Christmas Stalkings Read online

  Once we were all inside the pitch black attic, Bucky bent to pull up the hatch. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “In case Mrs. Cradway makes her rounds, I don't want her to figure out we’re up here.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, “and she definitely won’t notice the shelf in the middle of the hallway.”

  “I think she might notice that, Claire.” Rob said.

  “Morons. I am surrounded by morons.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s kinda hard to miss.”

  “Oh my God, Rob, I—”

  “Shhh, shhh,” Bucky said, as he pulled the hatch shut. “Listen.” He turned his flashlight app back on and shone it into the attic.

  The room was so large that I couldn’t see the end. The floor was made of exposed beams and grey insulation. He kept the light level, so I didn’t see the ceiling. The space was empty save a few stacked crates against the wall about fifteen feet away to our left and a few more, farther back to our right. A biting draft blew through. I shivered and zipped my sweater up to my chin.

  I heard dripping. Was there a leak? No, it was a scratching. Not a scurry sort of scratch like a mouse or rat would make. It was a slow—schiiit, schiiit, schiiit—so rhythmic that it could only be intentional. I sucked in a breath and grabbed Rob’s hand. He gasped and tried to jump away from me.

  “Stay on the beams,” I said, holding him in place.

  “Oh God, this is so unsettling,” he said. I’d like to think he meant the empty, unfinished attic, the cold horror-movie breeze, and the mystery scratching sound. But unfortunately, I knew he meant that staying on the beams was unsettling because he was essentially walking on the cracks.

  The sound seemed to be coming from the crates. Bucky held his light up and I pushed my free hand into his as something round and white began to rise up from behind them.

  “God, what is it?” I asked so quietly that neither of them could have heard.

  The white figure began to come toward us. “Boooooo,” it said.

  Boo? I let my mind catch up with my eyes.

  “Oh, Bucky!” I said, releasing his hand and whacking him in the stomach. ”You little shit.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Booooo!” the “ghost” said again as it closed the distance between us. What I was looking at was clearly a man standing under a white sheet.

  “Very funny,” Rob said, finally grasping sarcasm.

  “Who the hell is that?” I asked.

  “It’s the ghost,” Bucky insisted.

  The man was within reaching distance, and, to be perfectly honest, a grown man hanging out in the attic of a boarding school hiding under a sheet was a whole different kind of scary. So on instinct, I shoved him away.

  My hands pushed into nothing but cold. The sheet only pressed inward, hollow underneath. Suddenly, my hands were so cold that they hurt. I brought them to my mouth to stifle the scream that wanted to claw out of my throat.

  “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry,” a man with a prim voice said, from under the sheet. It shook and the sheet fell to the floor. “I told young master Buckingham that this was in poor taste.”

  Standing before us was a transparent man in a transparent tweed suit wearing little, transparent, round-rimmed glasses.

  He was real. There was a ghost in the attic of our boarding school. A little cliché, yeah, but holy cool. This was amazing! He was looking at us and talking to us. Bucky was right twice in one day—a whole other sort of phenomenon.

  Bucky laughed. “No, it was awesome! Haha, you two are such losers. Rob, I thought you were going to pass out when he came up from behind the crates.”

  “Bucky?” I asked, quietly because I couldn’t find enough breath for full voice. “You set this up?”

  “Yeah!” he boomed. “Ya burnt!”

  I held my palms out in disbelief. Not that he set this up, or that he had been having actual conversations with a ghost—because he had told us that. We thought he was full of crap at the time, but he still told us. But I had to ask the question that anyone in this situation would want to know. “Why the hell would you ask a ghost to dress up like a ghost?”

  “To scare you guys!”

  “But the ghost is scary enough!”

  “Precisely what I said.” The ghost shook his head. “But I’m afraid the young man insisted on the scratching and the rising and the ‘boo,’ whatever that’s supposed to bloody mean.”

  “And it worked,” Bucky said. “Nicely played, Jeeves.”

  “Young master, for the last time, my name is Carleton Nigel Winchester the Third.” The ghost said, prissily plucking at the cufflinks on his shirt sleeves.

  “Nah,” Bucky said. “Your name is Jeeves.”

  “I think he would know his own name,” I whispered, still not recovered enough to find my full voice.

  “Thank you, young master...” He trailed off, looking at me for the first time. “You, you’re not a boy.”

  “I...um...I’m...” I stammered, holy crap, the ghost was talking to me. “No. No, I’m not a boy.”

  He took a small sharp breath that brought his shoulders up. “Young Buckingham,” he said, and I detected a teacher in his sharp, checking tone. “Did you not promise to bring other students?”

  “Claire is a student here.”

  “They let girls attend now?” He rolled his ghost eyes. “I’m just going to say it. I am glad that I died a hundred years ago. Between,” he gestured to Bucky, “this young man’s appalling manners, young ladies in slacks, and,” he looked at Rob. “And this. What is this? Are you a girl too, or just an impossibly trim young man?”

  Rob didn’t respond. Actually Rob hadn’t moved at all since the sheet fell off.

  “Well?” the ghost asked tapping his leg impatiently. “Speak, young man.”

  Rob’s lips opened, he drew in a breath and, after a few painful “eh, um, ah” sounds, he said, “Meep.”

  That was it. Just “meep.”

  “Good heavens, what has the world come to?” He ran his hand tightly along his jaw line. “Young Buckingham, please tell me the other students you brought have more to offer than a female and the boy who says only ‘meep.’”

  “Ah, this is all I brought.”

  The ghost huffed. “We agreed upon five more.”

  “They’re all that’s left on campus.”

  The ghost snorted. “Times have certainly changed indeed.” He took another moment to study Rob and me, then studied Bucky. I saw his lip form a small snarl. “Well, I supposed you’ll have to do.”

  “Do for what?” I asked. “Bucky, what the hell did you bring us here for?”

  “Uh, to scare you. Tell her Jeeves.”

  The ghost huffed again. “Yes. The agreement between young Master Buckingham and myself was that he would produce five more students and in return I would scare them for him in,” he rolled his eyes, “whatever fashion he saw fit. And yet, I see only half the amount of students and they seem to be fully scared so forgive me for feeling that I may have been the slightest bamboozled in this matter.” He straightened out his tweed coat and shrugged. “Come along, you three, it’s already nearly midnight and I haven’t much time. You’re not six like the last time, but I must make do, I suppose.”

  He brushed past me, heading back in the direction we’d come, and I felt the icy air of him wash over me.

  “The last time?” Rob asked, catching my wrist as I attempted to follow as well.

  The ghost stopped and turned back to us, forming a twitching half smile. “Why, the last time I worked in my beloved library.” He said after a pause.

  Rob and I followed, farther behind, because Rob was now tracing the floor beams with the light of his cell phone screen. I had an uneasy feeling, which should not come as a great surprise considering that we were following a ghost through an old attic during a stormy black-out.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we came to a turn.

  He and Bucky were so far ahead that the ghost
had to call back to me. I could barely see Bucky’s phone light anymore. “Oh, just this way. It’s quicker to get to the library if we loop around the Grand Hall.”

  As I stepped from beam to beam, pausing on each to wait for Rob to make his careful step, I felt a tingling in my mind, a sense of déjà vu. This was all very familiar. Not like Grandma’s cookies, a favourite sweater, or well-worn pair of boots familiar. More like ‘I should know better because...’ But, I was too jittery—shaking with excitement, fear, and, most prominently, the cold—so my thoughts couldn’t complete the loop.

  “Come along, children. Catch up, catch up. It is most important that we all complete this last leg together.”

  “Six!” Rob gasped in an excited whisper. He clutched his hand over my forearm to stop me as they continued ahead. “Is this all starting to seem like one of Bucky’s other horror stories?”

  “Yes!” That was exactly it. I had heard something like this just earlier today, but I couldn’t quite close my brain around it. “But I don’t remember any dead librarians.”

  “The Grand Hall Massacre,” he whispered.

  I felt my face grow even colder as all the blood rushed out of it. “It was six, Claire. Bucky said fifty, Craig Wilson told me twenty-five, and Jeanne Crane said thirteen, but Mr. Howard told me that, in the only version around when he was a student here, it was always six.’

  “Bucky!” I hollered and abandoned Rob to run after him. Damn idiot! He told us the damn story! How did he not piece this together? Sure, I was still missing some pieces, and I had no idea how a ghost could kill a living being, short of scaring them out a window or...down a hole. Wait! The water damage! In the ceiling of the Grand Hall! This creep was trying to send us all falling to our death!

  “Bucky!” Rob now ran next to me, his light waving with the motion of his arm. My guess was that he had come to the same conclusion that I had. Inability to detect sarcasm aside, Rob was a pretty bright guy. “Bucky, stop!”

  We made it around the turn and I breathed a breath of relief to see Bucky standing there. The ghost was twenty feet beyond him. “Chill, guys,” Bucky said. “Jeeves told me to wait for you.”

  The ghost took one look at our panicked faces and snarled. “Now, young master, hurry!”

  “Bucky!” I shouted, as he obediently moved forward.

  “Come on!” he said cheerfully, gesturing for us to follow, and began to trot toward the ghost.

  “No!” Rob and I both shouted as the beams cracked under Bucky’s feet.

  I didn’t stop to think. Had I done that, this story might have ended very differently for poor stupid Bucky. But I didn’t. I leapt onto the beam flanking the one Bucky stood on and hooked my arms under his. He let out an anguished yelp as the beam under him gave way and I yanked him toward me. His weight brought me down hard. I landed on my bottom and the beam that took the impact released a terrifying creak. I almost lost my hold on Bucky as he sank into the brand new hole in our Grand Hall ceiling. I managed to lock my hands around his chest even though my arms felt as if they were being torn from my body. Then the beam under me snapped like a bone breaking and I saw splinters fly. The beam sunk, and we both screamed as it dropped us what felt like eight feet, but was probably only inches.

  Out of the corner of my left eye, I saw Rob fall. For one awful moment I thought he was going down too, but he reached out and grabbed Bucky’s arm. We both pulled him back out of the hole and scrambled in a tangle of limbs, like a beached octopus, to the next beam.

  “No! No! NO!” the ghost shouted from across the chasm Bucky had created.

  “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.” Bucky said as he gasped for air.

  Rob and I didn’t allow time for him to recover. Without so much as exchanging a look, we each grabbed one of his arms and towed him along with us as we ran.

  “No!” the ghost shouted again, as he dropped to his knees and slammed his fists down. The entire attic shook as we hurried back the way we had come. The first five or six beams we went over collapsed as we cleared them and the rest continued to crack.

  “You come back here, children! You come back here and die!” commanded the livid-faced spirit of the professor.

  “Yeah, no thanks!” I shouted.

  He ran after us, his every movement pulsing through the attic like an electric shock.

  I overshot a beam and the back of my heel scraped painfully over it as I lost balance. I barely even felt the surface beneath me before Rob’s long arms shot under mine. He set me back on my feet. We made the last turn and were almost back to the hatch.

  “You will die,” the ghost said, no longer shouting. That was even more frightening than his outrage. “You will die just like the others. I will see—”

  And then it stopped. The voice, the pulsing, the cracking boards.

  We weren’t stupid enough to let that slow us down. Well, Bucky stopped to look back, but I shoved him forward. “Go, go, move!”

  The hatch opened easily. I sighed with relief at the open hallway and the bookshelf that stood misplaced at the centre. We climbed out.

  Then we stood stunned in the hallway. I coughed up dust and picked at the wood splinters in my sweater. Bucky shone his light up through the hatch and I squeezed Rob’s arm, fully expecting the ghost to be there for a horror-movie style, pop-up, final scare. Nothing happened.

  “Where did he go?” Bucky asked, turning his light on me.

  I looked at his cellphone. “It’s midnight,” I said with relief. “Jesus Bucky, do you remember anything about the stories you tell us? He only comes on Christmas Eve. His time his up.”

  Rob chuckled a disbelieving laugh. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

  Bucky put a hand on each of our shoulders. “God bless us, every one.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said, swatting his hand away.

  “Well, I wasn’t wrong about the ghost, was I, Claire?”

  “Yeah, but maybe you could have had a bit more foresight about the murder.”

  “How was I supposed to know?”

  I waved my hands out toward him. “It was your damn story!”

  “I didn’t have all the details, Claire. I didn’t know it was only six kids and Jeeves said he was a librarian.”

  “Still!” I yelled. “The Grand Hall? Christmas Eve? It took Rob and me two minutes to figure it out!”

  He placed his hands on his hips and posed primly. “Well, sooooor-ry we can’t all be B-students like you and Rob.”

  “Actually,” Rob said, tipping forward, “my average is A minus.”

  I chuckled weakly and shook my head, as exhaustion set in. “Come on, let’s put this back together.”

  The boys held the shelf while I climbed up again to right the hatch. Once I hopped off, we pushed the shelf against the wall. I placed the copy of MacBeth back from where it had fallen and scooped my candle up from the floor. We all took a moment to look around.

  “How does it look?” Rob asked.

  “Better than the Grand Hall, that’s for damn sure.”

  “I assume, Claire, that the Grand Hall has a Bucky-sized hole in the ceiling.”

  I huffed. “Rob, I meant— Oh, never mind.”

  “What about him?” Bucky asked, looking up.

  I shrugged. “Well, he’s gone, for a year at least.”

  “What about next year?” Rob asked.

  I sighed, slipped each of my hands into one of theirs and started moving us through the hallway toward our rooms. “We’ll deal with that next year. And guys?”

  “Yeah, Claire?” they both asked.

  “Merry Christmas.”

  Author Notes

  I have always identified as a horror writer. While I enjoy dabbling in a variety of genres, I always felt that my strongest voice was also my most frightening. So, when Ken asked me to take part in the most recent instalment of the annual Gaudy Night: Evening of Christmas Ghost Stories, I was thrilled. Having never attended one of these events before and being only moderately familiar with Rob
ertson Davies, I purchased a copy of High Spirits from the Google Playstore. I read a few of his stories and then attempted to emulate him both stylistically and thematically.

  It did not go well.

  It seemed that whatever I wrote was either so obvious that it was boring or so exaggerated that it felt more like parody than imitation. The result was a series of partially written stories that were not only unrepresentative of Davies’ work, but also had very little few similarities to my own. In the end (the end of the beginning, anyway) I decided to scrap the stories that I started and simply write my own interpretation of a Christmas Ghost story.

  Bucky’s Ghost was originally supposed to focus on the ghost. I chose to set it on a campus where my ghost had been an educator. To help keep it light and humorous, I wanted my other characters to be young teenagers, so I made it the campus of a boarding school. My original vision was of the students discovering and forming a relationship with this uptight, amusing, and fascinating ghost before discovering who he was. However, when I found myself more than half way through and the ghost had yet to make an appearance, I realized that the story was about the students and how they interacted with each other during this supernatural experience.

  Because this was meant for a listening audience, it’s meant to feel like it could be told around a campfire, not unlike the stories that Bucky tells to Claire and Rob. I knew it would be slightly off theme, but my goal was to capture a “classic” ghost story as it would seem to someone who grew up in my generation. I used a few references from my youth (although, The Terminator and Buffy are still totally relevant...right?) and some stock horror elements, like the ghost in the attic and the power outage, in an attempt to accomplish that.

  The story was a pleasure to write and a joy to perform. I’ve made a few adjustments with the help of our editors to make my story more considerate of a reading audience. I only hope that the reader has as much fun as I did.

  Ken's Tale

  Todd Pettigrew

  Ladies and gentleman, I know that a great many of you came here tonight with the expectation that you would be hearing from the redoubtable Ken Chisholm. It is my sad duty to tell you that Ken could not be with us tonight, but he did send a rather detailed email just a few moments ago explaining his absence, and with your kind indulgence, I would like to share it with you now.