Short & Shivery

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by Robert D. San Souci


  “And I’ll give you twenty kopecks,” offered another girl.

  Soon Anya had extracted promises for all sorts of things from her friends. She vowed to go to the graveyard that very night, at the stroke of midnight, and force the ghost to tell her its name.

  When she went home that evening, her mother grumbled, “The dust is piling up in the corners of every room, because you won’t do your sweeping.”

  “Soon,” said Anya, taking out her favorite embroidered jacket and beginning to cut off the wooden buttons, thinking how grand Ivan’s silver ones would look in their stead.

  Her father cleared his throat impatiently. “You’d be better off learning to cook a decent meal and do an honest day’s work, than worrying about how you look. You’ll die a pauper in rags, if you don’t have a care.”

  “Never,” said the girl, thinking about the lace and kopecks and other things her cleverness would win her this night.

  Her parents just threw up their hands and shook their heads at each other.

  Shortly before midnight, when her mother and father were asleep, Anya pulled on her shawl and slipped out of the cottage. She planned to walk to the edge of the churchyard, because she was sure some of her friends would be watching from their windows to be sure she was doing what she promised. When she got there, she intended to turn right around and come home. In the morning, she would tell her friends the ghost was the ghost of Old Peter, who had died the spring before. That would satisfy them, and they would have to give her the things they had promised.

  So she strolled to the crumbling, low stone wall around the cemetery. She pushed her way through the rusting gate. The full moon shone brightly, filling the place with pale light. Just inside, she saw what looked like a corpse dressed in white from head to foot, sitting on a tombstone.

  Anya wasn’t the least bit afraid: she thought it was Ivan playing a trick on her. So she ran up to the figure and, pulling the cap off it, shouted, “You won’t frighten me!”

  The ghostly figure held its peace, never uttering a word. “Are you a ghost waiting for the stroke of midnight to speak?” she teased, “or are you the boy who will have no silver buttons on his jacket in the morning?”

  Laughing, she ran back through the moon-splashed streets. When she got home, she looked closer at her prize, and found it was a moldy white cap, half filled with loose earth.

  “Ugh!” she cried, tossing it into a dusty corner of her room. Then she blew out the candle and climbed into bed. Three times she came awake, thinking she heard someone tapping at the window. In the rising wind, she thought she heard a voice whispering, “Give me back my cap! Give me back my cap!” But each time she relit the candle and threw open the shutters, she discovered only darkness. Finally she slept soundly until the morning.

  The next day she met her friends on the riverbank. She told them she had gone to the churchyard the night before, and two girls admitted they had been spying on her and had indeed seen her walking down the lane toward the cemetery.

  “Did you meet the ghost?” asked Ivan.

  “To be sure,” Anya said, “it’s the spirit of Old Peter, who died last spring. He told me so himself. Then I snatched his cap as proof, and here it is.”

  She held out the dirt-stained cap, enjoying the way her friends shuddered and pulled away from the trophy. Only Ivan stretched out a finger to touch it. Anya tossed it at him, but he jerked away, so it fell onto the grass between them. “Don’t you want your cap back,” she teased, “since you lost it last night?”

  “I’ve never seen the thing before,” said Ivan. Then he reached into his pocket and dropped the silver jacket buttons into Anya’s cupped hands.

  “You’re a liar,” she laughed, “but you pay your debts like an honest man.” Then she gathered up the rest of her prizes from her friends and hurried back home to hide them away. She paused only long enough to crumple the white cap into a ball and toss it into the river.

  The night, long after everyone was asleep, in the hour just before dawn there came an angry tapping at the shutter of Anya’s bedroom window. “Give me back my cap!” a voice moaned. But the girl, sleeping heavily and dreaming of silver buttons and lace, never woke up.

  But her mother did, and woke Anya’s father. They opened the window and saw a ghastly figure in the moonlight.

  “What do you want?” asked the mother, trembling.

  “My cap, which your daughter stole.”

  Just at that moment the cocks began to crow, and the ghost disappeared.

  Anya’s parents woke her up.

  “Foolish girl! What have you done?” demanded her father. Then he told her what he and her mother had seen from their window.

  “It’s only Ivan,” said Anya, pulling the bedclothes up around her head. “He’s always playing tricks.”

  Her parents pleaded with her to give back the cap, but she said she had tossed it into the river on her way home, and that was that.

  Alarmed, the girl’s father and mother sent for the village priest, told him about their horrible visitor, and begged him to help. “You can perform a service to rid us of this ghost, can’t you?” they asked.

  The priest considered for a while, then told them to bring their daughter to church the next day.

  So on the following day, Anya was dragged to church, protesting loudly that she had buttons and lace to sew on her favorite coat. The priest had asked a number of villagers to come to add their prayers to help lay the troubled spirit to rest.

  Just as the service was nearly finished, a terrible whirlwind arose. The entire church was shaken, and everyone was hurled to the floor. But Anya was thrown down with even greater force. A single, bloodcurdling scream escaped from her lips. Then everything was silent, and the whirlwind was stilled.

  But when the terrified people picked themselves up and looked toward the altar, there on the bottom step, where Anya had been kneeling, was nothing but a single braid of her hair and one silver jacket button.

  The Witch Cat

  (folklore of the United States—Virginia)

  One windy March day back in 1850, a handsome young man, whose wife had died the year before, arrived in a small Virginia town. He brought with him his young daughter, a wagon full of household goods and tools, and enough money to buy a small plot of land.

  The townsfolk were kind and showed him several parcels of land that were for sale. Before he decided, he went walking through the back country and found a nice piece of land beside a wide, still pond.

  When he asked about it, people said it wasn’t owned by anybody. It had once belonged to a family that had left those parts after a string of misfortunes. No one said much, though they tried their best to get him to change his mind. But nothing would do except that land for his farm.

  The people in the neighborhood helped him get started. They had a house-raising to build him a cabin and a barn raising the following week. With the last of his money, he bought a horse, a cow, and several chickens.

  He worked hard, clearing the land and getting the fields ready for planting. His daughter milked the cow and fed the chickens. They seemed happy enough, though the townsfolk told one another that such a fine man should get married pretty quick, to give himself the sort of companionship a man needs and give his little girl a mother.

  Sometimes, when his day’s work was done, the farmer would fish for a while on the banks of the pond, staring dreamily out across the waters that turned gold, then red, then purple as the sun set.

  One evening, at twilight, he saw a small skiff coming across the water, poled by a tall, slender figure. The glare of the fading sun made it impossible for him to see whether it was a man or a woman on the water.

  But when the boat was nearer shore, he saw the stranger was wearing a bonnet. A moment later, as the skiff landed smoothly, a young woman’s voice called out, “Hello! Help me up, will you?”

  She extended a delicate hand, pale and fine as bone china, to him. Like a man in a dream, the farmer reached out
and took it, helping her out of the boat and onto the shore. The woman pulled off her bonnet and shook her curly black hair free. “That feels more to my liking!” she said. “All that rowing can really wear a body out.”

  For a moment he didn’t answer her. He was fascinated by her wide, green eyes, pale skin, and lips as dainty and red as a rosebud. At last he remembered his manners, removed his hat, and said, “Tom Morgan at your service, ma’am. Are you lost?”

  “Not a bit!” she said with a laugh. “My name is Eleanor Faye. I live over across the pond.” She gestured toward the far side, where willows and cypresses were tangled together. “I figured it was time I called on my new neighbors.”

  Still in a daze, Tom invited her up to see his cabin and barn, and meet his daughter Effie. Eleanor “ooh’d” and “ah’d” as he pointed out the new house and barn, and the chicken coop with its coat of fresh paint. But when she reached out a hand to stroke Effie’s hair, the child, clinging to her father’s trouser leg, began to cry, and wouldn’t let the woman touch her.

  “Shy little thing, isn’t she?” said Eleanor with a polite laugh that showed her white teeth. Tom, feeling badly, tried to get his daughter to apologize, but she ran away suddenly.

  “I’m sorry about that,” said Tom, “she’s not usually shy with strangers.”

  “No matter,” said Eleanor easily, “we’ll become good friends before long.”

  It was now nearly dark. “I have to be going,” the woman said. “Next time I won’t come by so late.”

  Tom walked her down to the shore. He offered to row her back across the pond, but she said, “No, I’ve been a widow for five years and doing for myself. I’ll manage fine.”

  It seemed that her pole barely touched the water before the skiff slid quickly and silently toward the shadowed far shore. Tom stood staring for a long time, until he could no longer see Eleanor or her boat in the gathering dark.

  After that, Eleanor came almost every day to visit. Once she brought ajar of homemade preserves; another time, it was a lace tablecloth.

  Tom was enchanted, but Effie hid if she could get away. If her father forced her to stay inside when Eleanor visited, she sulked in a corner, staying as far away from the smiling woman as possible. Eleanor would blink her green eyes, which seemed flecked with gold, as if she were holding back tears, but she always made a show of excusing the child’s actions.

  When Effie’s father asked her why she acted the way she did, Effie said, “I don’t know. I just don’t like her, papa.”

  This bothered Tom a good deal, because he had fallen under the spell of the young woman and was trying to work up nerve enough to ask her to marry him.

  He never went across the pond to her farm. She said she preferred to visit him and get away from her chores. And anything she said made sense to him.

  In addition to Effie being difficult, Tom was troubled by something getting at his chickens. Night after night, he would be aroused by a blood-curdling cat scream, followed by a fluttering and squawking from the chicken coop. Each time he ran out to see what the matter was, he’d find one or two of his chickens missing, and feathers scattered all around.

  Effie had bad dreams of a huge cat with blazing yellow-green eyes, that climbed through the window of her room and curled up on the foot of her bed, waiting for her to go to sleep, so that it could suck the breath of life from her when she did. One morning, Tom found her barely breathing, and there was a round spot in the bedclothes at the foot of her bed, as if something—a cat, maybe—had curled up to sleep there.

  When Tom went into town to pick up supplies, the townsfolk took him aside and whispered to him that Eleanor was a witch who lived beside the pond, because it was enchanted, having been sacred to the Indians who had lived there long before the white men had arrived. They also said she had done away with her husband by black magic, though no one was clear how this had been accomplished.

  The young farmer refused to believe them. “You’re just jealous o’ my good fortune,” he said.

  Folks in town shrugged and went their own way: they knew what they knew.

  His daughter got more sickly, and Tom began to fear for her life. Desperate, he went to the neighborhood “conjur man,” named Zeke Franklin. The old man was a white witch who helped people, especially those troubled by black magic.

  “I can’t say for sure who’s witchin’ you,” said Zeke, “but I’ll give you somethin’ to help.”

  He got a little bottle, and into it he put a dried snail, a mummified spider, and the toes from the left foot of a tree toad. He added a bit of bat’s wing, then corked it, and tied a string around the neck of the bottle.

  “That’ll do ’er, I reckon,” said Zeke. “Next, you take your huntin’ knife, whet it as sharp as a briar, and keep it under your piller.”

  Tom hung the bottle over Effie’s bed that night, and from that moment on, she had no more nightmares. But he kept his hunting knife, honed to a razor edge, under his pillow.

  In the morning, Eleanor came to visit him, and expressed disgust at the jar Zeke Franklin had given Tom.

  “That’s foolishness!” she said, sounding downright angry. “I don’t have any patience with nonsense like that.”

  While Tom tried to explain that the “conjur man’s” jar had kept Effie from nightmares, Eleanor ran back to her skiff and poled across the pond without ever once looking back at him.

  Frantic, Tom shouted after her; but she ignored him. In misery, he returned to his cabin, where Effie hugged him.

  That night something got into the chickens again and tore them apart out of sheer meanness.

  “I may have lost a lot,” Tom said angrily the next morning, “but I’m not gonna lose any more, that’s for sure!”

  So he sent Effie into town to stay with neighbors. That night, he moved the few remaining chickens into the barn, and hid behind some grain bags near the window.

  He hadn’t been in hiding long, when he heard the wind rise, followed by a rumble of thunder. A minute later, rain began pounding on the roof shingles, while the wind howled through the cracks in the walls. Tom was a man not easily frightened, but the power of the storm began to make him uneasy. Then he heard a yowl that sent a thrill of terror up his back.

  A moment later, he heard a pounding on the doors, as if huge fists were beating upon it. Tom raised himself into a crouch. At the same moment, a monstrous cat with flashing yellow eyes leaped at him through the window of the barn.

  The man sliced the air with his knife to defend himself. The briar-sharp blade caught the cat’s right paw, severing it completely.

  The cat gave a shriek of pain; yellow eyes blazing, it fled back out through the window.

  Tom stumbled out of the barn, like a man in a nightmare. A line of red drops led toward the shore; though the rain was washing the trail away, he was able to follow it easily enough.

  At the water’s edge, he saw the mark of a boat’s prow in the mud. Far out, where the rain-pocked lake was lit by flashes of lightning, Tom saw a skiff skimming the black water toward the opposite shore.

  He shouted after it, but the wind and thunder drowned out his cries. In a moment he had launched his own boat and was rowing across the storm-lashed pond.

  The storm ended shortly before dawn. The neighbors who had care of Effie came to the farm later, when they had begun to wonder why Tom hadn’t come to claim his daughter.

  Silence lay over the farm. The tracks of a man’s boots led down to the shore of the pond, now silver in the late-morning sunlight.

  Some brave villagers rowed across the lake at noon. On the far side, they found Tom sprawled lifeless on the muddy shore. Clenched in his fist was the severed paw of a cat.

  In the rude cabin farther up the shore, they found Eleanor Faye collapsed face down on the floor. When they turned her over, they found she was dead, and her right hand was gone.

  The Green Mist

  (a legend from Lincolnshire, England)

  In the old days, fo
lk believed that spring came to the world when a Green Mist covered the land and set seeds to bursting and made fields and trees and flowers grow again.

  Once there was a family more eager than the rest for the Green Mist to rise and put an end to winter. Their only daughter had grown sickly during the time of cold and snows. She had been the prettiest young woman in the village, but now she was so pale and thin and weak that she could not stand up on her own feet without the help of her parents or one of her brothers.

  Everyone else was sure she would die soon enough, but she thought that if she could only see the spring again, she would live. “Oh, mother,” she would say over and over again, “if the Green Mist would only come, I’m sure it would make me strong and well, like the trees and the flowers and the corn in the fields.”

  Her mother promised her that the spring would come soon enough, and she’d grow strong and pretty as ever. But day after day the girl became weaker and more lifeless, like an early-blooming flower when winter comes back after a false spring.

  Each morning, they carried her bed to the doorway, so she could watch for the first sign of spring. But the snows lingered and kept the seeds asleep, and the trees leafless, and the fields and flowerbeds locked in its frosty grip.

  Finally, in a voice hardly above a whisper, the girl said to her mother, “If the Green Mist doesn’t come tomorrow, then I must die. The earth is calling me, and it will cover me soon enough. Oh! If I could only live as long as one of those cowslips that grow by the door each spring, I swear I’d be content!”

  “Hush, now, child! Hush!” her mother cautioned. “You don’t know who might hear you say such a thing!”

  The old woman knew that there were always bogies around—wicked goblins who made mischief and grief for their human neighbors. No one was ever safe; people thought these evil creatures they couldn’t see were always spying on them and waiting to play their wretched tricks.

 

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