Goblins and Ghosties Page 5

  Already the man was climbing up beside him.

  ‘Off we go, then! Soon be there.’ That’s if he could get the donkey moving again. She took a deal of persuading – and threatening – before she’d shift from that spot.

  ‘Can’t think what’s got into her tonight,’ said Jacob. ‘She’s not usually like this.’

  The stranger said nothing, not one word. Not even when it started raining. Pouring down it was, like someone up there was tipping it out of a bucket. The stranger just sat there, didn’t even turn up his collar to stop the drips from his hat going down his neck.

  It was still raining when they got to the house. Jacob jumped down from the cart, got the donkey under cover, and then ran for the porch.

  He looked back and saw the stranger still sitting on the cart.

  He didn’t much care for the guy, but he couldn’t just leave him, so, ‘Come on!’ he yelled. ‘Come up here on the porch. You can wait here for the rain to stop.’

  The stranger got down and walked over – no hurry – though he must be soaked through by now. The rain was running off him, forming puddles on the porch.

  ‘Better get out of those wet clothes,’ said Jacob.

  The stranger nodded. Slowly he took off his broad-brimmed hat, his long coat, his boots and his trousers, till he was standing in his long white shirt.

  Then, at last, he spoke. The words came out slowly, as if talking was something he’d learned to do long ago and he was having a hard time remembering the trick of it. ‘Now you’ve got to help me,’ he said.

  ‘Help you?’ said Jacob.

  ‘Take out the pins at the back.’

  ‘What pins?’

  ‘The shroud pins.’

  Finally, Jacob knew why the donkey had been so spooked when she saw the stranger standing in the road and why she’d been so reluctant to pull the cart with him on it. This was no living man. This was a duppy, risen from the grave!

  Seeing the look on Jacob’s face, the duppy grinned. Then it began to laugh. A deep down belly laugh, it was. The duppy laughed and laughed, till it was shaking all over, the way things seem to shake when you look through a heat haze on a summer’s day.

  Gradually, Jacob realised he was actually looking through it. The duppy was slowly fading. Fading clean away, along with the sound of its laughter. Last to go was the grin.

  That grin of the duppy’s is something Jacob will never forget. It’s the reason he always makes sure these days to be home by nightfall. Even then, he can’t be sure it’s not going to come back and haunt him in his dreams.

  The Selkie’s Revenge

  Scotland

  There was a crofter living on the west coast of Scotland. His wife had died, leaving him with a baby girl to bring up, so now he toiled, day after day, all alone. Growing vegetables on the poor little scrap of land attached to the croft. Spreading his nets along the seashore in the hope of catching enough fish to make a trip to the market worthwhile.

  Life would have been a bit easier if the seals hadn’t kept helping themselves. Time and again he came down to find a great hole in his net and not so much as a fish or two left for his own supper.

  It made him angry. It made him wild. When he found a seal pup caught in the net, he didn’t think twice, he just knocked it on the head.

  He felt bad about it a moment after, when he saw the pup was dead, for he was not a violent man. He felt worse still when he looked up and saw another seal with its head poking out of the water, watching him with big sad eyes.

  ‘It looked so like a human mother grieving,’ he told the market women the next day, ‘it put me in mind of the stories my grandmother used to tell of the seal people – the selkies.’

  ‘You’re turning fanciful,’ the market women said, ‘and no wonder − living alone on the croft with only a toddler for company.’

  ‘Still, I know I never should have done such a thing. I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘If you’re not careful, you’ll be turning into a grumpy old man before your time,’ the women said. ‘What you both need is a woman about the place. Someone to come in each day and mind the child and the house, so that you can take the boat out the way you used to. You’d easily be able to pay her wages from what you made selling the extra fish.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  A knock came at the door the very next morning. It seemed that the market women had been busy spreading the word, not giving him a chance to think about the idea for long enough to say no.

  A young woman stood there. Big brown eyes, she had, and long dark hair plastered close to her head by the soft rain that was falling, though she didn’t seem to mind it.

  He had the strangest feeling that they’d met before, though for the life of him he couldn’t say where or when.

  ‘I heard you were looking for some help around the house,’ she said, smiling past him at the little girl.

  The little girl smiled back and the crofter felt a pang of sadness. How long was it since his daughter had smiled at him that way? It was true what the market women said. He had been turning into a grumpy, unlovable old man without even knowing it.

  So it was settled. The woman (whose name, she told him, was Mairi) would come early each day except Sunday and leave in the evening after dinner.

  It was good to pick up his old life again. To put out to sea, feel the wind in his hair and taste the salt spray. To come home from market with money in his pocket, knowing there’d be a fire going and dinner ready on the table. Sometimes, he’d hear Mairi singing to the child as he worked the vegetable patch. Strange, haunting songs they were, such as he’d never heard before.

  Sometimes, coming into the house, he’d find her and the little girl with their heads together, whispering secrets.

  Other times they’d be gone all day, down to the shore as like as not.

  ‘Mairi’s teaching me to swim,’ the little girl said, her eyes shining.

  ‘She loves the water,’ said Mairi.

  And he felt again that pang of sadness, a feeling that, little by little, his child was being stolen away from him. Even when Mairi wasn’t there, the child would say ‘Mairi did this,’ and ‘Mairi said that.’ Whenever she said ‘we’, she meant Mairi and her. No room for him. No need.

  He fell to wondering: what did he know about this woman, apart from her name?

  Where did she go each night and on Sundays? Not to the kirk, for he never saw her there. Nor would any of the market women own up to having sent her to him. ‘Word gets around,’ they said, shrugging off his questions. ‘Of course the child’s fond of her. You’re never there. Why don’t you all do something together for a change, the three of you? Take them out in your boat, why don’t you?’

  The next fine day, that’s what he did. Instead of taking the boat out alone, he got Mairi to pack up a picnic lunch for three. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘you two are coming with me.’

  So Mairi and the little girl climbed into the boat and the crofter pushed it off and jumped in after them and started to row.

  As they pulled away from the shore, he looked at them sitting at the stern of the boat, arms round each other, heads together, whispering secrets.

  Suddenly he burst out, ‘What is it you want from us, woman? Are you trying to take my daughter from me?’

  ‘Why not?’ hissed the selkie woman. He knew now where he’d seen her before, knew her by her big brown eyes and her sleek black hair, now when it was too late. ‘Why not? Since it was you that took my child from me?’

  With that, she wrapped her arms around the child and flipped herself backwards. Over the side of the boat they fell and into the water.

  He watched and watched and at last he saw, far out and heading for the open sea, two seal heads break the surface.

  Then they were gone.

  Often and often after that day he would stand on the shore and watch for the seals. And sometimes they came and sometimes there were none. But one seal looks much
like another, so he had no way of knowing whether any one of them was his lost daughter. Or whether she’d drowned fathoms deep on the last day he saw her and was lost forever.

  That was the worst thing of all. Not knowing.

  As Cold as Clay

  USA

  She was a wealthy rancher’s daughter and he was nothing but a lowly cowhand. Oh, but he had the bluest eyes you ever did see, hair the colour of honey and a smile that could light up the dullest day.

  To cut a long story short, they were soon head over ears in love with each other. Nothing her ma and pa could do about it.

  Oh no? Only send her away to stay with her aunt and uncle in the city, that’s what they did.

  (Well, the young man was a good worker, so no way were they going to part with him.)

  She pined for him and she wrote to him, but he never wrote back, most likely because someone was making sure he never got the letters. Still, she knew he was pining too. So she wasn’t at all surprised when she looked out of her window late one evening and saw him there, riding the best horse from her father’s stable.

  ‘Come quickly,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?” she said.

  ‘You must come home.’

  ‘Is something wrong at home? Is my father sick? Or is it my mother?’

  ‘Just come,’ he said. ‘Come now.’

  So down she crept, through the sleeping house and climbed up behind him and off they went, like the wind, on her father’s finest horse, her with her arms around his waist.

  Through the silent city streets they galloped and out into the country, across the wide grassy plain. Not a mouse stirring, it seemed, not a night bird or a bat to be seen flitting across the vast, starry sky.

  There was just the two of them, together under the moon and the stars, and it felt good. Except that with the two of them cuddling up like that, there should have been some warmth between them, but, ‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘As cold as clay.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘Feel my forehead. I’m burning up. The sweat’s running into my eyes.’

  She felt his forehead and he was burning up. So she tied her handkerchief round his head to stop the sweat running into his eyes.

  On they rode, and on again through that thick, dark night, till they came to her father’s house.

  She slipped down from the horse and knocked at the door and her father opened it. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘And how did you get here?’

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘didn’t you send…?’ Then she stopped. The horse and her lover were both gone.

  Of course, he’d be in the stable, rubbing down the horse after that ride they’d had.

  She ran to the stable and there was the horse, sweating and shivering, the saddle still on his back.

  She turned to her father, who had followed her. ‘Where is he?’ she said.

  Her father knew at once who she meant. Sadly, he shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘He took sick right after you left. We did everything we could and the doctor said there was every chance he’d pull through. But then, this evening…’

  ‘Where is he?’ she said again.

  ‘It’s this way.’

  He led her through the house to the room where the young man lay, in the bed he’d never left for three weeks past. She saw him lying there, stone dead, and round his head was that handkerchief of hers she’d tied with her own two hands not an hour before.

  The Ghost in the Library

  China

  Why the maidservant’s ghost chose to haunt the library was something that would never be known. She hadn’t left a note. How could she? She couldn’t write. She couldn’t read either.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe haunting the library was the best revenge she could think of for having to dust all those stupid books, day after dreary day.

  Now she haunted the library, night after night, with terrible moans and howls and in a shape so fearsome, so it was said, that old man Chu gave orders that nobody was to use the library after dark.

  ‘But I’m a student, uncle,’ said Chang. ‘I do all my best thinking at night. How am I supposed to know at sundown what books I’m going need at two o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘You can take as many books as you like up to your room,’ the old man said. ‘The library will be locked at sunset.’

  ‘That’s stupid! Even if I believed in ghosts, what harm can a ghost do me anyway?’

  ‘Rules are rules. It’s for your own good.’

  As to what happened later that evening, we must take Chang’s word for it that it happened by accident. He was in the library, choosing a pile of books to take up to his room, when a particular book caught his eye and he settled down to read it in a corner that just happened to be out of sight of anyone standing at the door. Then, maybe the book turned out not to be not quite so interesting as he’d first thought. Or maybe it was the fact that he’d just had dinner and Uncle Chu’s cook was a very good cook. ‘I must have dozed off for a minute,’ said Chang. ‘Next thing I knew was the sound of the key turning in the lock and footsteps moving away before I could cry out.’

  So he settled down to sleep again, his studies forgotten (it had been a very good dinner) until he was woken by a blood-curdling howl.

  He opened his eyes and there was the ghost, moaning and groaning, with a wolf-like howl thrown in from time to time, fit to wake the dead.

  Chang lay watching her until she ran out of breath (or whatever ghosts need to keep them going, since ghosts don’t actually breathe).

  ‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘Is that all you can do? I was told you were really scary.’

  The ghost frowned. ‘I can be really scary if I want,’ she said.

  ‘Go on, then.’

  She stretched herself out, till her head was just below the roof beams and her toes were still touching the floor. Her eyes bulged and her tongue lolled out halfway down her chest.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Chang. ‘But not scary enough. What else can you do?’

  The ghost glared. She shrank back to normal size. Her head started spinning round and round. Faster and faster it spun, till it lifted clean off her shoulders. She held it up, spinning, on the tip of one finger.

  ‘I can do that with a football,’ said Chang. ‘Do you fancy a game?’

  The ghost put her head back on. She opened her mouth wide, wide, wide.

  Chang covered his ears, expecting a scream, but what came out was a blast of ice-cold air, which gathered itself into a whirlwind.

  Curtains and carpets, dust and loose papers, books, cushions, anything not nailed down, were all swept up in a dizzy merry-go-round.

  Chang himself had to hang on to the nearest bookshelf to prevent being swept away.

  The air was sucked out of his lungs. He could hardly breathe. Yet he still managed to force out the words, ‘You’re still… not… scaring me!’

  The whirlwind died. The ghost had gone.

  The next thing Chang knew, his uncle was shaking him awake. ‘My boy! My boy! Thank heavens you’re still alive.’

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Chang.

  ‘What about the ghost?’

  ‘What ghost? Oh, that ghost. No problem. Do you think I could borrow the key of the library tonight, uncle? I don’t want to get locked in again.’

  That night, there sat Chang in the library, determined not to fall asleep this time (in spite of another very good dinner). He wanted to see the ghost appear and how she did it.

  She came first in a cloud of evening mist, which darkened till it looked more like smoke. The smoke wreathed about, thicker in some places, thinner in others, till he could see a body forming, arms, legs, head and all.

  And there she was!

  ‘Hello,’ said Chang.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she scowled. ‘It’s that stupid boy again!’

  She stamped her foot, spun round three times and disappeared.

  And was never seen again.

  Goldenhair

  Corsic
a

  She was a merchant’s daughter, not especially beautiful, apart from her long, golden hair. Everyone remarked on it when she was little. So soft, so fine, so fair! As she got older and young men started taking an interest, her mother always made sure it was tightly braided and pinned up in a modest coil on top of her head whenever she went out.

  At home though, when she shook it out and sat in the garden combing it in the cool of the evening by the light of the setting sun, that hair was like a river of shimmering molten gold.

  Count Rinaldo saw it as he was riding by on his way home from terrorizing a few of his peasant farmers and decided at once to marry her.

  Her father was delighted. ‘Think of the business he’ll bring me!’

  Her mother was over the moon. ‘To think of hob-nobbing with the nobility!’

  ‘But he’s horrible!’ cried Goldenhair. ‘He’s mean and cruel and miserly. Even his dog’s afraid of him!’

  All of which was true. On top of that, she was in love with Joseph, who was nothing but a common soldier.

  Marry a common soldier? Out of the question! Maybe if he rose to be an officer, they’d consider it.

  ‘But I love him!’ sobbed Goldenhair.

  ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ sniffed her mother. ‘Do you think I married your father for love?’

  ‘Well, I won’t marry anyone else,’ said Goldenhair. ‘And certainly not Count Rinaldo! If it’s my hair he wants, I’ll cut it off now, this minute, and you can box it up with a pretty bow on top and send it to him.’

  ‘Now you’re just being silly,’ said her mother.

  Count Rinaldo was used to getting his own way. Step one of his plan was to get rid of his rival. He lay in wait for Joseph one dark night, but things didn’t go quite as he expected. At the end of a short, sharp fight, it was Count Rinaldo who lay dying in a pool of blood, so he never got the chance to move on to step two.

  Poor Joseph, meanwhile, having killed a nobleman, even if it was in self-defence, had to flee for his life.

  ‘I’ll come back for you when all the fuss dies down,’ he promised Goldenhair. ‘As soon as I’ve earned my promotion. After all, the emperor himself began as a humble corporal.’