nce, not so long ago and not so far away, there lived a good little girl named Weezie. Actually, she was not so little as all that any more and perhaps not so good either. Her Mama and Papa said that since she had so shot up the summer before she should be called by her proper name, which was not Weezie but something horrid.

When people used her proper name, she would pretend not to hear. She had been pretending for so long that now she really did not hear, and would go on humming to herself and ignoring her parents until they finally abandoned the effort and called out 'Weezie, my Weeze, please not to tease!' Then she would look up and come indoors at a run.

Weezie liked to wear her blue pinafore, though its hem was well above her knees and Papa said she looked like a heron in it. She was still having lessons from Miss Emily Ginn, her governess, though she had been told she would have to go away to a school when the leaves started to fall from the trees.

She lived with her Mama and Papa -- and Miss Emily Ginn, Peter the Man, Katie the Cook and the goats Frisky and Whiskey -- at Hilltop Heights, a big old house in the countryside far away from the city. Only Weezie knew, for she was clever in a way grown-ups had forgotten, that others lived with them. She knew that Hilltop Heights was a Haunted House.

Everyone who ever lived at Hilltop, even when there was just a hill there without a house, had stayed on.

Oldest among the ghosts was Club, a Piltdown Man. He was not very bright and had little forehead to speak of, but was Weezie's best friend in all the world. His special place was in the hay-loft, which had once been his cave. Weezie and Club made drawings together, of the strange animals that had lived on the hilltop in his time and the strange people who lived there now. Club was a highly talented artist and would certainly be as wealthy and respected as Mr Van Loon if he were alive today.

The other ghosts were her friends too.

Sidney the Saxon and Guillaume the Norman, who had fought with thick, brittle swords. Goodie the milkmaid and Crispin the Fey, who had eloped together to spite Proud Queen Titania and shared a love that was still sung of. Rupert the Cavalier and Noll the Roundhead, who had fought with thin, tempered swords. Adventurous Captain Jack Persimmon, who had sailed the seven seas and had a leg eaten by cannibals and an arm eaten by a shark; and his stay-at-home brother Old Jarge Percy, who had lived to a hundred and twelve without ever walking beyond sight of Hilltop Heights. Sometimes, the ghosts played jokes. When a psychical investigator came from London to look over Hilltop Heights, they perpetrated such fearful pranks on him that Weezie had to become very grown-up and tell them all off. It was not nice to turn a man's hat inside-out in mid-air in front of him, even if he did lisp so that when he mentioned 'ectoplasmic manifestations' it came out as 'ectoplaththmic manifeththtationthth' and half a gallon of spit.

Hilltop Heights was an enchanted place. Every cupboard and carpet had its special qualities. In Weezie's room was a magic chest of drawers. The top drawer always had the same thing in and the bottom drawer never had the same thing twice and the middle drawer was always a jumble of surprises. Weezie loved surprises

The ghosts were Weezie's best friends.

One ghost, however, was not Weezie's friend. The Gloomy Ghost.

She didn't know his real name and none of the others did either. He didn't show himself as he had looked when he was alive but instead lingered about a dreary part of the hilltop as a thick black cloud or a pool of murky slime. He clung low to the ground and seeped into the house like damp. Whenever the Gloomy Ghost was about, even on the sunniest and happiest of days, it felt like a long rainy Wednesday afternoon. Weezie thought of him when she had toothache, and imagined his shadow gathering under the eaves when Miss Emily Ginn made her recite the seven times table.

Whenever china was dropped or a toe stubbed, the Gloomy Ghost was there. Whenever jam spoiled or a window broke, the Gloomy Ghost was sensed leaving the scene of the crime. But the worst habit of the Gloomy Ghost was that when he was most up to mischief, he would arrange matters so that Weezie, and not he, would take the blame.

She had lost count of the suppers she had missed and the times she had been sent to her room to learn her lesson. When that happened, the other ghosts would keep her company and endeavour to cheer her up.

They meant well and kept trying to help with her history lessons, but whenever Sidney and Guillaume or Rupert and Noll tried to tell her about the days in which they had lived they got into arguments and forgot all about her.

Then, when even the nice ghosts were ignoring her, Weezie felt in her bones an icy shudder that she knew was the Gloomy Ghost's chuckle. He could only be happy if she was not. When she was unhappy she leaked tears and screwed up her face until she became what Papa called 'a Sneezy Weezie'. She hated to be called 'a Sneezy Weezie' more than she hated spinach and wasps, which were the worst things in the world. The only thing she hated more was her horrid, horrid real name.

The only times the Gloomy Ghost laughed out loud was when someone called Weezie 'a Sneezy Weezie'. At those times, it was all Weezie could do not to blub like a baby.

All the ghosts had special places in Hilltop Heights, like Club's cave or Goodie and Crispin's herb garden. The Gloomy Ghost's special place was a sad copse down by a stagnant stream. When not making mischief for Weezie, the Gloomy Ghost lay on the rocks like a pool of black slime or hovered low about stunted roots like a thick mist. More than anything, he liked it when Weezie got some of him on her blue pinafore and she had to wear something else until it was laundered.

One morning, as a glorious summer morning was dawning and the ghosts were calling to Weezie to play outside in the sunshine, black ink was spilled over Papa's ledgers and trailed across Mama's best carpet by Weezie's shoes. It was useless for her to protest that she had not been wearing the shoes, had in fact outgrown them months ago. There was blame to be had and she would have to take it.

In her room, jailed for a whole day, she was a Sneezy Weezie. There was nothing else for it.

Why was the Gloomy Ghost so gloomy?

None of the others could tell her. He just was what he was.

She wished now that the ghosts had been nicer to the psychical investigator. He might have been able to tell her what to do about the Gloomy Ghost.

When finally let out of her room for supper, which she was to take today without dessert as a punishment, she was determined to sort the Gloomy Ghost out.

Things could not go on like this.

After supper, when it was almost dark and the summer day was gone forever, she went out to the Gloomy Ghost's copse and stood over his black pool of slime.

'Why are you so horrid to me?' she asked, out loud. 'I've never hurt you, and nor has anyone else.'

The black pool rippled.

She thought the Gloomy Ghost was laughing and stamped her foot. A loose stone splashed into the pool.

Suddenly, she felt awful inside.

The Gloomy Ghost was not laughing. He was crying, harder than she had in her room.

She forgot that she was very angry.

For the first time, between sobs, the ghost spoke.

'You gave me your toothache,' he said. 'And that hideous multiplication table. Ghosts feel only what people near them feel, and whenever I came near you, you felt only nasty things. Seven Times Seven'

She was surprised. She had not understood.

'And why do you call me Gloomy? I don't like it at all. No more than you like to be called Sneezy or ...'

He used her real name, her horrid name. Hearing it was like a slap across her face.

Weezie's heart ached. She thought back and couldn't remember when the Gloomy Ghost started to be gloomy. It seemed to be ever since she had known of him. But, she realised, she had been the one who gave him his name. The others had picked it up from her.

To him, it was as bad as her real name was to her. He hadn't chosen it and he hated it. If he was called Gloomy, he became gloomy. Worse than gloomy, cruel and mean. But, underneath, he wasn't like that. He wasn't like anything. He was a ghost.

She wanted to comfort him.

'There, there,' she said, letting her hand lie close to the pool but not touching the slime. 'What would you like to be called?'

'I ... I don't know. I've forgotten my name.'

'Poor thing.'

A tear leaked from her eye and dropped into the pool. Where it fell, the black became clear as water but thinner than liquid like pure light.

'I think I'd like to be called Merry,' said the Gloomy Ghost.

'The Merry Ghost?'

The pool rippled. Some slime accidentally got on Weezie's hand and before she could think not to she had wiped it on her pinafore, leaving a black streak. She frowned, but made herself not get angry.

As she watched, controlling herself, the streak faded to nothing.

The black pool rose up and became white, taking shape.

The Merry Ghost was a little boy, younger than Weezie but about her height. She could see through him, but he had a definite form. He was smiling but his eyes had no practice at not looking sad so they gave him away.

Her tear coursed through him, through the ghost-stuff of his body, until it touched his still-beating heart.

He smiled and reached out to hug Weezie.

His arms were clean but cold, and she shivered in his hug. It was a comforting shiver, a happy chill descending after a hot, stuffy day indoors.

From then on, the ghost was no longer gloomy.

Until she went away to school, Weezie was best friends with the Merry Ghost and Hilltop Heights was the happiest of haunted houses.

They had many other adventures, and perhaps you'll hear about some of them one day.

CHAPTER THREE:
'THE MOST HAUNTED SPOT IN ENGLAND'

Various sites have been nominated for the title of 'the most haunted house in England'; 'ghost-hunter' Harry Price made claims for Borley Rectory in Essex, while Lord Halifax opted for Haverholme Priory in Lincolnshire. In my experience, however, that the most haunted spot in England is an apple orchard in Somerset.

Currently the home of Louise Magellan Teazle, most-loved of all our children's authors, Hollow Farm has a history of haunting that stretches back at least a thousand years. A mile or so outside the hamlet of Sutton Mallet, isolated on what was once an island in the marshes that have become the Somerset Levels, the property known locally as the Hollow has been cultivated ground since well before the Domesday Book. I first visited the orchard in 1923, when the future owner was little older than her famous heroine but already demonstrating the spunk that has been so much a part of her enduring appeal. An especial surge in poltergeist activity much disturbed the young Miss Teazle's elderly parents but affected not a whit the cheerful and open girl herself. She confided in me then that she considered the night-time activities of numberless phantoms little more than conjuring shows staged primarily for her entertainment. I have returned several times in recent years to find the ghosts tamed if not dispelled, a circumstance I ascribe to the geniality of their present landlady, who has -- as generations of children know -- the ability to get along with anyone, and confesses to be more than happy to share her home with the spirits of the departed.

That it is the ground and not any building upon it which sustains the haunting is demonstrated by the several-times observed phenomenon of ghost trees which, in certain circumstances, are seen to grow inside structures, a farm-house and a barn, that are comparatively recent additions to the property. These trees seem more solid than the walls that fail to confine them, for their branches spread through all obstacles as if they were mere impertinences. I cannot bear witness to these spectral growths and Miss Teazle admits they have not been much apparent since she was a little girl, though both major 19th Century accounts of the haunting -- an anonymous article by 'a Gentleman' in Blackwood's Magazine in 1824, and a series of journal entries penned by the Reverend Mr Timothy Bannerman, parson of the nearby village of Alder, in 1879 -- describe the ghost trees at some length. The Blackwood's Gentleman even claims to have taken a piece of bark from one, though he reports that it dwindled to 'a smear of black stuff' (presumably, the matter we would now call ectoplasm) while wrapped in a handkerchief.

A local story connected with the ghost trees is extant in several versions: most notably as the folk song 'Apple Annie's Fancy' (familiar in the arrangement by Percy Grainger), though also as a dialect tale collected by Montague Summers. This has it that in the 16th or 17th Century, the daughter of the farmer who then owned the orchard, named variously Anne or Nan or Nancy, plucked an apple from one of these ghost-trees and ate it. This inculcated in the lass a powerful addiction to ghost fruit which led to a condition of self-neglect that continued until her premature death. She has since been numbered among the many spectres of the Hollow, and is heard singing among the trees, creating a sense of melancholy and lassitude in unwary auditors. A recent tradition is that the spirit is heard deliver a fine rendition of 'Apple Annie's Fancy', though the ditty must of course post-date the tragic death described in its last verse and thus be a post-mortem addition to the repertoire of its singer and subject, suggesting a capacity for learning and change rarely ascribed to the departed.

The Blackwood's Gentleman and the Reverend Mr Bannerman note that during the moments when phantom figures were visible and voices audible, the 'ceiling of the farm-house became itself ghostly' or 'grew transparent as thick, ill-blown glass' and that the stars were clearly discernible in the sky above. Bannerman, a keen astronomer, wrote that 'the constellations were not in their familiar places but strangely different, as if the night sky were not of the modern era but of some distant, remote past before the stars had reached their present positions.' To Bannerman, this was the most alarming of the many phenomena to which he was witness at Hollow Farm. Miss Teazle does not set much store by either of these accounts, pointing out that neither the amateur man of letters nor the professional man of the cloth were actually residents of the Hollow. 'The old place likes to put on a show for visitors, my dear,' she said to me, giggling like a girl, when I called upon her to discuss this chapter, 'as you well remember.'

This is, indeed, so. In '23, in the company of the trance medium Irene Dobson and the psychic investigator Edwin Winthrop, I spent a night at Hollow Farm. We saw not only recognisable human shapes formed out of light and darkness but witnessed the independent movement of objects as heavy as a writing-desk and a sturdy divan. Miss Teazle's mother was especially distraught at her inability to keep items of crockery for more than a few weeks before cracks appeared. I saw a row of crystal glasses broken as if exploded from the inside and had to extract splinters from Mr Withrop's hand, binding his wounds with a tea-towel. Madame Dobson, an undoubted talent whose name was later tarnished by several convictions for fraud, claimed to have communed with angry spirits who resented our intrusion but had taken a particular dislike to Mr and Mrs Teazle. It was the ghosts' intention, it seems, to drive them out -- as a succession of tenants and owners had been driven out in the previous two hundred years.

I doubt Mr Winthrop or I could take credit for a sudden cessation of any hostile manifestations, but Miss Teazle assures me that soon after our visit there was a change in the mood of the place. Miss Teazle's parents travelled abroad and died while she was away at school; she tells me that when she returned as mistress of the Hollow, the quality of the haunting had changed. She was able to make personal accommodations with 'the older tenants' and become accepted because of her affections for the home she was willing to share. Now, Miss Teazle reports that though she has never been alone at the Hollow, any malignity or mischief -- which she would frown on intently -- has ceased entirely. 'I'm used to living with people who aren't there,' she claims. 'Sometimes, they spill out of my head but mistake their way half-way to the page and escape for a while. It's probably good for them, you know.'

No such good fortune was experienced by the Maitland-Middleton family, owners of the Hollow from 1851 to 1883. When the last of the Gouch family, who had farmed the property for generations (Apple Annie is presumed to have been a Gouch daughter), died without issue, the Hollow was purchased by the visionary architect and transcendentalist philosopher Ronald Maitland-Middleton. He sold the surrounding fields to a local farmer, retaining only the orchard and the house. Maitland-Middleton added to the Gouch house the towers that are such an unusual feature, giving the spacious but hitherto humble dwelling a somewhat castellated, fairly pretentious air. He was killed in a fall from one of his towers, shortly before completion of building work. Violet, his daughter, told the Reverend Mr Bannerman that Susannah, her mother, was convinced that Maitland-Middleton was murdered by 'unknown and unknowable forces' who resented his 'casting of light into darkness'. Susannah devoted her life to her husband's memory, and turned the Hollow into a species of school for the materially wealthy but spiritually bereft, offering instruction in her husband's beliefs. Maitland-Middleton proposed that houses should be built upon a spiritual as well as a physical plane, maintaining that every dwelling should be a church, as much a home to angels as to earthly tenants.

When the Reverend Mr Bannerman, later briefly notorious for espousing a prophetic doctrine that the world would end in November 1887 (it did not, perhaps unfortunately for him), visited the Hollow, Susannah Maitland-Middleton was well on in years and her unmarried daughter driven half out of her mind by decades of living in a house that was 'home to wicked angels'. In his journal, Bannerman writes that he was 'initially of the belief that all the spectres of the Hollow are the product of an overactive feminine imagination, whipped up in the unhealthy atmosphere that must inevitably arise when a woman is denied all contact with the outside world, chained to an elderly relation and forced to consider only the thoughts and feelings of the departed.' Without saying as much, he plainly thought Susannah and Violet were faking the haunting as part of a lengthy psychological campaign against each other, the mother out of a belief that her daughter was somehow to blame for her husband's long-ago death and the daughter out of a conviction that her own life had been robbed from her by an enforced devotion to the cause of a man whom she had little memory of and no affection for.

However, this cleric -- on his own path from scepticism to credulity -- was eventually as convinced of the reality of the haunters of the Hollow as I was to be a half century later. Prevailed upon to remain well into the evening on his third visit to the Maitland-Middletons, Bannerman experienced a rare and complete immersion in the Hollow. Besides the transparency of the house and the celestial transformation noted above, he writes of 'figures in antique costume parading before my startled eyes' and of his 'conviction that I was in danger of harm to my person and mind'. His handwriting noticeably careless, he mentions that 'icy points pressed to my cheeks and forehead, as if long, invisible fingers were touched to my face, exerting considerable pressure ... my looking-glass tells me that the marks left by this touch have not faded completely. Two fingers apiece touched my forehead and my left cheek, while the impression of a thumb, down to a half-inch scratch that might be made by a raggedly-cut nail, marks my right cheek. The spacing of the impressions is such that my own hand, nor I would wager any but the most gigantic of human hands, could not have made them.'

Upon the death -- in the orchard, purportedly after being stung by bees -- of Mrs Susannah Maitland-Middleton, Bannerman ceased his regular visits to the Hollow, evidently with some relief. His journals are mostly concerned with the dreary minutiae of parish life and stop well before the commencement of his prophetic visions, though we cannot exclude the possibility that it was his experiences at the Hollow which opened his sensibility to such fancies. He mentions briefly that Miss Maitland-Middleton sold the Hollow in 1883 to a retired officer of the Indian Army, and married, somewhat against expectations, a widowed school-master. Major Tolliver Brough, whose son sold the Hollow to Miss Teazle's parents, was well-aware of his home's reputation. Bannerman paid a call on this ex-army man and was told in no uncertain terms that 'bogeys were not needed in this billet' and the parson reports, with obvious relief, that he could 'sense none of that weird and queer atmosphere which was so apparent about the place during the time of the late Mrs M-M and her unhappy daughter'. It appears that the haunting went into abeyance while Major Brough devoted his declining years to the cultivation of a rose garden. He trained flowers to stand in neat rows like soldiers at attention, but his efforts somehow lacked the romantic qualities which we care for in such things.

Bannerman concluded that the Maitland-Middletons somehow brought upon themselves the supernatural visitations to which he bore witness. This suggests he was unaware of the history of the Hollow, a circumstance that in itself lends weight to those elements of his account which parallel that of 1824. The Blackwood's article makes it clear that the Hollow was already notorious as a haunted site, and collects statements from several ancient Sutton Mallet residents who describe incidents from their own childhoods. Two dotards of the locality were engaged in a spirited argument, in accents that put the 'Gentleman' in mind of 'Olde Englishe', as to which of them had been in youth the swain bereft by the defection of Apple Annie to the ghostly lover conjured up when she was under the spell of her phantom fruit. He translates (or manufactures) passages from a Latin manuscript he claims to have been shown at Glastonbury Abbey, though no such document resides there now or has ever been noted by anyone less anonymous than this worthy.

In the record, which Blackwood's dates as written in the 1240s but describing events of some thirty years earlier, a monk, Brother Crispin, confesses that he was of a party assembled by the then-abbot after a 'desperate petition' from the Lord who was master of Sutton Mallet and the surrounding wetlands. Though the fruit of the orchard was plentiful and of high quality, none of the Lord's vassals could be persuaded to gather it for fear of the 'imps and goblins' that dwelled among the trees and would pelt 'with apples hard as stones' any intruders of whom they did not approve. Crispin, who went so far as to mention 'dragons and worms of the earth', took part in an exorcism of the site, but admits that it did not take. Though the quality of the spectral persecutions changed, the orchard was still so haunted as to be useless and the fruit rotted where it lay until the ground was thick with 'insects and wasps'.

The Lord and the Abbot were not thereafter on good terms and, according to Blackwood's, the orchard was not farmed until 'it became the property of a free Englishman'. A record does exist from 1322 of a special grant, whereby the property known as 'the Hollowe' was detached from the holdings of the Manor of Sutton Mallet and gifted to one William Tin, in recognition of 'his boldnesse during the late floode'. After that, the spirits allowed honest Will to have all the apples he could eat (or turn into syd dur, 'strong drink'), though the tributes he paid yearly to the Manor and the church rotted when they were removed from the property and went for compost. Throughout its history, it seems the Hollow has been particular about the living people who have been its custodians, treating them well or ill according to criteria that remain as obscure to Miss Teazle as to any previous resident. Though she follows Violet Maitland-Middleton in identifying several particular ghosts -- Apple Annie, the 'Tudor lady in some distress', Honest Will Tin, 'the Damp One' -- she believes they have been added to the collection over the years. Oddly, Ronald and Susannah Maitland-Middleton, so committed to the spiritual and deceased suddenly on the property, have never made themselves manifest in the home Ronald was explicitly preparing for his afterlife.

'There were ghosts here before there were people,' Miss Teazle says, with a twinkle in her eye. 'And, my dear, there will be ghosts here long after the people have gone.'

Though it has not always been, the Hollow is a happy spot. I have, in researching this book, visited many a place where the terrors of the past linger like fog in a ditch, where the unquiet spirits of those violently expelled from earthly shells walk in anger or fear or cruel hatred. The Hollow is not like that; I have claimed it as 'the most haunted spot in England', but I believe it also among the most magical, the most enchanting. It has supported one of our national treasures and gained from her benign proprietorship, and long may it continue so to do.

PAGES FROM THE JOURNAL OF A VICTORIAN GENTLEWOMAN

February 8 -- The Reverend Mr Bannerman is blind. He does not -- cannot -- understand the Hollow. No one who has not spent night after night after night under its roofs can hope to fathom this place. The Mama understands, only too well. But not half so well as I.

February 13 -- I barely remember Father, though I am certain that the portrait, painted from his death mask, which hangs in the Summer Room, is not a good likeness. I have read every word he ever set down, but still he is a stranger to me. The Mama has devoted her life -- and mine! -- to his sacred memory, but she despises him. His first great sin was dying so carelessly. His second, more unforgivable, lapse was not to make himself manifest post-mortem. The parade of mediums and sensitives and psychics and charlatans who have passed through the Hollow bear witness to the Mama's desperate need that Father linger here as a ghost. All these people, without fail, commence by stating that they sense his presence, that they are sure they can coax him out of his shadows of concealment with their especial -- expensive -- services. Then, after a varying period of mumbo-jumbo, they take fright. Even those that consider themselves arrant frauds swiftly realise that the Hollow is capable of trumping their manufactured illusions. Some have fled in panic, some swearing to quit their professions, a few even returning monies given over to them. Father is not here, not any more, but others are, earthbound spirits and goblins damned.

February 20 -- The Mama is a worse monster than all the others. She is petitioning Bannerman to perform a rite of exorcism. She wishes to be alone in the Hollow, with Father. I am never mentioned. She half-believes that an exorcism will cast me out too, I think. She cannot tell the difference between her own living daughter and Apple Annie. That song, heard all too often hereabouts, has stuck in her mind. Though none of the ghosts we have seen or heard -- ghosts are not all people, some are things, or sensations or transformations -- resembles in the least the wailing girl of the song, the Mama has taken it into her head that Father has deserted her for this chit of a spirit and is dallying with her in the orchard. She has fixed upon the tallest of the trees as their amorous nest, and loiters by it, tutting and fretting. If Bannerman doesn't allow the bell, book and candle, she will have sawmen in and bring the tree down. The prospect horrifies and saddens me, though I know her beliefs about the tree are baseless. It is a living thing, and spirits do cling to it. Apple Annie is a creature from a song, and Father is gone. The Mama cannot accept this, and Bannerman no less than all her charlatans is not helping her, or me.

March 28 -- Bannerman will not come back. The Hollow took against him as soon as he started to believe in it. I have seen it do that before, to the worst of the sensitives. The wonderment of levitating crockery evaporates instantly when a heavy tureen smashes against a man's face. The Hollow can mark those it deems enemies. It can kill. It killed Father, I am sure. Then it cast him out. I wish it would kill again. Truly, I do.

April 2 -- The Mama is worse in Spring, as the apple blossom thickens the air. She wavers between decreeing an execution order for the tall tree and having the whole orchard destroyed. The 'school' attracts fewer and fewer pupils, as the fad for Father's works passes from the public memory, and our only real income is from the apples. Apple Annie's, they call them hereabouts. There is a belief that the fruit has bewitching properties, and girls who set their caps at lads set great store on gifts of Apple Annie's. It falls to me every year to arrange the picking and sale of the fruit, and the Mama sometimes takes to taunting me, calling me 'the farm girl'. I have caught her out several times in her claim that 'her Violet' died soon after Father, and that I am a jumped-up pupil, who has become a servant. When the mood takes her, she threatens me with dismissal, accuses me of stealing items from the house (in truth, I have had to resort to the pawnshop in Taunton to pay for household necessities) and upbraids me for my many mismanagements. Her Violet would never be so ungrateful, she shrieks. She carries with her a riding-crop, though she has not set herself on a horse these past twenty-five years, and lashes out with it, inflicting what she calls her 'sting'. My hands, as I write, are striped with repeated stings. Some of the men I employed last year to bring in the apples will not return because of her habit of doling out instant punishments for 'liberties'.

April 24 -- I dread death, not in the way most folk do. I have no terror of the great unknown. For I know only too well what is to come. Bannerman's Heaven and Hell are comforting lies, just as Apple Annie's enchanted orchard or the spiritualists' 'other side' are fairy tales. What comes after is eternal torment, here on Earth. When the Mama sits at her place at the end of the long table, I can see the rows of shades in all the empty places along either side. As she is in this life, so are they in the life to come. Cold, dark, damp, alone, spiteful. Each carries their own miasmic Hell about, like a shroud or one of Mr Dickens's chains. A Christmas Carol is a lie. People, like ghosts, cannot change. All are trapped, as in aspic or amber. I have lash-stripes on my back and shoulders. Since her seizure, the Mama's right arm is frozen. Her fingers cannot hold her stinger, but still the stings fall on me when she is near and angry. It is as if her arm is dead but its ghost extends from her shoulder, invisible but supple and with a stinger -- a flint-studded length of ghost leather -- as an extension of the phantom fist. The pain will last, will extend into the twilight beyond death. The Mama will be there first, waiting for me. I should leave this place, but I have known nowhere else. Sometimes, I find it impossible to step over the boundaries of the Hollow. The world outside is haunted and tormented too. At least here, I ...

May 3 -- The orchard has blossom, and apple-buds. Soon, the fruit will swell. I can hardly walk, for the whipping I have taken. Since the Mama has had to use a stick, the lashes have always been at my legs. It is if I were being stroked with stinging nettles. I have angry red blotches. Tonight, we had the full company at dinner. The Mama talks to them, lectures on Father's greatness, with outrageous outbursts of abuse at him, myself and the assembly. It seems that the seated figures grow less shadowy. I can make out faces, all as twisted and shut as the Mama's. They nod at her every whim, humouring her. They have stingers, too. Mother does not want to join them before me. I fear for my life.

July 31 -- The tree is to come down. In a week's time. The thought has given the Mama strength. She has left her bed and hobbles about, lashing with her tongue and stinger. She quibbled with Adam Cobb on the price, but finally settled the matter. We cannot afford the loss of the tree, and we cannot really afford the price of its murder. It is no use talking to the Mama. I cannot sleep. Fingers like twigs rake at me. I fear for the Hollow. Without the tree, it will change again.

August 2 -- I have done it! I have talked with Adam Cobb and told him the Mama has changed her mind. He would have argued, but -- though it pains me to let the matter go -- I allowed him to keep the portion of the fee he was gifted. I, Violet, am true mistress of the Hollow. It is my decision that the tree should remain. Returning from the village, with an angry sky boiling overhead and the heat crackling all around, I felt straighter than I have in months. The stings do not bother me, and seem to change quality, almost to become caresses. Almost. In the evening, the first drops of rain spattered, pellets the size of thumbs, against the windows and made penny-sized dark spots on the bleached stones of the orchard paths. A summer storm, long predicted, is upon us. The thatch lets in trickles of water, and the house fills with a damp straw smell that is a ghost in itself, a presence that only makes itself known in heavy rain.

August 2 -- later -- The Hollow has cheated me! As the storm smote the countryside, I sat at table and informed the Mama of my decision about the tree. I was prepared for anger on a level of the storm, and knew she was too feeble to lash in a way that would hurt. I am mistress here, not her. But the Mama smiled, cunningly, and simply said that I had not the power to overrule her. She laughed, cruelly. At that moment, an arc of lightning lanced down from the dark skies and struck at the base of the very tree I had sought to protect. In a white moment, I saw everything. There were flames, instantly extinguished by the torrent, and the earth that bound the tree's roots seemed to be blasted out of existence. For a heart-smiting moment, I was afraid the tree would fall towards the house, smashing through the wall and the windows, an apple-pimpled fist coming down on the table where we sat. But no, it fell outwards, away from the house. It took a long time, I think. Other lightning strikes seared my eyes with lingering images of the great living thing tottering, branches shaking and snapping, fruit raining and rolling. I dare not go out to see what damage the felled titan has caused. The Mama laughs still, and not alone.

August 3 -- The tree has smashed a copse of smaller trees, at the edge of the property. Adam Cobb's labourers are at work, hauling away the ruined trees, costing money I cannot spare. Girls are picking up the shiny, wet apples. Each must be accounted for, and sold. If so much as one is eaten, it shall come out of the wages. I must be strict, for we are desperate and only I can cope. The miracle is that the tall tree still lives. It is on its side, but enough of its roots are in the earth for it to survive. Adam says it will adjust to its new position, and continue to fruit for a hundred years or more. The Mama called down the lightning, but has not won. She is talking with Adam now, insisting he bring axes and saws. She will not be stopped. I write in the Summer Room, surrounded by ghosts who dare not venture out into the sunshine. Everything is clean and dripping. Insects buzz and swarm. Insects have stingers, too. And some of the insects are not living things. Generation upon generation has lived and died here. They all remain. The Mama has just clapped her hand to the back of her neck.

August 7 -- It is over. The Mama is not here. I was afraid she would linger. The others remain, silent, at attention. I am uneasy around them. They have grown used to the habit of cruelty. It is hard to break.

August 10 -- She tried to kill the tree; I did kill her. That is how I see it. Everyone knows. I should hang for it, but I will not. She was old, wasps sting, bodies grow weak, people must die. We must wish what we must, and cannot be held accountable for it. If Bannerman's God answers a parishioner's prayer, He not the supplicant is given the credit; therefore, I cannot be blamed. And yet, a voice of doubt.

August 13 -- The ghosts are hooded, like wigged judges or hangmen. A black rope of some slimy stuff hangs from the chandelier in the Summer Room. A verdict has been passed, which I must agree with. It will come soon.

August 14 -- The fallen tree, which thrives, is a bridge over the rhyne. That part is dead, and will be cut away soon. But now it is a way out of the Hollow. Tonight, I will escape justice, crawl across the tree bridge. This will stay behind, with the ghosts. The Mama is murdered, and I can be free. I shall be stung no more.