3. Dec, 2022

A Light-Hearted Ghost Story for Christmas

Ella looked around the cottage at her many festive decorations and the Christmas tree thronged with baubles and tinsel. Yes, she ought to take them down, but she wasn’t ready yet. She was enjoying herself staying here, where Christmas had felt magical again in a rural, picture postcard setting which gave her a sense of unreality, of time enchanted by the moment. If she had to spend Christmas alone, she certainly hadn’t wanted to do it in the flat she had shared with Ben until so recently. It was haunted both by his presence and by the shock of his departure, which had so bewildered her.

He wasn’t happy, he said, and yet she had been, completely. He needed time, was all he could explain when she asked why he was not happy, watching him ramming things angrily into bags, as if even that question were putting him under pressure. Ella had jumped at the chance to house-sit in her brother’s new holiday cottage over Christmas, while he and his family went this year to Australia to spend it with his wife’s parents. Still reeling from Ben’s abandonment of her, even if it was supposed to be temporary, or so he had said, she swore her brother to secrecy as far as their own parents were concerned. They did not really ‘do’ Christmas any more, preferring to relax now that their adult children were out in the world. Let them think she and Ben were cosily holed up together, she had sobbed down the phone, as her brother tactfully suggested that she would be doing him a favour by staying in the cottage. Christmas was a prime time for break-ins and they hadn’t had the place more than a month or two yet.

Ella had arrived just before Christmas and instantly felt the relief of freedom from her city-bound flat, so empty without Ben. He had never been here and so she could revel in making it hers for now. She went to town with a real tree, cramming it with glass and plastic toys, tinsel, beads, as many things as it would hold, and of course, with a fairy on the top, all courtesy of a local garden centre. There was a jumble auction-off at a big house nearby, which developers were clearing of the many things left in attics. She saw the flyer in the village shop window and went along. Ella came home with a shabby wind-up gramophone and a set of old records, as thick as biscuits in their faded paper sleeves. She also bought a huge blue glass sphere, the size of as a football, on a long chain. It was like a giant’s Christmas bauble and she climbed up the step ladder to hammer in a nail to hang it from by her tree, where its mirrored surface caught the light from the candles in her angel chimes spinning round on the sideboard below.

On Christmas Eve, she went to a carol concert in the church, something she never did, and felt cheerful singing with friendly villagers who were happy to wish her a merry Christmas. On Christmas Day she ate, drank, watched films and did her best to be merry. On Boxing Day, she went for a long walk. She sang Auld Lang’s Syne in the village pub on New Year’s Eve and clinked glasses with a rosy-faced elderly couple, who took her under their wing for the convivial night and then walked her home. Yes, Christmas had been and gone, but it was still going strong in the cottage all around Ella. She was cosily snowed in with a fridge full of provisions, or she told herself she was, although it was easy enough to tramp down the road to the village in her wellies if she wanted.

Snow had fallen in the first week of January, leaving plump white cushions on roofs and walls. When Ella opened her door to look out at it, a shelf of snow fell with a flump from the porch roof. A set of cat’s paw prints showed leading away down the garden, neatly imprinted in the pristine white. Was that a white Persian cat she could see looking at her, or just snow on the gate post? She couldn’t really tell without her glasses on and she was still in her dressing-gown anyway.  Shutting the door, she went inside for her morning shower. Coming out of the tiny bathroom and crossing the landing, she saw a line of wet footprints on the polished boards of the bedroom floor, caught in the snow light. They were small, with a high arched instep and dainty toes, quite unlike her own. Going across to look more closely, she thought now it had just been a trick of the light playing on the varnish and knotholes in the pine.

Ella delayed taking the tree down on twelfth night. Just another day, she thought. That evening, she tried out the gramophone, winding it up and playing the wobbly, crackling records. Who had danced to these, she wondered, as the jazzy rag-time rhythm wavered jauntily along. She filmed it on her mobile and sent it to her brother in Australia saying ‘Olde Worlde England still going strong!’ in her text. Watching the short video later on herself she saw that, as the music played, a little line of dancing orbs floated around the gramophone, vanishing as the record stopped. Some kind of phone camera created artefact but very pretty, she thought. Didn’t they say it was dust or something being disturbed?

The following night she had eaten her supper and came in to look at the tree and decorations again, admiring them. There would come a point when they would seem past their moment, no doubt, she thought, but she could always leave them up till the very day she went back to the city again if she wanted.

“Ah. There you are!” said a bell-like voice, with rather posh clarity. The fairy on top of the Christmas tree was now a slight young lady, sitting on it with no effort at all and perched with her slender legs crossed. She wore silver patent dancing shoes, had shingled hair and very large eyes with an unruly sparkle in them. She was smoking a cigarette in a holder, but there was no smell of tobacco in the air, just a powdery scent that reminded Ella, stunned in to silence by this apparition, of her grandmother’s powder compact. “You left your Christmas tree up after twelfth night. Bit of a calling card for me, darling. Besides, you have my witch ball. I’ve been hanging about dropping hints for an absolute age! When you played my dance music last night, I was in sheer heaven, I assure you.”

“Your dance music?” stuttered Ella. “The orbs I saw!”

“Oh, yes, that was me blowing bubbles for you to see. Goodness me, you are slow on the uptake – didn’t you notice me as a white cat? And what about my footprints in the bedroom?

“Well, I did see them, but…”

“I suppose I can’t expect you believe the evidence of your own eyes now, then?” said the young lady, cocking her head playfully to one side. “I’m Maddie, by the way.”

“Oh, sorry, I’m…” began Ella.

“I know who you are!” interrupted Maddie rudely, blowing smoke rings. “Just why have you salted yourself away down here, though? The glory days are long gone.”

“Don’t you know already?” asked Ella, rather put out.

Maddie smiled and floated down from the Christmas tree, her wafting gossamer stole catching the baubles and making them spin and tinkle.

“No, I don’t. I’m curious.”

“I’m house-sitting. It’s my brother’s holiday cottage. They’re abroad and my Christmas plans had fallen through.”

“You mean you’ve left somebody,” remarked Maddie shrewdly. “Or they’ve left you. Oh…” she looked a little cross. “We’ll need a drink if you’re going to spill. I suppose I could see what I can do. You’ll have to get the witch ball down for us. Drinkies first. Let’s have champagne cocktails!”

“What? I haven’t got any…”

“Nonsense. There’s always champagne here! Come along,” instructed Maddie, sailing into the next room.  Here, a drinks cabinet which Ella had never seen before stood open. Champagne saucers sparkled against its mirror-tiled back and there was a bottle in an ice bucket. Other bottles stood invitingly around. Astounded, Ella watched Maddie mix two cocktails for them, handing her a fizzing glass. “Chin chin!” said Maddie, clinking hers to Ella’s. “Now, let’s sit down and you can tell me all.”

Sitting curled up on the sofa, she listened as Ella, in the chair opposite, did indeed tell her all. Afterwards, Maddie said, “The question is, darling, do you want him back or not?”

“I, yes, no, I don’t know,” flustered Ella, feeling on the spot.

“You’ll need to look in the witch ball for that decision. Go and get it.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“No – it has to be you. I’m kind of in it, you see.”

“But…”

“Oh, it’s hard to explain. It was my party trick when I was alive but now I’m caught in it. I can make it work a treat, though. I promise you that.”

“But you can move about and do things. You are alive,” protested Ella.

“After a fashion, poppet. Only after a fashion. But I know a lonely soul when I see one. Plain girls were always my speciality with the witch ball,” Maddie added complacently, glancing at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

“Thank you!” said Ella, half-offended and half-laughing at her unexpected guest’s outrageousness.

“Trust me, I used to make a packet out of them, sweetie. Well – vanity got me where I am today. I spent far too much time looking at myself in that witch ball as well as using it, so it caught me up in it, you see, when I popped off. Still, it means I can come along now and again. Been decades since I did, though!”

“Popped off?” asked Ella incredulously.

“Yes. I had a ducky little two-seater sports car and I was just coming back from a rendezvous with Nigel Callaghan. Naughty really, as I’d just done a witch ball reading for his luckless fiancée. Fickle chap but awfully good-looking. Anyway, I took a corner too fast and pouf! Gone – and then not gone. If you see what I mean.”

“Like Blithe Spirit!” exclaimed Ella.

“Oh, that old thing! Nothing like, I assure you. Anyway, time is getting on. I can only manifest like this on the thirteenth night. No idea why, so there’s no point in asking,” added Maddie airily. “Just fetch it down and we’ll have a gander.” Ella fetched the step-ladder and got down the gleaming blue witch ball. “You have to hold it,” instructed Maddie. “And look in.” Their faces appeared, rounded out in the glossy surface. “Keep looking. These were all the rage, you know, in my twenties’ hey-day. Every big house had one.”

“Did you used to live here, Maddie? In the cottage?” asked Ella.

“No, but I used to visit it a lot.” Maddie gave a husky, vampish chuckle. “Rod’s parties were terrific fun. So was he. No. I once lived in the house where you bought the witch ball.”

“So – I brought you here?”

“You did. Now. Concentrate.”

They both looked into the witch ball and, rather like the skin of a bubble, the surface seemed to stretch and thin, so they looked through an oily pattern of pinks and greens. Then a clear scene appeared. In a restaurant, Ella could see Maddie seated at a white-clothed table alone. She turned in her seat to stare directly at Ella, making her jump. The Maddie in the witch ball pointed at a nearby table, which came into focus. There, was Ella’s Ben! Ben who needed space and was finding that, although he loved her, he wasn’t happy. There was nobody else, he had said because, of course, she had asked. But of course, as she could now see, there was someone else. He was having dinner with another girl and they were gazing at each other in that rapt way which only lovers can do. Ella instantly saw a difference in the rapport he had with this girl. In this case, it was clearly Ben who was the more besotted, whereas in theirs, Ella suddenly realised, it had always been more on her side to want to be with him so exclusively that any other social life ceased to matter.

The scene began to dim and the witch ball’s skin thickened and closed over to the hard blue mirror gloss of before, but Ella could only see her own face in it now. She turned to where Maddie had sat beside her. She was gone.

“How do I know it’s true?” Ella cried.

“You don’t!” called back an ethereal sounding Maddie, growing more distant. “You can only trust your instincts, darling! I’d advise you to take notice of them…”

“Maddie!” called Ella, agitatedly shaking the witch ball, but the clock had just struck midnight, the thirteenth night after Christmas was over and Maddie was back in the witch ball. Ella looked about. There were no champagne glasses and there was no drinks cabinet in the other room. She hung the witch ball carefully back up again, saying, “When I go home, Maddie, I’ll leave you here where you belong. Who knows, I may come again next year!”

A tinkling laugh replied, or it might just have been that Ella had knocked the Christmas tree’s baubles when climbing down the ladder again. She found, though, that for the first time in weeks, she felt easier in her mind. There was not some mysterious fault to be worried over, some fatal flaw in her behaviour, or their relationship, that she could have rectified if she only knew what it was. She didn’t have to sit and wait any more to hear if Ben wanted to come back, feeling guilty for driving him away somehow. Let him try it, she thought to herself with spirit. No. It was time to be fair to herself. And tomorrow, it really would be time to put Christmas away too.

She slept far better than she expected and the next day, well wrapped up, she went out for a walk in the melting January snow, greeted by fellow walkers, often with dogs, all exchanging jovial ‘Happy New Years’ with people they were seeing for the first time in this year, emerging from being housebound. She saw the elderly couple from New Year’s Eve, who called, “Come to the pub with us! There’s always a bit of a get together lunch-time just after twelfth night. Cheers us up when it’s all over!”

She was happy to accept, mingling with friendly faces, men and women, old, young and middle-aged, tramping along in their wellingtons to the village pub.

“I’m glad you said yes,” said one young man who fell into step beside her, a pleasant smile being most of what she could see of his face under a big bobble hat with ear muffs. “I’ve been dying to say hello to somebody new around here!”

“Well, thank you,” Ella laughed back, feeling light-hearted with the load lifted from her by Maddie’s witch ball reading. “I’ll try not to disappoint!”

She was looking forward to her day and then to packing away the tree with its baubles when she got back to the cottage. Ella was staying until the weekend. It was high time to say goodbye to everything about last year and to greet whatever might be new in this one.