Haunted
Alma Alexander
Copyright Alma Alexander 2011
ISBN
Published by Kos Books at Smashwords
Kos Books
A & D Deckert
343 Sudden Valley Drive
Bellingham WA 98229
Cover Photo: Copyright Sean P Jones
Table of Contents
Foreword
We’ll Meet Again
Skye Child
The Old Pier
What Reviewers Say
Other Books by Alma Alexander
Contact Alma Alexander
About the Author
Foreword
I like ghosts.
Or at the very least, I like the idea that they might exist, and that they still have business with us, the living. And that the business in question doesn’t always have to be something that requires scaring us to death.
Back in the dawn of my publishing career, in South Africa in the mid-to-late 1980s, I used to write short stories which got picked up by various local magazines – the sort of thing that these days might be labeled “chicklit”, light romances, fiction whose entire purpose was to entertain the casual reader of a weekly or monthly magazine. I didn’t do a whole LOT of them, but I did a few, and what do you know, I couldn’t quite make myself go mainstream, not even then. At least two of my contributions were ghost stories as well as romances. I just can’t help myself, you see – I am indissolubly wedded to things that are not QUITE of this world, and even in what was supposed to be straight romantic fiction the ghosts manage to make their presence felt.
They’re good stories. As far as I am concerned, they’re the better for the spectral presences that haunt them. So here they are, my ghosts. I promise, they’re perfectly safe; come right in and meet them.
Welcome to the Alexander Triads, Book 3: Haunted.
Alma Alexander
Summer 2011
When I was young, before it was superseded by other and more accomplished tales, this was my Blessed Story. It was published in South Africa, in the UK, and even in a women’s magazine in Dubai (how THEY got hold of it I will never know). It won a writing competition for me. It was one of those stories that just kept on giving. It’s hard to even think about the fact that this was a tale which I dreamed up almost as long ago now as I’d had Wally haunting his cigarette case – but it still has… a certain… something. Wally was one tenacious ghost. He might have let his lady-love Alex go to the arms of a real live young man and live out a bright and blessed life that was of this earth, but he’s haunted me ever since. See him take another bow, in a new electronic medium which would no doubt have completely confused him if he’d still been around today…
We’ll Meet Again
I don’t know what made me reach for the cigarette case, out of the whole pile of junk on the stall.
“That’s a good piece, Miss,” the stall-holder said earnestly. “It’s pre-World War Two.”
Another customer claimed his attention and I was left to examine the cigarette case in peace.
It was plain to a fault, made of tarnished gunmetal. The clasp was still in good working order and I clicked it open. On the bottom right-hand corner of the lid, just next to the hinge, a set of three intials had been engraved. I could just make them out: WCH. They seemed to want to make up for the plainness of the case, for they were full of unexpected twists and curlicues.
Apart from these initials, the case was quite empty.
“Not very pretty,” said a youthful male voice beside me.
I looked up at met a pair of guileless blue eyes, set in a smooth and boyish face and rather fetchingly fringed by a lock of fair hair which managed to flop over his forehead despite the army-like short back and sides he sported. He smiled, showing a set of perfect teeth and two small dimples in his cheeks as he did so. Despite myself, I smiled back.
“Are you English?” I asked. He had spoken with the clipped, precise accent no local would use.
“I am… or I suppose I was,” he said cryptically.
“How long have you been in this country?” I asked, for that is what I took his words to mean – simply that he had been out of England for a long time, or perhaps had even been born in South Africa.
“Oh… some forty years,” answered the young man diffidently.
“Now you’re pulling my leg,” I said sharply, doing a swift double take. He couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20 at the outside.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not at all. I’ve been in this country for as long as that case you’re holding has been here. And that is about forty years. Yon good gentleman has exaggerated a bit about its age – it’s not, strictly speaking, pre-war, since it was brand new when my father gave it to me in 1940…”
“Now wait a minute!” I said, startled into loudness. “You can’t possibly mean - ”
“But I assure you, Miss, it’s perfectly true,” the stall-holder said earnestly. He had disposed of the other customer and was taking my remark, quite understandably, to be a response to his own earlier words.
“I’m sorry, I was talking to this young gentleman here.”
“Who?” asked the stall-keeper blankly.
The fair young man beside me gave half salute which the stall-keeper ignored entirely.
“The young…” I began, and my voice died agonisingly as the fair boy carried on smiling and the stall-keeper looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses.
Gradually, the horrible truth dawned.
“Would you like to take the case, Miss?” said the stall-keeper carefully.
“Oh, do get it,” the boy said at the same instant. “You’ll be doing me a great favor.”
I opened my mouth to say no, but what came out, despite my best efforts, was, “Yes, I’ll take it.”
Bemused, I scrabbled in the jumbled contents of my bag for my purse, which, as usual, had migrated to the bottom. As I did so, a square of white cardboard floated down to cobbles, coming to rest with the writing uppermost. My invitation to the local RAF society’s annual Battle of Britain Ball.
“You dropped something, Miss,” the stall-keeper observed, relinquishing the cigarette case.
“Battle of Britain Ball, what?” the fair youth said. “Nice to know someone still cares. Are you going?”
I refused to answer. Not in front of the stall-keeper. I picked up the card with great dignity, restored it to my bag, in the company of my newly-acquired cigarette case, and strolled slowly away from the market-place and into the quiet streets beyond.
The fair youth, hands in pockets, kept pace.
“Look, who are you anyway?” I said crossly.
“Oh, I am sorry, didn’t I introduce myself?” He sounded contrite. “Walter Charles Hawke at your service. But you can call me Wally. All my friends do.”
“I’m not your friend,” I informed him. “Besides…”
“Oh, I know we’ve only just met, but I can assure you that I think of you as a friend already,” Wally said with the same endearing smile that had captured my attention earlier. “After all, you do hold my immortal soul in the bag, so to speak.”
“I – what?”
“The cigarette case,” Wally supplied helpfully. And then, when I gazed at him with blank incomprehension, he sighed. “I can see I’m going to have to explain from the beginning.”
“I would be much obliged,” I said sarcastically. “But I absolutely refuse to walk around town talking to a piece of thin air. Enough people already think I’m crazy – I don’t need to add to the number.”
“Oh,” Wally said, in all seriousness. “I can probably solve that. Give me a moment.”
If I’d had any doubts, they vanished now. Before my eyes he sort of flickered, disappeared, then formed
again, causing one startled passer-by to turn and gape after us, probably doubting his eyesight. After all, he had just seen a man materialize out of nothing. And a man, as well, who was dressed in… I gave a squeal of indignation.
“Are you really going to walk around Cape Town wearing what I presume is a World War Two uniform?”
Wally looked down, as if this was the first time he’d noticed that he was wearing anything at all.
“You’ve got a point,” he conceded. “Give me another moment.” He faded again.
Scarlet with embarrassment – another man had stopped to goggle – I turned and studied a nearby shop window. In its reflection, I saw a shape form in the hitherto empty space beside me, and Wally popped into existence wearing jeans and a red T-shirt with a jersey tied loosely round his shoulders. His hands were still stuffed into his pockets.
“Will this do?” he inquired hopefully.
I glanced around. Nobody was paying us any attention. A jeans-clad youth was not an unusual sight, and anyone who had seen this particular youth appear out of nothing had already hurried home to take two aspirins and call the doctor.
“Now, about the case…”
It transpired that Wally’s father had given him the cigarette case when he had joined the RAF in February 1940. And then, towards the end of August in that same year, he had scrambled with the other pilots in his squadron to a warning of the approach of enemy planes.
Wally’s plane was hit at the outset of the battle. It plummeted and exploded into a ball of flames…
“They didn’t find much,” Wally said sadly. “Only bits and pieces. The case got flung free and they never found it.
“It was discovered three weeks afterwards by a local urchin who sold it to a pawnshop in town. And from there it was bought by a man, left on a train, picked up by another man, lost again... and so on for a year or so.
“Then some chap chucked it into the cases when he was packing for his trip to South Africa. Found it when he got there and wondered why he’d brought it. He got rid of it… and you picked it up off the stall in the market.”
“Well-travelled case,” I commented. “Do you mean to tell me that you haunt a cigarette case? I thought that ghosts always lived in grand old houses and rattled their chains around four-poster beds and floated down wide staircases with their heads in their hands…”
“Well, the truth is, most of such places are actually already occupied,” Wally said. “Besides, I’m a bit young to be toting chains… there you go again. What’s so funny?”
“You really are one of the most unorthodox specters I have ever met… not that I’ve met many, of course.”
“I can see that,” Wally said, aggrieved. “I got left behind on earth when I died, and I had to get attached to something, and this case was the only thing that survived the crash more or less in one piece. All right?”
“OK. I am sorry. The truth is, I don’t quite know what to make of you. Or what you want of me.”
“Just send the case back to my family,” Wally said plaintively. “Tell them what happened, and if they can bury it where they buried what they could scrape together of me, well, maybe then I can finally go and rest in peace.”
“A ghost in the post,” I said, and fought valiantly with another attack of hysterics.
“What?” Wally said.
“Never mind. All right, I’ll send it. Does that mean I’m stuck with the pleasure of your company until I do get rid of it?”
“Well, you don’t have to…” Wally began, affronted, and his edges began to blur.
“No! Wait!” I said, flinging out an arm. “Don’t do that to me again! And besides, I must admit, I quite enjoy having you around.”
He firmed again, and grinned. And you’re nice, too. It’s a pity I didn’t meet you back in 1939.”
“That would be a fine thing,” I snored. “My parents were toddlers then. By the way, how old are you?”
“Forever nineteen,” he said, with infinite sadness. “That’s when I stopped growing old.”
I did some mental arithmetic. “Well, you’re younger than my grandparents, but not my much,” I said. “It’s hard to think of you as a grandfather.”
“I don’t want to think of myself as a grandfather,” he retorted, “especially not yours. I wish I could take you to dances, not dandle you on my knee!”
“I wish you could, too,” I sighed. Too deeply. He looked up.
“What’s the matter?”
“Read my mind?”
“Don’t be silly, we can’t do that,” Wally said with asperity. “To take a good guess, though. I would say it’s to do with dances and partners. To take it a guess further, I would hazard the dance is the Battle of Britain Ball, and the problem is that there is no partner around.”
“You’re too astute.”
“You’re too kind,” he returned. “What’s with the fellows around here? Haven’t they eyes in their heads?”
“Now you’re too kind,” I said, and looked down to hide a sudden rush of tears. Maybe this was the real reason I was seeing things – I was tired and overwrought, and Michael didn’t want to know me any more. I was all dressed up with somewhere to go and no-one to go with.
“You still haven’t told me your name,” Wally said gently.
“It’s Alexandra,” I said, my voice unsteady. “Alex to friends.”
Afterwards I was never too clear how it had come up, but when I came out of my fit of despondency and self-pity, I discovered I had a date for the Battle of Britain Ball. A date quite out of this world.
But when I woke up to the fact that I was to be escorted to the Ball by what was in effect a Battle of Britain casualty, I suddenly saw a black mass of pitfalls in the scheme and began, panic-stricken, trying to convince Wally of them.
“It will be all right,” he kept saying to all my bleak predictions.
And so it was that I found myself driving to the ball, not quite knowing how I got drawn into it at all, wearing a sky-blue gown, white gloves and imitation diamonds at my throat.
I had started out alone, but soon a presence materialized beside me. Wally turned a frankly admiring gaze my way.
“My word,” he said, eyeing me up and down, “aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
“Do they rent tuxes in the Other World?” I asked, glancing at him. He was dressed in one, with a white scarf draped elegantly round his neck.
“So to speak,” he said.
I removed a hand from the steering-wheel to tuck-up a stray strand of hair. It was shaking and he saw it.
“Hey,” he said. “Relax. Get into the spirit of the occasion.”
I gave him an incredulous look but he appeared to be sublimely unaware of what he had just said. Then he made the error of glancing my way. I saw the devilry that danced in those blue eyes, and we both burst out laughing.
After this, I could almost believe that things were going to be all right after all.
At the hotel, I parked the car and climbed out, carefully smoothing my skirts. Wally politely offered me an arm.
I hesitated. So far he had been a shadow, a spirit, something that one’s hand would go through if one reached for it. He had never touched me. But now…
He noticed the pause, and waited until I looked up to meet his eyes. There was a wealth of understanding in them.
“I swear to you it will be all right,” he said. “For tonight I’m as human as I ever was, as you are. Take my hand, Alex. Please. Take my hand.”
His words echoed hollowly in the deserted garage. Very slowly I reached for the hand he held out to me. Our fingers met; my hand slipped into his as if it had always been there, as if it had been made for this, and his fingers curled protectively round it.
“Come on,” he said softly. “The music is waiting.”
The evening passed like a dream. Wally was a hit. His charm and ready wit enchanted the other three couples at our table. But he danced only with me, and when I was whisked off by a hoary patriarch
from our table to do a Scottish dance, Wally didn’t take the opportunity to ask anyone else but sat and watched me with a smile in his eyes.
My own eyes kept wandering back to the table, and I realised I was in real danger of falling in love with a man dead for 40 odd years. Dead and yet young and vibrantly alive and with a disturbing pair of blue eyes which knew how to smile at me.
Dancing with Wally was an experience which went beyond anything I had ever known. His touch was firm and sure, he knew how to guide a partner, and in his arms I found a calmness and a confidence that gave me the freedom to do anything.
During the slower numbers he held me close and I laid a cheek on his shoulder and dreamed that he was real.
He did not turn into a pumpkin or disappear at midnight, but remained clear and solid and debonair, and made outrageous comments about the people around us which made me laugh and them glower, because sometimes it was impossible to conceal whom the laughter concerned.
The patriarch and his lady went home at 12.30; the other two couples gave up at approximately 1 a.m. Wally and I stayed until the end, until the last magic note; and then, just as we thought it was over, the band, after a small pause, began to play its final number, a farewell song.
“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…”
“…but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day…” Wally sang softly into my hair as we swayed, very slowly, barely moving at all, while the mellow World War II melody wove its spell around us.
A song from his day, played in mine – it seemed impossible then that we could overcome even the towering barrier that divided us from one another, and yet – we clung to each other for a long moment after the song had ended, with the desperate and despairing strength of those who knew they were doomed to be torn apart despite anything they might do.
It was Wally who finally broke free. “Well,” he said, with a queer catch in his voice, “it’s over.”
We went to our table and retrieve dour things, and I placed the thin white silk scarf, which he had earlier removed, round his neck with an infinitely tender gesture, because that was all I would ever get to do for him.
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