Ghosts: The Story of a Reunion - Softcover

Plass, Adrian

3.61

254 ratings by Goodreads

9780310249177: Ghosts: The Story of a Reunion

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0310249171 ISBN 13: 9780310249177

Publisher: Zondervan, 2003

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'. . . [a] beautifully conceived and executed book.'---Publisher's Weekly It has been just six months since David Herrick lost his beloved wife, Jessica. The grief is still an open wound. So when he receives an invitation to a reunion of long-lost friends, David's first impulse is to refuse. After all, two decades have passed since he was in the same youth group with these people. But the invitation comes from Angela, one of his wife's oldest friends---and mysteriously, she claims she has something for him from his late wife. Reluctant but curious, David arrives at Headly Manor, an ancient house with an unsettling reputation. But life's most haunting specters are not a matter of location. In this honest, deeply moving novel of the heart, David and his friends search their souls for the courage to exorcise the ghosts of their own pasts.

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About the Author:

Adrian Plass is one of today's most significant and successful Christian authors, and he has written over thirty books, including his latest, Looking Good Being Bad - the Subtle Art of Churchmanship. Known for his ability to evoke both tears and laughter for a purpose, Plass has been reaching the hearts of thousands for over fifteen years. He lives in Sussex, England with his wife, Bridget, and continues to be a cricket fanatic

Ghosts Copyright 2001 by Adrian Plass This title also available as a Zondervan audio product. Visit www.zondervan.com/audiopages for more information. Requests for information should be addressed to: Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530 'The Road Not Taken' and 'Birches' are from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Latham, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Adrian Plass asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0 551 03110 7 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other -- except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United Kingdom 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 /.CLY/ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Part One: Loss I seem to wake. My bedroom is in darkness, the rectangle of my curtainless window less black only by a margin of the deepest shade of grey. I am lying on my back, and remain in that position as if paralysed, my eyes wide open, flicking from side to side as I listen intently. My anxiety is to establish urgently the absence of sounds that would be out of place in a safe, secure house at night. In fact, the loudest sound is my own panic-stricken breathing. I fancy, in addition, that I can hear my heart throbbing and hammering against the wall of my chest. It is as though, in that crucial instant before waking, I have received an overwhelming, crushing shock. I remember! Of course I remember. The noise that destroyed my sleep was a thunderous knocking and crashing on the top and bottom of my bedroom door, a veritable rain of blows, catapulting me into consciousness with brutal, wrenching abruptness. But -- and here is the crucial question -- this wild knocking, did it happen in my sleep? Was it the final instant or climax of a dream? That is possible. I have known such things before. Or not? Could there actually be, at this very moment, a person or persons standing outside my door, waiting for me to climb from the shelter of my bed to discover the cause of such inexplicable urgency? No, that idea is foolish and illogical. If there is a man or men who have somehow forced the locks of a door in my house and made their way up my stairs, why should they take the time and trouble to hammer on my unlocked bedroom door with such grotesque violence? If their intention was originally robbery or murder, am I seriously to believe that, in the course of a short journey from the top of the stairs to this side of the landing, they have, by some obscure process, been so infected with courtesy that they now feel obliged to warn me of their presence? On the other hand, if, unfathomably, their motive is an innocent one, why do they not simply come into my room and disclose the nature of the emergency that has made it necessary for them to break into my home and disturb my sleep? No, no, the outrageous knocking was a dream. It was the end of a nightmare. I know it was. In the past I have safely woken from so many nightmares.Actually, I have woken from every single nightmare that I have ever endured. For all my life. Not all. All but one. But I have certainly woken from this nightmare of meaningless knocking, and now I shall go back to sleep. In fact, that is my plan for dealing with the situation. I shall go back to sleep. I shall close my eyes and simply drift back into sleep. Suddenly it will be morning. I close my eyes and wait for sleep to come. I wait. I cannot sleep until I have opened that door.The mindless battering and kicking on the wooden panels that woke me just now was certainly nothing more than a nightmare. However, the fact remains that I cannot sleep until I have opened that door.There will be no one there, of course. There is never anyone there. But it is necessary for the sake of my peace that I should pull that door open, look carefully round it and see with my own two eyes that the landing is empty and clear of intruders. After that sleep will come.Yes, after that sleep will come easily. I push back my bedclothes. I swing my feet to the floor. I stand and begin to feel my way carefully through the pitch darkness towards the door. I am halfway there when a cold shiver of realization passes through me.What can I have been thinking of ? My bedroom at night is never this dark.The world outside my window is never as opaque as it appears now.The window is, in any case, in the wrong place. I was mistaken. This is not my bedroom. I am not awake. I never did wake. I dreamed that I slept. I dreamed that I woke. Dear God! I thought that I was awake, but I am in a nightmare.And now I am to be driven onward by that nightmare.There is no longer a choice between continuing across this alien room and returning to the bed that I naively believed to be mine. Opening that door and confronting whatever may lie behind it is my inescapable assignment. I am close to tears at the prospect of some shrieking abyss of insanity on the other side, and I am right to be petrified.The logic of nightmare interlocks as tightly as the logic of the waking world, but the one is as far removed from the other as hope is removed from despair. I am at the door. There will be nothing. I place my hand on the handle. There will be nothing. I push the handle down. There will be nothing. I pull open the door. Oh! A scream rises in my throat like vomit, but does not emerge. It is like choking on terror.There is something. Two figures are silhouetted within the frame of the door, nearly filling the space.One is large and shambling, slightly bent over, the other smaller. I peer at them but cannot make out the features of either.They do not speak.They do not move.Why, in God's name, do they say and do nothing? It is as if they know that by remaining silent and motionless they will bring me to the sharpest, uppermost pinnacle of this shrieking spiral of fear. I say, my voice contained within a thin, parchment-like skin of selfcontrol,' Yes, can I help you? Did you want something?' I cannot see their mouths, but I know that they are grinning horribly in the darkness now. They are amused by the grovelling terror that makes me say stupid, polite things to people who have callously broken into my house and smashed their fists and feet against my door.They have won.Again.Yet again I perceive that I am what I am. I am so full of trembling hysteria that I fear my spirit will unravel or disintegrate. My sole advantage is the certain knowledge that this is a dream. I may have learned the truth in time. I am not awake.This is a dream. I can escape.There is a way of escape. Surely nightmare is not permitted to break its own rules. As the larger figure makes a sudden slight movement in my direction, I close my eyes and allow everything that I am to fall back on to the smooth, yielding darkness behind me. Releasing body and mind, I slide at ever-increasing speed down the long, steep slopes of a strangely exhilarating descent into abandonment. In a final rush of excitement and dread I collide soundlessly with the real world, perspiring and trembling, awake in my own bed, my heart filled with a dark emotion that is much less and much more than the fear of nightmare. There is an old schoolboy joke that goes, 'How do you know when an elephant's been in your fridge?'The answer is,'You can tell by the footprints in the butter.' Losing someone you have loved and lived with carries echoes of that silly joke.The one who was half of your existence is gone, but, between them, the vastness of her life, and the elephantine, Jurassic creature called death, leave paradoxically tiny marks or footprints all

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