“‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!’”
Then:
“‘The Phantom Rickshaw glided from the mist and clop-clopped off into the fog—’”
And wasn’t there the faintest echo of a horse’s hooves behind, within the Orient ghost’s mouth?
“‘The beating beating beating, under the floorboards, of the old man’s Tell-tale Heart!’” she cried, softly.
And there! like the leap of a frog. The first pulse of the Orient ghost’s heart in more than an hour.
The Germans down the corridor fired off a cannon of disbelief.
But she poured the medicine:
“‘The Hound bayed out on the Moor—’”
And the echo of that bay, that most forlorn cry, came from her traveling companion’s soul, wailed from his throat.
As the night grew on and the moon arose and a Woman in White crossed a landscape, as the old nurse said and told, a bat that became a wolf that became a lizard scaled a wall on the ghastly passenger’s brow.
And at last the train was silent with sleeping, and Miss Minerva Halliday let the last book drop with the thump of a body to the floor.
“Requiescat in pace?” whispered the Orient traveler, eyes shut.
“Yes.” She smiled, nodding. “Requiescat in pace.” And they slept.
And at last they reached the sea.
And there was mist, which became fog, which became scatters of rain, like a proper drench of tears from a seamless sky.
Which made the ghastly passenger open, ungum his mouth, and murmur thanks for the haunted sky and the shore visited by phantoms of tide as the train slid into the shed where the mobbed exchange would be made, a full train becoming a full boat.
The Orient ghost stood well back, the last figure on a now self-haunted train.
“Wait,” he cried, softly, piteously. “That boat! There’s no place on it to hide! And the customs!”
But the customs men took one look at the pale face snowed under the dark cap and earmuffs, and swiftly flagged the wintry soul onto the ferry.
To be surrounded by dumb voices, ignorant elbows, layers of people shoving as the boat shuddered and moved and the nurse saw her fragile icicle melt yet again.
It was a mob of children shrieking by that made her say: “Quickly!”
And she all but carried the wicker man in the wake of the boys and girls.
“No,” cried the old passenger. “The noise!”
“It’s special!” The nurse hustled him through a door. “A medicine! Here!”
The old man stared.
“Why,” he murmured. “This is—a playroom.”
She steered him into the midst of all the screams.
“Children! Storytelling time!”
They were about to run again when she added, “Ghost-story-telling time!”
She pointed casually to the ghastly passenger, whose pale moth fingers grasped the scarf about his icy throat.
“All fall down!” said the nurse.
The children plummeted with squeals all about the Orient traveler, like Indians around a teepee. They stared up along his body to where blizzards ran odd temperatures in his gaping mouth.
“You do believe in ghosts, yes?” she said.
“Oh, yes!” was the shout. “Yes!”
It was as if a ramrod had shot up his spine. The Orient traveler stiffened. The most brittle of tiny flinty sparks fired his eyes. Winter roses budded in his cheeks. And the more the children leaned, the taller he grew, and the warmer his complexion. With one icicle finger he pointed at their faces.
“I,” he whispered, “I,” a pause. “Shall tell you a frightful tale. About a real ghost!”
“Oh, yes!” cried the children.
And he began to talk and as the fever of his tongue conjured fogs, lured mists, and invited rains, the children hugged and crowded close, a bed of charcoals on which he happily baked. And as he talked Nurse Halliday, backed off near the door, saw what he saw across the haunted sea, the ghost cliffs, the chalk cliffs, the safe cliffs of Dover and not so far beyond, waiting, the whispering towers, the murmuring castle deeps, where phantoms were as they had always been, with the still attics waiting. And staring, the old nurse felt her hand creep up her lapel toward her thermometer. She felt her own pulse. A brief darkness touched her eyes.
And then one child said: “Who are you?”
And gathering his gossamer shroud, the ghastly passenger whetted his imagination, and replied.
It was only the sound of the ferry landing whistle that cut short the long telling of midnight tales. And the parents poured in to seize their lost children, away from the Orient gentleman with the frozen eyes whose gently raving mouth shivered their marrows as he whispered and whispered until the ferry nudged the dock and the last boy was dragged, protesting, away, leaving the old man and his nurse alone in the children’s playroom as the ferry stopped shuddering its delicious shudders, as if it had listened, heard, and deliriously enjoyed the long-before-dawn tales.
At the gangplank, the Orient traveler said, with a touch of briskness, “No. I’ll need no help going down. Watch!”
And he strode down the plank. And even as the children had been tonic for his color, height, and vocal cords, so the closer he came to England, pacing, the firmer his stride, and when he actually touched the dock, a small happy burst of sound erupted from his thin lips and the nurse, behind him, stopped frowning, and let him run toward the train.
And seeing him dash like a child before her, she could only stand, riven with delight and something more than delight. And he ran and her heart ran with him and suddenly knew a stab of amazing pain, and a lid of darkness struck her and she swooned.
Hurrying, the ghastly passenger did not notice that the old nurse was not beside or behind him, so eagerly did he go.
At the train he gasped, “There!” safely grasping the compartment handle. Only then did he sense a loss, and turned.
Minerva Halliday was not there.
And yet, an instant later, she arrived, looking paler than before, but with an incredibly radiant smile. She wavered and almost fell. This time it was he who reached out.
“Dear lady,” he said, “you have been so kind.”
“But,” she said, quietly, looking at him, waiting for him to truly see her, “I am not leaving.”
“You …?”
“I am going with you,” she said.
“But your plans?”
“Have changed. Now, I have nowhere else to go.” She half turned to look over her shoulder.
At the dock, a swiftly gathering crowd peered down at someone lying on the planks. Voices murmured and cried out. The word “doctor” was called several times.
The ghastly passenger looked at Minerva Halliday. Then he looked at the crowd and the object of the crowd’s alarm lying on the dock: a medical thermometer lay broken under their feet. He looked back at Minerva Halliday, who still stared at the broken thermometer.
“Oh, my dear kind lady,” he said, at last. “Come.”
She looked into his face. “Larks?” she said.
He nodded. “Larks!”
And he helped her up into the train, which soon jolted and then dinned and whistled away along the tracks toward London and Edinburgh and moors and castles and dark nights and long years.
“I wonder who she was?” said the ghastly passenger, looking back at the crowd on the dock.
“Oh, Lord,” said the old nurse. “I never really knew.” And the train was gone.
It took a full twenty seconds for the tracks to stop trembling.
CHAPTER 13
Nostrum Paracelsius Crook
“Don’t tell me who I am. I don’t want to know.”
The words moved out into the silence of the great barn behind the incredibly huge House.
Nostrum Paracelsius Crook spoke them. He had been the first but three to arrive and now had threatened never to leave, which bent the backs and wrecked the souls of all who had gathered h
ere the twilight of some days after the Homecoming.
Nostrum P.C., as he was known, had a crook in his back and a similar affliction halfway across his mouth. One eye, also, tended to be half shut or half open depending on how you stared at him, and the eye behind the lid was pure fire crystal and tended to stay crossed.
“Or, in other words …” Nostrum P.C. paused and then said:
“Don’t tell me what I am doing. I don’t want to know.”
There was a puzzled whisper amongst the members of the Family gathered in the lofty barn.
A third of their number had flown or scurried back across the sky or wolf-trotted along the riversides north and south and east and west, leaving at least sixty cousins, uncles, grandfathers, and strange visitors behind. Because—
“Why do I say all this?” Nostrum P.C. went on.
Yes, why? Five dozen or so strange faces leaned forward.
“The wars in Europe have ravened the sky, shredded the clouds, poisoned the winds. Even the west-to-east oceanic currents of the heavens are redolent of sulfur and brimstone. The trees of China, they say, from their recent wars, are bereft of birds. The Orient wise are thus grounded where the trees lie empty. Now, the same threatens in Europe. Our shadow cousins not long ago made it to the Channel and across to England where they might survive. But that is mere guesswork. When the last castles of England decay and the people waken from what they call superstition, our cousins may well be in failing health and soon be melted down to sod.”
All gasped. There was a soft wail that stirred the Family.
“Most of you,” the ancient man went on, “may stay on. You are welcome here. There are bins and cupolas and out-dwellings and peach trees aplenty, so settle in. It is however, an unhappy circumstance. Because of it I have said what I have said.”
“Don’t tell me what I am doing,” Timothy recited.
“I don’t want to know,” whispered the five dozen Family members.
“But now,” said Nostrum P.C., “we must know. You must know. Over the centuries we have given no name, found no label, that signified self, which summed up the totality of … us. Let us begin.”
But before anyone could start there was a great silence at the front portal of the house, such a silence as might come from the repercussion of a thunderous knock never delivered. It was as if a vast mouth with wind-filled cheeks had exhaled upon the door and shivered it to announce all things half visible, there but not there.
The ghastly passenger had arrived with all the answers.
No one ever imagined or could figure how the ghastly passenger survived and made it across the world to October Country, upper Illinois. It was only guessed that perhaps somehow he prolonged himself in deserted abbeys and empty churches and lost graveyards of Scotland and England and finally sailed across in a ghost ship to land in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, and somehow threaded his way among the forest, across the country, to finally arrive in upper Illinois.
This happened on a night when there was little rain except for a small patch of clouds that moved across the landscape and finally battered the front porch of the great House. There was a shimmering and stammering of locks on the portal and when the doors swung wide, there stood at long last the first of a fine new batch of immigrant members of the Family: the ghastly passenger with Minerva Halliday, looking remarkably dead for someone so dead.
Timothy’s father, peering out at this half-perceived vibration of cold air, sensed an intelligence there that could respond to questions before they were asked. And so at last he said:
“Are you one of us?”
“Am I one of you, or with you?” the ghastly passenger replied. “And what are you, or we, or us? Can it be named? Is there a shape? What ambience is there? Are we kin to autumn rains? Do we rise in mists from wetland moors? Do twilight fogs seem similar? Do we prowl or run or lope? Are we shadows on a ruined wall? Are we dusts shaken in sneezes from angel tombstones with broken wings? Do we hover or fly or writhe in October ectoplasms? Are we footsteps heard to waken us and bump our skulls on nailed-shut lids? Are we batwing heartbeats held in claw or hand or teeth? Do our cousins weave and spell their lives like that creature lassoed to the boy-child’s neck?” He gestured.
Arach unraveled its spinneret in dark silence.
“Do we snug with that?” Again the gesture.
Mouse vanished in Timothy’s vest.
“Do we move soundless? There?”
Anuba combed good Timothy’s foot.
“Are we the mirror glimpses, unseen but there? Do we abide in walls as mortuary beetles telling time? Is the drafting breath upsucked in chimneys our terrible respiration? When clouds curdle the moon are we such clouds? When rainspouts speak from the gargoyles’ mouths are we those tongueless sounds? Do we sleep by day and swarm-glide the splendid night? When autumn trees shower bullions are we that Midas stuff, a leaf-fall that sounds the air in crisp syllables? What, what, oh what are we? And who are you, and I, and all surrounding gasps of dead but undead cries? Ask not for whom the funeral bell tolls. It tolls for thee and me and all the ghastly terribles who nameless wander in a Marley death of chains. Do I speak the truth?”
“Oh yes!” exclaimed Father. “Come in!”
“Yes!” cried Nostrum Paracelsius Crook.
“In,” cried Timothy.
“In,” pantomimed Anuba and Mouse and eight-legged Arach.
“In,” whispered Timothy.
And the ghastly passenger lurched into the arms of his cousins to beg merciful lodgings for a thousand nights and a chorus of “ayes” soared up like a rain reversed and the door shut and the ghastly passenger and his wondrous nurse were home.
CHAPTER 14
The October People
All because of the cold exhalation of the ghastly passenger the inhabitants of the Autumn House suffered a delicious chill, shook down the ancient metaphors in their attic skulls and decided to gather at an even greater meeting of the October People.
Now that the Homecoming was over, certain terrible truths arrived. One moment the tree was empty of leaves in the autumn wind, and then, instantly, problems clustered upside down along the branches fanning wings and baring needle teeth.
The metaphor was extreme, but the Autumn council was serious. The Family must at last decide as the ghastly cousin suggested, who and what it was. Dark strangers must be indexed and filed.
Who, amongst the invisible mirror images, was oldest?
“I,” came the attic whisper. “I,” A Thousand Times Great Grandmère whistled her toothless gums. “There is no other.”
“Said and done,” agreed Thomas the Tall.
“Agreed,” said the mouse-dwarf at the shadowed end of the long council table, his hands freckled with Egyptian spots pressing the mahogany surface.
The table thumped. Something beneath the table lid gave a laughing bump. No one looked to see.
“How many of us are table knockers, how many walkers, shamblers, lopers? How many take the sun, how many shadow the moon?”
“Not so fast,” said Timothy, whose task it was to scribble the facts, plain breadfruit or otherwise.
“How many branches of the Family are death-related?”
“We,” said other attic voices, the wind that crept through the cracked timbers and whined the roof. “We are the October People, the autumn folk. That is the truth in an almond husk, a nightweed shell.”
“Far too nebulous,” said Thomas the Short, not like his name, Tall.
“Let us go around the table of travelers, those who have walked, run, spidered, strode in time as well as space, on air as well as turf. I think we are in the Twenty-one Presences, an occult summing of the various tributaries of leaves blown off far ten thousand mile trees to settle in harvests here.”
“Why all this frittering and fuss?” said the next-oldest gentleman half down the table, he who had raised onions and baked bread for the pharaoh’s tombs. “Everyone knows what each of us does. I fire the rye loaves and bundle th
e green onions that bouquet the clasped embrace of Nile Valley kings. I provender banquets in Death’s hall where a baker’s dozen of pharaohs are seated on gold and whose breath is yeast and green rushes, whose exhalation is eternal life. What else must you know of me, or any other?”
“Your data is sufficient.” The Tall One nodded. “But we need a moonless night résumé from all. With this knowledge we can stand together when this mindless war reaches its peak!”
“War?” Timothy glanced up. “What war?” And then clapped his palm over his mouth and blushed. “Sorry.”
“No need, boy.” The father of all darkness spoke. “Listen, now, let me provide the history of the rising tide of disbelief. The Judeo-Christian world is a devastation. The burning bush of Moses will not fire. Christ, from the tomb, fears to come forth should he be unrecognized by doubting Thomas. The shadow of Allah melts at noon. So Christians and Muslims confront a world torn by many wars to finalize yet a larger. Moses did not walk down the mountain for he never walked up. Christ did not die for he was never born. All this, all this mind you, is of great importance to us, for we are the reverse side of the coin tossed in the air to fall heads or tails. Does the unholy or holy win? Ah, but look: the answer is neither none or what? Not only is Jesus lonely and Nazareth in ruins, but the populace at large believes in Nothing. There is no room for either glorious or terrible. We are in danger, too, trapped in the tomb with an uncrucified carpenter, blown away with the burning bush as the east’s Black Cubicle cracks its mortar and falls. The world is at war. They do not name us the Enemy, no, for that would give us flesh and substance. You must see the face or the mask in order to strike through one to deface the other. They war against us by pretending, no, assuring each other we have no flesh and substance. It is a figment war. And if we believe as these disbelievers believe, we will flake our bones to litter the winds.”
Ah, whispered the many shadows at the council. Eeee, came the murmur. No.
“But yes,” said Father in his ancient shroud. “Once the war was simply between Christians and Muslims and ourselves. As long as they believed in their sermoned lives, and disbelieved in us, we had more than a mythical flesh. We had something to fight for to survive. But now that the world is filled with warriors who do not attack, but simply turn away or walk through us, who do not even argue us as half unreal, we find ourselves weaponless. One more tidal wave of neglect, one more titanic rainfall of nothings from nowhere and the Apocalypse, arriving, will with one neglectful gust blow out our candles. A dust storm of sorts will sneeze across the world and our Family will be no more. Destroyed by a single phrase which, if listened to and leaned on, simply says: you do not exist, you did not exist, you never were.”