Old Geoffrey had always been a source of stories, fables and tales of warning from the otherworldly side of Mistleton's past. Michael and Willow, of course, never took his stories seriously. Well, they didn't take them wholly seriously, anyway. Mostly.
It depended, really, on when the stories were told. If it was a dark, misty day, which was not uncommon in Mistleton, even in summer, Old Geoffrey could scare the two of them to where he had to walk them to their back gate, and they would even plead for him to escort them all the way to the kitchen door. On sunny days like today, by contrast, even his most harrowing tales were more wonderful than worrying, and Michael and Willow would giggle with excitement and beg him for more, for something more gruesome, something more mysterious, something more frightening.
Old Geoffrey's pool of inspiration seemed impossible to empty. He could dip into the fathoms of his mind at any time and pull up, or make up, perhaps, a spellbinding new story the like of which Michael and Willow had never heard before. He told them the myths of old London, of Jack the Ripper, of Puss n' Boots, whom they knew but of whom they never tired. He frightened them with the Bloody Tower, with Victorian back streets, with swordsmen betrayed, with women abandoned, poisoned, or wedded against their wills.
He told them of somber-hooded highwaymen, galloping in eternal half light, searching for travelers to rob; of wandering Will o' the Wisps, luring the unwary from the road to the marshes from which they would never return; of jumping Jack o' Lanterns beckoning the innocent; of goat-footed devils collecting the damned. He warned them of trolls hiding under bridges, whom daylight turned to stone. He cautioned them of werewolves lurking in bushes, who gnawed on children's bones. There were faeries in starlight, pixies in moonlight, gremlins in ghoul light, gnomes in the fens. There were phantoms and phantasms, mermaids, mermen. There were midsummer madrigals, midwinter feasts. There were unicorns, leprechauns, magical beasts. There were dryads and nymphs who captured your soul. The horseless, the houseless, the headless, the whole. The listless and lyrical, the musical, the mute, the mystical, the noble, the brute. All climbed out of the bottomless waters of Old Geoffrey's inspiration.
Most wonderful and most frightening were the stories of those who even now surrounded Michael and Willow among the graves of St. Lucy's. The church was erected in 1066, soon after the arrival of the Normans from France. The site had long been a place of religious gathering, since before Roman times, and Geoffrey le Bon Marché, the first Norman lord of Mistleton, decided that to build a Norman church on that spot would be a good way to remind everybody he was running things.
Fittingly, St. Lucy's first lord was also St. Lucy's first haunting. According to the story, Le Bon Marché was caught cheating the King out of a dozen horses, for which he was hanged from his favorite oak in his favorite churchyard, on a cold December night. His head was cut off, for good measure, and le Bon Marché's body was sentenced to search for it among the churchyard oaks beneath which it was buried. Michael doubted this was so, but all the same, whenever he crossed the churchyard in the Yuletide darkness, he kept his hood strung tightly strung about his face, in case the ghost should decide to substitute Michael's head for his own.
Not long after the death of Geoffrey le Bon Marché, legend said, there was a priest who lived to be almost ninety years old, solely to prevent anyone's succeeding him as St. Lucy's spiritual master. He even insisted on being buried under the altar, where, according to Old Geoffrey, he still kept a spirited watch over his parish. The idea made Michael uneasy whenever he entered the church, but while he sometimes suspected Old Geoffrey had told him the story just to keep him awake on Sunday mornings, the old priest's spell was rarely strong enough to frighten Michael into wakefulness for an entire service--but then, it would have taken more than even an enthusiastic spirit to counter the effects of Reverend Clark Stewart Lewis's rambling homilies.
A few years on, Michael and Willow were told, there was the beautiful Lady Blanchefleur, who dabbled in magic and also dabbled in the handsome young men of the parish. When her beauty could not snare a man, her magic usually could. Being beautiful and magical, she was accustomed to getting what she wanted.
The one thing she wanted most, however, she couldn't have: one particularly handsome man resisted both her charms and her potions. This frustrated and infuriated her, to the point where she would rather he died than live without her. And so she decided to replace her customary love potion with a freshly concocted death brew. Simply put, she would invite him to dine and poison him.
Simply put, but not so simply done, because poison potions were, much, much trickier than love potions, and to assure herself that her elixir was correctly mixed, the lady took a sip. To her great pleasure, it tasted exactly right. To her great displeasure, this meant that she had just taken a sip of poison, and she died. Ever since her death, Old Geoffrey told Willow, Lady Blanchefleur had haunted the churchyard in search of beautiful, magical girls she could enslave and force to brew her potions. Willow was quite confident that Lady Blanchefleur wasn't a real person, and probably wasn't a real ghost, either. Still, Willow avoided the graveyard after dark.
One of the more grizzly tales Old Geoffrey liked to tell (and therefore one of Michael's favorites) was that of Mr. Gristler, a miserly old miller who grew rich out of cheating the local farmers, whom he habitually overcharged for grinding their grain, and from whom he habitually stole a portion of every sack of grain he ground. It was Mr. Gristler's greedy ways, Old Geoffrey liked to say, "that ground him up in the end."
One evening, as the story went, Mr. Gristler was sitting in his mill, counting his daily profits, in a loft just above the mill's machinery. A penny rolled off his table, down to the floor, and the miller reached to pick it up. To Mr. Gristler's dismay, his profits had gained him such a portly paunch that he had difficulty reaching the floor. He spread his legs to lower his belly, but the more he reached, the more his belly reached with him, so that he had to spread his legs so wide that he kicked the fallen penny, and the coin skipped out of the loft, coming to rest atop a sizable wooden wheel. Panting and swearing, the miller first kneeled, then leaned, then sprawled over the edge of the loft, reaching, reaching, reaching for the penny on the wheel.
With every rotation of the wheel, the penny would move away from Mr. Gristler, and then it would return. He grasped and waited, grasped and waited, grasped and waited as the penny completed circle after circle after circle, with the turning of the grinding mill. Each grasp and wait made the miller more impatient, until he lunged so angrily at the coin that the weight of his sizable paunch pulled his balance over, and he tumbled down into the machinery, where he triumphantly pinched the penny between his fingers. Then, just as he squeezed the coin, the wheels of the mill squeezed him. He was so squeezed, Old Geoffrey claimed, that he needed two very long, very thin coffins for burying. When Michael asked whether they might have folded him into one, Old Geoffrey didn't laugh.
Mr. Gristler's ghost now spent its nights groping for coins fallen from parishioners' pockets. Therefore, Old Geoffrey advised Michael, it was best to grasp his change very tightly before putting it in the pauper's box outside St. Lucy's great front door. Michael promised he would hold his money very tightly indeed. Old Geoffrey then confused Michael by telling him he should never hold on to his money too tightly. But Old Geoffrey was old, so Michael didn't challenge him on it.
The story of Little Milly Dew was less horrific, but it always upset Willow. Old Geoffrey described Little Milly Dew as "a sapling of a girl, barely more than a spirit" while she was alive, which wasn't long. When she was Willow's age, she ran out of the house following an argument with her parents, who hoped to protect her from the world, while she hoped to see as much of it as she could. A clash of hopes is a clash of wills, Old Geoffrey said, and a clash of wills is a guarantee of loss. Little Milly Dew's will had driven her out of doors on the night of the most violent storm in a century, so to demonstrate how easily she could handle the worst of the world, Little Milly Dew stayed out in the slashing rain and the thrashing wind, flashed at by lighting and crashed at by thunder.
She survived the night, but not much after, dying of influenza within two weeks. During the fortnight of fever, she constantly mumbled, "Where is my home? Where is my home?" to which her mother constantly replied, weeping, "You're always home, my darling, you're always home." Following Little Milly Dew's death, every heavy nighttime storm had found her amid the gravestones, coughing and weeping and beseeching, "Where is my home? Where is my home?"
Just a few days before, Michael had had to comfort Willow through the storm that raged, insisting to her that Little Milly Dew was only one of Old Geoffrey's ghost stories, and convincing her that the wailing in the churchyard was the wind, not Little Milly Dew. He suspected he might have been telling Willow this to convince himself as much as her, but he would never confess this to himself.
Willow preferred the tale of Hans Grebble. Hans was a German bomber pilot shot down during World War II. Hans escaped his plane before it hit the ground, but he landed on the roof of St. Lucy's, slid down the steeply sloped slate and tumbled to the ground, crashing through the branches of the giant yew on his way down. The tree broke his fall, but the ground broke a number of his bones, so rather than being sent to a prison camp, he was sent to hospital. There he met and fell in love with a young English nurse, and she fell in love with him, even though he was a German. It was an impossible love, they both knew, but love during wartime was often impossible, and that never seemed to stop it. So they loved.
All things being best, their love would have lasted a lifetime, and it did, in a way. Unfortunately for Hans, a lifetime only measured three weeks past his accident. Hans recognized that these were extreme circumstances, and extreme circumstances demanded extreme measures, so when his body was shipped back to Germany, Hans stayed behind, his spirit remaining in Mistleton, with the love of his life, and the love of his death.
The nurse, Old Geoffrey told Michael and Willow, never married. She saved herself, it was said, for the after-life, when she and Hans could be reunited forever in their love. So Hans haunted the roof of St. Lucy's, waiting, until he was eventually joined atop the church by his nurse, and they shared the stars and eternity. Michael couldn't help picturing Hans and the nurse tumbling off the roof and through the yew, again and again, but he quickly learned that this image did not amuse his sister, who found the tale deeply romantic. Willow would punch Michael hard if he ever laughed at this love, a love that lasted forever, even though it was impossible, maybe because it was impossible.
Old Geoffrey preferred to scowl about the German, and he would often declare that things would have been better if Hans had never left his homeland. When Michael asked why, Old Geoffrey would answer, "Them that belongs where they are, belongs where they are, and not where they doesn't belong." Michael had no idea what that meant.
What Michael did know was that Old Geoffrey knew a lot about ghosts. He knew the most about ghosts of anyone Michael had ever spoken to about ghosts. Old Geoffrey did make his living in a graveyard, after all. So when Old Geoffrey told him there were no ghosts in the shed, Michael had to believe him, which was very disappointing. What could be more exciting than ghosts?
For Old Geoffrey, the question wasn't what could be more exciting than ghosts. For Old Geoffrey, the question was what could be worse.
For Old Geoffrey, goblins were worse.