The Spirits Up

by Todd Babiak

Genres: Ghost; Literary Fiction; Satire

Synopsis

Warm, witty, and unsettling all at once, here is an unforgettable story of a family desperate for something to believe in.

Benedict is an inventor whose life’s work is a clean energy machine. It has just made him an overnight sensation and his family is suddenly wealthy. Benedict’s wife, Karen, and his teenage daughters, Charlotte and Poppy, are proud of him. But there are problems Benedict is too busy to see: Karen is deeply unhappy in the marriage and contemplating an affair, Charlotte, who is dealing with a chronic illness, is growing more and more distant, and Poppy is cracking under the pressures of her social circle. And there’s another problem. Benedict holds a rather terrible secret about his clean energy machine.
 
Then, on Halloween night, an accident threatens to make everything far worse for the family. The accident kicks off a series of hauntings in their beautiful, historic home in affluent Belgravia, and the ghosts make it clear that they want something from them. Karen has to save her daughters — and herself. Meanwhile, Benedict is consumed by the knowledge that he has to achieve the impossible by Christmas. As time ticks ever closer to the revelation of his secret, he spirals further into despair . . .
 
The Spirits Up is the story of a family haunted by the charmlessness of middle age and the cruelties of modern teenage life. Part social satire and part contemporary ghost story (with a hint of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol), it is an exploration of a timeless question: what happens when there’s nothing to believe?

Release date: October 26, 2021

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Print pages: 288

Sample

Only nine kids came that year, nearly all of them dressed as heroes. It was not a time for pretend scary. On any normal Halloween, two hundred little ghouls would stomp and shout on the front porch and at least twenty Belgravia parents would stand waiting for an invitation: beer, a glass of wine, the sort of whisky rich people were expected to keep. Hours later, when the network of motion lights popped on between the house and the garage, his first thought was for the peanut butter cups in orange wrappers, a hill of them in a blue bowl by the door. He should have left them outside. His staff worked from home now, so he couldn’t even bring surplus candy into the office.
 
It was difficult to guess the time. The rain had stopped and the bedroom was cold. Benedict Ross touched his phone and the screen shone 3:07. The light popped on again, which usually meant a cat or a jackrabbit was moving through the yard, a coyote. Then he heard something, jiggles and scrapes. And a cuss word.
 
Why wasn’t the dog barking? He remembered the dog was dead.
 
Benedict’s hand scrambled across the bedside table, feeling for his glasses. He shoved the mug of chamomile tea and knocked his watch to the floor before giving up. Karen was a light sleeper. When he stood up out of bed in his blue pyjamas, the ones with the dancing giraffes, it felt colder than Halloween cold. He sneaked down the stairs, to the front door, and out into the darkness. The avenue in front of their home glistened in the witching hour. It was a phrase his mother had used when he was a teenager, and it remained with Benedict as he rounded the corner and down the path toward the backyard. It was icy, so icy on his bare feet it shocked him into the realization of his dreamy foolishness: no shoes, no glasses, no parka.
 
The Halloween rain had frozen on the paving stones, on the grass, and on the double-car garage. He expected to see nothing. He wanted to be back in bed. Yet there it was: a blur in a black hoodie working on the garage door. Benedict had run track in high school and university, a good solitary sport, and he jogged every morning until a few years ago when his knees betrayed him. He could run. He did run. The police helicopter was overhead, en route to a more dangerous criminal, and it obscured the slap of his bare feet on the ice. There was a shout of warning in him, but it remained in his chest with fear for his girls cloaked in the fog of sleep. It wasn’t until he was ten feet from the man at the garage door that he had any thought about what might actually happen. He had miscalculated on the ice. He was running too fast.
 
Benedict slammed into the thief and his mouth clonked into the back of his head. He caught the thief as they fell back together. Blood popped in Benedict’s mouth, he slipped, he stumbled, and the man fell on top of him.  
 
This was not a heavy thief. This was a bird, a bird man, who flailed and softly gurgled. When Benedict shoved the little man off, his hands plunged into warmth and wet. And what else? A wide, thin, cool piece of metal. The motion sensor clicked and the floodlights popped on and Benedict saw blood on his hands. The metal was half inside the man. As Benedict slipped out from underneath him on the crispy grass, the thing fell out: a pry bar.
 
Benedict screamed and scrambled to his hands and knees. This was not a man. It was a young woman, a girl, with big cheeks and small eyes. She continued to move as though she were in another place. One of the dogs Benedict had grown up with was a Yorkshire terrier. When he held the dog over a full bath, she would swim in the air. The woman in the backyard tried to swim on her back in slow motion, in the dark and then the light, the dark and the light. She mumbled to herself.

The woman wore a bomber jacket over a sweater. Benedict checked her wound. The pry bar had plunged into her flesh above the waist of her jeans. She smelled of campfire and alcohol. Her teeth were bad. The woman shone.
 
She shone and shook and stared at him. He had to call an ambulance but he did not want to leave the woman alone so he shouted for help until their bedroom light turned on and his wife lifted the blinds.