The Headless Derbyshire Ghost by Elliott O'Donnell 1919
Some few years ago, two men were trudging along a road, not twenty miles from Sudbury, swearing heartily. It was not the first time they had sworn, not by any means, but it is extremely doubtful if either of them had ever sworn before quite so vehemently. There were, one must admit, extenuating circumstances. Having missed the last train, they were obliged to walk home, a distance of twelve or more miles, and having been overtaken by a rainstorm, they were soaked to the skin. True, the rain had now ceased, but as they had covered only six miles, they still had six more to go, and at every step they took, the water in their boots soaked through their socks and squished between their toes. Just as they arrived at a spot where the road swerved a little to their left and took a sudden dip, a clock from a distance solemnly chimed twelve.
The younger of the two men came to a halt and lighted his pipe. “Hold on a minute, Brown,” he shouted; “I can’t keep up this infernal pace any longer. Let’s take an easy.”
Brown turned and joined his companion, who had seated himself on a wooden gate. Below them, in the dip, the darkness was sepulchral. The hedges on either side the road were of immense height; and high above them rose the trunks of giant pines and larches, the intertwining branches of which formed an archway that completely obliterated the sky. A faint speck of light from afar flickered occasionally, as if through a gap in the foliage; but, apart from this, the men could see nothing—nothing but blackness.
“A cheerful spot!” Brown remarked, “as gloomy a bit of road as I’ve ever seen. And how quiet!”
The other man blew his nose. “Not so quiet now,” he laughed, “but how everything echoes! What’s that? Water?”
Both men looked, and, apparently, from the other side of the hedge, came the gentle gurgle of quick flowing water.
“Must be a spring,” Brown observed, “flowing into some stream in the hollow. The darkness suggests the Styx. A match, if you please, Reynolds.”
Reynolds gave him one, and for awhile the two men puffed away in silence.
Suddenly something whizzed overhead; and they heard the prolonged, dismal hooting of an owl.
“This is getting a bit too eerie, even for my liking, Brown,” Reynolds remarked; “supposing we move on. I always associate noises like that with a death.”
“I wish it were my mother-in-law’s,” Brown laughed, “or my own. But there’s no such luck. I’m cold.”
“So am I,” Reynolds replied. “Deuced cold! Come on, do!”
He slid off the gate as he spoke and strode into the centre of the road.
The moon, temporarily unveiled, revealed as wet a landscape as one could possibly imagine. Everything dripped water—bushes, trees, ferns, grass, hats, clothes—whilst every rut of the road, every particle of soil, shone wet in the moon’s rays. A deep, settled calm permeated the atmosphere. It was the stillness of night and moisture combined.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you coming?” Brown asked impatiently.
“One moment,” Reynolds replied. “I believe I heard footsteps. Hark! I thought so, they’re coming this way! Someone else lost their train, perhaps.”
Brown listened, and he, too, distinctly heard the sound of footsteps—high-heeled shoes walking along with a sharp, springy action, as if the road were absolutely hard and dry.
“A woman!” he ejaculated. “Odd hour for a woman to be out here.”
Brown laughed. “Pooh!” he said. “Women are afraid of nothing nowadays except old age. Hullo! Here she comes!”
As he spoke the figure of a woman—slight and supple, and apparently young—shot into view, and came rapidly towards them.
Her dress, though quaint and pretty, was not particularly striking; but her feet, clad in patent leather shoes, with buckles that shone brightly in the moonlight, were oddly conspicuous, in spite of the fact that they were small and partially hidden ’neath a skirt which was long and frilled, and not at all in accordance with the present fashion. Something about her prevented both men from speaking, and they involuntarily moved nearer to one another as she approached. On and on she came, tripping along, and never varying her pace. Now in a zone of moonlight, now in the dark belt of shadows from the firs and larches, she drew nearer and nearer. Through the hedge, Brown could dimly perceive the figure of a cow, immensely magnified, standing dumb and motionless, apparently lost, like he was, in spellbound observation. The silence kept on intensifying. Not a breath of air, not a leaf stirring, not a sound from Reynolds, who stood with arms folded like a statue; only the subdued trickle, trickle of the spring, and the hard tap, tap, tap of the flashing, sparkling shoes.
At last the woman was abreast of them. They shrank back and back, pressing farther and farther into the hedge, so close that the sharp twigs and brambles scratched their faces and tore their clothes. She passed. Down, down, down, still tripping daintily, until the sepulchral blackness of the dip swallowed her up. They could still hear her tap, tap, tap; and for some seconds neither spoke. Then Reynolds, releasing his clothes from the thorns, muttered huskily: “At last I’ve seen a ghost, and I always scoffed at them.”
“But her head!” Brown ejaculated, “where was it?”
“Don’t ask me,” Reynolds replied, his teeth chattering. “She had no head. At least I didn’t see any. Dare you go on?”
“What, down there?” Brown said, nodding in the direction of the dip.
“Well, we must, if we are to get home to-night,” Reynolds retorted, “and I’m frozen.”
“Wait till that noise ceases, then,” Brown answered. “I can’t stand seeing a thing like that twice in one night.”
They stood still and listened, until the tapping gradually died away in the far distance, and the only sound to be heard was that of the water, the eternal, never ceasing, never varying sound of the water. Then they ran—ran as they had never run since long ago Rugby days—down through the inky darkness of the hollow and out—far out into the brightness of the great stretch of flat country beyond; and, all the time they ran, they neither looked to the right nor to the left, but always on the ground just ahead of them.
.......
For a week the horror of what they had seen was so great that neither of the two men could bear to be alone in the dark; and they kept a light in their respective rooms all night. Then a strange thing happened. Brown became infatuated, he did nothing but rave, all day, about the ghost. She had the prettiest figure, the whitest hands, the daintiest feet he had ever seen, and he was sure her face must be equally lovely. Why couldn’t he see it? There was nothing about the neck to show she had been decapitated, and yet the head was missing. Why?
He worried Reynolds to death about it, and he gave no one else any peace. That waist, those delicate white fingers, those rosy, almond-shaped nails, those scintillating shoe buckles! They got on his brain. They obsessed him. He was like a maniac.
At last, at the suggestion of Reynolds, who wanted to get rid of him for awhile, he came up to London and paid visits to most of the professional mediums and occultists in the West End.
Some advised him one thing, and some another. Some immediately went into trances and learned from their controlling spirits all about the headless phantom, who she was, why she paraded the high road, and what had become of her head. But it was significant that no two told him alike, and that the head he so longed to see had at least a dozen different hiding-places. At last, when he had expended quite a small fortune, and his brain was much addled with psychic nomenclature, with detailed accounts of the Astral Plane, Karmas, Elementals, Elementaries, White Lodges, and What not, he interviewed a woman, living somewhere in the Bayswater direction, who suggested that he should hold a séance in the haunted hollow, and who promised, with a great show of condescension, to act as his medium if he would pay her the trifling sum of twenty pounds.
At first Brown declared the thing impossible, since he did not, at that moment, possess twenty pounds, which was literally true; but the prospect of seeing the ghost’s face at length proved too much for him, and he decided to pawn all he had, in order to gratify his longing.
He closed with the offer. When the night fixed for the séance arrived, the weather conditions were all that could be desired; the air was soft and calm, the moon brilliant, the sky almost cloudless, and promising only the finest weather for days to come. As the medium insisted upon a party of at least four, Brown persuaded a Mr. and Mrs. de Roscovi, Russians, to come, and they all set out together from Sudbury shortly after ten o’clock. Brown had made many inquiries in the neighbourhood as to the phantom figure, but he had only come across two people who would tell him anything about it. One, a farmer, assured him that he had on several occasions seen the ghost when driving, and that, on each occasion, it had kept abreast of his horse, even though the latter was careering along the road half mad with fright. But what terrified him most, he said, was that the apparition had no head.
The other, a blacksmith, said he had seen the woman twice, and that each time he had seen her she had been carrying something tucked under her arm, which he had fancied was a head. But he had been too scared to look at it very closely, and he only knew for certain that where her head should have been there was nothing. Both he and the farmer said they had heard all their lives that the road was haunted, but for what reason they had never been able to discover, as within the past sixty years, at any rate, neither murder nor suicide was known to have taken place near the hollow. This is as far as Brown had got with his investigations when he set out from Sudbury on the night in question. The de Roscovis did not think, for one moment, that the ghost would appear. They said, few people apparently had seen it; its visits in all probability were only periodical; and weeks, months, or even years might elapse before it put in an appearance there again.
“That may be, but then we have a medium,” Brown argued. “I engaged her to invoke the ghost, provided it would not come of its own accord. You can invoke it, can’t you, Madame Valenspin?”
Madame Valenspin now seemed rather dubious. “I have never tried in the open before,” she said, with a slight shiver, “but I will do my best. The conditions seem favourable; but I can’t say definitely till we arrive at the exact spot.”
Brown, however, could not help observing that the farther they advanced into the country, which became more and more lonely, the more restless and uneasy Madame Valenspin grew.
Once or twice she halted, as if irresolute whether to go on or not, and the moment she caught sight of the hollow she came to a dead stop.
“Not down there,” she said. “It’s too dark. We’d better stay here.”
It was frightfully still. Brown listened for the murmuring of water. There was none. The recent hot sun had probably dried up the spring. Through the same gap in the hedge he saw a big cow—possibly, so he thought, the same cow—and he took it as a favourable augury for the appearance of the ghost that the animal, as before, was gazing fixedly into the open space, as if momentarily expecting to see something.
Behind it, away back in the broad expanse of field, were other cattle, their skins startlingly white; all motionless, and all in attitudes suggestive of a sense of anticipation, of a conscious waiting for something. The sepulchral hush was uninterrupted saving by bats, assuredly the biggest and blackest Brown had ever seen, wheeling and skimming, with the faintest perceptible whiz, whiz, whiz, in and out the larches; and the soft intermittent fanning of the leaves as the night breeze came rustling over the flat country and continued its career down into the hollow. A rabbit scurried across the road from one gate to another, its white breast shining silver, and some other small furry creature, of a species undetected, created a brief pandemonium in a neighbouring ditch. Otherwise all nature was extraordinarily passive.
“The figure went right down into the hollow,” Brown said. “I think we ought to try there. What do you think, Mrs. de Roscovi?”
“I am of the same opinion as Madame Valenspin,” Mrs. de Roscovi replied, glancing apprehensively at the dip. “I think we had far better stay where we are.”
“Very well, then,” Brown said, “let’s begin. You are mistress of the ceremonies, Madame Valenspin. Will you tell us what to do?”
Madame Valenspin moved to one side of the road, and stood with her back resting against a gate. “Keep quite close to me,” she said, “and I will try and go under control. Ah!” She ejaculated the last syllable so sharply that Brown and Mrs. de Roscovi both started. She then began to mumble something, and then, breaking into a shrill, high-pitched key, stated that she was no longer Madame Valenspin but a spirit called Anne Heathcote, who was her temporary control. Anne Heathcote, so the audience were informed, was the ghost of a girl of very great beauty, who had been murdered in an adjoining field, close on a hundred years ago. There was no apparent motive for the deed, which was accomplished in a peculiarly barbarous fashion, the head being cut right off and thrown in a pit that had long since been filled in. The criminal was never caught.
“Can’t you appear to us with your head on,” Brown asked, “just as you were in your lifetime?”
“No,” the alleged spirit replied. “I am forbidden to do so. My visits are only periodical, and I shan’t be able to materialise again here for at least ten years.”
“Then there is little hope of my ever seeing you,” Brown said, bitterly disappointed.
“None,” was the somewhat abrupt answer.
“But why should you haunt this place at all?” Mr. de Roscovi asked. “What reason is there for your being earth-bound?”
“My sins,” the control replied. “I was a very wicked girl.”
“I don’t care whether you were wicked or not,” Brown put in mournfully. “I want to see you. If your face is in keeping with your limbs and figure, it must indeed be lovely. Is there no way of seeing you—just for a second?”
“None,” the control answered. Then, with much more emphasis, “None.”
But hardly had the alleged Anne Heathcote spoken, when far away in the distance came the sound of footsteps. Tap, tap, tap!
“Why! By Jove!” Brown shouted, “there she is! I recognise her step. I should know it in a million.”
For a minute everyone was silent, the tapping growing more and more audible. Then Madame Valenspin, in quite her own voice, exclaimed excitedly: “Let us be going. The spirits tell me we mustn’t remain here any longer. Let’s go back by the fields.”
She fumbled with the latchet of the gate, against which she had been leaning, and hurriedly tried to raise it.
Mrs. de Roscovi said nothing, but gripped her husband by the arm. The steps approached rapidly, and presently the same dainty form, Brown had previously seen when with Reynolds, once more figured on the horizon.
“It is—it is she!” Brown whispered. “Look—the waist, the arms, the hands, the shoes. Silver buckles! How they flash!”
An exclamation of horror interrupted him. It was from Mr. de Roscovi. He had moved to one side of the road, dragging his wife with him, and the two were standing huddled together, their eyes fixed in a frenzied stare at the phantom’s neck. Brown, forcing his attention away from the long slim hands which so fascinated him, followed their glances. The neck was not as he remembered it, white and slender as far as it went, but it ended abruptly in a grey nothingness, and beyond this nothingness Brown fancied he discerned the dimmest of shadows. He was appalled but fascinated, and intense curiosity far outweighed his fear. He was certain she was beautiful—beautiful to a degree that immeasurably excelled any feminine loveliness he had hitherto encountered. He must see her face. He did not believe her head was missing; he believed it was there on her body right enough, but that for some specific reason it had not materialised. He turned to Madame Valenspin to inquire the cause, and was greatly astonished to see her beating a hasty retreat across the fields. The figure had now come up to where he was standing, and tripping past him, it sped swiftly down the dip. Brown at once gave chase. He had not gone many yards before the darkness of the dip was on him; and the only clue he had to his quarry’s whereabouts was the sound of the shoes—the constant tap, tap, tapping. On and on he went, however, and at length, emerging from the darkness, he perceived a wooden stile and beyond it a tiny path, threading its way through a clump of firs that gradually grew thinner and thinner till they finally terminated in what appeared to be a broad clearing. Mounting the stile and springing off on the other side, the woman tripped along the path, and, turning for a moment to beckon Brown, disappeared from view.
The intense loneliness of the spot, emphasised a thousandfold by the eerie effect of the few straggling moonbeams that fell aslant the stile and pathway, and the knowledge that he had left his companions far behind made Brown falter, and it was some seconds before he could gather up the courage to continue his pursuit. A light girlish laugh, however, proceeding apparently from the spot where the figure had vanished, determined him. He saw once again vividly before him that willowy waist, those slim, delicate fingers, and those coquettish little feet. Were the devil itself to bar his way he must see her face. Sweating with terror, and yet withal obsessed with a passion that defies description, Brown mounted the stile and hastened in the direction of the laugh. Again it rang out, charged to overflowing with innocent fun and frolic, irresistibly girlish, irresistibly coy. This time there was no mistaking its locality. It came from behind a small clump of trees that bordered on the clearing. Wild with excitement and full of love madness, Brown dashed round the clump, and then halted. Floating in mid-air was a head, a head that looked as if it had long since been buried and just disinterred. The eyes alone lived, and they were fixed on Brown’s with a mocking, baneful glitter. Hanging on either side of it was a mass of long fair hair, suggestive of a woman.
Every detail in the face stood out with hideous clearness in the brilliancy of the moonlight, and as Brown stared at it, petrified with horror, the thing laughed.
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