Lady

by R J Dent

“Lady! Where are you?”

          I slowed my walking down. Up ahead – somewhere in the night – an old lady’s voice had called out. I looked across the main road, towards where her voice had come from, but couldn’t see anyone else on the road apart from myself. Besides, what would an old lady be doing walking along by a main road at two in the morning?

          Despite the dark, the view was clear on both sides of the road. There was the road itself, flanked by two footpaths, and there was a small grass verge in between each path and the road. There was nowhere else to go. This was because there was a high wall running along the side of each path. The wall was the boundary of some Lord or other’s estate. In a moment of benefice he’d allowed the local council to build a road running through the extremity of his estate. That was the official story. The unofficial one was that he’d received lots of money for the land that the road used, had then had stone walls – paid for by the council – built along the side of the road so that no commoners could stray onto his property, and had got himself a nice access road to and from the many businesses he ran from his estate.

          “Lady! Where are you?” the old lady called again. It sounded as though she was standing on the opposite side of the road from me. I looked across the road, but there was no one there. Again.

          No, I wasn’t scared. I had been when it had first happened, but after two months of the same thing happening every night, my fear had palled into genuine curiosity. Every night I walked along this road, making my way home from work. And every night, an invisible old lady called out the words that I’ve just reported.

          Of course, I’d checked into it carefully.

          According to some of the elderly locals, what I was hearing every night was the voice of a ghost. The ghost of Mrs Elvina White, a blind, elderly widow who’d taken her dog for a walk every night along the side of the road. Rumour had it that one night, the dog – Lady – had darted into the road after a rabbit. The rabbit had avoided the fast-approaching car easily, but Lady hadn’t been so lucky. The car had driven on without stopping and Mrs White had carried on calling her dog to her ever since. When she’d died at the age of eighty one, her ghost had begun to haunt the place where her dog had died.