THE WHITE LADY                      

 

 

 

              The white car ghosted to a stop outside Pat’s Tom’s cottage on a high road overlooking the Blasket Sound.  A tubby man dressed in white suit, got out of the car on the passenger side and wheezing chestily, crossed the boreen to the white-washed cottage where he stared through slitted eyes  up at Pat’s Tom standing in the open door.

 “You Pat’s Tom?  Yeah?  Well me an’ Helen here,” and he waved his cigarette back towards the woman in the driving seat. “Muh wife, we wanna spend a while over in the Island.  We, uh..we’ve bin told that you gotta house for rent there an’ kin take us over.”

Pat’s Tom straightened his long length and looked resignedly over the man’s head

 at the sullen mass of the island resting in the Atlantic Ocean.  It passed his understanding

 why two rich Yanks, who could be at home, living in luxury, would want to pass any

 time in that God-forsaken rock.

 He sighed deeply.  “Ye might as well come into the kitchen.” And stepped slowly

 ahead of them back into the house. Helen, a small spare blond in her early 50’s, sat in the only other chair and glanced keenly about the room.  The walls were whitewashed and bare, the furnishings minimal, but she admired its spartan freshness.

Observing her from his chair beside the stove, old Mike Sharkey came to the conclusion

 that she might be made of steel.  He wasn’t far from the truth.  Helen, in her fifty-two

 years, had worn out three husbands, all dentists, all deceased.  Trevor was her first artist, a real weakling; she didn’t think he would last long.

      Trevor, standing by the window, popped another cigarette into his mouth and

 looked down into the Sound. Cigarettes were Trevor’s main props in the business of looking tough.  He always held them in the corner of his gashy mouth and the muscular action involved screwed the

 rest of his features into a series of near horizontal lines, his eyes became slits and he liked

 to think that this made him look mean and tough. But the little quiff of blond hair falling over his

forehead,  made him look like a cherubic choir-boy and gave him away.  He didn’t look tough at all. Neither did he feel tough right now, the mere sight of the sullen gray sea made his stomach heave and he turned back to Pat’s Tom.

“Uh..which house is yours Tom?”

 Tom obediently pointed it out, looming over Trevor as he did so.  It was the highest house in the village, a two-storied cottage with yellow-painted window frames, at the top of a green road. It was known locally as the Yellow House.

Trevor took out his camera and studied the area through the telephoto lens. He had seen it all before, but he had read somewhere that it was good bargaining practice and made the other guy uneasy, to silently study the subject of the bargain.

That was all wasted on Pat’s Tom.

“What d’yeh want out there for at this time of the year?”  He asked, “sure it’s a

 miserable oul’ place at the best of times.’

  “Are you a native of the island?”  Helen asked.  She admired Tom’s tall spare

 toughness.

 “That I am.”  He replied.  He waved his hand at old Sharkey lounging in an armchair by the

 stove.  “But there’s the man now, could tell you about the island, who spent the most of

 his life there and wouldn’t spend another night, if yeh paid him, no more than meself.”

 

 

              But Sharkey had nothing to say.  He didn’t like them.  He thought Helen looked

 like a rich witch and he wouldn’t have swapped a mongrel cur for Trevor, nor could he

 understand what it was possessed them to be going about in identical white suits that

 would put the two eyes out of yeh with the glare.

  He didn’t want anything to do with them.

  Sharkey dreaded the thought of being stranded in the island for the night.  The

 place of his so-called happy childhood now filled his dreams with fear. He remembered the nights of rampage, the agonized screams, as the demon, known in English as the White Lady, came searching through the village for a weak soul and invariably found one. It was no wonder that they had all migrated to the mainland. They couldn’t get away soon enough.

“OK!”  Helen said, in her brisk New England no nonsense voice.  It was time to

 take charge.  “My husband likes adventure and strange places, so we are willing to put up

 with whatever discomforts the island has to offer.  We’ll stay……how long Trevor, how

 long do you want to stay honey?”

     Trevor didn’t want to stay at all.  True, it had been his idea to stop a while in

 Europe’s most westerly village, maybe collect a few unusual beer mats to show the boys

 back home.  But that was before he learned that the island had been abandoned in the

 fifties.  No wonder Helen had agreed so quickly.  She had probably known that all along.

     “Uh…look honey, mebbe these guys are right about this being……like…uh, a

 bad time.  We don’t wanna go risking their lives for a whim  I……”

     “Nonsense Trevor!  I’m quite sure that Pat’s Tom and Scarface here will be

 delighted to take us over….for the right price.”  She studied them briefly for a moment

 before mentioning a figure that brought Sharkey upright in his chair.

     Trevor turned and looked miserably down on the three-mile stretch of broken

 water separating the island from the mainland.  In the middle of the channel he could see

 the race, an extremely fast stream, combed by towering waves.  More than ever it made

 him want to puke. No seaman Trevor, to him the green and white sea resembled an alien monster

hungry for humans. The race with its whirling roiling green and white waves resembled, in his frightened mind, a giant anaconda hungry for his blood.

Sharkey interrupted the negotiations briefly, “ Ask her why they wear them white suits?” He said to Tom in his best English.

Smiling brilliantly, Helen successfully concluded the deal with the two men.They were to have the house for a month, provisions to be depositAed on the island jetty weekly and weather permitting, they would go across  the following morning.

“Just see you get us across there tomorrow.”

Wearing white was only one of her present foibles.  She had invented the practice just to take Trevor

down another peg.  His previous habit of dressing tough had been too ridiculous; what

was he after all, but a forty-five year old fat boy?  She preferred to treat him just like an

 expensive dog.  Well-groomed and on a leash. Meanwhile Mike Sharkey had changed his mind about taking them over. Money talks and it spoke volumes to old Mike who was subsisting on a state pension. But he could still have his fun and to that end he was putting the fear of God into Trevor.  “……that white wather has a rare tashte for men and boats aye!  It scours through the sound at five or six miles an hour.

One of the captings of a fishing vessel told me so.  Many was the stranger..............”

“Come along dear,” Helen interrupted.  “We have a lot of packing to do.  Thank you Thomas, and please tell Scarface to cheer up, we won’t be any trouble to him at all.”

When they had gone Pat’s Tom told Sharkey what she had called him.  He spoke

in Gaelic as they always did amongst themselves. Like many another old man

Sharkey only heard what he wanted and his understanding of English was spotty.

“That witches whore!” Sharkey roared, kicking out at the wall.  “May her soul

 fly into the devils arms.”

  It was a balmy October morning, the sea was calm and the ferry took half an hour

 to get to the island.  The two boatmen hardly stepped ashore and merely lifted the stores

 and luggage onto the edge of the crumbling island jetty.  Pat’s Tom pointed out the

 yellow house high above, then he turned the launch about and set off back to the

 mainland, leaving them to get on with it.

 When they were safely on the other side of the race Sharkey put the glasses on

 them.  He could see Trevor laden with luggage toiling upward through the spectral

 remains of the dead village and he shuddered again at the mere thought of spending

 another night there.

 By the time Trevor arrived with the last of the supplies Helen had a good fire going and a

 kettle starting to sing on the hob.

 “Took your time.”  She greeted him and there was dry amusement in her glance as

 she took in his sweat-strained condition.  “Might as well chop some wood since you’re all

 het up.  It’s through there.”  She hitched her thumb over her shoulder at a small door in

 the rear.

 “Hey!  Come on!” he yelped, but knowing it wouldn’t do any good.  “How about a

 smoke an’ a cuppa cawfee?”

      It took him an hour to chop enough wood for the evening and during that time in the small room he went over in his mind the various ways in which he might kill her. The room had a strange vaguely haunted atmosphere as if there was someone with him in the room. Several times he interrupted his work just to stare around the room, but it was just a bare room with some broken furniture around and about. Nothing evil about broken chairs and a three-legged table, he thought. No the evil thing was that white-suited bitch outside and he wanted badly to kill her.

He would have liked to use the blunt axe for the job, but as an avid reader of crime mags and thrillers, he knew that there would be too much blood and blood talks. It would be so much better if she just disappeared and how would he arrange that?

The blunt axe, the smell of sheep dung, if that’s what it was, mingled with the smell of his own sweat, helped make up his mind. Or maybe it was that strange stone, which inexplicably now lay

on the left hand sleeve of his coat and he would almost swear that it hadn't been there before.

He picked it up and almost dropped it again as a powerful tingle like a muscular shock ranged up his arm.

It looked like a shrunken head, that same shape and he could, with a little effort make out an eye cavity, a scarred nose and a mouth. The left side of the head was misshapen so badly that the features had been almost  rubbed out as if it had received a heavy blow. It looked evil to Trevor, but he liked the way it fitted into his hand and it gave him a wonderful sense of power.

It was sometime after two when they finished lunch.  Helen changed into her

 white skirt and that was the signal to Trevor that they were going ‘walkies’.  If he was

 ever slow to accompany her she would call him with that one word, just as if he were a

 dog.  The one time he had ventured to complain she had said, ‘A lazy man is far worse

than a dog .’

The front part of the island faced east toward the mainland.  They ascended out of

 the deserted  village, Helen leading, on a steeply climbing green road which headed south

 at first but gradually swung around to the west.

 Halfway along this road, out of sight of the immediate mainland where the cliff at

 the road’s edge dropped sharply away to the sea Helen came across a very strange plant

 clinging to the edge.  She lifted her skirt above her knees and carefully knelt, bringing her

 head out over the edge the better to examine her find.  It looked like a kind of thrift.

 Trevor, shambling along behind, breathing noisily through his open mouth and

 displaying his snag teeth, was holding his new found rock. He loved the way it fitted so

nicely into his hand and it was looked like an old worn shrunken human skull.  All the

features were there although it did look as if the left eye socket had received a nasty crack. 

Maybe, he thought, that’s what had killed….killed….killed, the word began to echo in his brain

but slowly, subtly it changed from past tense into present.  “Kill!” it said.  “Kill!   Kill!  Kill!”

His whole body stiffened and his head began to swing from side to side, the eyes

fixed, like an automaton., searching blindly, until like a searchlight beam they became

fixed on Helen kneeling by the edge of the cliff.  Then his whole arm jerked and pulsed

and the head in his hand said.  “Kill!  Kill!  Kill!””

In the last split-second of her life Helen turned her head.  All she saw was the

swift grey blur of the descending rock before it smashed into her left eye socket,

knocking her over the cliff edge four-hundred feet down into the rock–strewn Atlantic ocean.

The stone head followed and very nearly Trevor too as he teetered on the edge,

 dangerously off balance.  He made a mad snatch at the strange growth that had attracted

Helen’s last interest and pulled himself back onto the green road.

When he had recovered breath and nerve he crawled back to the edge and looked down.

There was no sign of her.  She was gone forever.  He found it hard to believe that she

 was really dead.  She had given him five years of hell and now he hoped it was to hell he

 had sent her.  For all eternity.

He headed back down to the village.  There was no time to lose.  He had to alert

the authorities right away.

Half-an-hour later he was still trying to get the emergency fire started.  There was

too much damp green wood in there.  Outside the house he found the can of paraffin he

had dragged up that morning and some old magazines Helen had dumped.  These got the

fire started and just at the right time too, another hour and it would be dark.  He didn’t

want to be on this island then.

The mere thought gave him the shivers and he cast an apprehensive glance toward

 the point on the green road where it disappeared around the side of the hill.  He half

 expected Helen’s white figure to appear, bound for revenge.

After a while he had the fire burning nicely, the green wood giving off lots of

black smoke.  He had what he thought was a bright idea, to make smoke signals and he

headed back to the house for a blanket, but when he got there he just couldn’t force himself to go in.

What if Helen?......he hardly dared think it……sitting amongst her things……she

would look at him……and the look on her face……Oh!!!!......that baleful eye.

Down in the local pub Paud put the creamy pint down on the counter and looked

across it with a friendly. “A great day entirely!  Thanks be to God!”  He lowered his voice confidentially, concern darkening the smile.  “The forecast has squalls gusting to fifty knots in the wesht.”

 He dropped his voice still lower.

 “You can see through the back window Tom, the signal fire is burning in the island.”

Tom looked through Paud’s glass at the fire; there was nothing else to see apart from the indistinct whitish forms of sheep as they meandered about searching for food.  The

 evening shadow had fallen on the village and though he thought he could see some white

 figures he couldn’t make out any human figure.

“May the devil ate their souls!”  he cursed.  “Didn’t I know they were bad news to

 me the minute I clapped eyes on them.”  He took a long draw on his pint.  “Well I

 suppose there’s nothing for it only to get in the Guards.”  He was no friend to the police.

 “Yerra then,” said Paud.  “You might have a hard job before you.  For the phone is

out of order all day long and Guard Moroney is away in Tralee.”

Finally Tom decided that he would have to get Sharkey and the two of them

would go over in the canoe, meaning a curragh, to see what was the trouble.

Sharkey, when he was found, had all sorts of reasons for why Tom and himself

 should not go across; they ranged from rheumatism in his back to the tide being wrong.

 But the main reason and it applied to them both, was superstitious fear of losing their

 immortal souls.

They both knew and firmly believed that the island was haunted by a demon. 

 This demon took the form of a woman dressed in white, preying on the souls of those unlucky enough to meet her in or about the island.

At about the time they started out from the mainland, Trevor, just returned from

an abortive search for more wood, stood irresolute beside the dying fire wondering if he

could bring himself to enter the house and get the wood he had chopped earlier.  He

didn’t want the fire to die out; but neither did he want to return to the house which reeked

of Helen's presence, he nerves wouldn’t stand it.

The twilight lasted a long time as the day drifted slowly, imperceptibly, into night.

It was that part of the twilight when inanimate things seem to move and merge, stretch

 and groan, released from the discipline of the sun and the sea mimics the sound of human

 voices on the shore.

 The unearthly shriek of a bird startled him and he glanced nervously over his

 shoulder at the hill.  A terrific shock hammered his heart and he actually clutched his

 chest as he stared terror-struck as a white figure came around the hill and began slowly

 descending.

“Helen!”  he said in a strangulated whisper.”  “Oh God no!  No!”  And turning, he

 plunged down along the road leading to the tiny harbour.

 While foraging for wood earlier he had noticed the old glass-fiber punt and had

 thought that if it came to the worst, he might make it back to the mainland in her.  There

 was even an old cracked paddle underneath.

 He almost fell into the boat in his haste to get it down the slip and into the water.

 The tide was just on the rise and he had to drag the boat out into the channel before there

 was water enough to take him clear of the island.

 

              He paddled like mad, kneeling in the bow like a Red Indian and then the main

 current caught the punt.  Suddenly, he found himself in amongst the giant race rollers,

 enormous waves that alternately towered above him and next moment carried him high.

That was when he discovered that the punt was making water dangerously fast

and was already half full.

Then as he stood in the flickering twilight surrounded by the ominously hissing

waves, up to his knees in water and with no possible hope of rescue, he did the only thing

 left to do; he began to scream.

 The screech of the oars and the slapping of the waves against the canoe were

 comforting sounds to old Sharkey.  Even though he knew that each pull on the double

 oars brought him nearer to losing his immortal soul.  These sounds were part of his life

 and brought him comfort with their friendly intimacy.

 But now there was a new sound that rose and fell faintly on the wind.  He listened

 and pulled but he couldn’t make it out.

Could Pat’s Tom hear it, he wondered?  He studied his partners back and head for

 any sign of tension.  Well he wouldn’t ask, but maybe he might take a look.

 He lost his stroke completely at the sight of the white figure rising out of the sea

 and he tumbled backward into the bow of the canoe.

 Pat’s Tom turned.  “The devil take…” then, in the corner of his eye he saw the

 white figure descend apparently beneath the sea and heard the distant, keening wail.

 “Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, save our immortal….” Sean!  Sean!  Will yeh get up

 an’ pull outta that, man?  Before….” He didn’t finish the sentence because the figure rose again

 from the sea with a blood-curdling screech much louder than before.

 

              Pat’s Tom spun the canoe like a top and leant into the sticks, pulling like mad for

 the mainland and Sharkey was soon back in place, his eyes bulging in their sockets from

 the fearful effort he was making to double their speed.

 They were only just in time.  As they scrambled and slid and fell about amidst the

 stones and weeds at the foot of the jetty, a terrific squall swept through the sound.

“Be the Holy Jasus!  “Sharkey mumbled, his face a pasty white in spite of the hard

pull.  “Thanks be to the Holy Name, I saw the devil and still I have me life.”  His breath

sawed in his throat

 Turning their backs to the sea they toiled up the steep path to the road at the top of the cliff.  They came to the gate outside Pat’s Tom’s house and Sharkey took Tom by the

hand.

“Listen to me boy,” he said; the tough expression he had shown to the world was gone.

Only a shaken old man’s face remained.  “I’m ….too old for th….for that….thing.”  His

nodding head indicated the sound from which they had just escaped.  “I’ll never cross

that white water again an’ if ye'll take the advice of an old man you won’t go yourself

either.  The divil’s curse is on that island and we can think ourselves lucky that we have

escaped this last time.”

“But, we can be partners no longer….I’m ….too old and worn out from the sea.

 It’s time….time for me now to make my peace.  Find….another man….with my blessing

 for I’ll never make shape for the sea again….never again.”  With those words Sharkey

 turned and with his head down on his chest, went away home, lurching and stumbling,

walking away from the sea.

                    The End.

 .