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handsome dog; although”—I took one look at the animal’s fiery orbs and made haste to add—“handsome is as handsome does.”
    As if in appreciation of this verbal bouquet, the animal promptly lay down, nose on his enormous paws, andbegan to pant in a way that stretched his mouth into a smile wide enough to swallow a dinner plate.
    “He comes after me, from behind a tombstone in the churchyard.” The woman had mustered the physical and emotional wherewithal to rise to her knees and again make the sign of the cross, in patent hope of banishing the huge canine back from whence he came. “And when I scream and start to run, he chases me all the way down the road to this house. One minute he nips at my heels, the next time he makes the circles around me like I am a sheep he has to round up into the pen. That was not nice of him.” Her accent was not from these parts.
    A foreigner? Perhaps from some village in Transylvania where phantom dogs routinely set upon unwary travellers? My mind raced from this possibility to the realization that the poor woman might have come to serious grief. In her panic she could have blundered off the road and over the cliff, which in places sheered down to where the sea came slathering up over the rocks. Thank God she had made it safely to our gates and had reached the house before expiring of terror.
    “He is the devil in dog’s fur.” The woman resisted my attempt to raise her to an upright position.
    “We mustn’t jump to conclusions.” I went to stand over the dog, who cocked a hopeful ear and looked at me with the eyes of one ready and eager to be redeemed from a life of frightening helpless females out of their wits. I’m not a doggy person, mainly because Tobias Cat wouldn’t have approved, but I’ve never been unduly nervous around dogs. “Look, he’s wearing a collar with a tag. Hold tight a minute.” I smiled reassuringly over my shoulder before bending down to lift the brass disk away from the furry throat and read the inscription.
    “My goodness!” I exclaimed.
    “His name is Lucifer?” The woman pressed a hand to her mouth.
    “No, Heathcliff!” I said. “Which means …”
    “What?” she demanded fearfully.
    “That he belongs, or, I should say,
belonged
to our local librarian. Poor Miss Bunch died of a rare virus that shuts down the heart. Sometimes the victim suffers flu-like symptoms, but just as often there are no warning signs. Itwas a shock, particularly, I am sure, for Heathcliff here.” I went on softly, very much aware that the dog had lowered his head onto his paws and was uttering a series of infinitely sad woofs like a dirge. “Miss Bunch was buried today in St. Anselm’s churchyard, and this sad little orphan must have escaped from the people who were temporarily housing him and followed his mistress to her final resting place.”
    “Her ghost! I saw it, walking on feet that do not touch the ground, between the tombstones. A woman—dressed in black from the head to the feet. She wears a veil that flutters like a big cobweb in the wind. And she twists her bony hands and she talks to herself.” My female visitor was pallid with terror.
    “A tall, thin woman with stooped shoulders?” I asked.
    “This is so.”
    “That wasn’t Miss Bunch. She was only of medium height and quite stout. I think you must have seen Ione Tunbridge, one of our local characters. She’s close to eighty now and has haunted, in a manner of speaking, St. Anselm’s since the day her bridegroom failed to turn up at the church for the wedding ceremony.” While speaking, I began to wonder if I had somehow become trapped within the pages of
Her Master’s Voice
as a punishment for scoffing so many digestive biscuits. Was I doomed to wander from one melodrama to another throughout eternity?
    “Miss Tunbridge hasn’t left her house in daylight in nearly sixty years,” I bumbled on, “but every so often she is spotted, between dusk and daylight, wandering around