The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women Part 7

Stop my friends; in a mirror see

What you who ere so healthy be,

Tho' beauty with rosebuds paint each face.

Coming death will strip you of each grace.

and the other goes: Here lyes ye body of

MRS AMNEY HUNT.

Wife of Mr Benjamin Hunt who died

Nov. 20th, 1769 aged

40 years

A sister of Sarah Lucas lieth here,

Whom I did love most dear.

And now her soul hath too its flight.

And bid her spiteful foes good night.

That both Mr Wells and Mrs Hunt died in November has always seemed significant, and sometimes this sempstress who is not a medium imagines it a portent of some sort, conceivably that she herself will perish on a chill November day, only after the crisper delights of October have finished, and that thought bestows a certain solace.

She sleeps always above the blankets, for no reason in particular and following from no superst.i.tion. This bed was once her grandfather's, as was once this house the property of that same man, who made his meagre fortune importing tea and exporting tobacco. She keeps a sachet filled with dried lavender and thyme beneath her pillow, and on the bedside table she keeps a small box made from cherrywood. The lid is finely carved with a scene from Greek mythology Narcissus gazing longingly at his own reflection while Echo watches bitterly. Inside the box, wrapped in a white linen handkerchief, she keeps her baby teeth and two she has lost as an adult. There is also the cracked arm of a china doll she found lying in the street, years ago, and there is a silver coin, tarnished mostly black, which she thinks must have come from Portugal or Spain.

She does not call them to her. Always, they find her by their own secret wiles, the spirits who come when she is sleeping or lying awake waiting for sleep. They find her, following whatever compa.s.s a ghost might hold, slipping in through the inevitable, stingy gaps afforded by all closed doors and windows. They rise up through floorboards or sift down through sagging ceiling plaster. Or they appear somewhere in the room without having seemed to have entered by any obvious, material route. So, she knows there must be a mult.i.tude of invisible doorways that her living eyes cannot discern. They have also risen from the scorched gla.s.s chimney of the oil lamp that sits on the table along with the cherrywood box, and from beneath the bed, too. On more than one instance, they have emerged suddenly from the brick maw of the chimney, sooty and fire-lit and scattering ash and embers across the room.

The first one came when she was only fifteen years old, and it merely sat at the foot of her bed and watched her with its sunken coal-lump eyes. She was not afraid that night, and she has never yet been afraid of them since. They come with needs, with the unfathomable and insatiable hungers and desires of all dead things, but they do not come maliciously. And though she understands, instinctively, that they are all jealous of her flesh and of her ability to taste and smell and touch, envious of her every breath, she also understands that she is an unlikely banquet, and that the loss of her would be an almost incalculable loss to these uninvited visitors.

Sometimes, they bring her gifts, though she has never asked or expected anything from them. Once, a withered bouquet of violets, found afterwards on her pillow, and on another night, a page torn from a book of poetry by Longfellow, and after still another liaison, she found a blue China bowl of milk waiting in the hallway outside her bedroom door.

She was a sickly child, p.r.o.ne to unaccountable fits and agues, and her parents were convinced on more than one night that she would not live to see the dawn. Certainly, hearing the grim p.r.o.nouncements of the physicians who attended her, they had not expected their daughter and only child to reach adulthood. But she did, and now she has outlived them both by almost fifteen years and grown to be a fit and st.u.r.dy woman, though still somewhat thin and of a paler complexion than she'd prefer.

One of the few times she has spoken with her spectral callers, she asked, "Why was I always so sick?"

And the ghost hesitated only for a moment, then replied in a voice like winter wind along s.h.i.+ngled rooftops, "We have ever been near to you."

Emboldened by its response, she asked, "Why, then, am I always well now, hardly ever suffering even so much as a runny nose?"

"Because," the ghost told her, and she thought possibly the tone of its voice betrayed a hint of impatience, "we are ever near to you."

Because you need me, she thought, but would not have spoken those four words aloud. If they need her, she has come to need them at least as much, and she can no longer comprehend the tedium of an existence without their nightly company. She is proud of her skill as a dressmaker and of her position in the shop on Hanover Street, but she knows that the work and the demands of her craft are hardly sufficient to give meaning to her life. She has seen and felt too much to live as others live, to be no more than a spinster and a sempstress dwelling alone in the high, old house in the city's North End. And it is not necessary that she flaunt her certainty of her visitors' need for her; it is enough to know they do, to sense, from time to time, their anxiety that they will come some evening or another and find her gone.

She has overhead whispers and gossip, in the shop and on the street, when others think she is not listening or out of earshot. "Such a shame she never married," someone will sigh, feigning pity, pretending to sympathy. Or, "An odd one, that woman, and have you heard . . . ?" and then there will be some hushed tale of strange lights from her windows or peculiar sounds heard in her presence. Perhaps the smell of dying flowers or brimstone whenever she pa.s.ses by, and were it only two centuries earlier, she might be hauled before magistrates in powdered wigs to be interrogated, accused of congress with demons, found guilty of witchcraft, and then hung from the limb of a convenient tree. But, by chance or providence, she was born into an enlightened age of Science and Medicine and gas streetlights. So, usually, she ignores the whispers, because none of them even begin to suspect the truth, and none of them can steal the nights away from her.

She lies in bed, naked and unashamed of her nakedness, s.h.i.+vering but unmindful of the chill, and she watches the restless patterns the lamp throws upon the walls. Sometimes, they come to her as no more than shadows, and when she happens to consider the unperceived form that casts those shadows, there is a delicious twinge or p.r.i.c.kling at the nape of her neck or deep in her belly. So often, it is not what she glimpses, but what she will never behold that seems to nourish the greatest revelations.

In her right hand, she cradles the page ripped from a volume of Longfellow and left upon her pillow, and she has underlined this pa.s.sage: Let us go forward, and no longer stay In this great picture-gallery of Death!

I hate it! ay, the very thought of it!

Elsie. Why is it hateful to you?

Prince Henry. For the reason That life, and all that speaks of life, is lovely, And death, and all that speaks of death, is hateful.

Elsie. The grave is but a covered bridge, Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!

Often, she has wondered which one of them left it for her, and precisely what those lines may have meant to them, but she has never found the courage to ask any of the visitors. Lying there with the page crumpled and brittle in her hand, worn smooth by her fingers and all the nights she has held it, she broods over the truest meaning of the stanzas and whether they might hold within them any truth beyond the pretty conceits of all poets, great and minor and those who have died completely unknown. It might be that Elsie has spoken the truth to the Prince, or it might be that the darkness of the grave runs on forever, that it is not a covered bridge at all, but a tunnel bored through solid granite, which never again emerges into the light of day. Or, she thinks, it might be a deep reflecting pool, where the weight of souls bears them down to the grey-green half-light, through murk and silt, to settle amongst the knotted roots of water lilies, disturbing only the fitful slumber of turtles and newts.

In a corner, near the bedroom door, something stirs and is still again. She watches, but only from the edges of her vision, because sometimes they are shy, especially if they have never visited before. For the moment, this one seems hardly more than a shredded slip of lightlessness, not even as solid as the fleeting wisp of smoke when a candle has been snuffed. She smiles and lets the page of Longfellow slip from her fingers to the floor, and then she rolls on to her back and raises her knees, spreading her legs in a wordless act of invitation. She turns her head until her right cheek is pressed against the blanket, until she can once again keep her indirect watch upon that corner of the room. She wants to whisper some further, slight encouragement, but keeps quiet for fear that even the softest voice might be too much. This one will come, or it will not, and she can make no more overture than the simple offering of herself that has been made already.

For an instant, a span measured in shallow breaths and the uncontrollable metronome of heartbeats, she watches as the angles of the corner become somehow more acute than their usual ninety degrees. The portal swinging open, stretching and straining that only apparently fixed intersection of the room's north and eastern walls, and she parts her knees the slightest bit more. What was only a slip or a smoky wisp has already taken on a more substantial form, flowing into this world from when- and wherever Nature or Super-Nature consigns that part of the human mind that survives death. Then the walls are merely plaster walls again, the corner no more or less than any corner in this house, but filled now with a roiling, slowly revolving material, the singularly gossamer filaments of a being sewing itself together with naught but longing and urgency and dim memories. It is not exactly translucent, nor quite genuinely opaque, and its s.h.i.+fting surface glints with a greasy sort of iridescence or polychromasia.

And this is when she always looks away, prudently turning to face the ceiling, instead, averting her gaze, for there is something too horribly vulnerable about her visitors at this stage of their manifestation. Neither quite here nor there, half in and half out, raw and exposed to any prying, curious eyes that might fall on them and stare without understanding or mercy. The lamp on the bedside table flares suddenly, glowing almost painfully bright, and then it gutters as if an unfelt draught is about to extinguish it. But soon enough the flame grows steady again and retreats to its former, fainter brilliance, and she is grateful that the presence in the corner has not seen fit to douse the wick and leave her blinking at afterimages and waiting in the dark.

That is kind of you, Sir or Madam, she thinks, and at once there is a dry, fluttering noise, the rattle of fallen leaves or castoff feathers blown across parched earth or cobblestones, and it may or may not have been anything meant for her ears. She knows that the apparitions hear her thoughts, sometimes, but other times, it seems her mind is closed to them. Or that they simply choose not to listen. She lies as still as she may, at ease and unafraid and open to the approach of her coalescing guest, waiting for this night's ministrations to begin in earnest. She takes a deep breath, filling herself with the air in the bedroom which has become laden with all the familiar, astringent odours of ghosts, and exhales through her nostrils.

And were there anyone alive a sister or mother, a friend or father confessor to whom the sempstress might ever divulge these unions, she would readily admit that while the visitors do not frighten her, the reactions of her own body to them often do. Which is to say, the unconscious reflexes of her sympathetic flesh to the appet.i.tes and yearnings of non-corporeal intelligences, and no doubt it would leave the spiritualists in awe, and surely they would deem her possessed of some mighty gift or talent. It has been her experience that people are often eager to praise or envy that which they themselves have never had to endure. The cold begins in her belly and rises quickly into her chest, that ache, that unfolding bloom of frost, as though she is about to cough up the dirty slush of a January street.

She swallows, blinks, and sees that it is standing at her bedside now - no, not it, but him, for the features have solidified into the face of a young man. There is a keen sadness to his expression, which is unusual; rarely do they show her sorrow, regardless of what the living might expect of those bereft of blood and bone. More often than not, there is relief that they have found her, that she has welcomed their arrival, and so their eyes beam and glisten for her, all grat.i.tude and release. They wear the echoes of smiles and the faint remembrances of joy, no moaning phantoms dragging the burden of clattering chains, no weeping haunts. So this gentleman's downcast countenance is unexpected, and she almost asks him aloud to tell her, to talk if he can and if, perchance, talking might help, but then she catches herself and keeps the questions to herself. If he wishes her to know, he will explain, when and how it suits him. The ghost leans nearer, and she knows there would be tears if the dead did not, inevitably, forget how to cry.

And here is the same fact they all bring to her, and it might overwhelm or disappoint or insult another, but never yet has it lessened her enthusiasm for these encounters. The fact they do not come to see her, but, rather, they come to see what she can show them. She is merely the instrument capable of sounding those old tones which they have dragged themselves up from pine boxes and mouldering, worm-gnawed sod to hear, just as they are merely the musicians capable of playing her. In this improbable symphony, as in all orchestrations, neither one is anything without the ability of the other. He reaches out, and she can almost feel his fingertips brush gently across and through her erect nipples, and trapped there within the bower of her ribcage, the cold has redoubled and swelled into a blizzard. She can hold it inside just so long and never a single second more.

He kisses her then, and his lips are flavoured with dust and the clicking language of ebony beetles. She does not shut her eyes, and he does not close his, and so they share this one moment between them before she can no longer forestall what he has truly come here for. But it is enough, and she stops fighting what cannot be defeated, as the ice inside flows effortlessly along the trough of her throat, answering his unspoken pleas and rising up to meet her visitor.

"Death," her father says, and he smiles so that the word does not seem so ominous. "When all is said and done, it is hardly more than a covered bridge."

And here she is standing down on the street, staring up at the gauzy white drapes that cover her bedroom windows like cataracts obscuring blind and aged eyes. A carriage pa.s.ses behind her, the horses' iron-shod hooves throwing sparks as they strike the pavement.

And here she is only seven years old, lost in the throes of a fever, and her mother is sitting next to her bed, holding her hand and wiping her face with a cool, damp cloth.

"Life, and all that speaks of life, is lovely," her mother says, and even though she sounds very afraid, the authority in her voice will brook no argument and accept no compromise. "Do you hear me, young lady? Death, and all that speaks of death, is hateful. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mother," the sempstress whispers, keeping her eyes on the inconstant shadows hunched all around, pressing in from the years she has not yet lived.

"So, you're staying here," her mother tells her, "with us. You're not going anywhere."

"No," the child replies, the child who knows what lies ahead because these are only recollections seen through the distorting gla.s.s of time. "I would never leave."

The frowning young man with sad grey eyes touches her face with intangible hands, and a glacier pours across her tongue and teeth and out of her open mouth.

"A shame she never married," mutters the greengrocer's wife, who has five children and loves none of them. And the sempstress thinks, But I am a married woman, and my husbands and my wives and all my children are scattered across the ages and always seeking me.

"An odd one," sighs the dour, scowling wife of a butcher or a banker or a Presbyterian minister. "You wonder what she gets up to, left all alone in that abominable old house. Oh, I've heard stories, but it's nothing I'd care to repeat, being a Christian woman."

From the s.h.i.+ngle of a rocky beach, she watches as the day draws to its sunset end and the advancing tide rises by slow degrees from the eternal, devouring sea; her father laughs and places an especially pretty sh.e.l.l or rounded pearl of blue beach gla.s.s in her palm.

"She is your mother," he says and sighs. "What did you expect she would say?"

She does not know, because she cannot even remember the question.

"Fear whatever you can avoid, and be mindful where you step, sure. But death, child, is only a bridge, leading you from light to light, through a brief darkness. Fear it all you wish, and sidestep all you like, it will change not a thing in that regard. Your mother knows that as well as I."

And now her soul hath too its flight And bid her spiteful foes good night.

As salt.w.a.ter and foam rush across sandy sh.o.r.es and weathered stone, so, too this flood spills from her, rus.h.i.+ng over her chin and across her bare chest and shoulders. Disregarding gravity, it flows back and upwards, as well, entirely shrouding her face, filling her nostrils, sealing her eyes. There is only a pa.s.sing, reflexive fleck of panic, that initial shock when she can no longer breathe or see and before she remembers that this is not what will kill her one day, somewhere farther along, and that she has done this thing so many nights before this night and, always, she has lived to entertain the needs of other visitations.

"Don't waste your days afraid of ghosts," her father says, and bends to lift another piece of flotsam from the beach. The b.u.t.termilk sky is filled with dappled wings and the cries of wheeling gulls.

The viscous, colourless matter expelled from some unknown recess of her anatomy or mind or spirit has already heard the ghost leaning low over her, that sorrowful man who has come here to find something lost and not yet restored to him. Someone who still breathes, perhaps, or someone dead who has yet to cross his path, and maybe there are so many roads on the other side of death's covered bridge that souls might wander all eternity and never find reunion. And, because she was born to be a violin or cello or a penny whistle, and because she is incomplete without a melody, she has disgorged this second, telepathic skin to read his thoughts, and that membrane expands and wraps itself tightly about her body until it has been pulled as thin as any human skin. Her face is no longer her own, but is the face he needs to see, the face that she was birthed to show him on this night when at last he has found his way to her bedroom. The caul hides away the indecent flush and warmth of her mortality, and now he can touch her as though the two of them were living or both of them were not even as solid as a breeze.

He kisses her again, and the sempstress does not need to see to know that he is no longer frowning.

The Lost Ghost.

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman.

Mrs John Emerson, sitting with her needlework beside the window, looked out and saw Mrs Rhoda Meserve coming down the street, and knew at once by the trend of her steps and the cant of her head that she meditated turning in at her gate. She also knew by a certain something about her general carriage a thrusting forward of the neck, a bustling hitch of the shoulders that she had important news. Rhoda Meserve always had the news as soon as the news was in being, and generally Mrs John Emerson was the first to whom she imparted it. The two women had been friends ever since Mrs Meserve had married Simon Meserve and come to the village to live.

Mrs Meserve was a pretty woman, moving with graceful flirts of ruffling skirts; her clear-cut, nervous face, as delicately tinted as a sh.e.l.l, looked brightly from the plumy brim of a black hat at Mrs Emerson in the window. Mrs Emerson was glad to see her coming. She returned the greeting with enthusiasm, then rose hurriedly, ran into the cold parlour and brought out one of the best rocking chairs. She was just in time, after drawing it up beside the opposite window, to greet her friend at the door.

"Good afternoon," said she. "I declare, I'm real glad to see you. I've been alone all day. John went to the city this morning. I thought of coming over to your house this afternoon, but I couldn't bring my sewing very well. I am putting the ruffles on my new black dress skirt."

"Well, I didn't have a thing on hand except my crochet work," responded Mrs Meserve, "and I thought I'd just run over a few minutes."

"I'm real glad you did," repeated Mrs Emerson. "Take your things right off. Here, I'll put them on my bed in the bedroom. Take the rocking chair."

Mrs Meserve settled herself in the parlour rocking chair, while Mrs Emerson carried her shawl and hat into the little adjoining bedroom. When she returned Mrs Meserve was rocking peacefully and was already at work hooking blue wool in and out.

"That's real pretty," said Mrs Emerson.

"Yes, I think it's pretty," replied Mrs Meserve.

"I suppose it's for the church fair?"

"Yes. I don't suppose it'll bring enough to pay for the worsted, let alone the work, but I suppose I've got to make something."

"How much did that one you made for the fair last year bring?"

"Twenty-five cents."

"It's wicked, ain't it?"