Twelve Great Black Cats by Sorche Nic Leodhas Read Free Book Online

gathered up her skirts and ran away from him, faster than she’d ever run in all her life before.
    He came after her, his bony hands outstretched to catch her. She felt his fingers take hold of the border of her shawl. But she cast off the shawl and ran on. She ran out from among the graves and down the path in front of the kirk, and through the gate of the kirkyard into the road. She was growing too short of breath to keep on running. She glanced over her shoulder to see how close he followed at her feet. But just at the moment she looked, the dawn broke in the eastern sky, and on every side the cocks began to crow to greet the morn.
    Like a puff of mist dissolving, ghost and horse disappeared, and the lass saw naught behind her but the kirk and the kirkyard with its graves, peaceful in the first gray morning light.
    The shock of relief at finding her pursuer gone was too great for the lass to bear. She lost her senses and fell to the road, and there she lay.
    A milkmaid on her way to milk her cows found the lass lying there in the middle of the road, and ran to the village close by to fetch help. Men came and carried her to a house where kind hands took her in and cared for her, until she came to herself again.
    They were curious to know what had happened to her, and when she told her story they were amazed. They might have thought that she had dreamed it all, or even that she was daft, if it had not been for the shawl.
    She had told them of casting her shawl away, when the specter grasped it in his hand. And it was true she wore no shawl when she was found. It was two or three days later that one of the villagers went to the kirkyard to tidy the graves, and saw upon one of them what looked to be a bit of tartan cloth with fringe at the edge. He went to pick it up, wondering how it had come to lie there, but found that it was buried deep in the mound of the grave. Pull as he might, he could not get it out. Then he remembered the strange lassie’s shawl, and hurried to tell his neighbors what he had found. They all ran to the kirkyard, and brought the lass with them.
    â€œâ€™Tis my shawl,” she told them. “I’ve had it many a year. I would not like to lose it.”
    But it was so firmly fixed in the soil that the strongest man in the village could not pull the shawl out. In the end they had to fetch shovels and dig it out. They dug all the way down to the coffin but still they could not pull the shawl away. It was not until the minister said that they might open the coffin lid to release the end of the shawl, that they found out what held it so fast.
    There, inside the coffin, was the corner of the shawl, held tight in the bony fingers of the man who was buried there. It was the grave of the lass’s lover whose drowned body had been washed ashore and buried by the villagers.
    When the lass recovered from the fright of that terrible journey she went back to her own village again. But she wept no longer for her dead lover, since she had no wish to disturb him, lest he come and carry her off again.

The Flitting of the Ghosts
    UP in the Scottish Highlands there once was a clan of Scottish ghosts who were having a terrible time. A raggle-taggle lot they were that had kept together, some of them, for as long as two or three hundred years. Of course, there were some whom one would consider newcomers, but the important thing was that they all belonged to the clan, which was why they all stuck to each other like cockleburs to the wool of a stray ewe.
    Not one of them could ever have been considered respectable when alive and in his flesh. A randy crew they all were, having been smugglers, pirates, catterans, reivers, and followers of a number of equally disreputable trades as men, and as ghosts they were as rackety as they had been before they died.
    They made their home in an old tumble-down castle near the sea, close to the place from which the family had originally sprung. The worldly clan was fast