Midwinter of the Spirit

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THIS IS WHERE it walks…

Washing her hands, Merrily looked up and became very still, convinced in this grey, lingering moment that she was seeing the imprint.

What she saw, in the cracked and liver-spotted mirror, was a smudgy outline hovering beyond her left shoulder in the women’s lavatory with its stone walls and flagged floor. Through the bubble-glass in the door, a bleary ochre glow seeped from the oil lamp in the passageway where, for some reason, there was no electricity.

This was where it walked, Huw had explained in his soft, mat-flat Yorkshire voice – David Hockney on downers.

It.

Rumoured, apparently, to be the shade of a preacher named Griffith who heaped sermons like hot coals on hapless hill-farming folk towards the end of the nineteenth century. But also known as the Grey Monk because this was what it most resembled, and this was where it walked.

Where it walked.

Merrily focused on her own drained face in the mirror.

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