My foot was already off the gas, our car falling behind the truck until all we could see was its rear lights through the swirling snow.
She smiled.
She reached over to squeeze my leg, then settled back to snow-watching silence.
Another mile. I’d crept up on the truck, but was still far enough back, and she said nothing. Then I saw it. A figure walking down the other side of the road. A woman in a long, red jacket.
I looked over. Ghost, I told myself, and I was quite certain it was, but I’d hate to be wrong and leave someone stranded. I squinted through the side window as we passed and—
That was all she said. My head whipped forward. I saw the ladder fly at us. I swerved to avoid it. The car slid, the road wet with snow. An oncoming car. I saw the lights. I heard the crunch of impact. Then . . . silence.
Now, three months later, I sit by the side of the road and I hear her voice.
Yes, I hurt myself. More than I could have ever imagined possible.
I get out of the car. The tube is in the trunk. I fit it over the exhaust pipe, and run it through the passenger window. Then I get inside and start the engine.
Does it take long? I don’t know. I’m lost in the silence. There’s a momentary break as a car slows beside me. The driver peers in, thinks I’m dozing, revs the engine, keeps going. The silence returns. Then I begin to drift . . .
I wake up. The engine has stopped running. I check the fuel gauge. Half-full. I try to start the car, but the ignition won’t work. I slump on to the dashboard, defeated.
Then I hear . . . something. A bird call? I look out the windshield. Fog, so thick I can’t see anything else.
I get out of the car. The hinges squeak. I leave the door open behind me and walk around the front. The memorial cross is there, but it’s been replaced, the flowers fresh and white, the can beneath them upright and filled with daisies.
Rose loves daisies. I smile in spite of myself and walk to the flowers. More scattered around. Still more trailing off towards the field.
As I follow them, I stumble through the fog. That’s all there is. Fog. Rolling across the field. I look down at the flowers, crushing beneath my feet. I keep going, following them.
Another noise. Not a bird call. It sounds like . . .
“Amy?” I call. “Rose?”
A voice answers. Then another.
The silence ends.
The Shadow in the Corner
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Wildheath Grange stood a little way back from the road, with a barren stretch of heath behind it, and a few tall fir trees, with straggling wind-tossed heads, for its only shelter. It was a lonely house on a lonely road, little better than a lane; leading across a desolate waste of sandy fields to the sea-shore; and it was a house that bore a bad name among the natives of the village of Holcroft, which was the nearest place where humanity might be found.
It was a good old house, nevertheless, substantially built in the days when there was no stint of stone and timber – a good old grey stone house with many gables, deep window-seats, and a wide staircase, long dark passages, hidden doors in queer corners, closets as large as some modern rooms, and cellars in which a company of soldiers might have lain
This spacious old mansion was given over to rats and mice, loneliness, echoes, and the occupation of three elderly people: Michael Bascom, whose forebears had been landowners of importance in the neighbourhood, and his two servants, Daniel Skegg and his wife, who had served the owner of that grim old house ever since he left the university, where he had lived fifteen years of his life – five as student, and ten as professor of natural science.
At three-and-thirty Michael Bascom had seemed a middle-aged man; at fifty-six he looked and moved and spoke like an old man. During that interval of twenty-three years he had lived alone in Wildheath Grange, and the country people told each other that the house had made him what he was. This was a fanciful and superstitious notion on their part, doubtless, yet it would not have been difficult to have traced a certain affinity between the dull grey building and the man who lived in it. Both seemed alike, remote from the common cares and interests of humanity; both had an air of settled melancholy, engendered by perpetual solitude; both had the same faded complexion, the same look of slow decay.
Yet lonely as Michael Bascom’s life was at Wildheath Grange, he would not on any account have altered its tenor. He had been glad to exchange the comparative seclusion of college rooms for the unbroken solitude of Wildheath. He was a fanatic in his love of scientific research, and his quiet days were filled to the brim with labours that seldom failed to interest and satisfy him. There were periods of depression, occasional moments of doubt, when the goal towards which he strove seemed unattainable, and his spirit fainted within him. Happily such times were rare with him. He had a dogged power of continuity which ought to have carried him to the highest pinnacle of achievement, and which perhaps might ultimately have won for him a grand name and world-wide renown, but for a catastrophe which burdened the declining years of his harmless life with an unconquerable remorse.
One autumn morning – when he had lived just three-and-twenty years at Wildheath, and had only lately begun to perceive that his faithful butler and body servant, who was middle-aged when he first employed him, was actually getting old – Mr Bascom’s breakfast meditations over the latest treatise on the atomic theory were interrupted by an abrupt demand from that very Daniel Skegg. The man was accustomed to wait upon his master in the most absolute silence, and his sudden breaking out into speech was almost as startling as if the bust of Socrates above the bookcase had burst into human language.
“It’s no use,” said Daniel; “my missus must have a girl!”
“A what?” demanded Mr Bascom, without taking his eyes from the line he had been reading.
“A girl – a girl to trot about and wash up, and help the old lady. She’s getting weak on her legs, poor soul. We’ve none of us grown younger in the last twenty years.”
“Twenty years!” echoed Michael Bascom scornfully. “What is twenty years in the formation of a strata – what even in the growth of an oak – the cooling of a volcano!”
“Not much, perhaps, but it’s apt to tell upon the bones of a human being.”
“The manganese staining to be seen upon some skulls would certainly indicate—” began the scientist dreamily.
“I wish my bones were only as free from rheumatics as they were twenty years ago,” pursued Daniel testily; “and then, perhaps, I should make light of twenty years. Howsoever, the long and the short of it is, my missus must have a girl. She can’t go on trotting up and down these everlasting passages, and standing in that stone scullery year after year, just as if she was a young woman. She must have a girl to help.”
“Let her have twenty girls,” said Mr Bascom, going back to his book.
“What’s the use of talking like that, sir? Twenty girls, indeed! We shall have rare work to get one.”
“Because the neighbourhood is sparsely populated?” interrogated Mr Bascom, still reading.
“No, sir. Because this house is known to be haunted.”
Michael Bascom laid down his book, and turned a look of grave reproach upon his servant.
“Skegg,” he said in a severe voice, “I thought you had lived long enough with me to be superior to any folly of that kind.”
“I don’t say that I believe in ghosts,” answered Daniel with a semi-apologetic air, “but the country people do. There’s not a mortal among ’em that will venture across our threshold after nightfall.”
“Merely because Anthony Bascom, who led a wild life in London, and lost his money and land, came home here brokenhearted, and is supposed to have destroyed himself in this house – the only remnant of property that
