Author: G. Gleason, Word Count: 984
Featured in Midwinter Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – Twixtmas 2024
Smithson is the name one of my ancestors gave him. He’s uttered his real one but once in my
presence. It is an agglutinated series of growls and barks, vaguely approaching the vicinity of
almost sounding like “Smithson”, so I accept the wisdom of my forebears. The kids just call him
“The Christmas Goblin”, because his unfailing knock usually comes around that time.
This year, Smithson did not knock, however, but appeared in the back garden, where I was
puttering about in the little greenhouse we keep.
“Lookin’ a little long in the tooth, eh, Gracie?”
I turned to see the diminutive form in the door. Tweed-clad, with a flat-cap, he looked sort of
like an early 20th century newsboy with a Hapsburg jaw. The goblin had pointed ears, slightly
translucent skin and two pupilless blue buttons for eyes. There was no mistaking him for human.
“Grandkids, now,” I muttered, affably as I could.
“Oh that’s fine,” he said. “I’ll have to meet ’em, guv. Got any sweet nog? I fancy a drink.”
In the kitchen, I poured an absurdly long glug of brandy into the kid-friendly stuff. The
kitchen is one of the few truly modern areas in the sprawling pile that is the Gracie house, and has the fortune of being central to the place. Unfortunately, it meant that as we trudged to the sitting-
room it attracted the maximum amount of attention, particularly from the house’s young visitors, of which there were currently two. Neither of the kids had before met Smithson, and they stared as if
they could not believe the confirmation of the family myth. Gracie-folk are after all a naturally
skeptical sort.
“You’ hair’s on fire!” shouted the kids, almost in unison, as Smithson doffed his cap to them.
That was quite an achievement as Smithson doesn’t have any hair. His scalp was indeed alight.
“Oh!” he cried, startled, and quickly covered his head again. He launched himself into a
reclining chair like a willful toddler.
“What brings you here this year?” I asked. Though, of course, I knew. The answer was
always the same.
“I seek the Dream.” he said, rather formally. “I know I will find it here, but I know not
when.”
“Do you wish to wake the house?”
“I do, for I am an archaeologist of Dreams.”
“You may do so, and look for the Dream.”
“You know that you may see unpleasant things? Even, it seems, your own death.”
“I know. I am ready.”
With that, the formalities were over.
As it happens, there are a number of dusty animal heads in the sitting room. We find them
distasteful, but it would seem a minor blasphemy to the ambiance of the place to cart them off to the
attic to gather even more dust in silence. As if to announce his disdain for formalities, Smithson
made them talk.
“It was a good life,” said the buck.
“Yes, it was,” agreed one of the does.
“Oh aye.” confirmed the other doe, emphatically. Smithson swears up and down that this
particular buck is “the” Monarch of the Glen–usually after he’s had a second helping of nog.
Smithson waved a small hand lazily. The house awoke.
It’s impossible to describe the sense of temporal vertigo that happens when Smithson does
his thing. So, then, suppose it felt like what tone might expect tumbling down through the centuries
ought to feel like.
There was a thud as the goblin propelled himself from the chair and made to find the Dream.
I too wandered. Some of the mustachioed ghosts I recognized from previous years, and some were
wholly unfamiliar. My descendants, perhaps? I saw Humphrey Gracie and his man hanging one of
the deer heads fresh from the taxidermist. That was fleeting. The elder Gracie turned to say
something to the other gentleman and was gone. Such vignettes might be interesting to humans, but
a respectable Dream Archaeologist hunts for the persistent patterns. A fortunate side effect of this is that moments of awful unhappiness tend toward brevity during one of these excavations.
Almost without warning, Smithson came bounding back into the sitting room, loafers
pounding staccato on the parquet.
An image was forming in the room’s center space. At first a murky yellow and gradually
resolving into an amalgamation of sorts. People gathered round the fireplace, but no particular
people. It was a sort of ideal Gracie family celebrating some ideal Christmas.
I knew then that I was looking at the memory of the house.
Smithson’s “Dream” as it were.
“No,” the goblin said. I must have muttered something, unless he was reading my mind. “It’s
only a part of the Dream. There’s more to be found. But I hope you have plenty of booze. I am so
going to celebrate after I finish my report.”
“Has anyone ever actually seen their own death death during one of your, er…vision quests
or whatever?”
“Awakenings. And yes, once. It was very, very unpleasant. Just try not to die at home, guv.
Simple as that.”
“That’s easy for an immortal to say.”
“Indefinite is not the same as infinite, O gracious Gracie.”
“What’s the point of collecting these Dreams? They don’t seem all that interesting, for all
that these…phantoms seem to be enjoying the moment.”
“We do it for the same reason that humans fondly remember days gone by. It’s about the
collective effect. It’s utterly fascinating in itself. The Dream is like a track, furrowed into the
essence of the place.”
As was his custom, Smithson stayed for the holiday, and a little after. He made the house a
better place while he was around, though I was quite clear that any incidents like that time he’d
pulled a boa from someone’s ear and it had stalked the house for the better part of two decades
would not be tolerated.
Finally, one day in early January, Smithson left again.
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