The White Lady.

THE WHITE LADY

The white car ghosted to a stop outside Pat's Tom's cottage on a high road overlooking the Blaskett Sound. A tubby man dressed in a white suit, got out of the car on the passenger side and wheezing chestily, crossed the boreen to the white-washed cottage where he stared through slitted eyes up at Pat's Tom standing in the open door.

"You Pat's Tom? Yeah? Well me an' Helen here," and he waved his cigarette back towards the woman in the driving seat. "Muh wife, we wanna spend a while over in the Island. We, uh..we've bin told that you gotta house for rent there an' kin take us over."Pat's Tom straightened his long length and looked resignedly over the man's head at the sullen mass of the island resting in the Atlantic Ocean. It passed his understanding why two rich Yanks, who could be at home, living in luxury, would want to pass anytime in that God-forsaken rock.

He sighed deeply. "Ye might as well come into the kitchen." And stepped slowly ahead of them back into the house. Helen, a small spare blond in her early 50's, sat in the only other chair and glanced keenly about the room. The walls were whitewashed and bare, the furnishings minimal, but she admired its spartan freshness.

Observing her from his chair beside the stove, old Mike Sharkey came to the conclusion that she might be made of steel. He wasn't far from the truth. Helen, in her fifty-two years, had worn out three husbands, all dentists, all deceased. Trevor was her first artist, a real weakling; she didn't think he would last long.

Trevor, standing by the window, popped another cigarette into his mouth and looked down into the Sound. Cigarettes were Trevor's main props in the business of looking tough. He always held them in the corner of his gashy mouth and the muscular action involved screwed the rest of his features into a series of near horizontal lines, his eyes became slits and he liked to think that this made him look mean and tough. But the little quiff of blond hair falling over his forehead, made him look like a cherubic choirboy and gave him away. He didn't look tough at all. Neither did he feel tough right now, the mere sight of the sullen gray sea made his stomach heave and he turned back to Pat's Tom.

"Uh..which house is your's Tom?"Tom obediently pointed it out, looming over Trevor as he did so. It was the highest house in the village, a two-storied cottage with yellow-painted window frames, at the top of a green road. It was known locally as the Yellow House.Trevor took out his camera and studied the area through the telephoto lens. He had seen it all before, but he had read somewhere that it was good bargaining practice and made the other guy uneasy, to silently study the subject of the bargain.

It was all wasted on Pat's Tom."What d'yeh want out there for at this time of the year?" He asked, "sure it's a miserable oul' place at the best of times.'

"Are you a native of the island?" Helen asked. She admired Tom's tall spare toughness.

"That I am." He replied. He waved his hand at old Sharkey lounging in an armchair by the stove. "But there's the man now, could tell you about the island, who spent the most of his life there and wouldn't spend another night, if yeh paid him, no more than meself."

But Sharkey had nothing to say. He didn't like them. He thought Helen looked like a rich witch and he wouldn't have swapped a mongrel cur for Trevor, nor could he understand what it was possessed them to be going about in identical white suits that would put the two eyes out of yeh with the glare.

He didn't want anything to do with them. Sharkey dreaded the thought of being stranded in the island for the night. The place of his so-called happy childhood now filled his dreams with fear. He remembered the nights of rampage, the agonized screams, as the demon, known in English as the White Lady, came searching through the village for a weak soul and invariably found one. It was no wonder that they had all migrated to the mainland. They couldn't get away soon enough.