Out of the Mist (5 page)

Margaret wanted to kiss Gran’s cheek. But
she knew it was silly to kiss a painted picture. Instead, she
kissed her own fingers, and touched them to Gran’s cheek. Why had
she thought Gran might reach out and grab her? Of course, she loved
Gran and Gran loved her. They stood looking at the picture for a
minute, then turned away. Margaret shut the door behind her, and
they went downstairs.

Mrs. Hemphill regarded them carefully when
they entered the kitchen. “And what have you two been up to?”

Margaret felt very calm. “Oh, nothing.”

“
Why don’t you girls go
out in the garden and play?” Mrs. Hemphill suggested. “It’s not
good to be too quiet and shut up inside when you are
young.”

In the back yard, Margaret
and Evelyn sat on each side of a wooden swing-seat and made it sway
back and forth. The image of Gran with a twisted face, and a
skeletal hand, crying, “
Get
out!
” had faded away. Gran-gran was a lady
in a flowered dress sitting upright, with abundant white hair in a
chignon, looking lovingly at pictures of her
granddaughters.

~~~***~~~

Who’s the Old
Hag?

Russell Barton

The attempt to move fails.
You’re paralysed. Breathing
,
an effort,
is controlled by another. A woman’s voice, old, crackled, whispers.
The words are clear. “Now you are hot and sweaty, your heart will
stop, breath shall leave you. Death and darkness must surely
follow. Let me be your companion, your guide in the hereafter.”

Breathing stops. Is suffocation
to be your fate? Eyelids, after a supreme effort, open halfway. A
grey pockmarked hag’s face hovers above, her eyes staring
maliciously into yours. You recognise a nightmare and desperately
try, in your mind, to rock back and forth hoping to generate motion
and wakefulness. You emit a stifled gasp. At last you sense a reach
into consciousness. Cold air and physical awareness waft over your
mind and body.

The hag’s face shrinks away but
her sinewy hands grasp at your
shoulders
.
Your scream reverberates throughout the
hotel.

Her face retreats further
towards the darkness, your eyes open wide. The wraith, gliding
towards a dark corner, dissolves into an ominous shadowy form.
Awakening and speedily sitting up, you clumsily try to activate the
bedside lamp but fail.

It takes a few seconds before
hotel guests, alarmed by the scream, arrive outside your room. They
bang on the door.

“Who is in there? Are you
OK?”

You attempt to explain, wanting
to say, “Yes
,
thanks, just a bad dream,”
but no sound comes forth. Unable to communicate you try the door.
The handle won’t turn. Is it locked? Puzzled, you push. Now you are
outside the room slowly moving along the hotel corridor. Guests
scream and run. A priest blocks your path. He is holding out a
crucifix at chest level. “Be gone, be gone foul creature
!
”

You try to tell him that he has
the wrong person, and turn to point at the wraith in the room’s
interior but the door is closed. You feel
faint
, objects are blurring. In the distance you see
a bright light.

The commanding voice of the
priest asks, “Who are you
? What
is your
name?
”
Somehow his question
s
demand a response and
they
power your voice.

“Matthew.” It sounds laboured
and strange.

“Matthew, you no longer belong
here. It’s time to leave, to pass on. Have courage. Now, I command
you
,
Matthew, enter the tunnel. Go to the
light at the end.”

~~~***~~~

The Skeleton without a
Skull

Maida Follini

I fought for family and for farm

Against the French when they did swarm.

Now here at home my bones do rest

But where my head is, who can guess?

Living next door to a
graveyard may seem gloomy to some, but for Marjory, the Old
Cemetery in Dartmouth was her familiar play yard from her earliest
years. She loved to walk among gravestones that stood high above
the harbour, looking out to sea. The oldest burials were not
marked. A tablet remembered, “Many Mi’kmaq and early settlers are
buried in this place.” Later graves had a variety of tombstones.
Marjory petted the marble lambs on the children’s graves, and
looked up into the eyes of carved angels whose wings spread
protectively over family plots. Some of the plots contained tombs
like small stone houses, with pillared porches, where Marjory could
play house, picking flowers to decorate sombre pillars. Other plots
contained English settler families, with tall stone blocks for the
parents, and a row of smaller stones for the children.

The quiet children under the sod were her
friends, and she brought wild flowers to decorate their graves, or
special things like a blue jay’s feather or a shining white
stone.

Sometimes Marjory wandered over the mossy
turf, reading the inscriptions and trying to make out the meaning
of the carvings and mottoes on the stones:

Praying hands and “Be Thou Also Ready”

“
Rest Eternal” and “In
Peace”

One inscription presented a mystery:

“
I fought for family and
for farm

Against the French when they did swarm.

Now here at home my bones do rest,

Where my head lies, none
can guess.”

Often and often, Marjory
returned to this stone, one of the oldest in the cemetery. She had
brushed the moss away to read the name:

Henry Ainsworth

Born Norwich, England 1720

Died Dartmouth, Nova Scotia 1749

Marjory imagined the bones buried six feet
under the earth: feet, legs, ribs, arms—but no head! What had
happened to Henry’s head? Suppose he woke up on Judgement Day, and
found he had no head? Marjory wondered if a headless person could
enter Heaven. How would St. Peter know it was Henry?

On the thirtieth of
October, Marjory gathered especially large bunches of goldenrod and
purple asters, and placed them on Henry’s grave. Tomorrow night was
Hallowe’en, when ghosts were supposed to walk, and spirits rose
from the grave to have one night when they could range about and
celebrate before returning underground. And she wanted everyone to
know that someone cared for Henry Ainsworth, even though he had no
head.

“
There, you’re not
forgotten,” she said to Henry.

“
Who are you talking to?”
A boy’s voice startled her.

Marjory stared. “What are
you doing here?” It was Ned, a buddy from her fifth grade class.
Ned lived the next street over from her and their mothers were
friends.

“
Checking out the graveyard,” said Ned. “Some of the guys are
daring each other to do a ghost walk here, tomorrow night, and I
thought I’d get here first and scare them! What are
you
doing here? Aren’t
you afraid of a graveyard?”

“
Of course not,” scoffed
Marjory. “Why, I come here all the time!”

“
Who were you talking to?”
Ned asked again.

“
Henry.” Marjory pointed
to the stone. “I tell him I’m sorry for him because he has no
head.”

“
No head?” Ned came closer
and studied the grave marker. He read, “‘But where my head lies,
none can guess.’ Say, that’s weird! How come he doesn’t have a
head?”

“
It’s a mystery,” Marjory
replied. “At least, I don’t know.”

“
Say, that would be scary.
To see a skeleton without a head.” Ned thought for a moment, then
his eyes lit up. “That would make a good costume for Hallowe’en!
But I wonder what his story is.”

Marjory showed Ned around
the cemetery, pointing out stones she was familiar with. But both
of them kept returning to Henry Ainsworth’s plot, the man without a
head. Marjory patted the gravestone. “Don’t worry, Henry, we’re
your friends even if you don’t have a head!” Then she jumped back.
“Something moved!” she exclaimed. “Under my feet!”

Ned stared at the turf covering the grave.
He said in a low tone, “Did you hear that rumbling sound?
Something’s under there.”

“
Of course,” Marjory
replied, with a nervous laugh. “Henry’s there!”

“
Do you think he heard
us?”

“
He might be sensitive
about having no head.” Marjory took care not to step on the grass
over the grave again.

“
If only we could find out
where it was, we could get it back for him,” Ned suggested. “I
could ask my grandfather about it. He knows a lot of early
history.”

Was there a movement atop the grave? Both
children stared at the grass. “I thought it rippled a little,” said
Marjory.

“
Probably just the wind,”
Ned offered, but he was quiet as they turned to go home.

“
If you find out anything
from your grandfather, tell me in school tomorrow,” said
Marjory.

The next morning, Marjory hurried over to
Ned, who was standing in line in front of the school, waiting for
the doors to open.

“
Did you find out about…
you know?” she whispered, so the other kids wouldn’t
hear.

“
Gramp told me the whole
story! It’s wild!” Ned’s eyes gleamed with excitement.

“
Tell me.”

“
I can’t right now. The
bell’s going to ring. I’ll tell you at lunch.”

At lunch, she managed to
snag a spot in the window alcove in the corner of the classroom.
Ned sauntered over to join her, trying to appear casual. But as
soon as he sat down and opened his lunch box, Marjory cried out,
“Tell! Tell!”

“
It was Indians! In the
Seven Years War! Henry was cutting wood. He and five other men.
Some Indians rushed out of the forest and Henry was
killed!”

“
But why no
head?”

“
Gramp thinks the Mi’kmaq
may have taken it away. He said the French rewarded the Indians for
every Englishman they killed or captured. They scalped some others,
and took one man prisoner. They must have cut off Henry’s head to
show the French in order to get the reward.”

“
Ugh!” Marjory made a
face.

“
Well, the English did the
same thing Gramp said. They paid a bounty for every Indian scalp
the English took.”

“
I wouldn’t want to carry
around an old head.”

“
Maybe they dropped it on
the way home,” Ned speculated. Ned and Marjory looked at each
other, and then down at their lunch boxes. Neither felt much like
eating anymore. Ned had an image of a head carried by its hair,
blood dripping from its neck. In Marjory’s mind, she saw the lost
head, flung down on the hill above the harbour, and rolling,
rolling down to the shore with a ghastly smile on its
face.

When lunch was over, the teacher, Miss
Primrose, smiled at her restless class. “Come on, get your coats
on. We’re going on a field trip!” she announced. “The
Parent-Teacher Organization has arranged with the Museum down the
block for you to attend a special children’s Hallowe’en
program.”

Within a few minutes, the
fifth graders, all 26 of them, were marching two by two to the
Alderney Museum. The entrance had a large banner: “Hallowe’en
exhibit: Ghosts, Goblins, and Haunts.” A museum instructor led them
to a darkened maze set up in the galleries, with phosphorescent
stepping stones for the children to follow. There were black
“spider web” curtains they had to lift to go between the
galleries.

The first gallery had
enlarged models of insects displayed on the walls: praying
mantises, cicadas, wasps, and dragonflies. There was also a
remote-controlled spider. The instructor let the children take
turns using the control stick to make it crawl across the
floor.

The next gallery had a mock jail set up in a
corner, and life-size “stocks” to punish early settlers who had a
run-in with the authorities. “You could be put in the stocks for
not attending church on Sunday,” said the instructor. “And when
ships came in, the jail would fill up, because sailors would often
be jailed for public drunkenness.”

While several classmates vied for the chance
to be put in the “stocks”, or locked in the “jail”, Ned and Marjory
peered around the door to the next gallery. Paper skeletons hung on
the walls beside charts naming all their bones. A large glass case
was in the centre of the room. Marjory hung over the glass. “Ned!
Look!” Ned hurried over. Staring back at them from under the glass
were the black empty eye-sockets of a human skull!

“
We don’t know whose skull
is in this case.” The Museum instructor moved to the display case.
“It was dug up recently by a construction crew. The experts who
looked at it say it is a man’s skull and that it must be very old,
because it was under layers and layers of soil.”

The fifth graders crowded
around. “Was he murdered? Who killed him?” someone
asked.

Miss Primrose said, “How do you know he was
murdered? Maybe he died of disease.”

“
No, Ma’am,” said the
instructor. He pulled on a pair of white gloves, unlocked the case,
and carefully turned the skull so the class could see the back of
the head. The back of the skull had been split and there was a
hatchet head still embedded in the bone. “We think he was one of
the early settlers. During the Seven Years War, there were many
skirmishes between the English, and the French and their Indian
allies. Many Englishmen and many natives were killed, right here in
Dartmouth.