"The Tale Is Real"
It was a tale I did not first believe in, a story I thought invented by a crazed mind when driven too far over the edge. I did not believe that a woman's specter dressed all in black could be the cause of so much pain and death. Of course, as a fully grown man who believed only in the material, I did not put any stock or belief in the paranormal or a higher deity, although I was raised in a perfectly good Christian home. I had no way of knowing that my whole life would be shifted one day as I worked at my lawyer's firm in London late in the year.
It all started when I sat at my desk in the main building, having just sent one of my employees on an errand for a client. I was just putting a light in my pipe when my secretary came to my door.
"Sir," he said in his usual nasally voice, "there is a… a Mr. Daily here to see you."
I looked up impatiently at him. "A Mr. Daily?" I repeated confusedly. "I've never heard of a man by that name." But he merely shook his head helplessly.
"He insists on a meeting with you, sir," he told me. "He's waiting right outside. He won't take no for an answer."
I waved a hand impatiently. "Yes, yes, let him in. I have a few moments before my next appointment… Go ahead. The sooner he talks the sooner he can leave." I really had no idea who this "Mr. Daily" was, but decided to get his insistency out of the way. Perhaps he needed a lawyer to settle some legal matter…? It took only a few moments before the secretary was back, this time leading in the so-called Mr. Daily.
It was an older man who stepped inside the office, tall and intimidating, dressed in handsome clothes, with a head of thick black hair liberally sprinkled with grey and a face wasted of its handsome looks by hardship. His piercing grey eyes were cold and heavy with grief, and they seemed almost hateful of me as his gaze locked with mine. I must say now that it did unsettle me how this total stranger looked at me in such open dislike, and it immediately put me on the defensive, which I see now did nothing to help the horrid conversation that I did not know was going to come.
"Yes, Mr. Daily?" I struggled to say as politely as I could. Tension seeped into my tone no matter how much I tried to keep it out. ""What do you need?"
"Only a few moments of your time, Mr. Bentley," he replied, and he paused for a long moment, looking uncertain, then abruptly cleared his throat. "I heard much about you from one of your associates."
I raised an eyebrow. "Who was…?" I, for one, had no idea which "associate" he was referring to—I had many different employees at any given time.
Again, Mr. Daily cleared his throat. "One Arthur Kipps, sir," he answered.
Ah. Kipps, the young whelp who seemed more of a hindrance than a help to the company. When Kipps had entered the law firm a few years ago while still a teenager, he had seemed at first a good, eager worker—but then came his wife's death while in childbirth, and he had quickly become dispassionate and nary a help to the company. I had actually recently sent Kipps on an assignment out in the English moor to prove his worth to his job, of selling a deceased client's house. Needless to say, I had expected him to be back by this time, and it seemed odd that this man showed up now. "Yes?" I asked impatiently. "Get on with it, man. Did the boy land himself into some trouble?"
If anything, the grief in Mr. Daily's expression deepened, and it was then a dark sense of foreboding stole upon me. "He's dead, sir," he answered bluntly, his voice slightly hoarse.
His words physically shocked me back in my seat. "What?" Impossible! I couldn't believe it. "Surely, Mr. Daily, you must be mistaken. Kipps was hardly twenty-five! You must be imagining it—"
"Do not tell me what I am or am not mistaken in, sir!" the man answered sharply, angry. "I saw him die myself."
I had no possible answer or comeback to this, no denial I could possibly utter against such a claim. "How?" I finally managed to ask, still not quite able to grasp this new reality.
Mr. Daily paused again before he answered. He seemed to consider me carefully for a long moment—gauging my willingness to accept his story, I came to realize later. "Mr. Bentley," he began slowly, every word sounding pained and raw, "do you believe in the activities of the paranormal?"
It took a long moment for his words to sink in. Then: "Like ghosts and such?" I asked a mite blankly. "Mr. Daily, I cannot believe you expect me to willingly hear about a story about ghosts—"
"In our town, Mr. Bentley," he continued as if I had never interrupted, "we are a tightly-knit group, and closed-mouthed about family skeletons hidden away for decades… but perhaps if we had all been truthful with Arthur from the beginning, he may yet still be alive…" Then he seemed to shake himself and looked back at me. "You sent Arthur to sell Eel Marsh House," he told me. "The house Alice Drablow owned until her death only a few weeks ago. There is a family skeleton there, sir, and of a sinister kind. Ms. Drablow had a sister, you see, Mr. Bentley, a woman by the name of Jennet Humphrey. Some thirty years ago, she had an illegitimate child, a boy. The child, who she named Nathanial, was given over to Ms. Drablow, her own sister, to be raised. But the child died, Mr. Bentley, drowned in the marshes surrounding the house… and Jennet watched it all from the nursery window. She was found hanging dead in the house only a short while later, unable to bear the reality of her son's death.
"We thought that was the end of the tragedy then," Mr. Daily continued heavily. I sat in dumbstruck silence, unable to speak spellbound as I was by the story, however impossible it seemed. "But we were wrong. Only weeks after her death, the specter of a woman dressed all in black started to appear to the townspeople… and anytime she was seen, a child died."
"A child died?" I repeated incredulously. "But, Mr. Daily…" Then I hastily shook myself of my complacency, "Mr. Daily, this is a most tragic story indeed, but I fail to see what is so important about it. After all, Arthur Kipps was not a child, and I for one do not believe in the possibility of a woman's ghost appearing intent on revenge, killing children—"
"Do you call me a liar, sir?" Mr. Daily snapped, anger flaring on his face. "I do not make up this story for my own enjoyment, nor am I addled. I myself have lost my only son to the Woman in Black."
Again, I found I had no possible retort to give to this revelation.
"Arthur started to see her shortly after he arrived to the town," Mr. Daily continued gruffly. "Indeed, he saw her at Alice Drablow's funeral, heard footsteps in the house, saw movement out of the corners of his eyes. He asked about her, and instead of telling him the awful danger he was in, we of the town kept silent about the truth. We tried to send him away, but he was adamant that he needed to continue with his job. The job you appointed to him, sir."
"Now see here!" I protested angrily, "you cannot hold me responsible for Kipps' actions—"
"You are partially to blame, Mr. Bentley," he answered coldly. "He explained to me that you had told him this was his last chance to prove his worth to this company. If you had not threatened him with the termination of his job we would have been able to convince him to leave earlier. But we could not, and he did not, and he discovered the story of Jennet Humphrey himself. He was almost driven insane by her, Mr. Bentley; he said he could feel her in the house with him, tormenting him, making things move, appearing and then disappearing, malevolent and cruel.
"He wanted to appease her, so he enlisted my help, and through some trouble and danger, we exhumed Nathanial's remains from the marshes and buried him with his real mother's, after Arthur realized that she would go after his own son next. We thought this act of kindness would appease her. The Woman in Black was not appeased, sir," he continued heavily, "and Arthur realized there was nothing more he could do. He was going to take the next train here and forget all about the house and the ghost, even if he faced the certainty of being fired from his job here."
He sighed now, looking old and weary. "I'm sure you knew of his son," he said. I nodded. "A bright lad. Joseph. He and his nanny met me and Arthur at the train station."
My stomach clenched.
Mr. Daily drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. Closed his eyes briefly. Opened them again. "The boy saw her. The woman. Standing on the opposite side of the tracks. He started across them under her influence as a train came up." I felt the blood drain from my face as horrible realization hit me. His dead voice continued. "Arthur saw her as well. We both saw her. I stood frozen as all do in her presence, but Arthur… stupid, brave fool that he was, went after his son." His voice cracked, his eyes bright with tears. "They never made it back."
I felt bile rise in my throat. "Both of them…?" I managed to ask. I was surprised to hear how strangled my voice sounded.
He nodded. "Instantly." Then abruptly he stood, cleared his throat for a third time. He had said enough. He did not have the strength to continue. "I thank you for your time," he told me hoarsely. "Perhaps now you will think twice about what you tell your employees and where you send them. Neither of them needed to die. They paid the ultimate price for their innocence. I'll see myself out. Good-day, Mr. Bentley." With that, he turned and left the office without even a backwards glance.
I sat there frozen in my seat for a long while, Mr. Daily's news and explanation unable to let me go. Even when my secretary came in to say that my next appointment was canceled. Normally I would have been quite angry about that—I was not going to sit here and let people just up and leave my appointments hanging—but at that moment I simply could not think of anything else other than the things Mr. Daily had so coldly told me.
One of my employees killed, saving his son. Even if I had never really cared for Kipps, I had felt sorry for him with the loss of his wife, although that had become tinged with impatience when he never seemed to recover. But never would I have wanted or thought him dead. It was difficult to believe. The rest of the day passed in a faint shock, my thoughts ceaselessly dwelling on Mr. Daily and his story.
A woman in black. A ghost seeking vengeance.
Ludicrous.
And abruptly I decided that I did not believe a word of Mr. Daily's story. The ghost of a scorned woman coming back from the dead, killing children to fulfill her monstrous blood-thirst for the loss of her own young son? It was simply preposterous, completely ridiculous, and sitting at my desk that day I made up my mind and decided that Mr Daily was simply insane, his claims born of an addled mind influenced by drinking too much spirits. The things he said to have seen I laughed away , and if I felt any guilt over what he had said about losing his own child to the ghost, I quickly banished away with reassurances that the man was quite insane, and troubled in the head. I so completely convinced myself that all was well that when I went home that night I was quite content and had all but forgotten the strange, unsettling story of the woman in black.
I never expected it to come back to literally haunt me.
I had just finished with a decent dinner with my wife, roast fowl and a good wheat bread with wine. I had settled myself in my living room, preparing to allow myself a smoke before going to bed, when suddenly everything seemed to go still. Not even the air seemed to move; my breathing seemed muted, thick, frozen in my chest. An unexplainable fear had suddenly fallen upon me as a light snow would, just as weightless and just as biting with cold. The lights flickered in the room, and the ones in the hallway flicked off completely.
It was a mortal fear that I felt, sitting in my chair by the fire that had suddenly gone cold. I struggled up to my feet, calling for my wife with a voice hoarser than it usually was, and in answer she screamed from where she sat in our rooms. Her distress allowed me to uproot my feet from the floor and calling her name I rushed to the doorway and found her weeping on her bed.
"A w-w-woman," she cried, shaking like one in mortal pain, "a woman dressed in black!"
My heart leapt up in my throat.
"S-she was just s-standing there, her eyes—o, her eyes, rotten and decayed, looking down at me!" my wife wailed as I drew her close. She seemed on the edge of fainting, and I could do nothing to comfort her, with my own stomach churning. The story that Mr. Daily so seriously told me about rushed into my mind.
-"Only weeks after her death, the specter of a woman dressed all in black started to appear to the townspeople… and anytime she was seen, a child died."
Awful realization hit me. It was all true. Mr. Daily had not been lying, he was not insane. This phantom really did exist. Even as I thought it, I thought I saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye and turning I saw, even as my mind screamed denial, the image of a woman dressed in a long black mourning dress, looking worn and thin, her eyes veiled with heavy black fabric. She was a ghastly sight to behold, and I found that I could not move.
Just as well, because she moved then, just as I realized this, and her lips moved, although she spoke in no audible way. Nonetheless, I somehow managed to hear a female's voice echoing around me, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, full of sadness and anger—like and unlike the same sensations Samuel Daily had professed to having when seeing her. She did not seem malevolent now, however, as if her fury had vanished somehow, not at all like the demon that had killed so many children and seen to it that Arthur Kipps died trying to save his son's life.
"You could have saved him."
Then she was gone, vanished like she had never been, and I was left utterly shaken with my wife shuddering in my arms. The memory of her continued to linger, however, and it would never fully leave our house, although neither of us ever saw her again. For many years afterward I would try to understand why the ghost of the woman in black showed herself to me—was it for my denying her story? Or was it that she wanted to try to make amends? Had the ghost of Jennet Humphrey perhaps remembered what forgiveness was, had she come to realize that her vengeful killings of innocent people was not the normal human way? Mr. Daily had told me she had never before killed, or even harmed, an adult before Arthur Kipps came along, and I wondered about that as well. Had she regretted killing Kipps—had she expected him to stand frozen as Mr. Daily had, at the train station when seeing his son walk to his death in front of that train? If so, she had miscalculated badly.
You could have saved him, she had told me. I never fully understood the meaning of that, either. So I write this story down for those who are willing to listen—so that others will learn of the story of the Woman in Black, and perhaps then Jennet Humphrey will finally find peace for her damnable actions.