True Story All Soul’s Night
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It wasn’t as bad as my father had made out walking past Murlog graveyard in the dead of night, I thought. Never worry, the dead won’t harm ye.” George McLucas, who lived in the cottages on the way to Ballindrait Train Station used to tell us children after our father had scared the bejesus out of us.
I wasn’t so sure.
Why had I waited for the last dance in the orchid Ballroom in Lifford and missed my lift. My ‘date’ had soon changed his mind about walking me home when he realised I lived two good miles out the road.
Safely past the graveyard I slowed a little then speeded up again as I passed the chapel set in darkness and the bushes behind the stone wall in the gardens of Reverend Bluegrass’s house took on strange shapes. I push on towards Mc Dougal’s farm and the thicket of egg-bushes we used to push each other into when we were sent to the Holy Hour on a Sunday evening.
Something rustled in the deep foliage. A rat, I told myself. Then something made a jangling sound close to me!
I took to my heels and didn’t stop until I was at Miss Blair’s ivy covered house at Houston’s lane about 300 hundred yards from home. Or so the sign advertising petrol, stuck into the side of the road just before I got to Throne’s Lane told me.
I topped the short hill and breathed a sigh of relief. Our cottage was in clear sight. Then I remembered my father’s stories about the ghost of a woman all dress in white who was said to walk the hedgerows along that road on All Souls’ Night. I took to my heels again.
Someone had forgotten to turn off the ESSO petrol sign on the high pole at the end of the forecourt of the shop. It creaked in the wind. Then just as I reached it, the bulb inside it flickered, dimmed and went out plunging the place into pitch darkness. s just as I reached it.
The door banged behind me as I flew in the house and up to my bed.
If there was something there it could stay outside
I’d be in time for my lift home next week.
Gemma Hill November 2018 copyright
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