The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “The Advent Reunion” began life as a video when the author decided to recapture the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. Using a webcam, he filmed it in front of his fireplace, offering it as if it were a true story, and then posted it online. It was rewritten as a short story and published in the January 2011 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

  The Advent Reunion

  ANDREW KLAVAN

  I. Ghost Hunter

  I’ve wanted to tell this story for a long time. It began when I was a young man, during my junior year at Harvard.

  To come, as I had, from a crumbling house on a sandy lane in a dying town just west of nowhere to the aged brick and history, high culture and customs, of one of the most prestigious universities in the country was a daunting journey for so inexperienced a boy. I spent my first year holed up in my room, buried in my books, working on my writing. Only after a very unpleasant summer break at home did I return to school determined to make friends.

  I soon fell in with an aspiring composer named Jonathan Wilson, and through Jonathan, I found myself part of a little clique of brilliant artsy types—brilliant in our own minds, anyway. Among this group was a girl named Amanda Zane. She was blonde and willowy and had a dreamy, wistful quality about her. She wrote songs and played guitar and sang. Her voice was high and clear and sweet with a sad, yearning tone that just grabbed me by the heart. I was crazy about her pretty much on sight and, for some reason, she seemed to like me as well. We became a couple within the clique. It was the first truly happy time in my life.

  No wonder, as the Christmas break approached, I began to dread the thought of going home again. And when Jonathan came up with an alternative, I was delighted. His parents had decided to spend the holidays in Hawaii. Their house in a rural part of upstate New York was going to be empty. Jonathan invited our little gang to spend Christmas there with him. Five of us accepted the invitation, David, Lucy, Rosemary, Amanda, and I.

  It was, it turned out, a perfect setting for Christmas. The house was enormous, stone and stately. It sat in a little valley with hills of forest on every side, everything white with snow as far as the eye could see. When we first arrived, we tried to behave with our usual pseudosophisticated pseudodetachment but the spirit of the season very quickly overwhelmed us. Within an hour of tumbling through the front door, we were laughing and shouting like the excited children we were. We found decorations in the attic and spread them all about the house. We found sleds in the garage and raced each other down the slopes. We found an axe in the cellar and cut down a large pine tree at the edge of the forest, tied it up with stout ropes and dragged it home over the snow. We hung ornaments on it and sang carols around the piano and basically had as much good, clean fun as it’s legal to have.

  We were having so much fun, in fact, that I didn’t notice—none of us noticed—that Amanda had begun acting very strange. Shy and distracted at the best of times, she’d grown almost silent in our boisterous midst. More and more often, she withdrew from our festivities without excuse and went wandering on her own for hours.

  Finally, one afternoon, when the others were planning a shopping excursion to the nearby mall, she asked me if I would remain behind. When we were alone together, she broke the news to me: she was pregnant.

  What followed was both pitiful and predictable, knowing Amanda. She lived a little too much inside her own head. She had actually managed to convince herself I might be happy to hear about the child. But how could I be? I had no money. I had worked like a slave, year after year, to win my place at school. I had ambitions—big ambitions—to become a writer, a novelist—not exactly a very secure profession, not something you can count on, not in the beginning at least. I was in no position to take on the support of a wife and child.

  Amanda only had to take one look at my face to read my thoughts. The next moment, she was in hysterical tears, raging at me. I had never seen her like that before. She screamed that I was selfish. I was thoughtless. I was this and that and the other. And when I tried to reason with her, when I suggested there might be another, better time for us to have a child together, she lost control completely, took it in the worst way, practically accused me of being some kind of homicidal maniac.

  Thankfully, the worst of it was over by the time Jonathan and the others returned from their outing. When they burst through the door, shouting and laughing, I was in the living room, sitting alone in an armchair by the fireplace, staring into the flames, torn between panic and despair.

  “Where’s Amanda?” they all cried out at once. “We’re going to play games! We’re going to make cookies! We’re going to play Ghost Hunter!”

  I hesitated—but I finally managed to smile and tell them Amanda had gone to bed early with a headache. I didn’t see the point of spoiling their good mood with the truth.

  It was already evening, already dark. We all went into the kitchen and made popcorn and cookies, swilling wine and beer as we did. I forced myself to join in the fun with a show of enthusiasm. After an hour or so, we began our game of Ghost Hunter.

  Ghost Hunter, if you’ve never played it, is really basically just hide n’ seek in the dark. One person is designated the Ghost Hunter, then you turn off all the lights and everyone else scatters and hides. The Hunter moves through the house with a flashlight and if he leaves the room in which you’re hiding without finding you, you’re allowed to jump out and scare him. Each person who comes out of hiding then joins the hunt for the others.

  I didn’t want to sit out and ruin the game, but with everything that was weighing on my mind, I didn’t know how long I could keep up the pretense of high spirits. I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I hid down in the basement behind the boiler. It was, I felt sure, literally the last place anyone would look. The game could go on without me, and I would have time to brood on my troubles and think things through.

  It was pitch dark down there, absolutely black. I could bring my hand within inches of my eyes and still not see it. I sat on the floor just behind the boiler, staring, blind, feeling sorry for myself. More than half an hour went by. All the while, I could hear the screams and giggles of my friends upstairs.

  Finally, I heard the basement door open. A flashlight beam shone on the cellar stairs. Jonathan was the Ghost Hunter. He’d already collected all the others and I could hear them murmuring to each other.

  “He must be here. Where else could he be?”

  Laughing nervously, they came thumping down the stairs behind the flashlight beam. When they reached the bottom, Jonathan swept the light across the pitch darkness. It went over me once, then, a second later, snapped back to pick out my face.

  “There you are! I see you!” they shouted together.

  Someone—Rosemary, I think—said, “I’ll get the lights.”

  The basement lights came on. And the next thing I knew, Rosemary let out a high, ragged, terrible scream. I lifted my eyes, following her horrified gaze. Then I started screaming too.

  There, just above my head, Amanda’s corpse hung dangling in the air, one end of a rope tied around a heating pipe in the ceiling, the other end pulled tight around her neck.

  She had been there, right above me, the whole time I was sitting in the dark.

  II. “She Haunts Us”

  The aftermath of Amanda’s death was ugly, especially for me. The coroner had no trouble deciding she’d committed suicide and he also had no trouble figuring out why. I was forced to tell the police the whole story: the pregnancy and our awful argument. This got back to Jonathan and the others, of course. I won’t say they blamed me or anything, but they didn’t exactly forgive me either. After that, we’d see each other around campus from time to time, and we were always pleasant enough with each other, but their underlying coldness toward me was unmistakable. To my great sorrow, the days of our true friendship were over.

  When I graduated, I moved to New York City. I didn’t see any of them again for a long time.

  Seven year
s went by, in fact. Some hungry times, a lot of hard work, then I started to establish myself. My first couple of books came out. I scored some movie sales. I hit some bestseller lists. Things started to go well.

  But all the while, I was aware that, in some way, what happened with Amanda continued to cast a shadow over my life. I had never been close with my family, but now I cut off communications with them altogether. I had girlfriends from time to time, but I never established another long-term relationship. Most of the people I called friends were really just casual acquaintances. Somehow, after Amanda, there was always a part of myself that I kept in reserve, that I was never quite willing to share with anyone else.

  One day, in early December, I came home from a party to find a message on my answering machine. The message was from Jonathan Wilson. He said he was in New York and he wanted to meet with me. You would think I would be surprised to hear from him, but the truth was, I’d been expecting that call for some reason—expecting it for as long as I could remember.

  The next evening, Jonathan and I met at my local tavern, McGlade’s. It was a cold, drizzly day. I stepped into the bar and stood brushing the damp off my overcoat as I looked around for him. At first, I didn’t see him. That is, I must have passed over him without recognizing him. Then I did. He was seated at a table in back by the brick fireplace. He was staring into a glass of red wine. He was a shocking sight. Only seven years had passed since I’d last seen him, but he seemed to have aged decades. He was thin and sallow and drawn.

  I sat down with him. Ordered a drink. Before the waitress even returned with the glass, Jonathan had begun to tell me his story. Things had gone badly for him since school, he said. He’d been ill off and on. He’d abandoned his composing. Gone from job to job until he finally ended up at his father’s investment firm, where he was doing only moderately well. The same was true of the others, he told me, the other three who’d been at his parents’ house with us that Christmas. Rosemary had struggled with drugs and alcohol. David had been through an ugly divorce that left him depressed and nearly broke. Lucy had gone through a series of abusive relationships, including one that ended with her in the hospital with a couple of broken ribs.

  “It’s about her somehow,” Jonathan told me. “It’s about Amanda. We all feel it. She haunts us. She won’t let us move on.” Then, after a pause, he said, “I read about you in the papers all the time. You seem to be doing well.”

  It felt like an accusation. I was the one most closely connected to Amanda’s death, after all. If anyone was responsible for it, obviously it was me. And I had my problems as I said, but basically he was right: I was doing well. And I said so.

  Jonathan stared into his wine a long, silent moment. Then he looked up rather sharply and said, “We have to go back. We’ve all agreed. We’re going to meet up at the house in a week. We’re going to spend Christmas there again.”

  “What’s that supposed to accomplish?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. None of us knows. We just have to do it. Will you come?”

  I said I would think about it. And I did think about it, all that night. And I thought: that time of my life, even that Christmas at the Wilson house before the tragedy—those were the happiest days I’d ever known. For all the success I’d had, nothing else had ever come close. I thought: Maybe they’re right. Maybe if we could go back, if we could capture some of that spirit, lay our guilt about Amanda’s death to rest … maybe we could be happy again.

  I called Jonathan in the morning and told him I would drive up to the house next weekend.

  III. A Voice in the Storm

  I left the city on a gray Saturday morning and headed upstate. When I was about fifty miles north of Manhattan, it began to snow. Pretty soon, the grass by the side of the highway was dusted with white.

  I pressed on. The snow kept getting heavier and heavier. The traveling wasn’t all that bad as long as I was on the interstate, but once I got past Albany, once I got off the main roads and into the back country, the conditions deteriorated fast. Soon, the snow was falling so thickly I could barely see—and when I could see, leaning forward to peer through the windshield, all I could make out were the vague hulking shapes of the surrounding forest. The roads here had not been plowed. They wound perilously through narrower and narrower passages between higher and higher drifts. I probably should have pulled over someplace, tried to find a motel and wait out the storm. But the idea of this reunion had captured my imagination. I didn’t want to get there late. I didn’t want to miss anything.

  I turned on the radio, hoping to hear the weather—news—any sound of civilization. Nothing came out of the speakers except a steady hiss of static. I hit the search button. The digital readout spun from number to number without stopping. A murmur of voices rose and faded. A whisper of music died beneath the unbroken wind-like sough.

  Then, after another moment or two, the tuner seemed to catch hold of something. For several seconds, I could hear—soft beneath the interference—the wistful sound of an acoustic guitar. It was playing a sad, lilting melody I had never heard before. A woman’s high, clear, sweet, and mournful voice was singing.

  “I wait for you,” she sang. “I wait for you.”

  I turned from the windshield and stared at the radio. That voice … It was far away, riddled with static … but I recognized it.…

  Just then, the car went into a skid. I faced forward—but too late. I had lost control and was sliding, blind, through the whiteness.

  Before I could get my bearings, the car dropped off the edge of the road and buried its front end in the deep drifts beneath the winter trees. I tried to rock it out, but the tires just whined uselessly. I couldn’t get any traction. The car was stuck.

  I sat back in my seat breathing hard as the full dimensions of the situation became clear to me. It was cold, very cold. I hadn’t seen a building or a turnoff for miles. I had only about a quarter tank of gas. Maybe two hours of daylight left at most. If I stayed in the car, the engine would probably die right about the same time the light did. There was a real possibility I could freeze to death out here.

  I decided to try to find help or shelter before nightfall. I stepped out of the car—and dropped into snow up to my knees. I stared around me into the blinding white. I saw nothing but the dim shadows of pine trees standing like sentinels watching me. I shouted for help. My voice was lost in the wind. Clutching my overcoat closed against the cold, I pushed forward until the snow grew more shallow and I could feel the road under my shoes. I followed the pavement as best I could up a small hill.

  Just as I got to the top, something wonderful happened. A gust of wind pushed the snow aside like a curtain. The view cleared. There, nestled in an empty valley not a quarter of a mile away, stood the old Wilson mansion, the very place I was looking for.

  I didn’t go back to the car for my luggage. I was afraid of getting lost. I stumbled down the hill until the road wound round to the Wilson’s long driveway. Then I shoved my way through the driveway’s big drifts until I was at the front door. I pounded with the old iron knocker. No one came. Finally, shivering, I tried the knob. Thank God, the door opened. I spilled inside.

  I shouted. No answer. It was clear the place was empty. I tried the lights. Nothing. The phones were out too. There wasn’t much time before sunset. I had to find some supplies. Some matches; flashlights. Logs so I could start a fire.

  Yet, I hesitated. I stood in the front room at the window, staring out at the falling snow. I watched the light grow dimmer and dimmer. Alone in that house with the night coming, all I could think about was that moment in the car just before I hit the final skid. That familiar voice lilting through the static on the radio. That song:

  “I wait for you. I wait for you.”

  IV. Reunion

  The day grew darker and darker at the windows. I made preparations to get through the night. I stacked some logs in the fireplace with old magazines for kindling. I rattled through every drawer I could find
, searching for matches. Luckily, just as the last light was dying away, I opened a hall closet and found a flashlight on the top shelf. I followed the beam to the kitchen. But I stopped on the threshold.

  I could see by the flashlight that the door leading from the kitchen down into the basement stood open, the cellar stairs disappearing into the blackness below. The open door unnerved me somehow. Alone in the dark house, my mind returned to that moment seven years ago when I saw Amanda’s corpse dangling above me.

  I stepped decisively to the basement door and swung it shut.

  I took a second to calm myself. Then I searched the kitchen. I looked in the small pantry. Went through some more drawers. Finally, the flashlight beam picked out a box of wooden matches on a small shelf over the stove. I was reaching up to take hold of the box when my hand froze in midair.

  I heard something, in the house. A guitar was playing. Slowly, I turned around, brought the flashlight around. The basement door was standing open again. A voice wafted up to me from below, singing softly, sadly.

  “I wait for you. I wait for you.”

  I moved quickly back to the door, intending to shut it again. But just as I reached the top of the stairs, the singing stopped. The lightless basement fell silent. I stood there, staring down into the darkness. I felt a sour, burning fear rise in me as I realized I couldn’t just close the door, I couldn’t just walk away. I couldn’t spend the night in this house wondering what was down there, not knowing.

  I had to look. I started down the stairs, holding tight to the flashlight. The basement dark seemed to crawl up my sides and close around me. I reached the bottom. Immediately, I guided the beam to the place where I’d seen Amanda hanging. There was nothing there.