The Seasonal Ghost Story Challenge

[caddyman]

Having issued the seasonal challenge, I thought it incumbent upon me to write a contribution. So, in exactly 500 words, the 500 word seasonal ghost story. I hope you enjoy it:

I stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me. Inside the service proper had ended and the carols begun. For the first time in seven years there was no blackout and the light spilt out of the church windows.

I needed a cigarette.

The moon was bright, the sky clear. An inch of snow had fallen that morning, but now there was a freezing mist above it, making the moon-lit churchyard look like the set of a Bela Lugosi movie.

One minute into Christmas Day.

I took a cigarette from its case and lit it; in the sudden flare of the match I noticed them for the first time. A young man: hair cut short and slicked down with Brylcreem, a double breasted seaman’s three-quarter coat over pale, dirty trousers and boots. He was standing looking at a gravestone just away from the main path; next to him holding his hand stood a little girl in a long coat. Her dark, sad eyes stared out of a pale, hungry face. Her hair was wet.

“Jim, come inside. You’re missing the carols” my wife whispered through the door. Cigarette finished, I turned to go back in for the rest of the service. Thinking how cold they must be, I called the pair inside. The church wasn’t well heated, but it was better than out here.

Later, when we were again outside ready to walk home, one of the children came scuttling back to the light of the vestry door, clutching a wet and bedraggled teddy bear that she’d found next to a gravestone. “Over there,” she said indicating the very place I’d noticed the man and girl earlier. There was a single set of footprints: hers. There had been no more snow.

The vicar saw the grave that I was eyeing with curiosity and spoke to no-one in particular, “A tragic case indeed, that one” he said sadly. “Mr and Mrs Roberts were killed during the Blitz four years ago. Their daughter Sally was nine years old and had been evacuated to the country; their eldest son, Bob was killed at sea when his ship struck a mine in the Western Approaches. On VE Day, too. His body was never found. Sally idolised him and never got over the shock of his death; it was too much for the child’s mind and she ran away to find her brother. The police found her body trapped in the weir. The entire family casualties of the war: tragic and upsetting.”

I looked at the stone more closely, there was an inscription barely visible in the light from the church porch: Together forever.

We walked home in silence, not noticing the cold. I reflected upon how lucky I was to have my family around me again after all these years. I linked my arm through my wife’s and smiled. Behind us, Bob and Sally came chattering along just like in the old days, she sitting on his shoulders.

Together forever.

Cross posted between my LJ and just_writing