A Christmas Ghost Story
Chapter 2: Something Wicked
Courtney stood, watching her assistant through the glass wall as she got in the elevator without looking back. After she disappeared from sight, the brunette rolled her eyes dispassionately. She finished gathering her things inside her suitcase and left it on her desk, ready to be taken home.
But Courtney was not going home that night. Actually, she rarely ever went home anymore. Most days she worked until late, and it just was not logical to walk late at night to her apartment in the city.
And Courtney owned no car, nor did she even consider spending money on taxis; she certaintly could afford it, but walking every day saved a dramatic amount of money. Plus, she had a long chair in her office that served for the purpose of laying down whenever she felt too tired.
She did not mind, and in fact almost liked, being at her company for days to end; it was the place where she had reminders of her success in sight. And, at her apartment, she had almost… nothing.
Because of that, she hardly ever left. There was simply too much to do all the time… Courtney knew she needed to make sacrifices if she wanted to achieve everything she wanted to achieve in her lifetime.
At night, the company remained alight. The only dark spot in the whole building was Heather's old office. When Courtney left her office to lock the doors, as every night, she turned to the empty room and stared at it, unlike every night. It looked particularly gloomy that night; Courtney thought that there was probably no moon.
Courtney sipped her coffee as the elevator lowered all the way to the lobby. She went down the five marble steps towards the outer door, keys in hand.
Since the building was an old one, and it did not have much of the technology modern companies had, Courtney was forced to pull by force both extremely old, fifteen-foot-tall doors, which stood open and welcoming during the day, closed—by herself.
One step at a time, she brought both doors together, and put the key in the lock—only to remove it a second later.
"Ah," she gasped softly, and for a moment she abandoned whatever she might have been thinking at the moment, surprised by what she had just seen.
For a moment there, she thought the door handle stopped being a door handle, and became Heather's face.
…Heather's face.
Courtney's mind raced as she tried to rationalize what had just happened. Yes, she had been thinking about Heather right before coming down. But then again, no imagination was strong enough to make you surprised out of your thoughts. She put a hand over her heart, which was racing for no reason.
When she looked at the handle again, it was back to being a handle. Big, round, and not in any way resembling of a human face.
Courtney looked at the cup of coffe in her hand with serious distrust.
Slowly, gingerly, she introduced the key back in the lock. She turned it twice, and when nothing out of the ordinary happened, she did the same with the other three locks under it, gradually arriving to normal speed.
She went back up her steps and started pulling the inner doors closed. When it was only two pulls away from being completely closed, Courtney found herself pausing and staring at the outer doors, where she had seen Heather's face so clearly.
The same ivory skin, same hard black eyes, same stern expression she used to wear; Courtney didn't even think she remembered Heather's features that well. Everything was the same, except the way it made her feel: the face was surrounded in a very ghastly kind. An omen of something wrong, something… wicked.
Courtney shook her head, and her features hardened. Overcome by a sudden outrage, she grabbed the door and slammed it shut. In direct reaction to this, the whole building seemed to shake; the sound echoed all the way up to the last floor. And while this would have made any other person feel considerably uneasy, Courtney was actually reassured by this 'response' of sorts. That way, she knew everything was where it should be; she knew the sounds of her building by heart.
And because she knew the sounds of her building so perfectly well, she immediately knew something was wrong when she heard the wind whistling through the closed windows; the wind had never been able to slip through those windows before. She calmed herself thinking that it was just because the wind must be stronger than other nights.
"Oooooooooooooooooooo…" the wind whistled.
And even though it was physically incongruent, Courtney shivered from a cold she did not feel.
"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…"
She hurried up in going to close the four locks. Even though she told herself she was being irrational, she was very keen on going back to her office, safe, warm, and secure.
She put the key in the first one, turned it twice and moved on to the second one.
"Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…"
She closed the second lock, and moved on to the third. Inserted the key, turned it twice, removed the key.
"…"
Courtney put the key in the last lock and tried to turn it, but it jammed. She fumbled with it for a few seconds, but it wouldn't turn.
She finally removed the key altogether and decided to try again. But when she went to put in the key, it bumped against the lock and fell to the ground, with a resounding group of clinks. Courtney kneeled down desperately.
"Loooooooooooooooooooooo-sseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrr…"
Courtney's head snapped up. "Heather?" she squeaked.
As soon as she heard her own voice, every other sound seemed to stop. Her voice hung, alone, in the air, and she suddenly felt very stupid for the way she had driven herself into paranoia.
She pfft-ed, "How stupid," she said, trying to ignore her shaking voice. She grabbed her forehead, and shook her head as she picked up the keys.
She introduced the key a third time, this time making sure to do it slowly. "So stupid," she murmured to herself. "Getting frightened by the wind… the freakin' wind, no less…"
Click!
In spite of all her puffing and scolding, Courtney turned around violently, pressing herself against the door when she heard this sound. It had been a rather subtle sound, and if she had not been so jumpy, she might not even have heard it.
She scanned her surroundings, and could not find anything that had changed on the scenery… oh, yes. One of the many lights that filled the roof had gone out.
A light had gone out. That was all.
Courtney started massaging her temples as she took a few tentative steps towards the elevator. Her knees felt weak now. She told herself she was probably stressed. Her fingers tightened around her cup of coffee, which she planned on throwing away when she came across a trash can.
She got to the elevator and pressed for her floor, and relaxed inside the compartment. After a while the doors opened and the comforting scenery that greeted her was that of her floor, at the end of which was her office.
She walked out, and immediately heard a sound that again filled her with dread.
Click!
She didn't look up as she continued to walk calmly to her office: she would have sped, but she had too much pride in herself to do that.
Click! Click! Click!
She didn't look up still as more lights behind her went out.
Shoom.
A whole line of light bulbs had gone out.
Courtney's heart was racing. The rate the lights were going out behind her sped and started to catch up with her, and the way to her office suddenly seemed too far away.
Shoom.
Shoom.
SHOOM.
The noise had gone from very subtle to deafening. She heard nothing beside the lights dying, and now she could see nothing, too.
SHOOM.
The brunette finally started running, as fast as she could on heels. She was soon running in darkness, and she didn't have time to call all of this stupid anymore; she was running for her life, if only from the abysmal darkness.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she got to her office—her safe, secure, alight office. She swung the door closed and fastened every bolt.
She stood glued to the door for a while, taking her time to calm down; she was being irrational still, but she was filled with fright for some reason. This had never happened the other nights she worked late. She looked at the lights in the room, and she prayed hard and long that those lights would not go out. She didn't have any candles near, or even a flashlight, because she had never had any use for those before.
Courtney threw the remainder of her coffe in the trash and decided that going to sleep would be the sensible course of action. She lay down on her long chair, and stared at an undefinite point on her office; so that she would get some sleep when all the fright had washed off.
And just when she had started to doze off, she heard it. A sound that froze her blood.
No way.
There was someone in the building. Down below, walking the lobby. No way in hell.
Someone couldn't be on the lobby! She had just closed those doors, and she still had the key! She felt the pocket of her dress to comfirm the last statement.
Whoever or whatever it was, it produced a heaving clanking sound, as if it was dragging an assortment of metal gear along with them.
Courtney, now wide awake, got up, looked around the room frantically and grabbed a black umbrella. It was slick and hard-tipped, and she knew for a fact it could cause some damage. She stood next to the door and held it in swinging position as she ran through every possibility in her mind.
They could be burglars. Ones that apparently made no effort in going unheard; but then, they could have thought the building was empty.
It was not a coworker; nobody else had the key to both doors.
It wasn't a ghost—Courtney wasn't even sure why she had thought of that possibility, but there was no way. Everybody knew ghosts were free spirits; as in, they floated in the air free of weight and they didn't ever drag chains or heavy objects with them.
With seemingly no separation point, she heard the dragging closer and closer until she was certain they were on her very floor. Her fingers tightened around the umbrella until her knuckles turned white. She listened to the sounds getting closer and adopted a fierce expression on her face, as she stood in place like a soldier. No one was getting through. Not under her watch.
Suddenly the sounds stopped. Courtney held her breath as her heart beat a mile an hour.
And then the door swung open, revealing a translucent, hovering-five-inches-off-the-ground figure, so terrifying that Courtney actually wavered and took two steps back, something that had never happened to her before. The figured crossed the room at speed and in no time, it was in front of the stunned brunette.
"Courtney," it said.
The brunette shrieked at top of her lungs, with all the strength of her mezzo-soprano voice, and promtly swung the umbrella violently at the thing.
It went right through it and, as it went out of Courtney's hand, landed five feet ahead with a set of clanks. The being looked at her with annoyance.
Deeply moved by the occurrence, Courtney scurried back, falling on a sitting position and backed away as she stared with her eyes nearly popping, heaving scrambled words,
"You—you— you are… you can't be—but you are a… a…" she couldn't say it.
The spirit saved her the effort. "I'm Heather Rhodes. Your associate."
With that statement, it was as if shadows suddenly cleared from the spirit's face for Courtney; she had been so stunned she had not repaired on the identity of the ghost, but now, it was as if a candle had lightened up her face, allowing her to recognize her old friend.
"Heather…" Courtney whispered, awed.
It was her, no doubts: same long dark hair, same tight features and stern dark eyes; the same she had seen not long ago on the door. Looking past her, she saw an explanation for the dragging noise; behind her, there was a number of metal goods connected to chains that were attached to Heather somehow, disappearing into the folds of her fog-like white dress.
Courtney focused back on her ghostly face. "But—but how? You're… I mean, three years ago, you…"
"What? Died? Oh, don't worry, I know," the spirit said. "I'm not one of those ghosts who don't realize they're dead."
Courtney believed her heart was about to jump out of her chest. She felt for a chair behind her and hoisted herself with her arms to sit on it. "I, uh…Please, t-take a seat," she said.
The spirit narrowed her eyes contemptuously instead. "Don't be stupid," she spat. "Everybody knows ghosts can't sit." Her tone was deriding, but her treating Courtney like she used to helped a great deal to put her at ease. She was still trembling, and her knees still felt weak, but she was able to calm down a little.
"Well, I also thought ghosts weren't supossed to carry stuff," she returned in an equal tone, gesturing to behind Heather.
Heather suddenly looked saddened. Courtney found herself staring at her; she looked so different than the woman she remembered, with her shoulders slouched and her face tired and afflicted. She looked so… miserable.
"So what are those?" Courtney asked quietly.
"That's what I came to warn you about," Heather said. "These," she gestured at her load. "Are the chains I forged in life. Boxes full of treasures, money and gold, that I never shared with anybody but me." She abandoned her somber tone for a moment, and turned to Courtney adopting a more familiar spiteful voice. "Except for a bit of money I left my associate for my memorial, which she did not use."
"Oh! Uh," Nervous at being called out by what was still a potentially dangerous spirit, Courtney explained, "I-I thought it'd be nice to have you buried at sea."
Heather pointed an acussing finger at her. "Bullshit you loser, you're so cheap you let the whole building freeze over s'long as you're warm in your little rathole!"
"Look who's talking! You're worse than me. You used to take pennies out of every month's salary so we could afford that heater!" Courtney countered.
"So? You run this enterprise like it's the military. You're so mean you don't even leave people days off if they're sick," Heather accused with a smirk, laughter in her voice as she exposed the other woman.
"It is an honor to work in this place!" Courtney defended, but she wasn't really offended, and smirked as she fired back, "Remember when you stood up DJ just as punishment for asking you out? Poor guy. He always had a crush on you and you didn't even give him a chance!" Courtney recalled; the accusations had gotten consistently less attacking and more conspiring.
Heather leaned back as she let the memory wash over her. "Oh, yeah" she then laughed guiltily. "That was by far the meanest thing I've ever done."
"No, the meanest was when you clocked people out when they were still working," Courtney contradicted, and they both laughed together again.
Courtney did not feel like she was in presence of a scary ghost anymore; as far as she was concerned, she had an old friend back. Heather and she— they could always be a bit shallow and with each other. The laughter died away and Courtney said, "You were a marketing genius."
"Haha, yeah," the other sighed. Then Heather's head snapped up. "Wait, no. No, it's nothing to be proud of! I was selfish! I was mean!"
Courtney was unsettled at the change in mood, and when her words sunk in, she was even more unsettled. She gave the spirit a long, skeptic look, unable to belive Heather would say something like that and actually mean it.
"You're kidding me, right?"
"I am not kidding! Listen to what I came to tell you! In life all I did was take advantage of the weak and think of no one but myself. Now I'm forced to roam around carrying these everywhere I go."
Courtney listened to her old friend, but was oblivious as to what the big deal was. She walked behind Heather to take a closer look at her 'baggage'.
They were purses and steel boxes; some with locks, some with spin dials and others with nothing. They were even pretty. Okay, they looked heavy to carry, but… she didn't understand why Heather seemed so hateful towards them.
She picked one up, a box, and smiled. "It's what you forged on life, alright. Look at this—this box looks loaded. Full of gold and who knows what else."
The box was suddenly yanked from her hands, so suddenly that it skinned her fingers, and when she looked at the spirit again, it had taken a terrifying quality.
"Oh, yes! Lots of boxes, lots of them!" It screamed, as it seemed to gain size. "Which I cannot ever hope to OPEN! And which I'm forced to carry around ANYWAY!" Courtney immediately lost any feeling of ease she might have had; this wasn't Heather anymore, it was again a menacing spirit. Her hair floated as if it had life of its own, and her features were twisted and distorted in the most perturbing way. "I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't rest! I can only roam around the same old places again and again and again!"
Her voice was booming and evil, and every time she screamed, Courtney felt wind on her face. The brunette was soon desperately pressed against the wall, covering her face with her arms. The spirit's eyes had turned black, and so had the mist-like quality that surrounded her, that quickly went to fill and darken the rest of the room like a thick fog.
The ghost suddenly extended an arm to the wall, shooting out strings of dark power that went to create the pattern of a scene on the wall. Courtney soon realized the figure was Heather herself.
"Every time I was selfish, every time I kept for myself something that could have been shared, a chain was created," she told, still in that inhuman voice. On the wall, a wicked-looking Heather was shown mindlessly taking treasures from other people and denying her own to others in need.
Courtney could not look away from the wall; she was blown away by the twisted spectacle she was mounting.
"Every time I was cruel, left someone behind, or refused to help others, a box was created." The shadow was Heather's ghost now, getting repeatedly chained and weighed down by the boxes. "Boxes after boxes of the weirdest kinds of locks" The shadow took a box and tried to get it open, to no avail. "And not, one, KEY!" The shadow was shown getting more and more desperate, until it tried to smash the box against everything it could find. The torture in its actions, even when the shadow had no face, was painfully evident.
"And YOU," she turned her apalling face to Courtney, who pressed herself harder against the wall. "Are forging your own chains right now— every time you close your heart, every time you're mean or unforgiving or unhelpful or hurtful to people. Eventually, you'll be the same as ME." Courtney realized with a start that the despairing shadow was no longer Heather, but herself.
She suddenly felt the weight of chains on her own body, in a way that was so real that she had to look down to make sure that they weren't really there. She felt one particularly clearly, a fetter around her neck that exerted a mild pressure, enough to make it hard for her to breath normally. She tried to touch it, but only felt the delicate skin of her neck; still she felt the chocking sensation.
She looked up to the wall, and to her dread, the Courtney in the wall pulled desperately at a fetter around her neck. Courtney felt like crying, as the weight her shadow self was attached to seemed to grow in number.
Heather made herself heard again.
"But your weight, Courtney Reyes, will be ten times worse!"
As the ghost said this, the show of shadows dissolved into several erratic bird-like shadows, which lunged at Courtney and swarmed around her. The brunette fell to the ground as she hopelessly batted the shadows, scream after scream pouring from her mouth.
Eventually they faded away, and Courtney looked up, trembling and holding her head. Heather's spirit was still inhumanly tall and mighty; but its features were not as distorted, and the mist she gathered was light again.
"Just a warning," she said, as she got gradually less intimidating. "Just a friendly warning."
"I—is that it?" Courtney spoke suddenly, surprising even herself; hearing something as normal as her own voice seemed alien after what she had just experienced, and she couldn't believe she was talking directly to the being that had made her go through it. "That's my fate? I have no way to change it?"
"That you can," the spirit kneeled down in front of her; she was normal size again. "But it'll take some work in your part. In the following three days, three spirits will come and visit you."
Courtney's heart sunk when she heard this; but she was too scared to protest. She just listened.
"The first will come tomorrow when the clock strikes twelve. The second, the day after tomorrow at the same hour. And… well, you catch my drift," Heather said, and Courtney nodded, if just to keep her happy. "They will show you the error of your ways, better than I ever could."
She got up and finished with a stern warning. "If you're smart, you'll listen to what they have to say. Now, I have to go."
The spirit slowly turned around and crossed the room slowly, routinely picking a chain and throwing it forward, then another, then another in a practised way.
It was at the door when Courtney had recovered enough to speak. "Wait," she called.
The ghost turned. "What?"
"What're you gonna do now?" Courtney asked her.
"What do you think? I'm gonna keep wandering."
"But… don't you get points for this? I mean, why else would you be here?"
"I'm always here, and nobody sees me. I don't know why you suddenly can see me tonight," Heather interjected.
"But—you did your good deed. Shouldn't you get to go to like, purgatory now? You know, something better… than this?"
The spirit looked at her like it would say something. But she just looked at her, and again, she looked so miserable that it shocked Courtney. Her ghostly face was a reflection of weariness of centuries of torture and the resignation of a saint.
She didn't know for how long she stared at the spirit, but slowly, relunctantly, it began to fade until it disappeared. And it did so so gradually that Courtney didn't even realize the exact moment she stopped seeing her.
Courtney stayed there a long time, just sitting on the floor, staring at the spot where Heather's face had been. She sat there, motionless, for so long that she started to question whether what had just happened had really happened. The last minutes (hours?) sounded like they belonged to a dream, they even felt like a dream, but logic didn't support that.
If it was all a dream, when had she gone to sleep?
And if she was awake now, why were the lights outside still off? (By the way, Courtney didn't find the menacing darkness anymore— what was a bit of darkness next to what she had just experienced?)
Has she imagined all the 'signs' that the spirit was coming? Or alternatively, had she gotten particularly alarmed by them because she could sense the coming of a spirit?
Maybe she had really fallen asleep when she lay down. She had seen the lights go off, gotten paranoid, and dreamed in result, everything from the racket of the chains to Heather's ghost.
Heather would never say something like what she came to say.
But if she was awake right now, how had she ended up sitting on the ground?
Courtney got up, ackowledging that she would resolve nothing sitting like this. From the corner of her eyes, she saw the lights come back. She decided to sleep for a while, until it was time for her employees to start arriving. When she woke up, the building would probably be full of people, which would make her forget all about the happenings of the night.
She turned off the lights in her office and drew the curtains over the glass wall that looked outside her office. Then she lay down on her chair and for any given reason, be it the exhaustion from what she had just seen, or any magic-related enchantment, she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the cushion.
Happy New Years, everybody!
Anonymous Rex: Well thank you! Hope you had very happy holidays too :)
CarmillaD: Pero gracias! :) Juju, ya vas a ver lo que tengo planeado planeado para el resto, sobre todo el pasado de Courtney! ;)
Hi: Hi! Thanks :)
Degrassi4evah12: Well, I guess I should thank you for taking the time to review, but there's really not much I can so with that review. A review is supossed to give praise or critique the writing, and this doesn't say much of… anything. Happy holidays.
Wow, I was really scatter-brained the day I submitted the first chapter, I forgot to say all I wanted to say. What I wanted to do with this story was to go the exact opposite way from Dickens and the classical elements of a Christmas Carol (minus the obvious, mean person, four ghosts, ultimate redemption, etc.).
Starting with the title: in the prologue C.D. says how this is a ghost story, and I thought it'd be a good idea starting with what might have been Dickens' second choice/working title.
Then I went against one of the best-known elements of the story which is the first line, 'Marley was dead: to begin with'; instead I have you believe (I think) that Heather can be alive ;) Then there's elements like Courtney being a young thing, and other little references like Heather's ghost not being able to sit, unlike Marley's ghost who tells Scrooge they indeed can. Plus a number of other things along the way, including the biggest change from the original, which you will see in the next chapter :D *is excited*
By the way, Total Drama Island is not mine, and neither is Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
~The Lighthouse