The Banshee's Tale

A cool Savannah breeze blew softly through the house, the lace Victorian draperies a semblance to a dancer whisking methodically across a ballroom floor. There was still a hint of humidity in the air, but it offered some relief from the scorching afternoon heat.

Damon sat at the table, drawing a picture of a beautiful lady. He was always considered by his teachers to be a savant or a prodigy of sorts with a rare talent for putting pencil to paper and yielding a flawless likeness to his subject. He loved to draw, sometimes to his detriment, spending nearly all of his time with a pencil in his hand and none of it with a baseball or a fishing pole. He wasn’t like most little boys and he didn’t care to be. He just wanted to draw. Sometimes there was no subject at all, not a real one anyway, just a face and often the same faces would pop into his head over and over. He would capture them in incredible detail giving an identity to those nameless faces that existed only in his mind.

She was a pretty lady, he thought, her long golden hair shining in the sunlight and her gown swaying in the breeze like the draperies. The subtle shading produced an illusion of depth in her eyes so vivid and so piercing that it was almost as if she were alive. Damon felt a sudden chill and as he shivered his concentration was broken. He put down his pencil then got up from the table and walked over to the window. Out in the yard his mother took the sheets down from the clothes line, shook them out, folded them and placed them neatly in the wicker basket. Behind her was a young woman standing there watching. Damon was not frightened at all, at least not at that moment, just curious. He walked away from the window and over to the screen door. When he looked back out into the yard, his mother was coming up the steps, but the woman was gone.

“Mother,” he asked, “who was that lady in the yard?”

“What lady? There was no lady in the yard, silly”. She said.

“There was. She was standing right behind you. She was watching you fold the sheets.”

“Damon, you should be ashamed of yourself. Why would you want to try and frighten your mother like that?”

“But it’s true, Mother. She was there.”

“That’s enough of that, young man.”

“But Mother…”

“Enough, I tell you!” she said, her failing Irish accent becoming more obvious as she became agitated.

She walked with the basket to the back of the house and Damon went back over to the table and picked up his pencil. He looked at the picture he had been drawing and the familiar stare of his subject seemed very real. Again, he shivered and was immediately drawn to the window for a second time. He was much more apprehensive about even looking out and when he mustered the courage to do so, to his surprise there was no one there. He was a little bit disappointed and then somewhat relieved, but as he turned away from the window he was startled to see the young woman standing inside the screen door. Her skin was pale and her expression was one of sorrow. She stood there, looking almost like a picture, not moving at all and not even looking at Damon, though her empty stare was firmly fixed on something seemingly far away and well beyond the room. At first he tried to run but he couldn’t move and his eyes became locked on her distant glare. Suddenly, the features of her face began to move and she drew a deep breath, then released a lifetime of sorrow in a wailing cry that brought all of the fear and anxiety of Damon’s childhood swelling in the pit of his stomach. Frozen in fear, he closed his eyes and clenched his fist tightly around the pencil. The shrillness of the woman’s cries was so permeating that he could not even hear his own screams. He closed his eyes tighter and still he saw the woman’s face as clearly as if his eyes were open. He screamed louder and louder until he felt hands on his shoulders. With a sudden turn he swung his arms defensively, his eyes still closed and his hand still clutching the pencil. The crying stopped and it was quiet.

“Honey, is everything okay?”

He opened his eyes and turned around. The house was empty and the windows were closed. There was no table, no draperies and no breeze. Standing there in the front door, looking back at him with obvious concern was a young woman. She was very beautiful and very real. For a few moments, the twenty years that had passed were tucked away somewhere in his suffering conscience and only a few minutes of that fateful day remained. Slowly, it all started to come back to him. The woman’s sorrowful cries; his fear, his own sorrow, his mother, her neck…the pencil.

He never drew another picture ever again. The aging hardwood floor, still stained from the blood of his mother was a grim reminder of what he had done all of those years before.

“Honey, please. It’s getting late and this house gives me the creeps. Can we go now?”

And as quickly as the memory of the Banshee had recaptured his soul, he was liberated.

“Of course we can, sweetheart. Go on out to the car and I will be there in just a minute.” He said.

As his wife walked out the door, Damon went over to the back window and looked out into the yard where all that remained of the clothes line were the old rusted posts. He mustered a half-hearted smile as he remembered the many times he watched his mother hanging up and taking down the laundry. Turning away from the window, he paused as he thought he caught a glimpse of someone standing in the yard just as he had all those years before. But there was no one there and he wondered if it was all in his mind. He wondered if she had ever been there at all or if the whole thing was just some Banshee tale that his subconscious had created in the likeness of his drawing. Nevertheless, this was one tale that Damon would never again forget.