The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

by Marie O'Regan

  I bring new mementoes every week. Something small. Something meaningful. A franc from our honeymoon. A seashell from our last vacation. A button from Rose’s First Communion dress. A cat’s-eye marble from Amy’s childhood collection. Indestructible. As memories should be.

  I come here twice a week to talk to them. I know they won’t hear me, but I hope others will. Other ghosts. I can see them flitting past the graves. Wandering, endlessly wandering, looking for someone to take their message to the world beyond.

  That someone used to be me. I couldn’t set foot in a cemetery without being besieged by the dead. Now they give me a wide berth. They know I come with a plea of my own. Find my wife. Find my daughter. Tell them I need to see them. Need to speak to them.

  I want something from the ghosts, so they want nothing to do with me. I sit here and I talk to my wife and child, and I pray my words will thaw the hearts of those shades. I pray one will finally approach and say, “I’ll do this.” They don’t. They keep their distance and they wander in silence. Always silence.

  The doorbell rings. I hear it through the garage walls. Someone on the front porch. Someone come to call. I ignore it and keep working on the car.

  Three months, and it’s almost finished. The windshield replaced. The engine repaired. The dents hammered out.

  There’s one thing I can’t fix. The blood on the passenger’s seat. No longer red. Faded to rust brown. But still blood. Undeniably blood.

  The insurance company didn’t want me to have the car. Too badly damaged, they said. We’ve paid you; now let us dispose of it. I’d pulled out my contract and showed them the clause where I could buy back the wreck for a few hundred dollars. At least let us remove the seat, they said. No one needs to see that. But I did.

  “Hello!” a voice calls.

  I stay crouched by the front of the car, replacing the cracked headlight. The door opens.

  “Hello?”

  It’s no one I know. I can tell by the voice. I consider staying where I am, but that’s childish. I stand and wipe my hands on my jeans.

  “Can I help you?”

  It’s a portly man, smiling that desperate, too-hearty smile of the salesman. I let him talk. I have no idea what he’s saying, what he’s selling. Just words, fluttering past.

  “I’m not interested,” I say.

  He sizes me up. I wonder how I look to him. Unshaven. Bleary-eyed. Worn blue jeans. Grease-stained T-shirt. A drunk? Drug addict? Can’t hold a job? Explains why I’d be home in the middle of the day. Still, it’s a decent house, and he’s desperate.

  He sidles around the front of the vehicle.

  “Nice car,” he says.

  It isn’t. Even before the accident, it was a serviceable car, nothing more. Amy had wanted something newer.

  Not fancier, she said. Just safer, you know. For Rose.

  I hear BMWs are safe, I said. You’re a lawyer’s wife now, not a law student’s. You need a BMW.

  She laughed at that. Said I could buy her one when I made partner. I played along, but secretly made phone calls, visited dealers, planned to buy her a BMW or a Mercedes, whichever would make her feel safer. It was to be a Christmas gift.

  Christmas.

  That’s what we’d been doing three months ago. Christmas shopping. The mall busy, the shoppers cranky, we’d left later than we expected, past dark. Cars were still streaming into the lot, circling for spots. A woman saw me putting bags in our trunk. She asked if we were leaving and I said I was. When I got in the car, Amy was still standing by the open rear door, trying to cheer up Rose, fussing, her nap missed.

  Hon, there’s a lady waiting for our spot.

  Whoops. Sorry.

  She fastened Rose’s chair and climbed into the passenger seat. I started backing out.

  Wait! I need to double-check the— She glanced back at the car waiting for our spot. Never mind. I’m sure it’s fine.

  “You restoring it?” The salesman’s voice jerks me from the memory and I glower at him. I don’t mean to. But for a second, I’d heard Amy’s voice, clearly heard it. Now it was gone.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m restoring it.”

  “Huh.”

  He struggles for a way to prolong the conversation. I bend and continue tinkering with the light. He stands there a moment. Then the silence becomes too much and he leaves.

  A week later, the car is roadworthy. Barely. But it will make it where I want to go, all the bits and pieces intact, no chance of being pulled over.

  The roadside.

  I pull to the shoulder. It’s dark here, just outside the city. An empty snow-laced cornfield to my right, a bare strip of two-lane highway to my left. In front of the car, a crooked cross covered in dead flowers. More dead flowers stuck in a toppled tin can. I didn’t put them there. I don’t know who did. Strangers, I suppose. Heard of the tragedy and wanted to mark the place. I’d rather they hadn’t.

  I didn’t need that wretched memorial to remind me where it happened. I would know the exact spot without any marker, save the image burned into my memory.

  Coming back from Christmas shopping. Dark country road. The car quiet. A good silence. A peaceful silence. Rose asleep, Amy and me being careful not to wake her. Snow falling. First snow. Amy smiling as she watches the flakes dance past.

  A pick-up ahead of us. A renovation company. Boards and poles and a ladder piled haphazardly in the back.

  Oh, Amy said. That doesn’t look safe. Could you . . . ?

  My foot was already off the gas, our car falling behind the truck until all we could see was its rear lights through the swirling snow.

  She smiled. Thanks.

  I know the drill.

  She reached over to squeeze my leg, then settled back to snow-watching silence.

  Another mile. I’d crept up on the truck, but was still far enough back, and she said nothing. Then I saw it. A figure walking down the other side of the road. A woman in a long, red jacket.

  I looked over. Ghost, I told myself, and I was quite certain it was, but I’d hate to be wrong and leave someone stranded. I squinted through the side window as we passed and—

  Watch—!

  That was all she said. My head whipped forward. I saw the ladder fly at us. I swerved to avoid it. The car slid, the road wet with snow. An oncoming car. I saw the lights. I heard the crunch of impact. Then . . . silence.

  Now, three months later, I sit by the side of the road and I hear her voice.

  Always dreaming. Always distracted. One of these days, you’re going to hurt yourself.

  Yes, I hurt myself. More than I could have ever imagined possible.

  I get out of the car. The tube is in the trunk. I fit it over the exhaust pipe, and run it through the passenger window. Then I get inside and start the engine.

  Does it take long? I don’t know. I’m lost in the silence. There’s a momentary break as a car slows beside me. The driver peers in, thinks I’m dozing, revs the engine, keeps going. The silence returns. Then I begin to drift . . .

  I wake up. The engine has stopped running. I check the fuel gauge. Half-full. I try to start the car, but the ignition won’t work. I slump on to the dashboard, defeated.

  Then I hear . . . something. A bird call? I look out the windshield. Fog, so thick I can’t see anything else.

  I get out of the car. The hinges squeak. I leave the door open behind me and walk around the front. The memorial cross is there, but it’s been replaced, the flowers fresh and white, the can beneath them upright and filled with daisies.

  Rose loves daisies. I smile in spite of myself and walk to the flowers. More scattered around. Still more trailing off towards the field.

  As I follow them, I stumble through the fog. That’s all there is. Fog. Rolling across the field. I look down at the flowers, crushing beneath my feet. I keep going, following them.

  Another noise. Not a bird call. It sounds like . . .

  “Amy?” I call. “Rose?”

  A voice answers. Then anoth
er.

  The silence ends.

  The Shadow in the Corner

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Wildheath Grange stood a little way back from the road, with a barren stretch of heath behind it, and a few tall fir trees, with straggling wind-tossed heads, for its only shelter. It was a lonely house on a lonely road, little better than a lane; leading across a desolate waste of sandy fields to the sea-shore; and it was a house that bore a bad name among the natives of the village of Holcroft, which was the nearest place where humanity might be found.

  It was a good old house, nevertheless, substantially built in the days when there was no stint of stone and timber – a good old grey stone house with many gables, deep window-seats, and a wide staircase, long dark passages, hidden doors in queer corners, closets as large as some modern rooms, and cellars in which a company of soldiers might have lain perdu.

  This spacious old mansion was given over to rats and mice, loneliness, echoes, and the occupation of three elderly people: Michael Bascom, whose forebears had been landowners of importance in the neighbourhood, and his two servants, Daniel Skegg and his wife, who had served the owner of that grim old house ever since he left the university, where he had lived fifteen years of his life – five as student, and ten as professor of natural science.

  At three-and-thirty Michael Bascom had seemed a middle-aged man; at fifty-six he looked and moved and spoke like an old man. During that interval of twenty-three years he had lived alone in Wildheath Grange, and the country people told each other that the house had made him what he was. This was a fanciful and superstitious notion on their part, doubtless, yet it would not have been difficult to have traced a certain affinity between the dull grey building and the man who lived in it. Both seemed alike, remote from the common cares and interests of humanity; both had an air of settled melancholy, engendered by perpetual solitude; both had the same faded complexion, the same look of slow decay.

  Yet lonely as Michael Bascom’s life was at Wildheath Grange, he would not on any account have altered its tenor. He had been glad to exchange the comparative seclusion of college rooms for the unbroken solitude of Wildheath. He was a fanatic in his love of scientific research, and his quiet days were filled to the brim with labours that seldom failed to interest and satisfy him. There were periods of depression, occasional moments of doubt, when the goal towards which he strove seemed unattainable, and his spirit fainted within him. Happily such times were rare with him. He had a dogged power of continuity which ought to have carried him to the highest pinnacle of achievement, and which perhaps might ultimately have won for him a grand name and world-wide renown, but for a catastrophe which burdened the declining years of his harmless life with an unconquerable remorse.

  One autumn morning – when he had lived just three-and-twenty years at Wildheath, and had only lately begun to perceive that his faithful butler and body servant, who was middle-aged when he first employed him, was actually getting old – Mr Bascom’s breakfast meditations over the latest treatise on the atomic theory were interrupted by an abrupt demand from that very Daniel Skegg. The man was accustomed to wait upon his master in the most absolute silence, and his sudden breaking out into speech was almost as startling as if the bust of Socrates above the bookcase had burst into human language.

  “It’s no use,” said Daniel; “my missus must have a girl!”

  “A what?” demanded Mr Bascom, without taking his eyes from the line he had been reading.

  “A girl – a girl to trot about and wash up, and help the old lady. She’s getting weak on her legs, poor soul. We’ve none of us grown younger in the last twenty years.”

  “Twenty years!” echoed Michael Bascom scornfully. “What is twenty years in the formation of a strata – what even in the growth of an oak – the cooling of a volcano!”

  “Not much, perhaps, but it’s apt to tell upon the bones of a human being.”

  “The manganese staining to be seen upon some skulls would certainly indicate—” began the scientist dreamily.

  “I wish my bones were only as free from rheumatics as they were twenty years ago,” pursued Daniel testily; “and then, perhaps, I should make light of twenty years. Howsoever, the long and the short of it is, my missus must have a girl. She can’t go on trotting up and down these everlasting passages, and standing in that stone scullery year after year, just as if she was a young woman. She must have a girl to help.”

  “Let her have twenty girls,” said Mr Bascom, going back to his book.

  “What’s the use of talking like that, sir? Twenty girls, indeed! We shall have rare work to get one.”

  “Because the neighbourhood is sparsely populated?” interrogated Mr Bascom, still reading.

  “No, sir. Because this house is known to be haunted.”

  Michael Bascom laid down his book, and turned a look of grave reproach upon his servant.

  “Skegg,” he said in a severe voice, “I thought you had lived long enough with me to be superior to any folly of that kind.”

  “I don’t say that I believe in ghosts,” answered Daniel with a semi-apologetic air, “but the country people do. There’s not a mortal among ’em that will venture across our threshold after nightfall.”

  “Merely because Anthony Bascom, who led a wild life in London, and lost his money and land, came home here brokenhearted, and is supposed to have destroyed himself in this house – the only remnant of property that was left him out of a fine estate.”

  “Supposed to have destroyed himself!” cried Skegg. “Why the fact is as well known as the death of Queen Elizabeth, or the Great Fire of London. Why, wasn’t he buried at the crossroads between here and Holcroft?”

  “An idle tradition, for which you could produce no substantial proof,” retorted Mr Bascom.

  “I don’t know about proof; but the country people believe it as firmly as they believe their Gospel.”

  “If their faith in the Gospel was a little stronger they need not trouble themselves about Anthony Bascom.”

  “Well,” grumbled Daniel, as he began to clear the table, “a girl of some kind we must get, but she’ll have to be a foreigner, or a girl that’s hard driven for a place.”

  When Daniel Skegg said a foreigner, he did not mean the native of some distant clime, but a girl who had not been born and bred at Holcroft. Daniel had been raised and reared in that insignificant hamlet, and, small and dull as it was, he considered the world beyond its only margin.

  Michael Bascom was too deep in the atomic theory to give a second thought to the necessities of an old servant. Mrs Skegg was an individual with whom he rarely came in contact. She lived for the most part in a gloomy region at the north end of the house, where she ruled over the solitude of a kitchen that looked like a cathedral, and numerous offices of the scullery, larder, and pantry class, where she carried on a perpetual warfare with spiders and beetles, and wore her old life out in the labour of sweeping and scrubbing. She was a woman of severe aspect, dogmatic piety, and a bitter tongue. She was a good plain cook, and ministered diligently to her master’s wants. He was not an epicure, but liked his life to be smooth and easy, and the equilibrium of his mental power would have been disturbed by a bad dinner.

  He heard no more about the proposed addition to his household for a space of ten days, when Daniel Skegg again startled him amidst his studious repose by the abrupt announcement:

  “I’ve got a girl!”

  “Oh,” said Michael Bascom, “have you?” and he went on with his book.

  This time he was reading an essay on phosphorus and its functions in relation to the human brain.

  “Yes,” pursued Daniel in his usual grumbling tone; “she was a waif and stray, or I shouldn’t have got her. If she’d been a native she’d never have come to us.”

  “I hope she’s respectable,” said Michael.

  “Respectable! That’s the only fault she has, poor thing. She’s too good for the place. She’s never been in service before, but she says sh
e’s willing to work, and I daresay my old woman will be able to break her in. Her father was a small tradesman at Yarmouth. He died a month ago, and left this poor thing homeless. Mrs Midge at Holcroft is her aunt, and she said to the girl, ‘Come and stay with me till you get a place’; and the girl has been staying with Mrs Midge for the last three weeks, trying to hear of a place. When Mrs Midge heard that my missus wanted a girl to help, she thought it would be the very thing for her niece Maria. Luckily Maria had heard nothing about this house, so the poor innocent dropped me a curtsey, and said she’d be thankful to come, and would do her best to learn her duty. She’d had an easy time of it with her father, who had educated her above her station, like a fool as he was,” growled Daniel.

  “By your own account I’m afraid you’ve made a bad bargain,” said Michael. “You don’t want a young lady to clean kettles and pans.”

  “If she was a young duchess my old woman would make her work,” retorted Skegg decisively.

  “And pray where are you going to put this girl?” asked Mr Bascom, rather irritably. “I can’t have a strange young woman tramping up and down the passages outside my room. You know what a wretched sleeper I am, Skegg. A mouse behind the wainscot is enough to wake me.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” answered the butler, with his look of ineffable wisdom. “I’m not going to put her on your floor. She’s to sleep in the attics.”

  “Which room?”

  “The big one at the north end of the house. That’s the only ceiling that doesn’t let water. She might as well sleep in a shower-bath as in any of the other attics.”

  “The room at the north end,” repeated Mr Bascom thoughtfully; “isn’t that—?”

  “Of course it is,” snapped Skegg, “but she doesn’t know anything about it.”

  Mr Bascom went back to his books, and forgot all about the orphan from Yarmouth, until one morning on entering his study he was startled by the appearance of a strange girl, in a neat black-and-white cotton gown, busy dusting the volumes which were stacked in blocks upon his spacious writing-table – and doing it with such deft and careful hands that he had no inclination to be angry at this unwonted liberty. Old Mrs Skegg had religiously refrained from all such dusting, on the plea that she did not wish to interfere with the master’s ways. One of the master’s ways, therefore, had been to inhale a good deal of dust in the course of his studies.