The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts!

by Wildside Press

  “Hickman! Hickman!” said the Baronet. “Not the gasman?”

  “Yes, sir, they called him Gas. He won his fights with what they called the ‘whisker hit,’ and no one could stand against him until Neate—him that they called the Bristol Bull—brought him down.”

  Stevens had risen from the table as white as cheese.

  “Let’s get out of this, sir. I want fresh air. Let us get on our way.” The landlord clapped him on the back.

  “Cheer up, lad! You’ve held him off, anyhow, and that’s more than anyone else has ever done. Sit down and have another glass of wine, for if a man in England has earned it this night it is you. There’s many a debt you would pay if you gave the Gasman a welting, whether dead or alive. Do you know what he did in this very room?”

  The two travellers looked round with startled eyes at the lofty room, stone-flagged and oak panelled, with great open grate at the farther end.

  “Yes, in this very room. I had it from old Squire Scotter, who was here that very night. It was the day when Shelton beat Josh Hudson out St. Albans way, and Gas had won a pocketful of money on the fight. He and his pal Rowe came in here upon their way, and he was mad-raging drunk. The folk fairly shrunk into the corners and under the tables, for he was stalkin’ round with the great kitchen poker in his hand, and there was murder behind the smile upon his face. He was like that when the drink was in him—cruel, reckless, and a terror to the world. Well, what think you that he did at last with the poker? There was a little dog, a terrier as I’ve heard, coiled up before the fire, for it was a bitter December night. The Gasman broke its back with one blow of the poker. Then he burst out laughin’, flung a curse or two at the folk that shrunk away from him, and so out to his high gig that was waiting outside. The next we heard was that he was carried down to Finchley with his head ground to a jelly by the wagon wheel. Yes, they do say the little dog with its bleeding skin and its broken back has been seen since then, crawlin’ and yelpin’ about Brocas Corner, as if it were bookin’ for the swine that killed it. So you see, Mr. Stevens, you were fightin’ for more than yourself when you put it across the Gasman.”

  “Maybe so,” said the young prize-fighter, “but I want no more fights like that. The Farrier Sergeant is good enough for me, sir, and if it is the same to you, we’ll take a railway train back to town.”

  THE SPIRAL STONE, by Arthur Willis Colton

  The graveyard on the brow of the hill was white with snow. The marbles were white, the evergreens black. One tall spiral stone stood painfully near the centre. The little brown church outside the gates turned its face in the more comfortable direction of the village.

  Only three were out among the graves: “Ambrose Chillingworth, aetat 30, 1675”; “Margaret Vane, aetat 19, 1839”; and “Thy Little One, O God, aetat 2,” from the Mercer Lot. It is called the “Mercer Lot,” but the Mercers are all dead or gone from the village.

  The Little One trotted around busily, putting his tiny finger in the lettering and patting the faces of the cherubs. The other two sat on the base of the spiral, which twisted in the moonlight over them.

  “I wonder why it is?” Margaret said. “Most of them never come out at all. We and the Little One come out so often. You were wise and learned. I knew so little. Will you tell me?”

  “Learning is not wisdom,” Ambrose answered. “But of this matter it was said that our containment in the grave depended on the spirit in which we departed. I made certain researches. It appeared by common report that only those came out whom desperate sin tormented, or labors incomplete and great desire at the point of death made restless. I had doubts the matter were more subtle, the reasons of it reaching out distantly.” He sighed faintly, following with his eyes, tomb by tomb, the broad white path that dropped down the hillside to the church. “I desired greatly to live.”

  “I too. Is it because we desired it so much, then? But the Little One—”

  “I do not know,” he said.

  The Little One trotted gravely here and there, seeming to know very well what he was about, and presently came to the spiral stone. The lettering on it was new, and there was no cherub. He dropped down suddenly on the snow with a faint whimper. His small feet came out from under his gown, as he sat upright gazing at the letters with round, troubled eyes, and up to the top of the monument, for the solution of some unstated problem.

  “The stone is but newly placed,” said Ambrose, “and the new-comer would seem to be of those who rest in peace.”

  They went and sat down on either side of him, on the snow. The peculiar cutting of the stone, with spirally ascending lines, together with the moon’s illusion, gave it a semblance of motion. Something twisted and climbed continually, and vanished continually from the point. But the base was broad, square, and heavily lettered: “John Mareschelli Vane.”

  “Vane? That was thy name,” said Ambrose.

  1890. AETAT 72.

  AN EMINENT CITIZEN, A PUBLIC BENEFACTOR AND WIDELY ESTEEMED.

  FOR THE LOVE OF HIS NATIVE PLACE RETURNED TO LAY HIS DUST THEREIN.

  THE JUST MADE PERFECT.

  “It would seem he did well and rounded his labors to a goodly end, lying down among his kindred as a sheaf that is garnered in the autumn. He was fortunate.”

  And Margaret spoke, in the thin, emotionless voice which those who are long in the graveyard use: “He was my brother.”

  “Thy brother?” said Ambrose.

  The Little One looked up and down the spiral with wide eyes. The other two looked past it into the deep white valley, where the river, covered with ice and snow, was marked only by the lines of skeleton willows and poplars. A night wind, listless but continual, stirred the evergreens. The moon swung low over the opposite hills, and for a moment slipped behind a cloud.

  “Says it is not so, ‘For the Love of his Native Place’?” murmured Ambrose.

  And as the moon came out, there leaned against the pedestal, pointing with a finger at the epitaph, one that seemed an old man, with bowed shoulders and keen, restless face, but in his manner cowed and weary.

  “It is a lie,” he said slowly. “I hated it, Margaret. I came because Ellen Mercer called me.”

  “Ellen isn’t buried here.”

  “Not here?”

  “Not here.”

  “Was it you, then, Margaret? Why?”

  “I didn’t call you.”

  “Who then?” he shrieked. “Who called me?”

  The night wind moved on monotonously, and the moonlight was undisturbed, like glassy water.

  “When I came away,” she said, “I thought you would marry her. You didn’t, then? But why should she call you?”

  “I left the village suddenly!” he cried. “I grew to dread and then to hate it. I buried myself from the knowledge of it, and the memory of it was my enemy. I wished for a distant death, and these fifty years have heard the summons to come and lay my bones in this graveyard. I thought it was Ellen. You, sir, wear an antique dress; you have been long in this strange existence. Can you tell who called me? If not Ellen, where is Ellen?” He wrung his hands, and rocked to and fro.

  “The mystery is with the dead as with the living,” said Ambrose. “The shadows of the future and the past come among us. We look in their eyes, and understand them not. Now and again there is a call even here, and the grave is henceforth untenanted of its spirit. Here, too, we know a necessity which binds us, which speaks not with audible voice and will not be questioned.”

  “But tell me,” moaned the other, “does the weight of sin depend upon its consequences? Then what weight do I bear? I do not know whether it was ruin or death, or a thing gone by and forgotten. Is there no answer here to this?”

  “Death is but a step in the process of life,” answered Ambrose. “I know not if any are ruined or anything forgotten. Look up, t
o the order of the j, stars, and handwriting on the wall of the firmament. But who hath read it? Mark this night wind, a still small voice. But what speaketh it? The earth is clothed in white garments as a bride. What mean the ceremonials of the seasons? The will from without is only known as it is manifested. Nor does it manifest where the consequences of the deed end or its causes began. Have they any end or a beginning? I can not answer you.”

  “Who called me, Margaret?”

  And she said again monotonously:

  “I didn’t call you.”

  The Little One sat between Ambrose and Margaret, chuckling to himself and gazing up at the newcomer, who suddenly bent forward and looked into his eyes, with a gasp.

  “What is this?” he whispered.

  “Thy Little One, O God, aetat 2, from the Mercer Lot,” returned Ambrose gently.

  “He is very quiet. Art not neglecting thy business, Little One? The lower walks are unvisited tonight.”

  “They are Ellen’s eyes!” cried the other; moaning and rocking. “Did you call me? Were you mine?”

  “It is written, ‘Thy Little One, O God,’” murmured Ambrose.

  But the Little One only curled his feet up under his gown, and now chuckled contentedly.

  THE GHOST OF THE BLUE CHAMBER, by Jerome K. Jerome

  “I don’t want to make you fellows nervous,” began my uncle in a peculiarly impressive, not to say blood-curdling, tone of voice, “and if you would rather that I did not mention it, I won’t; but, as a matter of fact, this very house, in which we are now sitting, is haunted.”

  “You don’t say that!” exclaimed Mr. Coombes.

  “What’s the use of your saying I don’t say it when I have just said it?” retorted my uncle somewhat pettishly. “You do talk so foolishly. I tell you the house is haunted. Regularly on Christmas Eve the Blue Chamber [they called the room next to the nursery the ‘blue chamber,’ at my uncle’s, most of the toilet service being of that shade] is haunted by the ghost of a sinful man—a man who once killed a Christmas wait with a lump of coal.”

  “How did he do it?” asked Mr. Coombes, with eager anxiousness. “Was it difficult?”

  “I do not know how he did it,” replied my uncle; “he did not explain the process. The wait had taken up a position just inside the front gate, and was singing a ballad. It is presumed that, when he opened his mouth for B flat, the lump of coal was thrown by the sinful man from one of the windows, and that it went down the wait’s throat and choked him.”

  “You want to be a good shot, but it is certainly worth trying,” murmured Mr. Coombes thoughtfully.

  “But that was not his only crime, alas!” added my uncle. “Prior to that he had killed a solo cornet-player.”

  “No! Is that really a fact?” exclaimed Mr. Coombes.

  “Of course it’s a fact,” answered my uncle testily; “at all events, as much a fact as you can expect to get in a case of this sort.

  “How very captious you are this evening. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. The poor fellow, the cornet-player, had been in the neighbourhood barely a month. Old Mr. Bishop, who kept the ‘Jolly Sand Boys’ at the time, and from whom I had the story, said he had never known a more hard-working and energetic solo cornet-player. He, the cornet-player, only knew two tunes, but Mr. Bishop said that the man could not have played with more vigour, or for more hours in a day, if he had known forty. The two tunes he did play were “Annie Laurie” and “Home, Sweet Home”; and as regarded his performance of the former melody, Mr. Bishop said that a mere child could have told what it was meant for.

  “This musician—this poor, friendless artist used to come regularly and play in this street just opposite for two hours every evening. One evening he was seen, evidently in response to an invitation, going into this very house, but was never seen coming out of it!”

  “Did the townsfolk try offering any reward for his recovery?” asked Mr. Coombes.

  “Not a ha’penny,” replied my uncle.

  “Another summer,” continued my uncle, “a German band visited here, intending—so they announced on their arrival—to stay till the autumn.

  “On the second day from their arrival, the whole company, as fine and healthy a body of men as one could wish to see, were invited to dinner by this sinful man, and, after spending the whole of the next twenty-four hours in bed, left the town a broken and dyspeptic crew; the parish doctor, who had attended them, giving it as his opinion that it was doubtful if they would, any of them, be fit to play an air again.”

  “You—you don’t know the recipe, do you?” asked Mr. Coombes.

  “Unfortunately I do not,” replied my uncle; “but the chief ingredient was said to have been railway refreshment-room pork-pie.

  “I forget the man’s other crimes,” my uncle went on; “I used to know them all at one time, but my memory is not what it was. I do not, however, believe I am doing his memory an injustice in believing that he was not entirely unconnected with the death, and subsequent burial, of a gentleman who used to play the harp with his toes; and that neither was he altogether unresponsible for the lonely grave of an unknown stranger who had once visited the neighbourhood, an Italian peasant lad, a performer upon the barrel-organ.

  “Every Christmas Eve,” said my uncle, cleaving with low impressive tones the strange awed silence that, like a shadow, seemed to have slowly stolen into and settled down upon the room, “the ghost of this sinful man haunts the Blue Chamber, in this very house. There, from midnight until cock-crow, amid wild muffled shrieks and groans and mocking laughter and the ghostly sound of horrid blows, it does fierce phantom fight with the spirits of the solo cornet-player and the murdered wait, assisted at intervals, by the shades of the German band; while the ghost of the strangled harpist plays mad ghostly melodies with ghostly toes on the ghost of a broken harp.

  Uncle said the Blue Chamber was comparatively useless as a sleeping-apartment on Christmas Eve.

  “Hark!” said uncle, raising a warning hand towards the ceiling, while we held our breath, and listened; “Hark! I believe they are at it now—in the blue chamber!”

  I rose up, and said that I would sleep in the Blue Chamber.

  Before I tell you my own story, however—the story of what happened in the Blue Chamber—I would wish to preface it with—

  A PERSONAL EXPLANATION

  I feel a good deal of hesitation about telling you this story of my own. You see it is not a story like the other stories that I have been telling you, or rather that Teddy Biffles, Mr. Coombes, and my uncle have been telling you: it is a true story. It is not a story told by a person sitting round a fire on Christmas Eve, drinking whisky punch: it is a record of events that actually happened.

  Indeed, it is not a ‘story’ at all, in the commonly accepted meaning of the word: it is a report. It is, I feel, almost out of place in a book of this kind. It is more suitable to a biography, or an English history.

  There is another thing that makes it difficult for me to tell you this story, and that is, that it is all about myself. In telling you this story, I shall have to keep on talking about myself; and talking about ourselves is what we modern-day authors have a strong objection to doing. If we literary men of the new school have one praiseworthy yearning more ever present to our minds than another it is the yearning never to appear in the slightest degree egotistical.

  I myself, so I am told, carry this coyness—this shrinking reticence concerning anything connected with my own personality, almost too far; and people grumble at me because of it. People come to me and say—

  “Well, now, why don’t you talk about yourself a bit? That’s what we want to read about. Tell us something about yourself.”

  But I have always replied, “No.” It is not that I do not think the subject an interesting one. I cannot myself conceive of any topic more
likely to prove fascinating to the world as a whole, or at all events to the cultured portion of it. But I will not do it, on principle. It is inartistic, and it sets a bad example to the younger men. Other writers (a few of them) do it, I know; but I will not—not as a rule.

  Under ordinary circumstances, therefore, I should not tell you this story at all. I should say to myself, “No! It is a good story, it is a moral story, it is a strange, weird, enthralling sort of a story; and the public, I know, would like to hear it; and I should like to tell it to them; but it is all about myself—about what I said, and what I saw, and what I did, and I cannot do it. My retiring, anti-egotistical nature will not permit me to talk in this way about myself.”

  But the circumstances surrounding this story are not ordinary, and there are reasons prompting me, in spite of my modesty, to rather welcome the opportunity of relating it.

  As I stated at the beginning, there has been unpleasantness in our family over this party of ours, and, as regards myself in particular, and my share in the events I am now about to set forth, gross injustice has been done me.

  As a means of replacing my character in its proper light—of dispelling the clouds of calumny and misconception with which it has been darkened, I feel that my best course is to give a simple, dignified narration of the plain facts, and allow the unprejudiced to judge for themselves. My chief object, I candidly confess, is to clear myself from unjust aspersion. Spurred by this motive—and I think it is an honourable and a right motive—I find I am enabled to overcome my usual repugnance to talking about myself, and can thus tell—

  MY OWN STORY

  As soon as my uncle had finished his story, I, as I have already told you, rose up and said that I would sleep in the Blue Chamber that very night.

  “Never!” cried my uncle, springing up. “You shall not put yourself in this deadly peril. Besides, the bed is not made.”