A great thank you to MW for her proofreading and support. Half of this story is here thanks to her.
October the 8th, 1889
Dear Brother,
I have been remiss in my duty towards you lately, and for that I hope you can forgive me. I don't want you to think that I don't treasure each and every one of your letters, for I do; it's only that my life simply does not hold any event worth mentioning at length in reply. Even as I am penning this letter tonight, my endeavor is not to describe the utter boredom of my well being, but to escape it by recounting something rare and truly worth sharing, something that at first might make you raise your eyebrows in disbelief or chuckle at your sister's childishness, but that I trust you'll come to follow with something more than polite interest.
Yesterday evening, the casual conversation in the parlor of the hotel I am staying at touched upon the topic of dark mysteries and ghosts. I don't know what ineluctable fascination this particular activity holds for crowds of people forced by circumstance to share their lodgings, but we somehow found ourselves compelled to follow the tradition of medieval travelers, and decided that the following night would be our night of storytelling. And yes, what I am about to share with you has been presented here tonight, as a ghost story (and in a sense it is just that—a truly frightening story about ghosts).
The appointed evening had started on a high note—perhaps a little too high for the rest of us to still have a chance at impressing the audience. The first story recounted was almost unsurpassable in gloom and terror; it was the dream of any writer wanting to make his readers glance over their shoulders with unease, of any storyteller aiming to make his listeners gasp and dread the impending bedtime. And when Mr. Quint, the man who told the story, drew up his sleeve with the violence of his last strength, to show to us all "the mark, she, the dead woman, the ghost, left on his flesh forever" and then fell back into his chair, exhausted, I thought nothing anyone could say would exceed that first remarkable thrill of the night.
One by one, the people gathered in the parlor of the dingy hotel—and yes, I do know it's not the best that I can afford, but it is the one I chose for my stay in England—told their stories. Some were vaguely disturbing, others were collections of clichés and a few were mere jokes; you must be familiar with them too: the sort in which the frightening beast with blood-thirsty eyes always turns out to be the family cat or some equally harmless creature.
When my turn came, I told one of the stories I had learned from our mammy and though clearly not the best of what we had heard that night, it was a success, for none of my listeners was from the South, and so I can only guess that for them the horrors of the tale took a second place to its general air of novelty. But I was like a writer that after countless books of worldwide success finds his best reward in telling a story to some shiny-eyed children that hang to his every word and candidly wish for the villain to die. And while mine has never been a worldwide success, I did become so accustomed with the complaisant smiles and honey-coated words of those who listen to me in my regular circle that the genuine reactions these people had were like breaths of fresh, comforting air.
And so time swept by, and the night was slowly drawing to its close, the only thing still keeping it alive—the insistence of a stout man from Dublin who had monopolized the last hour with a string of dreadfully repetitive ghost stories. I had promised myself I would write some notes before going to bed, so I was getting ready to make my apologies and retire to my room. But then, taking advantage of a small pause the Irishman took, a gentleman opposite me that had sat quiet so far offered to start a story.
We had all introduced ourselves at the start of the evening, and I had known from the beginning that he, like myself, was not used to the varied crowd cheap hotels brought together. The way we had mingled with each other without formal introduction had obviously made him a little uneasy, but he had managed to overcome that and spread to the public the knowledge that he was Mr. Vereker, and came from New York, a fact already quite plain from his accent.
But what could a Mr. Vereker from New York, a gentleman whose appearance was nothing short from that of a banker, be doing in such modest lodgings? Another mystery to amuse my imagination with over the next few days, I thought and decided to stay and listen to his story, especially since he promised only to start it that night and finish it the next evening. Like myself, some decided that his words may satisfactorily carry them through the next hours and stayed; others, especially those who were to depart the following morning and knew they would inevitably lose the second part of the story, left the room, and finally there was silence again.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" Mr. Vereker suddenly asked and we turned to him with curious eyes. He looked calm and serious, as though he really meant the question, and that was disconcerting for he had offered a story, not a lecture, and most certainly not an interrogatory.
"Do you really believe that when unusual, inexplicable things happen, spirits are behind them?"
He stopped for a second, waiting to no avail for someone to say something, to offer an answer or, if not, at least call into doubt the relevance of the question itself.
"No, you don't," he drew his conclusion over our silence and indecision. "Or the vast majority of you don't. If you were the sole witnesses of a weird occurrence, you would first assume there is a rational explanation behind it and search for it until you exhaust your strength. And when you did that, when you tried and failed to find the explanation, you would doubt yourselves, your sight, your judgment."
He moved his eyes from one expectant countenance to another under the unsure light of the gas lamps in the room, and I noticed that his features, otherwise nondescript, the same as those of any man in his fifties, had somehow sharpened, like he was aware of his importance now and reveled in it. What we had here was a veritable raconteur, and I was pleased that I had decided to stay.
"You don't believe in ghosts. And yet maybe you should. Because the story that I am about to tell you is that of a woman who did not believe in ghosts either, and for that reason alone stood to lose both her freedom and her sanity. Because the truth is that sometimes, most of the times, ghosts are the alternative we should be the least afraid of."
It was as if some chill of the autumn night had entered the room, some ominous whisper of the things to come, and I could see how everyone seemed to move closer to the one who told the story, like he could at the same time confirm their worst suspicions, and protect them from countless other nameless fears.
"The entire thing started in December of 1866 and by March of 1867 it was irrevocably over. Out of the persons involved in this bizarre situation, I personally know the woman and her husband-to-be. I've first heard an incomplete version of this story from him before they were married, and then fate made it so that I learned it in its entirety from her, when their marriage had all but fallen to pieces.
"But pray keep in mind that this incident is real and that the people who had the misfortune of experiencing it are still alive. So I must refrain from using any surnames, though, with a certain dose of determination and given how narrow the circle of those wealthy is, it would still be relatively easy for one to identify the heroes of my tale.
"I would be even more cautious and avoid using any real names at all, only that the first name of the lady involved is so expressive, so strong that replacing it would be to rob something of her, to diminish in a way her essence and her charm. And so I find myself forced to reveal that my heroine is named Scarlett."
The stout man from Dublin uttered a small sound of appreciation and—as you can guess—in the brief, awkward silence that settled I waited for a question that was still to be delayed. I had made a mistake in lingering there.
"It may seem an unusual name," Mr. Vereker carried on, "but it makes sense, considering one of her parents, from what I gathered, more likely the father, was of Irish descent. Her family owned a plantation in the South, in the state of Georgia. Maybe you had the chance of making this lady's acquaintance, Mrs. Corvick?" he asked, looking directly at me.
There it was—the question, the intrusion. Isn't Georgia just a small village where you-all know each other? Sometimes I think that you are fortunate for having stayed in the South. After a certain period, these questions become tiring even for someone of my nature, for someone inclined to compromise.
Everyone gathered in the parlor looked at me, expecting my answer. If I said yes, then Mr. Vereker would not proceed with the rest of it; it would be inappropriate. I had in my hands the power of making or breaking the story.
"No," I answered firmly. "I don't know her."
"Well," he smiled, obviously pleased, "you are of course too young to have been in her circle. But it's of no consequence. You will imagine her along with us, for one always has to picture vividly the heroes of the story they read or listen to; one has to see them and suffer along with them."
He embraced the room's attention again; raising his voice as if what he was to start was not a mere inn tale, but the great epic poem of our times.
"My friend is not beautiful, but men seldom realize it when caught by her charm. And after all, what's the difference between that gift, of moving even the most uncaring audience, and real beauty? Scarlett was, I say, the Southern Belle par excellence."
I had to fight against the heat that was beginning to ascend to my face at his words, in a way it hadn't for years. The liberality with which the circles I frequent treat feminine beauty has made it easier for me to disregard my own distance from that ideal. And now I was to see her again, the Scarlett he described, in her youth, with her magnolia-skin and her waist—the slimmest in how many counties? — floating in the ridiculous hoopskirts of the years before the War. I could not bring myself to hate her—you know I never could—but between she and I, between her radiance and my dullness there is such a chasm; you have to be completely blind or oblivious to common politeness to bring the two images together like Mr. Vereker had just done for the benefit of everyone in the room. But he was fortunately blind to my embarrassment as well and carried on with his tale.
He told us the history of her life. Of how she married a man at 16 and was left a widow with a child when the man went to war. Of how she moved to Atlanta and left mourning behind, because a man Mr. Vereker named the Captain willed her to; of how she fled Atlanta and survived the war; and her mother died, her father lost his mind and she was left in charge of everything. Of how she had to return to Atlanta to find the money to save her home and how she married Frank, a man that was engaged to her sister.
By the winter of 1866, Scarlett, Mr. Vereker's heroine, had a new child and, more importantly, two businesses. She had bought two sawmills, was running them with an iron fist and was more than occasionally interfering in the running of her husband's general store as well. And it was only to the storyteller's credit that none of the listeners found themselves in the position to despise or resent this woman, like many of the citizens of Atlanta must have at the time. He had managed to make her special for us, if not through her qualities, then through her endearing combination of faults and we wanted her to succeed. And if the railroad to that success cut through the happiness of her husband or her children, then well, that was the price they had to pay.
And if I now tell you that I found myself of the same opinion and wish, then you will have before your eyes the best proof of Mr. Vereker's talent, and you will understand why my only choice is to be as faithful as possible to his words, to let him tell the story, even though I am forced to condense it a little for the benefit of my letter.
"And now, now that you know her, that you know the sort of steel she was made of," he said after he had introduced his heroin, "you might be tempted to think that it would take a great earthquake, a thing of disastrous and frightening proportions to shake this woman and change the course of her life forever. And you would be wrong, for that was not how it went. It was a succession of little earthquakes, of minor events that, amassed, would shatter the very foundation of her self-confidence and—if I am right in my assumptions and I think that I am—ultimately trigger at least one person's death.
"And that it was like this—that seemingly inconsequential things would pool around her until she found she could no longer move free, we can see from the fact that, when the first of the series of peculiar occurrences took place, she wasn't even seriously frightened by it, and that it was only much later that she saw it for what it was and attached horrendous significance to that.
"And it all started with a door that wouldn't open.
"That day, her husband, ailed by one of his frequent head colds, had asked her to check on the store on her way home, as a special favor to him. It hadn't been often that Scarlett went there in the months that had followed her daughter's birth. As any of you gentlemen would, Frank had insisted that motherhood was strongly linked to the woman staying at home, but Scarlett had managed to gradually break his resistance on that issue and returned to her normal activities. Her visits to the store however were less frequent than before, though one would be hard pressed to say whether she merely wanted to have peace by allowing her husband the illusion that he was running it, or simply her other enterprises had, by then, become of more importance to her. The fact remains that, at Frank's request, she went there that late December afternoon.
"Now, we are all are familiar with that time of the day when gray seeps into every corner, slowly killing the light, and silence thickens the air. Imagine yourselves spending those hours alone, in a dark, stuffy room at the back of an empty store. There is a natural sense of uneasiness, an instinct that tells you to never keep your back to shadowy corners, a wish for light and sound of any kind, and not few are the people that under such circumstances whistle or talk to themselves just to fill the air with a security every bit as illusory as danger itself is. Of course, Scarlett, practical by nature and on top of that a lady, did not whistle, but it wouldn't require a major stretch of one's fantasy to think of her counting out loud the goods stored in that room.
"And imagine moreover that the time comes for you to leave. The dusky solitude had begun to take its toil on you, and—no matter how taciturn or misanthropic you may be the rest of the time—you now long for the lights and sounds of the street, for the company of people. So you sigh, partly in satisfaction for completing your work, partly in sheer relief, and head for the door.
"It does not open.
"It was in front of this locked door that Scarlett found herself that day, but—unlike you and I—she is one of those persons that rarely allow fear to freeze them in place, so she managed to smother her first twinge of uneasiness almost instantly. She was disconcerted for only a second, and then immediately furious. The door could only be secured from the other side, so she naturally suspected that one of the clerks had returned to check on the store and locked the door to the back room, as she had so often instructed them to do. It made sense; it was the rational explanation. How she didn't hear him locking the door, or how he didn't hear her counting the boxes inside was inessential; what mattered was that she had to get out. So she knocked, shouted and rattled the knob. And no one came.
"After a few minutes, fury mixed with fear—but it wasn't the primal, vague feeling of before; this time it was a well-defined apprehension. If the clerk had indeed been there and left, then she would be trapped in that room until dawn. And if it hadn't been the clerk, then that could only mean one thing: a burglar was on the other side of the door. Reaching this conclusion, most of us would have feared for our lives; Scarlett feared for the money she could lose. She was even concerned about the problems she would have dealing with the authorities, but amazingly fear for herself never crossed her mind, or so she told me (and on this particular point I do not doubt her sincerity, as I will on others). My theory is that sometimes our minds hold hidden paths that point to the truth, and that deep down she must have known that no thief—and no clerk either—had locked that door.
"And then the unexpected happened. She had been pacing the room in her distress and when she got in front of the door again, she shook the knob with frustration. It opened. You can imagine the painstaking caution with which she searched the entire building, and I think you all know by now that she found nothing, not a sign that someone had been there and certainly no indicator of burglary. She interrogated her husband that night and the clerks the next day, without telling them the real reason of her inquiries, and once again, found nothing.
"It was odd, but no reason for serious worry, for there was another explanation left: the door had to have some problem. Most probably the knob was rusty; it was old and it had remained stuck. At her command, it was replaced and everything seemed in order. Another week passed by and she had almost completely brushed aside that incident.
"Except that it happened again the next week, and from that second time it kept repeating itself at the most inopportune times. I can only guess the sense of growing desperation with which she found herself trapped into rooms, time and time again. She estimated it had happened at least eight or nine times before it stopped altogether. And it wasn't just that musty back room at the store that kept her prisoner. No, she found herself trapped in the main room of the store too one night, unable to open the front door, and in the small office at the mill, and even in the pantry of her other mill, and every time it happened, she had been alone in the building.
"That rusty knobs were not the cause it was now obvious, but put yourself in her shoes for a second. Someone—or something—was locking those doors. What would you rather have against you? What would you want to find behind a locked door? The great unknown or a person? A person made of blood and flesh, a person like you, one you can oppose, and fight and win against....
"And if your answer is the latter, then you shouldn't be surprised that Scarlett herself clung to this straw: the idea that some malevolent person was trying to play with her mind. It could have been one of her competitors, for example. She hadn't made herself exactly loved in the business world of Atlanta (and this, of course, I learned from the Captain; she hotly denied it), so I suspect it was a possibility, that a man might have been pushed to his breaking point by her and decided to seek revenge in this cowardly and grotesque fashion.
"From that moment on, Scarlett was with all her senses alert whenever she left the house (these peculiar events never happened when she was at home). She tried to surprise the potential prowler by swiftly turning around at the smallest noise. She laid traps for him, lingering near the doors of the rooms she entered, waiting to catch the exact moment the almost imperceptible twist of the knob would announce his presence on the other side. But somehow neither of these strategies worked and, when she found herself trapped and outmaneuvered again, she would sit by the door, waiting like a cat at a mouse hole for it to open. Her plan was, of course, to then spring and catch the man who unlocked it, but she didn't as much as catch sight of him once. If the man existed, then his abilities to sneak about and stealthily follow her footsteps were clearly out of the realm of her comprehension.
"You would of course assume that she abandoned the battle at this point, or at least alerted her husband, but that is because you've never met Scarlett. It was a peculiar type of strength the one that animated this woman, and aggravations only fed it. In short, she decided to solve it in the simplest way possible. She had no time to investigate what humans or demons were behind this, and she didn't care that much to find out either, so she would just move on and ignore this small inconvenience.
"I know most of you find it hard to believe that she was able to ignore something so blatant and weird, but when I asked her about this, she simply told me, 'I was busy feeding my family; I had no time to spare for these childish games'. And if you were living in a world that had violently changed beneath your feet, if the things you had known your entire life were simply abolished one day, and you had to adapt or die, do you really think you would've had the energy to treat a hoax as something of great importance? Scarlett did not, and, even after all these years, she still thinks her second plan was a sensible one.
"She was determined not to let fear seep into her mind and control her life. And fear of what, after all? No matter who or what was responsible for it—a man, a rusty knob, or something else—there was only one thing to fear about a situation like this: its consequences. And the consequences here were luckily negligible, and she thought she could prevent them anyway, by simply leaving all the doors behind her ajar.
"But I don't think she relied on that strategy entirely, for it was somewhere around this period that she asked the Captain to teach her how to pick a lock. For as long as I've known him, this has been one of his favorite stories to tell—and it was only later that I realized that large part, if not all, of his pleasure actually came from embarrassing his wife with it—of how elated he had been to hear that a charming lady wanted to break the law with him at her side ('And I ask who in my place wouldn't have thought adultery and then overthrowing the government?' Mr. Vereker imitation of the Captain's drawl came, prompt if a little overplayed), and what a bucket of water on his hopes: what she had in mind was petty thievery on her old husband and his locked moneybox (or so she had pretended).
"But he helped her anyway. You see, they had remained friends after the war, and though things have never been clear with them two, I think that he was in love with her at the time, only that she had no idea and he had no intention to illuminate her on the matter.
"But it's useless to ask ourselves about her feelings for him at this point, because well, he was the only man in her acquaintance who would teach her how to pick a lock and that without asking many questions, or better said the only man in her acquaintance that knew how to pick a lock to begin with, so sympathy or any deeper feelings would have taken a second place to that, even if Scarlett hadn't been already married. When she told me this story in 1875—and I am deeply sorry for betraying her trust, but I've promised to give you the entire truth—so, I say, when she told me the story, she claimed she had asked for his help because she loved him even then, but that, I am afraid, was not the case. She went to him simply because she didn't have anyone else to turn to, and he knew that.
"Her second plan was to fail though, despite the help she received. Either because the Captain was not that good a teacher, or because the door was not actually locked but secured in some other way, she didn't manage to escape her brief confinement the first time she tried that method on a door.
"And then, the second time, something deeply disconcerting happened. She had remained trapped in the small kitchen of one of her mills, and was just preparing to prove her deftness on the lock, when the door suddenly opened, and Scarlett found herself in front of her husband, that had apparently come to pick her up, and Gallegher, the man she'd hired to run the mill and whose real name I use here because he passed away a couple of years after this story.
"They both looked surprised at finding her there, alone in the kitchen and quite obviously trying to tamper with the lock. She of course explained that the door had been locked from the outside, and she was only trying to get out. I suspect she was even happy to see them there, for it was the first time she wasn't alone when something of this sort happened—it gave her hopes that they may still catch the one responsible.
"And then it came, the blow that would put everything into frightening perspective—her husband, saying with bewilderment and a vague note of reproach, 'But, sugar, the door was not locked'. She turned to Gallagher, who only supported that statement, adding that he had been in the other room since before she entered the kitchen: no one could come and lock the door without him noticing.
"She blanched, but had the presence of mind not to argue with them, and she even managed to look calm and parry Frank's concern on the way home. You see, she knew she couldn't tell him the truth as she had believed it to be, for he would only draw one conclusion, and that conclusion would give him the right to force her to stay home forever.
"Because by now the doubts were slowly creeping into her mind, fueled by the concerned, curious looks the two men had cast her. It was as if she had abruptly woken up from the trance the last weeks had been and she found herself amazed at her own actions. She had become so used to fighting her own battles that she didn't even stop for a second to consider the nature of this particular battle. She had acted like wild animals do when they are caught in traps. She had simply struggled against it, without as much as thinking to ask for help or a second opinion. And she behaved that way because she thought she knew what has happening.
"But what if there was no person harassing her as she had thought, and, moreover, there was nothing wrong with the doors to begin with, because nothing of all this was real? And how could it be real, if reason could not account for its existence?
"For Scarlett, born of an Irish father, the idea of ghosts was not entirely foreign, only that, like most of us, she rarely allowed it to seep into the clearly-defined lines of her diurnal world. Ghosts were nothing more than the small fear that clutched your heart at night, if you happened to be alone in foreign surroundings; they were not real; they couldn't move things or lock doors. And even if they had that power, other people—Gallagher, Frank—would have perceived its effects as well, and they hadn't. This wasn't about ghosts.
"She had, as the Captain used to say, no imagination, but the terrors that haunt people with no imagination are often greater than the minor frights of people who accept fantasy as real. And she was afraid of herself now, because if there was no other reasonable explanation left—then it was obvious that the problem was with her.
"She was not concerned that she had lost her mind; more that her overwrought nerves had begun to show. And that this might make her look weak in front of others—in front of her customers, and competitors, in front of her fussy husband. Life was complicated enough without people thinking she was insane. And so she was determined to not allow anyone to know about her unreasonable fears and incidents.
"But that was not to be, because, nearly two months after it had all started, she was found passed out on the floor of Gallagher's mill, and the things she said when she came to her senses were of disturbing nature to anyone who listened. She claimed that she had seen the dead; that he had come after her.
"But that, my friends, is a story for another night."
And this is where Mr. Vereker interrupted his story, and I will stop my letter as well. What do you think? It is hard to believe that something like this can happen, isn't it? I have a feeling that you have followed with quite some interest these lines, tarnished as they may have been by my usual flowery style. This is precisely why I decided to pen this now, and not wait until I have all the facts—so that you learn the story along with me, share my bewilderment and my anticipation.
Until the next time,
Your loving sister.