Hark! the Herald Angels Scream

by Hark! the Herald Angels Scream (retail) (epub)

  Once we had the names of those men, they were easy to find. One, Jim Warren, was dead, had drowned in his bathtub. He lived far away from here, another state. His death was said to be suicide. He left a note. All it said was “Sorry.”

  His family said he had been depressed for a long time, had been having financial problems, and was bothered by bad dreams and a pill addiction. Oddly, he wrapped himself in a blanket, covered his face and most of his body with it, and climbed into a tub full of water and forced himself under. It must have taken great determination to drown himself. It seems to me a horrible way to go.

  The other gentleman was found effortlessly as well. His name is Wilbert Kastengate, Jr. He is successful and lives in the city. His parents knew my parents, it turned out, and that’s why he was present that night. Once he was found, he agreed to talk to me. We met in a restaurant at, as you might have suspected, one of my hotels.

  He was a lean man in an expensive blue suit with a head full of thick gray hair. He had held up well, handsome for his age. But when we began to talk about the night of Amelia’s disappearance, I saw him pale, and it seemed to me that the years he had fought off for so long came down on him like a whirlwind. He sagged in his chair like a large beanbag.

  I went right at him, but he denied going upstairs with Amelia, said he had no idea who Jim Warren was. Not much was gained from the conversation, as far as satisfying my curiosity goes, but I convinced him to join me later tonight at the Christmas hotel. That was a month ago when he agreed. Meaning, he may or may not show.

  Come with me to the Christmas hotel. It is only an hour from here. I want you to see what is there, know that I’m telling the truth, and again, it would be nice to have a friend along as comfort. I know that we haven’t been in contact that much, but you and I are about all that is left from those parties years ago, at least as far as people I know go. So, come with me.

  * * *

  —

  When Robert finished his story, he leaned back and glanced at his watch. That was an obvious indicator that I should decide on my course of action for the night.

  I could have declined, but the truth was Robert and his story had grabbed me. I had never believed in ghosts, but I had always been amused and somewhat titillated by the idea of them. And, of course, there was my connection with that night, my small but significant memories of Amelia. I was a bit bothered by the fact that he had come to me because he didn’t know who else to come to. It was clear he didn’t want to go to the hotel by himself.

  Still, it was intriguing, and another incentive was to not spend the rest of Christmas Eve and all of Christmas Day alone. Especially after memories of Amelia had been reignited. Her sweet face, the gold hoop earrings, the short dress, that kiss beneath the mistletoe, haunted me.

  Robert drove us. It was a chill night, coat weather, the sky was clear and the moon was bright.

  “You think Kastengate will actually show?”

  “I got the impression he wanted to come, but it may have less to do with my ghost story and more to do with me trying to link him to Amelia’s disappearance. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty. However, just so you know, I have a gun in my coat pocket. Protection in case Kastengate thinks it might be a good idea to rid himself of suspicion. I know that sounds dramatic, but, it could be like that, I guess.”

  After that revelation, I was feeling less excited about the prospect of company for the night, and it even occurred to me that I may have been set up. What if Robert thought I was the one responsible for Amelia’s death, and this was all a plan to get me alone at the Christmas hotel and finish me off? What if he were responsible, and for some reason thought I might know something, an idea that had festered over the years, and now he had decided it was best I was taken care of?

  This was on my mind as we arrived at the hotel, an hour or so before midnight. There wasn’t any electricity, but Robert had brought a battery lantern, as well as a flashlight for me and him.

  He let us in and we trudged upstairs, Robert guiding, waving his flashlight before us. When we reached number twelve, he paused, sighed, and opened the door.

  The door pushed aside spider- and cobwebs, and in the beam of the flashlight dust motes spun about as if in a cyclotron. Robert moved the light about the room, flashed it on the closed closet door, then the bed, which upon closer observation appeared to have a velvet sheet over it; a coating of dust, made shiny in the flashlight beam.

  Nothing about the room appeared odd, other than those indicators of neglect. The clock he had mentioned was no longer in the room. Robert moved to the window and opened the curtains, and as he did, dust rose from them in a cloud.

  It was not a full-moon night, but the moonlight was strong. It landed on the window glass and turned the panes bright, fell across Robert like a slat of silver.

  I walked over and stood by him.

  “See,” he said.

  He was showing me the nails in the window frame, all around it, slammed in randomly. Something done long ago. You could tell because the heads of the nails were rusty and looked like copper in the moonlight.

  We stood there for a while and talked, maybe for as long as an hour, enough that I lost my suspicion of him, and as we stood there, car lights flashed and a car turned around a wooded curve and became visible in the moonlight. It pulled up to the side of the hotel, out of sight, and then some time passed and we heard someone on the stairs, coming up. I found that more disconcerting than the idea of a ghost.

  The steps ended at the open door of number twelve, and a tall, handsome man with smooth gray hair came into the room. Although I didn’t actually know him, and the years had settled on him, I realized he was the man I had seen that long-ago Christmas night. He was the one who had turned his head to look at Amelia, and had made an uncouth comment as she passed. There was still about him an air of arrogance and privilege. The kind of man who had done what he pleased in life and hadn’t suffered consequence of any kind.

  “You came,” Robert said.

  “Curiosity,” Kastengate said. His voice smooth as honey, his movements athletic. I hadn’t realized how old-man-like I had become until seeing him, a man the years were afraid to completely destroy, a man who could still turn a young girl’s head.

  “I didn’t know someone else would be here,” Kastengate said.

  “A friend,” Robert said.

  Kastengate smiled. “I don’t think you trust me.”

  “Do you remember this room?” Robert said.

  “I’ve never been in it,” Kastengate said.

  “Would you mind closing the door?” Robert said.

  Kastengate closed it. Robert leaned in close to the window and lifted his arm so the moonlight shown on the face of his watch.

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  “And that’s when your ghost comes, huh?” Kastengate said. “Maybe I should have stayed home.”

  “I suppose it may be more than five minutes,” Robert said. “It’s five minutes to midnight, but it may be a bit after that. As I remember, it didn’t come right away.”

  “The ghost you told me about?” Kastengate said, and grinned. The moonlight lit up his teeth, but I got the impression that in that moment he had lost some of his cocksureness. He began to look nervously around the room. Maybe not for a ghost, but perhaps by that time he had become suspicious, thought we might have made plans for his demise. The question was, of course, was he actually guilty of anything?

  As for the ghost, well, I doubted that. In five or ten minutes it occurred to me we would all look pretty silly standing in a moonlit room with our hands in our pockets. Maybe Robert thought the ghost story would cause Kastengate to admit what he had done. If so, I concluded that was unlikely. But if the story was designed to scare Kastengate, why tell me the same story?

  “Five minutes have passed,” Kastengate said.


  Robert looked at his watch. “Not quite. Please. Stick around. You came, so why not satisfy your curiosity? Sit.”

  Kastengate remained standing. Robert went to the windows and pulled shut the curtains he had opened. Robert switched off his flashlight, and I did the same. When we came into the room he had placed the lantern on the nightstand, and now he came over, turned it on, and went back to stand between the window and the foot of the bed.

  Kastengate seated himself in a chair by the door. He didn’t look in the least perturbed. He crossed his legs. Still, he had come, and that meant something. Curiosity maybe, guilt perhaps, a combination of the two.

  It is impossible to convey the feeling that came next, or to describe the stench, but the best I can do is to say the air grew colder and heavier and there was a stink in the room like dead rats in the walls, and then there was the sound of movement in the closet, like something heavy turning over.

  Robert switched off the lantern, picked up his flashlight, turned it on, and shined it at the closet. The closet door heaved a bit, as if something inside was pushing against it. The door beaded with liquid, and the liquid ran to the floor and into a puddle.

  Robert kept the flashlight on the puddle.

  Kastengate stood up, let out a loud breath.

  The puddle became a solid mass of what looked like molasses, and I could see a head poking up out of the slimy mess. The head was dark and rotten like a pumpkin left in the patch beyond its prime. Hair the texture of matted water weeds hung from its skull. The damp, dead odor intensified and filled my nose and turned my stomach.

  An arm moved out from the mess, a bony thing with leathery flesh and long fingers like dry sticks. Another arm revealed itself. Now there was a whole, but ravaged body lying there in a puddle. It reached out with its hands, scratched at the floor, and pulled itself toward the bed.

  As I was standing in front of the bed, it was coming directly toward me. I was frozen in place, but as the thing came nearer, I stepped back and sat on the mattress, swung my legs off the floor, and inched to the far side of the bed, which was flush with the wall. I felt like a sailor on a rickety life raft watching a shark approach.

  Robert kept the circle of light on the thing, but he had moved back to the foot of the bed and had his back against the wall.

  It kept crawling until it arrived at the bed. It was so low down and close to the edge of the bed by then, I could no longer see it. After what seemed like an eternity, a bony hand lifted, the fingers rattling together like dry sticks. It clutched at the blanket, and slowly I saw its head rise like a horrid moon, and the light from the real moon filled its dead white eyes.

  It paused there, seeming to look for something and not find it. I don’t know how to describe it, as the face was so odd, but I got the sensation that it was feeling disappointment.

  “Jesus,” Kastengate said.

  I’m sure he hadn’t meant to say that, but as soon as his voice split the cold, dead air, the thing turned its head toward him, and tilted it in a curious manner.

  Kastengate stepped backward until the chair against the wall stopped him. He fell back into it, sitting there as if it was his intended plan.

  The thing leaned its head forward. Its mouth opened slightly, and I can’t say for sure, but I thought there was a kind of smile there, like a gash in a pumpkin. And then, it moved. It covered the distance between it and Kastengate so fast it was as if I were seeing the event on film and frames were missing. It grabbed hold of Kastengate and that caused him to scream.

  Perhaps I should have sprung forward to help him, but I did not; even when he cried out to me, and then Robert for help, I didn’t move a muscle. Neither did Robert.

  The thing jerked Kastengate from the chair and collapsed out of my sight. I could hear it slithering across the floor. I could see Robert’s face, as he looked down, watching that thing crawl, dragging its prize with it. He didn’t try for his gun. He didn’t move.

  Then the revenant rose up from the floor like a puppet pulled upright by invisible strings. It was clutching Kastengate by the neck, as if he were a rag doll. There was nothing handsome about him now. His eyes were impossibly wide. His mouth hung open. He was the color of snow.

  The window curtains slid back, as if by some unseen hand, and the moonlight shown in again. I could see the rusty nails begin to turn and lift out of the window frame, and as they turned I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up like a bed of thorns. The nails rattled to the floor and the window flew up, and then, like a large windblown leaf, the thing and Kastengate were sucked out of the open window and plunged toward the ground.

  Robert came unstuck from the wall, eased toward the window. I found the courage to slip off the bed and stand by him.

  We looked out and down. The thing rose up and began to drag Kastengate away by the collar of his jacket. It was obvious the fall had cracked his bones in many places. One arm was twisted in a way an arm shouldn’t go, and one of his feet was turned at an awkward angle and raw bone glinted from his broken flesh and ripped pants.

  “We should help him,” Robert said.

  I didn’t reply, and Robert didn’t move.

  Kastengate was dragged out of view behind a row of dark, limb-dripping willows and an ancient cypress tree, on toward the river.

  We stood there for a long time, then we sat down on the end of the bed and waited until the sun came up, warm and rosy. Christmas Day.

  I looked up as the room darkened. The curtains had been pulled across the window again. It had happened so subtly, neither of us had noticed.

  I went to the window, moved back the curtains, and looked out at the newborn day. The window frame was shut and nailed down again, as if the nails had never been removed. It was as Robert had described when he had spent that lonely night in the room some years back. I could hardly breathe.

  Down by the river, we found Kastengate’s jacket, but besides that there was only the rolling brown water. Kastengate was gone.

  We drove to a pay phone and called the police. They came out and looked, thought we were suspects in the case. Nothing was ever proven, though if you look up old newspaper accounts, police records, you will see that Robert and I are still under suspicion.

  We didn’t tell them what we really saw, figuring that would only compound the situation. We said we drove out there under a spell of nostalgia and discovered Kastengate’s car, his jacket, down by the river. Neither of us lied when we said we hardly knew him.

  Next year we went there on Christmas Eve. Nothing happened in the room that time. I fell asleep in a chair and Robert fell asleep on the dusty bed. When we awoke the next morning, we decided it was over for good. Early the next year the hotel was torn down.

  I never saw Robert again, though I heard he died some years back. Went in his sleep.

  So now I’m old as dirt, waiting for the shadow, thinking about how one of those men had done himself in by drowning, and how the other was taken away by…Well, I can’t say for sure, but I have my idea about it. I think justice was paid.

  Sometimes, when I lay down, the last thing I think of is Amelia, young and alive, bright and magnetic, dressed as she was that night so long ago on Christmas Eve, those gold hoop earrings shimmering, almost as bright as the light in her eyes and the shine of her smile.

  She was and is a dark and beautiful dream.

  FARROW STREET

  ELIZABETH HAND

  For the last seventeen years, she’d spent Christmas with friends in Devon. Her coworkers at the law firm where she was the office manager thought this was the height of luxury, and there were always the same bad jokes about visiting the Queen and London Bridge. In fact she booked her flight months in advance, which made the trip relatively inexpensive, spent a night at a budget hotel in Heathrow, then caught the train from London to Taunton, where Joanne and Chris picked her up. Once
they reached Belstone, her costs consisted of a few meals out and the good wine she always picked up at Paddington.

  This year, however, she received a phone call from Joanne in mid-October.

  “I’m so sorry, Mel—I know this upsets your plans. But it’s the baby’s first Christmas, and Sarah and Trent really want us there with them. And of course we want to go. Do you think you could rebook and come after the New Year?”

  “I’ll check it out. And of course I understand, not a problem.”

  It turned out that it was a problem. Rebooking the flight would cost more than the original tickets. If she stayed at home, Melanie would be on her own for Christmas in her shitty little apartment just outside Tyson’s Corner.

  So she looked online and found a cheap hotel near Bloomsbury. She reserved a room beginning two days before Christmas, with plans to return home before New Year’s Eve. Christmas in London! She’d save on the cost of the train ticket and spend her money on meals out and nice wine for herself. Maybe see a show and find a nice place for a traditional Christmas dinner. She packed her carry-on (she never trusted the airlines not to lose her checked luggage), along with the burgundy cashmere sweater she’d worn to the office Christmas party for the last few years; also paperbacks of A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield, neither of which she’d ever read.

  The Buckingham Arms turned out to be a shabby converted row house off Gower Street, not Bloomsbury, one of eight equally dingy hotels with names like Queen’s Grove and Royal Stanwick. Inside it smelled of french fries and marijuana smoke. Her windowless room was tiny, a flimsy bed shoved up against one wall. Plywood shelves built into the other wall had buckled from damp. The bathroom had a metal shower stall and a sagging sink, its pipes dark with rust. When Melanie went downstairs to reception and asked if she could be moved to another room, the very young man behind the desk (it was built into a closet) turned from the computer, blinked sleepily, and shook his head.