Erika tipped the waiter and sent him on his way. She felt oddly dispirited. It was probably a result of seeing Roth, of all the reminders of the past. She didn’t usually look at older men peering out of their rooms in hotels and think they were dangerous—at least, she didn’t any more.
She had gotten better.
Just the combination of Hannah and Roth made her relapse. She would finish dinner, make sure the girls got back safely, and then head to her own apartment.
There, surrounded by her stuff, she would ground herself, so that she could be stronger in the morning.
***
The next morning, Roth found himself standing outside Brandis Tours. It was a tiny little office in a building that had somehow missed the neighborhood renovations. He couldn’t even see inside. He had to open the door, with Brandis Tours printed in tiny letters at eye level, and step into a narrow, somewhat cluttered corridor. A Brandis Tours sign pointed toward the back, past other closed doors, and he followed the corridor as if he were heading into hell itself.
It had been a long time since he’d been in a place this rundown. For years now, he had allowed his people to do errands for him. He had stayed inside a cocoon, and tried not to leave, pleading paparazzi, pleading celebrity, pleading nothing except selfish wealth.
He stopped for just a half-second outside the door that had Brandis Tours emblazoned across its yellow front. His heart was pounding as if he were going to go onstage. To be honest, it was worse than if he were going to go onstage.
He took a deep breath, remembered his lines—yes, he had planned lines—and then rapped on the door. The sound echoed in the hallway. He half expected the ghost to make some kind of snide comment about the vicinity, but the ghost had been unusually quiet the last 24 hours. In fact, Roth wasn’t quite sure when the ghost last appeared.
Roth knocked again, and while he waited, he burnished his lines. Would Erika believe he was just here because of the girl? Probably not. But the girl was part of the reason he had come. He had an obscene amount of money and if home truly were indescribable as the girl had implied, then maybe a tiny portion of that obscene amount of money would go to an attorney who could help emancipate her.
Roth had a hunch no one else had thought of that option; he certainly hadn’t at sixteen, and even if he had, even if his mother hadn’t rather conveniently kicked off, he wouldn’t have had the funds to hire an attorney to sever himself from her. Back then, he didn’t think in attorneys and legalities. He’d only learned that in Hollywood, and then because it was the only way to survive.
No one answered. He raised his hand to knock a third time, and then realized what he was doing. He couldn’t summon Erika through will alone. If he really wanted to talk to her, he probably had to call the Brandis Tours 800 number. But he was afraid of getting an over-the-phone brushoff that he knew he wouldn’t get in person.
Something crashed behind the door. He tilted his head, wondered if he had imagined that. Last night, he had dreamed about walking in on his horrid father menacing a frightened, half-clothed Erika with a gun. Erika had fallen backwards against a chair, then grabbed a book off the floor and tossed it at Roth’s father. That hadn’t slowed him down.
Another thump. Or crash. Or something Roth couldn’t identify.
It was probably harmless. It was probably another tenant. If he acted rashly, he would get sued or hit the tabloids or—
He didn’t care. He grabbed the doorknob, and was surprised when it turned under his hand.
He stepped inside an office not much bigger than his closet. Erika, white-faced, held a letter opener like a knife, her back against the desk.
A man leaned over her, a man who turned when Roth came in, a man with Roth’s eyes.
“You son of a bitch!” Roth said.
Erika swiped at the ghost, but of course the letter opener went through him instead of doing any damage.
The ghost’s obsession had lasted past death. Was it what kept the old man moving? Roth had thought maybe it was a final, misguided attempt to get his son’s forgiveness.
All those ghost rules his father had once complained about snapped into context. Maybe sticking with Roth was the only way the ghost figured he could get to Erika. Unfinished business and all that.
“Get out of the way, Erika.” Roth had no idea if the ghost could hurt her, but he’d seen indications that the ghost had gained solidity in the last few years. Maybe the ghost could control what he could touch and what he couldn’t.
Erika looked over the ghost’s shoulder at Roth. He could see it in her eyes: Not again! What is this?
“Get away from her.” Roth approached the ghost as if he were alive.
“Or what?” The ghost asked. “You can’t do anything to me. You’ve tried.”
Roth had tried everything he could think of. Spells from psychics. Sage in rooms where his father had been. Destroying the gun. Desecrating the grave. Quoting Shakespeare at the old man as if that would make him go away.
Everything except this.
Roth reached forward and grabbed the ghost by the throat. It was a real throat, except that it was cold and clammy. The skin actually felt dead.
“You’re no better than you were when you were alive,” Roth said. “You’re a useless bit of nothing and I’ve given you too much power. We both wear the chains you wore in life, and I, for one, am breaking them.”
He slammed the ghost against the wall. The ghost’s blue eyes widened in surprise. He had clearly felt that.
“It is your father?” Erika said as if she couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah,” Roth said, not letting go.
And then a Fury went by him in human form. Erika, launching herself at the ghost, fists clenched, hitting and screaming and kicking. The ghost was screaming now too, and trying to cover up his stomach, his groin, his entire self, but he couldn’t do it because Roth held him tight. Apparently, Roth was keeping him solid.
Good. The bastard needed to feel just a bit of the pain he had caused others.
Erika stepped back. She clearly saw the damage she had done, but she too had just figured out that it was impossible to kill something that had already died.
Death was a small punishment, one that the ghost had actually taken for himself. But death was only the beginning.
“I’m done with you,” Roth said.
“You’ve said that before,” the ghost said, his voice squeezed.
“I’m done keeping your secrets,” Roth said. “I’m going to tell the whole world what you did, how you died, what you were doing all those years, not just to Erika, but to other girls who somehow came to your attention. I’m going to tell everyone what a coward you were and how you couldn’t face anything, how you were so frightened you shot yourself rather than deal with me.”
The ghost’s neck felt less solid.
“And you’ll have to watch,” Roth said. “The whole world is going to know what an awful excuse for a human being you were.”
“You wouldn’t,” the ghost said.
“He would.” Erika leaned right into the ghost’s face. “And I’ll help. I’ll tell every single thing you did—”
“It’ll be about you,” the ghost said. “No one will respect you.”
“With the great Jaime McKendrick at my side?” she asked. “No one will respect you.”
The ghost looked at Roth in complete panic. “Son, if you ever loved me—”
“If I ever loved you, I don’t remember it,” Roth said. “No one remembers you with love or kindness. No one.”
The ghost’s eyes filled with tears. “You can’t….”
“Oh,” Erika said. “We will. And we will enjoy it.”
Roth’s hand slipped forward and hit the wall. The ghost had vanished.
Erika felt the air where the ghost had been. “Is he gone?”
“I don’t know,” Roth said. “But I’ve never been able to chase him off before. Usually he crosses the room and taunts me.”
�
�Has he been haunting you since…that day?”
Roth wiped his hand on his coat. He had been wrong about the goo. He felt like his palm was covered with it.
“Not visibly,” he said. “Not for years. But he slowly started to appear. And then he got more aggressive. I kept ignoring him. I thought that would make him go away.”
Erika let out a half-laugh. Then she bowed her head, and shook it.
“What?” Roth asked.
“Five different counselors,” she said. “They all told me that I can’t ignore the things that hurt me—”
“You confront them.” Roth had left one of the most recent counselors for saying the same thing. “They weren’t talking about ghosts.”
Erika did that Spock-thing with her eyebrow. “Weren’t they?”
Roth felt shaky. He looked at the wall, at his bruised knuckles, and then his knees buckled. He grabbed the side of a chair and eased into it.
“It can’t be that easy,” he said.
“You think that was easy?” she asked. “Five counselors. I couldn’t have gotten in your father’s face without them.”
Roth let out a small sigh. “That day, I should have pulled that gun away from him.”
“I don’t think you could have,” Erika said.
“I should have kept him away from you,” Roth said.
“You didn’t know what he was doing until that moment.”
Roth looked at her. “You’ve thought a lot about this.”
She nodded. “I had to. Otherwise, I would have been stuck, forever.”
They say that people stay the same age they were when they became famous, Wife Number Three said. You were, what?, twenty-five? You’re stuck there, Roth. You’re the most stuck person I’ve ever met.
He swallowed, then put his face in his hands. I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?
He’d been saying that all week, all fall, ever since he started doing A Christmas Carol. He had thought nothing more than lines in a play. But it wasn’t.
There was a reason people remembered that story.
Roth’s father still wore his chains. But Roth was still alive. He could break his chains. Forge new chains.
Become unstuck.
He looked up at Erika. “I’ve been unfair to you.”
She shook her head. “I’m the one who ran away from you.”
“We were kids,” he said, forgiving them both.
“We’re not kids any more,” she said.
He took her hand. It was warm and soft and familiar. How could a hand he hadn’t touched in fifteen years feel like one he touched every single day? One he needed every single day.
She slipped her hand out of his. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk about that girl,” he said.
“Hannah?”
“I never learned her name,” he said.
“She’s going to be eighteen in two months. The teachers are going to find her a new place to live, help her finish her last semester, get her to the right college. I was going to write letters and maybe research scholarships.”
“She won’t need a scholarship,” Roth said. “I can pay for—”
Erika put a finger over his mouth. He wanted to kiss it, but he didn’t. Not yet. “She needs to do this on her own. Or think she is. There are other ways to help.”
He gently removed her finger from his lips. “Like what?”
“I don’t know all of them yet,” she said. “But I’ll tell you as I learn.”
“You’ll stay in touch?” he asked.
“If you want me to,” she said.
Oh, God, he nearly said. Of course I do. I’ve felt so lost without you.
He would never say such things, never had said such things. Never would. Then he wondered why not. So he said, “I don’t ever want to lose you again.”
Erika stepped back. He felt it as if she had created a real absence.
“Did I say too much?” he asked. “I thought—”
“You just felt sorry for me,” she said. “That’s all. You never really cared—”
“Jesus Christ, Erika,” he said. “I still dream about you. I’ve missed you every single day. I’ve never loved anyone else.”
She stared at him. He held his breath. He’d never felt like this—hopeful and terrified at the same time.
Then she launched herself into his arms. He pulled her close. They were kissing and it felt like he had never been kissed in his entire life. Three wives, a dozen girl friends, even more groupies and stage kisses and this felt like the very first time.
He felt like a drowning man who had just come up for air.
“Don’t leave me again,” he whispered against her mouth.
She froze, then leaned back so he could see her stunning face.
“Don’t let me go,” she said.
“I won’t,” he said. “I promise.”
“I promise too,” she said, and went back to kissing him, as if they were buried in a pile of mistletoe.
He wasn’t sure he could make this work. But he knew, this was the first time in all of his relationships, in his entire life, that he wanted to make it work. On a deep level, an elemental level, down in his very soul.
Erika took his face in her hands, and smiled at him. And for the first time in years, he smiled back—a real smile, not a stage smile. A smile that came from deep within him.
A smile he knew he would only ever share with her.
Introduction to “Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies”
Carole Nelson Douglas calls herself a literary chameleon, and she proves it with this tale. “Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies” bridges our contemporary ghost stories with Anthea Lawson’s Regency, “A Countess For Christmas.”
Carole’s sixty contemporary and historical novels have made mystery, romance, and science fiction/fantasy bestseller lists. Her groundbreaking debut of female Sherlockian protagonist Irene Adler was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, also winning mystery and romance awards. She currently writes the long-running Midnight Louie feline PI mysteries and Delilah Street noir urban fantasies, which inhabit a bipolar Las Vegas worlds apart. Carole holds RT Book Reviews Lifetime Achievement Awards for Versatility, Suspense, Mystery, and as a Pioneer of Publishing. Over the last few years, she’s started reissuing her entire backlist.
About this story, she writes, “Who can resist a Regency rakehell? Not me. Twenty years ago, my novella, ‘The Rakehell’s Christmas Angel,’ explored the holiday of redemption, the attractions of a Regency hell, and a heavenly love story. ‘Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies’ allows me to tread the same eternally conflicted territory of the heart from another angle.”
She adds that nothing makes fiction richer than a redemption theme, and warns that the three-legged cat is just a metaphor.
Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies
Carole Nelson Douglas
Oh! Happy tricksome time of mirth
Giv'n to the stars of sky and earth!
May all the best of feeling know,
The custom of the mistletoe.
—The Mistletoe, 1827
Dark Angel was the heaviest heavy metal band on two continents, but lead singer Adrian Lord heard the country Gothic song, “When the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” as he blacked out onstage in front of 30,000 fans.
His fading consciousness saw three tiers of screaming Dark Angel fans slide up into some no man’s land above his vision. As his body folded into itself, he watched the Goth girl groupies in the mosh pit climbing over each other to reach him. Scrawny tattooed arms and black-painted fingernails clawed for him. Black-lipsticked mouths yawned open in a mockery of Munch’s famous painting, The Scream.
The band played on. Adrian envisioned his mates’ closed eyes as they massaged their screaming guitars and egos for the audience, unaware that their lead
singer was going down for the count.
An approaching roadie disappeared at the rim of his shuttering vision. Had he OD’ed? Or had his heart just burst? And then true blackness took him out. Dead out.
***
Even in total darkness, he couldn’t escape the screaming, the electric guitars reaching insanely high pitches until it seemed human voices had blended into the shrill, yodeling blare of oncoming emergency vehicles.
Maybe Adrian Lord would live to rock on another day. . . .
Except, the siren screams were fading too. Utter silence shocked his sensitively wired ears. He lay flat, his artistically stubbled jaw rubbing cheeks with rough stone, not the smooth wood of a concert stage. A reek of rotten food and . . . excrement filled his coke-reddened nostrils. His body heat was ebbing, edging him toward the disgusting process of decay too. A distant tunnel of light beckoned. Maybe he deserved this humiliating end.
As if what little remained of his senses switched from one cable channel to another, the cold stone beneath him turned slick. All odor dissipated.
Cautious, Adrian brushed his palms over the new surface, thrilled to feel small grout lines. A tiled floor. He wasn’t dead yet. They must have taken him to a . . . hospital ER? Adrian struggled to focus through the sweat-curled locks of his shoulder-length hair.
The damn leather pants were so tight he could barely move his legs enough to rise. Still, in moments he stood, gazing around the damnedest hospital receiving area he’d ever seen. Bloody hell! Columns of white marble thrust into the overhead darkness. A white marble floor stretched into infinity, bordered with black insets. Man, he’d love that look for the indoor pool at his Malibu mansion.
He took a couple of shaky steps in the thigh-high leather boots swagged with chains and pierced with crystal studs. Why hadn’t they removed his performance clothes? Naw, then he’d get a wussy hospital gown. That would kill his hard-won “the Bad Boy from Bristol” rep. He lurched toward the ultra-modern admittance desk, merely a black marble column with a huge book balancing on its top. Behind it stood dark double doors of exit, or maybe entrance.
Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River Page 17
