Skeleton Trees
By AM Cullens
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © AM Cullens 2013
Part 1
“There came a lady, all in white. Out of the mist, on a hill. She cries out for her heart, that she cannot find, though she searches, both morn and night. Surround by black skeleton trees is she, for that lady, that ghost, is me.” – Mary White, Bilpin, Australia.
***
My first day in the holiday home was beautiful. The warm sun, the fresh country air, sounds of bellbirds in the distance. But, the second day, as I sat out on the patio with my cuppa, a storm brewed to my east and a chill seemed to set in deep. I pulled my feet up onto the couch I was on, and brought my knees to my chest.
Then the rain came. The type of rain that is not torrential, but constant, the type you know is not going to rain itself out any time soon. The Gum trees, around the apple orchard, bent to the mercy of the wind. Lightning cracked on the horizon, illuminating the sky with white, followed by thunder rumbling in the distance. I held my mug close for warmth as my teabag tag flipped up and into my tea. It floated around on the top, delicately, like a feather on a pond.
I listened to the delightful squeals of Rainbow Lorikeets in a nearby tree, rejoicing in the downpour. I smiled to myself as I pulled out the floating tag. The first time I had smiled, honestly, in months.
The air around me became dense and infused with the smell of ozone. Everything seemed to be covered in an eerie white haze, as if someone had thrown a gossamer blanket over the landscape. It was the perfect weather for writing, if only I could have thought of something to write. I was starting to wonder if I had left my muse at home, with the sunny weather.
If my ex-husband had been there, he would’ve told me that I had brought the bad weather with me, that it was my curse. I believed I had worse curses.
The rain pelted down on the roof, but my ears picked up another sound. I could hear a drumming, not in tune with the nature of the rain. I put down my tea and went to the door.
I opened it to the sight of a vivacious older woman, with wet sandy blonde hair shocked through with silver, and a bright pink complexion. She burst into the house, barely allowing me time to open the door.
“Cindy! How are you my dear?” she said in an, almost-English accent, but still with an Aussie twang.
“Good, Thank you Mrs Porter.” She was the lady that owned the property I was renting.
“I was on my way over here and down it came! Huh! That’s the Hawkesbury for you,” she said, her eyes wondering around her house.
I looked her over. Her blue-tinged mascara had begun to run and her clothes clung to her skin, like Glad wrap to a sandwich. “Would you like me to get you a towel?” I said. It just so happened, that my luggage sat on the couch beside me. I handed her one without waiting for a reply — Of course she wanted a towel! She didn’t want to walk around all damp like that, did she?
She took the towel and with a growing smile she said, “Oh, you’re a gem!” She began tussling her hair with the towel. “I couldn’t trouble you for a nice warm cuppa, could I?”
I thought about my own mug, sitting outside all this time in the cold. A new one would not go astray. “Of course,” I said.
I meet Mrs Porter outside, where she sat patiently with the towel wrapped about her shoulders. I placed her mug of tea on the small table between us. My old tea sat there too, along with my writer’s pad and pen. I sat back down on the couch and hugged a fresh, warm cup.
I saw Mrs Porter’s eyes wonder over the blank paper. She looked up at me with pity. “Any luck dear?” she said with the same look in her eyes.
“No good. I think I left my muse at home.”
She nodded as if she knew exactly what I was talking about.
Her face changed drastically from pity to excitement in flash. “How are you liking the place?” she asked.
“It is lovely, truly beautiful up here!” I was speaking honestly. Compared to the city, this place was heaven. Wild life replaced rampaging traffic, produce farms replaced skyscrapers, constant noise and chaos was replaced by peace and quiet, and the night sky was not just a blanket of blue darkness, but it was sprinkled with thousands of points of glistening light. There were more stars than I had seen in my life time! (It was hard to believe that I had been looking at the same sky). It was perfect for what I needed.
“Have you met her yet?” Mrs Porter still looked excited. She grinned mischievously.
I thought for a moment, but no one came to mind. “Who?” I asked, not entirely interested yet.
“Why, our ghost of course,” Mrs Porter said.
I looked at her, weighing up whether she was pulling my leg, or not. “No,” I replied. I was not a firm believer in ghosts. But, the old duck did have my interest peaked.
She leaned in close and looked around, like she was about to tell me an enormous secret. “Everyone who stays here sees her,” she whispered to me. “Every story is a little different, but all ring with the same … personality.”
I was a sucker for a good story, so I leaned in closer.
Mrs Porter looked out into the back yard. The white mist flowed across the orchard and the rain still hammered down.
“It is said that a woman once lived here. Mary Anne Louise White. She was the lady of the estate, before my ancestors bought it. Supposedly, she was married to a man who was killed at war. He died when she was carrying their child. A little girl was born, with dark ebony hair like her mother. Six years went by and one day the little girl went for a walk in the apple orchard and never returned. Mary went crazy. Searching the orchard night and day, calling out for her little girl.” The look in Mrs Porter’s eye was so serious and glassy. “Henrietta, Henrietta!” She called loudly, making me start. “Mary died not long after. Some said it was suicide. Others said she died of a broken heart. Either way, she still can be seen sometimes, searching in the apple trees, calling out for her daughter.”
Tears stung the backs of my eyes as I listened to Mrs Porter’s spellbinding story. It was a beautiful one, so romantic and heartbreaking. I stared out into the fog where shadows of black, leafless apple trees were barely visible through its curtain. A cool shiver ran over my body and I masked it by taking a sip of tea.
“Well!” Mrs Porter said, suddenly. “I best be off! I only really came to give you the set of keys I promised you.”
Mrs Porter handed me an enormous ring of keys, a mixture of sizes and shapes. None of them labelled.
“This is better than the single front door key I gave you, by far!” she said, almost sounding serious.
I looked at the barrage of keys. Flicking around one key at a time, listening to the metallic slide and then the clink as they hit each other.
“Eeerr … Thanks Mrs Porter,” I said.
“This one is for the …” She started picking up keys and telling me what they were for. I looked at them, to me they all looked relatively the same — a key is a key is a key. I knew I would never be able to tell one from the other.
“Well I better go before it gets dark,” she said, getting up and heading inside. She went straight for a cupboard in the foyer. She opened the door and took out an umbrella from a pile of them, all in blacks and midnight blues. Why someone would need so many, I do not know. Perhaps, forgotten by previous tenants, in their haste to escape a ghost!
And before I knew it, she was gone. Off into the rain, leaving me with two cold cups of tea and a ghost story to go to bed with. I poured the tea d
own the sink and looked out into the misty rain one last time before night came and stole the land.
I walked to my room, clinking the keys as I went. That night, I noticed every breath the old house made. Every raindrop that fell on the roof. Every draft, every creak, every branch that scratched on a windowpane.
I curled up in the big, soft bed and turned on the lamp. I picked up the book I was reading at the time, Watership Down by Richard Adams. I stroked its front cover, longing for the solace I found within its pages.
The book took me away to another world. I forgot about the ghost of Mary and her pretty daughter, Henrietta. I forgot about my own ghosts too. I walked along side Hazel and Fiver and the other rabbits from the Sandleford Warren, and then, eventually the book dropped from my hands and I was asleep. But, I dreamed.
***
I am sitting on the patio watching my daughter play. She is playing with another little girl, but who is she? Where did she come from? My daughter takes the hand of the other little girl and they run into the orchard. “Gabby, Gabriella! Come back here please!” I stand up and run down the stairs. I can hear their laughter, but I cannot see them.
“Gabby!” I run across the grass and into the apple orchard, just as a fog comes down the mountain and rolls over the plantation. I make out the swishing, back and forth, of long hair, two little girls. Dark as night hair and next to it the bright golden of my own daughter’s.
I run after them. All I hear in return is giggling. “Gabby! Don’t leave me!” And then I remember, she already has …
I hear another voice, it is close but I cannot see where it is coming from. And then I see her. Running alongside me. In a long white dress, hair of pitch, eyes mournful.
“Henrietta!”
I start awake. I could still hear the echo of the name in my ears. As if it was real and close, like it was in my room. My heart thumped in my chest. Tears were in my eyes.
“Henrietta!”
I heard it again. Real that time. My body froze and I turned on the bedside lamp. Something was next to me on the pillow. Something small, that was not there before.
An Apple.
Part 2
It was hard to shake the feeling of no longer being alone, after that night. The night of the dream. Of the apple.
I had picked up the apple and thrown it out the bedroom window. The nightmare of my own daughter, Gabby, still fresh in my mind. And the image of the girl, Henrietta, taking her away.
It was the first dream I’d had, about my daughter, since her death. And my first “super natural experience”, although I did not believe that. Despite how much it frightened me.
I rang Mrs Porter in the morning. I thought that she had to be behind it. She must have paid someone to do it. It was probably good for reservations to have a ghost as a resident.
People must go and see if they too can hear crazy Mary screaming for her dead daughter!
“An apple you say?” Mrs Porter said. “I’ve never heard of that one before. Most people just hear her, or see her from a far, and even then, she has never been in the house. She must really like you!” She sounded honest. I felt my anger towards her fading. She was just too damned likable.
I thought about the apple sitting on the pillow next to me. It had reminded me of fairy tales were the evil witch offers a poisoned apple. “Or she really hates me,” I added.
“I don’t know about you, but I have never given an apple to anyone that I hated.”
“No, I guess not,” I said.
“So, maybe you should go thank Mary for the apple,” she said, seriously.
The concept sounded fair enough (if Mary was human), but despite what had happened, I could not shake my scepticism. I got off the phone to Mrs Porter, not before organising a time when we could meet up for tea and discuss everything.
I figured, all I needed to do was keep myself busy. I was determined to not let this effect my time away.
“Idle minds are the devil’s plaything,” I said to myself. “Or is that Idle hands?”
I wondered around the big, empty house, looking for something to keep me busy. I passed the old kitchen. An army of dirty teacups sat guarding the unused sink. Washing dishes, among other mindless tasks, were always great to get my creative juices flowing.
There was a window in front of me. I could, if I wanted to, stare out into the fog and watch the gum trees getting pummelled by the rain. They stood tall in the snow-white mist, like soldiers hiding in their own gun smoke. But I tried not to look out there. From my kitchen vantage point, I could also see out the back. Glass doors were down the hall to my left, and it was a direct line of sight from me, down the back steps and to the apple trees.
I began washing. Listening to the soft sounds of rain outside. The rain had continued to fall, never once letting up.
It was not long before movement drew my eyes up from the dirty dishwater. I looked down the hall and into the rain, to the orchard. The mist moved around freely, like clouds in the sky. Trees came and went as the white fog moved across the land. That was all that was there.
I resumed washing.
The movement again, my eyes couldn’t help but look up. It was an instant reaction. It had looked like someone was there on the grass. But nothing again.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be alone.”
I called Mrs Porter back and asked her to come over for a cup, told her that I felt like telling her all about my night sooner rather than later … just in case I forgot. Not that I really believed that I’d forget!
While I waited, I sat down out on the patio to try my luck at writing again. I thought, if I was directly in front of the apple trees, it would be less likely that my eyes would play tricks on me. I took my pen in my hand. Felt the smooth surface of the paper. I began to write. What I wrote was terrible, absolute rubbish! But it was something in semi-reasonable English.
And then I heard a noise, a twinkling, above the sound of the rain. I looked up to the source of the noise. To my right on the steps leading down onto grass, sat a pale ginger cat. It sat, drenched but regal looking, on the top step, just out of the rain.
I jumped at the sight of the cat and then I laughed at myself, at my own paranoia.
“Hey puss,” I called, and put my hand down to the ground, coaxing the creature to come to me. The cat stared at me for a moment, unblinking, and then it padded over to me, rubbing itself on my hand.
I picked up the cat and held it on my lap. “Aaww, you poor thing you are soaked through.” I saw that the cat had a collar. “What is your name, little mate?” He did not answer, but luckily, he had a nametag.
I held the small bell and nametag in my hand. The tag was red, and in the shape of an apple.
I felt a lump in my throat.
I turned the tag over in my fingers.
There was no phone number just a name.
Scabbers.
The cat stiffened and arched its back. It turned toward the farm and screeched. Hissing, it dove off my lap, scratching my arm as it went. It ran across the patio and scampered into the surrounding hedge.
I saw movement on the grass, but this time there was someone there. I couldn’t see her properly at first, just an outline. Then, as the mist moved about, it revealed her. Her white dress, ebony hair following over her shoulders, her arm reaching out towards me. My heart froze. There was no mistaking what I saw. But before I knew it, the mist had devoured her and she was gone. As if she blew away with it.
Tears welled in my eyes, I tried to speak, but nothing.
“Henrietta!” I heard her cry.
I got up and ran inside, locking the door. My heart thumped in my chest. I ran to my room. I had to get out. I was not staying in a haunted house.
Up the long hallway. I grabbed at the door handle. I rattled it. Nothing. I pushed the door and turned the handle again. The door just would not budge.
I looked behind me. To my horror, Mary stood at the door, a hand on the glass, her eyes were sunken and
sad and colourless. The mist followed her up onto the patio, it swirled around her. It flowed under the door. The glass frosted up around her hand. A rush of cold air fell over me.
I tried to open my bedroom door again, but it still wouldn’t open. “C‘mon,” I whispered, desperately.
I looked back at her. And she was gone. The mist was gone. But the hand print of frost remained.
“Henrietta!” I heard again. And my door opened.
I rushed in and closed the door. Locking it behind me. Immediately it began to rattle violently. I screamed and rushed to my bed and got under the covers.
There was movement at the windowsill. The cat stood there meowing at me, trying to get in. The rain ran down the window in streams.
It was too much. The door banging. The cat screaming and clawing at the window. The relentless rain, pouring and pouring and pouring.
I hid under my blankets like a child. I closed my eyes and cried. “GO AWAY! LEAVE ME ALONE!”
And it all stopped. Just like that.
Silence, except the pitter-patter of raindrops.
Then a polite knock at my door. “Cindy, It is Mrs Porter! I’m coming in.” The door opened and I came out from under my covers.
Mrs Porter stood there with a very worried look on her face.
“But I … I locked … I thought I locked it,”
I must have looked a fright, because she came to me. “Oh my dear! What has happened?” She threw her arms around me and held me tightly. She rocked back and forth. “Oh my you poor thing! You’re a mess!”
“… Mary … she was here, she was just …”
“Sssshhh, sshhh, ssshhhuusshh now my dear,” she said. She stroked my hair and continued rocking. This was not something I would normally allow. Mrs Porter was, after all, a stranger. But in the moment, I let her console me.
“I think it is best if I stay the night.”
I did not disagree, If I wasn’t going to leave, I definitely was not going to stay alone!
***
Mrs Porter snored next to me in the lounge room. We had opened up the only modern couch in the house — a sofa bed. We had watched movies and talked, I told her all about today and the previous night. After subtly moving a foot or so away from me, she told me about the other encounters. They were, as she had said before, nothing but glimpses, half heard words in the night, shadows behind the trees — Nothing as intimate as mine.