Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River (24 page)

He swallowed, then put his face in his hands.
I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?

He’d been saying that all week, all fall, ever since he started doing
A Christmas Carol
. He had thought nothing more than lines in a play. But it wasn’t.

There was a reason people remembered that story.

Roth’s father still wore his chains. But Roth was still alive. He could break his chains. Forge new chains.

Become unstuck.

He looked up at Erika. “I’ve been unfair to you.”

She shook her head. “I’m the one who ran away from you.”

“We were kids,” he said, forgiving them both.

“We’re not kids any more,” she said.

He took her hand. It was warm and soft and familiar. How could a hand he hadn’t touched in fifteen years feel like one he touched every single day? One he needed every single day.

She slipped her hand out of his. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to talk about that girl,” he said.

“Hannah?”

“I never learned her name,” he said.

“She’s going to be eighteen in two months. The teachers are going to find her a new place to live, help her finish her last semester, get her to the right college. I was going to write letters and maybe research scholarships.”

“She won’t need a scholarship,” Roth said. “I can pay for—”

Erika put a finger over his mouth. He wanted to kiss it, but he didn’t. Not yet. “She needs to do this on her own. Or think she is. There are other ways to help.”

He gently removed her finger from his lips. “Like what?”

“I don’t know all of them yet,” she said. “But I’ll tell you as I learn.”

“You’ll stay in touch?” he asked.

“If you want me to,” she said.

Oh, God,
he nearly said.
Of course I do. I’ve felt so lost without you.

He would never say such things, never had said such things. Never would. Then he wondered why not. So he said, “I don’t ever want to lose you again.”

Erika stepped back. He felt it as if she had created a real absence.

“Did I say too much?” he asked. “I thought—”

“You just felt sorry for me,” she said. “That’s all. You never really cared—”

“Jesus Christ, Erika,” he said. “I still dream about you. I’ve missed you every single day. I’ve never loved anyone else.”

She stared at him. He held his breath. He’d never felt like this—hopeful and terrified at the same time.

Then she launched herself into his arms. He pulled her close. They were kissing and it felt like he had never been kissed in his entire life. Three wives, a dozen girl friends, even more groupies and stage kisses and this felt like the very first time.

He felt like a drowning man who had just come up for air.

“Don’t leave me again,” he whispered against her mouth.

She froze, then leaned back so he could see her stunning face.

“Don’t let me go,” she said.

“I won’t,” he said. “I promise.”

“I promise too,” she said, and went back to kissing him, as if they were buried in a pile of mistletoe.

He wasn’t sure he could make this work. But he knew, this was the first time in all of his relationships, in his entire life, that he wanted to make it work. On a deep level, an elemental level, down in his very soul.

Erika took his face in her hands, and smiled at him. And for the first time in years, he smiled back—a real smile, not a stage smile. A smile that came from deep within him.

A smile he knew he would only ever share with her.

Introduction to
“Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies”

Carole Nelson Douglas calls herself a literary chameleon, and she proves it with this tale. “Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies” bridges our contemporary ghost stories with Anthea Lawson’s Regency, “A Countess For Christmas.”

Carole’s sixty contemporary and historical novels have made mystery, romance, and science fiction/fantasy bestseller lists. Her groundbreaking debut of female Sherlockian protagonist Irene Adler was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year, also winning mystery and romance awards. She currently writes the long-running Midnight Louie feline PI mysteries and Delilah Street noir urban fantasies, which inhabit a bipolar Las Vegas worlds apart. Carole holds
RT Book Reviews
Lifetime Achievement Awards for Versatility, Suspense, Mystery, and as a Pioneer of Publishing. Over the last few years, she’s started reissuing her entire backlist.

About this story, she writes, “Who can resist a Regency rakehell? Not me. Twenty years ago, my novella, ‘The Rakehell’s Christmas Angel,’ explored the holiday of redemption, the attractions of a Regency hell, and a heavenly love story. ‘Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies’ allows me to tread the same eternally conflicted territory of the heart from another angle.”

She adds that nothing makes fiction richer than a redemption theme, and warns that the three-legged cat is just a metaphor.

Miss Merriweather’s Christmas Follies

Carole Nelson Douglas

Oh! Happy tricksome time of mirth

Giv'n to the stars of sky and earth!

May all the best of feeling know,

The custom of the mistletoe.

—
The Mistletoe,
1827

Dark Angel was the heaviest heavy metal band on two continents, but lead singer Adrian Lord heard the country Gothic song, “When the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” as he blacked out onstage in front of 30,000 fans.

His fading consciousness saw three tiers of screaming Dark Angel fans slide up into some no man’s land above his vision. As his body folded into itself, he watched the Goth girl groupies in the mosh pit climbing over each other to reach him. Scrawny tattooed arms and black-painted fingernails clawed for him. Black-lipsticked mouths yawned open in a mockery of Munch’s famous painting,
The Scream
.

The band played on. Adrian envisioned his mates’ closed eyes as they massaged their screaming guitars and egos for the audience, unaware that their lead singer was going down for the count.

An approaching roadie disappeared at the rim of his shuttering vision. Had he OD’ed? Or had his heart just burst? And then true blackness took him out. Dead out.

***

Even in total darkness, he couldn’t escape the screaming, the electric guitars reaching insanely high pitches until it seemed human voices had blended into the shrill, yodeling blare of oncoming emergency vehicles.

Maybe Adrian Lord would live to rock on another day. . . .

Except, the siren screams were fading too. Utter silence shocked his sensitively wired ears. He lay flat, his artistically stubbled jaw rubbing cheeks with rough stone, not the smooth wood of a concert stage. A reek of rotten food and . . . excrement filled his coke-reddened nostrils. His body heat was ebbing, edging him toward the disgusting process of decay too. A distant tunnel of light beckoned. Maybe he deserved this humiliating end.

As if what little remained of his senses switched from one cable channel to another, the cold stone beneath him turned slick. All odor dissipated.

Cautious, Adrian brushed his palms over the new surface, thrilled to feel small grout lines. A tiled floor. He wasn’t dead yet. They must have taken him to a . . . hospital ER? Adrian struggled to focus through the sweat-curled locks of his shoulder-length hair.

The damn leather pants were so tight he could barely move his legs enough to rise. Still, in moments he stood, gazing around the damnedest hospital receiving area he’d ever seen. Bloody hell! Columns of white marble thrust into the overhead darkness. A white marble floor stretched into infinity, bordered with black insets. Man, he’d love that look for the indoor pool at his Malibu mansion.

He took a couple of shaky steps in the thigh-high leather boots swagged with chains and pierced with crystal studs. Why hadn’t they removed his performance clothes? Naw, then he’d get a wussy hospital gown. That would kill his hard-won “the Bad Boy from Bristol” rep. He lurched toward the ultra-modern admittance desk, merely a black marble column with a huge book balancing on its top. Behind it stood dark double doors of exit, or maybe entrance.

At least another human being shared this cold, vast space.

Adrian faced an oddly ageless dude wearing a seriously passé glitter-rock outfit of festooned jacket, black knee-pants with white knee-highs, and shoes more ballet slippers than brogues.

“Mr. Lord,” the man said in a precise, cold voice as he looked up from the book. “You do present as much of a problem dead as alive.”

“Dead?” Adrian laughed his relief. “Then I’m the walking dead, buddy.”

“I am not your ‘buddy.’ You may call me Pitt.”

“You may call me mind-blown. What kind of low-rent hospital leaves the patient to check himself in?” An evil thought struck. “Wait! Is this some freaky ‘intervention’? Am I in one of those exclusive rehab joints? It’d be just like my so-called pals and my bloodsucking agents to pull some knockout drops stunt onstage. You should know I’m here against my will, and I have the money and legal clout to sue the fancy pants off you and your entire operation. Pitt.”

“I doubt that, Mr. Lord,” Pitt said.

Adrian had mastered that upper-crust fancy, nancy-boy diction on his way out of the projects, so he machine-gunned out his own identity. “That’s right. Pitt. I
am
the world-famous Adrian Lord. I’m richer than a Russian oligarch.”

He eyed the imposing marble and snorted. Man, he wished he actually had something
to
snort, right now. “I can make you all regret this kidnapping to the soles of your best party slippers. Pitt.”

“I dare say so, Mr. Lord. The management is regretting the problems you’ve posed already.”

“Well, then. I’ll just leave.”

Adrian turned and recoiled to see a horrible figure, a gaunt tattered dwarf layered in rags that would be landfill laundry in the U.S. Out of them peered a thin dirty face. Its hollow, watery blue eyes stared at him and through him into some long-hidden abyss of shame that made him cringe.

“My God,” Adrian said, recalling the loathsome Bristol slums he’d escaped as soon as he could.

He heard Pitt cough and turned to find the impervious bloke wincing in pain. “Silence. We do not use that foul Name here. And that piece of filth is not allowed.”

He looked beyond Adrian and his expression curdled even more. “
You
again.” He addressed the apparition. “The Yorick Society does not admit ragamuffins of your sort. Moreover, you are interfering with the induction of this gentleman. He is richly worthy of admittance to our company, despite living in a lamentably modern age where sin in the classic sense is much harder to come by.”

A blaze of vague light haloed the pitiful figure.

“I want ’im,” the waif said, in a street accent right out of
Oliver Twist
, “to ’ave a second chance.”

“Why?” Pitt demanded. “He killed you.”

Adrian whipped his attention back to the elegant doorman. “Killed? I killed someone?”

“An accident, it was,” the waif said, not looking at Adrian. “And you,” she told Pitt, “know where I’m fated to keep for eternity. Besides, this is not the Adrian Lord who killed me. ’E’s a descendent.”

Pitt was unmoved. “We at the Yorick Club welcome our long generational tradition. The first Adrian, as I recall, barely missed membership. What an admirable rake.”

Pitt was now rhapsodizing like a tween girl. “He gambled, bankrupted men, committed adultery with their wives. His only flaw was he had never deflowered a virgin. Your lot wanted a second chance for him too, but his latest descendent lived two hundred years in the future, when our side had been so successful that virgins capable of being deflowered were hard to come by.

“
This
current Adrian”—Pitt’s dark eyes glittered with satisfaction as he turned to Adrian—“was born into an even more dissolute age . . . Oh, such lovely sins that even the clergy are joining us in droves now. This man has an entire club composed of virgins he deflowers after every performance.”

“They are willing,” the child said. “That does not make him worthy of Hell.”

“I disagree. Mr. Lord,” Pitt addressed him, “you and your train of lovely glittering sins of the flesh and pride and greed and lust would earn you instant admittance in the usual case . . . .”

“Pitt. Are you . . . talking about Hell?”

“Of course, Mr. Lord. This is Reception. We call it the Yorick Club.”

“Isn’t that Hamlet’s dead jester’s name?”