The Marmalade Cat’s Pendant

In the autumn of 1967, I was a restless twenty-year-old, spending a semester abroad in a small, forgotten village in the highlands of Scotland. My friends, Elodie and Marc, were exchange students from Lyon, and we had become inseparable in our shared love for the eerie and the unexplained. When they received an invitation to stay with a distant cousin in the remote hamlet of Crannoch, they insisted I come along. ‘You must see the old manor,’ Elodie had said, her eyes gleaming with mischief. ‘It’s said to be haunted by a Jacobite who never surrendered.’ I laughed it off, but a part of me was intrigued.

We arrived on a grey October afternoon. The manor, called Dunmore House, was a sprawling Victorian pile of granite and slate, perched on a cliff overlooking the North Sea. The cousin, a stern woman in her sixties named Morag, greeted us with a tight smile and a pot of strong tea. The house was filled with dark wood, faded tapestries, and the smell of damp and old books. Our room for the week was a large, draughty chamber with a four-poster bed, and I was given a small attic room with a narrow window that looked out over the moors.

That first evening, Morag told us stories of the house’s past: of a laird who had gone mad and bricked up his wife in the cellar, of a servant girl who had thrown herself from the tower, and of a strange pendant that had once belonged to the laird’s wife, lost for centuries. ‘They say the pendant brings bad luck to anyone who finds it,’ she said, her voice low. ‘It’s made of silver with a single garnet, shaped like a drop of blood.’ We laughed, dismissing it as folklore, but I noticed Morag didn’t smile.

After dinner, we decided to explore the house. The electricity was faulty, so we carried candles. The rooms were filled with dusty furniture and faded portraits. In a small study, we found a old desk with a secret compartment. Inside was a tarnished silver pendant with a single garnet, exactly as Morag had described. ‘It’s real,’ Marc whispered, holding it up to the candlelight. ‘But shouldn’t we leave it?’ Elodie said, her voice uncertain. I took it from him, feeling a strange warmth in my palm. ‘It’s just a trinket,’ I said. ‘We’ll put it back tomorrow.’ But as I slipped it into my pocket, I felt a cold draft that seemed to come from nowhere.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The wind howled outside, and the house creaked and groaned. Around midnight, I heard a faint sobbing from somewhere below. I got up and followed the sound, my candle flickering. It led me to the cellar door, which was locked. I pressed my ear against the wood, and the sobbing stopped, replaced by a whisper: ‘You have found me. Now you must set me free.’ I stumbled back, my heart racing. I returned to my room and hid the pendant under my pillow, but the whispers continued in my mind: ‘Free me, free me.’

The next day, I told Elodie and Marc about the experience. They exchanged worried glances. ‘Maybe we should leave,’ Elodie said. But Morag, who had overheard, shook her head. ‘The pendant has chosen you,’ she said, her face pale. ‘The only way to break its hold is to return it to the sea, where the wife’s body was thrown.’ We decided to do it that very day. We walked to the cliff’s edge, the pendant heavy in my hand. As I prepared to throw it, I saw a figure in the water below, a woman in a white dress, waving at me. I froze, and the pendant grew icy cold. ‘Don’t listen to her,’ Morag’s voice came from behind me, sharp. ‘She is the one who was bricked up. The pendant is the key to her prison. If you throw it away, she will be free to haunt the living.’ I pulled my hand back, confused.

That night, we held a séance in the study, using the pendant as a focus. The candles flickered, and the room grew freezing. A voice, not our own, filled the air: ‘I was the laird’s wife, Marjorie. I was accused of witchcraft and sealed in the wall. My husband stole my pendant, and with it, my soul. If you do not destroy it, I will remain trapped, but if you do, I will return and exact my revenge on all who wronged me.’ The séance ended abruptly when a gust of wind blew out the candles. Elodie was trembling. ‘We have to destroy it,’ she said. ‘But how?’ Marc asked. ‘Fire,’ I said, remembering a story about silver and garnet.

We built a small fire in the hearth and placed the pendant in it. The metal hissed and turned black, but the garnet glowed like an ember. Suddenly, a horrific scream echoed through the house, and the walls shook. The fire died, leaving the pendant intact but warped. Morag appeared in the doorway, her face ashen. ‘You’ve made it worse,’ she said. ‘Now she is furious.

That night, I dreamt of a beautiful woman with long dark hair, reaching out to me from a wall of darkness. ‘You are the one,’ she whispered. ‘You will free me.’ When I woke, the pendant was on my nightstand, still warm. I was terrified. I decided to take it to the village priest the next morning, but when I arrived, the church was abandoned and the priest nowhere to be found. The villagers I met refused to speak to me, quickly crossing themselves and walking away.

Desperate, I remembered Morag’s words about the sea. She had said the wife’s body was thrown there. Perhaps the pendant needed to be immersed in the sea, not just thrown. That evening, under a blood-red moon, I rowed a small boat out into the bay, the pendant clenched in my fist. When I dropped it into the water, it sank immediately, and the sea seemed to calm. But as I looked into the depths, I saw the woman’s face staring back at me, smiling. I rowed back to shore, feeling a sense of dread so profound it was almost physical.

The next morning, Morag was found dead in her bed, a look of terror on her face, her throat covered in bruises that looked like fingers. The pendant was on her chest, wet as if from the sea. The police ruled it a heart attack, but we knew the truth. Elodie and Marc wanted to leave immediately, but I knew it was too late. That night, as I lay in my attic room, the door creaked open, and a figure in white stood in the doorway. ‘You freed me,’ it said. ‘But you must take my place.’ I tried to scream, but no sound came out. The figure reached out and touched my forehead, and I felt a cold numbness spread through me.

The next morning, my friends found me sitting in a chair, staring at nothing. I was catatonic, unable to speak or move. They took me to a hospital, where the doctors could find no physical cause. I spent the next three years in an institution, bound by the whispers that only I could hear. Eventually, they released me, but I was never the same. I returned to Crannoch years later, out of morbid curiosity. The manor was abandoned, its windows shattered. On the cliff, I found a piece of the pendant, half-buried in the earth. I picked it up, and I swear I heard a woman’s voice in the wind: ‘You will always be mine.’

Now, I keep the pendant in a locked box, never daring to look at it for too long. But sometimes, at night, I feel it pulsing, and I know that Marjorie is still waiting. She has not finished with me yet, and I fear that one day, I will be the one standing in the doorway, waiting for the next poor soul to end my torment.