Spirit by Graham Masterton

where you’re wrong! I’m realand all these people are real and David’s real and Elizabeth and Laura are real. The only ficstitious – the only
fictitious –
character in this room is
you
. You’re not real. You’re not! But you won’t admit it.’
    Johnson Ward grasped mommy’s black-gloved elbow, partly as a gesture of sympathy, and partly to hold her steady. ‘Why don’t I mingle?’ he said. ‘Maybe some of these good people’s reality will rub off on me.’
    â€˜You’re a sham, Johnson,’ mommy declared. ‘A certified fraud.’
    Johnson Ward left mommy frowning at the wall as if she had never seen it before. He circled around the room, shaking hands with some of the people he knew, and smiling to some of those he didn’t know. He clasped the Reverend Earwaker’s hand and whispered something in his ear, and the Reverend Earwaker nodded, again and again. Elizabeth thought Johnson Ward was wonderful and couldn’t keep her eyes off him. He had not only said she was a lady, he had treated her like one, too. And although Mommy had been horribly rude to him, he hadn’t seemed to mind at all.
    On the other side of the room, Laura was chattering to Aunt Beverley, telling her how she still wanted to be a movie star, even famouser than Shirley Temple. Aunt Beverley was saying, ‘Of
course
, candy-cake. You’re
twice
as pretty as Shirley. If your mommy says it’s okay, I’ll take you to see Sol Warberg, he’s a very,
very
famous producer.’
    At one minute after eleven o’clock, the doorbell chimed. The murmuring conversation died away. Everybody knew who it was; they glanced at each other, discomfited. Elizabeth’s father went to open the door with the scissorlike stride of a man who wants to get something over and done with, as soon as he can.
    Black as two half-starved crows, Mr Ede the mortician and his assistant Benny, tall and painfully thin, stood side by side in the snow-clogged porch. They both removed their black hats,and Mr Ede’s hair, which had been carefully combed across his narrow skull to cover up his baldness, flew up in the air and waved around in the wind.
    â€˜Are all of your guests arrived, sir?’ he asked, peering beadily into the hallway and swivelling his head. Father turned around to look at their assembled friends and relatives, and there was a look on his face that was close to panic. Even Elizabeth could understand what the mortician really meant.
Are you ready, sir? It’s time to put your daughter into the ground
.
    Through the open doorway, across the white and ghostly garden, she could see the huge black hearse waiting, its windows so filled with flowers that she could only make out one glinting silver handle of Peggy’s coffin.
    She repeated the little prayer from
The Snow Queen
. ‘Our roses bloom and fade away . . . our Infant Lord abides alway . . .’
    When they returned from the funeral, the guests were silent and pinched with cold. There had been some painful sobbing at the graveside as Peggy’s small, white, silver-handled casket had been lowered, and mommy had thrown five white roses on it, one for each blessed year of Peggy’s life. A keen north-northeaster had cut across the exposed northern slope of the cemetery, so that the snow had blown into their eyes like shattered glass.
    As soon as Mrs Patrick opened the front door, mommy rushed past her and fled upstairs, a distraught black shadow. The girls heard her locking her bedroom door. Uncomfortably, the rest of the guests crowded back into the living-room. The double doors to the dining-room had now been opened, and the table spread with food and drink – chicken chowder and breadcrumbed ham and a joint of red-rare beef and spicy meatloaf, as well as a glazed turkey and a whole poached salmon with pimento-stuffed olives where its eyes should havebeen. It looked to the girls like a