I shook my head.
‘Well, never mind; you will. He didn’t come now because he thought two of us might be too much for you. But we are always together, and I am sure we three will be great friends. Bond of sympathy, you know.”
He sat down beside me and asked me to fill my pipe. It all seemed so natural that I did this with as much unconcern as if he had been Jonathan Adams in the flesh. He apologized for not joining me in my smoke, saying that he had lost his taste for it.
“It’s not a very long story,” he began, after I was nicely puffing, “and my being here is all through Mr. Hayes. He was Amelia’s first husband, you know. He stood it as long as he could, which was just five years. Then he came out here, discovered this place where we are now, and jumped over. It was taking awful chances, when you think that he didn’t know anything of what was coming after. But he was a nervous, high-strung man, and had reached the point where he was willing to take chances. He says now that he would have done it two or three years earlier if he had known the relief and rest he was going to get. It was perfect bliss, all right, after his five years of married life. For a number of years he just sat back and enjoyed it.
“Then he got to thinking, in his generous way, that perhaps some poor fellow was suffering just as he had suffered. This thought kept bothering him so much, being of a tender nature, that he made inquiries and found out about me. After that, the knowledge of my troubles bothered him still more, till at last he couldn’t stand it any longer and began to plan how he could help me out.
“Now, there is a rule where we are that every five years we can come back to Earth on the same day that we snuffed out. There aren’t many of us that do it, because we are satisfied where we are and are content to let the worth go its way undisturbed. But Mr. Hayes was so worried over my troubles that five years ago this very day, which was his ‘day back,’ as we call it, he made arrangements to meet me here.
“We met. It was a meeting that I will never forget, and it took me a long time to get over it. But finally I became accustomed to him, and in an hour he had convinced me, and I jumped off. And I may say that I have never regretted it since.
“Then through some mutual friend we found out about you, and we agreed that it was only fair that you should have the benefit of our experiences. So I have come back to clear up any of the points you may be in doubt about.
“Of course, there are some drawbacks, and we don’t get all the privileges of those who pass out naturally. But it’s so much better than the life you have been leading that there is no comparison.”
Here I stopped him with a gesture of my hand.
“Mr. Adams,” I said brokenly, “I think I understand what you are driving at, and I am very grateful. But did you know that I buried my dear wife last Tuesday?”
“No!” he cried, “You don’t mean to tell me that Amelia is dead?”
For a few moments he remained silent, his head bowed.
“Dear, dear!” he finally said. “I should read the papers more thoroughly. Allow me to condole with you.”
Mechanically he extended his hand. I reached out to grasp it, but my fingers closed on the empty air. He was too much worked up to notice.
“I will take the news back to Mr. Hayes,” he said quietly.
“I am very grateful to you both,” I said after a few moments of respectful silence, “for your kind intentions and your interest in me. Please express to Mr. Hayes my deepest gratitude.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Adams a little absently “I have enjoyed meeting you, and it is somewhat of a disappointment that you are not to join us. But, of course. I will not urge that now.”
“Poor Amelia!” was all I could say.
“And now,” said Mr. Adams, straightening up, “if you expect to get back before dark, I will not detain you longer.”
He was right—time had gone faster than I had noticed. I turned toward the pass through which I had come. Then we both jumped with fright.
A deep growl came rolling up among the rocks!
Mr. Adams was the first to recover himself. “Grizzly!” he said, smiling. “Funny how strong habit is. Of course, he can’t do a thing to me, yet for a moment I was as frightened as if I was alive.”
“How about me?” I asked, still trembling.
Mr. Adams became serious at once.
“I think I can manage it,” he said. “The bear smells you, but he can see me, and if you will step behind that rock, I may be able to decoy him off. He will think it is me he smells. So I will say good-bye, for I may have to leave hastily.”
I dropped obediently behind the rock, but peered over the top to watch developments. If Mr. Adams failed I preferred jumping off the cliff to being eaten gradually by a hungry bear.
The shaggy head and shoulders of a huge grizzly appeared round the corner. I knew he was a grizzly from a rug which we once owned. Mr. Adams approached him fearlessly, and the bear opened his mouth to receive him. I shuddered with horror.
But when within only a few feet of the bear, Mr. Adams jumped lightly over his head and landed somewhere behind him. The effect on the grizzly was astonished disappointment. He turned quickly round and dashed after Mr. Adams, who was disappearing round the corner.
After a few minutes had elapsed, I rose from my hiding-place and followed them.
There was no sign of them in the narrow defile, and I did not see them again until I reached the main ravine. There I caught sight of them far up the mountain: Mr. Adams sailing serenely over the rough ground, the bear panting in hot pursuit a few feet behind.
Mr. Adams turned and waved me a polite farewell, which I returned. Then I walked quietly to Organ, chartered a mule-team, and three days later arrived back in Boston.
* * * *
The first thing I then did was to visit a famous brain and nerve specialist. If science had any explanation for my experience, I wanted to hear it before I began boasting about my acquaintance with real ghosts.
“My dear sir,” said the specialist after I had told him everything, “your case, though interesting, is not at all unusual. It has nothing to do with mental telepathy or telegy which are the only so-called supernatural effects recognized by science. You are no doubt familiar with the phenomenon of walking in the sleep, the walker being awake to all appearances and with eyes wide open. You, sir, have the opposite malady of dreaming while you are actually awake. I prescribe complete rest and a change of climate.”
“But, doctor,” I expostulated, “if it was all a dream, why did the bear follow Mr. Adams out of the canyon?”
“Do not think,” answered the wise doctor, “that because the bear ran out of the canyon that he was necessarily following anyone. Unless cornered or wounded, they are timid animals, and your sudden appearance in a prospector’s outfit would ordinarily be enough to protect you. And then it is possible that this was also part of your dream and there wasn’t any bear.”
This was all I could get out of him.
Of course he is right, and there are no ghosts. But he’ll never get me to believe it, just the same!
MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY, by Rudyard Kipling
As I came through the Desert thus it was—
As I came through the Desert.
The City of Dreadful Night.
Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treating his ghosts—he has published half a workshopful of them—with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost
, and particularly an Indian one.
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.
Some of the dâk-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in their compound—witnesses to the “changes and chances of this mortal life” in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib’s service not a khansamah in the Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.
In these dâk-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to live in dâk-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in “converted” ones—old houses officiating as dâk-bungalows—where nothing was in its proper place and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken pane. I lived in dâk-bungalows where the last entry in the visitors’ book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-kid’s head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dâk-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant’s method of handling them, as shown in “The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories.” I am now in the Opposition.
We will call the bungalow Katmal dâk-bungalow. But that was the smallest part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dâk-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dâk-bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the windows were nearly black with grime. It stood on a bypath largely used by native Sub-Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forests; but real Sahibs were rare. The khansamah, who was nearly bent double with old age, said so.
When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside. The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.
The day shut in and the khansamah went to get me food. He did not go through the, pretense of calling it “khana”—man’s victuals. He said “ratub,” and that means, among other things, “grub”—dog’s rations. There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had forgotten the other word, I suppose.
While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down, after exploring the dâk-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps—only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.
For bleak, unadulterated misery that dâk-bungalow was the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy palms rattled and roared. Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a hyena stood afar off and mocked them. A hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead—the worst sort of Dead. Then came the ratub—a curious meal, half native and half English in composition—with the old khansamah babbling behind my chair about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.
Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.
Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking I heard the regular—“Let-us-take-and-heave-him-over” grunt of doolie-bearers in the compound. First one doolie came in, then a second, and then a third. I heard the doolies dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook. “That’s some one trying to come in,” I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. “That’s some Sub-Deputy Assistant,” I said, “and he has brought his friends with him. Now they’ll talk and spit and smoke for an hour.”
But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his luggage into the next room. The door shut, and I thanked Providence that I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, the sound that no man i
n his senses can possibly mistake—the whir of a billiard ball down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break. No other sound is like it. A minute afterwards there was another whir, and I got into bed. I was not frightened—indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had become of the doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.
Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up. It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting up.
There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one thing—a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs—all the furniture of the room next to mine—could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards. After another cannon, a three-cushion one to judge by the whir, I argued no more. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have escaped from that dâk-bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer. There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room. And the next room was not big enough to hold a billiard table!
Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward—stroke after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt was a failure.
Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see—fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat—fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? This is a fine Fear—a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved the reality of the thing. No man—drunk or sober—could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a “screw-cannon.”
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 15