The Wish Dog

by Penny Thomas

  ‘‘I think the old dead folk are the ghosts in this village.’’ Sarah says. ‘Mrs Connolly’s out pruning her roses in her dressing gown, and Cyril the blacksmith is outside the pub, which is now a private house, but I can see him there. Both of them died when I was a child.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I imagine seeing several of them as I walk around, but I always think it’s because those old black and white photos are in the village hall. Those people have never left. These living children, who are enjoying being ghosts, will move away, but something of them will remain.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Sarah says. It seems a shame that villages just get forgotten, they become assimilated into the town’s catchment area and become districts. ‘So, do you think these “Save our School” ghosts will frighten the councillors?‘

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘but they will be good for publicity and the photographs in the Gazette will help make others more aware of our campaign.’

  The evening was drawing in. I got up to pull the curtains. I saw a face at the window. I heard myself scream.

  ‘There’s someone there…’ I said. We went outside into the dusk with a torch and the dog. There was no one there, but the dog’s fur bristled, and he growled as he passed the window.

  ‘It’s your imagination, Mair,’ said my husband, ‘and all those ghost costumes you’ve been sewing. Come on now, we’ll take the dog for a walk. That will reassure you there’s nothing there but stars.’

  He was right, just stars and the quiet of the village graveyard, where I wouldn’t walk at night because there’s something about a graveyard at night that needs to be left to its own.

  *

  The ghost costumes didn’t save the school. It’s been sold and is now a private home. Incomers bought it; too expensive for locals. The eight village children are now bussed to school in town. Their faces in the minibus windows are like ghosts. Their names echo the ones on the gravestones : Tomos Davies, Elwyn Jones, Siôn Thomas, Rhodri Williams, Elin Thomas, Siân Hughes, Betsan Davies, Megan ap Rhys.

  A Matter Of Light

  Elizabeth Baines

  1816

  May 1st

  Never having been a man much given to journal-making but spending my life in the practical matters of trade, I am minded now, in my seventy-sixth year and possessing greater leisure (my youngest son having taken on the greater burden of our business), to write of certain curious phenomena of light which I have recently witnessed within the walls of my home. To my knowledge no other member of my household has likewise made such sightings, for which I must be grateful, since there is a strangeness about them that could unsettle those of weak or uneducated mind.

  All of my acquaintance, here and abroad, will vouch for me as a rational man, and I mean to set down in the spirit of scientific observation the particulars of these incidents, which have indeed occurred in broad daylight, and in a house but twenty-five years built – to my own commission and personal specification – and thus no likely repository for hauntings by previous deceased incumbents, even should one hold with the desire or ability of unquiet spirits to wander into our physical domain.

  My house, standing as it does on an open hill just beyond the sweep of the town, faces not to the past but to the future, with clean lines and spacious rooms looking out to the rear down a hill towards the river and the misty hills beyond, and equipped with the latest devices for household convenience. My study is a room of calm proportions and, being on the ground floor, lit by one of the tallest windows, a place conducive to clarity of thought, contemplative study and the judicious conduct of business transactions. It is in this room that, two days ago, the first of the events to which I refer occurred.

  It was mid-morning. I was alone and at my desk, reading an account by the Reverend Smythe of an attempt to transfer mulberry trees to warmer climes. The sun made a wide beam across the beige carpet in the centre of the room. I stood from my desk beside the window and crossed to the bookcase on the left-hand wall. As I did so, a movement to the right caught my eye. I thought that my servant had entered unnoticed, but in the next moment I knew I remained quite alone. I considered that my movement across the room had created an answering shadow, until I saw that my shade was falling away from me in the opposite direction, across the beige carpet and onto the wall on the left.

  In truth, it was at the time a little thing, for my mind was much on the mulberry tree and its transplantation, and my curiosity was mild as I stepped back to the window and looked out to see what reflection or refraction had thrown perhaps the shadow of a bird against the usual trajectory. Looking out I saw nothing but the empty road and the rise beyond nodding with cowslips, and my thoughts returned to my studies.

  I should have thought no more of it, had not something further occurred yesterday afternoon.

  It is true that, since my wife is a fastidious keeper of this house, in spite of our large windows we are often much shrouded in shadow, the curtains pulled to protect the furnishings from bleaching by the sun. The lower staircase, however, is ever an airy sweep of light, its pale stone and open ironwork balustrade lit by a long window that looks out to the westerly hills. Yesterday afternoon I was mounting the first flight when I noticed on the wall beside the window the shadow of a man, head and shoulders sans periwig, merging below into a less distinct column. I looked around me quickly, expecting to see someone behind down the stairs or up on the landing. No one was there, but it struck me that it should have been strange even had they been so, for light comes only from the uncurtained window, thus casting shadows in the opposite direction, and no mirror is hung on any of the walls or on the landing above or in the hall down below to send back any rays. When I looked back the shadow had gone, and I will confess that I did then suffer a moment’s unease, and the sense of encountering a Being, and the hairs on my neck did prick, before I mastered such thoughts that belong to base and irrational lore.

  It is a most curious phenomenon which I cannot account for by my own previous studies of refraction, and which has much excited my scientific curiosity. I have this day sent to London for a copy of Thomas Young’s paper to the Royal Society concerning the properties of light.

  May 6th

  I have perused Mr Young’s experiments, which proved that light is capable of being bent (and is thus made of waves rather than corpuscles as had been previously held), including his double-slit experiment in which two beams of light interfering with each other did indeed create stripes of shadow. But this yet does not explain how any shadow so created should appear on my wall quite against any beams of light entering my stairway.

  I shall watch for further instances and record them carefully. I have all my life endeavoured to avoid the sin of pride, disliking ostentation in matters of both material wealth (I have ensured that my home, though large, is simply furnished) and intellect, yet I cannot but feel that to make a discovery that may contribute to the greater field of scientific knowledge would be the crowning glory of an assiduous and careful life.

  I have not shared with my wife this hope, nor anything of the circumstance. She is stout of heart but she has suffered with her health since we settled in this rheumy part of the world; moreover, she has never put behind her the old superstitions, and would conclude that we have been invaded by ghosts.

  May 8th

  I have once more witnessed the shadow on the stairs. All was as before apart from the time of day and the fact that on this occasion I watched the shape disappear, which occurred not instantly, as with a sudden change of light or movement away of an object, but gradually, the object fading slowly before my eyes until no smudge of it remained. This pleases me, confirming perhaps some new character of light as yet unobserved and requiring investigation, light bending perhaps without the aid of mirrors from another vicinity altogether, and explaining those distortions which throughout history have been taken to be ghosts.

  May 10th

  No further occurrence of the light/shadow phenomenon, but I have been much taken up
with other matters, not only my ship coming to harbour and involving me and my son with merchants, but another mystery in my household, one involving sound.

  I was in the drawing room alone, waiting for my wife to join me, when I heard someone whisper, it seemed from over near the door. I peered but was blinded by the beam of sun coming through the half-drawn curtains, and could make out nothing in the gloom beyond. The whisper came again, a rustle that resolved itself into what seemed to me a human voice, though I could not make out the words. ‘Who is there?’ I asked, stepping into the gloom. My eyes accustomed themselves, and I saw that there was no one there. My eye alighted on the horn of the speaking tube, my house being most usefully equipped with an ingenious system, still unknown to many. A series of tubes connects the kitchen to the upper rooms, the servants being summoned by blowing through a horn at the upper end and activating a whistle at the lower, so saving much running about of servants, and the purse of the master who may thus employ fewer. I deduced that this was whence the sound had come, the whistle at the lower end having become detached and sound from the kitchen allowed to travel upwards. I tried it, my wife entering the room just then. The whistle sounded at the other end, and we thought that it must have been quickly replaced, yet when the maid appeared and my wife called her to account she averred that the whistle had been in place all along, and her manner was so sincerely upset that I do not know if the problem is a mechanical one needing my attention or a servant problem for my wife.

  May 15th

  I continue to hear whispering sounds. I now hear them along the landings, and I do not know how any sound from the speaking tubes could reach there. I have ventured to risk frightening my wife by asking her if she hears anything too, but she says she does not.

  And always I hear them when I am alone.

  I will confess that I am a little ruffled. Today as I was about to enter the drawing room, the sound came from along the corridor towards the back of the house, a hoarse sibilance seeming to snake towards me, and just as it stopped there was another sound like the scrape of a foot, as if someone were ducking out of sight. I turned quickly, my blood thumping, but the long space was quite empty, all the doors firmly shut.

  I fear that I am of a sudden pushed by old age from my rational character. All of my life have I conducted myself with equanimity and reason. No vicissitude has ever knocked me from my senses – no storm at sea, no grief, not the deaths of two of my beloved children, nor the waywardness of my elder sons. That those sons should reject my very principles of rationality and align themselves with poets and dreamers and, like their mother, be happy to submit to the promptings of feeling and of imagined spirits, was indeed to me a matter of both puzzlement and chagrin. It is hard for a man who believes in a life of rigour – hard work, early rising, regular and healthy meals and a daily plunge in a cold bath – to countenance his sons lounging in their opium dens, wigless in the way that is now the fashion, their hair awry. Yet I reasoned that no good comes of quarrelling with one’s children, and I took pains to accommodate them, so far even as to extend hospitality to their poet friends.

  I think it may be said that I dealt fairly with my children, and with all whom I have encountered, which is a steadying thought to have in one’s closing years.

  No further sign of the light/shadow business to date.

  May 17th

  My discomposure continues.

  A most odd happening when my wife and I were alone at dinner today. We enjoy the benefit of that modern invention, the dumb waiter, whereby food may be sent straight up to us from the kitchen without the need of human carrying. We are attacking our pudding today when a most prodigious sound of young girls giggling seems to burst from the shaft, and the cry, ‘Look!’ in a strange accent, as if some new maid, brought from other parts, were hollering up the hole. ‘God’s truth,’ cries I to my wife, most annoyed that this contraption, designed not only to bring the food to us piping hot, but also to afford us a privacy hitherto unattainable in a house with servants, should allow such disruption of our peace. My wife looks at me blankly. Says I, ‘Do you countenance such indiscretion by servants?’ She wants to know of what indiscretion I speak. She has heard no giggling and no sound whatever.

  Perhaps my wife is going deaf, I think, and believe that she feared so too.

  Yet tonight she tells me that no new maids have been employed, and that the cook when spoken to maintained that there were none in the kitchen at the time when we ate our pudding, one having been sent to the underground store for butter, the other outside for water.

  My wife tells me, laughing: ‘You have frightened the cook. She is afraid we are haunted.’

  I laughed too, though I cannot claim that I felt at ease. My wife, whose fear of the supernatural has hitherto amused me, patted my arm in a matter-of-fact way and went to her withdrawing room.

  I stepped out on to the landing. And then I thought I heard it again, fainter now, somewhere in the upper spaces of the house where no servants should be at that time, a voice calling, the words indistinguishable, and then a roiling of giggles, a trickling, bubbling sound.

  Rain on the roof perhaps, I thought, that’s all, but could not deny the broad sheet of sun lying on the pink stone of the stairs.

  May 20th

  I fear that I am now truly losing my reason.

  Investigation of the system for channelling water from the roof to the tank on the lowest level has yielded no lack or fault likely to cause these unaccustomed sounds, which I have since heard yet again. My personal examination of the dumb waiter found no mechanism worn and no piece of crockery overlooked and rattling. Unless I am to succumb to a belief that ghosts walk this house, I must conclude that my eyes and ears have been deceiving me all along, and that this must extend to the shadows as well as sounds.

  Today I looked up from my desk and thought I saw a man standing across the room. In an instant he was gone, and I knew him for what he was, a moment’s vision, a dream, but what lasted in my mind was the gaze he seemed to beam towards me, a gaze of accusation.

  Yet, just as I do not hold that any ghost has the capacity to rise up to reproach me, neither do I think that my conscience should do so. In all my dealings I have treated others with consideration. I did not disown my sons when they quarrelled with my philosophy; I even smuggled to safety one of their group in trouble for his radical activities. I made pains to understand and assuage my wife’s sad longings, arranging her frequent journeys to the land of her birth. Our close servants have been treated as family, my man, a manumitted slave, enjoying many of the freedoms of any young English gentleman.

  I should rather submit to the notion that we are haunted than to believe I am so far thrust from my reason as to imagine these presences. Yet what ghost would appear as these do, away from the traditional time of night and in the blare of the sun which flings itself in a gold river down our stairway turning to diamonds the fine sugar on the table, substance of my trade?

  May 21st

  Not long since, this very evening, I suffered a most distressing vision. I had repaired to our bedroom to change for dinner. The maid had failed to pull the curtains and sun was filling the room, light glancing off the washstand and the pure white dimity bed frills, dazzling my eyes. I went to the window to look down the valley, and experienced an alarming sensation. The view was quite changed: pale slabs of colour blocked the view of the river, as if films had formed before my eyes. I turned in. I felt blinded and giddy.

  I heard voices I did not recognise on the landing.

  I staggered rather than stepped into the dressing room and, though later I would find the room restored to its customary state, in that moment it appeared to me quite bare, bulging with sun and the curtains and furnishings all gone.

  Yet there in this dream, writ large on a plaque on the wall, were my very own words, my instructions to the managers of my plantations that my slaves should be treated with humanity, that I would not suffer any human being committed by providence to
my care to be treated with severity.

  It is my eternal sadness that my abolitionist elder sons should have lumped me with those cruel plantation owners who beat their slaves to death. It was nothing to my sons in their blinkered idealism that when I inherited my first plantation I freed the ill and starving slaves; they preferred to point to the financial saving which this admittedly made, along with the cheapness and investment of the child slaves I replaced them with, and to the economic wisdom rather than the philanthropy of providing my slaves with medical care and clothes and land on which to grow crops of their own. But humanity is surely not diminished by going hand in hand with good economic sense. And humanity must be tempered with justice, and the system maintained if our trade and the prosperity of our land is to continue. If I told my managers not to whip my slaves within hearing of abolitionist visitors, then it were for the sake of harmony rather than the shame my sons thought I should feel.

  May 22nd

  I see apparitions everywhere. They people the stairs and the landings and hover at the entrance to rooms, and are such as I never could imagine, in outlandish garb in colours of such luminosity that, though I have lived in the brightness of the West Indies, I did not know could exist. They gaze, they peer, at my furnishings and contraptions. They must be ghosts after all, rather than my own projections, for they are alien, and, though I cannot touch them, concrete-seeming, and I do not know what connection they could have with the pictures of black and broken skin now leaking through my mind…

  I, King

  Melanie Fritz

  There’s odd. You think you know where you are – lived all your life by here after all, Merthyr born and bred! – and next thing you know is you don’t really know.

  Rhian’s taking her pugs, Mollie and Batman, for a walk. As usual. She scans her surroundings. There’s no knowing where the two’ve run off to in this vaguely familiar, strangely unfamiliar, place.