This room was absolutely silent. I had a couple of hours, so I relaxed, closed my eyes, and allowed myself to drift off to sleep.

I would sense the arrival of the ghost and wake up immediately.

Sometime later, I woke exactly as I’d predicted. All spooks are seventh sons of seventh sons, and this means that we possess certain gifts. One was operating here: a cold chill that told me something from the dark was close; it ran powerfully up and down my spine. Before I even opened my eyes, I heard the sound of a girl weeping, and footsteps pacing back and forth beside the bed.

I looked at her. The ghost was that of a young girl, probably no older than seventeen. She had long hair pulled tightly into a bun at the back of her head. Like many ghosts, she was very pale, all the color having been left behind with death.

All the colors but one.

The front of her long pale nightdress was soaked in red blood, from neck to hem.

2

The Girl with the Mousy Hair

I looked at Miriam’s ghost and sat up in bed to face her. Then I gave her my warmest smile. I tried to be reassuring. “Stand still, Miriam,” I said softly. “Stand still and look at me.”

She turned toward me, gave a sob, and her eyes opened wide in astonishment.

“You can see me! Can you hear me?” she asked. Her voice had a slight echo to it and seemed to come from a distance.

“Yes, I can both see and hear you. I’m a spook, and I’ve come to help you.”

“I’ve been asking for help for days, but nobody listens. Nobody even looks my way.”

“You mean up here in the bedroom?”

“No—I went down to the kitchen where I used to work. Nobody comes up here after dark.”

Ghosts could be seen lingering by their graveside, but usually they haunted the place where they had died. As a seventh son of a seventh son, I might have been able to see or hear her in places where other folk wouldn’t.

“Do you know why that is?” I asked gently.

“It’s because I’m dead,” she said, beginning to cry again.

That was good—an important first step. Some ghosts didn’t know that they were dead. The hardest part of my job was convincing them of that fact before persuading them to move on.

“Yes, you’re dead, Miriam. It happens to us all eventually. But now you can move on to the light. You can go to a better place than this world. I’ll help you to do that, I promise, but first I need to ask you a few questions. Can you tell me how and why you died?”

The girl stopped crying, and an expression of terror came onto her face. “Something evil killed me,” she said.

I tried to keep my face calm, but my mind was whirring with thoughts. I was keen to find out what creature of the dark was responsible for this brutal murder.