The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) by Marie O'Regan Page A
Authors: Marie O'Regan
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lock, which was the same lock the carter had broken with his strong fist seventy years before. The door flew open, and Daniel went into the attic which he had chosen for the stranger’s bedchamber.
Maria was hanging from the hook in the wall. She had contrived to cover her face decently with her handkerchief. She had hanged herself deliberately about an hour before Daniel found her, in the early grey of morning. The doctor, who was summoned from Holcroft, was able to declare the time at which she had slain herself, but there was no one who could say what sudden access of terror had impelled her to the desperate act, or under what slow torture of nervous apprehension her mind had given way. The coroner’s jury returned the customary merciful verdict of “temporary insanity”.
The girl’s melancholy fate darkened the rest of Michael Bascom’s life. He fled from Wildheath Grange as from an accursed spot, and from the Skeggs as from the murderers of a harmless innocent girl. He ended his days at Oxford, where he found the society of congenial minds, and the books he loved. But the memory of Maria’s sad face, and sadder death, was his abiding sorrow. Out of that deep shadow his soul was never lifted.
The Madam of the Narrow Houses
Caitlín R. Kiernan
She has never called herself a medium, this furtive, brown-eyed woman who lives alone where Hull Street crosses Snow Hill Street and runs down to the glassy, slow river. She does not seek to profit from the bereaved, nor to offer solace to grieving widows, widowers, or orphans. She does not hold séances in hushed and darkened parlours, and never has she practised automatic writing, nor even once communicated with otherworldly spheres via planchettes and elaborate codes of table rapping and the cracking of knuckles. She does not call the dead, for always have they come to her unbidden, in their own time and in their own service. Rarely do they speak to her, and when they do, it is even more rarely that they share words she would dare repeat.
By day, she is a sempstress, an architect with needle and thread and thimble, clothing well-bred Boston women, and she minds her spools and stitches. She has a fondness for old hymns, and often hums them while she works, though she is not particularly religious. Religion has always seemed to her the domain of questions which will be answered in the fullness of time, one way or the other, by and by. Or they will not, in which case it hardly seems they matter very much. She lives in the high gabled house left behind by her mother and father when they passed – only one month apart, one from the other – and she imagines that she will live there until the end of her own days. She has an especial liking for yellow roses, and for mulled cider, as well, and late autumn, and the inscriptions she finds carved on slate headstones when she walks between the rows at Copp’s Hill. Of the latter, she has two favourites, both of which she has copied down and pinned upon the wall near her chifforobe. They offer some comfort on those infrequent occasions when it occurs to her, in passing, that perhaps she is a lonely woman who has simply never paused to recognize her own particular sort of loneliness. One reads:
Sacred to the Memory of
MR SAMUEL WELLS,
Who resigned this life Nov. 13th,
1804
in the 26 year of his age.
Stop my friends; in a mirror see
What you who ere so healthy be,
Tho’ beauty with rosebuds paint each face.
Coming death will strip you of each grace.
and the other goes:
Here lyes ye body of
MRS AMNEY HUNT
Wife of Mr Benjamin Hunt who died
Nov. 20th, 1769 aged
40 years
A sister of Sarah Lucas lieth here,
Whom I did love most dear;
And now her soul hath too its flight
And bid her spiteful foes good night.
That both Mr Wells and Mrs Hunt died in November has always seemed significant, and sometimes this sempstress who is not a medium imagines it a portent of some sort, conceivably that she herself will
Maria was hanging from the hook in the wall. She had contrived to cover her face decently with her handkerchief. She had hanged herself deliberately about an hour before Daniel found her, in the early grey of morning. The doctor, who was summoned from Holcroft, was able to declare the time at which she had slain herself, but there was no one who could say what sudden access of terror had impelled her to the desperate act, or under what slow torture of nervous apprehension her mind had given way. The coroner’s jury returned the customary merciful verdict of “temporary insanity”.
The girl’s melancholy fate darkened the rest of Michael Bascom’s life. He fled from Wildheath Grange as from an accursed spot, and from the Skeggs as from the murderers of a harmless innocent girl. He ended his days at Oxford, where he found the society of congenial minds, and the books he loved. But the memory of Maria’s sad face, and sadder death, was his abiding sorrow. Out of that deep shadow his soul was never lifted.
The Madam of the Narrow Houses
Caitlín R. Kiernan
She has never called herself a medium, this furtive, brown-eyed woman who lives alone where Hull Street crosses Snow Hill Street and runs down to the glassy, slow river. She does not seek to profit from the bereaved, nor to offer solace to grieving widows, widowers, or orphans. She does not hold séances in hushed and darkened parlours, and never has she practised automatic writing, nor even once communicated with otherworldly spheres via planchettes and elaborate codes of table rapping and the cracking of knuckles. She does not call the dead, for always have they come to her unbidden, in their own time and in their own service. Rarely do they speak to her, and when they do, it is even more rarely that they share words she would dare repeat.
By day, she is a sempstress, an architect with needle and thread and thimble, clothing well-bred Boston women, and she minds her spools and stitches. She has a fondness for old hymns, and often hums them while she works, though she is not particularly religious. Religion has always seemed to her the domain of questions which will be answered in the fullness of time, one way or the other, by and by. Or they will not, in which case it hardly seems they matter very much. She lives in the high gabled house left behind by her mother and father when they passed – only one month apart, one from the other – and she imagines that she will live there until the end of her own days. She has an especial liking for yellow roses, and for mulled cider, as well, and late autumn, and the inscriptions she finds carved on slate headstones when she walks between the rows at Copp’s Hill. Of the latter, she has two favourites, both of which she has copied down and pinned upon the wall near her chifforobe. They offer some comfort on those infrequent occasions when it occurs to her, in passing, that perhaps she is a lonely woman who has simply never paused to recognize her own particular sort of loneliness. One reads:
Sacred to the Memory of
MR SAMUEL WELLS,
Who resigned this life Nov. 13th,
1804
in the 26 year of his age.
Stop my friends; in a mirror see
What you who ere so healthy be,
Tho’ beauty with rosebuds paint each face.
Coming death will strip you of each grace.
and the other goes:
Here lyes ye body of
MRS AMNEY HUNT
Wife of Mr Benjamin Hunt who died
Nov. 20th, 1769 aged
40 years
A sister of Sarah Lucas lieth here,
Whom I did love most dear;
And now her soul hath too its flight
And bid her spiteful foes good night.
That both Mr Wells and Mrs Hunt died in November has always seemed significant, and sometimes this sempstress who is not a medium imagines it a portent of some sort, conceivably that she herself will
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