Read The Ghosts of Kerfol Online
Authors: Deborah Noyes
The Ghosts of Kerfol (16 page)
She’s gone now, anyway. They all are. I don’t know how I know, but I do. I feel it in Clio’s relaxed gait, in my own calm, in the fresh smell of the slowing rain. The woods are dripping-black and sleepy. I mumble a clumsy prayer and ask Mum to look for her, look after her, and we keep going through the waning storm. It isn’t long before Clio, dumb mutt, is wagging her pink tongue and her tail, happily shaking off rain like diamonds, and I’ve never been glad to say this before, but I can’t hear it falling. I can’t hear a thing.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” is one of my favorite ghost stories. I originally set out to retell it, together with several other American gothic tales, but in the end my editors and I thought it might be more fun and original to really
inhabit
the story we liked best of the group — and the haunted house of its title. This book is the result.
In the first two stories, I worked in phrases and dialogue from the original, so this was at least in part a fortuitous (for me) collaboration with Edith Wharton.
Thanks to my editors, Liz Bicknell and Amy Ehrlich; to my agent, Jill Grinberg; to Katie Cunningham, Sherry Fatla, Kate Cunningham, Hannah Mahoney, Meghan Blosser, Amy Carlisle, and Audrey Brown; and to my dear friend and expert first reader, Lisa Goodfellow Bowe.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2008 by Deborah Noyes
Cover photographs: copyright © 2008 by Jutta Klee/Corbis (young woman);
copyright © 2008 by Grant V. Faint/Getty Images (interior);
copyright © 2008 by Brian Chase/iStockphoto (necklace)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2013
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Noyes, Deborah.
The ghosts of Kerfol / Deborah Noyes. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Over the centuries, the inhabitants of author Edith Wharton’s fictional mansion, Kerfol, are haunted by the ghosts of dead dogs, fractured relationships, and the taste of bitter revenge.
ISBN 978-0-7636-3000-3 (hardcover)
[1. Haunted houses — Fiction. 2. Ghosts — Fiction. 3. Supernatural Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N96157Gh 2008
[Fic] — dc22 200705188
ISBN 978-0-7636-4825-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-7636-6411-4 (electronic)
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