The Wee Ghostie

At first I wasn't sure what I was seeing; then I realised that a ghost had taken up residence in my bedroom. She was so thin and insubstantial that it was very difficult to see her against the curtains, but when the moonlight was at the correct angle I could sometimes perceive parts of her skin and clothes. She didn't seem to want to say anything; and I was not even convinced she knew she was here. Her expression was that of a sleep-walker, a real girl who somewhere was dreaming her own projection, in my room.

I went into the kitchen and made her up a little bowl of fear. She looked at me absent-mindedly; her hands were like vapour, and she seemed incapable of holding anything at all. So I got a spoon and fed her from the bowl myself. But if the fear made her a little more substantial, it also seemed to take something from her, and make her ugly. Before, her features had been delicate and even neglected. Now they became increasingly forthright and vaguely offensive, as if she were trying to summon the strength to accuse me of something.

I didn't feed her again. Over the following days the ugliness receeded; she grew thin once more, and the thinner she grew, the prettier and more frail she seemed to become. Still she stood by the curtain without addressing me; and when she closed her eyes it was as if she were drifting into an ever deeper sleep.

Finally, after a week, it was nearly impossible to see her any longer. The moonlight seldom fell the right way, and even when it did there was almost nothing there now for it to settle upon. But I had the sense of an enormously beautiful face and the palest pair of eyes; I think I glimpsed them both for a moment in the dust that rose from the coverlet and the stacks of clothes on the chair. Then she had gone completely.