Helen Speaks

This is a story for Halloween, written for Caitlin, who asked for a scary story. Thanks to Courtney for your support.

I didn’t like my grandmother’s house. It was an old farmhouse, cold and stone, and too quiet. I hadn’t wanted to move here – but after my father died, my mother and I had nowhere else to go. We left behind the city with its bright lights, and took the spare bedrooms of the old house, with their smell of mould and peeling wallpaper.

One Halloween night when I had been very small, Grandpa had taken me on his knee and told me about Mary of the Glen, a beautiful young woman who had lived in this farm centuries before. The young lord had asked her to marry him, and when she had refused, he had placed a dagger in her heart and dropped her body into the well. By the time her body was found, the young lord had disappeared – and after that, he said, the cows’ milk turned sour, the hens would not lay, and, on the night of Halloween thereafter, you sometimes heard a young woman’s cry from the well.

My grandmother had become very angry, and snatched me from my Grandpa’s arms. Who was he, she demanded, to be telling such a young child such a terrible tale?

It had not bothered me at all – I didn’t mind being scared a little. But that night I had climbed the stairs and, down the landing, I saw my Grandpa staring back at me with pained eyes.

But that was impossible, as my Grandpa was still downstairs. I walked down the landing…

Oh, I had been so silly! It was nothing but a mirror. How could I have seen my own reflection and thought it was my Grandpa?

I had not slept well that night. I had nightmares – I heard a young woman’s voice calling, crying, begging for help, I saw a tunnel of darkness with a light at the end that faded and went out – and then the young woman’s voice changed, becoming cruel.

“I will,” she said, “I will have revenge.”

And when my grandmother woke me, she told me she had some sad news. My Grandpa had died in his sleep.

I was young, and I was silly – I told my mother what had happened, and she told me that it was just my imagination. Grandpa would tell all sorts of tall stories – and he was an old man. Old men did often die in their sleep.

But I was happy to leave, and I was not happy to come back here, to this silent house where every footstep echoed like thunder. Although as the years had passed, I had become sure that I had imagined seeing my Grandpa in the mirror, and hearing Mary of the Glen in my sleep, I became more and more anxious. Sometimes, when my mother and grandmother were out, I would become convinced that I was not alone. I heard the sound of footsteps, or lost something that I’d had only a moment before, only to find it again in a different place. And sometimes, on a windy night, I was sure I heard the echoing cry of a woman trapped in a well.

One night in late October, the fire was burning low, and my grandmother sat knitting, and my mother sat reading – but I felt the cold. I kissed my mother and grandmother goodnight, and climbed the stairs – and glancing down the landing, I saw my grandmother looking back.

I blinked – and then saw myself instead.

It was the mirror. I had looked at it many times. I didn’t like the reflection it gave – it seemed to make faces darker, sadder – and I didn’t like the wrought iron frame, twisting like the branches of an old dead tree. And its strange reflections were clearly playing tricks on my eyes. I would ask my grandmother to take it down. She was kind – she would do it if I asked.

I felt better just thinking of it. I went to bed. It was only as I began to sleep that I remembered it was Halloween.

I woke up the next day to grey skies, the cry of a raven from the tree outside my window. I went to make a cup of tea for my grandmother, to ask her about the mirror. But when I got downstairs, I saw that she was already there.

I called out, “Good morning!” but she didn’t answer. I touched her hand – it was as cold and lifeless as stone, her open eyes glassy and vacant. She was dead.

My mother did not take my grandmother’s death well. She wept a good deal, stayed in her room much of the time and only ate tiny nibbles of the meals I brought to her. Most of all, she could not bear to see anything moved or changed. I tried to throw away an old chipped cup from the kitchen – she had taken it out of the bin immediately, and told me harshly that I must never do that again. So I never did move the strange old mirror.

When the next summer was over, and the leaves were turning brown, my mother said to me, “Let’s go outside and watch the sunset.” It was the first time she had asked to leave the house in many months. She took my hand, and when the golden rays shone on her face, she looked quite beautiful. After all her long suffering, it seemed at last we would be happy again. Unless…

Halloween filled me with dread. I went down to the old well. I asked Mary of the Glen to go in peace. I was so afraid that it really was she who had taken my grandparents, and that this year, she would take my mother.

“Please,” I said. “Leave my mother. Leave her – she has only just found her happiness again.”

My voice just echoed down the empty well. There was no reply.

That night I left my mother sitting in the armchair by the fire, and I decided not to look at the old mirror on the landing – but I couldn’t help it. I glanced at it, out of the corner of my eye…

I didn’t see my mother. I was so happy. Surely if I couldn’t see my mother in the mirror, she wasn’t going to die. Mary of the Glen must have heard me – she had decided not to kill my mother.

I dressed for bed, switched off the light, and lay in bed. At last I could sleep peacefully. I lay back onto the pillow, and closed my eyes.

Cold fingers wrapped themselves around my wrist. I opened my eyes – but it was pitch dark, I saw no one. And yet my hand wouldn’t move, encased in that bony grasp.

“I have come for you.” I knew the voice. I had heard it so many years before. The young woman’s voice, sad and cruel, and so soft it might as well have been the crying of the wind.

“No – no!”

“I warned you,” she said, and, as her icy fingers gripped my throat, I knew she was telling the truth. I had seen myself in the mirror. And now I saw a long tunnel, a faint light – and then the light was snuffed out.