by The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories- From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (retail) (epub)
II
When about five years old I was condemned to sleep by myself in a certain isolated room, thereafter always called the Child’s Room. (At that time I was scarcely ever mentioned by name, but only referred to as ‘the Child.’) The room was narrow, but very high, and, in spite of one tall window, very gloomy. It contained a fire-place wherein no fire was ever kindled; and the Child suspected that the chimney was haunted.
A law was made that no light should be left in the Child’s Room at night, – simply because the Child was afraid of the dark. His fear of the dark was judged to be a mental disorder requiring severe treatment. But the treatment aggravated the disorder. Previously I had been accustomed to sleep in a well-lighted room, with a nurse to take care of me. I thought that I should die of fright when sentenced to lie alone in the dark, and – what seemed to me then abominably cruel – actually locked into my room, the most dismal room of the house. Night after night when I had been warmly tucked into bed, the lamp was removed; the key clicked in the lock; the protecting light and the footsteps of my guardian receded together. Then an agony of fear would come upon me. Something in the black air would seem to gather and grow – (I thought that I could even hear it grow) – till I had to scream. Screaming regularly brought punishment; but it also brought back the light, which more than consoled for the punishment. This fact being at last found out, orders were given to pay no further heed to the screams of the Child.
Why was I thus insanely afraid? Partly because the dark had always been peopled for me with shapes of terror. So far back as memory extended, I had suffered from ugly dreams; and when aroused from them I could always see the forms dreamed of, lurking in the shadows of the room. They would soon fade out; but for several moments they would appear like tangible realities. And they were always the same figures … Sometimes, without any preface of dreams, I used to see them at twilight-time, – following me about from room to room, or reaching long dim hands after me, from story to story, up through the interspaces of the deep stairways.
I had complained of these haunters only to be told that I must never speak of them, and that they did not exist. I had complained to everybody in the house; and everybody in the house had told me the very same thing. But there was the evidence of my eyes! The denial of that evidence I could explain only in two ways: – Either the shapes were afraid of big people, and showed themselves to me alone, because I was little and weak; or else the entire household had agreed, for some ghastly reason, to say what was not true. This latter theory seemed to me the more probable one, because I had several times perceived the shapes when I was not unattended; – and the consequent appearance of secrecy frightened me scarcely less than the visions did. Why was I forbidden to talk about what I saw, and even heard, – on creaking stairways, – behind wavering curtains?
‘Nothing will hurt you,’ – this was the merciless answer to all my pleadings not to be left alone at night. But the haunters did hurt me. Only – they would wait until after I had fallen asleep, and so into their power, – for they possessed occult means of preventing me from rising or moving or crying out.
Needless to comment upon the policy of locking me up alone with these fears in a black room. Unutterably was I tormented in that room – for years! Therefore I felt relatively happy when sent away at last to a children’s boarding-school, where the haunters very seldom ventured to show themselves.
They were not like any people that I had ever known. They were shadowy dark-robed figures, capable of atrocious self-distortion, – capable, for instance, of growing up to the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening themselves, head-downwards, along the opposite wall. Only their faces were distinct; and I tried not to look at their faces. I tried also in my dreams – or thought that I tried – to awaken myself from the sight of them by pulling at my eyelids with my fingers; but the eyelids would remain closed, as if sealed … Many years afterwards, the frightful plates in Orfila’s Traité des Exhumés, beheld for the first time, recalled to me with a sickening start the dream-terrors of childhood.1 But to understand the Child’s experience, you must imagine Orfila’s drawings intensely alive, and continually elongating or distorting, as in some monstrous anamorphosis.2
Nevertheless the mere sight of those nightmare-faces was not the worst of the experiences in the Child’s Room. The dreams always began with a suspicion, or sensation of something heavy in the air, – slowly quenching will, – slowly numbing my power to move. At such times I usually found myself alone in a large unlighted apartment; and, almost simultaneously with the first sensation of fear, the atmosphere of the room would become suffused, half-way to the ceiling, with a sombre-yellowish glow, making objects dimly visible, – though the ceiling itself remained pitch-black. This was not a true appearance of light: rather it seemed as if the black air were changing colour from beneath … Certain terrible aspects of sunset, on the eve of storm, offer like effects of sinister colour … Forthwith I would try to escape, – (feeling at every step a sensation as of wading), – and would sometimes succeed in struggling half-way across the room; – but there I would always find myself brought to a standstill, – paralysed by some innominable opposition. Happy voices I could hear in the next room; – I could see light through the transom over the door that I had vainly endeavoured to reach; – I knew that one loud cry would save me.3 But not even by the most frantic effort could I raise my voice above a whisper … And all this signified only that the Nameless was coming, – was nearing, – was mounting the stairs. I could hear the step, – booming like the sound of a muffled drum, – and I wondered why nobody else heard it. A long, long time the haunter would take to come, – malevolently pausing after each ghastly footfall. Then, without a creak, the bolted door would open, – slowly, slowly, – and the thing would enter, gibbering soundlessly, – and put out hands, – and clutch me, – and toss me to the black ceiling, – and catch me descending to toss me up again, and again, and again … In those moments the feeling was not fear: fear itself had been torpified by the first seizure. It was a sensation that has no name in the language of the living. For every touch brought a shock of something infinitely worse than pain, – something that thrilled into the innermost secret being of me, – a sort of abominable electricity, discovering unimagined capacities of suffering in totally unfamiliar regions of sentiency … This was commonly the work of a single tormentor; but I can also remember having been caught by a group, and tossed from one to another, – seemingly for a time of many minutes.
III
Whence the fancy of those shapes? I do not know. Possibly from some impression of fear in earliest infancy; possibly from some experience of fear in other lives than mine. That mystery is forever insoluble. But the mystery of the shock of the touch admits of a definite hypothesis.
First, allow me to observe that the experience of the sensation itself cannot be dismissed as ‘mere imagination.’ Imagination means cerebral activity: its pains and its pleasures are alike inseparable from nervous operation, and their physical importance is sufficiently proved by their physiological effects. Dream-fear may kill as well as other fear; and no emotion thus powerful can be reasonably deemed undeserving of study.
One remarkable fact in the problem to be considered is that the sensation of seizure in dreams differs totally from all sensations familiar to ordinary waking life. Why this differentiation? How interpret the extraordinary massiveness and depth of the thrill?
I have already suggested that the dreamer’s fear is most probably not a reflection of relative experience, but represents the incalculable total of ancestral experience of dream-fear. If the sum of the experience of active life be transmitted by inheritance, so must likewise be transmitted the summed experience of the life of sleep. And in normal heredity either class of transmissions would probably remain distinct.
Now, granting this hypothesis, the sensation of dream-seizure would have had its beginnings in the earliest phases of dream-consciousness, – long prior to the apparit
ion of man. The first creatures capable of thought and fear must often have dreamed of being caught by their natural enemies. There could not have been much imagining of pain in these primal dreams. But higher nervous development in later forms of being would have been accompanied with larger susceptibility to dream-pain. Still later, with the growth of reasoning-power, ideas of the supernatural would have changed and intensified the character of dream-fear. Furthermore, through all the course of evolution, heredity would have been accumulating the experience of such feeling. Under those forms of imaginative pain evolved through reaction of religious beliefs, there would persist some dim survival of savage primitive fears, and again, under this, a dimmer but incomparably deeper substratum of ancient animal-terrors. In the dreams of the modern child all these latencies might quicken, – one below another, – unfathomably, – with the coming and the growing of nightmare.
It may be doubted whether the phantasms of any particular nightmare have a history older than the brain in which they move. But the shock of the touch would seem to indicate some point of dream-contact with the total race-experience of shadowy seizure. It may be that profundities of Self, – abysses never reached by any ray from the life of sun, – are strangely stirred in slumber, and that out of their blackness immediately responds a shuddering of memory, measureless even by millions of years.
W. W. JACOBS
The Monkey’s Paw
I
Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.
‘Hark at the wind,’ said Mr White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.
‘I’m listening,’ said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. ‘Check.’
‘I should hardly think that he’d come to-night,’ said his father, with his hand poised over the board.
‘Mate,’ replied the son.
‘That’s the worst of living so far out,’ bawled Mr White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; ‘of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.’
‘Never mind, dear,’ said his wife, soothingly; ‘perhaps you’ll win the next one.’
Mr White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.
‘There he is,’ said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.
The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs White said, ‘Tut, tut!’ and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.
‘Sergeant-Major Morris,’ he said, introducing him.
The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.
At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.
‘Twenty-one years of it,’ said Mr White, nodding at his wife and son. ‘When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him.’
‘He don’t look to have taken much harm,’ said Mrs White, politely.
‘I’d like to go to India myself,’ said the old man, ‘just to look round a bit, you know.’
‘Better where you are,’ said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.
‘I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,’ said the old man.1 ‘What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?’
‘Nothing,’ said the soldier, hastily. ‘Leastways nothing worth hearing.’
‘Monkey’s paw?’ said Mrs White, curiously.
‘Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps,’ said the sergeant-major, off-handedly.
His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him.
‘To look at,’ said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, ‘it’s just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.’
He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.
‘And what is there special about it?’ inquired Mr White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.
‘It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.’
His manner was so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter jarred somewhat.
‘Well, why don’t you have three, sir?’ said Herbert White, cleverly.
The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. ‘I have,’ he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.
‘And did you really have the three wishes granted?’ asked Mrs White.
‘I did,’ said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.
‘And has anybody else wished?’ persisted the old lady.
‘The first man had his three wishes. Yes,’ was the reply; ‘I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.’
His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.
‘If you’ve had your three wishes, it’s no good to you now, then, Morris,’ said the old man at last. ‘What do you keep it for?’
The soldier shook his head. ‘Fancy, I suppose,’ he said, slowly. ‘I did have some idea of selling it, but I don’t think I will. It has caused enough mischief already. Besides, people won’t buy. They think it’s a fairy tale; some of them, and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward.’
‘If you could have another three wishes,’ said the old man, eyeing him keenly, ‘would you have them?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the other. ‘I don’t know.’
He took the paw, and dangling it between his forefinger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire. White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off.
‘Better let it burn,’ said the soldier, solemnly.
‘If you don’t want it, Morris,’ said the other, ‘give it to me.’
‘I won’t,’ said his friend, doggedly. ‘I threw it on the fire. If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens. Pitch it on the fire again like a sensible man.’
The other shook his head and examined his new possession closely. ‘How do you do it?’ he inquired.
‘Hold it up in your right hand and wish aloud,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘but I warn you of the consequences.’
‘Sounds like the Arabian Nights,’ said Mrs White, as she rose and began to set the supper.2 ‘Don’t you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?’
Her husband drew the talisman from his pocket, and then all three burst into laughter as the sergeant-major, with a look of alarm on his fac
e, caught him by the arm.
‘If you must wish,’ he said, gruffly, ‘wish for something sensible.’
Mr White dropped it back in his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table. In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second instalment of the soldier’s adventures in India.
‘If the tale about the monkey’s paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us,’ said Herbert, as the door closed behind their guest, just in time for him to catch the last train, ‘we sha’nt make much out of it.’
‘Did you give him anything for it, father?’ inquired Mrs White, regarding her husband closely.
‘A trifle,’ said he, colouring slightly. ‘He didn’t want it, but I made him take it. And he pressed me again to throw it away.’
‘Likely,’ said Herbert, with pretended horror. ‘Why, we’re going to be rich, and famous and happy. Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can’t be henpecked.’
He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs White armed with an antimacassar.
Mr White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously. ‘I don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a fact,’ he said, slowly. ‘It seems to me I’ve got all I want.’
‘If you only cleared the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you?’ said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder. ‘Well, wish for two hundred pounds, then; that’ll just do it.’
His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face, somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down at the piano and struck a few impressive chords.
‘I wish for two hundred pounds,’ said the old man distinctly.
A fine crash from the piano greeted the words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man. His wife and son ran toward him.
‘It moved,’ he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor. ‘As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.’