Yes and No

The dark had a different quality now, a held-breath quality, and out of it came laughter first, and warmth, and the smell of someone else's cooking, and before he had taken a step he was standing in his nephew's apartment in Ohio City, and it was Christmas Day. The nights had folded, exactly as Kline said they would, and Crane did not try to count them.

They were playing Yes and No, snow ticking against the windows behind the tree. One of them had thought of a thing; the others asked questions that could only be answered yes or no, and guessed at it. The thing, tonight, was a live animal. A disagreeable animal. A savage animal. An animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in the city, and was not a dog.

"Has it a master?" someone called.

"Yes," said Nate's wife, Teena, grinning.

"Does it belong to no one, then? Is it a stray?"

"A stray," someone guessed, "that answers to no name and knows the price of everything."

"Is it a bear?" said the youngest, and Teena said, "No," and Nate, flushed, said, "It's Uncle Crane," and the room went quiet for exactly one beat before it went the other way, all at once, and Nate let it, grinning.

And Crane stood in the middle of it, invisible, and did not feel hunted. He felt seen — seen in the way that rooms with curtains see the street — and it was not the seeing that was unbearable; it was that they were happy, and that they had included him, and that his nephew, whom he had thrown out of his office yesterday with a sentence about bills, was toasting him, actually toasting him, glass up, saying, "To Uncle Crane. His wealth is of no use to him. He does no good with it. He doesn't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the satisfaction of thinking — ha, ha, ha — that he is ever going to benefit us with it. I have no patience with him, and I am sorry for him, and I will not give up on him until the day I die, so Merry Christmas to Uncle Crane, wherever he is, and may he come to dinner next year, and may he like it."

And Teena's younger sister — the one with the guitar and the opinions — played, and everyone sang along to something about mistletoe and fire, and Crane stood by the door of the room his money had never entered, and felt the strangest sensation of his life, which was not regret, quite, and not joy, quite, but the place where those two files were supposed to touch and did not, and he understood, standing there, that this was the last watch of the one long night, and that the third spirit did not need a bell to come.

It came without one. It came like weather. The apartment went out like a candle, and the dark that replaced it was not the dark of a room but the dark of a place where rooms used to be, and in it stood a tall figure, robed and hooded, that looked like a nun in a habit made of water, if water were black and did not move, and Crane could not see its face, and did not want to, and knew, with the last of his animal certainty, whose face it was keeping from him.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come," Crane said, and his voice behaved better than he deserved. "You are about to show me shadows of things that have not happened but will happen. Is that so, spirit?"

The hood neither nodded nor spoke. One black-gloved finger rose and pointed, down and forward, and Crane followed it, because what else was left.