is as bitching as blood can seem."

THE HIRE

"Corn's high this year," chirped the old woman, almost with a cackle.
"All's the better for them to hide in," the old woman was continuing,
her face a brazen mixture of distain and contempt.

"These come to the house, late model cars, too, and just wait. Lord if
I knows what for," her voice trailing off, reedy, almost water besotted
much as the likeness of an old boot, the colour of her wrinkled skin.

Old Meg was an authority of sorts in these parts. Seems she had had her
share of the strange and eventful in her time.

At the age of sixteen she had married. I'm speaking now of early in
this century, just as the car was making its appearance in this part of
eastern Ontario. Right away her new husband and she had bought a farm
some eight miles distance from Kincaid off Palace Road.

"Yeh, well we weren't in that house morn a week when the strangest
things began happenin'." That was the extent of her explanation as to
why she and her hubbies of a few months made the journey into town to
stay at her in-laws not once but every night of their married life for
over forty years.

Meg was a recalcitrant soul. Probably had she been born three centuries
earlier folks would have said worse. Certainly she said little and
allowed you to say scarce more. Why, even now she was staring at you,
just like her custom offering only a pittance of facts as to why there
occurred an exodus of cars to the lone side-road by the big weathered
house. A cynic would have begged the hire of something illicit to
summon numbers in that quantity. Old Meg let it be known it was
something more profound than that. Her every manner convinced you
comments as such were guilty of the grossest understatement.

Weird lights, barnyard animals could be seen in the house and a hulk of
a rusted car in the debris of a lawn. She was a widow of 18 years with
no one to call her home. To listen to the neighbours tell it, they were
alarmed, best as they could recollect, when the old Ford lumbered
toward town regular as ever each night at dusk.

"What ails those two," folk along the Palace would say. "You'd think
new marrieds wouldn't care to be disturbed. Maybe Humboldt's right when
he says there's some awful going's on there."

Rumors don't substantially change, I thought. Take, for instance,
stories people tell of old Lake on the Mountain in these parts: the
underground reservoir replete with ghostly lights,