The moment the ghosts became gusts, I knew that wind worth its salt was as ever thus haunted. Most gales carried such spectral phenomena like flotsam within waterless seas but only later to be crowded-out by heavy rain as the air’s ark of future street-dancing fairies. I pulled up the mackintosh hood, as my wellingtons sloshed through the puddles of the dancers’ corpses; the gusts grew even colder with each guest thus expelled.
***
“That’s what I’m looking for — slugs and trees.” I looked at him askance, this being Christmas Day. He called himself Mr Non Sequitur, as if that explained everything except a genuine eeriness in the number 249. “Stout appears in my story…” he continues meaningfully as if I would understand. He tells me he is thinking of drinking one bottle a week, after an abstinence of years. “Oh, my goodness,” he ends by saying, as if he has surprised himself.
But what story is he referring to? There are no papers in front of him, only the lamplit glow of the study room revealing bits and pieces that don’t follow on, nor do they make any sense at all in the context, if that’s not saying the same thing. On the other hand, connections and coincidences were very important to me, and the horror was in there being none at all. I am left empty-handed, indeed starved of meaning, with no sense of an ending. Just sight of the equally empty glass of stout, giving thin gruel to whoever followed us on by reading this, as reading it they eventually must. What’s your anagram as a bid for the numbered lot?
***
Mr Non Sequitur suddenly turned up on Boxing Day with 249 boxes to distribute to the poor and needy. He pushed them along in his trolley, all piled topsy turvy, but I was distracted from watching him by a horrific haunting that took the full attention of my spirit. So I never noticed a misstep that was going to happen and turned out to be more important to my future life than anything else would, and I fell through a potentially lethal hole in the road with its lid missing, so none of it mattered, except Mr Non Sequitur, out of the blue, rescued me and we got married for the rest of our lives together, except his life turned out to be very short and I was a widow forevermore to be followed by the same horrific haunting that had once threatened me more than it did today, the same one that had killed him instead so as to co-opt his spirit as an addition to the spirits it had already collected as parts of itself. An accretion of souls. The lethal hole now made whole. A boxful of box lids leaving room for very little else at all.
CODA
***
There was no longer a Mr Non Sequitur who would accept the name as his. Even his widow eschewed any mention of him in her presence. Yet, as a ghost hunter, I still sought signs of his absence, signs that would at least evidence the presence that he once was. He perhaps still wore that presence as a glove, but now the glove’s fingers were empty and flopped over the newel-post at the foot of the mansion’s stairway. Cracked white ceilings, I thought, indicated the path of his departure. Could his actual presence be stuck in a chimney demolished too early to be used as conduit or is his absence at least draped over an attic’s rafter. I heard distant laughter that would indicate something at least, it not being a woman’s laughter, but that of an echo within an echo whereby the hard-bitten wood of a rafter was involved in the laughter’s timbre. Did you know that the collective noun for turkeys is a ‘rafter’, look it up and see. And, thus induced to do so, I could count — through one of the widening cracks in the ceiling — 249 of their shapes gobbling together with wattles and snoods. Unsealing what? Revealing a terror to outbid the next terror that would be worse? Or simply a huge empty glove hanging loosely over the empty roofs and rebuilt chimneys, only to be blown away like a dirigible with floppy tentacles by the gusts of ghosts that not even Mr Non Sequitur could have preordained by dint of synchronicity or cause and effect in reverse. And I hunted upward not by newel-post roost or unshod stairway, but through the cracks in my head.
***
When Mr Non Sequitur reached his own form of non-heaven he met several other Nons who had discovered there were many a slip between cup and lip, as well as between well and hell, Mr Non Entity and Mr Non Descript just being two examples. Any other Nons had already gone on. This fanciful tale of Nons meeting up beyond the realms of death must not diminish the horror, though, of death itself, a cruel barrier that needed crossing before reaching a new life via the gentility of ideas and conceits. The initial way was thus tough, and each hurdle was not in any logical conjunction with the next as if it were Mr Non Sequitur alone who held such conceits in his head, whilst the other Nons were mere figments of his own. But the more he conceived, the bigger his head grew and, at the very last moment, it got well and truly stuck in the aforesaid barrier. The rest never happened. And nothing prevailed even for non entities in indescribable wastes. Our hero’s very last conceit.
Coda: An Empty Heart
I’ve somehow tenuously received the forthcoming message below — by the preternatural means of this controlled writing about it — saying that, when Mr Non Se Quitur finally met the infamous Dapper Man in the realms of non-heaven and non-hell, the world on our side of death’s barrier would receive High Suspicion notice of what would happen when we eventually crossed over ourselves, i.e. we’d finally find the Shape in Darkness we’d always sought, this being the only possible ghost that a ghosthunter could find so as to prove ghosts existed at all, which naturally meant the ghosthunter dying first. All of us, you will see, were once failed ghosthunters at heart.
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