Ghost Stories: A Collection of Short Stories on Death and Dying © copyright 2014 by Lillian Carrero
Excerpt:
The Golem of Prague
In the city of Prague, in the year
1888 a man named Selwyn Figgs was said to have traveled distant lands to reach
the city. He spoke many languages and was clearly understood, but it was said
he had a funny accent and no one was ever quite sure of his origin. That he was
a quiet unassuming man in manner, but tended towards flamboyant eccentricities
in attire, made him seem rather odd. The long sweeping black cape, the hat with
the unfashionable plumage shooting up from the hatband and more lace and
ruffles than most men would see fit to wear.
It was on the third night
of his arrival that he’d met the widow Miksch. She was still a quite handsome
woman with a comely figure, having produced no children in the two years of her
short and lustful marriage. In the ten years since she’d been widowed she’d had
to curb her more passionate and ravenous appetites, biding her time and waiting
for the just right man to set her cap on. After all, the widow Miksch couldn’t
just take any man for her husband, as the late Mr. Miksch, a good man by many
accounts, had died in a horrible accident—sordid really and not often spoken
of. There had at first been talk as how the overturned coach when righted had
produced a dead young woman, not his wife, with a missing petticoat and Mr. Miksch
with a nearly decapitated head, but it could very well have been a torn
petticoat and a missing corpse. It was too awful to speak of and so mostly no
one did.
Well, Mr. Miksch had left
his widow wife an independently wealthy woman. She had everything and anything
she wanted, except a man to warm her bed and though it would have shocked her
friends and family, a man to warm her bed was what she wanted more than
anything else. Of course, there had once been rumors about the widow and her
young gardener, but it was a commonly held belief that those rumors were
spiteful in nature and had been spread by wicked jealous women who could not
bear the ways in which their husbands stared longingly at the widow Miksch. The
fortuitous disappearance of the young gardener ended all the talk.
When Selwyn Figgs had met
Eliska Miksch, more readily known as the widow Miksch, not a word was said to
have been uttered between them. As they were neighbors, after a fashion, and
had not yet been properly introduced, you can imagine there’d been many
occasions of imperceptible nodding of the heads in unspoken greetings. A
fortnight, two days and seventeen hours had elapsed ere they received a formal
introduction, without all the pomp and circumstances of a grand ball they had been
introduced outside the dinner hall of Teza house as dinner guest of Vojta
Wasecko.
“Mr. Figg.”
“Mrs. Miksch.”
And he had bowed as she
had curtsy.
No comments:
Post a Comment