The Ghost Who Fed Them Bones

by Tim Roux

  “I would like you to break another one.”

  It is obvious what is coming and I feel torn by the situation. The Marquis bullied me into refusing to help Louise yet, on the other hand, she surely has a right to make her own choices by now. Her sister, Anne-Marie, appears in the doorway and pulls away again, heading straight for the Marquis, no doubt.

  “Anne-Marie, wait!” whispers Louise urgently and moves rapidly after her. They stand facing each other at the bottom of the secret stairway before Louise coaxes her back into the bedroom.

  “You must let me,” she pleads with her sister.

  “Monsieur has promised Father that he will not help you.”

  “But he must help me.”

  “Our father will be extremely angry if he should even consider helping you, and you know how dangerous Father is when he is furious. He’ll bring the house down around our ears.”

  “I most definitely will,” booms the Marquis, making his own appearance in the room. “What is happening here?”

  “Louise is talking with Monsieur Paul.”

  “M. Paul, I explicitly forbade you from addressing my daughter.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to address your daughter yet,” I excuse myself.

  “Then you will please leave at once. I will watch over my daughter until you have finally departed.”

  “Please, Father, please let me go. You have no right to keep me here.”

  “I have every right. I am your father.”

  “I want to go. I have had enough of being here. Two hundred years of standing here doing nothing is more than unbearable. I want a chance of something else, even oblivion.”

  The Marquis holds up his hand. “We will discuss this at another time, Louise.”

  Louise throws herself at my feet. “Please, M. Paul, please.”

  The air is tornadoing all around me. The Marquis is working his way into a dramatic rage, and I can actually feel the building trembling. “Louise, enough!” he bellows. “M. Paul, go!”

  I stand there. Whatever he is doing has to be dealt with to keep the Château intact. It could collapse on the heads of my entire family. It could kill them all, not to mention the Earl and the Countess, and that would probably give him considerable satisfaction. He is a ghost, after all. What does he care about the living, that they should be reduced to his state or beyond? Nor do I question my own behaviour in provoking him into this maelstrom. It is his temperament alone that has brought him here.

  “Go!” the Marquis roars at me. “GOOOO!”

  (Which is pronounced “go”, not “goo”).

  I can sense my body filling with power as with a liquid filling a sponge, or oil soaking into polypropylene. I feel heavier. I feel stronger. I feel angrier. I feel recklessly determined. I turn on him as if on fire, as if I am a god preparing to launch a thunderbolt. He stops and eyes me with alarm.

  “Be gone,” I whisper, driving out the phrase with immense pinpoint force, as if thrusting a burning lance through his heart. His fear reduces to shock, reduces to invisibility. He is gone.

  I turn on Louise. “Be gone,” I say in a kindlier way, but with the same inescapable momentum. She also reacts with astonishment before disappearing.

  Anne-Marie and the Marquise are left before me. “What would you like me to do?” I ask.

  “I think I should like to leave,” answers the Marquise with quiet dignity, facing her second execution, as they all have been. I look at Anne-Marie.

  “Yes, please,” she says in a small anxious voice.

  “Be gone, both of you,” I proclaim, and so they are.

  I make a decision. I am going to get rid of all the entities in the house. I have seen what they can do. They will never do that again. If you are going to have a revolution, show no mercy. I march into each room in turn and banish all the ghostly occupants I come across to the light. I do it each time with one stroke, and with each expulsion I become stronger. I clear all the bedrooms, invading both towers where some of them have fled in terror. I am precise and decisive. They explode one after the other. I proceed downstairs, and ransack the public rooms. Mum, Dad and the Countess are in the main drawing room. Mike must be outside somewhere.

  “Hello, Paul,” the Countess greets me. “What are you up to? You have an extraordinary look on your face.”

  “I am doing some cleaning up,” I reply before skirting round her and cornering a young maid crouching under the piano. “Be gone!” I spit, as if swearing, and she vanishes.

  “Paul, should you be doing this?” Mum asks.

  “Yes,” I reply. Nothing will stop me now. I am reliving the thrash and the crash of Play Station games, obliterating my enemies wherever they are to be found. It is a satisfying sensation, a catharsis.

  The ground floor is now empty of lingering entities. I descend into the kitchens. Mme. Paladin is cooking lunch and more or less ignores me as I search each room, including the store rooms. Nothing here. “Sorry to have disturbed you,” I toss over my shoulder.

  “You didn’t,” she replies.

  Another quick sweep of the ground floor, gathering some disapproving and concerned expressions from the occupants of the main drawing room, then up the stairs and a double-check of the bedrooms. Empty. I climb up to the Earl and Countess’ private apartments. There are still several of them here, including the ugly bitter old matron I saw in the dining room attacking the Earl. “Be gone! Be gone! Be gone! Be gone! Be gone!” One after the other they pop – old and young, male and female. I have a certain ambivalence about dispatching the two children, but they deserve so much more than this. They need a chance of a future. They are also the least afraid.

  Finally, I enter the Earl’s room, more respectfully. An old family retainer is standing next to the Earl, awaiting instructions. “Be gone!” I shout at him.

  “Steady on, Paul!” splutters the Earl. “This house is within my jurisdiction here, not yours. What have you been doing, and by what right?”

  “I have been cleansing the house of ghosts. Liberating them.” Only now do I feel a sense of shame.

  “Did they ask you to?”

  “Some of them.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Once you have started, you have to finish, otherwise they all come after you like wasps to a funeral.”

  The old retainer is still here. “Be gone!” I pronounce again.

  “No!” countermands the Earl. “Etienne is a good and loyal friend. You will not banish him unless he chooses to go. Do you wish to leave, Etienne?”

  “No, Sir,” Etienne assures him.

  “Then leave him alone,” the Earl orders me.

  I stop fuming and start panting. I am becoming dizzy – hyperventilating, no doubt. I cannot stop myself. I am burning up. I can hear the Earl saying “Paul, Paul” ever more quietly, with great compassion in his voice …………