"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide. If that spirits goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death."
-Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
***
It was midnight on Christmas Eve. All the lights were out in the big family house and snow covered the grounds, including the aged trees, the rusting gate, and the dignified monuments of the family crypts where 12 generations of the Barrow family slept.
Silently, a woman walked along the rows of graves. She left no tracks, and though she carried a lantern she also cast no shadow. She wore a long white robe with a deep hood that covered her face, a garment so pale and spotless that if anyone had been awake to see her it would have been impossible to distinguish the woman from the snow.
She went first to the tomb of old Lord William Barrow, an ancient, leaning thing almost overgrown with black moss, the face on the bust of Lord William out front nearly worn away by rain and snow, with the exception of his nose and his double chin.
With her free hand, the woman knocked twice at his mausoleum gate, which shook on its hinges and seemed to exhale a small, cold sigh of grave air, as if it had been holding its breath all year. And then, with a sound like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle, Lord William appeared in the snow, shaking the cobwebs from his old gray head.
"Christmas again?" he said, dusting off the starched collar they'd buried him in. "I say, it seems to start earlier and earlier every year."
The silent woman said nothing. Lord William bowed to her anyway. She moved on.
Next came old Sir Barrow, who died fighting Edward Longshank's crusade in 1271 and whose bones Lord William brought with him to the New World, so much did he revere his ancestor's example. Sir Barrow answered the silent woman's knock at his tomb right away, appearing still proud in his armor, carrying his helmet beneath one arm and his head beneath the other.
"Merry Christmas," Sir Barrow told his esteemed descendant. "And just in time. I don't know about you, but I could use for a spot of a good wine."
"Capital idea," said Lord Barrow, doffing his hat to his ancestor, who of course was unable to return the gesture.
One by one, row by row, the silent woman made her way to each grave. Next came Archibald Barrow, the family's great poet, who never finished a verse in his entire life. Then came Sylvia Barrow, the admired opera singer whose notes could shatter glass and who accidentally destroyed most of the opera house windows during a performance of "Tosca" in 1906 .
There was also Judith Barrow, hanged for a witch on Christmas day in 1692. And her uncle, Justice Thomas Barrow, who handed down the sentence. "An honest mistake," he said, as he did every year. Judith sniffed.
Edwin Barrow, the convicted cattle thief and black sheep of the family, came too. And Matilda Barrow, the family's first and only doctor, who earned her degree while disguised as a man and attending the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Even Betsy Barrow, who sewed secret messages into rider's cloaks during the Revolution and captured two British spies with the militia at the Pepperell bridge in 1776, appeared, putting aside old arguments with the ghosts of her Tory ancestors.
All the Barrows came up out of the ground when the woman with the lantern called them, yawning and stretching and greeting each other, their shadowy figures barely disturbing so much as a snowflake as they stepped out of their graves.
And when they were ready she led them away from the crypts and across the big field and up to the house, as she did every year. The living Barrows slept all snug in their beds, waiting for the first morning bells to wake them to another glorious Christmas in their ancestral home, none the wiser to what was going on downstairs.
It was a frightening looking parade ghouls coming into the mansion late on Christmas Eve, but they were a jolly lot too, full of singing and laughter. Little Peter Barrow, age eight, threw a snowball at Sir Barrow, meaning to knock his helmet off but sending his head rolling instead.
Mary Barrow, the Sunday school teacher who drowned trying to teach her students how Christ walked on the sea, convinced Sylvia to join the others in a few carols, and when she hit the high notes the rafters creaked.
They joked, they sang, and they shouted "Merry Christmas!" at every opportunity, as Christmas Eve--being a time for miracles--was the only night of the year when fate allowed them out of the grave to make merry again.
In the family's great dining hall, all decked out with holly and pine wreathes and mistletoe, a feast waited on the big long oak table (made from the first tree Lord William chopped down in this country). Roasted goose, candied yams, fresh berries, puddings from the ovens, seething bowls of punch, and of course, bottles of the finest wine from the Barrow family cellars piled it from one end to the other.
It was the leftovers from the living Barrow's annual Christmas Eve dinner, left out because the servants all had the night off. But it was enough feed Barrow more than once, from the oldest ancient ancestor down to the youngest living descendant.
Eliza Barrow (who had once been just a household cook herself and married up by way of coy glances and good kidney pies), sampled every dish and declared it sufficiently excellent for all. Sir Barrow, holding his head in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, proposed a toast to the goodwill of all Barrows everywhere, and with that everyone fell to.
All the while the woman with the lantern remained in the doorway, simply watching.
The ghosts joked and laughed and ate enough that their stomachs would burst, if anybody had still had one. Everyone, that is, except for one.
Pretty Aurelia Barrow sat by herself at the edge of the table. Although many of her relations tried to make merry with her she refused each of them one by one, preferring to remain alone amidst the conviviality.
Aurelia was the newest addition to the annual gathering. She'd died the very day after Christmas just one year prior--also one day after her wedding. The bouquet she held now had still been fresh when they sealed her up in her coffin. Now it had wilted, just like her.
The family doctors hadn't been able to say what had made her little heart stop beating in. "Perhaps too much joy was fatal in the end," they told her shocked and ashen groom.
The others mostly respected Aurelia's privacy. Death was hardest on the young, they knew. Wearing the wedding dress they'd buried her in, she picked the petals off her bouquet and let them slip through her pale fingers while looking up at the dusty and cobwebbed rafters of the great hall.
"It will get easier with time," Mary Barrow assured her. "And after all, your young man will be joining us himself sooner or later. The years will pass before you know it."
Pretending to smile, Aurelia nodded. She didn't tell Mary or anyone else what she was thinking: That a day of being dead felt longer than an eternity of being alive, and that an eternity of eternities felt like too much to bear.
Had she been alive still, she'd have killed herself to put an end to the entire affair. But being dead, she had no choice but to abide.
She gave the others polite but melancholy smiles whenever they looked her way, and soon enough everyone stopped bothering even to do that. Eventually, the family forgot that the ghostly bride was even there.
And that's when she made her move.
