The Old Maid and Other Stories Read online

  For as long as she has lived in the town, Charlotte has never made many friends here. All her closest acquaintances are with girls she grew up with, went to school with, who she keeps in touch with by the occasional letter, cards at birthdays, at Christmas time. Even those friends she keeps at a distance. They know little about John and nothing about her life here. They never come to visit and she is never invited to visit them. For the most part, Charlotte is a woman who keeps herself to herself, she finds it easier that way. She finds it hard to talk to people, increasingly so these last few years. Something inside her has dried up, she thinks. She knows it and it frightens her a little – how far she has allowed herself to come, how little she is connected to anyone.

  In and around the town, Charlotte has a reputation for being strange. The children say she is a witch and dare one another to run into her garden at night to knock over the red rose bushes she grows there. The young mothers on the main street giggle about her as she passes. They pity her for her rogue of a husband but, just like their children, they fear her too. They see themselves in her, something they might themselves become if they are not careful. She is an unwanted warning, and so they ridicule her. She stands apart from all of them and is an easy target.

  Everyone in the town knows the story of what happened to Sissy, or at least parts of it. The parts they don’t know, the parts no-one, not even Charlotte herself knows, they make up with freedom and relish. Some say Charlotte murdered her sister in a quarrel over John and buried her body under the shifting sand-dunes. Some day she will return, they say, to have her revenge on the two of them. Others say John is the murderer, who then forced Charlotte to marry him in order to keep her quiet. Yet others say that the three of them met a devil out there on the sand dunes that day, that a pact was made and a curse set and the story that started has not yet reached its finish. Charlotte has heard all these stories at one time or another and none of them shocks her much anymore. She herself does not any longer think often of what happened to Sissy that day down on the beach. For a long time it did torment her, the gap in her memory between leaving the bay and being found by John, but she has long since given up hope of deciphering the mystery. Whatever happened happened, she tells herself now. Sissy disappeared that day, and wishing otherwise will not bring her back.

  So it is that Charlotte is not prepared for the shock that strikes her the day Sissy appears back in her life again. It is late in the morning. Charlotte is going through her routine visits to the local shops on the main street, collecting groceries, posting letters. It’s a market day, so the streets of the town are bustling and full of stalls. There are farmers selling soft fruits, vegetables, jars of preserves, crafts workers showing off their wares, artists, sweetmakers and wine merchants, the town is full of life, noisy and lively, packed with visitors from all parts of the county. Charlotte is browsing through the stalls when a strange feeling comes over her. She has the odd sensation that someone is whispering in her ear, though she cannot say what words are being spoken and when she turns to look, there is no-one near her. She tries to shake off this peculiar feeling and steals herself to begin the walk back home. As she does so, she sees Sissy standing in the crowds ahead of her.

  She has the same copper blond hair, the same bright, naïve smile on her face. She is wearing the same white dress, patterned with red flowers, that she wore on the day of her disappearance. In all the years she has been gone, she has not aged a day. She is the same Sissy in every way. Charlotte stares at this vision in front of her, her eyes wide, her mouth open in alarm. Sissy is walking casually through the stalls as though she has not a care in the world. She is talking to the stall holders, picking up and admiring the occasional item as she goes. Charlotte gasps and drops her bags to the ground. Her knees buckle under her and she stumbles forward. The next thing she knows, she is being helped to her feet, a crowd of worried looking strangers peering down at her. She gathers her bags together and pushes her way through them, but to no avail. Sissy has gone again. She is nowhere to be seen.

  The next day, it happens again. It is a Saturday and the market is still in town. Charlotte has left John at home and ventured down to the market to stretch her legs and have some time to herself. She has dismissed as nonsense the events of the previous day. They are too ridiculous, she tells herself, to even invent an excuse for. Nevertheless, she is not at all surprised when she sees Sissy again, strolling out of a café with an ice cream cone in one hand.

  This time Charlotte maintains her composure and looks hard at the girl in the street ahead of her. She is walking alone, but there is nothing to suggest she is anything other than flesh and blood, nothing to suggest her as an apparition or the invention of Charlotte’s imagination. Charlotte begins to follow her as she passes through the crowds. She wants to see where this girl goes, find out who she is here with, where she comes from. “It cannot be Sissy,” she tells herself. “The likeness is remarkable, but it cannot be anymore than that.”

  For more than half an hour Charlotte follows the girl move slowly from stall to stall. In all that time, the girl stops to talk to no-one, though plenty smile at her and greet her good morning, neither does she notice Charlotte following her. At last they reach a bandstand where a great press of people are heaving to and fro between the change from one performance to another. In the commotion, Charlotte loses sight of the girl and, no matter how hard she looks or how long she searches, she is not able to find her again.

  On Sunday morning, the next day, John and Charlotte go through their regular routine of a long breakfast before the church service. As the morning bells begin to ring out, they leave the house together and make their way along the tidy quiet streets of this part of town. At the church gates a small crowd has gathered. One of the young girls of the congregation, married just last year, has borne her first child and is presenting it to everyone as they pass. All the ladies of the town are buzzing around her, chuckling and greeting her happily as they lean in to look at the new arrival. Charlotte has no interest in this. She and John skirt the crowd quickly and head for the main entrance to the church. Before they can go in, though, an odd feeling passes through Charlotte and she stops dead in her tracks. It is the same sensation she felt in the market place just a day or so ago. A wordless hiss insinuates itself in her ear and a dizziness overtakes her. She waves for John to go in ahead of her, which he does without comment, and walks around to the back of the church to take some fresh air away from the gossiping and noise of the other ladies still arriving.

  She rests for a while, leaning back against an old gravestone, her head hung forward, her eyes closed. When she opens her eyes again, she is no longer alone. Sissy is standing in the graveyard ahead of her. This time she is certain it is Sissy, there can be no doubt any longer. She stands and stares directly back at Charlotte, her face pale and serious, her arms folded across her chest. For a long time they stand and stare at one another in silence. In the church behind them, the organ strikes up and the congregation begin to sing the opening hymn. It is a song of love and hope and a life that will never end. As the hymn reaches its last chorus, Sissy turns away and begins to walk out of the graveyard. Charlotte knows what she has to do. She follows her sister, not trying to catch up with her, but making sure she keeps a steady pace just a few yards behind.

  They walk out of the town, down to the shore and south along the beach. For several hours they carry on, Sissy leading the way over the beach and up onto the sand dunes. After a while they stop following the path along the coast and instead strike off on a faint, twisting path that leads inland, over the dunes, through the dips and the hollows. It is well into the afternoon now and Charlotte is not properly dressed for a trek like this, but she does not feel tired, she does not feel anything much, in fact. She is floating as though outside herself, watching each step she takes across the sand. She knows already how this day is likely to end, but she does not fear i
t. If anything, she welcomes it.

  Ahead of them, hidden away at the edge of the sand dunes is a small ruined cottage. It is a dark place, its roof mostly fallen in and no glass in its windows, yet its door remains intact, swinging back and forth on a rusted hinge. Sissy walks to the door of the cottage and stops. For the first time since they left the churchyard, she turns and glances over her shoulder as if to make certain that Charlotte is still there. So reassured, she steps forward once again, opens the door and walks inside the cottage. When she emerges again, she has in her hand a small bundle of twigs, none longer than a pencil, each one stripped of bark, all tied together with a scrap of dirty rag. She comes close to Charlotte now, so close that Charlotte can feel her sister’s breath on her face, can smell the salt water dried on her sister’s skin. Still there is not a word spoken between them. Sissy takes Charlotte’s hand and gives her the bundle of twigs to hold. Charlotte’s eyes close. When she opens them, her sister is gone. She is not alone, though. Behind her, just a few yards away, standing on top of a sand dune is the old woman. Still dressed in dark rags, still wearing her black veil, she faces towards Charlotte. Slowly, her arm raises and she points a long, twisted finger towards the cottage. Charlotte knows what will happen now, but she is still not afraid. She has no choices left to make. She does not know whether she ever had any at all. She steps forward and enters the cottage. The old woman follows her. There is a moment of silence, followed by a short sigh as of a deep breath, long held, finally being released. Then the sharp rattle of dry sticks falling on stone. Then silence again.

  Cold Companion

  There is something in the room beside them. They lie awake in the darkness together and listen to it move and breath. They cannot see it, cannot touch it, but they know it is there. This is not the first time it has come to them. For weeks now they have heard it, one of them or the other. In the dark, quiet of the night, they have both lain awake listening, while the other slept, or pretended to sleep, beside them. They have each lain quietly, holding their breath, straining to hear, trying hard to make some sense of the strange, unsettling sound that comes softly, intermittently from out of the silence.

  It is elusive and illusory. Sometimes it comes clearly, sometimes quietly. Sometimes it feels nearby, right there beside them, so close they think they should be able to reach out a hand to grab it or push it away. Sometimes it is faint and distant, so far off that it might be coming from a different room altogether, a different building even. And sometimes it does not come at all, so that even if they wake and listen for it, there is nothing to hear. Sometimes these can be the worst nights of all. When the silence closes around them, and the invisible thing that lives in the room with them might be close by or might not be there at all, and they have no means of knowing.

  On the nights that it comes, it starts slowly. A shallow breathing. Something small and quiet breathing in the darkness nearby. Weak and quiet. Slow, hesitant breaths that die quietly and leave long pauses between them. Some nights this is all there is, just this quiet breath that whispers in the night. Some nights there is a coughing. Dry as paper, short and persistent. Some nights the coughing can keep coming for up to an hour, over and over, hacking and choking, before fading away again, back to the slow breath whose silent pauses grow longer and longer, until they disappear altogether. On the worst nights, like tonight, there is a third movement, a third sound. A soft moaning, in between coughs, which grows mournfully to a sob, a wail of such pain, such sorrow as to leave their skins crawling with horror at the sound of it.

  This is the sound they hear tonight. A quiet, horrible sobbing which emerges, inexplicably from out of the darkness of the room in which they sleep. He wakes first and lies quietly for a while. For ten minutes, thirty minutes - at this time in the morning the passing of time is obscure and difficult to judge - he lies still with eyes open. As he listens, he feels her shift beside him, pulling the covers around her as she moves. He listens as her breathing softens and knows that she too is awake now, she too is listening. This always frightens him more than he imagines it should. It ought to be a relief, he tells himself. He should be glad that he is not facing this alone, is not, after all, losing his mind and imagining the whole thing. But it is not a relief. If anything it makes the fear stronger. It makes the thing real. If she hears what he hears, it begins a process that he dreads to face again, begins to open up a box of possibilities that he would dearly wish to keep closed.

  For several minutes they listen, breath held, waiting for the sound to ebb away. Both aware of each other’s wakefulness, each one waiting for the other to break the spell that binds them.

  “Are you awake?” She speaks first, her patience broken.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Do you hear that?” After a long pause she asks the question.

  For a moment he hesitates, still unwilling. He holds his breath and listens, the sorrowful groan rolling through him like a cold wind.

  “Do you hear it.” There’s a scared, angry tone to her voice that breaks him to attention. He switches on a light and sits up.

  “Come on,” he says and takes her in his arms. “I hear it,” he whispers, lips buried in her hair. They spend the rest of the night this way, holding each other tightly, listening to the sad, mournful sob which floats out of the air in front of them.

  In the mornings, they know, it will be easy to be rational. In the mornings, with daylight and coffee and chatter on the radio and company, they will forget the horror and reality of the night and will dismiss it all as an illusion or an invention. It is all a dream and that is all it is, they will say. Or perhaps, at worst, some odd thing that falls halfway between a dream and waking. These things they think they hear, they cannot possibly be real and that is the end of it. It is anxiety that does it. Anxiety that recycles and feeds upon itself, particularly late at night when the barriers are lower and the tired mind more suggestible, more malleable. Sleep is the answer. Good, restful sleep will do it. And exercise. Healthy living. Clean out the system, remove all the toxins, physical and spiritual, that have built up, and get some sleep. Then, they tell themselves, then we’ll find the whole thing will pass. Soon enough we’ll be able to laugh about it. It will be a curiosity. A spooky story to tell our friends and raise a smile. “Remember the time we had a ghoul in the bedroom?” “Remember when we couldn’t get even a single night’s sleep, for fear of the thing that hid in the darkness?” So sophisticated we will be, so amusing. But not yet. Not now when it still feels so uncertain, while its still happening, when they’re still not sure, cannot ever be quite sure whether these things they hear during the night are real or not. These things which whisper to them, and beckon to them from a cold, cold place beyond their understanding.

  #

  “Did you ever see a ghost?” She asks him one day, walking together, out under a bright sun, as far away from the quiet, unsettling events of the night as they could ever hope to be. They’ve been talking about it a lot these past few days, sharing their experience of it, trying to talk the worry away.

  “No,” he says, “I never did.” He takes her hand in his and pulls it up to his lips.

  “I never believed in all that,” he says. “I’m not sure I do now.”

  “It seems as good a word to use for this as any,” she says.

  “I suppose it does.”

  They stop at a park bench and sit for a while. The wind blows through the trees around them, warm and comforting.

  “My sister used to read a lot of ghost stories when I was a kid,” he begins to tell her. “We shared a room at the time and she’d get herself so worked up that she’d have to sleep with the bedside lamp on. Really. The slightest little thing, the slightest little noise would have her screaming out. She was always imagining things in the wardrobe or under the bed or behind the curtain. Most of all the curtain. She was terrified she’d pull them back one night and s
ee some horrible face staring back at her in the dark. Which was ridiculous of course, since our room was up on the third floor of our building.

  “Anyway, I got very fed up with this. I used to try and freak her out even more by waiting ‘till she was asleep and switching her lamp off. Then I’d open the curtains and make all sorts of creepy noises to wake her up and give her a fright.”

  “You were a charming little boy, I’m sure.”

  “I was a little brute, is the truth of it. She grew out of it in the end. Got more interested in boys than books. Then she got her own room and that was that.”

  “And that’s your best ghost story, is it?”