The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  But the roof looked sound, there seemed no reason why it should not be fairly dry inside – as dry, at any rate, as I was likely to find anywhere.

  I decided; and with a long look up the road, and a long look down the road, I drew an iron bar from the lining of my coat and forced the door, which was held only by a padlock and two staples. Inside, the darkness was damp and heavy; I struck a match, and with its haloed light I saw the black mouth of a passage somewhere ahead of me; and then it spluttered out. So I closed the door carefully, though I had little reason to fear passers-by at such a dismal hour and in so remote a lane; and lighting another match, I crept down this passage to a little room at the far end, where the air was a bit clearer, for all that the window was boarded across. Moreover, there was a little rusted stove in this room; and thinking it too dark for any to see the smoke, I ripped up part of the wainscot with my knife, and soon was boiling my tea over a bright, small fire, and drying some of the day’s rain out of my steamy clothes. Presently I piled the stove with wood to its top bar, and setting my boots where they would best dry, I stretched my body out to sleep.

  I cannot have slept very long, for when I woke the fire was still burning brightly. It is not easy to sleep for long, anyhow, on the level boards of a floor, for the limbs grow numb, and any movement wakes. I turned over, and was about to go again to sleep when I was startled to hear steps in the passage. As I have said, the window was boarded, and there was no other door from the little room – no cupboard even – in which to hide. It occurred to me rather grimly that there was nothing to do but to sit up and face the music, and that would probably mean being hauled back to Worcester Jail, which I had left two bare days before, and where, for various reasons, I had no anxiety to be seen again.

  The stranger did not hurry himself, but presently walked slowly down the passage, attracted by the light of the fire; and when he came in he did not seem to notice me where I lay huddled in a corner, but walked straight over to the stove and warmed his hands at it. He was dripping wet – wetter than I should have thought it possible for a man to get, even on such a rainy night, and his clothes were old and worn. The water dripped from him on to the floor; he wore no hat, and the straight hair over his eyes dripped water that sizzled spitefully on the embers.

  It occurred to me at once that he was no lawful citizen, but another wanderer like myself: a gentleman of the road; so I gave him some sort of greeting, and we were presently in conversation. He complained much of the cold and the wet, and huddled himself over the fire, his teeth chattering and his face an ill white.

  “No,” I said, “it is no decent weather for the road, this. But I wonder this cottage isn’t more frequented, for it’s a tidy little bit of a cottage.”

  Outside, the pale dead sunflowers and giant weeds stirred in the rain.

  “Time was,” he answered, “there wasn’t a tighter little cot in the co-anty, nor a purtier garden. A regular little parlour, she was. But now no folk’ll live in it, and there’s very few tramps will stop here either.”

  There were none of the rags and tins and broken food about that you find in a place where many beggars are used to stay.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  He gave a very troubled sigh before answering.

  “Gho-asts,” he said; “gho-asts. Him that lived here. It is a mighty sad tale, and I’ll not tell it to you; but the upshot of it was that he drownded himself, down to the mill-pond. All slimy, he was, and floating, when they pulled him out of it. There are fo-aks have seen un floating on the pond, and fo-aks have seen un set round the corner of the school, waiting for his childer. Seems as if he had forgotten, like how they were all gone dead, and the why he drownded hisself. But there are some say he walks up and down this cottage, up and down; like when the smallpox had ’em, and they couldn’t sleep but if they heard his feet going up and down by their do-ars. Drownded hisself down to the pond, he did; and now he Walks.”

  The stranger sighed again, and I could hear the water squelch in his boots as he moved himself.

  “But it doesn’t do for the like of us to get superstitious,” I answered. “It wouldn’t do for us to get seeing ghosts, or many’s the wet night we’d be lying in the roadway.”

  “No,” he said; “no, it wouldn’t do at all. I never had belief in Walks myself.”

  I laughed.

  “Nor I that,” I said. “I never see ghosts, whoever may.”

  He looked at me again in his queer melancholy fashion.

  “No,” he said. “ ’Spect you don’t ever. Some folk do-ant. It’s hard enough for poor fellows to have no money to their lodging, apart from gho-asts sceering them.”

  “It’s the coppers, not spooks, make me sleep uneasy,” said I. “What with coppers, and meddlesome-minded folk, it isn’t easy to get a night’s rest nowadays.”

  The water was still oozing from his clothes all about the floor, and a dank smell went up from him.

  “God, man!” I cried, “can’t you never get dry?”

  “Dry?” He made a little coughing laughter. “Dry? I shan’t never be dry . . . ’ Tisn’t the likes of us that ever get dry, be it wet or fine, winter or summer. See that!”

  He thrust his muddy hands up to the wrist in the fire, glowering over it fiercely and madly. But I caught up my two boots and ran crying out into the night.

  The Considerate Hosts

  Thorp McClusky

  Prospectus

  Address:

  Felders, near Little Rock Falls, Arkansas, USA.

  Property:

  Clapboard rural house with grey, weather-beaten exterior. The building is screened by mature trees and it has a small garden. Located on a back road to Little Rock.

  Viewing Date:

  December, 1939.

  Agent:

  Thorp McClusky (1906–?) was born in Arkansas and worked as a clerk while augmenting his income with items for the famous US pulp magazine, Weird Tales, to which he contributed one of the magazine’s best-remembered stories, “The Crawling Horror” in November 1936. “The Considerate Hosts” was also first published in the magazine and selected by the famous American editor, Bennett Cerf, as one of the all-time best supernatural tales for his collection, Famous Ghost Stories (1944). Although the concept of a traveller lost in a storm may not be new, what the hero of this story discovers when he crosses the threshold of the old house certainly is . . .

  Midnight.

  It was raining, abysmally. Not the kind of rain in which people sometimes fondly say they like to walk, but rain that was heavy and pitiless, like the rain that fell in France during the war. The road, unrolling slowly beneath Marvin’s headlights, glistened like the flank of a great backsnake; almost Marvin expected it to writhe out from beneath the wheels of his car. Marvin’s small coupe was the only man-made thing that moved through the seething night.

  Within the car, however, it was like a snug little cave. Marvin might almost have been in a theater, unconcernedly watching some somber drama in which he could revel without really being touched. His sensation was almost one of creepiness; it was incredible that he could be so close to the rain and still so warm and dry. He hoped devoutly that he would not have a flat tire on a night like this!

  Ahead a tiny red pinpoint appeared at the side of the road, grew swiftly, then faded in the car’s glare to the bull’s-eye of a lantern, swinging in the gloved fist of a big man in a streaming rubber coat. Marvin automatically braked the car and rolled the right-hand window down a little way as he saw the big man come splashing toward him.

  “Bridge’s washed away,” the big man said. “Where you going, Mister?”

  “Felders, damn it!”

  “You’ll have to go around by Little Rock Falls. Take your left up that road. It’s a county road, but it’s passable. Take your right after you cross Little Rock Falls bridge. It’ll bring you into Felders.”

  Marvin swore. The trooper’s face, black behind the ribbons of water dripping from his hat, laughed.
>
  “It’s a bad night, Mister.”

  “Gosh, yes! Isn’t it!”

  Well, if he must detour, he must detour. What a night to crawl for miles along a rutty back road!

  Rutty was no word for it. Every few feet Marvin’s car plunged into water-filled holes, gouged out from beneath by the settling of the light roadbed. The sharp, cutting sound of loose stone against the tires was audible even above the hiss of the rain.

  Four miles, and Marvin’s motor began to sputter and cough, Another mile, and it surrendered entirely. The ignition was soaked; the car would not budge.

  Marvin peered through the moisture-streaked windows, and, vaguely, like blacker masses beyond the road, he sensed the presence of thickly clustered trees. The car had stopped in the middle of a little patch of woods. “Judas!” Marvin thought disgustedly. “What a swell place to get stalled!” He switched off the lights to save the battery.

  He saw the glimmer then, through the intervening trees, indistinct in the depths of rain.

  Where there was a light there was certainly a house, and perhaps a telephone. Marvin pulled his hat tightly down upon his head, clasped his coat collar up around his ears, got out of the car, pushed the small coupe over on the shoulder of the road, and ran for the light.

  The house stood perhaps twenty feet back from the road, and the light shone from a front-room window. As he plowed through the muddy yard – there was no sidewalk – Marvin noticed a second stalled car – a big sedan – standing black and deserted a little way down the road.

  The rain was beating him, soaking him to the skin; he pounded on the house door like an impatient sheriff. Almost instantly the door swung open, and Marvin saw a man and a woman standing just inside, in a little hallway that led directly into a well-lighted living-room.

  The hallway itself was quite dark. And the man and woman were standing close together, almost as though they might be endeavoring to hide something behind them. But Marvin, wholly preoccupied with his own plight, failed to observe how unusual it must be for these two rural people to be up and about, fully dressed, long after midnight.

  Partly shielded from the rain by the little overhang above the door, Marvin took off his dripping hat and urgently explained his plight.

  “My car. Won’t go. Wires wet, I guess. I wonder if you’d let me use your phone? I might be able to get somebody to come out from Little Rock Falls. I’m sorry that I had to—”

  “That’s all right,” the man said. “Come inside. When you knocked at the door you startled us. We – we really hadn’t – well, you know how it is, in the middle of the night and all. But come in.”

  “We’ll have to think this out differently, John,” the woman said suddenly.

  Think what out differently? thought Marvin absently.

  Marvin muttered something about you never can be too careful about strangers, what with so many hold-ups and all. And, oddly, he sensed that in the half darkness the man and woman smiled briefly at each other, as though they shared some secret that made any conception of physical danger to themselves quietly, mildly amusing.

  “We weren’t thinking of you in that way,” the man reassured Marvin. “Come into the living-room.”

  The living-room of that house was – just ordinary. Two overstuffed chairs, a davenport, a bookcase. Nothing particularly modern about the room. Not elaborate, but adequate.

  In the brighter light Marvin looked at his hosts. The man was around forty years of age, the woman considerably younger, twenty-eight, or perhaps thirty. And there was something definitely attractive about them. It was not their appearance so much, for in appearance they were merely ordinary people; the woman was almost painfully plain. But they moved and talked with a curious singleness of purpose. They reminded Marvin of a pair of gray doves.

  Marvin looked around the room until he saw the telephone in a corner, and he noticed with some surprise that it was one of the old-style, coffee-grinder affairs. The man was watching him with peculiar intentness.

  “We haven’t tried to use the telephone tonight,” he told Marvin abruptly, “but I’m afraid it won’t work.”

  “I don’t see how it can work,” the woman added.

  Marvin took the receiver off the hook and rotated the little crank. No answer from Central. He tried again, several times, but the line remained dead.

  The man nodded his head slowly. “I didn’t think it would work,” he said, then.

  “Wires down or something, I suppose,” Marvin hazarded.“Funny thing, I haven’t seen one of those old-style phones in years. Didn’t think they used ’em any more.”

  “You’re out in the sticks now,” the man laughed. He glanced from the window at the almost opaque sheets of rain falling outside.

  “You might as well stay here a little while. While you’re with us you’ll have the illusion, at least, that you’re in a comfortable house.”

  What on earth is he talking about? Marvin asked himself. Is he just a little bit off, maybe? That last sounded like nonsense.

  Suddenly the woman spoke.

  “He’d better go, John. He can’t stay here too long, you know. It would be horrible if someone took his license number and people – jumped to conclusions afterward. No one should know that he stopped here.”

  The man looked thoughtfully at Marvin.

  “Yes, dear, you’re right. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’m afraid, sir, that you’ll have to leave,” he told Marvin. “Something extremely strange—”

  Marvin bristled angrily, and buttoned his coat with an air of affronted dignity.

  “I’ll go,” he said shortly. “I realize perfectly that I’m an intruder. You should not have let me in. After you let me in I began to expect ordinary human courtesy from you. I was mistaken. Good night.”

  The man stopped him. He seemed very much distressed.

  “Just a moment. Don’t go until we explain. We have never been considered discourteous before. But tonight – tonight . . .

  “I must introduce myself. I am John Reed, and this is my wife, Grace.”

  He paused significantly, as though that explained everything, but Marvin merely shook his head. “My name’s Marvin Phelps, but that’s nothing to you. All this talk seems pretty needless.”

  The man coughed nervously. “Please understand. We’re only asking you to go for your own good.”

  “Oh, sure,” Marvin said. “Sure. I understand perfectly. Good night.”

  The man hesitated. “You see,” he said slowly, “things aren’t as they seem. We’re really ghosts.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “My husband is quite right,” the woman said loyally. “We’ve been dead twenty-one years.”

  “Twenty-two years next October,” the man added, after a moment’s calculation. “It’s a long time.”

  “Well, I never heard such hooey!” Marvin babbled. “Kindly step away from that door, Mister, and let me out of here before I swing from the heels.”

  “I know it sounds odd,” the man admitted, without moving, “and I hope that you will realize that it’s from no choosing of mine that I have to explain. Nevertheless, I was electrocuted, twenty-one years ago, for the murder of the Chairman of the School Board, over in Little Rock Falls. Notice how my head is shaved, and my split trouser-leg? The fact is, that whenever we materialize we have to appear exactly as we were in our last moment of life. It’s a restriction on us.”

  Screwy, certainly screwy. And yet Marvin hazily remembered that School Board affair. Yes, the murderer had been a fellow named Reed. The wife had committed suicide a few days after burial of her husband’s body.

  It was such an odd insanity. Why, they both believed it. They even dressed the part. That odd dress the woman was wearing. ’Way out of date. And the man’s slit trouser-leg. The screwy cluck had even shaved a little patch on his head, too, and his shirt was open at the throat.

  They didn’t look dangerous, but you never can tell. Better humor them, and get out of here as quick
as I can.

  Marvin cleared his throat.

  “If I were you – why, say, I’d have lots of fun materializing. I’d be at it every night. Build up a reputation for myself.”

  The man looked disgusted. “I should kick you out of doors,” he remarked bitterly. “I’m trying to give you a decent explanation, and you keep making fun of me.”

  “Don’t bother with him, John,” the wife exclaimed. “It’s getting late.”

  “Mr. Phelps,” the self-styled ghost doggedly persisted, ignoring the woman’s interruption, “perhaps you noticed a car stalled on the side of the road as you came into our yard. Well, that car, Mr. Phelps, belongs to Lieutenant-Governor Lyons, of Felders, who prosecuted me for that murder and won a conviction, although he knew that I was innocent. Of course he wasn’t Lieutenant-Governor then; he was only County Prosecutor . . .

  “That was a political murder, and Lyons knew it. But at that time he still had his way to make in the world – and circumstances pointed toward me. For example, the body of the slain man was found in the ditch just beyond my house. The body had been robbed. The murderer had thrown the victim’s pocketbook and watch under our front steps. Lyons said that I had hidden them there – though obviously I’d never have done a suicidal thing like that, had I really been the murderer. Lyons knew that, too – but he had to burn somebody.

  “What really convicted me was the fact that my contract to teach had not been renewed that spring. It gave Lyons a readymade motive to pin on me.

  “So he framed me. They tried, sentenced, and electrocuted me, all very neatly and legally. Three days after I was buried, my wife committed suicide.”

  Though Marvin was a trifle afraid, he was nevertheless beginning to enjoy himself. Boy, what a story to tell the gang! If only they’d believe him!