It all started quite normally tbh:
No hint of an MR James ghost story at all,
Just straight forward hiking and walking
(Though admittedly Edenic)
Through layers of time,
Following the route signs
And ticking the sights off the list:
Mesolithic coastal meandering;
Ancient Greek woodland temple:
Woodland cave where Pan was worshipped;
Roman cemetery with bas-reliefs
Depicting Persephone's abduction to Hades
(Where we stretched out in open tombs,
Coins in our mouths to pay the ferryman),
Then a Byzantine Christian basilica;
Venetian footpaths and a ruined lighthouse;
A Guns of Navarone-like gun emplacement,
Where a giant Krupp battery commanded the
Ionian Sea -
But this route required a passage through a deserted
village:
A street succession of gaping windows and doors,
Doorways that once were portals between
different worlds,
Entries to domesticity and security and a
refuge
From the travails of the heat of the day,
But long open to nature's calling,
With roofless houses,
Full of lustrous arum lilies, and countless trees
Soaring to a cloudless cypress sky;
And as I reflected on such liminalia, and
took pictures
(Finding a shard of pottery as Trish picked a
lemon),
I sensed a shadow and movement to my right -
And when I talked to Trish about my sensing
of a ghost
Just there in front of the doorstep we had
just passed,
The keys in my rucksack started jingling and
jangling.
Now I am a rationalist and I am sure there
are sound reasons
Contained within the laws of physics and the
rules of the universe,
As to why those keys started their movement
and their jangle -
But all I know is that it only happened just
there,
Just that once, and on no other occasion on
our walking holiday,
Even though the keys were placed in exactly
the same place
In the rucksack, as a sort of half-baked
empirical test.
All I know is that those keys started
automatically jangling,
Coinciding with our doorstep conversation
about how
Time had changed the meaning of these doorways.
Btw,
I hasten to add that we had no madeleine
biscuits in the bag,
But I can't stop thinking about it all.
Why did they jangle?
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