Free From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury

Marley word. His eyes were locked, his mouth sewn with icicles.
    "Wait!" she cried.
    And opened the first book … 
    Where Hamlet stood on the castle wall and heard his ghost of a father moan, and so she said these words:
    " 'Mark me … my hour is almost come … when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames … must render up myself..
    And then she read:
    " 'I am thy father's spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night … ' "
    And again:
    " ' … if thou didst ever thy dear father love … O, God! … Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder' "
    And yet again:
    " ' … Murder most foul' "
    And the train ran in the night as she spoke the last words of Hamlet's father's ghost:
    " ' … Fare thee well at once … ' "
    " ' … Adieu, adieu! Remember me.' "
    And she repeated:
    " ' … remember me!' "
    And the Orient ghost quivered. She seized a further book:
    " ' … Marley was dead, to begin with … ' "
    As the Orient train thundered across a twilight bridge above an unseen stream.
    Her hands flew like birds.
    " 'I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!' "
    Then:
    " 'The Phantom Rickshaw glided from the mist and clop-clopped ofF into the fog—' "
    And wasn't there the faintest echo of a horse's hooves behind, within the Orient ghost's mouth?
    " 'The beating beating beating, under the floorboards, of the old man's Tell-tale Heart!' " she cried, softly.
    And there! like the leap of a frog. The first pulse of the Orient ghost's heart in more than an hour.
    The Germans down the corridor fired off a cannon of disbelief.
    But she poured the medicine:
    " 'The Hound bayed out on the Moor—' "
    And the echo of that bay, that most forlorn cry, came from her traveling companion's soul, wailed from his throat.
    As the night grew on and the moon arose and a Woman in White crossed a landscape, as the old nurse said and told, a bat that became a wolf that became a lizard scaled a wall on the ghastly passenger's brow.
    And at last the train was silent with sleeping, and Miss Minerva Halliday let the last book drop with the thump of a body to the floor.
    " Requiescat in pace ?" whispered the Orient traveler, eyes shut.
    "Yes." She smiled, nodding. " Requiescat in pace ." And they slept.
    And at last they reached the sea.
    And there was mist, which became fog, which became scatters of rain, like a proper drench of tears from a seamless sky.
    Which made the ghastly passenger open, ungum his mouth, and murmur thanks for the haunted sky and the shore visited by phantoms of tide as the train slid into the shed where the mobbed exchange would be made, a full train becoming a full boat.
    The Orient ghost stood well back, the last figure on a now self-haunted train.
    "Wait," he cried, softly, piteously. "That boat! There's no place on it to hide! And the customs !"
    But the customs men took one look at the pale face snowed under the dark cap and ear muffs, and swiftly flagged the wintry soul onto the ferry.
    To be surrounded by dumb voices, ignorant elbows, layers of people shoving as the boat shuddered and moved and the nurse saw her fragile icicle melt yet again.
    It was a mob of children shrieking by that made her say: "Quickly!"
    And she all but carried the wicker man in the wake of the boys and girls.
    "No," cried the old passenger. "The noise!"
    "It's special!" The nurse hustled him through a door. "A medicine! Here!"
    The old man stared.
    "Why," he murmured. "This is—a playroom."
    She steered him into the midst of all the screams.
    "Children! Storytelling time!"
    They were about to run again when she added, "Ghost -story-telling time!"
    She pointed casually to the ghastly passenger, whose pale moth fingers grasped the scarf about his icy throat.
    "All fall down !" said the nurse.
    The children plummeted with squeals all about the Orient traveler, like Indians around a teepee. They stared up along his body to where blizzards ran odd temperatures in his gaping mouth.
    "You do believe in ghosts, yes?" she said.
    "Oh,