Are You Haunted (part fourteen)

Are You Haunted

(part fourteen)

“You’ll figure local youngsters, playing pranks on the old watchman. I’ll tell you how Mr. Doyle described the ghost to me.”

He stood like a preacher, his small flock with upturned faces waiting for him to speak. But Summers himself waited, while the rumbling of a big engine, a truck coming over the rise, subsided.

“You could call that a mixed blessing, Mr. Doyle. Can you turn that fan off? I want to be sure I’m hearing you.”

When the fan completed an oscillation to the right, and came back centering itself, Doyle hit the switch. The desk belonged to Davis Drybrook. The watchman only sat nights in this shed that served Drybook as a private office. The watchman had been asked by the mill’s new partner to take one thousand dollars, and be gone.

“I may not understand you, sir. But if you mean being run out of my job is better than being frightened out of my wits…ah, it may be so.”

“But she’s not that scary, is she? Drybrook told me you’ve seen her a few times. Your wits seem all right to me.”

“Lord preserve. I’ve been at Drybrook’s from aught one. We worked when the light was in the sky, and that made a shift for us, because you know they did not have her fitted out with electric then, the mill. The river ran the machinery. Six days a week, Sundays off. Seasons the mill was closed, being January to March, off altogether. Think of that, not a brass farthing in your pocket to tide you through the wintry times! My wife took on the sorting and patching of old clothes, and I sat by the stove with her, handing buttons across and threading her needles. And we got our coal by Toveys. You won’t know it, sir, but round here…to be saying ‘got by Toveys’, is to be saying stolen goods. But so it was, having to be. I came to America on Papa Drybrook’s guarantee of my employment. Our Lettie… Our haunting spirit.” Doyle to his folded hands gave a private laugh. “That was ’96 the girl died, a terrible thing. Big in the local talk still when I’d arrived, not so old and forgotten as all that seems to the young. But there, if she’d been restless, she might have walked long since.”

“Let me tell you, Mr. Doyle, you have a knack. Can you paint me the same sort of picture, with regard to appearances? How you become aware of the ghost, what she looks like in particulars, and whether anything in common from one visitation to the next, stands out for you…?”

“Well, you must pursue the matter as a detective.”

“I am not,” Summers said, “a detective.”

“It would take a dark night, sir, and me the worse for drink, if I were to be fooled so by a prankster. I see a fog… I have only ever seen her in the fog. I feel a gripping in my head, as though something has stopped my senses, and I see the fog pull itself into a shape, grown terribly white and clear, the image of a woman. The face will not stay. I mean by that, as best I can describe it, that she has eyes and a mouth, but the features shift about so, I can’t see them proper. And then I am no longer compelled to look, and she has vanished.”

“Would you be disappointed if we caught someone?”

“Disappointed to find there is no ghost? She may be there all the same, never minding what our young outlaws get up to. It’s more than I understand myself, how the trick might be done. And what do you think, Mr. Summers?”

“Mr. Doyle, we’re at war now. I don’t think anything. They send me down to ask questions, and I go back and tell them what I’ve learned.”

14

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part fifteen)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)