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

these ghosts, who would soon be homeless, find a new home? The chief of the clan would not let himself be daunted. He had faced many a trouble in his life as a mortal man and had weathered every one of them. Would he not do the like now he was a ghost? To be sure, he would. So he called to him a spry young ghost and bade him go out into the world and find a place the clan could bide in, and not come back until such a place was found.
    The young ghost set off at once on his search. It was no more than a fortnight before he came back again, looking very pleased with himself.
    â€œI’ve found it!” he said.
    â€œWhere is it? Is it a castle?” the ghosts asked.
    â€œA-weel, it is not a castle,” said the young ghost.
    The other ghosts sighed a great and doleful sigh that sounded like the wind blowing through dry leaves in autumn.
    â€œCome now, do not fash yourselves,” the spry young ghost said kindly. “If it is not a castle, I promise you it is no worse. A grand big manor house it is, with plenty of space within for all of us, forty or fifty rooms in all, to say the least.”
    The ghosts gathered hopefully about him, and he went on with his tale.
    â€œIt sets high on a crag above Loch Doom,” he told them. “The only house, it is, between the fishing village of Dulldreary by the sea and the town of Grim-bailey twenty miles beyond across the moor. There will be no neighbors to trouble us there because the village is a good five miles away. The road runs by the manor, but the manor house lies away from the road, and there are trees all about it that hide it well from sight. There it stands, alone and empty, just waiting for us to move in.”
    â€œA-weel,” the old chief said doubtfully. “I’m thinking a place the like of that would be having a wheen of ghosts within it already. I’m not saying it would suit me to share a place with a pack of ghosts.”
    â€œDe’il a ghost is there,” the spry young fellow said. “Och, there’s no reason why there should be. ’Tis no ancestral home. The man who built it lived in it less than two years. What with the fogs rolling in from the sea, and the mists rising up from Loch Doom, and the mizzle drifting down from the moor five nights out of seven, the place was so dank and chill he could not thole it. He packed up his goods and his family and moved away. So, you’ll see, no one ever died in it by violence to bring a ghost there, and for that matter, no one ever died there at all. Except for spiders and mice and a rat or two, it’s as toom as the inside of a drum.”
    â€œOch, my lad, you’ve done very well by us!” exclaimed the chief. “We’ll all be off, then, to the manor house.”
    The chief had been a sea dog when he was living, and he was well pleased to find out that the clan could go by sea for most of the way to their new home, instead of traveling over moor and mountain making the long hard journey on foot.
    Some of the clan went off to fetch the ghost of an old galley that haunted the waters of the bay, while the rest of them gathered up their gear, getting ready to flit.
    Three nights later the ghosts who had gone to fetch the galley brought the shadowy old ship into a hidden cove, a mile or so below the castle village, and moored it there. When the ghostly galley was laden with their possessions, the ghosts went aboard themselves. Up came the anchor, and the galley with its load went slipping quietly down along the coast.
    The night that the ghosts came ashore at Dulldreary, if the weather was not worse than any the village had ever seen before it was certainly no better. The fog rolling in from the sea was that thick that it could have been stirred with a spoon. A man coming out on his doorstep to have a look at the weather would not be able to see the house of his neighbor across the road. ’Twas not the sort of night to be stirring abroad in, and