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

the personalities – if not the actualspirits – of people who had died there, or even elsewhere, he had heard of thistoo – but they came back to that spot – that particular hill or street orhouse, because it had for them some special meaning. And then again it seemedsome ghosts really were the life force, the soul or spirit, that had lingered.Either it didn’t credit its physical life was done, and so went on acting itout until, eventually one hoped, it got the message and moved on. Or else ithad simply been so happy there it insisted on remaining a few years, orcenturies, longer. And if it had been traumatised, the same thing might happentoo. It was unable to escape – which was where some form of exorcism might behelpful.

How gracious and how magical hewas, that man. My father. How I loved him. I don’t think I ever, while I lived,loved anyone, even Steven – when I did love him – so well, so deeply.But he died, my dad. And if he haunted anywhere, I never found it. Perhaps,even though he’d loved me, he was just glad to get completely free of it all,and us, me too, in the end.

Yet obviously that’s why I cameback here after I died: my father and the visit to the house. What he said. Hissweetness .

I hadn’t meant to do anythinglike this. Nothing was further from my plans. Or – nearer. I wantedNothingness. A bit of peace.

But there was a kind of gliding,as if, half asleep, my bed, or the train carriage I was seemingly snoozing in,was skating calmly through the depths of night. And in a while I ‘woke up’,there is no other way I can describe it. And here I was.

I wandered a while through thehouse and into the ruins and around the gardens and the hill. And when the sun roseI went indoors and sat on a chair, which naturally I didn’t at all do, since wepass through furniture and everything else; it takes an act of will,even unconsciously, to keep us even standing or walking on the floors or theground. Not difficult, only peculiar...

I wasn’t frightened. I knew whathad happened. And in a while more I met the others, or at least the two girls;Laurel, who I’d seen before in my teens when she had stood on the staircase,then turned, gone up three stairs and vanished. And Coral, who had died sometime before Laurel, as Laurel had died some fifty-plus years before me. I met theKnight last of all, though he was the first here. And we all met our Scholarlylibrarian almost forty years after, when the book killed him in the library.

And then, of course, the otherthing started.

2020. Year of the Apocalypse.

Progress Report

 

You’lldoubt this, but when I first saw them I laughed. Oh, not absolutely atfirst. That was on the TV news bulletin before the signal failed, and then allelectric power went. But when they began to turn up here...

Well, I had nothing to fear,presumably, unlike any live human in a living flesh-and-blood body, who hasevery physical reason to fear them utterly.

And they do look soincongruous.

Clumsy and wilful and repulsiveand useless.

Staggering along in the woods orthrough the amok fields, or about on the road. They keep falling over, orcrashing into things. Now and then bits of them fall off. They aren’t allrotting exactly, though some have gone farther than others before the zomboidforce, or whatever one calls it, got them going again

But they have no coordination, nomental power – how could they have? These are the dead without any soul orspirit at all.

Mostly, then, they came and went,floundering about, sometimes even getting into the rampant orchard and flailingthrough the boughs, fruit raining – and ignored. They rarely caught any animals– or if they did, nine times out of ten they let them go out of sheerdiscoordination. There was sometimes a single casualty. I try not to thinkabout that. It goes without saying where they got hold of people they tore themup, biting off bits, and left them dead. (Glad to say I only saw examples ofthat on TV.) But the killed corpses, empty but contaminated with thisridiculous and illogically motivating plague, would presently get up too andstart crashing and sprawling about like the originals that had killed them.

They seem to have no real goal.Well, they wouldn’t have, would they? No heart, no soul, no brain – just randomleft-over mental impulses. Of all the deaths that have been visited on the humanrace, this has to be the most pointless. Grossly disgusting yet utterly inane.

No ghosts seem to have resultedeither. No one like the five of us.

Maybe a good thing, that.

There are now a few of themanyway, that seem to hang around – whereas mostly, before, they came and went,moving in and then on, in random, lumbering surges.

There are three I’ve seen a lotof in the past two months. Indescribably repellent, but with oddcharacteristics. I’ve given them names. Yes, I’m perverse. I always was, aliveor dead.

There’s Ugg – he looks to mesomehow like a caveman in some old (bad) film. Or Dug – he’s always digging attree roots with what’s left of his hands. And Jug, who has jug ears – or onlyone, now. He appears to have lost the other since I christened him.

So far, they – none of them – haveactually properly entered the house. I don’t know why not. I suppose it’s onlya matter of time?

Something to look forward to.(Ha.)

Ha.

3

Laurel

Itis rather silly, perhaps, for me to write about myself, even as I was, before Istopped being a physical person. I don’t like the word died. I never did, norany of the odd ways other people employ, as perhaps they still do, to veil overthe fact of death. For example, I hate the expression ‘passed away’, and, muchworse, the terms ‘gone to God’, or ‘taken by the angels’, as though they hadbeen kidnapped. In a strange fashion it’s as if I partly knew that would neverhappen for me. I was nothing, when living, only an ignorant and