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

by Marie O'Regan

  The abomination did not fight her father. Unfamiliar with violence, and young, she assumed she deserved it. The whip was not nearly as bad as the exile from Jane, whom she missed so enormously that she could not think about her without weeping. Finally, during the third week, she cried out: Mother! Why have you abandoned me?

  Jane remembered being twelve years old, and sold to the man who’d murdered her sister. She remembered working the fields, bare-backed and whipped. She remembered the feeling of life in her belly and the old woman in that cottage, who’d surely been a witch. She walked down the stairs, and charged. The robber did not turn in time. She gutted him with his own scythe.

  Then she unchained her daughter. They held each other and it was sweet and good, and she knew then that she’d loved her sixth sister, and been loved, too. She knew then that things unsaid have a way of being forgotten. Though you are ugly and not human, I love you, she told the child.

  Together, they axed down the house of human scalps and warmed themselves by its fire. Then, carrying the robber’s corpse, they set out to the place where the woods folded. It was dirt now, dry and barren. On the ground, panting and nearly lifeless, was Jane’s other daughter. Her white wings had retracted into her back. Jane took her husband’s carcass and let the blood drip to the north, south, east, and west. From the depths of each spot, stones pushed up into corners, and made a house. It surrounded them, warm and full of food and tinctures and children’s cauls.

  This place will be a beacon, Jane told her daughters. Far and wide, my winged one will travel, and spread the news. My strong one will protect us. We will let the world know that places and people used to matter. One day, they will matter again.

  After her daughters had rested and fed, they rose up and fulfilled their duty. Jane made daily offerings with her husband’s bones, and the scalps she’d saved from the old house, including the red-headed one. The house became more houses, that became a village. Small animals returned. The people who inhabited these houses ceased to eye each other’s flesh with desolate grins. They built things of beauty, and carved flutes from trees. The daughters and Jane did not marry, but stayed in the house as years and centuries passed, until the town became civilized, and they seemed strange and frightening. The three witches, they were called. The weird sisters. By then, only the desperate who wanted children and requited love visited. Jane collected drops of blood from their fingers for potions. She cackled, deep-throated, with a strange, otherworldly joy.

  Jane’s reflection in the mirror by then showed a stout woman with warts and missing teeth. On her deathbed, with her children at either side and the sun shining bright, her life flashed before her, and she knew that she’d summoned herself all those years ago, and she’d gotten exactly what she’d wished for in her daughters: strength and freedom.

  Sister, Shhh . . .

  Elizabeth Massie

  Charity did not look back. She did not slow down. Her thin white sneakers, meant for sandy pathways and wooden floors, were savaged on the rock-strewn, hard-packed earth. Her yellow dress caught at her legs and threatened to throw her on to her face.

  The heat of the desert was cooling quickly, the sun reduced to an orange smear atop the mountains to the west. The sky was starless and the colour of water in a deep well. Charity did her best to keep pace with her sister-wife, who was several yards ahead, but Fawn was older by a year and taller by nearly a foot.

  Though she could not hear anything but her own footfalls and raspy, desperate breaths, she was sure the Prophet had roused a posse and they were thundering along behind in the darkness, truck tyres biting the ground, dogs and correction rods at the ready.

  Heavenly Father, help me! God, please do not curse me!

  “Fawn!”

  Fawn did not look back. She did not answer.

  The Prophet and his men would catch them and take them to task, dragging them by their hair to show others what happened to backsliders, claiming any punishments they received at the hands of the elders were mild compared to their punishments in hell were they to escape to live among the Outsiders.

  Charity’s foot caught a stone and she fell, wailing, and came up with her mouth and hands embedded with grit. She scrambled up a cactus-covered slope and skidded down the other side. The small Bible she’d pocketed before running thumped her hip, reminding her it was there, reminding her of the vows she was breaking, the chance she was taking, and the hope she might be protected anyway. Up ahead, Fawn’s pink dress flapped like the wings of a terrified bird.

  It was forbidden for girls to leave Gloryville. Females were to remain at home in the protection of God and the Fellowship. They were not to travel, nor even to speculate as to what lay beyond the borders of their holy, isolated town. They were to be submissive daughters and brides and mothers. They were to do as they were told, to surrender their bodies and souls to the men in their lives – their shepherds – who had spiritual and bodily charge over them.

  “Fawn!”

  Fawn called back, “Come on!”

  An engine revved far behind in the blackness. They were coming. Charity glanced over her shoulder and saw nothing but the outlines of boulders and brambles and the quarter moon, hovering like a cat’s eye in the near-black sky.

  The engine sound faded, disappeared. Maybe it was thunder, Charity thought. A storm coming in over the desert.

  Baring her teeth, she pushed on. Her heart hammered, her lungs drew in and out like bellows against a fire.

  Then Fawn slowed. She bent over, clutching her knees, wheezing, spitting blood. Charity reached her and grabbed her arm.

  “Are you all right?”

  Fawn nodded.

  “No, really!”

  “I bit my tongue.”

  “Oh!”

  Fawn glanced up; her eyes were creased at the edges, terrified, flashing white in the faint moonlight. But she nodded again. “I’m all right.”

  “We should rest. Somewhere. We can hide.”

  “They’ll catch us, certainly. But Flinton isn’t too far, I don’t think. Just a mile, maybe.”

  Mile? I can’t run another mile!

  “Can you run with me? Can you be free with me?”

  Can I, God? Will You hate me for leaving Gloryville? Will You punish me forever?

  Charity whispered, “Yes.” Fawn took her hand and they ran, into the blackness, zigzagging across the Arizona desert, heading for Flinton. Heading for freedom.

  Flinton had a reputation for sin. Whoring. Gambling. Murders. Loud music, televisions, and a movie theatre that showed films glorifying violence and sex. People dressed in clothes that revealed shoulders, midriffs, and bare thighs. Children running without supervision. Women out of their homes unescorted, drinking with each other and with men into the wee hours of the nights. Charity had heard all these things in passing, whispered stories that skittered through the sanctified compound of Gloryville like thorny tumbleweeds on a foul breeze.

  The men of Gloryville went to Flinton to trade, sell, and buy. It was the closest Outsider town. It had stores and banks. And so they went. But they always stamped their boots clean of Flinton’s foul dirt before they re-entered their own town.

  And though Charity had dreamed of escape as she lay trembling on her cot at night, she could not reconcile her longing with the fact that the only place to run to would be Flinton.

  It was Fawn who first spoke the dangerous words. She had sneaked to Charity’s bedside one morning before the rest of the household was awake, kneeled down and whispered, “I’m going to run away, dearest. Come with me.”

  Charity had pulled her pillow over her head, pretending to be asleep. Fawn had poked her in the shoulder and whispered again, “Friday. After prayer meeting. We can pretend to go looking for Pips.”

  Charity whispered into the pillow, “Why would we look for Pips? He’s a faithful dog. He would never leave Rufus.”

  “We can hide him, tie him up so he looks to be missing. That will give us the time we need before an
yone wonders where we are.”

  Charity was silent, though her heart pounded so hard the cot shook beneath her.

  “All right? Charity? Please? I don’t want to go alone. We’ll be safer together. And I don’t want to leave you behind. You’re the only person who loves me.”

  Charity felt herself nod. Fawn slipped away, back to her room, a whisper of slippers on bare floor. And Charity slept not at all until dawn, trying to breathe, staring at the wall, thinking of the dangers in Flinton, seeing images of Satan and the Prophet glaring at her, one with eyes of blazing orange, the other with eyes of ice-cold blue, wrangling over her soul.

  But she wanted to leave as much as she wanted to live. And life in Gloryville had become unbearable.

  Over the days that followed, Charity fought hard to keep from letting the rest of the family notice her nervousness. She was certain the fear of the impending escape was obvious, etched on her cheeks and mouth like the scars cut into Fawn’s shoulders from the beating Rufus gave her when she resisted him on their wedding night. Yet, as the fourth and youngest wife of Elder Rufus Via, Charity was overlooked most of the time, her ranking in the expansive family just a little higher than that of Pips.

  Charity had married Rufus, a smelly fifty-eight-year-old goat farmer, brother to the Prophet though a lesser church elder himself, thirteen months before on her fourteenth birthday. She had looked forward to the marriage and the assurance of a place in the highest realm of heaven for obeying the expectations of her sex. She thought she knew what would be expected of her, having grown up in a family with three sister-wives and nineteen children. But her own father, a carpenter who worked hard and said little, was quite different from Rufus Via, who didn’t work very hard and said quite a bit. Rufus stomped and yelled, then would disappear for several days, expecting not only the housework to be done but all the farm work, as well. If it wasn’t done, and done to his liking, there was hell to pay.

  The first two sister-wives, Prudence and Faith, were humble women, busy with their babies, and with little time to help Charity adjust. They assigned the youngest sister-wife the most tedious chores, as was to be expected. Laundry. Scrubbing the floors. Mucking goat pens. Gathering eggs. Cleaning the dishes. Changing the diapers of their growing brood – eleven and counting, as all of the other sister-wives, including Fawn now, were expecting. Fawn, however, had taken Charity under her wing. The two girls had known each other before the marriages, had lived in adjacent homes. They’d played together when there was time to play. They’d sat near each other during the long church services that all Gloryville residents were required to attend in the windowless chapel in the centre of town. Occasionally they dared pass notes back and forth, snickering silently over which boys were cute or which woman had a hole in her stocking or a bug in her hair.

  So when Charity wed Rufus, Fawn was quick to give her advice on how best to submit to him when he wanted her and how best to stay out of his way when he didn’t.

  “He wants to make you scream when he takes you,” she said. “If you are silent, he thinks you aren’t paying attention. If you lie still, he thinks you are in contempt of him. It’s best to writhe and scream and call out to God. He may spank you with a belt, or make you do things with your mouth. Oh, Charity, just say yes to it all. Then he will be done with his business more quickly and will leave you alone.”

  And so Charity screamed. She writhed. She prayed she would never have his child. She prayed he would die, then she prayed she would die. Then she prayed God would forgive her for her prayers. She didn’t really want to die. She wanted to be gone, gone far from the man and his brutal hands and body.

  She peeled carrots and potatoes. She washed. She minded the others’ babies. She bent over in the shed when Rufus found her there. She bore his beatings when he came to her and found she was in the midst of her unclean days. She endured his curses when she did not conceive.

  And she cried on her cot in the pantry behind the kitchen. How could she stand this for another sixty years? If this was God’s plan, then God was as cold and cruel as Rufus. Maybe Satan would be kinder. He certainly couldn’t be much worse.

  According to the whispered rumours, Satan lived in Flinton. The road to Flinton was likely the road to hell.

  And it was also the road to freedom.

  They reached the outskirts of Flinton and stumbled along the shoulder of the road, at a walk now, panting, sweating. Charity’s hair had long since fallen free from its pins and lay like a tangled brown shawl about her shoulders. Each time a vehicle whizzed past, they shuddered and prayed it was not the Prophet. Each set of receding tail lights looked like glowing devil’s eyes, daring them to follow. Along the roadside were flat-roofed houses, tangled chain-link fences behind which dogs snarled and howled. They passed an abandoned building with rusted gas pumps, and trailers set like litter carelessly tossed, their porch lights winking. Inside, there was loud and rowdy laughter. Charity could not help but weep. Her feet were hot with blood, her face hot with dread. There was nothing left in her body but the agony of the escape, nothing left in her heart but the fear of what lay ahead.

  “Sister, shhh,” said Fawn. She leaned close and nuzzled Charity’s cheek. “It will be all right. We just get into town, find a telephone, and call the authorities. We tell them we are runaways from Gloryville and that we need help.”

  “How do you know they’ll help us? How do you know they won’t just send us back to Rufus?”

  “I’ve heard tell that laws of the Outsiders forbid men to marry girls our age. They believe it’s criminal for men to beat their wives.”

  “Whose laws? Not God’s laws, surely! God’s laws are above the laws of man!”

  “No, no! God doesn’t want us beaten . . .”

  “But if we disobey we should be beaten!”

  “You’re tired, Charity. Shhh, now. You want to be away as I want to. Trust me. We’ll be all right. I have some coins in my pocket that I took from Rufus’s dresser. We just need to find a phone, we just need to . . .”

  And in that moment, there was a rumbling on the road, a roaring from behind, a dark growl bearing down on them, and Charity turned just in time to see a truck without its headlights on aiming for them, swelling in the darkness like an enraged monster. She felt the heat of the machine before it struck her, knocking her up from the shoulder and out into the sand. And then darkness covered darkness and everything flew away.

  “Careless, Rufus,” said a man’s voice. The sound cut through Charity’s brain and she flinched. “Knew you took chances but never thought you’d be so careless.”

  Even with her face pressed into a mattress, she knew the men who were with her. Her husband. The Prophet. She could feel the sticky crust of the sheet, could smell stale sex in the fabric. In a room next door, there was muffled music, talking, laughter.

  Fawn, where are you?!

  “Damn women,” said Rufus. He huffed and hawked, and it sounded like he spat on the floor. “What gets into them, you know? What makes them think they can run?”

  There was a moment of silence. The Prophet was likely pondering the question. Then he said, “Satan grabs a few of them and off they go. Think something’s better out here.”

  “Out here? In Flinton? Hah!”

  “Seems so.”

  “Bitches.”

  “I won’t have those words, Rufus. You’re an elder and ...”

  “I am who I am and have always been that. Don’t get high and mighty with me, Walter. I know you and I’ve heard your babblings ever since I was born.”

  “The past is past, brother. I’ve put up with your shenanigans for much too long. Coming to Flinton once a month for your floozies and your drink! Staying away for days, leaving your wives and children while you do God knows what with unholy women! I should have corrected you earlier, should have not allowed you to take four wives, should have . . .”

  “Should have what, Walter? Used the law of placing against me? Or hauled me to the front of the body
during worship to dress me down? Or would you have my blood atonement? Oh, I have shenanigans, all right. I come to Flinton for my fun, but I keep it away from Gloryville. I never sully our holy town. I never sully your holy name.”

  “Rufus! Enough.”

  “Enough? For who? For me? For you? Let me tell you, Prophet, should you share what I do on my own time with the flock, I will tell them of your sins. I will tell them of the boys you have sent away from Gloryville when they reached the age. You claimed they were listening to rock music, or were caught smoking. Off they went, banished! And I have no problem with that. We’ve not enough girls as it is for all the men to marry their required three. Yet what no one knows but you, me, and God is that you had your way with all the boys before you set them adrift. You blessed them with your lust, rammed them into the wall of your private prayer closet, left them limping, bloody, and torn.”

  “Rufus!”

  “I tell the truth, brother. Shall I share that truth with the body of believers? Shall I tell the congregation?”

  There was a sharp slapping sound and a grunt. Then a tussle and thud. Charity tried to turn over but her body screamed with the attempt.

  “Hold! I think she’s awake.”

  “You’re no prophet, Prophet! You’re as full of sin as the rest of the world!”

  “I said hold! Stop it! She’s awake, Rufus. Take care now.”

  “More care than your driving?”

  “Not another word from you.”

  The bed sank and squealed. A beefy hand took hold of Charity’s chin, and turned it around. “Open your eyes!” It was Rufus. Charity tried to look but could not find the energy. Though the mattress was no longer sinking, she felt herself continuing on without it, spinning, floating downward towards a soft sound of crying. A faint sound of scratching ...