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The Cry of the Banshee

a ghost story

For the first several years of my life I lived in a house on Didcot Lane, and only came to Mainwaring Castle when the time came for me to start school. That was ironic really, since Didcot Lane had a perfectly adequate schoolhouse on the end of it, where Mainwaring Castle was far from any source of conventional education, or civilisation at all, it sometimes seemed. It was served by villagers from thereabouts, but these people were never resident, making what in winter would be treacherous as well as long trips through the mire just to clean house, serve meals, then make the absurd journey home again.

I’m afraid that in my childhood I was rather cruel to these people, who were merely good and straightforward Christians, country people unwise in the ways of cosmopolitan types and understandably wary of them. To a child, though, they seemed little more than red-faced rustics, the women hefty and silent, the men prone to bursts of anger in a heavy dialectic tongue I couldn’t understand. There was a window from the kitchen (or one of them) that looked out over the courtyard where the servants would tether their horses, and before my education truly began I would sit there leaning on the sill and stare at them, the villagers, making jokes to myself about them.

Not that I was some Little Lord, you understand. We were of the same social class; the house on Didcot Lane was one of those tenements you see in black-and-white films these days, with an outhouse, soot-faced menfolk, and (you suspect) a room with a coal-filled bathtub somewhere. Quite how my mother ended up there I’ve never been sure, though it probably had something to do with a bad marriage and disapproving parents. It usually did. I never knew my father, though I traced him a few years ago and had my suspicions as to his worthlessness confirmed. What did my mother see in him? Perhaps he was handsome in his youth.

My mother provides the fondest memories of my youth before the education began, before Mainwaring Castle and the terrible inheritance it would pass down. I remember her singing and dancing in a pub not far from Berkeley Square, her washerwoman’s uniform replaced with a feathery dress that she wore for what she called ‘going out’. The pianist by the bar would steal glances at her, as would all the menfolk, and sometimes they’d buy me lemonades just to get on her good side.

In the gossip pages of the time there was a scandal about an aristocrat’s son, a playboy, who’d been seen cavorting with common women in the East End. There was a sketch of him that I’ve always remembered. It caricatured him as a drunken gadabout with a protruding, toothy grin, and the girl he was with as a simpering yet sophisticated ‘it’ girl. She was dressed like a flapper and underneath the sketch a caption referred to her as ‘Master Something-or-Other’s sparrow in the gutter.’ That’s how I remember my mother, as a sparrow in the gutter.

We stayed together for a time at the Castle, but were inevitably separated. She looked at me in those first few months with a sadness and regret too deep for a child to fathom. She’d start to cry, then realise what she was doing and put a record on, or take a book of fairy tales down from the shelf and read to me. To this day her loss is like an open wound, and I still can’t listen to certain records. (Thankfully, the music has gone out of style, just as the world of Mainwaring Castle was going out of style even then.)

Not long after my mother disappeared from my life altogether (though I didn’t realise that at the time) I was led into the study of Dr Andrew Rawley. He was the owner of the Castle but I hadn’t met him before, nor been told that he was the one who’d called me there. He was a pleasant man of about sixty-five, with exquisitely managed white hair that washed in waves around his head so that his pate looked like a rocky island. He seemed like a kindly schoolmaster, and I remember feeling surprise when I learned that my mother was his only child, and that he’d never kept the company of children.

He sat me in a large armchair whose arms I could just about reach and offered me an ornate rosewood box filled with colourful boiled sweets. I popped one in my mouth and he leaned back in his chair. Birds flew by the window, and if you listened you could hear the sea crashing into the bluff. ‘What do you see when you look around this room?’ he said. I took in my surroundings. It was a large study, more like a parlour, and there were curio cabinets alternated with bookshelves along the left and right walls. The cabinets were filled with figurines and trinkets.

The figurines were of men in robes and other religious vestments, with arms raised to the sky or charming serpents with sticks. One held a crystal ball and another was posed with a dagger, suspended above an altar to which a lamb was bound. The books, I noticed, had words like ‘grimoire’ on their spines and included King James’ Daemonologie. There were also law books from the 17th century and a volume by someone referred to as ‘the Mad Arab’, which I supposed had something to do with the Arabian Nights. I had little idea of what any of it meant.

Dr Rawley explained the history of Mainwaring Castle, how it had been owned by an aristocratic family who allowed its central courtyard to be used as a place of execution for witches. ‘Witches, Harold, were hung, not burned alive, like so much false history would have it. The English are sometimes more merciful than you might think’ he said with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I know of only two convicted witches who were burned, and they were strangled to death first, to spare them the agony. And the audience their screams.’ By now he’d stood up and was pacing the study with a lit pipe stuck in his mouth. ‘Their bodies had to be burned because these witches in particular had used their magic against their husbands, which was treated as a slight against God Himself. History has not been kind to disobedient women, Harold. An intolerance with which I can sympathise.’ He added the last sentence quietly, though well within my hearing.

‘Did you see any witches die?’ I asked. He burst out laughing and slapped me on the back. ‘I’m not that old, you cheeky little blighter.’ He settled himself in his chair again. ‘No, the last witch to be hung at Mainwaring died over two-hundred-and-fifty years ago. Her name was Ida Mullins. She was a widow twice over and had a good bit of farmland to her name. According to court documents her grandson said that he saw her consorting with a barnyard owl. When the witch-finder came he alleged that an invisible presence came into his room at the inn and rested its claws on his chest. In a state of panic he saw Ida Mullins, grinning from ear to ear, in the corner of the room. And on her shoulder was an owl. That, Harold, was her familiar, a demon in animal form sent by the devil to do a witch’s bidding.’

He took me to the central courtyard. It was a bright and breezy April day with a sky like a painted egg. I wondered what my old friends on Didcot Lane were doing. Last year we were all bussed into the countryside by the Fresh Air Project, which aimed to give city children a day away from the smog to restore their lungs. I needed no such project now, I thought. To the back of the courtyard was erected a twenty-foot gallows. Rawley had had it commissioned as an exact replica of the one from which the witches were hung, and he grasped one of its long oaken legs with pride.

‘When Ida Mullins was brought here’ he said, ‘she would have needed two men to carry her up the steps.’

‘Why couldn’t she have just walked up?’

‘There are many ways to get a confession from a witch. One of them is to exhaust her. After what happened at the inn the witch-finder and his assistant took Ida to a barn and made her stand on a stool. All night. She was taken from the county gaol after evensong, stripped naked, and stood there in the cold and the dark, with only the moon in the hayloft to lighten the scene. The court documents are very clear about this stage of the interrogation.’

As he narrated the tragedy of Ida Mullins his eyes glowed with a feeling that even at my tender age I recognised and found grotesque. When I remember Dr Rawley I think of those aged colonels you’d sometimes see, back in Empire days, sat on the verandas of King’s Clubs across Jamaica and India. They’d smoke their pipes through yellow, jagged, syphilitic teeth, their jowls as red as roasted pork, their eyes rheumy like the cores of boiled eggs, and with choking voices tell you dirty stories about native girls. Behind all his wealth and education and arcane expertise, that’s what Dr Rawley was: a dirty old man.

It was as we stood in the shadow of that gallows that my grandfather explained why he’d called me to Mainwaring Castle, that edifice clinging to the edge of the bluff like a fingernail. When someone dies in violent circumstances, he said, they leave behind a residue, an imprint of what a priest would call their soul. In the case of the witches executed at Mainwaring Castle, they would have made quite an impression on the land. My grandfather opened a leather bag that he’d brought with him and showed me several occultic instruments. These included a parchment disc with nymphs frolicking nude between the bars of the pentagram drawn on it, a ceremonial blade with a black handle, a metallic wand, and a goblet.

My education began on that bright summer’s day between the walls of the courtyard, the sound of the sea crashing into the bluff, and my grandfather telling me what a banshee was. ‘A female spirit whose cry presages death’ he said. ‘There are few sounds more terrible than the cry of the banshee, and it’s my belief that banshees are what those dead women became, executed here, trapped in this castle. But the men of our family - and that includes you, Harold - have great power, and we can channel the energy imprinted on this place by those women into our own magic. We can control it, and through it become stronger.’

The humour evaporated from his countenance and he looked at me more seriously than I’d ever seen anyone look at anything. ‘The Rawley men are warlocks, Harold. The new religion has denied us our birthright, but we can reclaim it. There is no resurrection, no salvation, and we are not bound by prophets or commandments. You don’t realise it now, but what this means is that we can take what we want from this supposedly fallen world.’ He grinned, the humour returning. ‘Money. Liquor. Women. You name it. Every day you and I will come to this courtyard and meditate, and we will take from this place of execution what was wasted on Ida Mullins: her magic.’ He took my hand and cut it with the blade, letting blood pour into the goblet. Once the pain subsided I imagined my mother watching us from one of the windows high above, opening her mouth to make the cry of the banshee.

My education lasted into my teenage years. If I told you half of what I learned you wouldn’t believe me. If I told you that I saw my grandfather, sixty-odd and potbellied, fly across the entrance hall at a height of twenty feet, you’d think I was ready for the butterfly nets. If I said that I found him attended by nymphs in his bedchamber, snorting and smacking his lips like a hog as they fed him grapes, their nakedness made paler by a waxing moon, you’d call for a Dr Freud to diagnose me with a complex named after some character from Greek myth. It was the strangest period of my life, and like the banshee it presaged death, though I didn’t know it at the time and assumed that it would last forever. That someday I’d be that dirty old man eating grapes, having called on a grandson to inherit the family business.

But one night when I was thirteen I woke to a distant sound of weeping. It insisted itself upon me. It sounded frail and elderly, like the cry of a parent who’s been rendered child-like by the onset of dementia. Though uneasy I climbed out of bed and followed the sound towards a hallway which overlooked the central courtyard. I looked out a window and what I saw has stayed in my mind ever since, as permanently lodged as a tumour.

Atop the gallows was my grandfather, Dr Rawley, surrounded by women in old-style dress who were somehow ephemeral and transparent. There were about ten of them in total. Dr Rawley knelt among them, head lowered and body wracked with violent weeping. He looked up just once at the woman stood by his side, and as he did I saw his face, formerly plump and red but now emaciated. Cheeks drawn inwards from the bones that framed them, like the walls of a tent in a harsh wind. The woman stood beside him had a barnyard owl on her shoulder. A noose was tightened around Rawley’s neck and he started to thrash and panic as his grinning female executioners drew him up to his feet. I jumped when a lever was thrown and my grandfather fell through the trapdoor, his neck cracking like a wishbone in the unblinking light of the full moon.

The woman who in that moment I knew was Ida Mullins looked up at me while my grandfather twisted in the wind. She smiled, wrinkled face brightened by girlish mirth and untidy white hair in strands. She opened her mouth wide and let out a cry that almost rendered me deaf, a screeching war chant which spurred her owl from its perch towards me. I ran, down the corridor, down the steps to the entrance hall, through the kitchen, out the servants’ door, across the yard, down the steep and winding, muddy hill, and so towards the village.

I awoke the next day in a police station, having apparently collapsed in the village square and been found shortly before the chill would have taken me by the vicar, who to my good fortune was an insomniac prone to walking at night. I believe it was surmised that Rawley, always an eccentric and unpredictable figure, had taken his own life. His body was cut from the gallows and buried in a grave outside the local cemetery, which forbade suicides. ‘May he rest less troubled in death than in life’ is the legend that marks his tombstone. A legend his daughter deserves more, I thought bitterly and secretly on being shown it by the vicar. He’d take me in as his charge for the next couple of years, but as soon as I turned fifteen I returned to London and took a job as a butcher’s boy. When I turned twenty-one I inherited more money than I’d ever need from the Rawley estate.

I spent years looking for my mother but never found her. I think I know what happened to her, but try not to dwell on it. Whatever did happen, I know she’s at peace now, and as the years go by that’s all the information I need. What else is there? As for myself, I’ve been married and divorced twice, worked a standard job in book-selling for thirty-two years before retiring, and now spend my twilight surrounded by friends who see me as nothing more than an East End survivor. I’ve never wanted children, which is likely what ended at least my first marriage. I’ve led an unremarkable life, which is what I always wanted ever since that night when I was thirteen. That, and to never again hear anything like the cry of the banshee.
Written by The_Silly_Sibyl (Jack Thomas)
Published
Author's Note
This story was recently declined for publication by a magazine, so I'm posting it here. I may remove it if I decide to submit it to a different publication. (Most magazines ask that your work not be available elsewhere.)
All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.
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