G is for Ghosts

by Rhonda Parrish

  “Ready, Charlie.”

  They looked over to Charlie, who began to turn the hand-crank like it was the easiest thing in the world. The Wheel of Life began to turn, faster and faster. Mary could not help herself; holding Freya’s hand, she walked over and looked through the vertical slits. It was the same as other zoetropes she had seen, in that it showed the same cycle of movement on repeat. On others, it might be man in top hat and tails, walking briskly in a ceaseless circle, or two dancers in masquerade masks and capes, waltzing, one-two-three, one-two-three. No matter how much they looked to be moving, theirs was an immutable path, a caught moment replayed over and over.

  But that was the only thing that was similar. The images themselves were something entirely different. The figures were sepia, three dimensional, so lifelike she was surprised they didn’t simply step out of the wheel and begin to wander through the exhibition hall. A simple life played out as the wheel spun: baby, child, adulthood, death, back to babe again. With each rotation, the image filled out, became a little more than the last. An ephemeral grandmother stood over the baby in the cradle; then, a dead child wrapped his hands around his father’s throat. Soon, there were more dead than living. Mary felt Freya shiver beside her and wished she could do the same.

  Then, in between death and birth, so quick Mary thought she might be imagining it, a wisp of mist, a curl of ephemera leaving the coffin and flitting up, up, away. She gripped the watch face and gently prised the glass off. The stolen time glimmered over the words “THE END”, almost playing across the letters. The scent of loam and rotting leaves, saltwater and ozone wafted up, then was gone.

  She held the watch face to her lips and gently blew. The silvery particles swirled into the wheel, caught in its slipstream. As it melded with the images, the song began. Dancing across the domed, crystalline ceiling, reflecting back on itself and refracting through the fog into the world beyond. If sunset light on clouds created music, it would sound like this. Gold and rose and inky-indigo, underlit by dying light and the promise that something new awaits in the world just beyond. Music to call home the dead.

  It filled the Crystal Palace and the city’s errant ghosts, from the future dead, began to gather there. They passed through the glass as though it wasn’t there at all; hung like spiderwebs from the balustrades and corners of the great hall; rose from the floor in a pearled fog the colour of dragon’s tears. Freya sank to her knees and Mary took a step back as they all gazed at the Wheel of Life, transfixed by the echoes of life playing out there in an endless loop.

  One of them, of a young woman in a flapper costume and feathers in her hair broke away from the balustrades on the upper floor and wafted up toward the ceiling. Meeting the glass, she melted into it, becoming part of it.

  “Weren’t they supposed to go through, and leave here?” Charlie whispered.

  Mary shrugged, just as confused as he was. More ghosts broke away—children in raggedy clothes, soldiers in uniform with spectral bullet wounds trailing silver blood, the most ordinary looking of men and women. Not one of them, Mary noticed, was elderly. No wonder they had grasped at a second chance for life—these were people whose lives had not been fully lived.

  The spell was broken by Freya screaming. Just as Mary turned, she saw a ghost slipping inside her skin as though it was shrugging on an old coat.

  Mary found Freya in the fragrant tearoom they had passed earlier, peering around a column with a smile that definitely did not belong to her. Was she in there at all, or had the intruder managed to push her aside completely and fit itself into her skin? Mary sat on one of the marbled benches, keeping a safe distance from Freya. She briefly thought of Charlie, bravely cranking the zoetrope to trap the other spirits in the walls and ceiling of glass.

  “Keep going!” she had shouted to him as she took off after Freya. The music followed her, then faded, as she had run through the exhibition hall, following the sounds of running footsteps.

  “And what now?” the ghost asked in Freya’s voice.

  “Perhaps you could tell me who you are.”

  “Ah! You haven’t recognised me, have you?”

  “A little difficult when I only caught a glimpse of you climbing into a body that doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Permit me to show you.”

  From the waist up, the ghost left Freya’s body. It was all Mary could do not to look away, run as far as she could. It was misshapen, looking more like a decomposing body than the shade of a person who once lived. It smiled at her with a rictus grin, and its wild eyes glittered like corpselights.

  The same awful wisps of brightness that she, Charlie and Freya had seen at the Hothouse Bacchanal. Mary, with Charlie perched on her shoulder like a jaunty toy, had wandered the paths of the great atrium, the ferns and vines waving gently as the revellers ran by, the butterflies flitting on jewelled wings. Like all their parties, the guests had drunk the violet potion that Charlie mixed so expertly in the Pimm’s for the ladies’, brandy for the gentlemen. The transformations taking place were just as lovely and unexpected as ever. The most charming were the women mutating into glowing blue fungi, being chased by men who had grown wings of peacock green, or become great snowy owls of clockwork.

  By stealing just a little bit of their time, the travellers were able to gift them a night of possibility. That same time ran through Mary, ticking under her skin. Leading the three of them backward and forward across the centuries, leaving them adrift in an ocean of moments, days, years to which they would never belong. That should have made her sad, Mary had mused as she and Charlie took in the bacchanal, and wondered why it didn’t. Then the screams had begun, from atop the winding iron staircase that led to the second level orchid room. Mary ran towards it, towards Freya who was standing at the base of the staircase, begging the woman above, in her crinolines and velvet gloves and blood-red feathered headdress, to please compose yourself, Madam.

  Then, a pearly spectre crawled out from the woman’s flesh and tossed her body over the edge, a discarded costume that it no longer needed. They had jumped back as the body crashed at their feet, stared up in horror at the very same ghost who was peering at Mary now from Freya’s fragile form.

  “Ah, you do remember,” it rasped, then retreated inside Freya’s torso. “You see what happens when you try to steal time from the spirits?”

  “Clearly, nothing good,” said Mary, outwardly regaining her composure.

  “Not for me, nor for your friend, here,” it said, pointing Freya’s finger towards her own heart. “She’ll not last long, Mary.”

  “Perhaps we can come to an arrangement that would suit?”

  “I want my time back.”

  “I’m afraid that is the very thing that I cannot give you.” Mary spoke as gently as she could. She gasped as Freya’s face contorted in pain and the ghost hissed through clenched teeth. “There is no need for that, we are not uncivilised. Let’s see if we can’t get you what you need.” She felt like a duck on a lake, gliding across the surface while frantically paddling beneath just to stay afloat.

  Freya relaxed again, although she was very pale, her skin clammy and damp.

  “So,” Mary tried again, “you had possessed the unfortunate woman who attended the Hothouse Bacchanal, and instead of our little concoction stealing her time, we stole yours?”

  The ghost nodded in response, swaying unsteadily on Freya’s feet.

  “What could time mean, in death?”

  “It is everything! The only thing I had left of my own life. It was mine, all mine, mine…”

  Those words were not a petulant refrain but the sound of the first stirrings of winter, shushing through naked branches and across frosted moors. Lonely gloom and endless chill meeting what was once lively and bright.

  Mary had encountered the dead before—there was not much she had not encountered, truth be told—and she knew that it could not possibly be referring to minutes, hours, days in the same way that people did.
For them, there was nothing linear about their existence. She thought back to the seances she had attended in the 1930s, and to wandering through cemeteries hung with verdant moss and the spirits of the recent dead. To the witch trials of the 1600s and the vengeful ghosts haunting the streets after hangings, burnings, drownings. None of them had had any concept of time. On the contrary, it was as though they were stuck in a perpetual cycle—

  “Time for you is a single moment or a short burst—one that you hang onto and replay, over and over?” Like the grey matrons haunting a hospital corridor or the spirit of a professor pacing a long-gone lecture theatre.

  Freya nodded. “It is not all that we do, but we must hang onto it to have a place in this world. Without my time, I am anchorless, unable to stay inside a body without destroying it.”

  The ghost leaned out of Freya again, just its neck and shoulders. Where before it’s face was fierce and cruel, now it looked scared. “Please give me back what is mine.”

  “I cannot,” she said, “but I think I can send you somewhere that does not matter. Where you may find some peace.”

  “No!”

  “Look inside Freya, inside the mind you are occupying. She has been there. Search her memory and see if it is true. But I will only help you if you surrender Freya immediately. I will not lose her.”

  The ghost disappeared and Freya closed her eyes, and groaned, eyes flickering under their lids as though she was in the midst of a nightmare. Then Freya’s body gave a shudder and fell to the ground with a thud.

  Mary knelt over Freya. Her breathing was shallow, but her pulse firm. Our girl is made of tough stuff, she thought. She picked Freya up in her arms.

  “I will send you home,” she said to the ghost that hovered uncertainly.

  Together, they walked back to the zoetrope.

  The Wheel of Life. The Great Zoetrope. A continuous circlet, with no beginning and no end. An imitation of life, just like the ghosts it called that winter morning, with its sunset music and illusion of motion and life.

  “Change of plans, old girl?” Charlie asked when Mary returned with Freya in her arms and the ragged ghost hanging in the air behind her.

  “One more turn of the wheel, I should think, Charlie.”

  Mary hastily sketched a series of images on the back of the stereoscopic cards as Freya whispered fragments of memories and impressions of the period she was separated from Mary and Charlie and, really, the world. She inserted the cards back into the zoetrope, in the hope that they could send one last, lonely ghost somewhere it didn’t need an anchor. Under a glass ceiling in which the ensnared phantoms glimmered like the winter’s first snowflakes, Charlie turned the crank once more. Even when he lifted his hand and walked back to Mary and Freya, the wheel continued to turn and turn, singing like the call of the albatross blown in on the storm.

  Inside, a ship floated above a strange horizon, cutting through misty clouds, its dark shape purposeful against the nebulous background. Mary hoped Freya’s memories were right, that it was reminiscent of the time-wraiths’ ship that sailed endless skies and that they would hear the call.

  Charlie carefully undid the silver buttons running down Mary’s spine, opening the doors again.

  “What time does the clock have, Charlie?”

  “5.30pm, 30 November 1936.”

  Time flowed around them in silver waves as they walked, Freya somewhat gingerly, from 1868 into 1936, where the palace was cold and dark and almost decrepit. For a moment, Mary thought she could still hear that albatross echo across the decades, then decided it was just her imagination.

  “Seems a shame to… well, you know,” whispered Freya.

  “I know,” Mary replied, “but we have to seal the rip over.”

  “And what of me?” The ghost asked.

  “Don’t you worry,” said Charlie, “Mary’s never made a promise she hasn’t kept.” Then he turned to Mary. “Cloakroom might be best, don’t you think? Bound to be smaller and easier.”

  Mary nodded.

  After they found it, it was easy, really. A small incendiary device in a wastebasket, fuel sprinkled over a long, varnished wooden counter and wooden lockers. And if the workers found it, well, the palace was big enough to find another quiet corner in which to start a blaze.

  There was no need. It was not discovered until the structure was well ablaze, flames raging inside as molten glass rained down inside. The fire brigade could do little to dampen it. The smashes and pattering became a downpour, a hail of fiery glass. As it melted and disappeared into the flames, the apparitions inside shot upward, limned by the sparks that flared after them, disappearing into the darkness. They watched them in silence, for hours as the fire raged, until less and less of those comet-like spirits were released. At last, none were left. Then Freya pointed to the thick, billowing smoke choking the night sky.

  “Here they come,” she said.

  A ship, made of smoke and bone and starlight, cutting a swathe through the night. It descended, lower and lower, and the lonely ghost who had lost its time, its connection to this world, glided toward it without looking back. Mary thought she saw a childlike arm reach over the side, offer its hand. Then they were simply gone, swallowed by the updrafts and the night itself.

  “There won’t be another Crystal Palace, will there?” Freya sounded tired, and full of sadness.

  “There won’t, that’s true, but have a look, closely now, at what is left behind.”

  Freya and Charlie smiled at Mary. There, in the white-hot flames that were beginning, at last, to die down, was the outline of the shadow of the great zoetrope. It turned endlessly, merrily uninhibited by the laws of physics or the imagination of men. It would turn there, perhaps forever, spiralling up the time from the ghosts of this world like a bobbin and singing them through the gateway to the lands beyond.

  Z is for Zoetrope

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  G is for Ghosts

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  SELECTED ANTHOLOGIES BY

  RHONDA PARRISH

  A IS FOR APOCALYPSE

  B IS FOR BROKEN

  C IS FOR CHIMERA

  D IS FOR DINOSAUR

  E IS FOR EVIL

  F IS FOR FAIRY

  G IS FOR GHOSTS

  FAE

  CORVIDAE

  SCARECROW

  SIRENS

  EQUUS

  FIRE: DEMONS, DRAGONS AND DJINNS

  EARTH: GIANTS, GOLEMS AND GARGOYLES

  AIR: SYLPHS, SPIRITS AND SWAN MAIDENS

  WATER: SELKIES, SIRENS AND SEA MONSTERS

  GRIMM, GRIT AND GASOLINE

  CLOCKWORK, CURSES AND COAL

  MRS. CLAUS: NOT THE FAIRY TALE THEY SAY

  TESSERACTS TWENTY-ONE: NEVERTHELESS

  HEAR ME ROAR

  ARCANA

  DARK WATERS

  SWASHBUCKLING CATS: NINE LIVES ON THE SEVEN SEAS

  SELECTED BOOKS BY

  RHONDA PARRISH

  HOLLOW

  ONE IN THE HAND

  HAUNTED HOSPITALS

  EERIE EDMONTON

 

  Rhonda Parrish, G is for Ghosts