The Second Macabre Megapack

by Various Writers

  In the third summer after Colin Galbraith was lost at sea, on a lovely summer evening, Mrs. Galbraith sat at the open window, knitting and smiling placidly as she watched her son at work in his little plot of garden watering the tufts of pinks and pansies. She laid her work in her lap, and her eyes followed his every movement with quiet pleasure. Sandie would make a good gardener. There was not a straggling growth in his plot nor any weeds ; all was neat and trim, and the flower-beds were prettily bordered with shells he had collected on the beach at North Berwick.

  He was gathering a posy with fastidious care, and his mother knew that it was for her, and thought to herself that if he had been uncanny in time past, he was a good boy, his heart was in the right place. But something disturbed him in his work. He rose from stooping over the bed, dropped his flowers to the ground, and Alison thought he was listening to some far-away sound till a change that passed over his face showed her that she was mistaken. Sandie was not listening, he was seeing. His face grew pale and his features pinched, his grey eyes were fixed while the color faded out of them till they were almost white, and he shuddered as though a cold wind blew over him.

  Mrs. Galbraith rose silently, and assured by the deep breathing of her husband, who was sitting in an armchair by the hearth, that he was asleep, opened the door softly, left the room, and hurried into the garden. There in the sunshine, surrounded by summer sights and summer scents, stood Sandie, a very image of midnight terror. His mother laid her large, warm hands on his shoulders, and gently shook him.

  “Sandie, Sandie, if you’re seeing again, for God’s sake say nothing to your father! He canna bear it; ye’ll tell me,” she said in a frightened whisper.

  The boy gave a sigh, passed his hands over his eyes, and staggered as though he were dizzy. Alison grasped her son firmly by the arm. “Come awa’! if your father wakes and goes to the window he’ll see us; come awa’!” and she hurried the boy through the warm evening sunshine that had suddenly grown cold and dim to her, and led him to a retired part of the garden.

  “And now what was it that ye saw?” and looking at her with a strange expression of fear and compassion, Sandie said, “I saw my father lying on the road at the foot of the steep brae by Sir Ewen Campbell’s gates, and his ’een were shut, but for a’ that he was the same as Uncle Colin!”

  The self-controlled, unemotional Alison Galbraith gave a smothered scream as she listened to her son, and, seizing his arm in a passion of fear, with a grip like a vice, said ‘Elspeth McFie was right when she called you an awesome bairn! What for has God in His wrath given me such a child?’ and she shook him off, and left him in his confused misery.

  If David Galbraith had not been overcome with drink that night, he would have seen that something terrible had occurred to agitate his wife, but when the drunken fit was spent he noticed that she looked white and ill.

  “Alison, woman, ye keep too close in the house,” he said; “ye should walk to the sea and breathe the caller air, to bring the color back to your cheeks.”

  The following Friday was the corn market at Haddington, and David Galbraith, sober, shrewd, and business-like, set out to attend it, bent on driving a hard bargain. Alison stood at the gate as he mounted his horse, to wish him good luck, and to add a word of wifely admonition as to the advisability of not drinking too much whiskey before the return journey, and “Ye’ll no be late coming home the night, Davie?”

  “There is no night at this time o’ year, Alison.”

  “And ye’ll mind to come by the level road. There’s the steep brae beyond the Campheils’ gates, and I’d rather ye gave it a wide berth, and came by the long road.”

  “Not I, woman! Do ye expect me to mak’ a midnight ride a mile longer, just to avoid a brae that I ken as weel as my ain doorstep? Kelpie’ll be sober, douce beast, if his master’s not, and he kens every stane on the hill. Ye’ll go to bed, and leave the house door unlocked for me,” and David gave his horse a touch with the whip and away he trotted.

  Alison stood till the sound of hoofs had died away, and then went back into the house with a boding heart. Sandie returned from school at noon in high spirits, and asked his mother’s leave to bring home a schoolfellow to play with him in the afternoon. It was wonderful how his spirits had rallied since his vision of a few days before. It seemed as though his body had now grown strong enough to shake off the ghastly influence entirely, but his mother was shattered both by memory and apprehension.

  A dreadful restlessness possessed her as night drew on, and after the shouts of the boys at play were over, and silence fell on house and garden, she slipped out unnoticed and walked in the twilight to the beach. It was high midsummer, when in those latitudes the sunset lingers on the western horizon till in the east the vigorous dawn breaks to quench its lesser light. The crescent moon hung low in the sky over the gently murmuring sea that glimmered mysteriously in the diffused twilight, and the brown rocks loomed dark above the water. A time and a place to suggest eerie feelings to the most unimpressionable; but Alison’s whole mind was so filled with the apprehensions of approaching doom that the scene had no effect on her— she scarcely noticed where she was. The fear that possessed her was inward, and neither suggested, nor could it be increased, by the aspect of familiar things. She did not meet a soul in her restless wanderings. As she opened the house door on her return the clock struck twelve. Oh, when would David be home? He was seldom later than midnight. Alison needed no light, and, creeping softly up-stairs, she entered Sandie’s room, and drawing aside the curtain, by the solemn twilight of the northern night she saw his sleeping face calm and peaceful as an infant’s. Did she grudge him his untroubled slumber, that she would rather have found him awake and oppressed with terror as herself?

  While she stood listening to the beating of her own heart, that sounded louder than the breathing of her child, she heard the first distant sound of approaching hoofs, and as they rapidly drew nearer she recognized Kelpie’s familiar steps.

  “Thank God, he is safe home!” she said, and lest her husband should be displeased to find her sitting up for him, she hastened to her room and lighted a candle. The horse had stopped opposite the house, and David had had time to dismount, but he had not opened the gate. Some one might be detaining him there; yet there was no sound of voices to be heard, only Kelpie impatiently striking the ground with one of his fore feet.

  Alison looked out of the window, but could see nothing for the high wall, and as several minutes passed and still her husband did not come, and the horse stamped with increasing impatience, she slipped down-stairs, out of doors, and across the garden to the gate. So deadly a fear lay upon her spirit that when she flung the gate open and saw Kelpie standing riderless on the dusky highway she felt no surprise, only an assurance that Sandie’s vision was about to come true.

  “Oh, Kelpie lad, your master’s no far to seek!” she said as she led the trembling, sweating beast towards the stable yard. Then, without calling up any of the men, just as she was, with uncovered head, Alison Gaibraith sped through the dusk and silence of the summer night.

  “The steep brae by Sir Ewen Campbell’s gates! the steep brae by Sir Ewen Campbell’s gates!” she said to herself as she ran, and when the dark firs and high wall bounding the park came in sight her limbs almost gave way beneath her. Then she reached the great iron gates between granite pillars, and in the twilight she caught sight through their bars of the black avenue within, and heard the wind sigh in the boughs. Alison pressed her hands to her heart and urged herself on. Now a bat cut its zigzag flight through the air and startled her, the white scut of a frightened rabbit shone out in the dusk as it flashed across her path in search of a friendly burrow, and her echoing steps woke many a sleeping bird and set it fluttering with fear.

  The next turn in the road would bring her to the foot of the hill, and to something that she dared not name that she knew was waiting for her there. She closed her eyes for an instant, as she rounded the curve of the road and clenched her
hands then the soft silence of the summer night was broken by a wailing cry, and Alison Galbraith fell senseless on the dead body of her husband.

  David was sober that night, but as he rode through the mirk lanes the old horror had overtaken him. He thought that he heard a horseman following hard upon him, and clapped spurs to his beast and galloped down the hill, at the foot of which Kelpie slipped on a rolling stone, threw his rider heavily to the ground, and he neither spoke nor moved again.

  Alison Galbraith did not long survive her husband, and her death took place without Sandie having any intimation of its approach. He never had vision or prophetic foresight again after his father died. The weird gift departed from him with his weakly childhood, and he grew up robust and stout, thriving and commonplace as his forebears. Sandie is even a better farmer than his father before him, and is in a fair way to solve the problem of how to make two blades of wheat grow where only one had grown before. He has married a wife, practical and matter-of-fact as himself, and their sons and daughters are as guiltless of imagination as they are of any touch of the uncanny. The burly Lowland farmer can never be induced to speak of the second sight, even to his most intimate friends. In the early days of their married life his young wife ventured to ask him about the visions of his childhood, of which she had heard, but he silenced her with such severity that she did not again dare to approach More Stories by Louisa Baldwin the subject, and she will never know whether the stories of her husband’s uncanny childhood are wild legends or plain truth.

  [1] dowry [Middle English]

  [2] sober; sedate [Middle English]

  [3] holding [Scottish]

  UNCLE ABRAHAM’S ROMANCE, by Edith Nesbit

  “No, my dear,” my Uncle Abraham answered me, “no—nothing romantic ever happened to me—unless—but no: that wasn’t romantic either—”

  I was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair’s right hand, a portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature-painter’s art had been powerless to disguise—a woman with large lustrous eyes and perfect oval face.

  I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough in my baby days I had asked, “Who’s that, uncle?” always receiving the same answer: “A lady who died long ago, my dear.”

  As I looked again at the picture, I asked, “Was she like this?”

  “Who?”

  “Your—your romance!”

  Uncle Abraham looked hard at me. “Yes,” he said at last. “Very—very like.”

  I sat down on the floor by him. “Won’t you tell me about her?”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” he said. “I think it was fancy, mostly, and folly; but it’s the realest thing in my long life, my dear.”

  A long pause. I kept silence. “Hurry no man’s cattle” is a good motto, especially with old people.

  “I remember,” he said in the dreamy tone always promising so well to the ear that a story delighteth—“I remember, when I was a young man, I was very lonely indeed. I never had a sweetheart. I was always lame, my dear, from quite a boy; and the girls used to laugh at me.”

  He sighed. Presently he went on—

  “And so I got into the way of mooning off by myself in lonely places, and one of my favourite walks was up through our churchyard, which was set high on a hill in the middle of the marsh country. I liked that because I never met any one there. It’s all over, years ago. I was a silly lad; but I couldn’t bear of a summer evening to hear a rustle and a whisper from the other side of the hedge, or maybe a kiss as I went by.

  “Well, I used to go and sit all by myself in the churchyard, which was always sweet with thyme, and quite light (on account of its being so high) long after the marshes were dark. I used to watch the bats flitting about in the red light, and wonder why God didn’t make every one’s legs straight and strong, and wicked follies like that. But by the time the light was gone I had always worked it off, so to speak, and could go home quietly and say my prayers without any bitterness.

  “Well, one hot night in August, when I had watched the sunset fade and the crescent moon grow golden, I was just stepping over the low stone wall of the churchyard when I heard a rustle behind me. I turned round, expecting it to be a rabbit or a bird. It was a woman.”

  He looked at the portrait. So did I.

  “Yes,” he said, “that was her very face. I was a bit scared and said something—I don’t know what—and she laughed and said, ‘Did I think she was a ghost?’ and I answered back, and I stayed talking to her over the churchyard wall till ’twas quite dark, and the glowworms were out in the wet grass all along the way home.

  “Next night I saw her again; and the next night and the next. Always at twilight time; and if I passed any lovers leaning on the stiles in the marshes it was nothing to me now.”

  Again my uncle paused. “It’s very long ago,” he said slowly, “and I’m an old man; but I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me. I don’t know how long it went on—you don’t measure time in dreams—but at last your grandfather said I looked as if I had one foot in the grave, and he would be sending me to stay with our kin at Bath and take the waters. I had to go. I could not tell my father why I would rather had died than go.”

  “What was her name, uncle?” I asked.

  “She never would tell me her name, and why should she? I had names enough in my heart to call her by. Marriage? My dear, even then I knew marriage was not for me. But I met her night after night, always in our churchyard where the yew-trees were and the lichened gravestones. It was there we always met and always parted. The last time was the night before I went away. She was very sad, and dearer than life itself. And she said—

  “‘If you come back before the new moon I shall meet you here just as usual. But if the new moon shines on this grave and you are not here—you will never see me again any more.’

  “She laid her hand on the yellow lichened tomb against which we had been leaning. It was an old weather-worn stone, and bore on it the inscription—

  ‘Susannah Kingsnorth,

  Ob. 1713.’

  “‘I shall be here.’ I said.

  “‘I mean it,’ she said, with deep and sudden seriousness, ‘it is no fancy. You will be here when the new moon shines?’”

  “I promised, and after a while we parted.

  “I had been with my kinsfolk at Bath nearly a month. I was to go home on the next day, when, turning over a case in the parlour, I came upon that miniature. I could not speak for a minute. At last I said, with dry tongue, and heart beating to the tune of heaven and hell—

  “‘Who is this?’

  “‘That?’ said my aunt. ‘Oh! she was betrothed to one of our family many years ago, but she died before the wedding. They say she was a bit of a witch. A handsome one, wasn’t she?’

  “I looked again at the face, the lips, the eyes of my dear and lovely love, whom I was to meet tomorrow night when the new moon shone on that tomb in our churchyard.

  “‘Did you say she was dead?’ I asked, and I hardly knew my own voice.

  “‘Years and years ago! Her name’s on the back and her date—’

  “I took the portrait from its faded red-velvet bed, and read on the back—‘Susannah Kingsnorth, Ob. 1713.’

  “That was in 1813.” My uncle stopped short.

  “What happened?” I asked breathlessly.

  “I believe I had a fit,” my uncle answered slowly; “at any rate, I was very ill.”

  “And you missed the new moon on the grave?”

  “I missed the new moon on the grave.”

  “And you never saw her again?”

  “I never saw her again—”

  “But, uncle, do you really believe?—Can the dead?—was she—did you—”

  My uncle took out his pipe and filled it.

  “I
t’s a long time ago,” he said, “a many, many years. Old man’s tales, my dear! Old man’s tales! Don’t you take any notice of them.”

  He lighted the pipe, puffed silently a moment or two, and then added: “But I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was lame, and the girls used to laugh at me.”

  MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE, by Edith Nesbit

  Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe it. Nowadays a “rational explanation” is required before belief is possible. Let me then, at once, offer the “rational explanation” which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale of my life’s tragedy. It is held that we were “under a delusion,” Laura and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can judge, when he, too, has heard my story, how far this is an “explanation,” and in what sense it is “rational.” There were three who took part in this: Laura and I and another man. The other man still lives, and can speak to the truth of the least credible part of my story.

  * * * *

  I never in my life knew what it was to have as much money as I required to supply the most ordinary needs—good colours, books, and cab-fares—and when we were married we knew quite well that we should only be able to live at all by “strict punctuality and attention to business.” I used to paint in those days, and Laura used to write, and we felt sure we could keep the pot at least simmering. Living in town was out of the question, so we went to look for a cottage in the country, which should be at once sanitary and picturesque. So rarely do these two qualities meet in one cottage that our search was for some time quite fruitless. We tried advertisements, but most of the desirable rural residences which we did look at proved to be lacking in both essentials, and when a cottage chanced to have drains it always had stucco as well and was shaped like a tea-caddy. And if we found a vine or rose-covered porch, corruption invariably lurked within. Our minds got so befogged by the eloquence of house-agents and the rival disadvantages of the fever-traps and outrages to beauty which we had seen and scorned, that I very much doubt whether either of us, on our wedding morning, knew the difference between a house and a haystack. But when we got away from friends and house-agents, on our honeymoon, our wits grew clear again, and we knew a pretty cottage when at last we saw one. It was at Brenzett—a little village set on a hill over against the southern marshes. We had gone there, from the seaside village where we were staying, to see the church, and two fields from the church we found this cottage. It stood quite by itself, about two miles from the village. It was a long, low building, with rooms sticking out in unexpected places. There was a bit of stone-work—ivy-covered and moss-grown, just two old rooms, all that was left of a big house that had once stood there—and round this stone-work the house had grown up. Stripped of its roses and jasmine it would have been hideous. As it stood it was charming, and after a brief examination we took it. It was absurdly cheap. The rest of our honeymoon we spent in grubbing about in second-hand shops in the county town, picking up bits of old oak and Chippendale chairs for our furnishing. We wound up with a run up to town and a visit to Liberty’s, and soon the low oak-beamed lattice-windowed rooms began to be home. There was a jolly old-fashioned garden, with grass paths, and no end of hollyhocks and sunflowers, and big lilies. From the window you could see the marsh-pastures, and beyond them the blue, thin line of the sea. We were as happy as the summer was glorious, and settled down into work sooner than we ourselves expected. I was never tired of sketching the view and the wonderful cloud effects from the open lattice, and Laura would sit at the table and write verses about them, in which I mostly played the part of foreground.