The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House Read online

  There were no telephones, television sets, radios, movies, or stereos. But there were sleds for the children in winter, horse-drawn sleighs for the grown people. Most girls and boys took piano lessons or violin lessons. After dinner, the one who had “practiced” and had a gold star on his music lesson would play for the family. The family sometimes grouped together by the piano, singing.

  —

  Waldo Messerman, while his house was being built, traveled all over Europe to buy chairs with gilt legs and satin seats, hand-carved chests and beds and tables, a chandelier and a grand piano for his fine house. He came back home, married his bride, smiled at her as he handed her out of the carriage drawn by four horses, and said, “My dear, this house is your wedding present.”

  The bride and bridegroom stood on the steps as the vans of furniture lumbered and teetered and swayed back and forth as they were pulled through the gates by horses. They watched as the movers carried the fine furniture inside and set it carefully down on the polished floors. Then, arm in arm, they walked inside, and so they did not see the big wooden trunk carried in the back door and up the back steps to the rooms on the third floor where the maids and the cook would live.

  This trunk belonged to a little Irish parlormaid who would answer the door, serve the meals, and dust the furniture in the big rooms. And what she didn’t know was that a real leprechaun had gone to sleep in her trunk as it stood open in a garden in Ireland.

  He thought it was a woodbox, and covered himself with a blanket he found in it. So you can imagine his surprise when he woke up and found himself being tossed back and forth in the hold of a ship on the high seas. And you can imagine her surprise when she was unpacking her blankets and dresses and a little old man jumped out of her trunk, leaped to the windowsill, and sat himself cross-legged there, looking around curiously.

  “Shame on yez,” said Nora, in a scolding tone because she had seen many like him hiding in the woods near her old home in Ireland but never one this close to her.

  “Crossin’ the high seas on my ticket. Go on back where ye belong. Do ye want to cause me to lose my place here in my first job in the U.S.A.?”

  No, he didn’t want to do that, and he could have gone back, because leprechauns know all kinds of magic from a “bag of tricks” which some keep in a little brown leather sack around their wrinkled old necks.

  But just then he looked down into the garden. He saw the young bride sitting on the stone rim of the pool beside the iron boy. How beautiful she was! Beauty always softened his bright little blue eyes. But there was beauty back home, too. It was what she said and the way she said it as she spoke now to her bridegroom standing beside her.

  “We are fortunate,” she told him, “but we must never forget those less fortunate. As long as we live here we must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and comfort the sorrowing.”

  Waldo Messerman was rich, but his bride was richer.

  The leprechaun decided he would stay. So he leaped out of the window, hid himself behind a chimney until dark, and then leaped off the house, into a tree, onto the roof of the summerhouse and then he slithered inside, crouched down, and laid himself low. He was not only a leprechaun, he was a slitherer, a croucher-downer, and a lier-lower—and, incidentally, a gent.

  The Irish parlormaid would hurry out to the summerhouse at night and leave a glass of milk or a piece of pie or a bit of meat on the floor for him.

  “Why do you leave that food in the summerhouse, Nora?” asked Waldo Messerman one day.

  “Oh, sure now, I leave it for the birds,” she told him, crossing her fingers. He laughed and lit his pipe.

  —

  Hiding himself behind garden tools, the leprechaun, whom Nora named “the Leaper,” would watch the bride as she strolled around the garden, picking flowers, trailing her fingers in the pond.

  He would crouch lower whenever she said, “Somehow, I always feel that when I walk in my garden, someone is watching me.”

  “Birds, ma’am,” Nora would tell her nervously. “There’s birds all over the place.” And there were. Pigeons flocked to the broad roof and the chimneys of the Messerman house.

  As time went on, the bride no longer walked alone. A little girl walked with her, then another and another and another, until the day came when there were seven pretty little girls running around the garden in white dresses with pink sashes, their braids and curls bobbing up and down as they played tag or hide-and-seek.

  It was a lovely sight to watch, so no wonder the leprechaun smiled as he watched them. So one day when Ingrid, the eldest, ran into the summerhouse, the leprechaun did not hide. He was very fond of children and had often talked to them in the woods back home. He found their conversation interesting—more interesting than grownup talk.

  “How are yez?” he asked Ingrid, his eyes sparkling.

  “Ugh,” she told him. “Scat!” And she stamped her foot as she might have done to a mangy cat. Then she picked up a hoe to hit him.

  This didn’t frighten the leprechaun. He knew many tricks. He knew, for instance, how to make himself disappear—whish—like that. So the next thing Ingrid knew she was hitting at the floor of the summerhouse—at nothing. So she threw down the hoe and ran back to play.

  She was not like her mother, he knew then, even though her hair was the same silky texture and her cheeks the same apple-blossom pink. Ah, well, he would wait and make friends with one of the others, and maybe all of the others. In the meantime, he enjoyed watching the mother and her children in the garden in the daytime and at the dining table at night, where glossy gold-rimmed plates were set around a shining table with candles. Nora stood by Waldo Messerman’s side as he carved the roast and spooned up the potatoes and vegetables onto the plates. Then she carried a plate first to the mother and then to the seven little girls.

  He was watching them through the window one night when he heard Augusta Messerman say to them, “And tomorrow we shall drive into the poor section of town and take baskets of food to the hungry.”

  He saw a frown cross seven white foreheads and a curl twist seven pairs of lips.

  Only Ingrid spoke. “What shall we wear?” she asked, and listened with interest to her mother’s answer.

  “You shall wear your green coats, your black boots, your green bonnets, your gray knitted gloves.”

  “Our gray gloves?” This was Mavis. “No muffs?”

  “You will each be carrying a wicker basket,” her mother reminded them, and they all said, “Oh, that.”

  As time went on and the Messerman girls grew taller, they grew more fashionable and more clothes-conscious.

  On the day for visiting the sick or comforting the sorrowing or feeding the hungry, Mavis would often say, “Excuse me today. Today I have a fitting at my dressmaker.”

  Or Cleo would pout, “I must go to the hairdresser.”

  And then Mrs. Messerman would climb into the carriage with only Nora to help her carry the baskets or the cheerful word, while the sisters stayed in their rooms, combing their hair, or went shopping in the stores, matching foulard and serge, challis and ribbons.

  Mr. and Mrs. Messerman would tell each other, “The girls will grow out of it.” But as time went on, they grew more and more into “it.” “It” meant coldness, selfishness, small-heartedness.

  One day their father spoke to them sternly. “You will go with your mother this afternoon on her charitable calls. You will not go shopping. So dress yourselves accordingly.”

  Seven sullen faces stood on the porch waiting for the carriage to roll up to the steps from the carriage house behind the mansion.

  A flock of pigeons flew over the garden.

  “Look at them,” said Maude to her sisters. “They can fly where they wish and do what they will. I envy them.”

  “Fortunate birds,” Cleo said. “They do not have to visit the dull and dirty poor.”

  “How wonderful it would be—to be as free as the pigeons.” Ingrid smiled as she watched them. �
�How I wish I were one of them now.”

  “Me too,” echoed each sister from the bottom of her small stony heart.

  When the carriage rolled around to the steps in front of the house, pulled by the trotting horses, the porch was empty. A wind was blowing against the leaves of the bushes by the steps, making a dry, whispering little noise.

  “Girls,” called Mrs. Messerman from inside the carriage, “come on. I’m waiting.”

  She sent the footman inside to find them.

  Nora came out behind him. “Excuse me, ma’am, but the young ladies came outside here to wait for yez.”

  She and the footman looked carefully all over the garden, in all the rooms of the house, even the attic, in the carriage house, the summerhouse, and the cellar.

  “They went shopping on foot,” Mrs. Messerman decided sadly. “We’ll go on as I planned.”

  When the carriage rolled back through the iron gates, it was dark and cold. The candles were lit in the dining room, and the glossy white plates with the gold rims were set between the silver on the polished dining-room table. The light from the candles flickered on the tapestry on the walls, woven with pictures of castles and bridges and shepherdesses in long full skirts sitting beside sheep.

  No, the young ladies hadn’t come home. They must have finished shopping. The stores were now closed. Visiting friends? Since there were no telephones, Mr. Messerman didn’t take off his greatcoat at all. He got back into his carriage and went searching. No one had seen them.

  Had they gone on a trip suddenly? No, their clothes were all hanging in the closets of their rooms. They had been kidnapped! The police were notified. Descriptions of the seven daughters were sent all over the country. The weeks went by.

  There were many idle, foolish reports. Some people swore they had seen seven girls boarding a ship for South America; some swore they were now dancers in a cabaret in New Orleans. Every report was investigated. None were true. The Messerman parents never saw their girls again. Sadly, Nora and the cook packed away their clothes in trunks and put the trunks in the cellar. Mr. and Mrs. Messerman grew old within a week. He took to using a cane whenever he walked. She fell ill and stayed in bed.

  The people who came on foot through the iron gates! There were so many it looked like a party in the big house, except that these people were shabby and looked around so shyly as they were ushered into the big room. Many of them carried packages wrapped in newspapers; small jars of jelly or soup; some brought flowers.

  “Is there anything we can do for her?”

  “Your prayers,” Nora would tell them in a whisper, “for her and her daughters.”

  Nora always felt like saying “cruel daughters,” but she didn’t. Of the leprechaun in the summerhouse she demanded, “Is this something from your bag of tricks?” She studied his wrinkled old neck. “And by the way, where is your bag of tricks?”

  “It’s hid safe—from everyone but meself.”

  “Then it’s the devil’s own work,” she insisted.

  “It’s bad, bad,” he agreed, “but who knows? Some good may come of it—sometime—somehow.”

  “Divil a bit,” she answered as she hurried back into the house. Now only a light shone here and there, where before every window had blazed.

  Mr. and Mrs. Messerman soon came to be known as “Old Mr. and Mrs. Messerman.” One day she died. Old Mr. Messerman died shortly after and then people came and moved out the furniture. Nora wouldn’t let them take the trunks of clothing.

  “Who knows?” she told Lizzie, the cook. “Those girls might come back sometime, and how they did love their clothes!”

  She went away herself, riding out of the gates in a wagon with her wooden trunk beside her. She had looked for the Leaper to say goodbye, but she couldn’t find him. He was hiding. He never cared for goodbyes. But he watched her leave, crouched down beneath a bush.

  The gates were locked then and boarded up. Before long he discovered somebody had stolen his bag of tricks, which he had hidden in a deep hole behind the canvas in the summerhouse. He sat still for three days and three nights on the top of the canvas, thinking about this. Who had stolen it? It was dangerous in the wrong hands. Anything could happen now. He suspected Nora. And he knew if she were the culprit she could get out beyond her depth. Then she would have to come back and ask his advice. This thought made him smile and then sing the words of a song he had often heard them sing around the piano in the house: “Wait ’Til the Sun Shines, Nellie.”

  Now, as he sang it, he changed the word Nellie to Nora and made the song go this way:

  Wait ’til the trouble, Nora, foolin’ with my bag of tricks, you’ll find yerself, dear Nora, in some fix.

  He lived on vegetables from the kitchen garden; fresh vegetables in the summer, dried vegetables in the winter, which he kept in a hole in the ground.

  —

  The house crumbled, the garden grew to weeds, but Nora never came back again.

  One November evening, after many years had passed, there was a thick fog crawling like smoke through the streets. The cars were moving slowly, honking insistently, down the wide boulevard which now ran past the Old Messerman Place. The mist hung like gray silvery draperies around the tops of the spruce trees. The Leaper was in the summerhouse, reclining on the pile of canvas, watching it, enjoying it. It was a change. Seven pigeons flew over the trees and came to light on the roof. When he looked again, he couldn’t see them and he told himself they were huddled behind one of the chimneys.

  Soon he sat up straight and then leaped off the canvas as he saw lights in the house, flickering in the hallway, on the second floor, on the third floor, and in the cellar. Then, to his amazement, the front door creaked open and a lady in a long coat, holding a lighted candle in one hand, moved out onto the porch. She held the candle high as she peered out across the misty garden. Now the door opened again and six other ladies, in long, old-fashioned coats, carrying candles, came and stood beside her. The coats, he could see, were dusty and split with age in some places, but the ladies wore them proudly as they came down the garden steps, picking their way through the high weeds and grass. Their candles shone in the water of the little pool now brim full of rainwater. It was the Messerman girls come home! They hadn’t aged a day or changed at all.

  “Glory be,” he cried out in astonishment. “Is it yerselves come home, after all this time?”

  Mavis moved her candle close to his face. Sylvia and Cleo took tight hold of his arms.

  “What is it?” asked Constance. “Some kind of animal?”

  “Yes.” That was Ingrid who laughed. “It’s the leprechaun. I remember him. He lived in the summerhouse. Nora used to feed him.”

  “Where is Nora?” Mavis asked him. “And where are Mama and Papa?”

  “Everybody’s gone long ago,” he answered them as the two sisters still held him tight and the others stood about him in a half-circle, looking down at him, their candles held lower now to look into his face. He shook his head.

  “Shame on yez,” he said, and frowned at them. “They looked and they waited and then—whoosh, they were gone. First herself and then him. Where did yez go?”

  “Where does the wind go?” Ingrid said, and smiled, and the sisters smiled, too.

  “We were gone only one afternoon,” said Maude. “They really might have waited.”

  “However,” Ingrid reminded them, “we do have the place to ourselves now.”

  “No more dull visits to the dreary dirty poor.” Maude sighed happily. All the others sighed happily, too, except Sylvia. She lifted the skirt of her long coat, worn and hanging in strips.

  “What a pity! I always adored this coat,” she moaned.

  The leprechaun was shocked. Not one word of grief about the parents whose hearts they had broken. Only the sad sigh about the clothes.

  “I’ll thank yez,” he said as he tried to wriggle himself free again, “to return my bag of tricks.”

  “Oh, that,” Ingrid laughed merrily. “We
threw that away after we learned every trick you had in it. Hold him, sisters, and let me get a stick or a hoe to finish off the nasty little creature.”

  But they couldn’t hold him. He slipped out of their grasp, leaped onto the roof of the summerhouse, and looked down on the seven sisters, getting soaked in the softly falling drizzle. But, then, so was he.

  Ingrid tried to hit him with the long-handled hoe, saying, “Take this.”

  “Take what?” He’d grin and leap away.

  She couldn’t touch him. He laughed.

  So she threw away the hoe and smiled up at him with a false smile, mysterious and deadly. Her sisters fixed their faces in the same false smiles and regarded him fondly.

  “Dear leprechaun.” Ingrid’s voice was soft. “Let us be friends.” To the others he heard her muttering, “I’ll get him—later.”

  They couldn’t beat him at this game. So he removed his damp brown knitted cap from his shiny bald head and let the rain spill onto it as he smiled at them.

  “Sure’n it’s fine to see yez back,” he told them, “in yer glory and yer grandeur.” To himself he muttered, “But I’d sooner have snakes.”

  They didn’t hear this. They curtsied low in the wet weeds as seven heads bowed in the rain.

  “Thank you kindly, Leaper; we shall be so happy here together.”

  Then they filed across the grass, up the porch steps, and into the dark house which snuffed out the candles.

  He wondered, in a few minutes, what kind of a black crawling thing it was coming up out of the chimney and letting itself flap down to the roof. It was a pigeon. He looked closer, knowing it would be impossible for an ordinary pigeon to fly up that narrow chimney, once having fallen into it. But then he saw another and another until now there were seven, huddled close together, looking down at him.