This is an original story by Karine Green, written for this collection in the tradition of the classic Christmas ghost tale. 2026
Edmund Hale arrived at Aldercott House a full day before the guests.
“Come early,” Constance had written. “George and I will be run off our feet with the last shopping, and someone sensible needs to be in the house while the staff hangs the greenery.”
He liked Aldercott best like this. Not yet full of people, but not empty either. Somewhere between. The halls smelled of pine and beeswax, and every room he passed had someone in it doing something purposeful, arranging chairs, winding garland along the banister, setting candles in the windows against the coming dark.
Constance and George left for the village at two, promising to be back well before dusk.
“Mind the house doesn’t burn down,” George said, pulling on his gloves.
“I make no promises,” Edmund said, and watched them go.
He wandered.
That was the whole of his plan, really, to wander through his sister’s house while it was dressed for Christmas Eve, and to stay out of everyone’s way while they did the actual work.
He found her in the long gallery.
She stood at the far window with a length of holly across her arms, choosing sprigs with a slow, practiced care, as though she’d done this many times and still hadn’t tired of getting it right.
Her dress was a deep, rich red, a flouncy skirt gathered over a bustle with an overskirt draped just so, the fabric catching what little afternoon light came through the glass. The bodice rose high at the throat, dark green and closely fitted, edged where it met her collar by a fall of white lace beneath. Her hair was done up in the elaborate fashion of the year before last, dark and glossy, not a pin out of place.
She must be one of the girls his sister had brought in to help.
“You’ve a good eye for it,” he said. “Most people just grab whatever’s nearest.”
She turned. Her smile arrived slowly, as if she were deciding whether he’d earned it yet.
“Most people are in a hurry,” she said. “I’m not.”
“No,” he agreed. “You don’t look it.”
They talked for a while about the holly, whether the dark red berries or the pale ones held their color longer once cut, and she held strong, amused opinions about it that he suspected she’d invented on the spot rather than admit she didn’t actually know.
“You’re guessing,” he said.
“I am guessing beautifully,” she said, smiling with perfectly white teeth. “There’s a difference.”
Somewhere past that, the conversation drifted, the way it does when neither person is steering it anymore.
“What brought you to Aldercott?” she asked. “Truly. Not the version you’d give my father.”
He should have given her the easy answer: Constance had asked him to come early; that was all. Instead, he found himself telling her the true one.
“I’m thirty-five,” he said. “Unmarried. My mother has stopped asking about it, which is somehow worse than when she used to ask constantly, because it means she’s given up expecting an answer.” He turned a sprig of holly over in his hands, not really looking at it. “I keep thinking of a man standing on a railway platform, watching his own train pull out without him. He didn’t miss it through any single mistake. He just kept meaning to board tomorrow, and tomorrow, until there was no tomorrow left to mean it in.”
He hadn’t meant to say that much. He never said that much, not even to Constance, who had heard versions of it and always tried to fix it, offering names of eligible women, dates for dinners he had no interest in attending.
Betty didn’t offer him a single name.
She set down the holly and looked at him in a way almost no one had looked at him in a long while, as if his own account of himself were worth hearing all the way through rather than worth interrupting.
“It hasn’t pulled out yet,” she said. “You’re still standing on the platform. That’s something. Just step forward and get on the train.”
“It feels like everything, some days.”
“I know,” she said, and something in the way she said it made him believe she genuinely did, that she wasn’t merely being kind. “I’m not going to tell you it will sort itself out. People say that when they’d rather not sit with you in it.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The gallery had gone dim enough that the candles someone had lit along the far wall threw more light than the windows did, and in that low gold light she seemed, for one strange instant, both entirely present and slightly apart from the room, as though she belonged to it more completely than he did and yet stood at a small remove from it all the same.
“You’re very easy to talk to,” he said. “I don’t know why that should surprise me, but it does.”
“Perhaps because most people talk at each other,” she said, “and you’ve only just noticed what it’s like when someone doesn’t.”
He laughed, and it came out unguarded, nothing performed in it. In four hours she had asked him more real questions than most people managed in four years, and answered none of her own the same way, and he noticed that too, distantly, and let it go. No sense in over-examining it.
“And you,” he said. “What brought you here?”
“My father’s business,” she said, in the tone of someone repeating a sentence she’d been given rather than one she’d chosen. “There’s an arrangement. Railroads, mostly. He’s very pleased with himself about it.”
“Railroads,” Edmund said. “Well, they’ve certainly done their work by now. My father’s generation nearly wore themselves out laying track across half the country. I’d imagine whatever your father built has more than paid for itself these thirty years on.”
Something crossed her face, quick and puzzled, gone before he could read it properly.
“Thirty years,” she said slowly, as though testing the weight of the number. Then, brightening, the puzzlement folded neatly away: “Good. I’m glad to hear it went well.”
He laughed, not quite following what had amused her, but willing to be charmed by it anyway, and the moment passed.
She held her strong, amused opinions on holly right up until the light outside the gallery windows started going gold and then grey, and by then he had told her things he hadn’t told anyone, and she had told him, once, almost carelessly, that she hadn’t chosen very much in her life so far, the holly being one of the few things that were actually hers to decide, and he had laughed, thinking she meant something about being the youngest of many sisters, and let it go.
“You’ll be at the party tonight,” he said. It wasn’t quite a question.
“I’m always at the party,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “Save me the first dance.”
She looked at him a moment too long before she answered.
“I’ll be wherever the house needs me,” she said. “That’s rather the same thing, in the end.”
She touched his sleeve once, light as a leaf falling, and said she had to see to the candles before the dark came all the way down. He watched her go, red skirts disappearing around the turn of the gallery, and told himself he’d find her again the moment the guests arrived.
He did not find her again before his sister returned.
The party filled Aldercott by eight o’clock, every room bright and loud, and Edmund moved through all of it looking for red, green, and a particular fall of white lace at a particular throat.
Twice he thought he’d found her.
Once across the ballroom, a flash of dark red skirt disappearing behind a knot of guests, and his pulse actually lifted before he caught up to it and found a stranger, older, laughing at someone else’s joke, wearing a shade of red that wasn’t hers at all now that he was close enough to see it properly. Once more near the stairs, dark hair done up just so, and he’d already begun crossing the room toward it before the woman turned and he saw a face he didn’t know.
He asked three different girls in plain black dresses whether they knew the young woman who’d been arranging the holly that afternoon, red dress, dark hair, a way of choosing her words like she was deciding whether you’d earned them.
The first girl looked at him blankly and said she’d been in the kitchens all day.
The second said, slowly, that she didn’t think anyone matching that description had been hired for the party at all, and looked at him a beat too long before excusing herself.
The third didn’t answer right away either. She glanced past him, toward the long gallery, dark now and empty of guests, and something crossed her face that he couldn’t name, before she said, quietly, that she wouldn’t know, and went back to her tray.
None of them knew who he meant. Or none of them would say.
He gave up looking sometime after midnight, when the party had thinned to its last determined stragglers, the candles burning low in the windows, the house settling into the particular hush that comes after too much noise, and went up to bed with the specific tiredness that comes from hoping for something all evening and getting, instead, only the sense that something had been quietly, deliberately withheld from him.
His room was at the end of the guest corridor, warm from the fire someone had banked an hour before. He set his candle on the washstand and turned to undress, and stopped.
She was above the bed.
A portrait, gilt-framed, hung where he’d swear nothing had hung that morning. Dark hair done up in a fashion the better part of thirty years out of style. A red dress trimmed close with green, a fall of white lace at the throat, and on her hand, small in the paint but unmistakable once he looked for it, the same heavy, old-fashioned ring he’d seen that afternoon. The same slow, deciding smile, caught mid-arrival, as though the painter had captured her just before she’d made up her mind whether he’d earned it.
He was still standing there, candle in hand, when Constance found him.
“I wondered if you’d notice tonight,” she said from the doorway. “I put it up myself, this afternoon, while you and George were still out.”
“Who is she?”
“We don’t actually know. There was never a name with her, only the note. The woman who was to have been Aldercott’s first mistress.” Constance came and stood beside him, looking up at the painted face with the fondness of someone revisiting an old friend. “An American girl, from what we could piece together. Her father had money and wanted a name to go with it. Aldercott needed the money rather badly by then. She died the Christmas Eve before the party that was meant to announce the engagement. Never even got as far as the wedding.”
“Betty,” Edmund said. “Her name is Betty.”
Constance looked at him for a long moment, her fondness for the portrait giving way to something wary. “How could you possibly know that?”
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t certain himself how he would have explained it.
“There was a note,” Constance said at last, “pinned to the back of the canvas, in a hand none of us recognized. I kept it, if you’d like to see.”
She drew a folded scrap of paper from her sleeve, worn soft at the creases from being unfolded and refolded many times over many years.
I shall not be remembered until the light of day.
Constance didn’t offer an explanation for it. She only said, “I chose this room for her. Our best guest room. I couldn’t have told you why, exactly, only that it felt like the right one, and I’ve learned not to argue with a feeling like that in this house.” She looked at the window a moment, east-facing, dark now, giving nothing away. “Someone will always be sleeping under her here. And waking to her, every Christmas.”
Edmund looked at the portrait a long while after his sister had gone.
He was thirty-five years old, standing in a stranger’s guest room in his shirtsleeves at one in the morning, looking up at a dead woman’s face.
He had spent ten years telling himself, in one form or another, that his life hadn’t started late, only slowly, the way a man tells himself a train is delayed rather than cancelled, still coming, still worth the waiting, and he had believed it so consistently and for so long that he’d stopped noticing it was something he had to keep telling himself at all.
Here’s the passage with the duplicate removed. Nothing else is changed:
He didn’t believe it anymore. Not standing here.
He had spent one afternoon arranging holly with a woman thirty years dead, and in those few hours she had asked him more real questions, and listened to more real answers, than anyone had bothered with in longer than he cared to count. Whatever that had been, it had not felt like the beginning of something. It had felt, unmistakably, like the one thing he’d been waiting a decade for the train to bring him, arriving at last, in the wrong hands, thirty years too late to be his.
He told himself, even as his hand rose, that he only meant to trace the line of her painted cheek the way a man touches a photograph of someone he’s lost, a small foolish gesture, nothing more. His fingers found the canvas.
It was not canvas.
It was warm, and it gave slightly under his touch the way skin gives, and for one suspended moment he felt her turn her face into his palm exactly as a living woman turns into a hand she has been waiting for.
Something was wrong with his arm.
He heard Constance scream from the doorway, distant, as though the sound had to travel some distance to reach him that the room itself didn’t account for. He meant to turn toward her. His body did not agree to it. There was a stillness spreading from his hand that had nothing to do with cold, and everything to do with something else entirely, something he had no name for and no time to find one, his own sleeve gone strange beneath his eyes, the firelight sliding across it wrong, the way light moves across a thing that has stopped being cloth.
He tried to speak. Nothing came. Not silence, exactly. Absence.
The last thing he was aware of choosing, the last thing that still felt like his, was where to look. He chose her face.
After that there was no after, only the angle he had chosen, held.
In the morning, the sun came level through the east window and found two figures above the bed instead of one. A woman in red and green, dark hair done up beautifully, finally wore a slow smile as she gazed up at her love. And beside her, a man in his shirtsleeves, one arm settled at her waist as though he had always belonged there, his face turned toward hers with an expression the household would later call, in the hushed way such things get called, perfectly content.
Constance never slept in that room again. She kept the door closed and told the guests it was being repapered for years, until she stopped telling anyone anything about it at all.
“This one is an original. The rest of Grim Tales takes classic stories, like The Yellow Wallpaper and The Open Window, and gives them a modern, darker turn. [link]”
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