Edith's Ghosts - a ghost story for Christmas

Did she look dead? Probably. Probably to a third party – her husband, perhaps, popping in from the neat little garden to see how she was – Edith might look dead. But then he would notice the cigarette in its holder and the wisp of blue-grey smoke curling its way upwards like a genie.

Edith smiled. She liked that image. And lying in the comfortable bed, surrounded by exotically embroidered cushions and shawls, all in reds and violets and Roman purples – the shades of romance, violence and vengeance – she felt as if she were in some ancient fairy tale. Or one of her own stories perhaps.

She took a long drag on the cigarette and then spent a full minute coughing till her ribs ached. Her sweet doctor – what was his name? – had warned her repeatedly against the habit. But what was the point of warnings now? Might as well enjoy her last days. And so here she lay, like the Queen of Sheba, waiting, waiting, waiting…

Waiting for what?

How would Death come?

To one with such a remarkable and fecund imagination as Edith Nesbit (even if she did say so herself), all manner of phantasms suggested themselves. A shrouded, faceless ghoul, perhaps, like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? Accompanied by a sonorous, tolling bell and perhaps with scythe in skeletal claw? Or a great shining white light – like a door opening onto summer – and a chorus of beatific angels? Or would it be the face of a loved one, as everyone secretly hoped? Coming to claim one for the Great Beyond with a happy, beaming smile and assurances that all would be well? Perhaps it would be Hubert, her late husband. Or perhaps darling Fabian. Her son. The son who…

Edith’s drawn face clouded. The memory of his loss still pierced her like a hat pin, even after all these years. Yes, perhaps it would be him she would see. Standing at the foot of the bed, arms open, smiling.

Or perhaps… Edith allowed herself a little smile. She remembered something else. A feeling which had – there was no other word for it – haunted her since childhood. She took another draw on her cigarette and felt her mind tick-tick-ticking back through the years.

They had been travelling. Travelling for her sister’s health – though ultimately nothing could be done for those poor, consumptive lungs of Mary’s. At first, the prospect of so much foreign travel had been thrilling. There had been joyous dashes to gaily liveried trains, wreaths of steam, shrieking whistles. Mysterious foodstuffs in paper packets and sour fruit jellies that made her mother’s face screw up in distaste. It had been very funny. But then Edith had become homesick. Homesick as only a small child can ever be. Filled with a deep longing in her bones for the certainty of home. The crackling fireside. Her dolls. Her picture books. The gilt-framed picture of poor, dear Daddy…

They had reached Bordeaux and Edith had found herself yet again kicking her boots against the wall and picking idly at the edge of her none-too-white pinafore. Then someone had mentioned the mummies…

Mummies! This was more like it. But it was not the lure of the exotic that caught Edith’s imagination and made her eyes sparkle like boot buttons. It was the whiff of familiarity. Of the long, clean, white galleries of the Bloomsbury Museum. The glitter of gold. The neatly printed explanatory notes written in English, not boring old French. The kindly guides peering at her over their half-moon spectacles, explaining this dynasty and that Pharaoh in the calm, measured tones of home. Yes. A visit to some mummies! That would do very nicely.

It was the whiff of decay, though, that Edith had caught as she and her sister trudged behind the French guide, a small figure in a greasy blue jacket and trousers, which looked like they were made from old ship’s sails. This odour, the guide had explained, was because the mummies were not embalmed as by the Egyptians but preserved by the special soil of that area.

The door to the vault had been skreaked open by then, revealing a small, cramped room and tiny blue lamp, burning and sputtering and sending a curl of smoke upwards, just like Edith’s cigarette.

But the vault was not like the Bloomsbury Museum. It was very much not.

Standing behind the railing that ran around the place were hundreds of skeletons, propped upright; still clothed in flesh, or the dry, leathery, vile remnants of it. Many were still actually clothed; like some ghastly parade of past fashions. This season’s look? Dust and mould. Mushroom brown and bog-leather black. They seemed to grin at little Edith, their teeth horribly exposed by the hardened flesh that had retreated back in death, as though wrenched, protesting, screaming from the grave. And their hands seemed to reach out towards her. “Come,” they seemed to whisper. “Come…”

Those dreadful apparitions had fixed themselves upon her brain from that moment on. And they had turned up again and again in her stories, hadn’t they, the waking dead? In the Crystal Palace dinosaurs coming to life. In the Ugly-Wuglies, made of old coats and sticks and pillowcases. And, of course, in those famous knights of hers. Those tomb effigies, getting up and walking around, “man-size in marble…”

Perhaps that would be what would find her at the end. Shuffling forwards out of the shadows of her bedroom, blank eyes fixed on her. Stone fingers clawing at the counterpane…

Edith gasped. There was something at the foot of the bed. Crouched, shadowy, full of menace. She relaxed. Gave a little grunt of a laugh. Just her dressing gown, she realised, hanging from the corner of a papier-mâché screen. That old silk rag, torn and patched and re-patched umpteen times, that she’d picked up on one of her more memorable travels.

She shifted her head on the pillow to dispel the garment’s sinister look. But the impression persisted. As if someone were waiting in the corner. A lumpen, bent thing, watching with eyes as dark as its wispy contours.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said aloud.

But Edith was afraid…

Edith's Ghosts artwork by Red Dress

Read more:

• Mark Gatiss reveals Doctor Who connection in his Ghost Story for Christmas
• Mark Gatiss explains why he changed the ending of Lot No. 249

Mark Gatiss has also written and directed A Ghost Story for Christmas: Woman of Stone – adapted from Edith Nesbit's chilling short story Man-Size in Marble – airing on Christmas Eve at 10:15pm on BBC Two.

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