ELLIE BOWMAN RETURNS

Devlin bought the old mill for well below the market price. He took a risk. Risk was his business. It was no longer a mill. It was operating as a builder’s storehouse. The roof on the west side had fallen in after a fire, and the brickwork of the mill chimney, which stood a hundred feet high and was a ‘B’ listed building, needed urgent repair. The mill looked decayed and sad. To Devlin, the sadder, the better. He intended to transform it into a number of premium apartments and to make his fortune in so doing. He knew the history of the place from his grandmother, who had worked at the loom a half-century before. She had described the clanking of the machinery, the noise, the dust, the smell of hot oil, the painful skin rashes from the raw wool, the darkness, the long hours, the camaraderie between the mill-hands, the severity of the owner and the bowler-hatted managers, the pittance of pay the workers earned. There had been several tragedies at the mill over the years, but none worse than that which befell young Ellie Bowman. Ellie was a young woman of about twenty-eight. She had to look after four machines and had to be very nimble and quick to move timeously from one machine to another. On the fateful day, the mechanics had oiled the motion of one of the machines, and had left a patch of oil on the stone floor. Ellie dashed forth as required, slipped, became entangled with one of the looms, and was strangled to death before anyone could come to her aid. ‘They do say,’ said Devlin’s Grandmother, ‘that she appears from time to time, especially when there is some great change afoot. One of the contractors saw her clearly when he was removing some of the machinery.’ Devlin dismissed this as fanciful nonsense. He viewed his new purchase one frosty evening in February. He stood in the long, low basement area that had once housed all the machinery and he fancied he heard the whining of the Brammer belts and the clatter of the looms. A full moon lit up the ruined, and open, western end of the mill, casting a brilliant light. He prided himself on his temperament – he was a man of steel, a man with whom liberties could not be taken. To his great surprise, he watched as a woman, head tilted back and arms thrown out in front of her, apparently in supplication, beseeching someone, appeared from the shadows and stood in front of him. Her face was suffused and purple and her eyes seemed almost to be out of her eye-sockets, so protuberant were they. Devlin watched this phenomenon for several seconds and then, being a man of steel, took to his heels so quickly and so far that he did not halt until he reached the next town, five miles away. The next day he put the mill back on the market.