The Haunting of Sarah Carew

by Joseph H.J. Liaigh

Chapter Three

  A mist was she, a shadow

  And the moonlight

  And the starlight

  Passed through her.

  A month passed before I heard the music again. It was an eventful month. Florence had successfully argued that, as a remote area student, I should be allocated social bandwidth specifically to message my old friends in the city. At first this was great but over time it became more and more frustrating. It was never enough. Always, I was looking to the clock. Always, I was wanting longer. There was also another deeper problem. Each conversation made it ever more obvious how far apart our different lives were leading us.

  I took my frustration out on the garden, trying to bring some sort of order to the wilderness. My greatest achievement was to clear the old stone path down to the beach. This was a private beach, accessible only through our property. It was a broad, curving stretch of white sand, bounded to the north and south by tall cliffs of dark stone. There was a reef offshore where the swell from the Southern Ocean often broke with thunder and fury. By the time it got to the beach, however, the ocean swell had been reduced to, at most, a gentle shore break.

  If you wanted an exciting surf beach, you would have to go somewhere else: the rocks were too dangerous and the beach was too gentle. Still, it was a great place just to sit sometimes, when you needed a bit of quiet, a bit of time to sort things through.

  It was again around the time of the full moon when I next heard the music. I was exhausted from a day of hand feeding sheep and pruning azaleas and I was fast asleep when the music invaded my dreams with its gentle melancholy. I dreamt that I was standing at my parents’ grave. The sun was setting and it was growing darker. That’s it. Nothing else happened. It just got darker and the music filled the world. By the time I had dragged myself awake, I could recognise the closing bars of the piece I had heard before.

  I jumped out of bed and ran towards the piano room. The music finished as I was crossing the ball room and by the time I got to the drawing room, there was no trace of the girl, except perhaps for a flash of sliver/white near the false panelling. I ran over to the panelling and again, in the fading moonlight, searched all around for some sort of catch or opening. There was nothing. There was no door, I would have thought that the silver-white flash had just been my imagination except that I knew that someone had been playing the piano, that they weren’t there, and that they certainly hadn’t gone out the way I came in.

  I beat my fist against the panel in frustration but it remained, stubbornly, just a panel and it was clear that there was nothing else I could do that night, so I went back to bed. I didn’t sleep well, however. All night, the music kept playing in my head and a pale girl in a white nightgown kept wandering through my dreams.

  After breakfast the next day, I went down to the garden shed and took out a small crow bar and a hammer. I then went back to the drawing room, determined to find out what was behind the false panel.

  In the end the panel came away fairly easily, even if I did make a fair bit of noise getting it off, and there was a door behind it. This still didn’t solve the mystery, however. I couldn’t see any way that the panel could have been removed quickly, quietly and without tools, as the girl must’ve done. Also, the door behind the panel had a rusted latch and was clogged with dirt and debris. It didn’t look as if it had been used for many, many years.

  I pushed the door. It didn’t move. I forced the rusted latch and pushed hard. Something broke with a splintering sound and the door squealed open, the rusted hinges resisting every move. Behind the door was a small reading room. One whole wall was French windows reaching high to the ceiling and facing east to catch the morning sun, although these were now so covered in dirt and moss that they hardly let in any light at all. If the drawing room had been dusty and disused, this one took it to a whole new level. Not only was the whole room covered in a thick layer of dust but long cobwebs were strung, like weird Christmas decorations, across every wall, even hanging from the furniture. It was clear that no one had been in this room for a very long time. I stared at the room in disbelief. This couldn’t be where the girl had gone and yet it was. It had to be. I started to doubt myself. Perhaps the girl and the piano had been a dream. Maybe, in my overly emotional state, I was starting to imagine things, starting to see what wasn’t there. This might sound reasonable but I knew I hadn’t been dreaming and I found it impossible to believe that I was going mad. No, this was just a puzzle. A puzzle that I needed to solve.

  Apart from some bookcases along the wall, the only furniture was a small wooden table and an old cane chair. A book lay open on the table. I picked it up and blew the dust off its yellowing pages. It was a book of poetry. The poem on the facing page was headed XXIII and read:

  Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead

  Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?

  And would the sun for thee more coldly shine,

  Because of grave-damps falling round my head …

  This was getting a bit gloomy and morbid, so I skipped to the end. It didn’t get any better:

  As brighter ladies do not count it strange

  For love, to give up acres and degree,

  I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange

  My near, sweet view of heaven, for earth with thee.

  It was a gloomy poem, I thought, and one that well matched the room. I looked at the book’s cover and, while I hadn’t recognised the poem, I did recognise the title. It was ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ by Elizabeth Browning. I had had to study it in English earlier in the year. The module had gone on and on about how historically important Elizabeth was as a poet, about how she had blazed a trail for women even though she was married to the even more famous Robert Browning. Strangely though, the module had contained very little of her actual poetry. I thought I could see why.

  I was shocked, however, when I turned to the title page. I checked the dates again and checked to see if I had missed anything. I hadn’t. This was a first edition. This book, lying untended in this cobwebbed room, was probably worth thousands, tens of thousands, of dollars.

  “You Know, you’re probably the first person to enter this room for well over a hundred and fifty years.” I turned to find Florence standing in the doorway and looking at me with a hard to read expression. Annoyed, certainly, but more sad than angry. “It was walled up after she died, died there in that chair while reading that book. It was left just the way it was on that night all those years ago – until now, that is.”

  “After who died?” I asked, taking a step backwards from the chair.

  “Sarah, of course,” Florence replied. “This was her favourite room. Her mother couldn’t cope, not with losing her husband and her daughter so close together. She just walled up the room and sold the house. That’s how we came to own it. Your great, great, great, great, great grandfather took the opportunity to buy the place at a bargain price. He left this room alone, however, as did every succeeding generation – until now.”

  I put the book down, feeling a bit guilty. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know it was even here. I certainly didn’t know it was some sort of shrine to a dead girl. I was just looking for the piano player. I know she came this way …” Florence was still looking at me with that strange expression, as if I was missing something obvious and she was waiting for me to catch on.

  “What?” I asked. She raised her eyebrows and it suddenly dawned on me what she was hinting at. “No! No! No!” I said. “There’s no way the dead girl is the piano player. That’s just stupid. The dead are gone, just … gone. There’s no such thing as ghosts!”

  Florence gave only the slightest hint of a smile. “Life and death may be a good deal more complicated than you imagine,” she said. “Young Sarah was, by all accounts, a lovely girl; quiet, gentle and a very good young pianist. The piano in the drawing room was bo
ught for her. Her father doted on her. She was the joy of his life. She was never strong, however, and when she was about your age she developed serious lung problems, probably the first stages of TB. Can you imagine how her parents must’ve felt? The fear that would’ve gripped their hearts? In those days, medicine was primitive and that disease, consumption they called it, was most often a death sentence.”

  “Look, I’m sure this is a sad and tragic story,” I said angrily, “and I’m sorry she died young but people die all the time: in war, from disease, from natural disasters … in road accidents. They die and they’re gone. They don’t come back!”

  Florence continued on as if she hadn’t heard me. “It was a winter day. Sarah was ill, as she often was, and she was sitting in this room to catch the morning sun. She asked her father for some trinket or other, or perhaps it was for some sweet. I really don’t know. Anyway, her father rode off to get it from the town. It was a foolish thing to do. The town was miles away and there was a storm coming. His horse was a fine animal, fast, but high spirited and skittish –“

  I could see where this was going. “Let me guess.” I interrupted. “He didn’t make it home.”

  “No,” Florence said. “He didn’t. There was no bridge over Kelly’s Creek back then and his body was found caught in some tree branches downstream from the creek crossing. They thought at the time that his horse must’ve panicked crossing the creek; maybe something floating in the flood or maybe just the force of the flood itself. We’ll never know. Anyway, he was thrown and he died. In the middle of the storm, the panicked horse made its own way home without its rider.”

  I watched Florence in silence for a moment while she collected her thoughts. I thought I could see where this was going.

  “Sarah blamed herself?” I suggested.

  “Yes, she did,” Florence confirmed. “Already weak with fever, when the search parties started to come back without finding him, she became distressed beyond reason. She ran out into the tail end of the storm to find him. Still dressed in her nightgown and screaming over and over again for her father.”

  “So, she also died in the storm?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Florence said. “Although, it’s a wonder that she didn’t. She must’ve become lost and disoriented. They found her down on the beach a little later, sobbing uncontrollably. The storm had passed and the night had turned clear and cold and she was soaking wet from the rain. You can guess what happened next.”

  “She caught pneumonia and died,” I said.

  “Yes. It was quick. She died less than a week later, still grieving the death of her father. She died sitting in that chair.” She pointed to the cane chair. “Wrapped up in blankets and watching the full moon rise over the sea.”

  “While reading some very gloomy poetry,” I said.

  Florence shrugged. “Who could blame her? The last active thing she did was play out her grief and her guilt on the piano. According to the story, she played music so sad that no one who heard it could ever forget it. They say she plays it still, every full moon. Unlike many such stories, this one is true. You know it’s true because you’ve heard her play. Why couldn’t you leave it alone? This is dangerous. People have been lost to that music.”

  I wasn’t buying it. In fact, I was getting annoyed by the whole silly story. “Is that why the doors were locked?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Always, at the full moon. Always, until now, that is. Just as, since that day, no one has ever entered this room – until now.”

  I dropped the book back on the small table. “Nice story,” I said tersely, “but I don’t believe in ghosts. The dead are gone. You put them in the ground and they rot away. They don’t come back.” I pushed past her into the drawing room and out into the garden.

  I spent the afternoon wildly attacking some blackberry bushes. I was angry, furious. It wasn’t a rational anger. It was something that came from deep in my gut and expanded to fill my chest, until I thought I would explode with anger. My head was full of all those images I had tried so hard to forget: images of my Mum and Dad lying, broken, on a hospital trolley or cold and stiff at the funeral director’s parlour; images of two coffins being lowered into the grave and of a sad priest who didn’t know what to say and who at least had the sense to say nothing.

  I don’t know why, I still didn’t believe in ghosts and I should’ve been able to just laugh it off, but the thought of some dead girl coming back to play the piano just filled me with a wild rage. The blackberries took the brunt of it, my scythe cutting through them as if it were death’s own.

  In the end, I had to stop. I was exhausted, my hands were red raw, and my arms and legs were laced with cuts from the blackberry’s thorns. Even then, I didn’t go back to the house. Instead, I stumbled down to the beach and just sat there, looking out at the waves. I didn’t know if I was still angry. I didn’t really know what I was feeling. Then, suddenly, I was crying, crying like a little child. I wanted to call out to my mother but I knew she couldn’t come. I was alone. The dead don’t come back.

  Even after I had cried myself out, I just sat there. All that anger was now replaced by a dull, dead feeling. The sun began to set behind me and the afternoon turned into evening. A chill crept into the still air and the moon began to rise over the sea in front of me. Still, I just sat there.

  I don’t know how, but at some point I became aware that I was not alone. I turned to see her standing there, about twenty meters further down the beach. She was facing out to sea and the wind seemed to blow her thin nightgown around her, even though the night was still. The moon shone silver bright on her hair and tears glistened on her cheeks. She was beautiful but her beauty had a weird translucent quality. I mean that literally. I could kind of make out the shapes, like faint shadows, of the beach and cliffs behind her. Although, as the moonlight got brighter, she seemed to become more solid. She always remained, however, pale and silver in the moonlight.

  It was strange but, at first, I didn’t feel scared. There was a ghost, an impossible thing, standing there, being blown by a wind I didn’t feel, and yet I wasn’t scared. It may be that I was so emotionally drained that I was now unable to feel anything at all. It may also be that she seemed to be about my age, that she was beautiful, and she didn’t seem even vaguely scary. She just seemed sad. Did I mention that she was beautiful?

  It’s more likely, however, that I wasn’t afraid simply because I couldn’t process her presence, even though I could see her. I couldn’t feel scared because my mind wouldn’t accept that she was possible.

  When she started to turn towards me, however, I started to feel, not fear exactly, but a sort of deep, urgent dread, rising in my chest. It was worse than fear. It was like a panic deep in the centre of my being. I wanted to run but I was frozen in place. My heart was racing as her moonlight bright eyes turned to look directly at me and she let out a wail that would’ve done justice to the best movie special effects guys.

  “Nooo!” she cried, her cry rising in pitch and volume until it was a skull shattering scream. My fear was gone. I could think of nothing but that sound reverberating in my head and I had to clamp my hands over my ears and was bent double in pain.

  Then she was simply gone and I was left looking at a few wisps of silver mist, slowly dissipating in the moonlight. Up at the house, I could faintly hear the sound of a piano weeping into the quiet night.