I Hear It In My Ghost

• Harrison Kewley, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2009

No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and night is as solemn to me as the early morning. In the summertime I often rise very early and repair to my room to do a day's work before breakfast, and I am always on those occasions deeply impressed by the stillness and solitude around me. Besides that, there is something awful in being surrounded by familiar faces asleep; in the knowledge that those who are dearest to us and to whom we are dearest are profoundly unconscious of us, in an impassive state, anticipative of that mysterious condition to which we are all tending—the stopped life, the broken threads of yesterday, the deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but abandoned occupation—all are images of Death. The tranquillity of the hour is the tranquillity of Death. The colour and the chill have the same association. The certain air that familiar household objects take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of the night into the morning—of being newer and as they used to be long ago—has its counterpart in the subsidence of the worn face of maturity or age, in death.
I once saw the apparition of my grandfather at this hour. He was alive and well—nothing ever came of it, but I saw him in the daylight, sitting with his back towards me on a seat beside my bed. His head was resting on his hand, and whether he was slumbering or grieving, I could not discern. Amazed to see him there I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and watched him. As he did not move, I spoke to him sequentially. As he did not move, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder, and as I thought-- there was no such thing.
For all these reasons and for others less comprehensible, I find the early morning to be a most ghostly time. Any house would be quite haunted, to me, in the early morning; and a haunted house could scarcely address me to greater advantage than then.
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With the desertion of this house upon my mind, I approached the landlord of a small inn sanding his doorstep. I bespoke breakfast, and broached the subject of the house.
"Does this house contain live-ins?" I asked.
“No sir, it’s free of all tenants,” replied the landlord in a tone which enraged me beyond all belief.
“No!” replied I, rather intensely. “Does the house contain spirits? Is the house ghostly? Good god, you pathetic hoodwink, at a time such as this, one would expect such a question! Try using your damned brain, however small it is!”
No reply.
Suspect as he was at this haunted hour, I shot the poor fellow. How I smiled as the cobbled street met his crown. The blood ran in the cracks, as the waters do through the adhesive streets of Venice.
“Oh Venice, how I’ve missed you,” I said, smiling.