The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

One morning there was a pretty substitute teacher in Mrs Harding’s classroom. “Mrs Harding is unwell, I’ll be taking her place today,” she said, and we saw the nervousness in her face; we guessed there was a secret she wouldn’t tell and we waited and a few days later the principal himself came to tell us that Mrs Harding would not be back, she had died of a stroke. He spoke carefully as if we were much younger children and might be upset and Mary Lou caught my eye and winked and I sat there at my desk feeling the strangest sensation, something flowing into the top of my head, honey-rich and warm making its way down my spine. Our Father Who art in Heaven I whispered in the prayer with the others my head bowed and my hands clasped tight together but my thoughts were somewhere else leaping wild and crazy somewhere else and I knew Mary Lou’s were too.

On the school bus going home she whispered in my ear, “That was because of us, wasn’t it! – what happened to that old bag Harding. But we won’t tell anybody.”

Once upon a time there were two sisters, and one was very pretty and one was very ugly. . . . Though Mary Lou Siskin wasn’t my sister. And I wasn’t ugly, really: just sallow-skinned, with a small pinched ferrety face. With dark almost lashless eyes that were set too close together and a nose that didn’t look right. A look of yearning, and disappointment.

But Mary Lou was pretty, even rough and clumsy as she sometimes behaved. That long silky blond hair everybody remembered her for afterward, years afterward. . . . How, when she had to be identified, it was the long silky white-blond hair that was unmistakable. . . .

Sleepless nights, but I love them. I write during the nighttime hours and sleep during the day, I am of an age when you don’t require more than a few hours sleep. My husband has been dead for nearly a year and my children are scattered and busily absorbed in their own selfish lives like all children and there is no one to interrupt me no one to pry into my business no one in the neighborhood who dares come knocking at my door to see if I am all right. Sometimes out of a mirror floats an unexpected face, a strange face, lined, ravaged, with deep-socketed eyes always damp, always blinking in shock or dismay or simple bewilderment – but I adroitly look away. I have no need to stare.

It’s true, all you have heard of the vanity of the old. Believing ourselves young, still, behind our aged faces – mere children, and so very innocent!

Once when I was a young bride and almost pretty my color up when I was happy and my eyes shining we drove out into the country for a Sunday’s excursion and he wanted to make love I knew, he was shy and fumbling as I but he wanted to make love and I ran into a cornfield in my stockings and high heels, I was playing at being a woman I never could be, Mary Lou Siskin maybe, Mary Lou whom my husband never knew, but I got out of breath and frightened, it was the wind in the cornstalks, that dry rustling sound, that dry terrible rustling sound like whispering like voices you can’t quite identify and he caught me and tried to hold me and I pushed him away sobbing and he said, What’s wrong? My God what’s wrong? as if he really loved me as if his life was focused on me and I knew I could never be equal to it, that love, that importance, I knew I was only Melissa the ugly one the one the boys wouldn’t give a second glance, and one day he’d understand and know how he’d been cheated. I pushed him away, I said, Leave me alone! don’t touch me! You disgust me! I said.

He backed off and I hid my face, sobbing.

But later on I got pregnant just the same. Only a few weeks later.

Always there were stories behind the abandoned houses and always the stories were sad. Because farmers went bankrupt and had to move away. Because somebody died and the farm couldn’t be kept up and nobody wanted to buy it – like the Medlock farm across the creek. Mr Medlock died aged seventy-nine and Mrs Medlock refused to sell the farm and lived there alone until someone from the country health agency came to get her. Isn’t it a shame, my parents said. The poor woman, they said. They told us never, never to poke around in the Medlocks’ barns or house – the buildings were ready to cave in, they’d been in terrible repair even when the Medlocks were living.