

Ghost Story
by Alex Reynard

*epilogue*


     ~~~~~


Christmas morning!

No single day of the year can fill a kid with such incredible joyful energy. Suzy and Milo were no exceptions.

"Wake up! Wake up, Milo! Now!" Suzy gleefully shouted as she jumped up and down on the bed.

"Waaaaah!" Milo screamed. He tumbled out of bed and landed on the floor with a thump.

"Oh crap!" Suzy was at his side in a heartbeat. "Did you hurt your neck?" she asked worriedly.

"Nope, it only hurts a little." Milo rubbed his neck gently. The bruises were still there, but they didn't look so bad anymore. They couldn't be seen through his fur at least. And they had taken on a rather awful yellow shade that Milo hoped would be the last sign of them.

Suzy helped him up. She gave him a little hug. "I'm sorry."

He smiled and squeezed her back. "It's okay. It's Christmas morning! We're allowed to be overly excited and do dumb stuff all day!"

She giggled. She snatched up Ruthie in her arms. "Let's go get presents!" she squeaked.

Milo heartily agreed. The two of them were soon bounding down the stairs like a herd of wild elephants.

The noise also did a nice job of waking up Milo's parents. Mom rolled over, looked at the clock, and groaned.

"They're awaaa-ake," Dad singsonged.

"I'm aware of that, dear."

He rolled over and smooched her. "I'll get up and start the coffee brewing."

She kissed him passionately. "This is why I love you. You know exactly what I need."

He grinned and went to go find his house robe.

Milo's parents had actually taken quite well to suddenly acquiring a daughter. A daughter who'd been dead for over a year, no less.

After the initial brouhaha of the Friday Night Dinner Party Massacre (as Milo had dubbed it), their lives had all been turned so far beyond upside down that meeting a ghost was actually one of the *less* bizarre things to happen to them.

For starters, Milo's father had gone through hell at the police station. Richard MacAllister's remark about how people tended to believe whatever sounded most like it should be the truth was proving exceedingly correct. It took the cops hours to get their minds wrapped around the concept that the two men at the scene had not been the ones causing the disturbance. This was even despite the fact that the officers who had actually been at the scene had told the rest of the squad this several dozen times.

Damian, of course, went through worse. A pothead young male with piercings who just *happened* to show up at the scene of a crime? Never mind that he was the one who had called 911 in the first place. He HAD to be guilty of something! Luckily for Damian, a high-profile coyote attorney of the ambulance-chasing, publicity-craving ilk happened to be in the precinct at the time. He smelled lawsuit as soon as he heard the news. He stepped right up to offer Damian his services. Damian admitted that he probably didn't even have enough money for an hour's worth of the lawyer's time. The lawyer however, just smiled. He said he'd take the case pro bono, that the publicity alone would be worth it. And, of course, if they won at trial or reached a settlement, he'd be obliged to take a share of that. Damian was not surprised.

Eventually, after all their statements had been taken umpteen times, both Milo's parents, and Damian too, were released. They all met up again at the hospital. The doctors said that Milo had been luckier than a four leaf clover. His neck was bruised up and down and sprained in a couple of places, but nothing was broken. Milo also had some mild first and second degree burns on his back from the salmon, but those were expected to clear up within a few days.

Suzy could not pass up the opportunity to sniff the air and ask, 'Do I smell burning foxfish?'

Milo was not amused.

He was, however, released from the hospital a day later and told to get lots of bed rest. For the next few days, Milo was pampered like an emperor. His mom and dad, still blown away by his bravery and resourcefulness, waited on him hand and foot. He ate lots of icecream and finished six novels.

While Milo recuperated, his parents got to know Suzy. They could see, hear and touch her as well as Milo could now. Ever since they'd moved into the house, they'd noticed tiny little odd things happening. Strange sounds from nowhere, almost like airy swatches of conversation. Objects seeming to move by themselves. Phantoms knocking on the door. Stuff they'd normally dismiss if not for so much of it happening at once. Finding out it was a ghost was really not much of a surprise.

Suzy did her very best to be charming and sweet, and promised to be quiet and well behaved if Milo's parents let her stay. She was so cute she managed to negate the creepiness factor of having a ghost in the house quite nicely. Also, when they'd all sat down and she'd told them her whole life story again from start to finish, there was no way they could reject her. After she'd finished, Milo's mother got up and hugged her, Milo's father did the same, and they both told her that she could consider them her new adoptive parents from now on. Suzy cried tears of joy.

And on the twenty-first of December, the one year anniversary of her death, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing at all. At least not to Suzy. Needless to say, she was overwhelmingly relieved.

Her diary did indeed make headlines. All the local newscasts, and more than a few national ones, were all fighting tooth and nail to break the story first. As soon as the local newspapers got ahold of it, it was plastered on every front page in town. One paper even printed a special edition that had a complete transcription of it from start to finish (including her expletives for emphasis), then left seventeen pages blank to simulate the amount left in the diary that Suzy had not been able to finish. They sold *thousands* of copies. There was even talk of the diary being published on its own in a hardback edition.

And then, like a swarm of locusts, the papparazi came. Milo's house was swamped with them. Dozens, sometimes seeming like hundreds, of people sticking cameras and microphones in his face, asking him the most inane questions imaginable. Sometimes it even seemed like they were crawling up the walls and onto the roof. It was truly a pain in the patoot, as Suzy would say.

One question that came up, after Ms. MacAllister's taped confession became public, was how could Milo possibly have known what happened that night, when Suzy's diary had ended the day before? Milo casually answered that the diary had convinced him that Richard was innocent and Cheryl was guilty, then he'd gone online, found out what Richard had said at trial, and elaborated on it with some educated guesses. The reporters ate it up. Soon he was being called the Hero Kid Of The Century. Milo thought that was a bit over the top, but he wasn't about to argue with them.

Also, amid some rather furious public opinion, the police department reluctantly apologized to Milo's father. To make amends, they agreed to set up a special patrol to keep the reporters away from the house on Christmas. That was slightly trampling some first amendment rights, but who was going to take the reporters' side anyway? It was Christmas, for crying out loud!

Which brings us back to Milo and Suzy, running around the livingroom in their pajamas, grinning like idiots at the incredible pile of shiny loot under the tree.

The tree itself was gorgeous. Milo and Suzy had spent a happy evening decorating it together three days before. Milo's father opened up their box of family ornaments and Suzy had gone up to the attic to bring down hers. The tree held memories from both families, arranged side by side in harmony. It was a powerful symbol of Milo and Suzy's lives coming together to make something beautiful.

Milo's parents came into the livingroom looking like bog mummies. Milo tried really hard not to laugh at their tangled messes of hair. "Good morning!" he cried cheerfully.

"Mmmmmfrrrmmmghh," they said.

Once they were full of coffee, they became much more sociable. The three foxes, and one mouse, all gathered around the tree. They lit a nice warm blaze in the fireplace, tuned the radio to some Christmas music, and got down to some serious gift unwrapping.

Wonderful, heartfelt things were exchanged all around. But the two gifts that made the most impact were Milo and Suzy's gifts to one another.

Milo urged Suzy to open hers first. He handed her a huge box wrapped in shimmering metallic red paper and green ribbon. She was appropriately impressed. She held Ruthie up to see as she tore into the packaging to reveal... a featureless cardboard box. Okay, well, there must be something inside then. She dug her nails into the box, opened it up, and her jaw dropped.

In amongst the packing peanuts, at least a dozen Ruthies looked back at her.

Suzy was beyond astonished. There were two more Ruthie plushies in different outfits, a 100 piece Ruthie jigsaw puzzle, four Ruthie storybooks, a Ruthie pencil topper and *eight* Ruthie videotapes!

Suzy just about exploded. "Where the heck did you FIND all this!?" she shouted.

Milo explained that he and his dad had gone down to the city library a few days ago and did some searching online. They happened upon a website called eBuy.com, where millions of online auctions took place. To their delight, they found that Ruthie stuff was plentiful on the net. They signed up and placed bids on seventeen close-to-ending auctions in one day and won most of them. They paid extra for overnight delivery and nearly all of them came through in time despite the annual Christmas clog at the post office. Milo knew there were still two packages on the way, but he decided not to tell Suzy for now since it would make such a fun surprise. She was going to freak when she saw the Ruthie action figure set!

Still in giddy shock over The Best Christmas Present Ever (aside from her original Ruthie, of course), Suzy felt like her gift to Milo would be a huge disappointment. Since she didn't have any way to go out shopping for him, she'd had to search through the stuff in the attic for something he might like.

Milo said he didn't mind at all. His parents told Suzy that if she'd just told them she wanted to buy something for Milo, they would have been happy to find a way to take her out shopping with them. Suzy was very glad to hear this and felt a little silly that she hadn't thought of it too.

The little mouse left the room and came back pushing a cardboard box as equally enormous as Milo's. It wasn't wrapped, but she had drawn little christmas ornaments and snowmice all over it in colored pencil. Milo thought it looked wonderful.

It also looked heavy. He tried to lift it and it felt like it was full of bricks. He opened it up and his jaw dropped just like Suzy's had.

"Books!!!" he shrieked.

More books than he could count! Old paperback sci-fi novels! There were some good authors in here, too! Milo's eyes lit up in enchantment. The cover arts were all vivid and overdramatic. Robots and spaceships and wildly inaccurate visions of the future. He even spotted a few by one of his favorite authors that he'd been trying to track down for years!

Milo dug through the box like a mole and Suzy was pleased as punch. She'd worried so much that a box full of moldy old books was a terrible present. Not worthy at all of the immense gratitude she felt towards her dear fox friend.

"Suzy, I'll be reading these for *years*!!" Milo shouted wildly. "Decades maybe!!"

Suzy's heart grew wings when she saw his smile. He was almost delirious with happiness! It appeared that one furson's moldy old books was another's goldmine. As she explained to Milo, her Daddy was a sci-fi nut too. He'd read most of these in college and had kept on collecting them through the years. There were lots more recent ones at the bottom of the box, she told him. (And, she carefully whispered, she'd also found a few of Daddy's old nudie magazines. He could check those out too if he liked. The magazines, for obvious reasons, were not included in the box.)

And so, as Suzy popped in a videotape of 'Ruthie's Amazing Travels: The Lost Emerald Of Singapore', and Milo busied himself peeking through the synopses on the jackets of all the paperbacks, Milo's mom and dad retired to their bedroom and exchanged some gifts of their own. Mistletoe was employed for various naughty uses that don't need to be elaborated on here.

All four of them decided on their own that this had been, by gosh and by golly, as cliched as it was, the Best Christmas Ever.

It was about to get a whole lot better though.

***

With Suzy enthralled by an incredible wave of nostalgia for cartoons she hadn't seen since she was six, and Milo already starting on a murder mystery featuring an android detective, and Mom and Dad having fallen into a blissful mid-day nap, Christmas progressed nicely.

Milo stopped reading after a few chapters and decided to join Suzy in front of the tube. After watching a bit of the Ruthie show with her, he had to admit that, while the animation was a little sub-par, the writing was good and Ruthie was a great, likeable character. Plus, for a kids' cartoon, it contained a surprising amount of lessons about history and geography. It was absolutely unprecedented: an educational TV show that was subtle about it and fun to watch? Lord have mercy!

Breakfast was a fat stack of pancakes drowned in ooey-gooey syrup, and was served sometime after noon. It took a while for Milo and Suzy to realize that the grown-ups had snuck off back to bed. They were having none of that, so they crept into the bedroom and started loudly singing Jingle Bells off-key until they got up again. Mom and Dad were torn between wanting to throttle them and thinking it was adorable.

For the rest of the afternoon, everyone mostly sat around enjoying their presents. Eventually Mom started on dinner; a nice canned ham. She could be heard buzzing about the kitchen, humming along with the radio to various christmas carols. Dad joined her and soon they were singing two-part harmony while they mashed the potatoes and devilled the eggs.

The feast began around seven, and what a feast it was! Suzy felt like her taste buds were going to simply explode. It was still a little odd for all of them to watch Suzy's head floating about through the dishes. Though it seemed a bit wasteful to serve Suzy a plate and have her not be able to digest any of it. So, they simply tried to ignore her smiling and bobbing about in the middle of the cranberry sauce.

After dinner, the foxes all collapsed on the couch, feeling like a trio of zeppelins. Suzy had to admit that the one advantage to being a ghost was that you could eat all you wanted and not feel full. And there was still pie and icecream for later, not to mention all that fruitcake!

Around nine, while they were all snuggled together under a great big afghan watching Christmas specials, there came a knock at the door. Dad was pretty sure the police would have successfully chased away all the reporters, so maybe it was one of the officers themselves come to wish them happy holidays or something.

When he got up and went to the door, no one was there. There didn't seem to be anyone up or down the street.

When the tall fox looked down though, he noticed a piece of newspaper held in place by a rock from the front lawn. Arching an eyebrow in puzzlement, he picked it up.

His eyes bugged out. "I've gotta show Suzy this!" he yelped.

He rushed back inside and thrust the clipping in front of the startled little mouse's face. "Read this!" he said excitedly.

The date said it was from today's paper. The headline read: FREEDOM FOR CHRISTMAS.

Suzy read: 'In light of alarming new evidence, both the lawyers of Richard MacAllister and the state district attorney rushed paperwork through the courts over the past week to overturn Macallister's conviction for murder. He was released with the court's apologies today and walked out of the courthouse with tears in his eyes...'

The article continued, but that was all Suzy needed to hear.

Milo looked at her. She was completely silent and had gone still as a statue. "Suzy?"

Her eyes filled with tears, a wavering smile grew on her lips, and she suddenly screamed out joyfully, "We did it!!!"

At that, there was another knock on the door.

Suzy did not dare hope it was who she so desperately wanted it to be.

Milo's father got up again. Suzy heard him walk to the door, open it, pause, and say in a startled voice, "Wow, you're even bigger than I thought you'd be."

"DADDY!!!!!"

Suzy literally flew off the couch. She turned the corner and saw her daddy standing there in the doorway.

He was as muscly as ever, maybe even more so. His fur was the color of cigarette ash, which suited him impressively. He was wearing a felt santa hat and carrying a plastic grocery bag full of hastily-wrapped presents.

When he saw her, the hopes he'd tried so hard to destroy, tried to dismiss as impossible, leaped forth again and burst open like fireworks.

It was her. His daughter. His Suzy.

The fact that she was no more than a mouse-shaped cloud of mist with two sparkling blue eyes did not dampen his love an ounce.

Daddy flung his bag of gifts at Milo's father and rushed forward. "SUZY!!!"

She held out her arms, and he scooped her up in a hug. Both of them cried out in unimaginable, unthinkable joy.

As she hugged her daddy with all the love she'd kept saved up for an entire year, Suzy began to glow. The same electric blue corona as before surrounded her, and something began to happen all along the street.

Streetlights grew brighter. The wind began to dance. Tree branches shook. Snow began to swirl. The air tingled with readiness...

Then, like a supernova, a pulse of sheer happiness exploded from Milo's house.

It touched each and every person within a twenty mile radius. All of a sudden everyone, *everyone*, felt a wave of incredible joy and contentment come over them. For no reason at all. Just a sudden, inexplicable burst of happiness.

Arguments were stopped. Family gatherings were salvaged. Suicides were averted.

No one ever even tried to explain it. Most people just accepted it as some kind of Christmas miracle.

But in the livingroom of one house in the very epicenter, two families knew.

Two families that had become one.

"Hey, are those my old books?" Richard noticed.



     The End
     for now...





***

Started: December 9th, 2004. Finished: January 11th, 2005 Editing Completed: January 16th, 2005


