A shadow gathers when the wind begins to mourn.
At midnight she comes.
Under the failing light of the streetlamp, the ghost takes shape - slight, brittle, stitched together from darkness and memory. The world grants her only a few stolen minutes at a time. Always she stands in the same place. Always she lifts her gaze to the same house — the house that once held her laughter, her future, and the beloved who never spoke of what truly happened to her.
The tale of her death has withered into legend. The truth was buried with her. Yet her pallid, ruined skin and the ceaseless twisting of her hands betray a grief that clings like frost - as if she still feels the moment life was torn from her body.
Those who wander late, tugged onwards by restless dogs and foolish bravery, sometimes glimpse her first. They whisper greetings into the wind. The world goes utterly still. Even the branches refuse to move, as though creation itself strains to hear her answer. When they blink, she has dissolved - and they find themselves nearly running home, unable to escape the thought of the Black Lady who does not speak.
Others wait deliberately, craving the thrill. They bring flasks and bravado and stories rehearsed in advance. But she does not appear for hunger or spectacle. She comes only on her own sorrowing terms. They leave with loud tales - empty, breathless - nothing like the quiet terror of those who truly meet her and carry away an icy ring tightening around the heart.
Sometimes the house-dwellers sense her first - the prickle at the spine, the compulsion to draw the curtains closed. Too late. Her shadow seeps across the windowpane, drinking the lamplight until the room forgets it was ever warm. A chill slips into their veins, patient and poisonous. They sleep fitfully. Their tempers sour. They speak of moving, and soon they do. The house is sold again, again, always at a price suspiciously generous.
Her eyes - deep charcoal, hollow and infinite - search ceaselessly through the veil, yearning for that single, forbidden moment.
What she seeks, no living soul knows.
But when the wind begins to cry, and midnight bends its head, the shadow returns - and remembers everything.
Originally written for a writing group prompt on the colour black.
For more gothic ghost fiction by the author, see the link below.