Gloria Metcalf opened the door to the tomb with enthusiasm and flair, as she was expecting to show off to her assistants a surprise trove of treasure that she was sure had been stashed in with the body of Lady Hortense Marigold. Instead, along with a whoosh of dusty air, they were assaulted by the ghost of said Lady Marigold, who had been waiting for this day for one hundred and thirty-six years.
Gloria was the first to get it, and get it bad, as she was in front. Along with violent diarrhea erupting as the spirit passed through her, her heart began to beat so fast that she sweat through her clothes and passed out awkwardly, getting a fierce concussion in the fall. Her three assistants merely threw up from both fear and the nauseating effects of the spirit. These tomb raiders were not Lady Marigold’s concern, however, she was fiending to get her intangible claws into her husband, whom she did not realize was now long gone to dust. No, her arrested state in death had caused her to have no track of Earthly time, such that she initially thought she was dreaming, even knowing she was dead and hadn’t slept in nearly a century and a half.
Her spirit surged to the Feldencrest Manor, where she searched the halls for her worse half, the man who slit her throat out by the lake so many years ago when she refused his pleas to divorce him so that he could marry his younger, more beautiful lover, the evil Dorothy Goodwin Sparks. Then reality began to sink in: it was no longer 1896. No longer the nineteenth nor even the twentieth century. Looking for clues and cues of what to do next, the freed spirit of Lady Marigold saw an oil painting on the wall of a salon, the painting hung where the marriage portrait once hung portraying Lady Marigold and Lord Feldencrest, the bastard. Replacing it was a painting by the same artist, using the same pose, but showing the lowly Miss Sparks with her former husband. Miss Sparks, the scheming governess of their good friends, the Veldts. Hung near this were framed daguerrotypes depicting the lifelike likenesses of the couple, ensemble and in solo, and then the ghost noticed more modern photographic evidence of the late life of the couple.
A woman entered the salon, chicly dressed, moving to a writing desk near a window. She bore such a striking resemblance to Miss Sparks that it shocked the ghost, it was, of course, her grand-daughter, and current lady of the house. Lady Marigold didn’t know what to do, how would she exact her revenge? They must all learn how she died, who knows what they knew of her, if anything? She had not been able to bear children, and Lord Feldencrest had drained his inheritance rapidly, almost you might say with aplomb. He was every bit the nineteenth century stereotype. Yet here he was, honored in their great room. They must learn of what he did! Lady Marigold summoned all the energy at her command and worked to make her presence visible to the lady, but she was turned away from her. That had depleted the last reserves she had, it was going to take a while to recover the strength to manifest again or make herself known, she realized in defeat.
That was when she saw him, watching her from the other end of the salon, surreptitiously, mouth agape: a five-year-old boy. He could see her! She moved to him and he ran away, but later that day she approached him while he was playing in his room. She introduced herself calmly and asked if he knew who was represented in the paintings in the salon. Yes, it was his great-grandfather, the boy said, a hero. Hero! Lady Marigold scoffed, but she was just as impulsive in death as she was in life. He was no hero, he murdered me, look! And with a flourish she whipped the scarf from her neck, displaying the slit open throat from the day of her death. The boy screamed in utter manic terror, screaming for his life. The woman and a servant came rushing into the room to help him and found him pointing in her direction. Lady Marigold covered her neck and used her firm tone with the boy. Listen, I promise not to scare you again, but here’s what you need to do. Tell them that Lord Martin Feldencrest, your great-grandfather, was a murderer. He murdered his first wife, Lady Hortense Marigold. Say it! The boy tried to get it out but kept sobbing, the adults were confounded and scared by his behavior.
Lady Marigold realized she wasn’t going to get through today, but she wasn’t going to give up. No, no, no. As she watched them swaddle the boy, pick him up and carry him out to care for him, she made an oath to herself. Either I get justice, or every single one of the damn Sparks girl’s descendants will burn in hell. I’ll kill them all in retribution. Death to the Feldencrests! And she whooshed back to the darkness of the graveyard to bide her time.
October 12, 2022