“The House by the dark pool”

A hundred years ago, a husband and wife lived in a cottage in the middle of a deep wood, near by
a dark pool. They made a living by cutting wood. The husband, Eric treated his wife very badly.
He made her work hard for him all day long, cooking, cleaning, growing the vegetables they
mostly ate, and even chopping up the logs he cut each day. She hated her life in this dark place
and longed to get away. She dreamed of taking the money he hid in a box under their bed and
escaping from his clutches.

One evening, as Martha was cooking, Eric came in to the cottage in a foul temper, sat down at the
table and demanded his food. When Martha put his plate in front of him, he looked at it in disgust
and then threw it at his wife. He shouted and ranted, accused her of being lazy and beat her. She
fended off his blows as best she could and finally escaped to the bedroom. Eric sat downstairs, his
evil temper smouldering and flickering like the single candle which lit the room, drinking heavily
from the bottle on the table. She listened for the sounds which told her he had fallen asleep. At last
she heard his drunken snores.

With difficulty, she moved the heavy bed, hardly daring to breathe. She moved the floorboard,
heaved out the moneybox, lifted the lid and ran her fingers through the heavy coins. But when she
raised her eyes, there at the door stood Eric. With a wild roar, he plunged the knife with which
he’d eaten his meal into her heart.

He stood looking in amazement at the blood covering his hands, unable to move. At last he awoke
from his trance and went out to the hut where he kept his tools. He found a large sack and
returned to the room where his wife lay dead. He put her body in the sack, pulled it outside, put
in a large rock and then tied the neck firmly.

The night was dark. He dragged the sack towards the edge of the pool. A veil of mist covered it’s
dark surface. He lifted the sack into his rowing boat, stepped carefully aboard, settled the oars,
and rowed out to the middle of the pool. When he reached the deepest part, he manhandled the
sack out of the boat. It slid at once into the black water.

Eric rowed back to the cottage across water as dark as his evil heart. He went once more to his hut,
collected a pail and brush, filled it with water and returned to the room where the blood of his
wife still splattered the wall and lay in a pool on the floor. For the rest of the night he scrubbed to
remove all traces of his crime. At dawn he fell into an exhausted sleep.

When he awoke, the memory of the crime flooded back. For the blood he had cleaned away the
night before still lay in pools on the floor and in spatters on the wall. In a panic, he rushed to the
hut, collected limewash and a paintbrush and returned to the room. Frantically he tried to blot out
every trace of blood.

That night, as Eric lay once more in a fitful sleep, there was a stirring on the surface of the dark
pool. A figure slowly formed from the mist covering the pool, and slid across the surface towards
the shore. Silently it slipped towards the house, through the locked door and into the room where
Eric slept. It stood at the end of the bed. Eric muttered in his sleep, became aware of the chill that
had come into the room, and awoke. He saw the figure at the end of his bed , shrank away from it
in fear, a strangled cry in his throat as the ghost of his dead wife claimed her revenge.