STAVE ONE

THE GHOST OF BILL HUNT

William "Bill" Hunt was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the forensic expert and, Mac Taylor signed the police report about his death. And at the CSI venue of New York the name Mac Taylor enjoyed great credibility, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Bill Hunt "the savage", first partner of lieutenant Taylor as well as his instructor, was dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.

You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Bill Hunt was as dead as a door-nail.
Mac Taylor knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Seventeen years before, when he still was an inexpert officer, they had arrested together Raymond Harris because of drug and weapons possession; the carryall full of Harris's money had tempted Hunt, who stole 200,000 dollars, leaving Mac subscribing the report about the carryall delivery and making him being shown as scapegoat in case of problems. Just free, Harris had looked for the two officers and, at the end of a car chase, had killed Hunt, guilty of soiling his hands with the death of Miranda, beloved girlfriend of the convict.

In short, Mac personally had witnessed at Bill Hunt's death and he was one of the few to attend at his funeral.

The mention of Hunt's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot - say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance - literally to astonish his son's weak mind.
Without any doubt Mac Taylor was so terribly shaken from the sad event to celebrate it, as a workaholic as he was, with an hard working day the same day of the funeral.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Mac Taylor: a rude, aloof, implacable old sleuth! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his features, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, stiffened his gait and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Mac Taylor. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often "came down" handsomely, and Mac Taylor never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, "My dear, how are you? When will you come to see me?" No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, "No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"

But Mac couldn't care less! It was what the most delighted him. Pushing him through the crowded streets of the life, moving away every human liking.

Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—lieutenant Taylor sat busy in his office. It was cold, bleak, biting weather, foggy withal; and he could hear the people in the streets outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their chests, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already (it had not been light all day) and the lights in the neighboring offices were surfacing trembling, like red stains on the palpable, dark air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.

Mac Taylor had sent Danny Messer in his office for imparting him what he had decided about his request of having the next day, Christmas day, free of work.

"I'm sorry, Danny" he said to him, without too much contrite air "You know our job never stops, people commit crimes and kill themselves at Christmas too, and I can't leave uncovered a duty like yours".

"But…" the other had risked, who was growing acrimonious "It's the first Christmas day of Lucy… I wanted to stay at home with her and Lindsay!".

"Exactly" Mac answered "I've already given her a free day and I need you here. You know that a year ago I gave you a day off because she was pregnant. This year I can't, many are ill and others had already worked at Christmas day last year"".

"Then" he added with a smile that didn't raise the temperature of the room of a half a centigrade "Lucy is still young, she wouldn't have remembered anything!"

Danny didn't say anything, disappointed and sad, knowing how much Lindsay would have been disappointed. To not talk about him: after all that had happened in the previous months - his wounding, the period spent on the wheelchair when he feared he won't have walked anymore, the serial killer Sean Casey who had followed them during the journey and had broke into their house, kidnapping the baby - that feast seemed to him a way to thank God all had been ok and Lindsay and him were still together, with a little angel. However, he knew that his boss was an hard bone and that, once he had decided, the hope to make him change mind - at Christmas too - were practically inexistent.

He grumbled something that Mac didn't understand, but that wasn't surely a declaration of eternal friendship.

"Come on" he said to him to dismiss him, as the thing could in some way cheer him up instead of making it worse definitely "Tomorrow I'll be at work too!".

"Obviously" the young agent wanted to exclaim at that moment "You don't have anybody to spend Christmas Day with, for you it's a day like another one!".

"Merry Christmas to everybody! God bless you!" a joyful voice suddenly trilled. It was the one of the forensic expert Sid Hammerback, rushed into Mac's office with so unexpected way that these words were the first signal of his arrival.

"Bah" Mac said "Humbug!".

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, the good doctor, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug!" he exclaimed "You don't mean that, I am sure?".

"I do" Mac said "Merry Christmas! What right do we have to be happy? Why should we be happy? The evil doesn't stop for the feasts; people lie, steal, kill, hate also at Christmas. On the contrary, sometimes more at Christmas than in working days!".

"Don't be in a bad mood!" Sid retorted, dejected.

"What else can I be" the lieutenant answered "when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Everyone says "Merry Christmas"! But what is Christmas if not a day like the other, a period when you see your way an year older, but not an hour richer? If I could work my will" he continued indignantly "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should have a little tour on your autopsy table, Sid, then buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!".

"Mac!" Sid Hammerback entreated.

"Sid" the other one replayed "Celebrate Christmas in your way and let me celebrate it like I want to!".

"Celebrate!" the doctor repeated "But you don't celebrate it!"

"Let me not doing it, then" Mac said "Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!"

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned Sid "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

Danny, who was still standing in the office, involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he crossed his arms on his chest and put his hands under his armpits, trying to become smaller as far as disappear.

"Let me hear another sound from you," Mac Taylor said, "and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your employment!" .

"Don't be angry, Mac, come on. Dine with us tomorrow" Sid replayed.

Mac said that he would see him—yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

"I'm really sorry, with all my heart… but I went here with my Christmas spirit and I'll keep my Christmas mood until the end" Sid Hammerback concluded "So, Merry Christmas, Mac!".

"Have a nice work!" Mac said.

"And happy new year!".

"Have a nice work!" Mac said.
Nevertheless, the doctor left the office, followed by Danny Messer, without the smallest disappointing word.

Mac Taylor came back to his work with a higher himself opinion and a better mood than usually.

Meanwhile the fog and the darkness thickened so, that along the street, despite the lights of the street lamps, you could hardly see in front of you. The ancient tower of a church became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. A damaged hydrant in solitude, its overflowing sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. The commerce became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do.

The mayor of New York, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave instruction to the fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a mayor's household should; and even the young mason, who an agent had given him a fine for bothering drunkenness last Monday, finished to prepare the Christmas tree in his poor house, while his wife and his son sallied out to buy the necessary for the dinner..
Foggier yet, and colder. Piercing, searching, biting cold.

At the end Mac went home. Badly moody, he stood up and went out in the snow; as soon as he was in the street, a boy stopped in front of him to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of
"God bless you, merry gentleman!
May nothing you dismay!"

Mac seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

Mac took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy diner; and having read all the newspapers, pausing particularly on the crime news, and beguiled the rest of the evening with the tv, went home to bed.

He lived in one of several anonymous building of New York, put the finishing touches with red bricks, neither particularly ugly and nor particularly pretty: however, at every window colored lights, twinkling comets, paper chains sparkled that night, and behind the glasses, where the calm domestic privacy could be seen, other decorated fir trees peeped out. At every window except, obviously, detective Mac Taylor's.

The power had one off and the yard was so dark that even the agent, who knew every meter, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the mirror in the hall, except it was a bit dirty and filmy. It is also a fact, that Mac Taylor had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place.

Also that the detective had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of New York, even including (which is a bold word) the corporation, alderman, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Mac Taylor had not bestowed one thought on his ex colleague Bill Hunt "the savage".

And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Mac Taylor, crossing the hall, saw in the mirror

without its undergoing any intermediate process of change, not himself, but William Hunt's face, called "the savage".

Bill Hunt's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at his ex colleague as he used to look: with his ghostly, sparkling eyes on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid color, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.
As Mac looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was his image again.
To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he took the lift and, arrived at his floor, walked on the brown-carpet corridor up to his entrance door. But he put his hand upon the key, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted the room.

"Bah!" he said and closed the door with a bang. he sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. But Mac was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked quietly across the hall, and made a tour of the flat to make sure it was all right. He remembered the face too well to not do it.

Living-room, bedroom, study, kitchen, bathroom: everything was as it had to be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa, on the desk the usual pile of files of unsolved cases that he had brought with him from the office. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his jacket and put on his dressing-gown and slippers; he sat down on his armchair with a handbook about digital prints. He looked through the pages, that he perfectly knew, but the face of Bill Hunt, dead by a long time, arrived as the staff of that old prophet and swallowed up everything. If every image had been a neutral surface, with the property of taking a shape and color by the messy chips of Mac Taylor's thoughts, in every one there would have been a copy of old Hunt's face.

"Humbug!" Mac said; and walked across the room. After several turns, he sat down again. As he sat down, with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, he heard the door bell, the entry phone, the alarm clock, the oven timer and all the other bells of the house ringing together, all of a sudden. This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain. Mac then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

The front door flew open with a booming sound, and then the detective heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

"It's humbug still!" he said "I won't believe it."
His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, every bulb in the flat leaped up, as though it cried, "I know him; William Hunt's Ghost!" and fell again, leaving the agent in the darkness.

The same face: the very same. Bill Hunt, the same he had buried some time ago. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle; it was long, and wound about him like a tail. His body was transparent: Mac Taylor had often heard it said that his ex instructor had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes. He was a scientist, a rational man and, still incredulous, fought against his senses.

"How now!" said the detective, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"
"Much!"—Hunt's voice, no doubt about it.
"Who are you?"
"Ask me who I was."
"Who were you then?" said Mac, raising his voice. "You're particular, for a shade." He was going to say "to a shade," but substituted this, as more appropriate.
"In life I was ex colleague William Hunt."
"Can you… can you sit down?" asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.
"I can."
"Do it, then."
The ghost sat down on the armchair next to that where the agent was, as if he were quite used to it.
"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.
"I don't," said Mac.
"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?"
"I don't know," said Mac.
"Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because," said the detective, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Mac Taylor was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, he felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Mac could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and shirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapor from an oven.

"You see this toothpick?" said the agent, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.
"I do," replied the Ghost.
"You are not looking at it," said Mac.
"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."
"Well!" returned Mac, "I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you! humbug!"
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Mac held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, and at the same time he opened the shirt, showing the hole made by the bullets fired by Raymond Harris.
Mac fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?"
"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or not?"
"I do," said Mac. "I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"
"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!"
Again the specter raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.
"You are fettered," said Mac, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "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?"
Mac trembled more and more.

"But you too" continued the ghost of William Hunt "you are forging yours, with the dryness, the indifference towards your neighbor, the absence of tender feelings, the loneliness".

Mac got dismay hearing the ghost speaking in that way and he couldn't counter anything. Then, he took heart.

"But you're a thief, a murderer! Me, instead, I spent my life fighting against those like you…" he exclaimed.

"And who are you to judge what is good and, instead, what is evil? Do you maybe think you're over God's laws? Do you think you're exempt from the wrong? You're spending your life in the loneliness, avoiding every human liking, neglecting your soul and devoting yourself just to work!".

"Hear me!" cried the Ghost. "My time is nearly gone."
"I will," said Mac.

"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day."
It was not an agreeable idea. The agent shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

"That is no light part of my penance," pursued the Ghost. "I am here tonight because I'm in debt with you: seventeen years ago I put you in the middle; then, when Harris had been released, because of my fault you risked to be killed too… So, I want to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Mac!".

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."
Mac Taylor's countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost's had done.
"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Bill?" he demanded, in a faltering voice.
"It is."

"I… I think I'd rather not," said Mac.

"Without their visits," said the Ghost, "your destiny will be marked, you'll be doomed to loneliness and pain. Expect the first to-morrow, when the bell tolls One."
"Couldn't I take them all at once, and have it over, Bill?" hinted the detective.
"Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!"

When it had said these words, the specter closed the shirttails and bound it round its head, as before. The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the specter reached it, it was wide open. When they were within two paces of each other, Bill Hunt's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Mac stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The specter, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.
Mac Taylor followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Bill Hunt's Ghost; some few were linked together; none were free.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had been when he walked home.
Mac closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked, as he had locked it with his own hands, and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say "Humbug!" but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.