“The Ghost Child”
Bernard Capes
Available in Spectres in the Snow
ebook $0.99

Christmas is a time for children. Christmas is a time for love. Christmas is a time for ghost stories.  “The Ghost Child” combines all three in a chilling way.

There will be spoilers with this post. You have been warned.

This story has an odd structure. It’s narrated in the first person, but the narrator isn’t one of the principle characters. In fact the only purpose the narrator seems to serve is, well, I need to introduce the main characters first.

There are three main characters. The first is a young woman named Tryphena. She is an orphan, quite beautiful, and extremely wealthy. She lives on an isolated estate on the eastern coast of England. She is raised by a caretaker, a nameless old man who has a son, Jason. Tryphena and Jason are playmates as children, but goes to sea and becomes an officer in the Royal Navy. He comes back, apparently having left the navy, and see Tryphena, now a grown woman.

They fall in love and plan to marry. This has been the hope of the old caretaker for many years.

But Jason has issues, primarily issues with authority. If he thinks he’s being pressured or expected to do something, he tends to rebel. Later he will regret his course of action and beg for forgiveness. This has been the pattern of behavior he’s exhibited to his father for years.

Feeling the pressure of impending matrimony, he splits and accompanies a friend on a cruise on the friend’s yacht. The boat is lost at sea with all aboard.

At this point, the narrator pops into the story as a distinct individual. He is fishing in a small boat out on the ocean and is putting into shore to have a quick bite of lunch. On the way in he sees what he thinks is a mermaid sitting on the shore, great tail, bare breasts, the whole stereotype of a traditional mermaid. As he gets closer, he realizes it’s Tryphena. She is wearing a green dress, which is wrapped around her legs and flares at the bottom, and a blouse that matches her skin color. When he passes by that point after having found a place to eat lunch, she is gone.

I’m not sure what purpose that passage served except to sexualize Tryphena. The next part of the story supports that idea. On what would have been her wedding night, Tryphena has a dream. In it, Jason returns to her and pledges his eternal love. She holds him in her arms for the remainder of the night, and he vanishes.

The implication is that she engaged in sexual congress with a ghost. “…the girl came down from her bedroom with an extraordinary expression of still rapture on her face…but now there was a newborn wonder in it that hovered on the pink of shame.”

We are told that this occurred in March.

The following Christmas Day the old man, who is fast becoming senile, calls her down by saying that his son had returned. Tryphena cones downstairs to discover that the son who has returned is not the adult Jason but a small child. He is naked, and they clothe him in some of Jason’s old garments. She asks him who he is, and he replies Jason. When she asks him who he thinks she is,this is his response:

“I know,” he said; “but I mustn’t, unless you ask me.”

You know this isn’t going to end well.

That afternoon the boy wants to go for a walk towards the sea. The old man is sleeping, and we are told he never wakes up. Tryphena dresses the boy for the weather, and they walk down to the sea. The boy begins to dissolve. Tryphena asks what he was to call her, and he replies “Mother.”

Then he vanishes.

Although written in a somewhat archaic style, I enjoyed this one enough to read some more of Bernard Capes’s stories.