The Third Macabre Megapack

by Various Writers

  * * * *

  You are unlucky tonight, Mynheer,” said he, with provoking indifference, which greatly increased the farmer’s chagrin; “but come, you have a goodly ring on your finger; will you not venture that against my phial?”

  The farmer paused for a moment it was the gift of an old friend yet he could not stomach the idea of being cleared of his money in such a manner; what would Jan Brower, the host of the Van Tromp, and little Rip Winkelaar, the schoolmaster, say to it? It was the first time he had ever been a loser in any game, for he was reckoned the best hand at nine pins in his village; he therefore took the ring from his finger—threw again—and lost it!

  He sank back in his chair with a suppressed groan, at which his companion smiled. The loss of his money, together with this ring, had nearly sobered him, and he gazed on the stranger with a countenance indicative of anything but good will; while the latter drew from his bosom a scroll of parchment.

  “You grieve,” said he, “for the loss of a few paltry guilders; but know, that I have the power to make you amends for your ill-luck—to make you rich—aye, richer than the Stadtholder!”

  “Ha! the fiend!” thought Peter, growing still soberer, while he drank in every word, and glanced at the legs of the stranger, expecting, of course, to see them, as usual, terminate with a cloven foot; but he beheld no such unsightly spectacle; the feet of the stranger were as perfect as his own, or even more so.

  * * * *

  “Here, said his companion, “read over this, and if the terms suit you, subscribe your name at foot.” The farmer took the parchment, which he perceived was closely written, and contained many signatures at the bottom. His eye glanced hastily over the first few lines, but they sufficed.

  “Ha! now I know thee, fiend!” screamed the affrighted Peter, as he dashed the scroll in the face of the stranger, and rushed wildly out of the room. He gained the street, down which he fled with the swiftness of the wind, and turned quickly, thinking he was safe from the vengeance of him, whom he now supposed to be no other than the foul fiend himself, when the stranger met him on the opposite side, his eyes dilated to a monstrous size, and glowing like red-hot coals. A deep groan burst from the surcharged breast of the unfortunate farmer, as he staggered back several paces.

  “Avaunt! Avaunt!” he cried, “Sathan, I deify thee! I have not signed that cursed parchment!” He turned and fled in an opposite direction; but, though he exerted his utmost speed, the stranger, without any apparent exertion, kept by his side. At length he arrived at the bank of the canal, and leaped into a boat which was moored alongside. Still his pursuer followed, arid Peter felt the iron grasp of his hand on the nape of his neck. He turned round, and struggled hard to free himself from the gripe of his companion, roaring out in agony, “Oh, Mynheer Duyvel! have pity, for the sake of my wife and my boy Karel!” But, when was the devil ever known to pity? The stranger held him tightly, and, spite of his struggles, dragged him ashore. He felt the grasp of his pursuer like the clutch of a bird of prey, while his hot breath almost scorched him; but, disengaging himself, with a sudden bound, he sprung from his enemy, and—pitched headlong from his elbow-chair on to the floor of his own room at Voorbooch.

  The noise occasioned by the fall of the burly Hollander, aroused his affrighted helpmate from the sound slumber she had been wrapped in for more than two hours: during which time, her husband had been indulging in potations deep and strong, until, overpowered with the potency of his beloved liquor, he had sunk to sleep in his elbow-chair, and dreamed the hellish dream we have endeavoured to relate. The noise of his fall aroused his vrow from her slumbers. Trembling in every limb on hearing the unruly sound below, she descended by a short flight of steps, screaming loudly for help, into the room where she had left her spouse when she retired to rest, and beheld Peter, her dear husband, prostrate on the stone floor, the table overturned, his glass broken, and the remainder of the accursed liquor flowing in a stream from the stone bottle, which lay upset on the ground.

  THE HAUNTED MILL, by Jerome K. Jerome

  OR, THE RUINED HOME

  Well, you all know my brother-in-law, Mr. Parkins (began Mr. Coombes, taking the long clay pipe from his mouth, and putting it behind his ear: we did not know his brother-in-law, but we said we did, so as to save time), and you know of course that he once took a lease of an old Mill in Surrey, and went to live there.

  Now you must know that, years ago, this very mill had been occupied by a wicked old miser, who died there, leaving—so it was rumoured—all his money hidden somewhere about the place. Naturally enough, every one who had since come to live at the mill had tried to find the treasure; but none had ever succeeded, and the local wiseacres said that nobody ever would, unless the ghost of the miserly miller should, one day, take a fancy to one of the tenants, and disclose to him the secret of the hiding-place.

  My brother-in-law did not attach much importance to the story, regarding it as an old woman’s tale, and, unlike his predecessors, made no attempt whatever to discover the hidden gold.

  “Unless business was very different then from what it is now,” said my brother-in-law, “I don’t see how a miller could very well have saved anything, however much of a miser he might have been: at all events, not enough to make it worth the trouble of looking for it.”

  Still, he could not altogether get rid of the idea of that treasure.

  One night he went to bed. There was nothing very extraordinary about that, I admit. He often did go to bed of a night. What was remarkable, however, was that exactly as the clock of the village church chimed the last stroke of twelve, my brother-in-law woke up with a start, and felt himself quite unable to go to sleep again.

  Joe (his Christian name was Joe) sat up in bed, and looked around.

  At the foot of the bed something stood very still, wrapped in shadow.

  It moved into the moonlight, and then my brother-in-law saw that it was the figure of a wizened little old man, in knee-breeches and a pig-tail.

  In an instant the story of the hidden treasure and the old miser flashed across his mind.

  “He’s come to show me where it’s hid,” thought my brother-in-law; and he resolved that he would not spend all this money on himself, but would devote a small percentage of it towards doing good to others.

  The apparition moved towards the door: my brother-in-law put on his trousers and followed it. The ghost went downstairs into the kitchen, glided over and stood in front of the hearth, sighed and disappeared.

  Next morning, Joe had a couple of bricklayers in, and made them haul out the stove and pull down the chimney, while he stood behind with a potato-sack in which to put the gold.

  They knocked down half the wall, and never found so much as a four-penny bit. My brother-in-law did not know what to think.

  The next night the old man appeared again, and again led the way into the kitchen. This time, however, instead of going to the fireplace, it stood more in the middle of the room, and sighed there.

  “Oh, I see what he means now,” said my brother-in-law to himself; “it’s under the floor. Why did the old idiot go and stand up against the stove, so as to make me think it was up the chimney?”

  They spent the next day in taking up the kitchen floor; but the only thing they found was a three-pronged fork, and the handle of that was broken.

  On the third night, the ghost reappeared, quite unabashed, and for a third time made for the kitchen. Arrived there, it looked up at the ceiling and vanished.

  “Umph! he don’t seem to have learned much sense where he’s been to,” muttered Joe, as he trotted back to bed; “I should have thought he might have done that at first.”

  Still, there seemed no doubt now where the treasure lay, and the first thing after breakfast they started pulling down the ceiling. They got every inch of the ceiling down, and they took up the boards of the room above.

  They discovered about as much treasure as you would expect to find in an empty quart-pot.

  On the fourth
night, when the ghost appeared, as usual, my brother-in-law was so wild that he threw his boots at it; and the boots passed through the body, and broke a looking-glass.

  On the fifth night, when Joe awoke, as he always did now at twelve, the ghost was standing in a dejected attitude, looking very miserable. There was an appealing look in its large sad eyes that quite touched my brother-in-law.

  “After all,” he thought, “perhaps the silly chap’s doing his best. Maybe he has forgotten where he really did put it, and is trying to remember. I’ll give him another chance.”

  The ghost appeared grateful and delighted at seeing Joe prepare to follow him, and led the way into the attic, pointed to the ceiling, and vanished.

  “Well, he’s hit it this time, I do hope,” said my brother-in-law; and next day they set to work to take the roof off the place.

  It took them three days to get the roof thoroughly off, and all they found was a bird’s nest; after securing which they covered up the house with tarpaulins, to keep it dry.

  You might have thought that would have cured the poor fellow of looking for treasure. But it didn’t.

  He said there must be something in it all, or the ghost would never keep on coming as it did; and that, having gone so far, he would go on to the end, and solve the mystery, cost what it might.

  Night after night, he would get out of his bed and follow that spectral old fraud about the house. Each night, the old man would indicate a different place; and, on each following day, my brother-in-law would proceed to break up the mill at the point indicated, and look for the treasure. At the end of three weeks, there was not a room in the mill fit to live in. Every wall had been pulled down, every floor had been taken up, every ceiling had had a hole knocked in it. And then, as suddenly as they had begun, the ghost’s visits ceased; and my brother-in-law was left in peace, to rebuild the place at his leisure.

  What induced the old image to play such a silly trick upon a family man and a ratepayer? Ah! that’s just what I cannot tell you.

  Some said that the ghost of the wicked old man had done it to punish my brother-in-law for not believing in him at first; while others held that the apparition was probably that of some deceased local plumber and glazier, who would naturally take an interest in seeing a house knocked about and spoilt. But nobody knew anything for certain.

  THE GROVE OF ASHTAROTH, by John Buchan

  “C’est enfin que dans leurs prunelles

  Rit et pleure-fastidieux—

  L’amour des choses eternelles

  Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!”

  —PAUL VERLAINE.

  We were sitting around the camp fire, some thirty miles north of a place called Taqui, when Lawson announced his intention of finding a home. He had spoken little the last day or two, and I had guessed that he had struck a vein of private reflection. I thought it might be a new mine or irrigation scheme, and I was surprised to find that it was a country house.

  “I don’t think I shall go back to England,” he said, kicking a sputtering log into place. “I don’t see why I should. For business purposes I am far more useful to the firm in South Africa than in Throgmorton Street. I have no relation left except a third cousin, and I have never cared a rush for living in town. That beastly house of mine in Hill Street will fetch what I gave for it,—Isaacson cabled about it the other day, offering for furniture and all. I don’t want to go into Parliament, and I hate shooting little birds and tame deer. I am one of those fellows who are born Colonial at heart, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t arrange my life as I please. Besides, for ten years I have been falling in love with this country, and now I am up to the neck.”

  He flung himself back in the camp-chair till the canvas creaked, and looked at me below his eyelids. I remember glancing at the lines of him, and thinking what a fine make of a man he was. In his untanned field-boots, breeches, and grey shirt, he looked the born wilderness hunter, though less than two months before he had been driving down to the City every morning in the sombre regimentals of his class. Being a fair man, he was gloriously tanned, and there was a clear line at his shirt-collar to mark the limits of his sunburn. I had first known him years ago, when he was a broker’s clerk working on half-commission. Then he had gone to South Africa, and soon I heard he was a partner in a mining house which was doing wonders with some gold areas in the North. The next step was his return to London as the new millionaire,—young, good-looking, wholesome in mind and body, and much sought after by the mothers of marriageable girls. We played polo together, and hunted a little in the season, but there were signs that he did not propose to become the conventional English gentleman. He refused to buy a place in the country, though half the Homes of England were at his disposal. He was a very busy man, he declared, and had not time to be a squire. Besides, every few months he used to rush out to South Africa. I saw that he was restless, for he was always badgering me to go big-game hunting with him in some remote part of the earth. There was that in his eyes, too, which marked him out from the ordinary blond type of our countrymen. They were large and brown and mysterious, and the light of another race was in their odd depths.

  To hint such a thing would have meant a breach of friendship, for Lawson was very proud of his birth. When he first made his fortune he had gone to the Heralds to discover his family, and these obliging gentlemen had provided a pedigree. It appeared that he was a scion of the house of Lowson or Lowieson, an ancient and rather disreputable clan on the Scottish side of the Border. He took a shooting in Teviotdale on the strength of it, and used to commit lengthy Border ballads to memory. But I had known his father, a financial journalist who never quite succeeded, and I had heard of a grandfather who sold antiques in a back street at Brighton. The latter, I think, had not changed his name, and still frequented the synagogue. The father was a progressive Christian, and the mother had been a blonde Saxon from the Midlands. In my mind there was no doubt, as I caught Lawson’s heavy-lidded eyes fixed on me. My friend was of a more ancient race than the Lowsons of the Border.

  “Where are you thinking of looking for your house?” I asked. “In Natal or in the Cape Peninsula? You might get the Fishers’ place if you paid a price.”

  “The Fishers’ place be hanged!” he said crossly. “I don’t want any stuccoed, over-grown Dutch farm. I might as well be at Roehampton as in the Cape.”

  He got up and walked to the far side of the fire, where a lane ran down through the thornscrub to a gully of the hills. The moon was silvering the bush of the plains, forty miles off and three thousand feet below us.

  “I am going to live somewhere hereabouts,” he answered at last. I whistled. “Then you’ve got to put your hand in your pocket, old man. You’ll have to make everything, including a map of the countryside.”

  “I know,” he said; “that’s where the fun comes in. Hang it all, why shouldn’t I indulge my fancy? I’m uncommonly well off, and I haven’t chick or child to leave it to. Supposing I’m a hundred miles from rail-head, what about it? I’ll make a motor-road and fix up a telephone. I’ll grow most of my supplies, and start a colony to provide labour. When you come and stay with me, you’ll get the best food and drink on earth, and sport that will make your mouth water. I’ll put Lochleven trout in these streams,—at 6,000 feet you can do anything. We’ll have a pack of hounds, too, and we can drive pig in the woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at our feet. I tell you I’ll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamed of. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns and rose-gardens.” Lawson flung himself into his chair again and smiled dreamily at the fire.

  “But why here, of all places?” I persisted. I was not feeling very well and did not care for the country.

  “I can’t quite explain. I think it’s the sort of land I have always been looking for. I always fancied a house on a green plateau in a decent climate looking down on the tropics. I like heat and colour, you know, but I like hills too, and greenery, and the things that bring
back Scotland. Give me a cross between Teviotdale and the Orinoco, and, by Gad! I think I’ve got it here.”

  I watched my friend curiously, as with bright eyes and eager voice he talked of his new fad. The two races were very clear in him—the one desiring gorgeousness, the other athirst for the soothing spaces of the North. He began to plan out the house. He would get Adamson to design it, and it was to grow out of the landscape like a stone on the hillside. There would be wide verandahs and cool halls, but great fireplaces against winter time. It would all be very simple and fresh—“clean as morning” was his odd phrase; but then another idea supervened, and he talked of bringing the Tintorets from Hill Street. “I want it to be a civilised house, you know. No silly luxury, but the best pictures and china and books. I’ll have all the furniture made after the old plain English models out of native woods. I don’t want second-hand sticks in a new country. Yes, by Jove, the Tintorets are a great idea, and all those Ming pots I bought. I had meant to sell them, but I’ll have them out here.”

  He talked for a good hour of what he would do, and his dream grew richer as he talked, till by the time we went to bed he had sketched something more like a palace than a country-house. Lawson was by no means a luxurious man. At present he was well content with a Wolseley valise, and shaved cheerfully out of a tin mug. It struck me as odd that a man so simple in his habits should have so sumptuous a taste in bric-a-brac. I told myself, as I turned in, that the Saxon mother from the Midlands had done little to dilute the strong wine of the East.

  It drizzled next morning when we inspanned, and I mounted my horse in a bad temper. I had some fever on me, I think, and I hated this lush yet frigid tableland, where all the winds on earth lay in wait for one’s marrow. Lawson was, as usual, in great spirits. We were not hunting, but shifting our hunting-ground, so all morning we travelled fast to the north along the rim of the uplands.