Twelve Great Black Cats

by Sorche Nic Leodhas

  It was the grief of her life that she could not sit and mourn beside the grave of her dead lover, but the seaside village to which he had gone for the fishing was at a distance from his own home. When his body was washed ashore, the villagers had carried it to their own graveyard and buried it there.

  Now the lass sat by herself in the shadow of the hedge, near the dancing place where she and her love had once been happy together, and watched and listened and wept.

  While the dancers were merrymaking a man came cantering along the road on a great black horse. He pulled up his steed at sight of the merry throng, and swinging himself from its back, he hurried to join their sport. The dancers, intent upon their own amusement, paid him little heed, but opened their ranks to let him in. He, for his part, threw himself into the dance with a will. No voice laughed louder or sang more gaily, no foot moved more fleetly than that of the stranger in their midst.

  So the night wore on, and many a reel and strathspey and jig was footed by the young folk, and many a gay lilt was sung. But all good things must come to an end. As the hour grew late, the dancers, tiring, began to steal away for home. One or two at a time they went at first, then in larger numbers, until the last stragglers in a body hurried away. No one was left then at the dancing place but the stranger who had ridden there upon his black horse and the lass who sat weeping under the hedge.

  He strode up to the lass and stood looking down upon her.

  “You were once a bonnie, bonnie lass,” said he. “And you’d be bonnie again if your face were not so raddled with weeping and your eyes not so swollen red.”

  She buried her face in her hands and wept harder. “Why would I not be weeping?” said she. “The tears I’m shedding are for my true love who is dead.”

  “Greeting and grieving will not bring the dead back to life again,” the stranger said roughly. “So much mourning serves no purpose but to make it so the dead cannot rest easy in their graves. Come, lass, dry your tears and hush your lament, and tread a measure with me!”

  She looked up at him but could not see his face because of the tears in her eyes. She shook her head. “I will not dance,” said she.

  But he reached down and took her wrist in his hand, and pulling her to her feet, he drew her toward the dancing place. She held back and struggled with all her might, but he was stronger than she and he would not let her go. Against her will she found her feet were moving in the figures of the dance, while he whistled softly to mark the time of their steps.

  “I will not!” she protested and tried to free herself.

  “Aye, but you will!” said he, and she could not stop, because he whirled her so madly and held her so fast.

  Then, she looked up at the face that bent above her. A shaft of the cold moonlight lay white upon it, and she cried out. The face she saw was that of the lover whom she had mourned so long! Her heart leaped for joy and she called him by name. “They told me you were dead!” she cried.

  “Is that what they told you?” he asked.

  “They said you were dead and long buried,” said she.

  “Did they say so?” he asked, and whirled her faster and faster in the dance.

  “You will never leave me again?” she begged him.

  “I must be on my way from here, lass,” he told her. “Long before the break of dawn.”

  “Then I shall go too,” the lass cried out. “Take me with you wherever you go!”

  “My dwelling place is small and low,” he told her. “I doubt you’d like it o’ermuch. The walls are damp and it is dark, and there is little more than room enough for me.”

  “With me to help we’ll soon earn a better,” the lass insisted stoutly. “I’ll help with my hands and share your toil each day.”

  “You’d do better to find yourself a new love,” he said.

  “You shall not go without me,” said she.

  “Come then, if you must!” he said.

  Then he took her up behind him on his great black horse, and off they galloped up the road the way he had come.

  “Hold fast!” he bade her. “The time is short. We have a long way to go and I must be home before the break of day.”

  The black horse spurned the stones of the road with his hoofs until sparks flew out at either side. The wind came tearing after them, but never caught up with them as they sped by.

  “Hold fast!” the lass’s lover called to her over his shoulder, and at his command, she caught his belt in both her hands and held it tight.

  Then a chill came over her. She felt so cold that she thought she could not bear it. She wondered that a summer night should freeze one to the bone like one of winter, but laid it to the speed at which they rode.

  Her lover’s garments whipped back against her. She wondered, as they touched her, why they felt so damp when no rain had fallen all along the way.

  “Why is your cloak so wet?” she asked, but he made no reply at all.

  The black horse raced faster and faster, through clachan and village, and over hill and down.

  “Will we not soon be there?” the lass cried out in despair.

  But her lover whipped his steed on through the night without an answering word.

  Then, of a sudden, her shawl flew up into her face. She had to take one hand from his belt to pull the shawl down and wrap it about herself. When she reached to take hold of the belt again she grasped, instead, a handful of his linen shirt. The cloth was icy cold and heavy with moisture. “Why are your clothes so dripping wet!” she exclaimed. “Och, a body’d think you’d been riding through a storm, but no rain at all has fallen. See then, my own clothes are dry.”

  Just at that moment they came to the gate of a kirkyard where the kirk stood tall and dark with its graves on either side.

  Her lover slowed his black horse down, and turned it in at the gate, bringing it to a stop among the graves at one side of the kirk.

  “This is my dwelling place,” he told her, as he alighted from his horse. “You gave me no rest in my grave. The sound of your voice lamenting kept me awake night and day. And if my clothes are wet, ’tis little wonder, for the tears you have shed have gathered and run down into the place where I lay. Now you shall cease your weeping and lie beside me in my grave, and I shall have peace at last.”

  The lass looked down at the face that was turned up to her own. She saw, with horror, that it was not a face at all, but a bony skull, and under the clothes that clung so wetly there was no warm living flesh, but only whitened bones. Then she knew that her lover was dead indeed, and it was his ghost that had brought her here.

  “Come!” he said, and reached up to pull her down from the back of the horse.

  But she cried, “Nay!” and slipped to the ground on the other side. She gathered up her skirts and ran away from him, faster than she’d ever run in all her life before.

  He came after her, his bony hands outstretched to catch her. She felt his fingers take hold of the border of her shawl. But she cast off the shawl and ran on. She ran out from among the graves and down the path in front of the kirk, and through the gate of the kirkyard into the road. She was growing too short of breath to keep on running. She glanced over her shoulder to see how close he followed at her feet. But just at the moment she looked, the dawn broke in the eastern sky, and on every side the cocks began to crow to greet the morn.

  Like a puff of mist dissolving, ghost and horse disappeared, and the lass saw naught behind her but the kirk and the kirkyard with its graves, peaceful in the first gray morning light.

  The shock of relief at finding her pursuer gone was too great for the lass to bear. She lost her senses and fell to the road, and there she lay.

  A milkmaid on her way to milk her cows found the lass lying there in the middle of the road, and ran to the village close by to fetch help. Men came and carried her to a house where kind hands took her in and cared for her, until she came to herself again.

  They were curious to know what had happened to her, and when she told her
story they were amazed. They might have thought that she had dreamed it all, or even that she was daft, if it had not been for the shawl.

  She had told them of casting her shawl away, when the specter grasped it in his hand. And it was true she wore no shawl when she was found. It was two or three days later that one of the villagers went to the kirkyard to tidy the graves, and saw upon one of them what looked to be a bit of tartan cloth with fringe at the edge. He went to pick it up, wondering how it had come to lie there, but found that it was buried deep in the mound of the grave. Pull as he might, he could not get it out. Then he remembered the strange lassie’s shawl, and hurried to tell his neighbors what he had found. They all ran to the kirkyard, and brought the lass with them.

  “’Tis my shawl,” she told them. “I’ve had it many a year. I would not like to lose it.”

  But it was so firmly fixed in the soil that the strongest man in the village could not pull the shawl out. In the end they had to fetch shovels and dig it out. They dug all the way down to the coffin but still they could not pull the shawl away. It was not until the minister said that they might open the coffin lid to release the end of the shawl, that they found out what held it so fast.

  There, inside the coffin, was the corner of the shawl, held tight in the bony fingers of the man who was buried there. It was the grave of the lass’s lover whose drowned body had been washed ashore and buried by the villagers.

  When the lass recovered from the fright of that terrible journey she went back to her own village again. But she wept no longer for her dead lover, since she had no wish to disturb him, lest he come and carry her off again.

  The Flitting of the Ghosts

  UP in the Scottish Highlands there once was a clan of Scottish ghosts who were having a terrible time. A raggle-taggle lot they were that had kept together, some of them, for as long as two or three hundred years. Of course, there were some whom one would consider newcomers, but the important thing was that they all belonged to the clan, which was why they all stuck to each other like cockleburs to the wool of a stray ewe.

  Not one of them could ever have been considered respectable when alive and in his flesh. A randy crew they all were, having been smugglers, pirates, catterans, reivers, and followers of a number of equally disreputable trades as men, and as ghosts they were as rackety as they had been before they died.

  They made their home in an old tumble-down castle near the sea, close to the place from which the family had originally sprung. The worldly clan was fast dying off, and those few members of it who were still alive had wandered far and wide. But no matter how far from home a clansman got, the minute he died his ghost would hotfoot it back to the castle, to take his place there with the rest. Although of late they were coming along fewer and fewer, still one or two would show up every now and then. As time went by, maybe the castle was getting a wee bit crowded, but none of the ghosts minded that. If anything, they liked it that way, because, being so numerous, they could kick up a fine old row when any curious mortal came poking about the castle. All the folk for miles around were so scared of the ghosts that not a body among them would come within sight of the place.

  So there the clan were, having their pleasant little feuds and friendships, quarreling bitterly and making up joyfully, with never a dull day to fret them, as happy a crowd of Scottish ghosts as ever you’d hope to see.

  Their troubles began when the castle was sold to a man who came from somewhere down below the border. A master builder he was, or so folk said, who made his living building grand houses for Englishmen who had the money to pay for such things. It wasn’t that he wanted to live in the castle, Heaven save the day! But having an eye for business, he saw that the leaden roof and the fine old woodwork and stone would make the sort of building materials that he could use in his trade.

  The builder moved in upon his castle with a crew of his own workmen, Sassenachs to the last man, and without the least warning they all pitched in and began to tear the castle down.

  The ghosts were terribly annoyed when the roof was suddenly snatched away from over their heads. But after it was gone, they found the floor of the attic would do very well for a roof, so the damage was not too bad. It wasn’t until the walls of the castle began to come tumbling down about their ears that the ghosts were at their wits’ end. The top story was gone, and the wreckers were starting to pry out the great gray stones from the walls of the next one, and it was plain to see that very shortly there would be naught left of the castle but the bare cellar holes and the empty moat.

  The ghosts were fair distracted. They had not been standing about and doing nothing while all this destruction was going on. The minute the strangers appeared at the castle, they had mustered their forces and prepared to drive them away. But the worst of their tricks were no good at all. The poor ghosts raised a terrible racket, but the rumble of falling stones, the screech of splitting wood, and the thunder of crashing beams was louder yet, and easily drowned out the loudest noises all of them together could make.

  They gibbered and mowed and made terrible faces, swooping down upon the workmen, thinking to frighten them away. If the men had been Scottish workers, the sight of a sluagh of ghosts coming at them might have put them to flight. But these workmen were not Scots. They were all Englishmen that the master builder had brought with him when he came up from England, and they were all much too practical and hardheaded to believe in ghosts. They did not shriek and take to their heels when the ghosts came at them. They just looked right through them and paid them no heed at all, except for remarking to one another that the plaster dust was awful thick in the air at times. A man could scarcely see through the clouds of it, they said. All the while, the castle walls were getting lower, day by day. At last, one evening, after the workmen had laid off for the day and had gone to their quarters in the nearby village, the old ghost who was chief of the clan gathered the ghosts together.

  “There’s naught that we can do here, lads,” he told them sadly. “We must just be flitting away.”

  “Och, aye,” the others agreed. “We must be flitting away. But where?”

  Where? That was the important question. Where would these ghosts, who would soon be homeless, find a new home? The chief of the clan would not let himself be daunted. He had faced many a trouble in his life as a mortal man and had weathered every one of them. Would he not do the like now he was a ghost? To be sure, he would. So he called to him a spry young ghost and bade him go out into the world and find a place the clan could bide in, and not come back until such a place was found.

  The young ghost set off at once on his search. It was no more than a fortnight before he came back again, looking very pleased with himself.

  “I’ve found it!” he said.

  “Where is it? Is it a castle?” the ghosts asked.

  “A-weel, it is not a castle,” said the young ghost.

  The other ghosts sighed a great and doleful sigh that sounded like the wind blowing through dry leaves in autumn.

  “Come now, do not fash yourselves,” the spry young ghost said kindly. “If it is not a castle, I promise you it is no worse. A grand big manor house it is, with plenty of space within for all of us, forty or fifty rooms in all, to say the least.”

  The ghosts gathered hopefully about him, and he went on with his tale.

  “It sets high on a crag above Loch Doom,” he told them. “The only house, it is, between the fishing village of Dulldreary by the sea and the town of Grim-bailey twenty miles beyond across the moor. There will be no neighbors to trouble us there because the village is a good five miles away. The road runs by the manor, but the manor house lies away from the road, and there are trees all about it that hide it well from sight. There it stands, alone and empty, just waiting for us to move in.”

  “A-weel,” the old chief said doubtfully. “I’m thinking a place the like of that would be having a wheen of ghosts within it already. I’m not saying it would suit me to share a place with a pack of ghosts.”<
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  “De’il a ghost is there,” the spry young fellow said. “Och, there’s no reason why there should be. ’Tis no ancestral home. The man who built it lived in it less than two years. What with the fogs rolling in from the sea, and the mists rising up from Loch Doom, and the mizzle drifting down from the moor five nights out of seven, the place was so dank and chill he could not thole it. He packed up his goods and his family and moved away. So, you’ll see, no one ever died in it by violence to bring a ghost there, and for that matter, no one ever died there at all. Except for spiders and mice and a rat or two, it’s as toom as the inside of a drum.”

  “Och, my lad, you’ve done very well by us!” exclaimed the chief. “We’ll all be off, then, to the manor house.”

  The chief had been a sea dog when he was living, and he was well pleased to find out that the clan could go by sea for most of the way to their new home, instead of traveling over moor and mountain making the long hard journey on foot.

  Some of the clan went off to fetch the ghost of an old galley that haunted the waters of the bay, while the rest of them gathered up their gear, getting ready to flit.

  Three nights later the ghosts who had gone to fetch the galley brought the shadowy old ship into a hidden cove, a mile or so below the castle village, and moored it there. When the ghostly galley was laden with their possessions, the ghosts went aboard themselves. Up came the anchor, and the galley with its load went slipping quietly down along the coast.

  The night that the ghosts came ashore at Dulldreary, if the weather was not worse than any the village had ever seen before it was certainly no better. The fog rolling in from the sea was that thick that it could have been stirred with a spoon. A man coming out on his doorstep to have a look at the weather would not be able to see the house of his neighbor across the road. ’Twas not the sort of night to be stirring abroad in, and Dulldreary folk showed their good sense by biding indoors. The fishermen did not go out that night. Their boats were pulled high up on the shingle with the oars and boat gear carefully stored away, and there was no visiting that night around the village to ceilidh with friends.