I was walking with a ghost

For the past three nights, I have been trying to remember a book that terrified me as a child. This afternoon, I found it at the Cary Library in Lexington. It was The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, by Vivien Alcock. And now I want a copy.*

What I'd remembered was a single scene: a scarred ghost, a child, someone's apprentice who had died horribly, beaten or stoned to death; no title, no plot, only an overwhelming sense of dread and a child's dirty face streaked with blood. I had remembered this half-accurately. (In case you read the book, I shouldn't tell you which half.) What I'd forgotten was all the rest of the story: Cassie's mother, the medium who has been raising her seventh child of a seventh child to follow in her footsteps, who's caught out as a fraud in the first chapter and still continues to insist that her daughter will be a great clairvoyant; Cassie's brother Tom, who disbelieves in ghosts as fervently as he is afraid of them; Cassie herself, who has always hated her much-praised clairvoyance and wants to be a doctor; and Deverill, the more than faintly sinister, nightmare-tormented ghost that Cassie raises accidentally from a near-unmarked grave:

It came from the black headstone. The one marked Deverill. It was huge. It towered above her, three times its normal height—then she saw it was a man, dressed in a black coat or cloak, so similarly flecked and speckled with gray, so harshly creased in the cold light that it might have grown from the same stone. One shoulder angled up sharply, higher than the other, but this might have been the way he was standing, leaning forward, one hand on either corner of the crooked headstone. His face was thin, the eyes hidden by the shadow of his hat, the pale skin, drained of all color by the moon, much pocked and pitted and scarred so that the smooth lips showed up in strange contrast, glistening like gray satin.

Like any good devil, he offers Cassie knowledge and wealth—spells that the son of an eighteenth-century witch might have known, the coins and small treasure he buried himself and that lie still undisturbed in the house where he lived and died—and seems to ask no more than her companionship, respite from his bad dreams. Rejecting all his offers, Cassie remains steadfastly sure that he wants more, like her soul. The more commerce she has with Deverill, besides, the more she's pulled into her mother's world of spirits and apparitions that might not all be fakery: and what kind of future does a clairvoyant doctor have?

I didn't find The Haunting of Cassie Palmer frightening, this second time around. I do note that Deverill, however much I forgot him after elementary school, almost certainly went straight into my pack of archetypes: the outcast (while Deverill is still only a name and a pair of dates on a neglected headstone, Cassie decides that "he must have been poor and ugly, wicked and unloved, so that no one was willing to pay to have him rest in peace") between worlds, threshold-frozen, the shadowy character who may not be evil, but he's certainly not safe. Either this type was an early influence, or I had well-defined preferences even then. My favorite of all the Norse gods, in second grade and still nowadays, always was hurtful, charming Loki.

From the same library run, I netted Helen Cresswell's The Secret World of Polly Flint and Moondial, William Mayne's It, Grace Chetwin's Gom on Windy Mountain, and Ruth Park's Playing Beatie Bow. (I forgot Monica Hughes' Devil on My Back, but I'll have to return the books in a few days; I'll get more then.) All of these are re-reads, but I'm still looking forward to them. Rewards for when I finish my reading list . . .

*The original Delacorte Press hardcover from 1980, please, not the paperback reprint. I despise the current cover. And I can't find the original artwork anywhere online, but you'll have to take my word for it: both Cassie and Deverill look like themselves.