The Banshee

by Elliott O'Donnell

O’Hara at once became interested.

“Why,” he said, “from your description she must have been one of the Banshees that is supposed to haunt our family, and which my mother always declared she saw shortly before my father’s death. A hideous hag with a shock head of tow-coloured hair, who stood on the staircase laughing devilishly, and then, all at once, vanished. She is known as the bad Banshee to distinguish her from the good one, which is, so I have always been led to understand, very beautiful, but which never manifests itself, saving when anything especially dreadful is going to happen to an O’Hara.”

Feeling very uneasy in his mind, Menzies now bid his friend good night, and went home.

After that days passed and Menzies saw nothing of O’Hara, until one evening, when he was thinking it must be about now that the marriage was to take place, O’Hara turned up at his flat, and proposed that they should go for a stroll in the direction of the fortifications near Montsouris. But O’Hara was not in his usual good spirits; he seemed very glum and depressed, and Menzies gathered that there had been occasional differences of opinion between his friend and Gabrielle, and that the affair was not running quite as smoothly as it might. Gabrielle had a great many admirers, one of them very rich, and O’Hara was obviously very much annoyed at the attentions they had been bestowing on his fiancée, and at the manner in which she had received them. But there was something else, too; something he could see in his friend’s face and manner, but which O’Hara would not so much as hint at. Menzies was, of course, pleased, for there now seemed to be a glimmer of hope that these frictions would materialise into something stronger and more definite, and lead to a rupture that would be final.

He was so engrossed in speculations of this nature that he forgot all about the time or where they were, and was only brought back to earth by the whistle and shriek of a train, which made him at once realise they had left Montsouris and were several miles without the fortifications.

It was also getting very dusk, and, as he had to be up unusually early in the morning, he suggested to O’Hara they had better turn back. They were then close beside a clump of bushes and a very lofty pine tree that was bending to and fro in such a peculiar manner that Menzies’ attention was at once directed to it.

“What’s wrong with that tree?” he remarked, pointing at it with his stick.

“What’s wrong with the tree?” O’Hara laughed. “Why, it’s not the tree there’s anything the matter with—the tree’s all right, quite all right—it’s you. What on earth are you staring at it for in that ridiculous fashion? Have you suddenly gone mad?”

Menzies made no reply, but went up to the tree and examined it. As he was doing so, a slight disturbance in the bushes made him glance around, and he saw, a few feet from him, the tall figure of a girl, clad in a kind of long flowing mantle, but with bare head and feet. The moonlight was on her face, and Menzies, hard and difficult though he was, as a rule, to please, realised it was lovely, far more lovely, so he declared afterwards, than any woman’s face he had ever gazed upon. The eyes particularly impressed him, for, although in the darkness he could not tell their colour, he could see that they were of an extremely beautiful shape and setting, and seemed to be filled with a sorrow that was almost more than her heart could bear. Indeed, so poignant was this sorrow of hers, that Menzies, infected by it, too, could not keep back the tears from his own eyes; and, dour and unemotional as he was by nature, his whole being suddenly became literally steeped in sadness and pity.

The girl looked straight at him, but only for a few seconds; she then turned towards O’Hara, and seemed to concentrate her whole attention upon him. There was now, Menzies thought, a certain indistinctness and a something shadowy about her that he had not at first noticed, and he was thinking how he could test her to see if she were really a substance or merely an optical illusion, when O’Hara, who was getting tired at his long absence, called out, whereupon the girl at once vanished, uttering, as she melted away in the background, in the same inexplicable manner as the old woman had done, such an awful, harrowing, wailing shriek, that it seemed to fill the whole air, and to linger on for an eternity. Thoroughly terrified, Menzies, as soon as his scattered senses could collect themselves, fled from the spot, and didn’t cease running till O’Hara’s angry shout brought him to a standstill. To his astonishment O’Hara hadn’t heard anything, and was only annoyed at his seemingly mad behaviour. In answer to his description of the girl, however, and the wailing, O’Hara at once declared it was the Banshee, and the one he had always been so particularly anxious to see.