Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales

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It was a quiet, grey Tuesday toward the end of the Christmas holidays. Turkeys had been devoured, gifts exchanged, and the festive season had tailed away into mundane January. Parents swept the last of the Christmas tree pine needles out of the carpet, while vowing to start dieting. As for the children, they were complaining that the batteries in their new toys had run out. Everybody was disgruntled, disillusioned and disappointed with the whole process of Yuletide. The fun, laughter and fairy lights would not return for nearly a whole long year.

None of this ever bothered Mr. Bausin, going about the same daily ritual he performed in his timeless world of Middlechester Museum: unlocking the great doors, checking the central heating gauges, switching the automatic alarm system back and forth to test it, and tidying the rows of brightly colored pamphlets and folders on the information desk. Christmases came and went; they were none of his business—the museum was his world. He lived in the apartment alone and self contained on the second floor, trusted completely by the administrators and curators. Mr. Bausin was totally devoted to his job as caretaker attendant of Middlechester Museum. His dark, muddy eyes smoldered with anger as he took solvent and a nylon pan-scrubber to the graffiti message sprayed on an Italian marble portal column.

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