Mr. Morgan Hill
A short story for the holidays by Josh Clark
For a long moment, his old eyes gazed at the prismatic Tiffany glass of the double doors leading into Villa Mira Monte, the home he and his wife had built as a sanctuary to escape the strains of San Francisco society. Back then, so long ago in the 1880s, they would travel by train to their pastoral Santa Clara Valley ranch and find freedom from their cares. His hand shaking with age, he gently took hold of the doorknob. 
The round handle held the face of a Japanese maiden imprinted on the metal. It was a token of remembrance of his once taking Diana to the opera house in San Francisco to enjoy a evening’s performance of “The Mikado” when they were courting. Against the wishes of Diana’s father Daniel Murphy, they had secretly eloped a few months later. His wife had been enchanted by the young bride Yum-Yum in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera and installed the knob featuring the character on the home’s entrance door when they built Villa Mira Monte.
He pushed on the door but found that it was locked. He pulled his pocket watch out of his vest coat and saw it now showed five minutes to midnight. Perhaps by crossing this threshold at the magic hour where one day passed into the next, he could cross the threshold of time and find himself back home here with his family. A silly wish for a 65 year old man, perhaps. But then again it was the holiday season, a time when silly wishes might come magically true.
Feeling his body nearly drained of all its energy, he sunk down on one of the wicker chairs on the porch and recalled the happiness he had once shared with his family in this lovely home. He saw himself lifting up his 7-year-old daughter so that she could put an angel on the top of the Christmas tree in the parlor. He smiled at the memory of that one happy afternoon a yuletide so long ago. Following their father-daughter decorating of the tree, she had served him tea on the rug beside the pine, handing him a tiny child’s cup of make-believe beverage. Jenny Lind, her favorite china-head doll, sat in a small chair as the guest of honor at the tea party. With great exaggeration, he had sipped the air from the cup and proclaimed the tea delicious. The child had laughed with delight at the pretend play they shared.
A tear ran down his cheek as he saw his daughter in his mind’s eye. Sweet, precious Diane. The sting of the tragedy that had ended her life last year hit his heart. He winced his eyes and slumped his head, trying to force the memory out of his mind. The telegram he had received had told him that she had thrown herself head first from the window onto the cobblestones street outside London’s St. Pancras Sanitarium, dying instantly. Her marriage to that horrid drunken baron, pushed upon her by her mother who desired high social standing, had caused Diane’s nervous breakdown. Last year? No, not last year, he realized. That tragedy had taken place in 1912. Diane had killed herself more than a century ago.
Opening his eyes, Hiram Morgan Hill wondered how it might be possible that in some mysterious manner he found himself in an age a century’s passage from the one he had last known. He looked up from the porch at Monterey Road. How strange and sleek the vehicles rolling by on the night street looked compared to Mr. Ford’s cumbersome horseless carriages. How fast they flew by along the asphalt paved street he remembered as a dirt-muddy road. A rumble overhead made him turn his eyes up to the sky at a brightly lighted object flying high overhead toward San Jose. How wonderfully the Wright brother’s flying machine had advanced in its complexity during the course of a century, he thought.
He felt intensely lonely. “Diane, my dear, beloved daughter, I miss you so much,” he whispered as if she stood there somehow. “What have I seen today? All the bizarre and wonderful things I’ve observed here in this strange world of a future century. This must be either a strange dream…” He paused, considering the dreaded other explanation. “Or I must be a ghost.” 
The journey Morgan Hill had taken that day certainly seemed like a dream as he recalled how it had started. Laying in his bed back in his ranch in Elko, a pain had momentarily shot through his chest and he had felt himself sinking into what seemed like a sea of black mist accented by sparkling shimmers of rainbow-colored light.
The next instant he had mysteriously found himself standing here on the front porch of Villa Mira Monte looking toward El Toro mountain. It was the house he knew well, and yet it looked so very different. It was decorated with Christmas garlands and ornaments including two waist-high red Nutcracker soldiers guarding the front door. An elderly lady and two young granddaughters proceeded up the steps and passed by him and stepped through the open doors into the home. They were dressed in another fashion, clothes he was not familiar with, and he at first believed they might be foreigners. He followed them in and saw his home was filled with strangers standing by a series of tables prepared for some sort of event. He listened in on a conversation of a couple of women chatting beside a Christmas tree in a corner. He saw one woman in her early 20s take out of her purse a small rectangle square with a black glass on it and push her finger on it for a moment. She put it to her ear and started speaking into the device. He stepped closer and listened to her side of the conversation. “Yeah… yeah… you gotta come here… it’s the best Victorian tea… and the lemon cookies are just yummy.”
He stepped into a side room featuring a long dining room table in the center. Hanging on the wall over the fireplace at the far end was an immense portrait of an elegantly dressed woman. He recognized her face immediately, although it was a little worn by age since the last time he had seen her. “Diana,” he said gently, feeling the familiar sadness.
A woman’s soft voice came from behind him. “Excuse me, did you come for the tea?” she asked pleasantly.
He turned.
The woman’s face suddenly showed a look of surprise. “My goodness,” she said with a light-hearted chuckle, and then studied his face a little more. “Would you be… are you… Mr. Morgan Hill?”
He felt confused by the stranger’s question. “I beg your pardon. Do you know me?”
“You’re here for the historical society’s Victorian tea, I assume,” she said. “It’s remarkable how you look so much like Morgan’s photo… a little older of course, but the resemblance is uncanny. And how nice that you dressed in costume for the occasion.” She extended her hand. “My name is Kathy Sullivan. I’m one of the organizers of the tea.”
Taking her hand, he introduced himself as Mr. Morgan Hill and she laughed. “You play your part well,” she told him.
“Part?” he said. “I’m not playing a –“ And suddenly he realized. He had somehow come through some portal to find himself in some other era.
“I beg your pardon, this might seem like a strange question, but what year is this?”
The woman laughed again. “Why it’s 2013, Mr. Hill. December 7, 2013.”
Morgan smiled at the woman as he realized he indeed truly must be a ghost haunting his own home. “And, as you’re with a historical society, Mrs. Sullivan, perhaps you can tell me what date might I, uh, might Mr. Morgan Hill have died upon?”
The woman thought a moment. “Hiram Morgan Hill died on November 13, 1913 – at his cattle ranch in Elko, Nevada.”
The mystery was being solved. That was the last day he remembered before finding himself here at Villa Mira Monte in the year 2013 at a historical society Victorian tea. He turned around and gazed again at the portrait of his wife. “And when did Mrs. Morgan Hill pass away?”
Sullivan nodded. “That photograph was taken after Diana married Sir George Rhodes and she was presented at the court of King George V. She died, I believe, in1937 in Cannes, France.”
“’The Duchess of Durango’ we called her,” he said, and let a mischievous grin form on his face. “Diana got her life-long wish. She married into nobility.”
The rest of that day had been filled with even more marvels for Morgan. He walked along the sidewalk of Monterey Road to the downtown district of the city that beared his name, exploring many of the shops and talking with the citizens. The old bank he knew that had been built by Mr. Votaw in 1905 was now a warm and welcoming cafe called Grinds, Vines andAutomobilia. Down the street from this was a delightful shop called BookSmart where he found a small volume that featured his young face on the cover. It described the history of the community. Chatting with a Mr. Jones, the proprietor of the bookstore, he learned that the city of Morgan Hill in this year was home to nearly 40,000 people. Time passes and places change. The ranch village had grown into a proper city a century later. It was part of some place called Silicon Valley, Morgan had learned from Mr. Jones, although why a region would be named for silicon – the substance that made up sand – the ghost could not fathom. 
As the sun set behind El Toro mountain and the downtown grew dark, crowds of people bundled in jackets and scarves against the freezing weather gathered along the sidewalk and median strip of Monterey Road. Morgan soon realized that they now waited for a holiday parade, a delightful tradition for the winter season, he thought. When the pagentry started, he stood on the sidewalk under the marquee of the Granada Theater and watched the various marchers and yuletide-decorated floats go by. He was particularly amused by the performance of young ladies from Lana’s Dance Studio, all wearing bright red Christmas costumes and march-dancing to a happy tune called “Jingle Bell Rock.” His own daughter had loved to dance. A firetruck rolled by with the city’s mayor, a Mr. Steve Tate, and various city council members riding inside, all waving at the crowds. And as the parade came to a close, a delightfully strange ship on wheels carrying a fake-bearded Father Christmas waving from the deck and wishing everyone “Merry Christmas” passed down the street.
Joining the crowd as they walked several blocks following the wheeled ship, Morgan arrived at a set of buildings with an outdoor plaza and amphitheater, a place which he learned from reading the sign outside was called the Community and Cultural Center. There, the people of Morgan Hill gathered together and sang happy holiday songs. Then the mayor formerly lit the lights of the city’s Christmas tree. Morgan observed the eyes of all the children enthralled by the yuletide celebration. He smiled in realization that the magic of Christmas might be experienced by boys and girls of every generation as it had been with his own child. Silently in his heart, he wished everyone at the celebration a Merry Christmas.
After the Christmas tree lighting ceremony came to a close, Morgan spent the next several hours wandering the city and observing with awe how strange the place he had known as pasture land and orchards had grown one hundred years since he had known his ranch. As the midnight hour approach, he strolled down Depot Street and came to the Third Street intersection. Here he observed on the corner a bronze sculpture of three life-sized individuals. Curious as to who these frozen figures represented, he stepped closer. A shock of surprise shot through him when he observed their faces. A mustached man who resembled him gazed down at his pocket watch held in his right hand. A woman much like Diana wore elegant nineteenth century traveling attire. She sat on a traveling trunk, her hand resting on a travel bag. And a girl of about seven years with a basket in her crooked arm – no doubt it was his beloved daughter – showed a pleasant grin on her face and seemed to be frozen in mid skip. He looked at the plaque marker on the foundation. “Waiting for the Train,” he read out loud. The sculpture memorialized his family.
“It’s time,” he whispered, taking his pocket-watch out of his vest coat pocket and looking at it much like his sculpture self was doing. “It’s time… It’s time to go home.”
He noticed the train tracks on the other side of the fence. With one last look at his daughter and wife’s faces in the sculpture, he strolled over to the guard gate and crossed through. Hurrying along the wooden ties, he started to follow the train tracks north back to Villa Mira Monte.
* * * 
Growing ever more tired, Morgan sat on the front porch’s wicker chair waiting as the minutes to the magic midnight hour ticked by. He didn’t know what he was waiting for exactly, and a flash of fear flew through him, making him shiver with the thought that maybe as a ghost, he would be doomed to wander the world forever alone, forever waiting for his family. He pulled out his pocket watch again, and stared at the hands on the face, both stretching up to the Roman numeral XII.
He winced his eyes for a second, then gazed up at the Tiffany glass window of the double doors. Suddenly, a bright colorful light started streaming through them from some mysterious source inside the house.
He slowly stood up and looked at the windows, then at the door knob with Yum-Yum’s face on it. He stretched his hand out toward the knob but a moment before his fingers felt its metal, both doors flew open by some invisible presence. He peered inside the Victorian parlor he knew from a Villa Mira Monte Christmas a long age ago. It was ablaze with light. And skipping toward the door was Diane, a seven-year-old child dressed in a petty-coat dress and her hair bouncing on her shoulders. The girl stopped just before the threshold, her eyes staring up at Morgan with a child’s true love. Behind her, standing next to a Christmas tree, Diana was beaming a smile at him. His wife held out her hand invitingly but said nothing.
“Papa, would you care to join mama and me for our Christmas tea party?” Diane said sweetly. “Everyone’s been waiting for you. You’re the guest of honor. We’ll enjoy our tea as we wait for the train to come for us.”
Tears welled up in Morgan’s eyes, blurring the scene for a second. His silly Christmas wish had come true, he thought as he wiped them away. “I’d love some tea, my dear child,” he said softly, and then stepped across the door’s threshold and took his daughter’s hand.
