Christmas Ghost Story

“I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t until I knew you were sure about me.”

She smiled as her blonde hair, which was studded by the stars in the sky behind her, fluttered in the winter wind. She’d never looked more radiant, more spectre-like. Taking my hand, she began to guide me up the hill. 

She giggled as we ran, further and further, my ankle boots kicking mounds of grass and slipping on unseen slopes, never a stable step. The cold air felt good in my lungs. There was a crazed wildness to our being out in the dark like this, on some mysterious adventure, having snuck out of the Christmas celebrations. It was Christmas eve and our wedding anniversary, but our families had forgotten.

She’d always been unpredictable, untraditional. She was like an animal – untamed and pulsating with instinct. She was ancient and young at the same time. She saw things others didn’t.

Of all the places in the four corners of the Earth, we’d met on a cliff in the fog. I had chosen, that day, to throw myself off it, deciding that being lost to the icy waves of the North Sea was the most brilliant destiny this world could give me. The last thing I had expected to find up there, in such dangerous conditions (I couldn’t see more than two meters in any direction, such was the thickness of the fog), was this lithe, remarkable and irresistible woman. 

She had asked me what I was doing there and I had told her (when you’re about to off-yourself, there is no longer cause to keep your cards close to your chest). She had then reminded me that it was Christmas Eve and that what I was doing was very sad. All I had said was ‘I know’. We stayed like that: me standing at the edge of my doom and her quietly sitting on the grass behind me. 

After a while, I forgot she was there, having successfully convinced myself that she was a hallucination. I took some last breaths, readied myself, and began to run. She’d pulled my hand back and I’d fallen down next to her. I spent the next hour crying.

And then I’d asked her what she was doing there and she told me she liked to look at the fog. I’d asked why, and she’d explained that the whiteness calmed her, that it was neither empty nor full, fog. 

Our love came from nothing and could survive anything.

We’d gained some height on the hill and the top was in sight. Ringed by trees, I knew at the summit there was a clearing hidden behind the beech and hazel. I had wondered if she wanted to make love up there – it was something we’d done a number of times in other outdoor places, when nobody was around. 

Although the Christmas lights all over town spread out below us like a sub-astral cosmos, she didn’t look backwards. Her shawl floated behind her as I followed her up and up and up.

Half panting, half laughing, we reached the top, where the line of trees loomed, dark and silent, against the early night sky. Her nose was red as she turned to me and I loved her all the more for it. 

“Are you ready?” she smiled, her flicked nose always making her appear mischievous like a pixie, her brown eyes glinting as if to confirm it.

“Always” I breathed as I looked at her intently and wondered if she was really going to take her clothes off in the freezing weather.

Again, she took my hand, not hesitating as we approached the treeline. Inside, there were streams of rigid fog suspended around the bushes and many branches of the trees. An atmosphere, invisible but alive, enveloped us with the quality of a Christmas ghost story, spooky and magical. I heard music and chatter coming from further in - apparently from inside the clearing, which I guessed was a bowl of fog too.

She pulled me along, yanking absent-mindedly at the thorns that kept tangling into her woollen clothes and hair. Faintly, the sound of an accordion, followed by claps and cheers, wafted toward us. 

I squeezed her hand. She turned calmly.

“What’s in there?” I whispered. She bowed her head ever so slightly and looked at me with wide, ancient eyes so deep I’d fall into them if I didn’t keep my balance.

“My family” she whispered back.

So this is it, this is the moment I find out who she is.

A golden light emerged from the fog as we kept walking and, soon, everything was visible again. A bustling, cheery fair stood before us, complete with tipis, wooden stages, barrels of cider and pans of hot chestnuts. There were people – about seventy – walking and dancing and skipping. I saw to one side there stood a small, makeshift stage with a sign reading ‘Shakespeare today’, on which an old man and a young woman seemed to be performing to a crowd. On the other side stood a bear, chained to a cage, juggling purple balls, while its owner continuously changed between slinging meat into its mouth and collecting coins from the onlookers in an old hat. Musical instruments were being played, often over each other and to different songs, as kids chased through the legs of the many partygoers.

I looked at my wife, who was crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, my breath faltering as I tried to take my eyes off this miraculous event to focus more keenly on her.

“I want to stay here forever, but it only lasts a night” she sobbed. 

I took a look around, seeing now the true nature of things with clarity. These people were pearlescent and vague. This music was…old. My beautiful wife, so distinctive and thin in the regular town below us, now so visceral and vibrant.

“Then let’s stay” I said, and her face flowed with the kind of special happiness and joy that little children emit on Christmas Day, when they get what they’d hoped for after all. 

“Thank you” she smiled.

The merriment and cheer lasted for many more hours. I joined in, taking my mind off what I knew was to come. Every once in a while, I found myself mind descending into fear, but I downed another drink and took up another dance to take the edge off. 

As the sun rose on the morning of Christmas Day, I looked up at the dawn stars, held her hand, and let the wind remove all traces of the me I had been on Earth, as it whisked us away into forever.