The Last of the Spirits

They stood in the Exchange Club, the downtown private club where the city's lenders and landlords ate lunch, and the clocks had no second hands, and two men Crane knew by their voices — though in the dim he could not find their faces — were talking by the fire.

"No," one said. "I don't know anything about it. Dead, is he? When?"

"Last night, I believe."

"What has he done with his money?"

"Hold on to his portfolio, I suppose. He hasn't left it to me, that's all I know."

"It's likely to be a very cheap funeral. I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?"

"I don't mind going if lunch is provided."

They laughed, and the fire popped, and the ghost's finger moved Crane along, out into the gray street, into a part of the city Crane's car had never idled in, into a back room where a laundress and an undertaker's man and an old woman who cleaned offices sat over a card table sorting what they had taken from a dead man's rooms, haggling on a pawn app, and the laundress pulled the shirts off a bundle, and then the rings off her own fingers, and said, "He robbed himself, that's what he did, leaving it all lying out for people like us. He'd have had somebody's head off if he'd caught them at it, and here he lies in the dark corner and the bed curtains stripped and the blanket off him, and I took everything that wasn't nailed, and I'm not ashamed, and I'd have taken the nails."

"Every man deserves this who made his office a pestilence," the old woman said, biting a coin. "He frightened everyone away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he's dead."

The ghost pointed, and the room dissolved, and Crane was in a hospital room where the bed was stripped and the monitor was dark and a nurse was saying to an orderly, "He died alone, no next of kin, no emergency contact — the contact field said the same thing twice, it said CRANE, that was all, first and last," and Crane understood the sentence a half-second before he understood it, the way you understand a fall.

"Not that room," Crane said. "Spirit. Not that bed. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I would have been but for this intercourse."

The ghost moved him on, and they were outside a small apartment, and a young couple was coming down the steps with boxes, and the wife was crying with relief. "It's the news we wanted. The old man that it belonged to is dead. If he hadn't been, we'd have been on the street by New Year's, and now — the company will still sell the debt to someone, of course, someone worse, probably, it's always worse — but we have time. We have a little time. We have time to breathe." And Crane knew, with a sensation like the floor of an elevator, whose death had bought the couple's time, and what the new buyer would be.

And the last place was a churchyard, through the snow, a real churchyard with real stones, and a bell tolling somewhere under the mist, and between the stones, in the mist, he saw them at last, close enough to touch: the gray bearers of chains, Voss among them, both hands on the shoulders of a lost man, turning him toward the lit street, and on the church steps, small and gray and patient, the two children from under the robe; and the ghost's finger came down and did not waver, and Crane read the name on the slab, and it was his own.

"Am I that man?" Crane knelt — his knees did not ask him, they went — and took the ghost's hand, and it was cold, and did not resist, and did not help. "Spirit, hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I was. Why show me this, if I am past all hope? Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life."

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone."

And he caught the black hood, the way he had caught the first spirit's hood, to pull it down, to smother, to shred — but his hands, this time, closed on the hood, and the hood was empty, and the churchyard was empty, and the best bed in the brownstone, and his own hands, were his.