Do
you believe in ghosts, my dear reader? And what is the definition of a ghost
for you? Maybe for someone from another planet we all are nothing more than the
ghosts ourselves obsessed by our small everyday wishes and ambitions. Human
kind always was striving for miracles and was eager to get eternal life. To
look beyond the realms of life and death. As children we are fascinated by
ghost fairy tales. As adults we very often enjoy gothic fiction and horror
cinema. We want to enter the unknown and we fear it at the same time. We want
the eternal life and we fear it too. Be careful what you wish for, my dear
reader. One day you might get it. Some of us are not careful. And they get the
eternal life. As ghosts. And what about the eternal love? The two strongest
desires of human kind are – to live forever and to love forever. Who knows,
maybe on the other side of the human existence lies the fulfillment of the two
strongest wishes – to live and to love forever. My mother, Emma, always said:
there was no need for fantasy, life was strange and beautiful enough as it was.
And in proof of her words she told me the story from her life that occurred to
her during her university days. She had never believed in the supernatural
until that fateful night when she arrived at that deserted hotel… There she
discovered the bewitching, haunted world – a timeless realm of undying life and
undying love hidden within the walls of the hotel. The following story is taken
down by me according to her memories.
It
was in summer, in the late sixties of the twentieth century. I was coming back
home after a month of vacation spent in Sochi. The train from Krasnodar to Kiev
arrived late at night and my plane from Kiev to Sverdlovsk was supposed to take
off only the next morning.
I
was housed in a small inn. It was a very small guest house with the only room
inside that was located near the airport. The very small house resided on the
edge of the field very far from any other buildings. Behind the house spread a
deserted, neglected field of enchanting beauty covered with cornflowers, daisy
wheels, dandelions… A once well-groomed, now derelict small house full of
mysteries. I arrived to the house before midnight. The building seemed
desolate, its interior full of shadows. Was anyone moving through its darkness?
A warm summer night began a secret life of its own - as I heard a barely
audible whisper of the wind. . In a window of my room cold, teasing light of
the full moon was rising. As if inviting me to an unknown journey. The sweet
smell of flowers. The crickets were beginning to chatter. My eyelids picked
straws suddenly. It was time to close my eyes. Being already in bed and
preparing to sleep I looked very calmly towards the door and then froze peering
into the darkness.
There
stood He. The ghost. Or was He just the creation of my own imagination– so
beautiful and mysterious, so perfect and unusual? He seemed an alien adrift
from some different planet. The ghost was deep-brown –coloured, closer to the
colour of cognac, than the colour of chocolate. His body and his face created
the impression of perfect proportions. And at the same time he looked
completely transparent and weightless. His body was gleaming as though it had
been varnished. I was not able to run away. I was not even able to turn my
head. I was not able to speak or to shout. My muscles were completely
paralyzed. In his presence I felt absolutely numb. All my thoughts disappeared.
My mind was completely empty. The moonlight from the window was falling down
onto Him. He was coming rapidly nearer and nearer to me. When he reached my bed
a white thick fog - like cotton, started to rise from the floor. The white
clouds of fog were rising higher and higher. His legs, body and head vanished
little by little in the clouds of fog.
At
the very moment when He vanished completely the feeling suddenly surged back
into my arms and legs. I could think again. Thinking about what it was I
realized that He was looking for his girlfriend in the small house. And each
time when he made sure that it wasn’t his girlfriend, he passed into
nothingness. It was very late that night that I fell asleep…
The
next morning I got on my plane successfully and came back home.
Twenty
years passed. The story in the hotel sunk back into the past, so far back that
it seemed hardly to belong to me at all. But I faced the beautiful and
blood-chilling enigma of the hotel again. And pieced together puzzles from the
past and present.
One
evening I was roaming the streets of my home town. That evening I bought a
bouquet of flowers to decorate my home. I wanted to roll them in a piece of
paper. So I asked a seller at a news-stand to give me any newspaper. Turning
over the newspaper I saw an article that attracted my attention at once. The
article talked about the plane crash near that airport some time before the
night when I saw the ghost. All the passengers died. The article was
accompanied by photos of the passengers. One of those portraits bore striking
resemblance to the harmonious and perfect facial features of the ghost. Gazing
into the photos of other passengers, I realized that He was travelling together
with his girlfriend when that terrible plane crash happened. The very same girl
who He so desperately and hopelessly wanted to see in each girl that came to
spend the night in that remote desolate and lonely house…. He wanted it with
all the power of his undying love.
[VERA DROZDOVA]
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