The Ghost Quartet, page 15
“And for that he wants to kill me?”
“He blames you. Between killing her father and trifling with her affections—”
“I don’t want to fight Laertes.”
“Hamlet—he’s been practicing for four years in order to fight you.
“What? We were friends! Until this afternoon I thought we still were!”
“It’s not what you think. He meant to kill your father. But he believed that in order to kill him, he’d have to fight you first. He knew that nobody could beat you with a sword—but he was determined to try. Now your father is dead, but his rage isn’t. If you leave, just stay away for a few days—take ship for the Orkneys, Hamlet, I beg you to do it. Laertes will be back in his right mind before you return.”
“But I won’t be,” said Hamlet. “My father is unburied.”
“He’s also dead,” said Horatio. “You aren’t, and so far neither is Laertes.”
“And neither is Claudius.”
“Exactly. Leave bad enough alone, Hamlet.”
But Hamlet had already strapped on his sword and was striding toward the castle.
“O God!” cried Horatio. “Stop him! Stop this all!”
The torches flickered and danced. Several courtiers were already there, as were the King and Queen. Laertes was pacing up and down in front of them, shouting, demanding justice, vengeance, satisfaction. “My sister’s dead body is still drenched in seawater and I’ll have the heart’s blood of the rogue who drowned her!”
“No one drowned her but herself,” said King Claudius.
It galled Hamlet to hear his uncle plead for him. “Enough talk!” he cried from the far end of the chamber. “Do you want my heart, Laertes? You had it all our lives; it still belongs to you. Take it now, if you can!”
Their swords drawn, they fairly flew at each other across the room, blades flashing. Everyone moved out of the way, behind the arches, trusting in the stone pillars that held up the ceiling to keep them safe.
How many times had they fought, as boys? Laertes had learned much since then. There was no playfulness about it now. Laertes’s every blow and thrust was intended to kill or maim; he moved in a fury, taking no pause for breath.
Yet Hamlet saw very quickly that Laertes could not win unless he let him. It was not a lack of skill—Laertes was as good a swordsman as Hamlet had ever seen. Nor was it Laertes’s rage: He fought with control, with a furious calm that made no mistakes.
He simply wasn’t quick enough. All his practice and study with the sword in France had made him an interesting opponent, but not one that could defeat Hamlet, even with his lack of practice. Laertes had new and clever moves that Hamlet had not seen before; but he understood them at once and countered them and that was it.
“Laertes, stop this,” Hamlet said. “You aren’t good enough. You won’t win.”
“Then I’ll die,” said Laertes. “I have nothing left but this. You’ve taken it all from me.”
“I’ve taken nothing from you. I grieve at your father’s death. Your sister’s suicide destroys me. I cared for her as much as I could for any woman, and I wished no harm on either of them. Nor do I wish to hurt you.”
“Kill me or die,” said Laertes.
“The only way I’ll die is if you poisoned your blade and some of it spills on me,” said Hamlet.
Laertes’s answer was a furious onslaught. But he drew no blood. He didn’t even nick the clothing Hamlet wore.
Hamlet maneuvered the fight so that his back was to his mother and King Claudius.
“I have only one enemy in this room,” said Hamlet, “and it isn’t you. It’s the man who killed my father, married his widow, and stole the crown.”
He could hear people gasping at his words. And Mother cried out, “He didn’t! It’s a lie! Who told you such a thing!”
Hamlet gave a twist and a spin and Laertes’s sword flew up to the ceiling and then clattered back down a dozen yards away. With his opponent disarmed, Hamlet whirled on King Claudius.
“The ghost of my father told me!” cried Hamlet. “How you poured poison in his ear while he lay asleep in the garden! I swore an oath to avenge him, and this day I honor my father’s command!”
Uncle Claudius was rising to his feet—to fight? to flee? it mattered not a whit. For Hamlet ran him through the heart and had the sword back out again in time to whirl and face Laertes, who was running at him from behind, his sword again in hand.
There was not time for finesse. With Claudius’s blood still hot on the blade, it went through Laertes’s heart as well.
“No!” cried Hamlet.
“O God!” cried Horatio. “O God, how could you punish them all for my sin!”
“Your sin?” said Hamlet.
“I killed your father!”
Hamlet stared at him dumbfounded. Horatio, unarmed, tore open his shirt. “Here’s my heart! Kill me! I’m the one you vowed to murder to avenge your father! I’m the one who killed him!”
Hamlet staggered back, turned a little, touched his uncle, who lay sprawled across the table while Mother wept over him.
“But Father said—”
“He lied! The old bastard lied!” cried Horatio. “Why didn’t you tell me what he said? I would have told you. I thought you knew the truth—I offered to let you kill me right there in the garden! I thought you understood!”
“Offered? But I never—why would you kill him?”
“Because he was evil. Because of what he did to us. All of us. The Companions. All the boys but you!”
Behind him, Hamlet heard his mother wail.
“What did he do?” asked Hamlet.
“He had us,” said Horatio. “All of us, one by one, over and over again. Told us how much we owed him. Our duty to the King. How to thank him.”
“Thank him?”
“With our bodies! You’ve never heard of such a thing? You read the Greeks and Romans and you never heard of it?”
“But you never told me.”
“He swore he’d kill us if we told.”
“All of you?”
“It twisted us. I saw it in the others. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they could never look at women. Laertes—he told me, even before he left for France, that his stick was broken and would never grow again. And me—I thought I was all right. I thought…”
He broke down and wept.
Mother’s voice came from behind him. “When I found what he was doing to the Companions, I almost killed him myself. I caught him fondling you when you were practically a baby, Hamlet. I held a knife at his throat and vowed that I’d have his blood if he ever touched you or was alone with you again. I’d tell the barons and they’d kill him themselves. He took a solemn oath never to touch you and he kept it. I didn’t know what he did with the Companions until—until Laertes came to me and told. Then I made him dissolve the Companions and let them all go free. But it was too late.”
“Too late,” echoed Horatio. “A few months ago, a new page came to the castle. I taught him. He followed me everywhere like a dog. I delighted in his company. And then one day I found myself … I had him naked, I was telling him how a boy shows love to his friend and teacher … the words your father used, the very words. I was the worst of all of them! I was like him! I stopped myself. I told the boy to dress and never come near me again. That I was evil. A monster. And then I went out into the garden to kill your father. There he was, asleep. As if the devil had a right to rest in such a place! I took my dagger and poised it over him. Then with my other hand I clamped his mouth closed, holding his head in place, and then I pushed the dagger down into his ear and through his brain. He twitched, he pissed, he shat, he died. And that’s where your mother and Claudius found me. I was working up the courage to put the knife into my own heart. They took it from me, and then your mother washed the blood as best she could and Claudius and I carried the body to the icehouse and wrapped it. Hamlet, it was me.”
“He said it was poison in his ear.”
“The blade must have felt cold at first, and then it burned going in,” said Horatio. “He never turned his face. He never saw.”
“But spirits … don’t they know?”
“Maybe he did,” said Horatio. “But he wanted Claudius dead because he was the King your father never knew how to become. He lied to you! He used you as surely as he used the rest of us!”
“What have I done?” whispered Hamlet.
“Your father’s ghost appeared to you?” said Mother.
“He said that Claudius …”
“I know the things he’d say,” she said. “Oh, the liar. The monster. I should have killed him when I could. Better to have my hands stained with a husband’s blood than all the evil that has come from letting him survive!” She fumbled for something in the waistband of her dress. “It was my fault, all of it!” she said. “I should have denounced him to the barons!”
She found what she was looking for—a small phial. Before Hamlet could reach to stop her, she had it open and drank it down.
“I love you, Hamlet,” she said. “I tried to protect you. Horatio did only what I should have done. What the law of God demanded.” Then the poison struck and she cried out in agony. She threw herself upon the body of King Claudius, cried out his name, and died.
Hamlet turned to face Horatio, who was still standing there, bare-chested, head bowed, waiting for the blade.
“Keep your oath,” said Horatio. “Kill the killer of your father.”
“If you had told me,” said Hamlet. “If I’d known, do you think I’d have shed a drop of blood to avenge him?”
Hamlet knelt beside Laertes. “What my father meant to do to me, he did to you instead, my friend. All my friends. And now how many suffered, and how many died, to protect me from the monster whose blood half-fills my veins?”
Then he staggered to his feet and went to his mother’s body, which lay half overspreading Claudius’s. “Mother, you did for me what you could; you thought it was enough; and it was. He never touched me. And you, Uncle Claudius, what a good King you were. You should have been King all along. I would to God you had been my father.”
Hamlet was still holding the sword, but when he turned again to Horatio, he let it fall. “I forbid you to die,” he said to Horatio. “You are the one good man still living. You did justice on a devil. You served me well, and the King, and the kingdom. I command you to live. When Fortinbras comes, hail him King of Denmark. Let the kingdoms be united. Tell him that he has the vengeance he long wanted, and now I charge him to be a good King to Norse and Danes alike.”
“Tell him yourself.”
“My father deserved to die,” said Hamlet. “There was no sin in what you did. But how will the deaths of my mother and my uncle and good Laertes and Polonius and Ophelia be avenged? If only I had let Laertes kill me. But I didn’t, and now his blood joins the others.”
“You’re innocent of any wrong,” said Horatio.
“God gave me only one gift—to know how to handle a blade. Too bad it took me this long to learn where the point of it most needed to be put.”
Then Hamlet drew his dagger and pushed it, smoothly, unhesitatingly, into his own chest, between the ribs, just beside the breastbone. It found his heart—he felt it as a searing agony. He heard it as a song.
As he fell to his knees, he could hear Horatio weeping. “Live,” Hamlet whispered one last time.
“I will,” said Horatio. “Ah, Hamlet, I love you!”
Then Hamlet’s body slumped onto the floor.
But his spirit did not go where his body went. His spirit arose and looked around the hall. To where Laertes’s spirit held his father’s and his sister’s hands; then they arose into heaven. To where his mother and Claudius, bright spirits both, embraced each other, and also rose into the air, toward the bright light awaiting them.
And finally to the dark shadowy corner where his father’s spirit stood, laughing, laughing, laughing. “Welcome to hell, my beautiful son. At last we’ll be together as I always longed for us to be.”
It’s always embarrassing to write an introduction to one’s own story, so I’ll just say that I’m in this collection because Tanith Lee personally invited me to be one of the four, for which thanks, my dear transatlantic friend.
A native of Philadelphia, I began my writing career in the mystery genre, which, however, I never cared for as much as fantasy/science fiction. My fantasy/ghost novels include A Cold Blue Light (with Parke Godwin), Ghosts of Night and Morning, Fantastique, The Possession of Immanuel Wolf (with Brother Theodore) and The Last Christmas of Ebenezer Scrooge. I have edited many fantasy/ghost anthologies, most of them for the Science Fiction Book Club, and am editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror.
THE HAUNTED SINGLE MALT
a Spectral Symposium
by MARVIN KAYE
– I –
Every first Monday of the month the back room of The Tron is given over to ghost stories, and anyone interested can ask the bartender to point them towards the Jamesians, a loose gaggle of folk, present company included, whose pretentious (I think) aggregate name is not reflective of the ambiguous Henry, and certainly not his brother Bill, but was chosen in honour of Montague Rhodes James and his proposition that benevolent, troubled spirits are but pale shades (sic) not worth reading or, as we see it, telling about. To hold our interest each month, spectres are expected to be baleful, inimical, vengeful, in a word, terrifying, which admittedly is no longer quite so easy to accomplish in this faith-twisted bloodthirsty age.
Now don’t form the wrong impression. The Jamesians don’t sit around reading supernatural stories, not that we don’t like them, as witness the writer we’re named after, but we’re all much more interested in hearing about those paranormal occurrences that produce what the French call un frisson, and Yanks describe as goose-bumps. The experience must always be personal, or at least verifiable by its narrator, and we’re very picky about the permissible degrees of separation. If it happened to a near relative or a close friend, it’s allowed, but the raconteur who attempts to pass off a tale based on hearsay or urban legend is swiftly interrupted and spurned.
To be fair to those who get it wrong, it’s no small condition to satisfy our criteria. Ghost stories are like folk songs: they fall into a handful of thematic patterns, and if you doubt this, read Louis C. Jones’s fascinating sociological study, Things That Go Bump in the Night. It’s not easy to come up with first-hand new tales of what I like to call “cold grue” month after month; as one may expect, there’s a deal of fluctuation in membership, and only four Jamesians are really what you could call denizens. There are only so many ghost stories to be told … a pity, since our egocentric species never tires of them, for paradoxically, they’re the very spirit of life …
(Now, that’s not to be confused with uisgebaugh, the water of life, which any good Scot will tell you means a wee dram of single malt, though in winter, when the North Sea wind clashes with the cutting air that rips down off the Pentlands, I’ve been known to tolerate a bit o’ blended, particularly when poured in equal portion with Crabbie’s Green Ginger Wine. There are few mixed drinks you can work with scotch, but blended and Crabbie’s are legitimate mates in these parts, probably because Crabbie’s is headquartered in our maritime district, Leith; the mix is called Whisky Mac, and it makes a brisk palate-cleanser alongside a comforting platter o’ haggis and tatties and neeps. But I’ve digressed. The thought of a wee dram has that effect. Slainté! That’s Celtic for “Your health,” or if you’re a Yank, “Cheers”).
So anyway, if you’re in town the first Monday of the month, and you would like to sit with us and listen to our stories, you’re more than welcome at our table, though do be aware that the management doesn’t take kindly to teetotalers, and though the bartender’s in the other room, he keeps an eye on us so we won’t parch ourselves from too much dry talking.
My name is Wallace Kimble, D. O., retired psychiatrist, and before that I was a surgeon, but carpal tunnel syndrome dictated a change of specialty. I’m a native of Pitlochry, some fifty miles north of here, here being Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, and if you’re a Yank, we’re talking about a city roughly the size of Hartford. (Connecticut figures in the story I’m going to tell you, which is why it now comes to mind.)
Edinburgh is configured in three strips: to the north, New Town; south lies the Meadows district that rolls down into broad green countryside where stallions race the wind. The middle, oldest section of “Auld Reekie” (Edinburgh’s nickname), is Old Town, where you’ll find The Tron, not far from the site of the gallows that once stood at the western edge of St. Giles Cathedral a short distance down the Royal Mile. The “Mile,” Old Town’s main east-west street, begins at the upper part of a volcanic ridge with a castle dominating the skyline, then runs east past St. Giles and City Hall (both of them haunted), and ends at Holyrood Palace, where the queen puts up when she has a mind to visit, not that we give a damn.
The Tron’s got two entries. If you come in off the Mile you’ll be greeted by a wide-angle view of Edinburgh’s kitschiest pub, for that entry point brings you onto an upper shelf with a couple of tables, a dumb waiter and a small service bar. But if you take a few steps to the right, you’ll come to a steep flight of wooden steps leading down to the main bar, a space that looks like Aubrey Beardsley designed it either during a fey moment, or while having a monumental hangover. None of the five sofas match, the rickety tables are internationalists made of foreign woods not so much painted as attacked, and somewhere in the midst of this chromatic fantasia there’s a ponderous wastebasket (seldom empty) that’s fashioned from a rhino’s foot (left rear, according to the old bartender Mike, though I never asked him how he knew).
The front room’s funky chaos is dominated by a fifty-foot bar that for many years was ruled over by the dourest bartender you’d ever be likely to meet. Mike reminded me of Edward Woodward, the actor who played Breaker Morant in the movie. Laconic and contained, but tough. Once someone mentioned Sean Connery and Mike snorted. “Tam he was when he was a bouncer. He come in here, loud and lookin’ for trouble, so I give it ’im. I bounced ’im out on ’is arse.”
