The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

then it gutters as if an unfelt draught is about to extinguish it. But soon enough the flame grows steady again and retreats to its former, fainter brilliance, and she is grateful that the presence in the corner has not seen fit to douse the wick and leave her blinking at afterimages and waiting in the dark.

That is kind of you, Sir or Madam, she thinks, and at once there is a dry, fluttering noise, the rattle of fallen leaves or castoff feathers blown across parched earth or cobblestones, and it may or may not have been anything meant for her ears. She knows that the apparitions hear her thoughts, sometimes, but other times, it seems her mind is closed to them. Or that they simply choose not to listen. She lies as still as she may, at ease and unafraid and open to the approach of her coalescing guest, waiting for this night’s ministrations to begin in earnest. She takes a deep breath, filling herself with the air in the bedroom which has become laden with all the familiar, astringent odours of ghosts, and exhales through her nostrils.

And were there anyone alive – a sister or mother, a friend or father confessor – to whom the sempstress might ever divulge these unions, she would readily admit that while the visitors do not frighten her, the reactions of her own body to them often do. Which is to say, the unconscious reflexes of her sympathetic flesh to the appetites and yearnings of non-corporeal intelligences, and no doubt it would leave the spiritualists in awe, and surely they would deem her possessed of some mighty gift or talent. It has been her experience that people are often eager to praise or envy that which they themselves have never had to endure. The cold begins in her belly and rises quickly into her chest, that ache, that unfolding bloom of frost, as though she is about to cough up the dirty slush of a January street.

She swallows, blinks, and sees that it is standing at her bedside now — no, not it, but him, for the features have solidified into the face of a young man. There is a keen sadness to his expression, which is unusual; rarely do they show her sorrow, regardless of what the living might expect of those bereft of blood and bone. More often than not, there is relief that they have found her, that she has welcomed their arrival, and so their eyes beam and glisten for her, all gratitude and release. They wear the echoes of smiles and the faint remembrances of joy, no moaning phantoms dragging the burden of clattering chains, no weeping haunts. So this gentleman’s downcast countenance is unexpected, and she almost asks him aloud to tell her, to talk if he can and if, perchance, talking might help, but then she catches herself and keeps the questions to herself. If he wishes her to know, he will explain, when and how it suits him. The ghost leans nearer, and she knows there would be tears if the dead did not, inevitably, forget how to cry.

And here is the same fact they all bring to her, and it might overwhelm or disappoint or insult another, but never yet has it lessened her enthusiasm for these encounters. The fact – they do not come to see her, but, rather, they come to see what she can show them. She is merely the instrument capable of sounding those old tones which they have dragged themselves up from pine boxes and mouldering, worm-gnawed sod to hear, just as they are merely the musicians capable of playing her. In this improbable symphony, as in all orchestrations, neither one is anything without the ability of the other. He reaches out, and she can almost feel his fingertips brush gently across and through her erect nipples, and trapped there within the bower of her ribcage, the cold has redoubled and swelled into a blizzard. She can hold it inside just so long and never a single second more.

He kisses her then, and his lips are flavoured with dust and the clicking language of ebony beetles. She does not shut her eyes, and he does not close his, and so they share this one moment between them before she can no longer forestall what he has truly come here for. But it is enough, and she stops fighting what cannot be defeated, as the ice inside flows effortlessly along the trough of her throat, answering his unspoken pleas and rising up to meet her visitor.

“Death,” her father says, and he smiles so that the word does not seem so ominous. “When all is said and done, it is hardly more than a covered bridge.”

And here she is standing down on the street, staring up at the gauzy white drapes that cover her bedroom windows like cataracts obscuring blind and aged eyes. A carriage passes behind her, the horses’ iron-shod hooves throwing sparks as they strike the pavement.

And here she is only seven years old, lost in the throes of a fever, and her mother is sitting next to her bed, holding her hand and wiping her face with a cool, damp cloth.

“Life, and all that speaks of life, is lovely,” her mother says, and even though she sounds very afraid, the authority in her voice will brook no argument and accept no compromise. “Do you hear me, young lady? Death, and all that speaks of death, is hateful. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mother,” the sempstress whispers, keeping her eyes on the inconstant shadows hunched all around, pressing in from the years she has not yet lived.

“So, you’re staying here,” her mother tells her, “with us. You’re not going anywhere.”

“No,” the child replies, the child who knows what lies ahead because these are only recollections seen through the distorting glass of time. “I would never leave.”

The frowning young man with sad grey eyes touches her face with intangible hands, and a glacier pours across her tongue and teeth and out of her open mouth.

“A shame she never married,” mutters the greengrocer’s wife, who has five children and loves none of them. And the sempstress thinks, But I am a married woman, and my husbands and my wives and all my children are scattered across the ages and always seeking me.

“An odd one,” sighs the dour, scowling wife of a butcher or a banker or a Presbyterian minister. “You wonder what she gets up to, left all alone in that abominable old house. Oh, I’ve heard stories, but it’s nothing I’d care to repeat, being a Christian woman.”

From the shingle of a rocky beach, she watches as the day draws to its sunset end and the advancing tide rises by slow degrees from the eternal, devouring sea; her father laughs and places an especially pretty shell or rounded pearl of blue beach glass in her palm.

“She is your mother,” he says and sighs. “What did you expect she would say?”

She does not know, because she cannot even remember the question.

“Fear whatever you can avoid, and be mindful where you step, sure. But death, child, is only a bridge, leading you from light to light, through a brief darkness. Fear it all you wish, and sidestep all you like, it will change not a thing in that regard. Your mother knows that as well as I.”

And now her soul hath too its flight

And bid her spiteful foes good night.

As saltwater and foam rush across sandy shores and weathered stone, so, too this flood spills from her, rushing over her chin and across her bare chest and shoulders. Disregarding gravity, it flows back and upwards, as well, entirely shrouding her face, filling her nostrils, sealing her eyes. There is only a passing, reflexive fleck of panic, that initial shock when she can no longer breathe or see and before she remembers that this is not what will kill her one day, somewhere farther along, and that she has done this thing so many nights before this night and, always, she has lived to entertain the needs of other visitations.

“Don’t waste your days afraid of ghosts,” her father says, and bends to lift another piece of flotsam from the beach. The buttermilk sky is filled with dappled wings and the cries of wheeling gulls.

The viscous, colourless matter expelled from some unknown recess of her anatomy or mind or spirit has already heard the ghost leaning low over her, that sorrowful man who has come here to find something lost and not yet restored to him. Someone who still breathes, perhaps, or someone dead who has yet to cross his path, and maybe there are so many roads on the other side of death’s covered bridge that souls might wander all eternity and never find reunion. And, because she was born to be a violin or cello or a penny whistle, and because she is incomplete without a melody, she has disgorged this second, telepathic skin to read his thoughts, and that membrane expands and wraps itself tightly about her body until it has been pulled as thin as any human skin. Her face is no longer her own, but is the face he needs to see, the face that she was birthed to show him on this night when at last he has found his way to her bedroom. The caul hides away the indecent flush and warmth of her mortality, and now he can touch her as though the two of them were living or both of them were not even as solid as a breeze.

He kisses her again, and the sempstress does not need to see to know that he is no longer frowning.