Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be Mistaken, Tanith Lee [classic fiction txt] 📗

disease, murder, age... Evenperhaps, for whatever now-unpredicted reason, one or other of them may one daykill the body he or she now has on, which at this present time they value sohighly. Who can foresee? And what then? To be a ghost again, and maybe seekanother re-housing project? Or flying elsewhere to other ills or blessings of whichthey can know nothing, here. But let that go for now. Now is the Present, theGift of Today, and there can be Champagne, if not quite up to standard, andevery hand can hold a glass, or a toothbrush, or a doll, or a sword or a rose.Or another hand. And the fire burns bright.

Later, over toasted loft-storedapples and mugs of tea, they discuss the journeys they will make next. Perhapsthere are other centres of live un-Zombied people, or even people reclaimedfrom Zombishness by an influx of ghosts similar to their own invasion force.

They have a sing-song round anout-of-tune piano, (played by El), in which Cora’s dolls join. Gui manages tocall El ‘El’. He’ll get better at that. He’s decided to spell his own name inthe English way: Guy.

It rains, and they – and thedolls – go out to roll about in their nice new clothes. Children again.

(They know instinctively theyhave been miraculously lucky in discovering – or having presented before them –such almost perfect new domiciles, (bodies). The luck they never question. It’stheirs by right. And so perhaps it is... unless some magnetic need of theirshas drawn ideal specimens towards them here. Rather as El and Ed used to makethe lights work – )

At some other juncture they know,one and all, they must leave the house, and begin the follow-up adventure oftheir rebirth. A family, and such a close one, they are of one mind.

El kisses Daphne Daffodil under atree, going slowly because DD grew up in the early 1900s, not the 1960s. And DDblushes, and holds El’s hand. Guy begins to teach Cora old French, and shebegins ably to learn it. He lost a daughter once, still-born. But here isanother daughter, and she’ll grow up – her body is about sixteen, seventeen. Ashe, he supposes, will grow old. He will be glad to do so. He’s had no bloodychance to grow old before. And killing enemies? Well, one he has successfullyrepossessed. He’s more eager now to assist his friends.

As for old Edward, (now aboutfifty-seven), he has found a family, but also a pipe and some tobacco –bollocks to the deteriorated and poisonous cigarettes electrically shorted out,or growing verdigris in the stores. He had smoked a pipe at Murchester, andelsewhere, until the hoo-ha about smoking turned everyone into a frustratedmonk. Who cares now? Who cares?

Life is for the living. Live andlet live.

And so they do. Soon out into thewide world they will go, bold as brass and twice as bright. The sun’s risingagain, strawberry and honey. And this tomorrow is, and will be always, anotherday.

It matters not how strait thegate,

How charged with punishments thescroll,

I am the Master of my Fate:

I am the Captain of my Soul.

Invictus

W.E. Henley

(1849 - 1903)

EPILOGUE

 

The Recluse

TodayI will thank God, nay, I shall heap upon the Lord ten thousand praises: Theyare gone. How I have lamented and suffered this while, these endless years,nigh on three hundred of them.

At the commencement, the intrusionseemed not too onerous a burden upon me, for only one in number was there tohaunt my peace, and that one inclined also to keep mostly to himself in thepurlieus of the old castle. Yet then, in ones and twos, the rest were addedunto him, until at length full five of the beasts had taken up their residencewithin my private lair. I could step nowise and nowhere without I must chanceupon some other. I, who throughout his existence, quick or dead, have loathedand shunned the company of what simpletons are apt to call My Fellow Man. Tush.I have no fellow, nor he me. The last of them also proved the worst, too, sincehe drove me out my library wherefrom, until that hour, none ever had, neitherghost nor man. For most living presences grew invisible to me, when once I hadbecome a phantom, and inaudible too. As indeed I must conclude I grew for mostof them. Nor had this fiend troubled me, while yet he lived. But following hisdoubtless deserved demise, we were in another case quite. A ghost by then, asam I, his continual adherence to my own preferred retreat, my hermitical cell,caused me to conceal myself yet more, especially from him, and then into exileI take myself, to the lower depths of this, once my, house. And there, ten ormore long years, I have clung, pitiable as a bat upon the darkness’ wall. Inhiding, cursing my lot, nor no respite in view.

During this winter of mydiscontent, creatures of vile aspect began to swarm across the land outside.They are not Men, as not quite living – since, as a ghost, as I have said,full-living men, nor women, I seem not to see. But these things, a sort ofgolem, I do. They have a name also, which I have partly heard, as if spoken onthe wind, Zumble I believe it to be; but they are monsters that prowl.

Then commences a miracle. Theghostly five presences here inflicted upon me are able, it turns out, to enterand possess the Zumble Kind. Thus my torturers pass from the state of spiritback to flesh, if so it may be termed, and imbued with fleshly form and motionthey are apt to desert my house and rove the country beyond. There is, for myself,this added curiousness: while the Zumble Kind are, for me, both visible andsomewhat obscure – when once occupied by the five ghostly parasites who hadinfested here, the five chosen Zumble creatures dim out from my sight, as doesa flame beneath the hood of a smoke-dirtied lamp. To their discredit, theirnoise is still audible to me, as that of men generally is not. But even thenoise grows muted. Until there comes a congruence of days and darknesses, andthen, to my joy, all