A River Darkly

Rain, like a deluge of wet regrets, poured without pause from the murky skies. The huddled woman, a dreary figure, head hidden by a large black scarf, leaned over the stone railing of the little bridge. She sobbed into her cupped hands. There was an insubstantial quality to the weeping woman, a monochromatic vagueness around the edges, as if somehow, she partially merged with her bleak surroundings.

She was a gray thing integrating into a grayer world. Adelaide knew this blurring wasn’t due to the cascade of rain, the reduced visibility. The woman was a true phantom. She was a sinister specter haunting a dark river. Worse, she wasn’t the only one. There were those dead children to consider as well...

It hadn't begun like this. For Adelaide, the mansion was meant to be her summer paradise in turn-of-the-century Scotland. While her husband was off with friends at his hunting lodge, his gift to her was the house, a place of refuge for her, a home where she could escape the summer heat of south England, to relax instead in the cool climate of misty Scotland. To take walks through the orchard, or stroll along the edge of the river toward the quaint stone bridge, sounded like delightful prospect to her.

But having already had an odd meeting with the estate agent to lease the place, and now alone on the estate with only the odd local maid for company, things seemed to be off on the wrong footing. And despite the gingerbread beauty of the mansion, the surrounding gardens, there seemed a persistent melancholy about the place, a constant vague darkness of spirit hovering over it all.

Then one day, when Adelaide spies a weeping woman on the little stone bridge, and then tells her maid about it, the servant warns her not to go near the river again. It seems the river is haunted, and it isn't just by the weeping woman...