Previously published in "The Trick or Treat Trader"

Yoji had never been to England before, as it was too much like Japan with everyone driving on the wrong side of the road and acting as if they were heading for a collision. Driving in the states was so sane, so civilized, so easy.

"You're back and forth to Japan all the time, how do you get around there?" His English friend, Chris had asked.

"I take a rickshaw!" he joked. The truth was he walked most places or rode his bike if he had to. He had learnt to drive after he came to America and was petrified to drive on the wrong side, or the opposite side, so to speak, of the road. On occasion, he took a bus or a taxi, but sat to the back and kept his eyes closed as much as he could, so as not to see the oncoming traffic. When he decided to visit England with his friends he made it understood that he would always sit in the back seat, preferably with his eyes closed. It wasn't that he was a coward he was simply petrified of the sight of trucks and other vehicles rushing madly at him.

The trip from London to York was almost as bad as he envisioned with trucks that the English call lorries and cars speeding past them with such hairline precision that he felt they only missed him by inches. Even the incessant chatter and singing of his friend's wife, didn't lull him out of the horror of the incessant zooming past of vehicles, when they were bound in the opposite direction.

York in the spring is a mass of bright yellow daffodils, budding and blooming everywhere you looked. The fortress city that Wallace had once taken was surrounded by banks of yellow in every shade nodding and bowing to each other as if in greeting, each time a gentle breeze rippled through them, while the visiting pollinators that sang where going about their life's work, enjoying the sweetness of the smell and the taste of the bright yellowness they were imbibing.

They had parked their rented car at the Four Seasons Hotel they were staying at and walked about the historic old city, looking at the architecture and the places that Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators had known when they tried to blow up the houses of Parliament. The looked into shop windows, admiring the antiques and considering the modern items that were in the gift shops. They admired the flowers and stopped to smell them, even though daffodils are not the most aromatic of flowers.

The places for food were perhaps, the most interesting to him. He liked the pub atmosphere and the variety of different types of items that he had never before heard of or tried. He was very intrigued by the food and he tried many items which after he had eaten, his friends informed him were not English but were from France or Germany or Italy. He ate with the gusto of an adventurer and sampled the different beers on tap. He promised himself to try and remember things like leek and chicken pie, watercress soup, and clotted cream as some of his favorites that he would have to remember to reorder elsewhere, as at least these were British like the fish and chips were. He was beginning to relax and have fun. The postcard show at the racetrack was enjoyable though some of the dealers had been a bit rude, most had been very friendly and he had purchased quantities of cards of highly decorative, vintage Art Nouveau and Art Deco, as well as street views from the golden era of Deltiology. Everything was going nicely until they went on the ghost walk.

There are two ghost walks in York, which is a city marinated in ghosts, and specters. They chose the earlier tour, even though he had tried to bow out and said he would just stay quietly at the hotel. Over one hundred people including seven other Japanese were on the tour. It had begun to drizzle and twilight had faded away leaving the city lights to give them enough to see the uneven pavement and the buildings that the guide would stop in front of to weave his little tale of long dead beings of years gone past. He was not enjoying himself, and the damp was beginning to seep into his very being making him wish he was sitting in the pub, listening to the noise of the guests there and drinking a pint of bitter. More and more he was beginning to feel uncomfortable, irrationally so, like he had as a child. It was as if pins and needles were tingling his skin and a chillier feeling than any the damp night air could bring on, was enveloping him. He walked on slowly falling further and further behind his friends.

"The small building you see before you has a glowing light that appears, from time to time, right in that window over there." The guide, dressed in a black theatrical costume said, while pointing up to a window. Yoji shuddered. "The story goes that during the Black Death everyone in the house died of the plague except for one single solitary small child." When the men came to remove the bodies to be disposed of they saw the child and thought they would catch the plague from the living child so they hurried out of the house boarded it up and left the child alone and living in that tomb. She would go to the window and bang on it and cry out but no one paid her any attention. Eventually she too died, not of the plague but of starvation." Yoji shivered with horror as he stood frozen to the spot looking up at the room, unable, or unwilling, to leave, he didn't know which. He just stared at the room unable to move with the crowd that was sweeping past him toward the next building with its ghastly tale of death and horror. It was if his eyes were riveted to the window with a will beyond his own. It was then that he realized there was a light in the window and he could see the form of a very young child banging on the window and faintly crying out to him. He turned and ran, stumbling over the pavement and his own fear.

By the time his friends found him at the pub, he had regained his composure, his sense of humor, and had conquered his desire to leave the city that night. The two pints of beer he had drunk might have had something to do with his relaxed, almost natural demeanor, when his friends arrived.

"Oh, so here you are. What happened to you? We looked all over for you. You didn't let a little drizzle scare you off?" they teased.

"No it was a ghost." He said taking another sip of the local brew.

"Ah I see, more Japanese humor. Knowing you it is just an excuse for Washington State's most eligible bachelor to sit and watch the girls."

He smiled; they wouldn't believe him if he told them what he saw and what happened. "Let's just say I was detained, and leave it at that." And they did.