Excerpt: Cousin Jacky's Jig

On the sixth night after we'd arrived, after supper and prayers, Susanna suddenly froze and cocked an ear as we sat in the kitchen where it was warm so that we could sew and patch until bedtime.
'What was that?' she said.
'I didn't hear anything!' I replied. But then I did hear it. A faint whisper, like the bow of a fiddle dragged lightly across the strings. The ghost of where a sound might be.
'There!' she said again. 'That!'
'The wind blowing up the valley?' I suggested. 'Sounds like an owl at times.'
Susanna shook her head, and went on sewing. But then restless, she set it aside and stuck her needle in it and got up to go to the door. Not the front door, that faced up the valley, which appeared from the outside as if it were sunken among the green and thick trunks and shoots and leaves that clung to the valley sides like fur on a weasel - not that door. She went instead down the dark passage to the back door which opened sideways onto the valley below and from which, if you stood tiptoe, you might see the sea on a clear day drawing a smoky blue line along the edge of the sky.

But someone else had reached that door first, and opened it. Dawson pulled the door wider so we could see beyond the hillocks of grass and the rough leaves and the mist that was already swirling up from the sea far below. A figure, tall and dark, moved in that mist, toiling up the lower path from the beach, wrapped as we could see as it drew nearer in a cloak as grey as the mist itself. Dawson gasped, and clapped one hand to her mouth. I moved moved forward, unspeaking, like a stiff doll. Only Susanna crossed the narrow space to reach him, and take both his hands in hers as if she expected him. In another second, Jack Crago was beside me, freeing one hand to put it on my shoulder.
'Mistress Porcupine,' was all he said, smiling, before I fell hard against his wet boots, fainting at the sight of my first ghost.

COUSIN JACKY'S JIG
NANOWRIMO 2008