A Ghost Story–
Ghosts, or fragments of ghosts, phantoms of partial vanished events, appear to have piled up in an old house until its new occupant, A, becomes sensitive to them. She is upset by a particular manifestation. She begins to track it down in local history records, piece it together. With each discovery, more of the apparitions in the house are brought in under the umbrella: everything begins to make sense.
Along with this comes an increased pressure on A to bring peace to the house: she feels that only she can understand what has happened–of course, it mirrors events in her own life–and that only such an understanding can “earth out” the psychic overload in the house. But one piece of the story–its conclusion–is missing: no local record can tell her what happened. She doesn’t know where to dig to find the corpse, the star-crossed lovers, the stolen birthright, or the evil object. A can’t right the wrong.
Balked, she becomes ill. In parallel, the hauntings become more horrific.
Worried all along by A’s skewed relationship to her house and its past, her friend B repeats the local history research, but across the whole life of the house. B discovers that the attempt to find a single historical explanation for the haunting has caused A to conflate events from two thousand years or more of occupation of the ground. The fountain of blood in the cellar comes from a different incident to the repetitive shriek in the attic. She has mistaken medieval manifestations for seventeenth century ones, children for adults, sex for murder, & strung them all together to make a story she cannot quite complete.
Once B has relocated each incident to its proper temporal place, he understands that the hauntings are not motivated. They are fragmentary, palimpsestic, meaningless. They are a record of habitation, not an explanation of the personal lives of particular inhabitants or a message to the future about some injustice so monstrous no one can have peace until it is righted. It is not the responsibility of the living to redress–or even facilitate the redressing–of wrongs in the past. The past is only the past: we do not owe it any guilt, we cannot even recognise anymore what constitutes it. The past is just some decaying, meaningless echoes. When we “learn” from it, all we are doing is rewriting it according to what we need at the time.
As soon as A understands this, she gets well. The hauntings stop. She has laid the past to rest not by understanding it but by consigning it to the past where it belongs.
I bet that fountain of blood looked good on the HIP.
But, yes, we’re all haunted – dead parents, lost loves, that one moment when you could have said yes and instead of no and changed (you think) everything that’s gone wrong since.
After a while, I stopped thinking of them as active presences and just imagined them as doors I could go through or not, as I chose. Then I turned them into doors flat on the ground, dream debris. Sometimes the doors still flap open of their own accord and show what’s gibbering or twitching beneath them. But after a while, I just think – oh, for god’s sake, and leave them to it.
A splendid tale and I enjoyed it very much… but if I had any doubts about your not being an American southerner, those doubts have been dispelled. Slavery, Sherman’s March and The Reconstruction won’t stay in their graves around here. Not that we’re the only subculture privileged with old ghosts, but we wouldn’t exorcize them if we could.
The “palimsestic” quality of history and hauntings is such fertile ground, isn’t it?
In the end it was too schematic–too much of a notion–to write, so I exiled it to the Neat Idea But Maybe Too Neat file. I prefer to start with emotional mess & see what idea it generates.
Also I think this one might have been waiting for more complex characters than I could write back then. I’m ageing Anna Kearney into the third Light novel at the moment, picking up her life long after the original events. The older Anna would be perfect for this story but I’ve lost interest now.
You could use the same structure to deconstruct the cold-case thriller.
“i prefer to start with emotional mess.”
it seems you’ve overshadowed your own post with one light, quick stroke.
Hi hrodebert.
Indeed.
Utterly off-topic, and apologies- but I’m compelled to ask if you’re familiar with Simon’s Cat? On the chance not, it’s a series of short extremely funny films drawn by animator Simon Tofield, who clearly knows his cats
Dunno if wordpress will allow embedding- If the link doesn’t work, his latest, ‘Fly Guy’ is also up on my blog. Hope you enjoy 
Mark, that’s hilarious. Although I slightly wish that the fly hadn’t buzzed again at the very end.