It was strange and horrifying. I had to get to the bottom of the mystery, and I knew the best way go about it.
“Well, hopefully I’ll be able to tell you more tomorrow,” I replied, “after I’ve talked to her ghost. What’s her name?”
“Her name was Miriam,” the innkeeper replied.
With that, I gave a nod and walked off down the street. Before long I turned down a passageway that brought me round the back of the inn to the edge of the churchyard I’d seen through the bedroom window. I opened the ornate trellis gate and took the narrow path through the tombstones that brought me past the small church.
I needed a walk to stretch my legs and get some fresh air to clear my head. I wanted a bit of time by myself to think about the situation, too.
In the County, it usually got chilly after dark, even in summer, but this was a warm night in late August—probably the last of the good weather before the autumn cooled the air, ready for winter.
I came to a slope that offered a spectacular view of a valley; the range of hills in the distance was bathed in moonlight. It was something that cried out to be painted, and it held my attention for a long time.
Since John Gregory’s death, I’d changed a good deal. I still felt a sense of loss—I really missed him—but along with that, there was also anger. A friend had been taken from me, as well as a master. I now spent most of my days alone, with a lot of time to brood on things, but there was one source of solace. Increasingly, I’d come to appreciate the beauty of the countryside, with its varied landscape of meadows, woods, fells, and marshes. This view at Kirkby Lonsdale was as good as anything I’d seen, if not better.
My mind wandered back to the cause of Miriam’s death, and I sat down on a tree stump to allow my mind to mull over the situation. The girl had been young and strong, so there was a possibility of foul play. It wasn’t unknown for a murderer to hide his own involvement by blaming witchcraft or some other supernatural occurrence. But there had been no wound . . . maybe she’d been poisoned . . . or it could have been a natural death, and the horror of dying in pain was what had brought that expression to her face.
I hoped to find out the truth soon enough. It all depended on what the ghost remembered of her own death.
After a while I retraced my steps through the churchyard and went back up to the haunted room. I closed the curtains, then pulled off my hooded cloak, hanging it on a hook on the back of the door. Next I tugged off my boots and lay down on the bed, fully clothed and ready for action. I was slightly nervous, as I always am when dealing with spook’s business, but I wasn’t afraid. I’d dealt with lots of ghosts before.
I’ve always been good at seeing in near darkness, and once my eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight filtering through the curtains, I studied the room carefully. There were shadows in the corners—a particularly dark one just below the window. I spent some time trying to work out whether it was natural or not. It wasn’t. After a while, satisfied that it was nothing to be concerned about, I listened carefully. Sometimes you could hear ghosts before they wanted you to. Some rapped softly on doors or walls; others pattered across the floorboards, sometimes almost indistinguishable from mice.
This room was absolutely silent. I had a couple of hours, so I relaxed, closed my eyes, and allowed myself to drift off to sleep.
I would sense the arrival of the ghost and wake up immediately.
Sometime later, I woke exactly as I’d predicted. All spooks are seventh sons of seventh sons, and this means that we possess certain gifts. One was operating here: a cold chill that told me something from the dark was close; it ran powerfully up and down my spine. Before I even opened my eyes, I heard the sound of a girl weeping, and footsteps pacing back and forth beside the bed.
I looked at her. The ghost was that of a young girl, probably no older than seventeen. She had long hair pulled tight into a bun at the back of her head. Like many ghosts, she was very pale, all the color having been left behind with death.
All the colors but one.
The front of her long pale nightdress was soaked in red blood, from neck to hem.
2
The Girl with the Mousy Hair
I looked at Miriam’s ghost and sat up in bed to face her. Then I gave her my warmest smile. I tried to be reassuring. “Stand still, Miriam,” I said softly. “Stand still and look at me.”
She turned toward me, gave a sob, and her eyes opened wide in astonishment.
“You can see me! Can you hear me?” she asked. Her voice had a slight echo to it and seemed to come from a distance.
“Yes, I can both see and hear you. I’m a spook, and I’ve come to help you.”
“I’ve been asking for help for days, but nobody listens. Nobody even looks my way.”
“You mean up here in the bedroom?”
“No—I went down to the kitchen where I used to work. Nobody comes up here after dark.”
Ghosts could be seen lingering by their graveside, but usually they haunted the place where they had died. As a seventh son of a seventh son, I might have been able to see or hear her in places where other folk wouldn’t.
“Do you know why that is?” I asked gently.
“It’s because I’m dead,” she said, beginning to cry again.
That was good—an important first step. Some ghosts didn’t know that they were dead. The hardest part of my job was convincing them of that fact before persuading them to move on.
“Yes, you’re dead, Miriam. It happens to us all eventually. But now you can move on to the light. You can go to a better place than this world. I’ll help you to do that, I promise, but first I need to ask you a few questions. Can you tell me how and why you died?”
The girl stopped crying, and an expression of terror came onto her face. “Something evil killed me,” she said.
I tried to keep my face calm, but my mind was whirring with thoughts. I was keen to find out what creature of the dark was responsible for this brutal murder.
“Something sat on my chest. It was heavy and I couldn’t breathe. Then it sank its teeth into my throat and began to drain my blood. I could hear it sucking and snarling. Its eyes were red. It wore a long coat like a man’s, but it was definitely some kind of animal, because its arms were hairy and it had a long tail.”
I listened in astonishment to her description. This was completely outside my experience—I had never even heard of such a creature—but I tried not to reveal anything in my expression. I wanted Miriam to remain calm so that I could get as much information as possible from her.