The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“And your friend, Laura, what of her?”

“I think she has already left The Folly.”

She waited a moment, then forced herself to add, “Julian Treville was killed today out hunting – as I suppose you know.”

“Good God! How awful! Believe me, I did not know—”

Roger Delacourt was sincerely affected, as well he might be, for already he had arranged, in his own mind, to go to Leicestershire next week.

And, strange to say, as the two travelled up to town together, he was more considerate in his manner to his wife than he had been for many years. For one thing, he felt that this curious episode proved Laura to have more heart than he had given her credit for. But, being the manner of man and of husband he happened to be, he naturally did not approve of her having risked her spotless reputation in playing the part of duenna to a friend who had loved not wisely but too well. He trusted that what had just happened would prove a lesson to his wife and, for the matter of that, to himself.

Clytie

Eudora Welty

Location:  Farr’s Gin, Jackson, Mississippi.

Time:  June, 1941.

Eyewitness Description:  “This face had been very close to hers; almost familiar, almost accessible. And then the face of Octavia was thrust between, and at other times the apoplectic face of her father, the face of her brother Henry with the bullet hole through the forehead . . .”

Author:  Eudora Welty (1909–2001) has been described as the “Queen of Southern Gothic”, a story tradition evolved from the original European version set in the southern states of the USA and including tales by the likes of William Faulkner (“A Rose for Emily”, 1930) and Flannery O’Connor (“Judgement Day” 1956). Growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty worked for a local radio station and as a journalist for the Commercial Appeal writing and photographing the local area. During her later career she lectured on writing and for a time had an extended residence at Cambridge University where she became the first woman to enter Peterhouse College. Her fascination with the gothic was evident in her early short stories and particularly a novel, The Robber Bridegroom (1946), set in Natchez about a highwayman masquerading as a part-time gentleman, which earned laudatory reviews for its “mystery, sense of the inexplicable and gothic horror”. Among her stories cast in the same mould are “A Still Moment” (1943), “Moon Lake” (1949) and the earlier “Clytie” which she wrote for The Southern Review in 1941 and is the account of another “ghost feeler”, the enigmatic, mysterious Clytie Farr, as well as a landmark in 20th century Gothic fiction.

It was late afternoon, with heavy silver clouds which looked bigger land wider than cotton-fields, and presently it began to rain. Big round drops fell, still in the sunlight, on the hot tin sheds, and stained the white false fronts of the row of stores in the little town of Farr’s Gin. A hen and her string of yellow chickens ran in great alarm across the road, the dust turned river-brown, and the birds flew down into it immediately, seeking out little pockets in which to take baths. The bird dogs got up from the doorways of the stores, shook themselves down to the tail, and went to lie inside. The few people standing with long shadows on the level road moved over into the post office. A little boy kicked his bare heels into the sides of his mule, which proceeded slowly through the town toward the country.

After everyone else had gone under cover, Miss Clytie Farr stood still in the road, peering ahead in her near-sighted way, and as wet as the little birds.

She usually came out of the old big house about this time in the afternoon, and hurried through the town. It used to be that she ran about on some pretext or other, and for a while she made soft-voiced explanations that nobody could hear, and after that she began to charge up bills, which the postmistress declared would never be paid any more than anyone else’s, even if the Farrs were too good to associate with other people. But now Clytie came for nothing. She came every day, and no one spoke to her any more: she would be in such a hurry, and couldn’t see who it was. And every Saturday they expected her to be run over, the way she darted out into the road with all the horses and trucks.