A Christmas ghost story. This piece was longlisted by Liars’ League (London) in their December 2025 competition.

I was following the last car’s tyre marks, fingers clamped to the wheel, when I saw him. His was a black silhouette that hardly moved. His overcoat reached almost to his boots; his brimmed hat was tugged down to his nose tip.

I clicked my tongue while conscience and risk slugged it out. How could I leave him out here? Mine had been a generation raised on tales of lone hitchhikers dumping bodies in culverts. The warmth in my gut – aided by a twenty-year malt bought with my Christmas bonus – helped me decide. If I stopped for him, a long-standing joke would finally be laid to rest. Every year I’d say this Christmas will be different. This will be the year I’ll reject materialism and overindulgence. I won’t prop up the bar at the Prince of Wales or snore beneath a paper crown in front of the darts. This year I’ll peel the sprouts and spuds for the Christmas dinner at St Chad’s, I’ll volunteer to get the meals on wheels out with the vicar, I’ll deliver the prize winners their beef joint or brandy butter from the hospice raffle.

I turned up the heating as I pulled in. The flakes were getting heavier, spiralling down and slowing the windscreen wipers, causing them to scuff. As he came alongside the passenger window he ducked his chin into his battered overcoat. There was a faint glow from the tip of his rollup as he flicked it into the slush. Without speaking he opened the door and dropped into the passenger seat, grunting. Water bubbled from a crack in his boot leather. Though he was all bones – coat hanger shoulders and an Adam’s apple like a ballcock – he dropped like a bag of cement and the suspension squealed. His stained fingertips (a tea-coloured ochre) reached for the curls of warmth from the dashboard heater and the car began to fill with the aroma of pipe tobacco, drying dog, a nip of something I couldn’t place.

I was about to say, ‘Where to?’ when he reached into his jacket and took out a metal flask. It was dented and the cap scraped as if there was grit in the thread. He unscrewed it, wiping it with a sleeve and passing it to me. He named a road that ran down to the marshes. It was dreadfully cold. I reached out for the flask accepting his hospitality.

It was easy to keep my focus on the road, knowing there’d be black ice in the dip at Doxey, as he was no talker. He sipped brandy, staring at the dash as if he couldn’t fathom the heat coming from it. I guessed he was a farm labourer, the kind of throwback who poached and scraped a living. He reminded me of my grandfather’s generation: hard men who’d gone off to war, who smelt of woodsmoke and diesel, the coal tar soap they’d used to scrub work from their callused hands. They could eat from the hedgerows, sleep under them too if it meant avoiding their father’s belt.

I turned into Blackberry Lane and pulled up beside a row of black poplars for shelter. There had been a line of derelict farm cottages here when I started school, but they’d long since been demolished, leaving the footprints of their foundations. I knew from walks with the dog there were rabbit burrows in the gorse, nettles growing around cracked Belfast sinks used for cattle troughs. As he got out he offered a hand. He gripped hard, skin like a dogfish sandpapering my palm. He gave me his name. ‘Most grateful,’ he said. I watched him totter down the lane. He made his way out towards the marsh where the remains of the cottages lay. He passed beyond a snow-topped bank of gorse and was gone.

It was only when I got home I saw the dented metal hip flask was lying in the footwell. Alf Myatt, he’d told me. His was a name I felt sure I knew, but it remained beyond my grasp like the dream you’re desperate to recount, but that’s gone on waking. I crept in the back door and gently closed the kitchen door so as not to wake Jane. I made hot, sweet tea and dug out the laptop. A quick search online found him. I dunked chocolate digestives as I read a blog called Marshes Memories. In 1881 Alfred Myatt had gone out into the worst blizzard in decades looking for lost souls. England had been carpeted in thick drifts of snow, so deep that fences and outbuildings were erased from the landscape. I took three fingers’ worth of scotch to the fireside and sat beside the glow, watching it make patterns in the amber liquid. I continued to search blogs and history sites. Alfred Myatt was no legend. He had a grave. After serving with the Staffordshire Regiment he’d returned to work at a timberyard. He’d completed a late shift when he’d ignored work mates’ warnings to go out into the marshes. Above me, Jane’s footsteps padded to the bathroom. I thought of talking to her, but she was the practical type who believed there was nothing after death, certainly no Victorian ghosts walking the frozen lanes to aid lost travellers.

I crept under the duvet and watched the green diodes of the alarm clock as I drifted off into sleep. Alfred Myatt had led two families through the blizzard, somehow finding the town in the swirl of snow and bitter east wind. It was said they’d rung the bells of St Mary’s to guide them home. He’d saved eleven lives, but a place at the fireside and a flask of brandy couldn’t save him for the cold got deep into his bones. He died on the stroke of midnight.

I came to, grimacing at the cold. I tugged at the duvet. Jane was at an age where she might open a window at four am and leave me shivering, contemplating a better chance of sleep by the glowing radiator in the spare room. I shuffled off the mattress, or so I thought, except there was no carpet beneath my feet, no bedside clock beside me. I blinked at the sight of a petrol gauge, a rev counter. I gripped a frigid steering wheel. Moonlight was reflected by a thick covering of snow. I offered up a silent prayer as I turned the key in the ignition. The engine caught and heat slowly began to drift from the vents in the dash.

I was steering into fresh and shallow snow for better grip, thinking I had to get home, when I saw someone stumbling in the slush. A woman in a sparkly coat, two sizes too large and pulled tight about her was slipping and sliding in heels. Her legs were bare. I got out as the snow came on harder. Flakes of snow clung to her eyelashes. Despite it all she was singing. ‘You’ll catch your death out there,’ I said. She squinted and then grinned as if I’d made the funniest joke. She had a bottle of vodka in her coat pocket which she brought out and tilted at the sky. She’d been crying and her makeup had smudged across her cheeks, but now she seemed happy. Her words when they came were slurred. ‘Who are you then? My guardian angel?’

            ‘Something like that,’ I said.

She got in without asking and nodded at the hipflask. I silently drove her home to a new housing estate I hadn’t known existed just a mile or so away, but she’d never have made it.

Boxing Day brought more snow and news stories of grit running out and ploughs failing to keep roads clear. I’d got a sore throat so I tucked up in bed with some hot lime juice, while Jane watched a late-night movie. Delirious, I must’ve wandered into the bathroom and pressed my hot forehead against the tiles. I stood there, oblivious, like a drunk at a house party. Slowly, the realisation dawned it wasn’t a tile pressed to my cheek; it was cold window glass. I opened my eyes. I was in the car again. Across the road a teenage boy and girl were huddled in a broken bus shelter. Snow swept through the cracks in the wooden boards. This time there were no tyre marks in the snow which was drifting deep. I got out, telling them to get in the back and that I wouldn’t harm them. ‘There’s two of you. I’ll take you straight home.’ As I drove, praying we’d make it before the snow fell deeper, I wondered how many times I’d be called back here. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘Can I have some, to warm me?’ the boy said. He’d seen the metal hipflask by the handbrake. Did I think about handing him the flask? Passing on that contract, that burden? Perhaps for a moment, but then I saw them holding hands and the hope and the love they had that would’ve been lost if I hadn’t been there and stopped and helped them. I couldn’t do it. ‘It’s no good for you,’ I said.

‘Who are you?’ the boy said. ‘I mean we’re grateful like, but what are you even doing out here?’

It was a question I was asking myself. I saved two more that week – an old woman possibly suffering from dementia who’d got lost going for a pint of milk and a farmhand who reeked of cider – until the westerly wind finally came, delivering rain and milder weather.

In the years that followed the fields out here would change beyond recognition. A new junction of the M6 was built, delivering a sprawl of new-build homes that stretched for miles. I took a nip from the flask. Despite all this, there would always be the stragglers, the lost, the drunk and the broken-hearted and each time it snowed I’d be there for them.