Happy New Year and a belated Happy Christmas

So the time has come to tell the story that has been brewing in my head for a while. It has changed a few times since the thought of writing a Christmas ghost story and the fact that I am hideously late for Christmas Cards.

One of the exponents of the Christmas Ghost story is, of course, Charles Dickens – but like the courses in a Christmas dinner there are many writers. One of the writers that I admire for his use of the aforementioned genre is the man named Montague Rhodes James. He was known for being a scholar in mediaeval history, a provost of King’s College in Cambridge (1905-1918) and was at Eton School until 1936. But his ghost stories, which have had many incarnations as radio and television plays, were written as a Christmas Eve entertainment and were read aloud to a gathering of friends. So if I am to obey the Jamesian rules of his ghost tale (established in 1929), I have five to adhere to:

1) The pretense of truth
2) A “pleasing terror”
3) No gratuitous bloodshed or sex
4) No “explanation of the machinery”
5) Setting: “those of the writer’s (and reader’s) own day”

If, of course, you would like to read one of Mr. James’ own ghost stories, as mine will pale into the swirling mist of a new dawn, can I suggest you look at the story entitled, “Whistle And I’ll Come To You” (http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0163.pdf). However if you dare read any further:

The Mirror

I could tell you that I am telling you this tale from comfortable, leather and wing-backed armchair by a coal fuelled fire surrounded by books. But that would not be the truth and this is the time, New Year’s morning, is exactly the time to tell the truth.

The crying of seagulls and the paddling noise of the webbed feet on the flat roof of a rented seaside flat woke me up this morning. There was a dull thud along the left-handed side of my head, more to the feeling that if any spare room in my cranium was filled with a semi-liquid like glue. I had been reading a paperback on the scientific writings of Stephen Jay Gould; I have a pile of paperbacks perched on the water reservoir of the toilet bowl in the bathroom. When I have a quiet thirty minutes to myself, I pick a book at random, open it up and indulge my curious literary appetite. This time, as I had already stated, I was deep into the Mister Gould’s scientific outpourings. The line that I had to read twice, as I poured some semi-skimmed milk on the amber blooming teabag that floated like a bloated body on the surface of the tea bag, had something to do with a mirror and survival. That was when a scrap of paper floated out from amongst the leaves of the book. It had a black and slightly-spidery, hand writing style that I didn’t fully recognise as mine to start off with, the message, itself, took longer to translate. As I understood that I had written the note upside down and by the look of it, backwards without the aid of a mirror. The dark letters when rearranged spelt out the message below. I ask you not read the message aloud, especially if you have a mirror in the room where you read this, you may think me superstitious but maybe my cautionary tale will explain what causes my visual vigilance:
Don’t trust the mirror

I had recently moved from my original flat, it was a time of a renaissance; new friends, new job, new surroundings and the removal men had been pretty thorough in their translocation of my belongings. No such damage had been recorded and by the end of the second night I had got most of the boxes folded in to their smallest dimensions and stored in the cupboard under the communal stairs. The new job was an easy one. It was one where I would virtually move information from one filing cabinet to another. The only problem was it was virtual.

I was stuck in an office that when busy sounded like a flock of flamingos nesting and chattering on one of those soda lakes in East Africa, but on the very slow days you could throw a paper aeroplane from one side of the office to the inoperable window at the far side without hitting anyone on its inevitable flight path – as there was no-one there. The swapping of data from one file to another led to a crick in my neck, a pain in my wrists and a distinct weariness in my vision. So I thought nothing of my reflections in the mornings and evenings when I returned home and looked at the full-length mirror in my sitting room come kitchenette.

The first signs that I saw reflected in the mirror was a greying of the hair around my temples, nothing much odd you say. The job could be quite stressful, especially if your line manager didn’t get the results she wanted, so she would pass on those inadequacies in her life coupled with the shit that got passed down onto her from her area manager. So a greying of a few hairs wasn’t much too complain about and nothing that a bottle of hair dye would cure. But at the office, in there less than salubrious surroundings of an office toilet block, I would look for those annoying greying hairs and would find none. I didn’t think much of it to start with but since I had no mirror in my pitiful excuse of a bathroom at the flat, there was no place to hang one. So I had to use that one full-length mirror in the sitting room and normally not at a decent hour of the day when there was enough light. So for the next week, I did the usual game of checking the colour of my hair at work and at home, each place showed an opposite vision.

(The next chapter tomorrow...honest) Any comments, please feel free to add some...