Ghost Walks.
I have gone to the east jetty every night and waited, but they haven’t made contact. Sebastian has been to the house, but they won’t answer him. I’m sure they’re watching me, especially when I’m alone, but they will not talk. I’m going to wait until the weekend and then it’s back to Sheffield. I don’t know where Sebastian will go. At his request I wrote a letter, and left it weighed down with a stone at the jetty. We argued a bit about the content: he tends towards grovelling far too easily, but maybe that’s just when he doesn’t have to sign his name to it. The gist of the letter was that I’m sorry if I caused any offence, and I didn’t mean to skit their beliefs. Sebastian made me leave out the line about how I thought they were supposed to be above such sensitivity now that they’re pursuing a higher calling. Apparently that wouldn’t have been helpful. The fact that their huff proves my point isn’t helpful either.
“We need to know where they sent David.” Sebastian told me in his teacher's voice. “We have to ignore their peculiarities just long enough to find that out, and then you can score all the points off them you want.”
In the meantime I’ve been adjusting to seaside life. Like Otis Redding, I’ve been watching the boats come in and out. The reality has a bit more of a chugging rhythm than a smooth melody, and everyone seems put out by the cold, but it’s pretty relaxed. The main difference here is that, while everyone has a place they belong, they’re not nailed down to it. I get the sense that they go to work out of their own free will, rather than being summoned there. Norman said that when he left school, all the folks he worked with lived for the weekend, but in the last few years they stopped living that much. They lived for a few hours at the gym, or an aimless diversion on the drive home. Norman’s life before it all fell apart doesn’t sound that much better that the one he has now. I called him yesterday: there’s no word from Samuel yet. He and Angela are well. No one has written odd notes to me – which is always a relief.
The man in the pub had few good ghost stories to tell. There’s an unused cafe along the beach, halfway to Sandsend. It’s a squat oblong of a building, with a flat roof where they used to have tables, and white walls studded with bolts that weep rust. At dawn, people say they have seen a vision of a woman walking along the roof: she isn’t looking out to sea as you might expect, but paces furiously, as though waiting. She is a woman wronged, according to my storyteller. He prefers the modern tales to the old nonsense about witches and vampires – to which I could only agree, since it would keep him talking. The other story he has, is from the other side of the town: a family of holiday makers were forced to flee the cottage they were renting when an old woman appeared in their room in the middle of the night. The mum and dad were woken by a screaming about three in the morning, and when they looked, this white haired, skinny wretch of a woman, was lying in the bed between them. They could see each other through her body. The kids came down from the attic bedroom to find out what the screaming was, and within an hour they were packed and on the road home. The woman who owns the cottage didn’t find out anything was wrong until she got a letter demanding their money back and suggesting that she specialised in renting out to tourists interested in the supernatural.
I didn’t think much to these tales when he was done. He sat back and looked at me as if to say ‘what do you think to that then’, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. They’re not exactly chilling though. They don’t tell of the bloody revenge of vengeful spirits. He conceded the point, but said I should stick to what he presumes is fiction if that’s what I wanted. What he was telling me was fact: these were both things that had been seen in the last few years. He said he can take me to see the cottage, where the old woman's ghost still keeps the place empty.
“We need to know where they sent David.” Sebastian told me in his teacher's voice. “We have to ignore their peculiarities just long enough to find that out, and then you can score all the points off them you want.”
In the meantime I’ve been adjusting to seaside life. Like Otis Redding, I’ve been watching the boats come in and out. The reality has a bit more of a chugging rhythm than a smooth melody, and everyone seems put out by the cold, but it’s pretty relaxed. The main difference here is that, while everyone has a place they belong, they’re not nailed down to it. I get the sense that they go to work out of their own free will, rather than being summoned there. Norman said that when he left school, all the folks he worked with lived for the weekend, but in the last few years they stopped living that much. They lived for a few hours at the gym, or an aimless diversion on the drive home. Norman’s life before it all fell apart doesn’t sound that much better that the one he has now. I called him yesterday: there’s no word from Samuel yet. He and Angela are well. No one has written odd notes to me – which is always a relief.
The man in the pub had few good ghost stories to tell. There’s an unused cafe along the beach, halfway to Sandsend. It’s a squat oblong of a building, with a flat roof where they used to have tables, and white walls studded with bolts that weep rust. At dawn, people say they have seen a vision of a woman walking along the roof: she isn’t looking out to sea as you might expect, but paces furiously, as though waiting. She is a woman wronged, according to my storyteller. He prefers the modern tales to the old nonsense about witches and vampires – to which I could only agree, since it would keep him talking. The other story he has, is from the other side of the town: a family of holiday makers were forced to flee the cottage they were renting when an old woman appeared in their room in the middle of the night. The mum and dad were woken by a screaming about three in the morning, and when they looked, this white haired, skinny wretch of a woman, was lying in the bed between them. They could see each other through her body. The kids came down from the attic bedroom to find out what the screaming was, and within an hour they were packed and on the road home. The woman who owns the cottage didn’t find out anything was wrong until she got a letter demanding their money back and suggesting that she specialised in renting out to tourists interested in the supernatural.
I didn’t think much to these tales when he was done. He sat back and looked at me as if to say ‘what do you think to that then’, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. They’re not exactly chilling though. They don’t tell of the bloody revenge of vengeful spirits. He conceded the point, but said I should stick to what he presumes is fiction if that’s what I wanted. What he was telling me was fact: these were both things that had been seen in the last few years. He said he can take me to see the cottage, where the old woman's ghost still keeps the place empty.
posted by The son of Edward Fold at 5:12 pm
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