Christmas Stalkings Read online

  “Another playwright,” said I. “The other great contemporary of Shakespeare.”

  “More famous than I?” demanded Marlowe.

  “Not really,” I replied.

  “Well, there’s that.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Jonson, “but I was no man’s contemporary. Other men were contemporary of me. I was the great poet and playwright of my era. Shakespeare was an unlearned scribe compared to me. Did you ever hear him attempt Latin? He kept confusing the nominative with the dative. The dative! To say nothing of his Greek. I, on the other hand, was conversant even in Hebrew!”

  “Yes,” I said, “but you yourself wrote that Shakespeare was not for an age, but for all time.”

  “Oh. That,” said Jonson. “The man had died. I had to say something. But,” he said, turning to look at his fellow ghost, “am I to understand that you are the great Christopher Marlowe?”

  “Your servant,” said Marlowe with an elegant bow.

  “Ah, sir, it is an honour to meet you. I always admired the strength of your verse.”

  “You called it his ‘mighty line’,” I said, trying to be helpful.

  “Don’t interrupt, boy,” said Marlowe, who, I hasten to point out, was not much older than I at the time. Unless you count the four hundred years he had been dead. Which, I guess you should.

  What followed was, to paraphrase Shakespeare as I often do, long to tell and tedious to hear. It was mostly Jonson lavishly complimenting Marlowe on his plays and fishing for compliments of his own, which were hard to come by since Marlowe had been dead for years before Jonson made his debut. They bonded over many things—their hatred of creditors, their overbearing fathers (Marlowe’s wanted him to be a cobbler like himself, ditto for Jonson, except with bricks instead of shoes), and their resentment of Shakespeare, who, it seemed, was not going to be making an appearance after all.

  And then as the dawn grew nigh, a thought occurred to me, and, as Marlowe generously conceded that the Roman general Sejanus sounded like an excellent tragic hero and that Jonson’s failure with his own Sejanus must have been Shakespeare’s fault, for Shakespeare had acted a minor role in the play, I picked up my notebook and started writing.

  For what was happening before me was infinitely more interesting than another paper about the life of Shakespeare. Here were lives that were shaped by the great man. Genius is, to some extent, inscrutable, incomprehensible, but the impacts of genius on the world and on those who inhabit it—in its joys and its griefs—never fails to fascinate.

  We are all the heroes of our own life stories, but that is only one of the characters we play. We are also the supporting cast members in dozens of other life stories, and bit players in thousands more. In our story we are protagonists, the first person narrators, but what are we for others? The indispensable friend, the resentful ex-lover, last night’s error of judgement, tomorrow’s guardian angel.

  These men, as much as any other of their day, pulled on the oars of their little boats, always in the wake of the great ship sailing beside them. I didn’t want to know Shakespeare through them; I wanted to know them through Shakespeare.

  And so it was that after another hour of this, I had the outline of a terrific paper that I was to call “Shakespeare’s Other Lives: Marlowe, Jonson and the Shadow of Genius.” And, as all academics know, the most important part of any paper is an impressive-sounding title. Once you have that, the rest of the essay more or less takes care of itself.

  Thus, as the sun was about to rise on Christmas Eve, we all sensed that it was time for the spirits to depart. I was pretty sure Shakespeare said something about them having to do so in Hamlet, but I didn’t think it appropriate to mention it just then. Jonson and Marlowe promised to keep in touch over the millennia and they thanked me for a pleasant evening.

  As they were about to vanish, I felt I had to ask one more question. “Say, have either of you ever...you know...been... together...with a man...as one would with a woman?”

  They paused and looked to each other blankly for a moment. And then Marlowe spoke “No idea what you’re talking about.” But he said it with a grin and he gave me a knowing wink as he faded from view. And so they were gone.

  I returned, as I have for many years since, to my Scholar’s Christmas, for I had a paper to finish.

  Author Notes

  Since Shakespeare has been the centre of so much of my life as a scholar and man of the theatre, it seemed sensible to do something with the ghost of the Bard. But I couldn’t figure out what I would want the spirit of Shakespeare to say or how he would act. Consequently, I started toying with the idea of what Shakespeare’s contemporaries might say if they returned to the world of the living. That led me to the dialogue about rats and everything else fell into place after that.

  Bucky's Ghost

  Jenn Tubrett

  December 24th, 11:22 pm.

  “Come on,” Bucky whispered.

  I marked his stop at the end of the wide dorm hallway by the stark white light of his cellphone flashlight. The three of us were the last students left on campus at Saint Anthony’s Boarding School on the night before Christmas, so it was quiet—aside from the noise of the storm.

  Never one to move easily in the dark, I held a candle that dripped wax onto my closed hand at every step. My cell phone battery had been down to its last bar long before the power went out. Rob had told me like eight times since the storm started to plug it in. Sage advice to be sure, but if you knew Rob as well as I did, you'd learn to brush off his constant warnings, too.

  Rob was the young man to my left. Well, to my left and about three corridors back, tracing the tiles on the floor with the light cast from the screen of his phone, making sure he stayed between the cracks. He had a flashlight app as well, but claimed it was too bright and the well-polished floors sent it back to his well-cleaned glasses which meant he could go blind or something. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s Rob. You tune him out.

  “Hurry up!” Bucky hissed, swivelling his light down each side of the intersecting hallway, likely looking for signs of Mrs. Cradway. She was the only faculty member who remained on campus with us over the break.

  I huffed and turned back. Ignoring the unpleasant sting of the wax, I grabbed Rob’s hand and dragged him along the hall at a regular human pace.

  “Claire...” he protested, but his only resistance was the small stunted steps he took to stay inside the lines of the tiles.

  Rob sometimes forgot to avoid cracks when he walked, sometimes he only flicked a light switch off once rather than his standard seven times, and sometimes he even went a full hour without washing his hands. But he was a little on edge tonight. We both were.

  Before the power had gone out we were gathered in the small dining room, listening to Bucky’s mostly-fabricated stories about the sordid history of this campus. Most of them involved this ghost he would show us tonight, his “Christmas ghost.” But there were other ghost stories he liked to drag out when he had our full attention. Including, but not limited to, a collapse during construction of the East Wing. He’d told us three of the construction workers were killed in the wreckage and the reconstruction was built over their mangled corpses. Also there’s the massacre he claims happened around the turn of the century. Pretty standard story: an overworked teacher breaks his sanity bone and cuts down fifty students in the Grand Hall before finishing himself off. Tonight he added the part about it happening on Christmas Eve.

  “When the halls were near empty and a storm raged wild. Like tonight,” he said, gasping dramatically as if he had just made the connection. “Just like tonight.”

  He also liked to claim that this place used to be a courthouse with a gallows out front and that the campus grounds were littered with the roaming ghosts of thieves, murders, and traitors. They form what he called the “Parade of the Guilty Dead” and scoop up unsuspecting students who get caught on the parade route.

  Of course, all of these stories are total BS. Sure, there w
as a collapse during construction and three workers were injured; one of them spent the rest of his life in a wheel chair, but nobody died. I’ve heard about five different versions of the Grand Hall massacre story. How could a teacher gather fifty students on Christmas Eve when there’s rarely more than half a dozen on campus? And a courthouse? Our campus was built on such a quiet edge of Cape Breton Island that most people didn’t even know we were here. There’s barely a street around this place and there has never been anything resembling a town, village, or city. If that all wasn’t enough to convince me that Bucky was full of it, he’d also once told us that an old British librarian warned him that this school was built on the mouth of hell. Sound familiar?

  As we approached, Bucky shone his light under his chin, illuminating his chubby face. “Zee ghost is zis vay,” he said in a poor impersonation of Arnold Schwarzenegger—for reasons that made absolutely no sense in this context. We had watched Terminator 2 last night, so I expected to hear him butcher that accent at least until the New Year.

  I sighed silently as I watched them. Rob, having found his rhythm, skipped from tile to tile to catch up with Bucky, now shining his light at the ceiling. Merry Christmas, Claire. Enjoy your surrogate family. Really, neither of them were that bad. Tonight was Christmas Eve and I was already having a better time than I did last year with my family. When my dad called yesterday to say he was stuck in Tokyo on business, I was actually relieved.

  “There, there, there it is!” Bucky yelled.

  “Shhhhhh!” Rob and I both said, probably matching him in volume.

  I looked at the ceiling where Bucky’s light hovered. There was a hatch that I had never noticed before. It ran about fifteen feet long and three feet wide with a metal pull cord shining in the light.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “The attic,” Bucky said.

  “The attic’s in the East Wing.”

  “This is the old attic, before the extension. This is the only way in. It’s blocked off from the new section. Safety reasons, I think. Floors are rotted out or something.”

  “Gee, I can’t wait to go up there,” I said.

  “Claire,” Rob protested, failing to detect my sarcasm, “there could be mold, or asbestos, or spiders, or—”

  “A ghost?” Bucky asked, turning his light back to his face. “Well, do you want to see him or not?”

  Rob and I exchanged a look. Yes, we did want to see him. I had first heard of the librarian’s ghost almost two years ago. It was our eighth grade Spring Break and only Rob, Bucky, myself, and a handful of other kids were left on campus. I wanted to see it then, but Bucky said the ghost only comes on Christmas Eve. I always thought that was a convenient excuse, considering he was here alone that previous Christmas break and likely to be here alone for the next one. But I was wrong. Rob had been here with him for our ninth grade Christmas break.

  Rob didn’t see the ghost. He claims to have heard it and chickened out. His exact words were, “I heard it and I chickened out.”

  So now Rob was desperate to redeem himself, Bucky was desperate prove himself, and me? Well, come on! It’s a ghost. Of course I wanna see a fricken ghost...or prove Bucky wrong. Either one and I would consider this a Merry Christmas all round. Also this: sneaking around after lights out and exploring during a black-out, made me feel...I don’t know, older, I guess. Now that we were in Grade Ten, we were technically high school students, but it was the same ship-away boarding school, the same indifferent parents, the same grossly-enthusiastic teachers, and the same geeky friends. I wanted something to feel different. I wanted to feel more grown up and this little adventure seemed like something my childish middle school self would never have done.

  “How are we supposed to get up there?”

  Rob gasped. “Oh, Bucky, the ladder.”

  “Right, the ladder,” Bucky said snapping his fingers. “Ya know, I had a feeling that I was forgetting something. Nagging at me, like it might have been something important.”

  I sighed and leaned against one of the many bookshelves that lined the wall. The dorm hallways were “quiet zones,” filled with books and benches where students were encouraged to “sit, learn, and reflect.” Really though, to “shut up and behave,” at least that’s how it always seemed to me. “Nah, it’s just twenty-five feet up,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “No, he’s right, Claire,” Rob said. “The ladder was important.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Jesus.”

  “Gesundheit,” Bucky said as he scanned the hallways with his cell phone. The light flitted over a poster for a fundraiser the student council organized before break. Repair the water damage in the Grand Hall!!! it read, with a series of overtly aggressive exclamation points. The caption underneath read: Who wants to look up at the hundred foot ceiling of our glorious Grand Hall and see this? Underneath, was a photo of the hideous brown water spot, perfectly centred in the white plaster ceiling. This is what was considered a cause worth fighting for around here.

  “Claire, you’re a genius,” Bucky said when his light landed on me.

  I shrugged. “Well, yeah, compared to you two, but, really boys, who—”

  “No, the bookshelf. Pull it over, I’ll climb up and open the hatch. There’s a drop-down ladder inside.”

  I turned and held up my candle to look at the shelf. It was tall, stopping about three feet before the ceiling. There were only a few books on this one. A full set of encyclopedias—circa before the Internet—stood on the second shelf. The shelf below it had a selection of dictionaries, both of the English and French-English variety. There was also one hard-cover copy of Macbeth that some superstitious drama geek undoubtedly removed from the Shakespeare collection in the play house. I had to hand it to Bucky. It could work. And good for him, he almost got through the whole year without one single useful idea, and with seven days to spare. The kid was on a roll.

  The shelf creaked as we slid it out from the wall, but it echoed more like a whimper than a scream, so we just shushed it uselessly and continued until it was lined up under the hatch. It really wasn’t as heavy as it looked, or, now that it was away from the support of the wall, as sturdy. I pressed on the shelves and felt the slightest bit of give at the center. I wobbled it easily with the tips of my fingers, and gazed through the dark over at the dim outline of my chubby friend.

  “Bucky, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “It’ll be fine. You two just hold either side to keep it steady.”

  “But I don’t think it will support your weight.”

  “Ah!” Bucky took a step back and placed his hands on his hips. “Me-ow, Claire. Sure, I may be festively plump, but it’s the holidays for crying out loud. Who doesn’t pudge up a little at Christmas time?”

  “Sound logic there, buddy, but it’s not going to stop you from crashing through this shelf to an untimely death.”

  “Now who’s being a drama-queen?”

  “You Bucky, it’s always been you. You’re always the drama queen.”

  He sighed. “Fine, the lightest one will have to climb up.”

  We both looked at Rob. He was the tallest by a good six inches, but also the skinniest by a lot more than that. Bucky scanned him with his phone light. When the light passed his chin he threw his hands over his face. “Watch it, Bucky! My eyes!” Then he dropped his hands and looked at us both. “What?”

  I raised a brow at him and looked at the shelf. He followed my stare to the top of it then scrambled for his puffer, taking two long draws.

  I huffed. “I'll go.” I held my candle out to Bucky. “Hold this.”

  He had it in his hand for a full second before he said “Ow!” and dropped it, still lit, to the floor, shaking his hand as if he’d put it through a torch flame. “Stupid wax.”

  Rob gasped and shot his foot out to stamp out the flame. His foot landed on the crack between two tiles. “Oh no. Oh, this is not good.” He began flicking his cellphone off and on, counting quietly to himself.
/>   “Oh, for God's sake you two! Would you just hold the damn shelf?”

  “Fine, geez,” Bucky said.

  “Sorry, Claire,” Rob said.

  They moved into position on either side so I could climb up.

  Other than one askew one clicking back into its proper position, the shelves didn’t budge. I was on the second to last shelf, still with the support of the top against my hips, when I was able to reach out and snag the cord. I expected it to be jammed, since no one uses this section of the attic anymore, so I gave it a good yank.

  It opened so easily that I lost my balance and slipped. Rob tried to catch me, but really only managed to punch me in the ribs as we both fell to the floor. Bucky, ignoring his post, rushed around to help us. I watched the bookshelf wobble and thought this is how I'm going to die as I hissed, “Bucky, the shelf!” Just in time, he turned back and steadied it enough to keep it from crushing all of us. As this happened, one of the books careened from the top shelf. I shot my arm over my face just before it hit and flung it to the floor.

  I glanced over at it. Macbeth. Maybe those theater geeks were onto something.

  Breathing heavily, I looked at Bucky. “There had better be a ghost up there or I’m going to kick you in the face.”

  “Be careful vat you vish for.”

  “Ya know, I might kick you in the face either way.” I stood up and stretched my back. There was a pain in my ribs where Rob had tried to catch me and my elbow throbbed. I’d feel it in the morning, but for now I was fine. Poor Rob stared at the floor tiles he had been sprawled over, looking as appalled as if he had fallen into a litter box. “Shake it off, buddy,” I said as I helped him up.

  Rob only nodded, focussed because we were close now, and reached up to finish extending the drop-down ladder.

  Bucky went first, I followed, and Rob came last. At the top, I glanced back where my candle had fallen and regretted leaving it there. It was just as well, I realized, since I left my matches back in my room anyway.