Christmas Stalkings Read online

  Verne was having none of it. “Ze future was mine before it was yours! All zese things which I foresaw!”

  “Yes,” sneered Wells, “the twenty-first century has, indeed, borne out your prophecies. Hot-air balloon technology is booming.”

  “Toujours avec le ballon!” Verne spat. “What about ze gas-cab, or vat you call ze automobile, heh? Ze buildings which scrape ze sky? Ze picture-telegraph?”

  I tried another olive branch. “I didn’t know you predicted all those, Monsieur. Which books were they in?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” sniffed Wells, returning to his graph work. “What the Frog here fails to realize is, I was sent here not to boast, but to boost. My later utopian writings—”

  “Utopia!” Verne hollered, “You do not know ze meaning of ze word!”

  “Indeed I do,” huffed Wells, taking the bait. “It derives from the Greek. It means ‘no-place.’”

  “No-place is where you deserve to be!” spat Verne; then he bolstered this weak comeback by launching forward to disrupt Wells’ graph. “Zis is ze trajectory of a true optimiste!” Verne began inscribing his own line through the air—a straight line as high as he could reach. He punctuated it with call-outs to his own utopian greatest hits. “From ze Earf to ze Moon! Une ville flottante—Ze Floating City! Ze Mysterious Island! Ze Begum’s Millions!”

  “Oh, jolly good,” scoffed Wells. “You wrote the same thing five hundred times. Somebody pin a medal on this one.”

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “this isn’t helping. Can’t we—?”

  “There, you see? Our subject has dismissed you. He seeks practical solutions to the global issues that humanity has wrought. Not penny-ante, pie-in-the-sky nonsense like your books disgorge.”

  “Zis, from ze man who tinks zat Martians with heat rays would invade ze Earth wizzout first getting zeir flu shots? Ta geule!”

  “Real problems,” Wells repeated. “Climate change. The lack of non-renewable resources. And...and something about the North Pole?”

  “It doesn’t matter—”

  “Aha!”cried Verne. “Ze Norf Pole, you say? As in, perhaps, Ze Purchase of Ze Norf Pole? Published dix-huit cent quatre-veignt neuf. Eat zat, H.G.!”

  “Yes, in which you predict, I believe, that a private gun club purchases the pole via auction, so they can fire a cannon at it to adjust the Earth’s axis? What utter rubbish!”

  “Well, it didn’t work in ze book, but...”

  Off they went. There was no interjecting, and if their quarrel kept growing in volume, they were liable to wake the toddler. How could I stop them, without betraying some preference for one or the other? They both wanted to be the Father of Science Fiction. Surely the genre was enlightened enough that it could handle having two daddies?

  Yes, as I watched their bilingual argy-bargy, I realized their egos were eclipsing the real issue. They both seemed to genuinely want to help me, they just didn’t quite know how. And there was my own dilemma, in stereo. Weren’t we all, all three of us, nerdy writers, closet optimists, utopians searching for a mythical “no-place,” eager to fix each other’s problems, but clueless where to start?

  I caught my reflection in the dark, flat screen. To show you how low I had sunk, I almost found myself preferring Santa Claus Versus the Martians. But that truly wretched thought sparked an idea. And that idea set me in motion.

  As I raced down the stairs, I drew no attention from the bickering ubergeeks—they were now embroiled in a match of sci-fi oneupsmanship unrivaled since the first Kirk vs. Picard Wars of the early Internet. I double-stepped down three flights, to the basement. Swiftly, I flipped breakers left and right, hoping against hope I’d remembered the right pattern.

  Three flights up, I heard Wells bellow, “And who in bloody blue blazes would ever want to Journey to the Centre of the Earth?”

  And then...the screaming stopped. I hurtled back up to the kitchen. Through the front windows, my Christmas lights flashed out a rainbow. Yes! Success! Yet for my plan to succeed, I was counting on the relative naiveté of two old ghosts whose eyes were fixed upon the universe.

  “Oh no!” I cried. “The Martians are invading!”

  I heard—“Good Lord!” “Mon dieu!”—so I knew I had their attention. I ran to the front door, threw it wide, then fairly leaped upon the lawn to execute Stage Two of my strange plan. It ran an awful risk of waking up the toddler—to say nothing of the neighbours, who’d be in their rights to have me straitjacketed and jailed. But it was the only way I knew to give the sad, bewildered ghosts their due.

  “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP!” I thumbed my car’s alarm fob. “It’s the Martians!” I called again. “That must be the sound of their...atomic...missile...gun! Run for your lives—if you have any!”

  I looked up towards my own house. Above the holiday Morse code of the lights, I saw two glowing faces, phasing through the wall, their eyes raised up towards the stars. Beyond the beeping, I heard Verne’s excited voice: “Ze missile gun! I had not taught of dat!”

  “We must stop it, somehow,” said Wells.

  “But how? Anozer gun of ballistically similar proportions?”

  “It’s possible. Or germs!”

  And with that, the brace of undead authors sprang out through the wall and bounded across the sky into the night. I smiled for them. They had a mission now, though ludicrous and vain. It kept them in motion, airborne like balloons, and a straight line is always better than a plunge.

  “Boop.” I fobbed the car alarm into silence. The blue-gray snow upon my lawn was painted with rainbows. My back still ached from hanging the lights, but in this quietude, it seemed worthwhile.

  Then, from within: a long, low sob. The toddler was up after all. Another holiday tradition, I thought: lack of sleep.

  I climbed up to the family room where he sat, weeping in confusion. I spoke soothing platitudes and stroked his hair until he calmed. I couldn’t tell if he had seen the ghosts; he claimed not to have seen anyone, but then he asked me what I’d been talking about.

  “Well, Papa had a visit from some...friends. And we were all trying to talk about the future. Which is tricky when you all have different presents.”

  “Oh.” His eyes grew bright. “Can I have presents too?”

  “Not for a couple more weeks, buddy.”

  “Okay.” His mind returned to the fog of half-dreams. Finally he fished out one word from the night, and asked me, “What’s a utopia?”

  “Hmm.” My reflex was to answer as Wells had, but then I thought of a quasi-literary, half-synonym for “no-place” that seemed right, after all. “It’s home, bud. Utopia is home.”

  Author Notes

  Before writing “No Place Like Home” for the 2015 Gaudy Night, I participated in all the previous years’ events, presenting an assortment of Robertson Davies’ stories (my favourite is “Offer of Immortality”), and even writing one for 2014, the year we formally “crossed over” to completely original fiction. My inaugural tale featured the ghost of Clement Clarke Moore, as well as a demonic Santa Claus, and served to introduce the motif of fatherhood, which persists throughout both its sequels.

  Unfortunately, when approached about this anthology, I found that story had vanished from my hard drive like an exorcised spirit. As my first stab at this rarefied genre, its absence need not be lamented, but its brief existence serves to explain why, in the preceding tale, my narrator reacts with such nonchalance when his Yuletide is disrupted by another ghostly guest.

  Life Writing for the Lifeless

  Todd Pettigrew

  My friends, I must begin my remarks tonight with something of a confession. When I have spoken previously to you about my encounters with spirits, I may have left you with the impression that my first brushes with the supernatural have occurred only these past two years, coincident with this storytelling event. Indeed, since my fellow readers have likewise been visited by spectres recently, I am forced to wonder whether the very act of telling ghost stories funct
ions as a kind of ethereal lightning rod. One publicly avows that one believes in ghosts, and the ghosts, for ghosts are always drawn to believers, come running.

  Or, floating, as the case may be.

  And while Pettigrew’s Ectoplasmic Postulate may turn out to have paranormal merit, I must admit to you tonight that these past few years did not, in fact, mark my first encounters with ghosts. The events were so affecting, in fact, that for a time I tried to convince myself that they were the products of a fevered brain, too much overtaxed with study. But in my heart I knew what had happened, and I am now, at long last, ready to tell the tale.

  It was December of 1993, and I was a graduate student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. One of my courses that year was with the distinguished literary biographer Jefferson Queene, who frequently gave a graduate seminar in what he called “Life Writing.” Though some lesser students rather crudely called it “All Writers Turn Out to be Gay” behind his back.

  The best thing about the class was that one could tailor it to one’s own interest. If you were a fan of, say, Virginia Woolf, you might do a presentation on the great novelist’s debt to her close friend Vita Sackville West. Or, say, Oscar Wilde and his extremely close friendship with Alfred Douglas—okay, fine, some of the writers did turn out to be gay, but that is in itself a perfectly legitimate thing to study, and in any case, you didn’t have to select those authors if you didn’t want.

  You could choose Shakespeare, as I did.

  And you would not necessarily have to focus on the beautiful young man to whom the Bard addressed 126 sonnets.

  Besides, there is a very amusing story about Shakespeare seducing the female lover of Richard Burbage and renaming himself William the Conqueror in the process.

  But these kind of rumours were hardly worthy of a young grad student with dreams of a professorship in some far off—and exotic—locale. Perhaps an island somewhere?

  No, what I needed was a unique angle. Something that had never been considered before, but when it comes to Shakespeare, that is next to impossible.

  And so it was that night, a few days before the end of term. In grad school, deadlines are fairly flexible, but it is universally understood that handing in something from the fall term after Christmas or, heaven forfend, in January, was a mark of shame upon a student that would never wash off. I simply had to finish. But I needed inspiration. A unique view of Shakespeare.

  That was the year I coined the term “Scholar’s Christmas.” For while most people see their holidays as a chance to be freed from work, academics see the large blocks of unstructured time as a chance to get the things done that they hadn’t had a chance to get done while classes were in session. A Scholar’s Christmas, like a busman’s holiday, is scarcely Christmas at all.

  Seeking inspiration, I decided to work by candlelight. I thought perhaps the absence of modern illumination would somehow connect me to the figures of the English Renaissance that I so wanted to understand. Shakespeare primarily, but I also thought I could come to understand him through the lesser figures in his life. Anne Hathaway, the woman he supposedly was forced to marry when she became pregnant. His fellow writers, Marlowe and Jonson. Or, Beaumont and Fletcher, who, it was said, were involved in an ongoing, sexy three-way with their maid.

  And so I worked, late into the night of December 23rd, reading everything I could get my hands on related to the English Renaissance, its authors, its history...until I fell asleep amid a pile of books.

  Sometime later I awoke in a haze. A literal haze. One of my candles had fallen over and partially ignited a volume on Elizabethan dramatists, and though it was only the work of a minute to extinguish the flames, the room had mostly filled with acrid smoke, which left me choking and fanning the air trying to collect myself.

  Just as I came to my senses, I saw the figure of a man. This, of course, was strange enough in itself, for who would be troubling with me on this bleak December night? I had nothing to steal—certainly no good ideas. But as the smoke began to dissipate, I noticed he was even stranger than I could have imagined. His clothes were dark and heavy, not at all modern, not even of this era. Instead of trousers he wore breeches, and a woolen doublet. His sleeves had the slashes characteristic of the sixteenth century and he wore a ruff about his neck. And as for his face, why, there was something familiar. The penetrating eyes, the thin beard, an air that only came from a life in the theatre. Could it be—?

  “Christopher Marlowe, at your service,” said the figure.

  “Rats!” I said.

  “Rats?” he cried, somewhat alarmed.

  “Oh, sorry,” said I, my scholarly reflexes kicking in. “Of course you wouldn’t like rats. Because they carry the plague.”

  “Rats carry the plague?” he screamed, looking about him even more wildly than before.

  “Well, fleas, actually,” I mumbled. “See, the fleas bite the rats... and oh, never mind.” I found my way back to my chair.

  We remained in the candlelight, silent for some time.

  Finally the ghost—and here I reach the essence of my confession—broke the silence and spoke.

  “What are these books over which you toil? The type is remarkably clear. The illustrations, so life-like. The printers of London could take some lessons.”

  “They are about you, actually.”

  “Me,” he said brightly. “Then we have that in common.” He winked. “We are both fascinated by the same thing.”

  “Well, not just you,” I hastened to point out. “You and your contemporaries. And your world. And, of course, Shakespeare.”

  “Ah yes, they were grand times what with London teeming with every manner of— Wait, what do you mean, ‘of course, Shakespeare’?” His eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  I felt suddenly anxious. How much does a ghost know of the intervening years between the end of his mortal life and his spiritual visitations to the world of the living? “Oh,” I said, trying to sound breezy, “just that he is, ahem, so... well, famous.”

  “Shakespeare? Famous?”

  “Pretty famous.”

  “Known to all those who read plays?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Regarded as a genius?”

  “Universally.”

  “More famous than I?”

  The candlelight flickered during another long pause.

  “Say no more,” he barked, turning away from me and looking out a window into the dark night. Then he turned his fierce eyes upon me once again. “You were hoping for him!” he declared.

  “Him?”

  “Just now, when I materialized, you had a look of hopeful anticipation that fell away when I announced myself. You were hoping I was Shakespeare!”

  “Well, what if I was?” I said, in a raised voice. My usual pattern with ghosts is immediate fearful deference followed by misguided anger when the spirit begins to try my patience. “He is the greatest writer of an age, and when the walls of time and space fall away, I get stuck with the second banana.”

  That bit about the banana was deliberate. I knew he wouldn’t get it and I thought that might put him in his place. It worked. Marlowe looked confused, then dejected, and then sat sadly in the seat across from me.

  “I don’t understand,” he said confidentially. “My plays drew thousands to the theatres. My Tamburlaine was a revelation. My Jew of Malta was heralded as genius. My Faustus—” Here, he broke off in morose wonder. I felt bad for bringing him low in this way.

  “All wonderful plays,” I said. “And still frequently read by scholars and some still performed. It’s just that they are now viewed as, well...”

  “As what?” snarled Marlowe, the fire beginning to return to his eyes.

  “As...preliminary,” I said haltingly.

  “Preliminary to what?”

  “Well, you know...”

  “To Shakespeare?”

  “Yes. Your Edward II laid the groundwork for Shakespeare’s historical masterpieces like Richard III and Henry V.
Your Faustus for his high tragedies like Othello and Macbeth.”

  “Good heavens,” he moaned. “How many masterpieces did he write?”

  “Around forty, depending on what you count.”

  “So many. I wrote only half a dozen or so. But why...”

  I remembered reading that ghosts sometimes have hazy memories of their own lives. Marlowe was struggling to recall the end of his.

  “It’s because you were murdered.” I suppose that was a bit indelicate, but the hour had grown late.

  “Murdered?”

  “Yes, I was just reading about it. At a pub in Deptford. Stabbed in the eye.”

  “And Shakespeare?”

  “Lived into his fifties. Retired a wealthy man. Said to have died after overdoing it at his daughter’s wedding reception.”

  “And remembered as the greatest maker of plays in history,” said Marlowe, disconsolate.

  “Yup.”

  “Well, then,” said Marlowe, a diabolical spark in his eye again, “let’s see what he has to say for himself!”

  He grabbed one of still-lit candles and plunged it into the nearest book. The volume leapt into flame in a way that ordinary science could not have accounted for—the blaze clearly aided by the supernatural quality of the candle-bearer.

  The flames gave off dark, sooty clouds of smoke which billowed and swirled and began to coalesce into a shadowy figure. As before, it gradually took shape, and revealed the early modern details of figure, costume and stance, until the apparition said, “Ben Jonson, of the South Bank.”

  “Damn it,” I said.

  “Rats!” said Christopher Marlowe.

  “Rats?” cried Ben Jonson in alarm.

  “Apparently they carry the plague,” said Marlowe.

  “Good heavens!” said Jonson.

  And thus began a good deal of zoundses and gadzookses and merries and many things denounced as foul and not worth a groat, until finally Marlowe returned us to order.

  “Who is this man?” he asked. “He is not Will Shakespeare, I can tell you that.”