“Petrol?”
“Yes, and you can see he hears it, and you can see he sees it. It haunts him, as if it was a ghost. You see, it was he that picked her up after the violet car went over her. It was that that turned him. I only saw her as he carried her in, in his arms—and then he’d covered her face. But he saw her just as they’d left her, lying in the dust…you could see the place on the road where it happened for days and days.”
“Didn’t they come back?”
“Oh yes…they came back. But Bessie didn’t come back. But there was a judgment on them. The very night of the funeral, that violet car went over the cliff—dashed to pieces—every soul in it. That was the man’s widow that drove you home the first night.”
“I wonder she uses a car after that,” I said—I wanted something commonplace to say.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Eldridge, “it’s all what you’re used to. We don’t stop walking because our girl was killed on the road. Motoring comes as natural to them as walking to us. There’s my old man calling—poor old dear. He wants me to go out with him.”
She went, all in a hurry, and in her hurry slipped on the stairs and twisted her ankle. It all happened in a minute and it was a bad sprain.
When I had bound it up, and she was on the sofa, she looked at him, standing as if he were undecided, staring out of the window, with his cap in his hand. And she looked at me.
“Mr. Eldridge mustn’t miss his walk,” she said. “You go with him, my dear. A breath of air will do you good.”
So I went, understanding as well as though he had told me, that he did not want me with him, and that he was afraid to go alone, and that he yet had to go.
We went up the lane in silence. At that corner he stopped suddenly, caught my arm, and dragged me back. His eyes followed something that I could not see. Then he exhaled a held breath, and said, “I thought I heard a motor coming.” He had found it hard to control his terror, and I saw beads of sweat on his forehead and temples. Then we went back to the house.
The sprain was a bad one. Mrs. Eldridge had to rest, and again next day it was I who went with him to the corner of the lane.
This time he could not, or did not try to, conceal what he felt. There—listen!” he said. “Surely you can hear it?”
I heard nothing.
“Stand back,” he cried shrilly, suddenly, and we stood back close against the hedge.
Again the eyes followed something invisible to me, and again the held breath exhaled.
“It will kill me one of these days,” he said, “and I don’t know that I care how soon—if it wasn’t for her.”
“Tell me,” I said, full of that importance, that conscious competence, that one feels in the presence of other people’s troubles. He looked at me.
“I will tell you, by God,” he said. “I couldn’t tell her. Young lady, I’ve gone so far as wishing myself a Roman, for the sake of a priest to tell it to. But I can tell you, without losing my soul more than it’s lost already. Did you ever hear tell of a violet car that got smashed up—went over the cliff?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
“The man that killed my girl was new to the place. And he hadn’t any eyes—or ears—or he’d have known me, seeing we’d been face to face at the inquest. And you’d have thought he’d have stayed at home that one day, with the blinds drawn down. But not he. He was swirling and swiveling all about the country in his cursed violet car, the very time we were burying her. And at dusk—there was a mist coming up—he comes up behind me in this very lane, and I stood back, and he pulls up, and he calls out, with his damned lights full in my face: ‘Can you tell me the way to Hexham, my man?’ says he.
“I’d have liked to show him the way to hell. And that was the way for me, not him. I don’t know how I came to do it. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t think I was going to—and before I knew anything, I’d said it. ‘Straight ahead,’ I said; “keep straight ahead.” Then the motor-thing panted, chuckled, and he was off. I ran after him to try to stop him—but what’s the use of running after these motor-devils? And he kept straight on. And every day since then, every dear day, the car comes by, the violet car that nobody can see but me—and it keeps straight on.”
“You ought to go away,” I said, speaking as I had been trained to speak. “You fancy these things. You probably fancied the whole thing. I don’t suppose you ever did tell the violet car to go straight ahead. I expect it was all imagination, and the shock of your poor daughter’s death. You ought to go right away.”
“I can’t,” he said earnestly. “If I did, some one else would see the car. You see, somebody has to see it every day as long as I live. If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else. And I’m the only person who deserves to see it. I wouldn’t like any one else to see it—it’s too horrible. It’s much more horrible than you think,” he added slowly.
I asked him, walking beside him down the quiet lane, what it was that was so horrible about the violet car. I think I quite expected him to say that it was splashed with his daughter’s blood… What he did say was, “It’s too horrible to tell you,” and he shuddered.
I was young then, and youth always thinks it can move mountains. I persuaded myself that I could cure him of his delusion by attacking—not the main fort—that is always, to begin with, impregnable, but one, so to speak, of the outworks. I set myself to persuade him not to go to that corner in the lane, at that hour in the afternoon.
“But if I don’t, someone else will see it.”
“There’ll be nobody there to see it,” I said briskly.
“Someone will be there. Mark my words, someone will be there—and then they’ll know.”
“Then I’ll be the someone,” I said. “Come—you stay at home with your wife, and I’ll go—and if I see it I’ll promise to tell you, and if I don’t—well, then I will be able to go away with a clear conscience.”
“A clear conscience,” he repeated.
I argued with him in every moment when it was possible to catch him alone. I put all my will and all my energy into my persuasions. Suddenly, like a door that you’ve been trying to open, and that has resisted every key till the last one, he gave way. Yes—I should go to the lane. And he would not go.
I went.
Being, as I said before, a novice in the writing of stories, I perhaps haven’t made you understand that it was quite hard for me to go—that I felt myself at once a coward and a heroine. This business of an imaginary motor that only one poor old farmer could see, probably appears to you quite commonplace and ordinary. It was not so with me. You see, the idea of this thing had dominated my life for weeks and months, had dominated it even before I knew the nature of the domination. It was this that was the fear that I had known to walk with these two people, the fear that shared their bed and board, that lay down and rose up with them. The old man’s fear of this and his fear of his fear. And the old man was terribly convincing. When one talked with him, it was quite difficult to believe that he was mad, and that there wasn’t, and couldn’t be, a mysteriously horrible motor that was visible to him, and invisible to other people. And when he said that, if he were not in the lane, someone else would see it—it was easy to say “Nonsense,” but to think “Nonsense” was not so easy, and to feel “Nonsense” quite oddly difficult.
I walked up and down the lane in the dusk, wishing not to wonder what might be the hidden horror in the violet car. I would not let blood into my thoughts. I was not going to be fooled by thought transference, or any of those transcendental follies. I was not going to be hypnotized into seeing things.
I walked up the lane—I had promised him to stand near that corner for five minutes, and I stood there in the deepening dusk, looking up towards the downs and the sea. There were pale stars. Everything was very still. Five minutes is a long time. I held my watch in my hand. Fou
r—four and a quarter—four and a half. Five. I turned instantly. And then I saw that he had followed me—he was standing a dozen yards away—and his face was turned from me. It was turned towards a motor car that shot up the lane. It came very swiftly, and before it came to where he was, I knew that it was very horrible. I crushed myself back into the crackling bare hedge, as I should have done to leave room for the passage of a real car—though I knew that this one was not real. It looked real—but I knew it was not.
As it neared him, he started back, then suddenly he cried out. I heard him. “No, no, no, no—no more, no more,” was what he cried, with that he flung himself down on the road in front of the car, and its great tyres passed over him. Then the car shot past me and I saw what the full horror of it was. There was no blood—that was not the horror. The colour of it was, as she had said, violet.
I got to him and got his head up. He was dead. I was quite calm and collected now, and felt that to be so was extremely creditable to me. I went to a cottage where a labourer was having tea—he got some men and a hurdle.
When I had told his wife, the first intelligible thing she said was: “It’s better for him. Whatever he did he’s paid for now—” So it looks as though she had known—or guessed—more than he thought.
I stayed with her till her death. She did not live long.
You think perhaps that the old man was knocked down and killed by a real motor, which happened to come that way of all ways, at that hour of all hours, and happened to be, of all colours, violet. Well, a real motor leaves its mark on you where it kills you, doesn’t it? But when I lifted up that old man’s head from the road, there was no mark on him, no blood—no broken bones—his hair was not disordered, nor his dress. I tell you there was not even a speck of mud on him, except where he had touched the road in falling. There were no tyre-marks in the mud.
The motor car that killed him came and went like a shadow. As he threw himself down, it swerved a little so that both its wheels should go over him.
He died, the doctor said, of heart failure. I am the only person to know that he was killed by a violet car, which, having killed him, went noiselessly away towards the sea. And that car was empty—there was no one in it. It was just a violet car that moved along the lanes swiftly and silently, and was empty.
KENTUCKY’S GHOST, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
Originally appear in Men, Women And Ghosts, 1869.
True? Every syllable.
That was a very fair yarn of yours, Tom Brown, very fair for a landsman, but I’ll bet you a doughnut I can beat it.
It was somewhere about twenty years ago that we were laying in for that particular trip to Madagascar.
We cleared from Long Wharf in the ship Madonna—which they tell me means, My Lady, and a pretty name it was; it was apt to give me that gentle kind of feeling when I spoke it, which is surprising when you consider what a dull old hull she was, never logging over ten knots, and uncertain at that. It may have been because of Moll’s coming down once in a while in the days that we lay at dock, bringing the boy with her, and sitting up on deck in a little white apron, knitting. She was a very good-looking woman, was my wife, in those days, and I felt proud of her—natural, with the lads looking on.
I used to speak my thought about the name sometimes, when the lads weren’t particularly noisy, but they laughed at me mostly. I was rough enough and bad enough in those days; as rough as the rest, and as bad as the rest, I suppose, but yet I seemed to have my notions a little different from the others. “Jake’s poetry”, they called ’em.
We were loading for the East Shore trade. There isn’t much of the genuine, old-fashioned trade left in these days, except the whisky branch. We had a little whisky in the hold, I remember, that trip, with a good stock of knives, red flannel, hand-saws, nails, and cotton. We were hoping to be at home again within the year. We were well-provisioned, and Dodd the cook made about as fair coffee as you’re likely to find in the galley of a trader. As for our officers, when I say the less said of them the better, it ain’t so much that I mean to be disrespectful as that I mean to put it tenderly. Officers in the merchant service, especially if it happens to be the African service, are quite often brutal men, and about as fit for their positions as if they’d been imported for the purpose a little indirect from Davy Jones’s locker.
Well; we weighed, along the last of the month, in pretty good spirits. The Madonna was as seaworthy as any eight-hundred-tonner in the harbour, even if she was clumsy; we turned in, some sixteen of us or thereabouts, into the fo’castle—a jolly set, mostly old messmates, and well content with one another; and the breeze was stiff from the west, with a fair sky.
The night before we were off, Molly and I took a walk upon the wharves after supper. I carried the baby. A boy, sitting on some boxes, pulled my sleeve as we went by, and asked me, pointing to the Madonna, if I would tell him the name of the ship.
“Find out for yourself,” said I, not overpleased to be interrupted.
“Don’t be cross with him,” says Molly. The baby threw a kiss at the boy, and Molly smiled at him through the dark. I don’t suppose I should ever have remembered the lubber from that day to this, except that I liked the looks of Molly smiling at him through the dark.
My wife and I said good-bye the next morning in a little sheltered place among the lumber on the wharf; she was one of your women who never like to do their crying before folks.
She climbed on the pile of lumber and sat down, a little flushed and quivery, to watch us off. I remember seeing her there with the baby till we were well down the channel. I remember noticing the bay as it grew cleaner, and thinking that I would break off swearing; and I remember cursing Bob Smart like a pirate within an hour.
The breeze held steadier than we’d looked for, and we’d made a good offing and discharged the pilot by nightfall. Mr. Whitmarsh, the mate, was aft with the captain. The boys were singing a little; the smell of the coffee was coming up, hot and homelike, from the galley. I was up in the maintop when all at once there came a cry and a shout; and, when I touched deck, I saw a crowd around the fore-hatch.
“What’s all this noise for?” says Mr. Whitmarsh, coming up and scowling.
“A stow-away, sir! A boy stowed away!” said Bob, catching the officer’s tone quick enough. He jerked the poor fellow out of the hold, and pushed him along to the mate’s feet.
I say “poor fellow”, and you’d never wonder why if you’d seen as much of stowing away as I have.
I’d as lief see a son of mine in a Carolina slave-gang as to see him lead the life of a stow-away. What with the officers feeling that they’ve been taken in, and the men, who catch their cue from their superiors, and the spite of the lawful boy who was hired in the proper way, he don’t have what you may call a tender time.
This chap was a little fellow, slight for his years, which might have been fifteen. He was palish, with a jerk of thin hair on his forehead. He was hungry, and homesick, and frightened. He looked about on all our faces, and then he cowered a little, and lay still just as Bob had thrown him.
“We—ell,” says Whitmarsh, very slow, “if you don’t repent your bargain before you go ashore, my fine fellow—me, if I’m mate of the Madonna! And take that for your pains!”
Upon that he kicks the poor little lubber from quarterdeck to bowsprit and goes down to his supper. The men laugh a little, then they whistle a little, then they finish their song quite gay and well acquainted, with the coffee steaming away in the galley. Nobody has a word for the boy—bless you, no!
I’ll venture he wouldn’t have had a mouthful that night if it had not been for me; and I can’t say as I should have bothered myself about him, if it had not come across me sudden, while he sat there rubbing his eyes quite violent, that I had seen the lad before; then I remembered walking on the wharves, and him on the box, and Molly saying softl
y that I was cross to him.
Seeing that my wife had smiled at him, and my baby thrown a kiss at him, it went against me not to look after the little rascal a bit that night.
“But you’ve got no business here, you know,” said I; “nobody wants you.”
“I wish I was ashore!” said he—“I wish I was ashore!”
With that he begins to rub his eyes so very violent that I stopped. There was good stuff in him too; for he choked and winked at me, and made out that the sun was on the water and he had a cold in the head.
I don’t know whether it was on account of being taken a little notice of that night, but the lad always hung about me afterwards; chased me round with his eyes in a way he had, and did odd jobs for me without the asking.
One night before the first week was out, he hauled alongside of me on the windlass. I was trying a new pipe so I didn’t give him much notice for a while.
“You did this job up shrewd, Kent,” said I, by and by; “how did you steer in?”—for it did not often happen that the Madonna got out of port with a stow-away in her hold.
“Watch was drunk; I crawled down ahind the whisky. It was hot and dark. I lay and thought how hungry I was,” says he.
“Friends at home?” says I.
Upon that he gives me a nod, very short, and gets up and walks off whistling.
The first Sunday out that chap didn’t know any more what to do with himself than a lobster just put on to boil. Sunday’s cleaning day at sea, you know. The lads washed up, and sat round, little knots of them, mending their trousers. Bob got out his cards. Me and a few mates took it comfortable under the to’gallant fo’castle (I being on watch below), reeling off the stiffest yarns we had in tow. Kent looked on a while, then listened to us a while, then walked off.
The Fifth Ghost Story Megapack 25 Classic Haunts Page 11