Ghostwood

By Michelle Sagara

Originally published in Enchanted Forests, ed. Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg. A short story of 9k words

A young man is visiting his sister at her cottage—in the middle of a bitterly cold winter. Who does that? He doesn’t particularly like cottages, he’s not fond of nature when it’s not contained in planters, and he’s not a fan of the cold.

But he’s here, in a winter forest, with his sister ... and shambling corpses that seem to follow him wherever he goes.

What happened here? Why are they after him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosdan Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781927094402

Michelle Sagara

New York Times bestselling author Michelle Sagara writes as both Michelle Sagara and Michelle West; she is also published as Michelle Sagara West. She lives in Toronto with her long-suffering husband and her two children, and to her regret has no dogs. She can be found @msagara on Twitter or http://msagarawest.wordpress.com

Book preview

Ghostwood

Ghostwood

Michelle Sagara

Rosdan Press

Copyright © 1995 by Michelle Sagara

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Introduction

GHOSTWOOD

About the Author

Also by Michelle West

Also by Michelle Sagara

Other Short Stories

Introduction

More on death, now.

Kit Kerr was editing an anthology of stories called Enchanted Forests for DAW, and she asked me if I’d like to submit something.

Forests are often evocative for me, and I said yes, thinking I would have no problems doing so.

But then a friend’s younger brother, and his wife of maybe a year, died in a car accident. I saw him often throughout university; he was our Star Trek expert, and he was a soft-spoken, extremely intelligent young man. The baby of the family. His sisters, Debbie and Ruth Ohi, are university friends of mine, and both are enormously creative and talented individuals; I met Jim through them because it was impossible not to meet people they loved — and they loved him fiercely. He was their baby.

Debbie’s husband phoned one morning, and he knows I’m not a morning person. So I answered the phone in my usual morning fog, and he said, I’m just phoning to let you know that Jim and Diane died in a car accident last night on the way home from Bramalea.

I didn’t have much to say, then. I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t a bad dream.

But I became sure in the days that followed.

Funerals, I’ve been to. But I’d never been to a funeral for people so young and healthy before. Many of the deaths I’d seen were the lingering deaths of cancer or age related health problems; this was like a small bomb that exploded without warning across our emotional landscape.

Two years later, out Christmas shopping with Ruth, we stopped in front of a display of pewter sculptures. Ruth pointed at the Next Generation enterprise, and said, Jim would love this, and I replied, without thinking, No he wouldn’t — it’s out of proportion. It would bug him. And then after a pause, I said, You must hate this time of year.

And she said, I hate it.

But I digress.

What I thought I would write for Kit Kerr was completely lost, and it remained lost. What I wrote, instead — the first thing I attempted after the funeral — was this.

GHOSTWOOD

It was winter in a forest that had forgotten