place Like Home

  Scott Sharplin

  It scarcely needs to be stated that Christmas, or the holiday season in general, is a time steeped in tradition. Or perhaps “steeped” is the wrong metaphor, for while it might conjure the pleasant yuletide aromas of peppermint tea or nutmeg apple cider, it fails to evoke the discomfort of scalding one’s lips by trying to drink said cider through a straw...every year.

  Indeed, the discomfort and anxiety that comes from trying to make each year’s traditions go without a hitch might lead one to a different idiom. Yet for me to say, “Christmas is lousy with traditions” would be to brand myself a humbug—or a hum-louse? And I freely confess that some traditions bear enough charm to outweigh their impositions.

  So, to say that Christmas is a time of baking, of clove-infused craft beer, of voices raised in chorus so as to hide my butchering of lyrics, of witty ghost stories recounted in good company—in these, the Christmas tea is admirably steeped. But insofar as Christmas is a time for shoveling, shopping, hanging lights, and being pestered by the ghosts themselves —it is here that the lice of the season start to crawl across my long-suffering scalp.

  It was here in the midst of this precarious balancing act of the heart—poised between festivity and infestation—that I found myself two weeks ago. My teaching term complete, I had thrown myself, perhaps a bit ungently, into yuletide preparations. But I’d failed to factor in the disruptive presence upon my traditions of a boisterous toddler beneath the tinsel. For X (we’ll call him X), having been mostly pre-sentient for his first three Xmases, now yearned to put upon all chores his personal stamp—and, of course, when a three-year-old “helps” one with something, one’s workload spikes like a heating bill in winter.

  So far that day, we’d hung three wreaths, the first two of which lacked the tensile strength to support a toddler’s weight; we’d explored the principle of entropy, using several boxes of glass decorations; and we’d hung the outdoor lights—or rather, I hung the lights while X serenaded my labours using my car’s alarm fob: “BEEP the BEEP with BEEPs of BEEP—”

  After apologizing to the neighbours, we tested out the lights, which led swiftly to another holiday tradition: flipping breakers and re-routing fuses in the basement, while X, unsupervised for less than five minutes, unerringly located all the presents we’d concealed throughout the house. At last, exhausted and still unable to ignite the Christmas lights without denying the microwave its juice, I threw my hands up, and decreed that all traditioning would cease, except for those traditions which involved pyjamas, hot cocoa, and Netflix.

  I was, of course, naively optimistic.

  So the night found us, father and son, enjoying the 1964 holiday camp classic, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. And “enjoying” is a stretch—not that there’s nothing to enjoy in a film that features an 8-year-old Pia Zadora in bronze body paint singing “Hooray for Santy Claus.” But X was nodding off, perhaps done in by the complexities of the plot, and I was preoccupied with another personal end-of-year tradition: despair for the future of mankind.

  You cannot tell me I’m alone in this. Black Friday had just come and gone, with its ever-rising toll of frenzied, consumerist self-destruction. The changing climate had recently unleashed the first record-demolishing storm of the season, taking aim at humankind’s collective derriere, exposed and hoisted aloft as we kept our head deep in the sand. Even the North Pole, once an idyllic crystalline wonderland reserved for polar bears and magical workshops, seemed on the fast track to becoming the next militarized zone, as all the northern nations desperately laid claim to its oil.

  These issues weighed heavily on me, partly because of the extra weight now slumped across my lap, sleeping his way through the third act of Santa’s opus horribilis. And while my spirits should have been buoyed by my other traditions—even if the outside lights didn’t work just yet—I just couldn’t muster the cheer. I thought about X’s future. He’ll be a grown-up in 2050. Will there be enough energy by then to power a frivolity like Christmas lights? Will his lights flicker in time to a clean, green turbine alongside his energy-efficient house? Or will he use an old string of burnt-out lights to strangle his neighbours over a Christmas can of beans?

  My dread was compounded by a sense of helplessness. I knew the crises, as I catalogued them daily in my head. I knew what sorts of measures I could take to help correct them. And yet, here I was, hanging Christmas lights, planning for another holiday steeped with—lousy with—disposable gift-wrap, sweatshop dollar-store plastic gewgaws, and an oven working overtime to cook a turkey, half of which would end up on the floor surrounding X’s chair.

  Ah, but, I would reason, holidays are the exception! Once a year, Mother Nature will permit me to cut loose. While the rest of the year, I could reassure myself that, as a writer, I was...well, my contributions to these large-scale problems were...um...as a writer...I sometimes buy recycled notebooks ...if they’re on sale...

  On the screen in front of me, Voldar, the malicious Martian, had just kidnapped Santa Claus—or rather, Dropo, another Martian dressed as Santa Claus. The bronze skin really should have tipped off Voldar.

  From behind me, a stentorian voice declared, “This is not how I pictured Mars at all.”

  My first response, of course, to hearing a strange voice in a dark and empty house, was fear. But that reflex only lasted a heartbeat. Its disruptive arrival into my family room stirred memories, not so much of terror and trauma, but of mild irritation. I had only been visited once before by a ghostly writer at Christmas time, but apparently it was to become a tradition. I made a mental note to investigate the possible causes for this—undigested piece of beef, house constructed on ancient burial site, persuasive academic colleague obsessed with Robertson Davies—and then I sighed, gently adjusted my sleeping filial burden so I could crane my neck to look behind me, and saluted the intrusive spectre.

  “Happy Holidays,” I said. “I’d offer you some apple cider, but I’m afraid it would go right through you.”

  My admittedly weak jest was merely dead air to the phantom. It floated haughtily through the sofa, drifting ever closer to the television set. Through the ectoplasmic nimbus that surrounded it, I could make out a heavy-set, middle-aged white man in a tailored three-piece suit. His comb-over and pencil moustache suggested he was of early twentieth century provenance, and his accent placed him in the southern U.K. Those clues, combined with his declared interest in the red planet, prompted me to make an educated guess.

  “Herbert Wells, perhaps?”

  “Please,” he replied with a distracted bow, “everyone calls me H.G.”

  “This certainly is an honour,” I said, forgetting altogether my despair of a few moments past. “You’re one of my favourite writers of science fiction—or, do you prefer scientific romance?”

  “No matter,” said the ghost, turning back to the flickering images of papier-mâché sets and ill-made costumes.

  “If it’s not an imposition, I have so many questions for you. I’m not even sure where to start. Are you planning to stay awhile?”

  “Hmm.” The ghost made a noncommittal sound.

  I could see that he was becoming hypnotised by the inanities upon the screen, as children or pets sometimes get distracted by flickering lights. I reached for the remote.

  “If you’re interested in television,” I said, “later I could show you some of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s C
osmos. But for now—”I clicked off the screen.

  “What’s all this then?” sputtered the ghost of H.G. Wells. “Reopen the transmission at once. I was just about to get a glimpse of the terrain beyond the walls of Mars’ cities.”

  “Oh!” I said, realizing too late my error. “Forgive me, I should have explained. That screen you see, that’s not a live broadcast of anything, thank goodness. That was a fictional performance, like a play, recorded onto film stock and then broadcast—”

  “Do not patronize me, sir!” said Wells, prodding the dark flat screen with a luminescent finger. “I may be best remembered for my fin de siècle works, but I’ll remind you that I clung to this mortal coil until nineteen hundred and forty-six. I saw the fruition of innumerable devices which I, myself, predicted. The moving picture and the electronic television were among the least of my predictions.”

  “Oh, I know!” I let my inner fanboy out to gush a little bit. “You were a true visionary. Your novels foresaw everything from cell phones to atom bombs. Why, you wrote about genetic engineering in, what was it, 1896?”

  “And let us not forget who predicted the outbreak of World War II, with a mere six-month margin of error.”

  I knew the book that Wells referred to—it was called The Shape of Things to Come. But that was written later in his life—in 1933—a time when, in my view, it didn’t take a visionary to foresee the war. I was predicting calamity almost daily, and I seemed to be right about half the time. But I let it slide.

  Yet in the pause I’d taken to consider this, the ghost had returned his attention yet again to the extinguished television screen. “A pity,” He was saying, “I should very much like to see what the cities on Mars look like. Perhaps we have time to hop on a trans-planetary shuttle?”

  “Well...” Now we were getting to the downside of the visionary racket: the more futures you predict, the worse your odds for a perfect score. I decided to lie, so as not to bruise his ego. “I’m afraid the shuttles are all closed for the holidays.”

  The ghost harrumphed. “No matter,” he declared. “A quick trip in your time-carriage should resolve that. We can travel a month forward, or in reverse if you prefer. The shuttles would be open then.”

  “Yes, well...my time-carriage is...in the shop.” I shrugged apologetically. “I just don’t have the time to fix it. So much to do, you see. The holidays—”

  “A pity,” said the ghost. “But no surprise. For I also predicted not having time for things. It’s true. You see, together with my breathtaking visions of limitless mechanical wonder, I saw displeasure as mankind achieved increasing velocities; I saw dismay, dysphoria, and dissonance—all the 'dis' words, really—as we rode the mechanical carousel of our own devise, spinning faster and faster while the world around us is torn up into a discarded, dysfunctional, dys...dys...it’s on the tip of my tongue...”

  “Dystopia?”

  “Precisely! Oh, I was a whiz at dystopias. Barren, post-atomic wastelands, far-flung global garbage heaps, clear-cut and scorched from the heat rays of invading fiends...”

  Wells appeared to be getting teary-eyed over his apocalyptic reminiscences. Myself, I could feel despair creeping back in. His descriptions not only evoked the catastrophic futures of The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and more; they also reflected the grim imaginings of my own pessimistic mind. As Wells waxed poetic, I flashed back to parking lot riots, and hurricane-force snowstorms, and the international rush for oil beneath the North Pole.

  “...the problem, of course, with universal automation is the need for power,” Wells was droning on. “And then, should power be cut off, as happens in the future plutocracy of London in The Sleeper Awakes, the general population becomes first disoriented, then enraged, then finally—”

  “Then finally, they all move to the North Pole!” I snapped, out of patience with the spectre’s self-promotion. My admiration for Wells was undiminished, but now my despair was back in full force. As I looked at the man, I saw not a crusader for change, but a powerless pebble in an endless flood. He was a visionary, sure—but as a writer, his job was to foresee dystopias, not to stop them from coming to pass. If such a scribe as H.G. Wells was helpless in the face of progress, what was I? Less than nothing.

  Wells regarded me strangely. I regretted my outburst, but before I could apologize, the ghost leaned in and laid an incorporeal, yet somehow still avuncular, hand upon my shoulder. “There, there,” he said, stiffly British, yet sincere. “The fault is mine. I became so caught up in my remembrances that I quite forgot why I came.”

  Strangely perhaps, the question hadn’t yet occurred to me, but now it did. I gently shifted so as to let the sleeping three-year-old slump down onto the sofa, then stood up to face the phantom. “Why is that?”

  Wells spun his hand in the air mysteriously. “Some benign animus which protects writers must have sensed your despair, and sent me hither from the ether to enliven your spirits.”

  “Oh,” I shrugged, then made my best effort to seem grateful. “That was nice of it.”

  “I know well the malaise you suffer, sir,” said Wells. “It haunted me for much of my young life. But let me chart out my trajectory—for dystopia is only half the story.”

  With that enigmatic statement, Wells raised his translucent left hand and traced a luminous, straight line across the dark air. The glowing line clung to the air, like headlights in a time-dilated photograph, and I made a mental note to later research the electromagnetic properties of ghosts. Perhaps Wells could help me with my fusebox problem.

  “This line represents my life,” said Wells. “Eighty years, from 1866 to 1946. Now this line can be taken as an indicator of the general state of happiness in Europe.” Reaching back to the first point on his ghostly graph, he traced a second line— not straight this time, but bouncing wildly up and down and with the same unpredictability as one might find in, say, a freelance writer’s bank account. Overall, the trend went downwards, with abrupt chasms marking what I figured to be 1914 and 1939. By the end of Wells’ timeline, the happiness marker was nearly hitting the hardwood.

  “Wait,” said Wells. He proceeded to draw a third line. For my sake, I presume, he made each line glow a different colour—red, green, and gold—so that by the end of his work, it felt rather festive in the room. His final line was quite erratic, like the second, yet it appeared almost as a mirror to

  that trend—starting low in the air, and ending up as high as the tall ghost could reach without the aid of levitation. “Behold!” He cried, “My literary arc, from dystopic pessimism to utopian idealism. All those ghastly futures you continue to read and to adapt into your cinematic block-annihilators—they were my early works! The outcomes of my adolescent rebelliousness, my mistrust of authority, and my publisher’s preference for cracking-good catastrophe.

  “But nearly all my later works—Days of the Comet, Men Like Gods, The Shape of Things to Come—predict a future in which mankind bands together in the face of global crisis, overcoming inestimable odds to set the world aright before dystopia descends!”

  I stared, bewildered, at the ecto-graph. I understood what Wells was saying, yet it seemed to contradict all reason. “You’re telling me that, even as the world descended into war and chaos...as the long shadow of the atom bomb was cast across the continents...you actually became...an optimist?”

  Wells spread his hands, as if to say, There are more things in heaven and earth, Sharplin, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. His gesture also had the unintended effect of disrupting his glow-chart, dissolving it like sunbeams on a river’s surface.

  “Chin up, my extant friend. From one writer to another: the future is friendly.”

  To hear these words coming from the long-dead lips of he who gave us Morlocks, Martian tripods, and the dying Earth of 30 million years AD...it was too much. I began to laugh. This was the last thing I expected after a day of disheartening traditions: a spectral vision that actually cheered me up.

  I could tel
l that Wells was pleased with the success of his mission. “There now, you see? Isn’t that better? What good is it, being the Father of Science Fiction, if you can’t brighten up your children now and then?”

  I opened my mouth to thank him, but another voice erupted from the darkness.

  “Ç’est de conneries, mauvais Anglais!” it barked. “Qui est la père de la science-fiction?”

  My French was rusty, but I knew from this new interloper’s tone that he objected strenuously to what Wells had just said: “The Father of Science Fiction.” There were a few contenders for the title. But this stentorian Frenchman was not Hugo Gernsback, the Manhattan publisher. Nor was it Swift, of Gulliver’s Travels fame—he was Anglo-Irish. Nor was it Edgar Allan Poe, thank God. And as for the writer whom I privately held to be the first true author of SF? Well, she was not French, either. There really was but one possibility.

  “Monsieur Verne,” I said, “please calm down. There is a sleeping child here.”

  The ghost of Jules Verne was thinner and more hirsute than his fellow phantom, but in attire they could well have been twins. I reflected that, even though Verne passed away some 40 years prior to Wells, he was clearly ahead of his time in sartorial matters—or else Wells’ wardrobe was not as forward-thinking as his pen.

  In any case, Verne made for a hot-headed cold case. Switching to English, the novelist continued his tirade. “Zis is an outrage! Why ze Powers send zis connard to do my job? Eee is no fit man to tcheer you up, wit’ ees invisible mans and ees wars of de world!”

  “Well, I’d very much like to hear your opinions too, Monsieur.” I tried to be diplomatic, although between you and me, I had never been much of a fan of Verne’s work, which I suspected lost something in translation.

  But my mediation was in vain, for Wells cut me off. “I am precisely the man. This miserable writer—” he meant me, and I inferred that he meant I felt miserable, not—well, anyway—“has already benefitted from my broad perspective on world events. The future—” He began at this point to retrace the floating graph.