Fellowship Fantastic by Martin H. Greenberg

Author:Martin H. Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Full dark had descended on the desert when the man finally goes inside. He refills his coffee, then steps into the living room and puts another log into the wood-burning stove. Desert nights are cool, but the stove would keep the house warm through the whole winter.

For a time, he simply watches the flames and sips his coffee, waiting. He knows that if he goes to bed, the ghost will come for him after he falls asleep. That was how it always worked. If he stays up, he’ll be able to confront it head-on, deal with the thing, deal with the past once and for all.

He leans back in his favorite chair—an old, wooden-armed, heavy-padded monstrosity that he refuses to get rid of—and waits.

Outside, night birds call hunting cries and occasionally, a horse would neigh or a dog would bark. The wind would sing against the window or over the top of the chimney and echo into the room. He wants this confrontation, he realizes. He’d wanted it most of his life, and he’d avoided it, too.

On the nights when he’d woken, sweating and afraid, gasping for breath, and his wife would ask him what was wrong, he knew, but he had said . . . nothing. He blamed it on a bad dream or a leg cramp or a noise in the house. Anything to avoid telling her the truth.

Anything to avoid facing the truth.

But the truth had always been there and he would lay awake at night and think about it and know that the dream wasn’t a dream, that his past was very much a dead thing, reaching out to touch him, to remind him.

And then, three weeks ago, the ghost came for the first time.

The ghost of the boy he’d left behind. An insubstantial shade, a wisp of white in the darkness of his bedroom, but an all-too-familiar shape. His first reaction had been to scream—long and loud, a mournful wail of recognition.

Night after night it went on, always with him waking as the ghost appeared at the foot of his bed, reaching out its placating hands—which grew more substantial and solid with each passing minute—as if to say, “Why?”

The ghost wanted . . . deserved, the man corrects himself . . . an explanation. A revelation. A truth.

The man knows there was no revelation and the truth was a shoddy thing indeed.

But tonight he would wait. Tonight, he would face the past and put it away forever.

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