When Angus MacHale bought Adderbrooke Hall, he took
parsimonious pleasure in the fine bargain. Old Lord
Adder's widow had been faced with enormous death duties,
made all the more odious by the loss of all her portable wealth
(hence able to be concealed from the Inland Revenue),
cash and jewels, at the time of her husband's sudden
and inconsiderate demise in Monte Carlo. Angus relieved
Lady Adder of her manor house at no great expense to himself,
and he satisfied (he presumed) his wife's longing for a stylish
life of ease in the Old Country; he was also able to 'launder'
some excess cash at the same time. No better bargain could
be asked for.
Aggie MacHale had in such wise completed her progress
from a hovel in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee to
a Hall in the mountains of Cumberland on the Scottish
borders. For this she was indebted to her husband, who in turn
owed everything to the sweat and suffering of his laborers in
the coal mines he had started acquiring at
the age of eighteen. (His first mine had been won in a poker game,
and he never looked back.) But, to parody the Christmas song,
five matching rubies, four fancy cars, three lovely houses, two graceful
yachts, and a parrot in a gilded cage were inadequate compensation
for a general lack of connubial affection from a man who
worshipped black nuggets of petrified bog. Aggie was lonely
and bored.
So once upon a time, when Angus was away in Tennessee for
the trial of a union agitator who had pushed the foreman of the pit
into a mineshaft, Aggie decided to relieve her boredom by
hiring some local brawn to bash a hole in the wall, replacing an
arrow slit the original Border reiver owner had considered
more useful than a window with something more suitable for admiring
the view over the moors, such as it was when it was not pouring
rain. A workman's pickax revealed a blackened skull in a hidden
niche in the wall; Aggie grimaced and had the thing thrown into
the garbage pit (what used to be in the days before waterwork
plumbing a latrine shaft).
That night, after the men had gone and the servant couple slept
(in their quarters over the old stables),
she sat alone in the Great Hall. The cavernous fireplace in that
vast room arched over the conflagration on its tiles, and in the
gloom beyond it Aggie sat in an enormous armchair, looking a
bit like a delicate pistil in some huge orchid. She was reading a
dog-eared Horrendous Stories comic book, the pages of
which she turned gingerly by the edges so that her fingers would
not touch the dreadful Speckled Spider of Spillwater Grange.
Suddenly, a blood-freezing scream echoed through the house,
around the room, in one door, out through the labyrinthine corridors,
and back in again by another, so that there was no telling where
it was coming from. The crumpled and torn pages of Horrendous
Stories flew from Aggie's hands and floated up the gaping
chimney in a swirl of red sparks. Again the scream resounded. What
with all the dark corners and strange draughts from doors that
would not stay closed and odd creaking noises and the
whistle of the wind through the chimneys and arrow slits, Aggie was
afraid to stir from her chair. Her parrot, in its cage by the mantelpiece,
squawked an imitative cry.
"B'Gad, Zounds, blast and fiddlesticks!" thundered a voice from far
away. "What perverse, cursed, demented being da'st cast me into
the privy pit? God damme, God damme, restore me to my closet or
I'll cast down every cursed stone i' the place."
Aggie sat and trembled. The arch of the fireplace began to twist
and bend. Walls groaned and creaked, plaster flaked off and
pattered on the floor, two swords from over the mantel uncrossed
themselves and clashed in combat, hunting trumpets blew in their
brackets. Still she did not move. The ceiling sagged, its huge oak
beams bending like straws; roof tiles rained down on her head.
And when she saw the roof-tree collapsing, she jumped up
screaming.
"Stop it," she cried. "Please stop it."
At once the house stopped shaking, and everything was as before. There
was no sign of any damage; even the plaster dust floated back up onto the
walls
"Where y'all at?" Aggie asked.
"In the bloody privy pit," the booming voice replied, rattling the glasses
in the sideboard.
"W-who are you? What do you want?"
"Oliver Grampian, odds cods, an it be your affair. For myself I
only ask to be let in peace, as I have been these past three
hundred years."
Well, Aggie could think of nothing to do but agree to his demands,
which seemed reasonable enough. She lit a lantern and crept
nervously along the corridors. In the days when Adderbrooke Hall
had been fortified and insanitary all the privies had emptied into a
big shaft near the kitchen; at the bottom was an external hole
covered by
a big slab of rock, the grund wa' stane (so one of the
workmen had called it) emptying out into the dry moat, and from
there the pit could be cleaned. Now it was used as a convenient
receptable for garbage, its lid having been placed in the old
garderobe off the buttery passage.
Timidly extending her lantern, she peeped over the edge of the
shaft. At first her eyes could not discern much on the lumpy surface
of the refuse; gradually they adjusted sufficiently to see what
appeared to be a man buried up to his neck in trash.
"Don't stand gaping, woman," came the voice from the pit,
"fetch me out."
"But how'm I gonna do that?" Aggie asked with a whine.
"Remove the grund wa' stane, catch me when I tumble out."
"Lordy," she said, "y'all nuts? I ain't gonna stand for all
that trash bowlin' down on me. Here now, fella, I'll lower a rope
and haul y'all out o' there."
So Aggie went off and got a rope, which she unwound into the privy pit.
After a moment she felt a tug, and something heavy was on the end.
She pulled it up, as though she were hauling in a big catfish: it was a
human head--nothing more.
But it was a talking head, hairy, wild-eyed, swart: it might have been a
handsome head at one time (when it belonged to a body), for the nose was
well shaped, the beard was full and manly (despite the onion skins and eggshells),
and the teeth were fine and white, shown off to advantage, as they were
firmly clenching a rat's tail along with the rope.
Aggie was shocked. She remembered the skull that had been removed from the
wall earlier. Apparently it had grown some flesh. With no more ado (but with some
disgust) she carried it by the hair to the excavation in the wall. There she propped
it up on the stump of its neck
and went off to find another comic book. (In spite
of her eekness, Aggie was a very practical young woman.)
The next day she had her favorite among the brawny workmen, the one who told
her about the grund wa' stane, carve out a special niche for the head (now just
apparently a blackened skull again) in the embrasure of the new window. This man
did not respond to her flirtatious advances, so when the work was finished she
felt depressed and very lonely. Angus had written from a hospital in Knoxville
where he was abed with a fractured skull -- the union organizers had had more
support in the locale than Angus had anticipated -- and would not be returning for
a few weeks. Aggie was all alone.
One night she went to Oliver. He was fleshed again, as she was not surprised to
discover, having expected this sort of thing in her imagination. In her hands were
scissors, a Gillette safety razor, canned lather, and a bowl of hot water.
"I reckon," she said, "you'll be wantin' a shave after three hund'd years."
"I thank you ma'am," he said with a wolfish grin.
"Y'all chomp on this here Dentyne gum," she said. "Your breath stinks."
Well, things went on in this fashion: Every night Aggie would come to him
with razor and toothbrush; every night he would amuse her with tales and
witticisms about his Cavalier past, his loves and battles. In fact, he found
her an easy conquest -- up to a point, that is. Not that she resented the
lecherous gleam in his eye, but there were simply insurmountable
difficulties barring his way to an apt consummation of their friendship.
Ingenuity, nevertheless, overcame the problem to a certain extent. One night,
a couple of weeks after their extraordinary meeting one another, Oliver composed
the following ditty:
"My dear, to thee my love I'd prove,
But lacking hands I cannot move.
Yet therein lies a fallacy, O
Huzzah, huzzah for the fallacy, O!"
Actually, she did not understand the innuendo, but being the inspiration
of poetry of any sort, which novel experience she could only think of as
'romantical', was so flattering to Aggie that Oliver felt safe in following
his lyrical outburst with a blunt prose proposition. Oliver, so to speak, used
his head to the utmost of its capabilities. (There will be no attempt in this
story to explain the mechanics of this or what Aggie had to do to accomplish
it! Adult readers will understand.)
When Oliver himself was beginning to tire of the frustrations of this new
relationship, Aggie's husband returned. From Angus's encounter with the
miners there remained only a large bump on his forehead, an ivory plate, he
said, of which he was inordinately proud. Oliver
sensed the reservoir of power
that had built up in Angus during this long recuperation and decided to tap it
for his own purposes that very night.
So while Aggie and Angus were at last sleeping, Oliver came rolling into the
bedchamber. With a snort he propelled himself squid-like through the air until
he hovered over Angus's neck, and with the slightest of exhalations touched
down gently on his spine, fusing his own severed nerves with those of the
sleeping man. Immediately, Angus was possessed, and with a wild leap cast
himself upon Aggie.
Afterwards, when Oliver explained his feat with the borrowed voice of her
husband, she could only gasp and giggle, and he kept touching the ivory plate
in Angus's forehead, muttering, "Was ever such a cuckold?" Meanwhile, Angus,
furious, looked out from the prison of his left eye, which flashed bloodshot and
twitched angrily. "Zounds," said the parrot on the window ledge by the bed (in
his gilded cage).
"My dear," said Oliver from his awkward position on the back on Angus's
neck, "fetch a knife to cut off his head. Then truly shall this
scion flourish on new stock."
But in a sudden struggle for control, Angus managed to slam the extra head
off against the bedpost. It bumped and rolled into a corner of the room,
gnashing its teeth and growling: "Argh, argh, argh." With a howl of triumph, Angus snatched a sword from the wall and chopped off the head of his wife, as quickly as a farmer whips off the head of a chicken for tonight's dinner. Her twitching body
flipped and flopped, and in an instant sprang up with Oliver's head attached to
it back to front.
"Have at ye, varlet," cried Oliver, snatching down another sword, and spinning
like a top with the bright blade whirling at the periphery. Snick. Off came Angus's
nose.
"God dabh id. Stad still ad fight like a ban."
"Huzzah," Oliver shouted. He stood with his back to Angus in order to take aim
(because his head was back to front), he attacked blind in staggering frontal
rushes, spun, he parried from the side. Aggie's body spasming under its new head could
barely hold the weight of the sword. But Angus was no swordsman. Back to the
wall went he, and would have lost his head had not his assailant just then stepped
on Aggie's face loose on the floor. Woosh, he fell, nightgown flying and Aggie's
beautiful legs flashing whitely in the air, and his head detached from her body. Both
severed heads rolled together, swearing at each other.
In triumph Angus grabbed up the two heads by their hair and carried them with
writhing mouths and curse words you would not have believed to the privy pit.
He tossed them into the hole, where they remain to this day. Aggie's body ended up
buried in the cellar. He returned to Tennessee with some sort of plausible excuse
for the fact that he was noseless -- he could get away with anything
there. But he
fell to a sniper's bullet and that is the end of the story.
Adderbrooke Hall is now for sale again, ideal for a rich young couple who wish to
establish a squirarchical family. Oliver and Aggie are waiting eagerly for a capital
venture like this. All that's needed is to shift the grund wa' stane. The servant
couple who were mentioned but not exploited in this
tale inherited the parrot, and that bird is where I got the story from. "Zounds."
Copyright © Wyatt James
I found a web page translator at Go.Com -- if you know any foreign languages you can amuse yourself by reading one ot the following versions (can't vouch for how good the translations are, but this isn't exactly a classic story in English):
Spanish :: German :: Italian :: French