Free Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane

During those years, my mother would often tell me what she called ghost stories in order to make me afraid or what she called sad stories in order to make me weep. Her favourite ghost story had as its chief character a ghost named Old Eric. My mother had first heard the story dramatised on radio late at night, and she told the story to me one evening when I was lying in bed before sleep.
    A newly married couple arrive on the first evening of their honeymoon at an unoccupied castle that someone has made available to them in a remote district of England. The husband mentions light-heartedly the legend of Old Eric, the first owner of the castle, who had a withered leg and who preyed on young women. According to the legend, Eric could be brought back to life if his remains were moistened with female blood. While exploring the cellars, the couple find some old bones but think nothing of their discovery, not even when the wife cuts her finger on a suit of armour and blood drips to the floor. They choose for their bedroom the topmost attic-room. Then the wife prepares for bed while her husband explores some or another distant wing of the building. Soon afterwards, the wife hears the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The footsteps have an irregular rhythm, as though the person climbing the stairs has a faulty leg.
    When she first told me the story, my mother had switched off the light at this point and had then left the room. Soon afterwards, I heard the sound of footsteps approaching my room. The footsteps had a distinctive, irregular rhythm, as though the person approaching had a faulty leg. I obliged my mother by screaming as though terrified. I obliged her in the same way on later occasions when I was in bed and she would imitate in the hallway the sound of Old Eric climbing the stairs in the castle. Although I was not terrified, I was concerned for the safety of the young woman. Even so, I believed she could have saved herself from Eric by the same means that I myself relied on when I woke sometimes in the early hours and supposed an intruder was in the house. She might have saved herself if she had had the wit to undress and put on her nightdress and then to lie in bed utterly still and taking only shallow breaths so that Old Eric would suppose she had already died and would then go in search of some other victim. Being ignorant of the ways of female persons, I was unable to see in my mind the young woman undressing or putting on her nightdress, but before my mother’s footsteps had reached my door I had always composed in my mind the last scene of the story of Old Eric in my mind. The young woman lay on the bed with only a sheet covering her. (The young couple had chosen high summer for their wedding and honeymoon.) She had been cunning enough to lie sprawled in the way that corpses were often sprawled in illustrations. The window of the attic room was high above the trees, so that the moonlight entered unchecked. The young woman was so clearly visible, so I supposed, that Old Eric would have taken her for a corpse as soon as he had looked in at the door. He would have done no more than look for a few moments beneath the sheet and the nightdress before he went on searching the other rooms on the upper floor.
    My mother’s sad stories, as she called them, were mostly about children who became lost in uninhabited places or became orphans at an early age. As with her ghost stories, I feigned sadness so as to oblige my mother. One of her sad stories worked on me differently. When I first heard it from my mother, I thought of it as the story in verse of a child named Bridget. A few years later, I learned that the words my mother had often recited to me by heart were three stanzas of a poem with the title “The Fairies,” by William Allingham. I learned this in 1947, when I was in the third grade of primary school. The poem was part of the contents of the Third Book in the series of readers published by the Education Department