The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books)

by Peter Haining

  “Oh, you needn’t be so sarcastic. At least George would do his best to be a good provider.”

  “I’ll say he would. He provided me with a lot of laughs ever since I met him.”

  “That’s the trouble with you – you and your superior attitude! Think you’re better than anybody else. Here we are, practically starving, and you have to pay instalments on a new car just to show it off to your movie friends. And on top of that you go and take out a big policy on me just to be able to brag about how you’re protecting your family. I wish I had married George – at least he’d bring home some of that hamburger to eat when he finished work. What do you expect me to live on, used carbon paper and old typewriter ribbons?”

  “Well, how the devil can I help it if the stuff doesn’t sell? I figured on that contract deal but it fell through. You’re the one that’s always beefing about money – who do you think I am, the goose that laid the golden egg?”

  “You’ve been laying plenty of eggs with those last stories you sent out.”

  “Funny. Very funny. But I’m getting just a little tired of your second-act dialogue, Daisy.”

  “So I’ve noticed. You’d like to change partners and dance, I suppose. Perhaps you’d rather exchange a little sparkling repartee with that Jeanne Corey. Oh, I’ve noticed the way you hung around her that night over at Ed’s place. You couldn’t have got much closer without turning into a corset.”

  “Now listen, you leave Jeanne’s name out of this.”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to leave Jeanne’s name out of it, eh? Your wife mustn’t take the name of your girlfriend in vain. Well, darling, I always knew you were a swift worker, but I didn’t think it had gone that far. Have you told her that she’s your inspiration yet?”

  “Damn it, Daisy, why must you go twisting around everything I say—”

  “Why don’t you insure her, too? Bigamy insurance – you could probably get a policy issued by Brigham Young.”

  “Oh, turn it off, will you? A fine act to headline our anniversary, I must say.”

  “Anniversary”

  “Today’s May 18th, isn’t it?”

  “May 18th—”

  “Yeah. Here, shrew.”

  “Why – honey, it’s a necklace—”

  “Yeah. Just a little dividend on the bonds of matrimony.”

  “Honey – you bought this for me? – with all our bills and—”

  “Never mind that. And quit gasping in my ear, will you? You sound like Little Eva before they hoist her up with the ropes.”

  “Darling, it’s so beautiful. Here.”

  “Aw, Daisy. Now see what you’ve done. Made me forget where we left off quarreling. Oh, well.”

  “Our anniversary. And to think I forgot!”

  “Well, I didn’t. Daisy.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking – that is, well, I’m just a sentimental cuss at heart, and I was sort of wondering if you’d like to hop in the car and take a run out along the Prentiss Road.”

  “You mean like that day we – eloped?”

  “Urn hum.”

  “Of course, darling. I’d love to. Oh, honey, where did you get this necklace?”

  That’s how it was. Just one of those things. Daisy and I, holding our daily sparring match. Usually it kept us in trim. Today, though, I began to get the feeling that we had overtrained. We’d quarrelled that way for months, on and off. I don’t know why; I wouldn’t be able to define “incompatibility” if I saw it on my divorce-papers. I was broke, and Daisy was a shrew. Let it go at that.

  But I felt pretty clever when I dragged out my violin for the Hearts and Flowers. Anniversary, necklace, re-tracing the honeymoon route; it all added up. I’d found a way to keep Daisy quiet without stuffing a mop into her mouth.

  She was sentimentally happy and I was self-congratulatory as we climbed into the car and headed up Wilshire towards Prentiss Road. We still had a lot to say to each other, but in repetition it would be merely nauseating. When Daisy felt good she went in for baby-talk – which struck me as being out of character.

  But for a while we were both happy. I began to kid myself that it was just like old times; we really were the same two kids running away on our crazy elopement. Daisy had just “gotten off” from the beauty parlor and I’d just sold my script series to the agency, and we were running down to Valos to get married. It was the same spring weather, the same road, and Daisy snuggled close to me in the same old way.

  But it wasn’t the same. Daisy wasn’t a kid any more; there were no lines in her face, but there was a rasp in her voice. She hadn’t taken on any weight, but she’d taken on a load of querulous ideas. I was different, too. Those first few radio sales had set the pace; I began to run around with the big-shots, and that costs money. Only lately I hadn’t made any sales, and the damned expenses kept piling up, and everytime I tried to get any work done at the house there was Daisy nagging away. Why did we have to buy a new car? Why did we have to pay so much rent? Why such an insurance policy? Why did I buy three suits?

  So I buy her a necklace and she shuts up. There’s a woman’s logic for you.

  Oh well, I figured, today I’ll forget it. Forget the bills, forget her nagging, forget Jeanne – though that last was going to be hard. Jeanne was quiet, and she had a private income, and she thought baby-talk was silly. Oh well.

  We drove on to Prentiss Road and took the old familiar route. I stopped my little stream-of-consciousness act and tried to get into the mood. Daisywas happy; no doubt of that. We’d packed an overnight bag, and without mentioning it we both knew we’d stay at the hotel in Valos, just as we had three years ago when we were married.

  Three years of drab, nagging monotony –

  But I wasn’t going to think about that. Better to think about Daisy’s pretty blond curls gleaming in the afternoon sunshine; to think about the pretty green hills doing ditto in the afternoon ditto. It was spring, the spring of three years ago, and all life lay before us – down the white concrete road that curved across the hills to strange heights of achievement beyond.

  So we drove on, blithely enough. She pointed out the signs and I nodded or grunted or said “Uh-uh” and the first thing I knew we were four hours on the road and it was getting past afternoon and I wanted to get out and stretch my legs and besides –

  There it lay. I couldn’t have missed the banner. And even if I did, there was Daisy, squealing in my ear.

  “Oh, honey – look.”

  CAN YOU TAKE IT?

  THE HOUSE OF TERROR

  VISIT A GENUINE, AUTHENTIC HAUNTED HOUSE

  And in smaller lettering, beneath, further enticements were listed.

  “See the Kluva Mansion! Visit the Haunted Chamber – see the Axe used by the Mad Killer! DO THE DEAD RETURN? Visit the HOUSE OF TERROR – only genuine attraction of its kind. ADMISSION–25¢”

  Of course I didn’t read all this while slashing by at 60 m.p.h. We pulled up as Daisy tugged my shoulder, and while she read, I looked at the large, rambling frame building. It looked like dozens of others we passed on the road; houses occupied by “swamis” and “mediums” and “Yogi Psychologists.” For this was the lunatic fringe where the quacks fed on the tourist trade. But here was a fellow with a little novelty. He had something a bit different. That’s what I thought.

  But Daisy evidently thought a lot more.

  “Ooh, honey, let’s go in.”

  “What?”

  “I’m so stiff from all this driving, and besides, maybe they sell hot dogs inside or something, and I’m hungry.”

  Well. That was Daisy. Daisy the sadist. Daisy the horror-movie fan. She didn’t fool me for a minute. I knew all about my wife’s pretty little tastes. She was a thrill-addict. Shortly after our marriage she’d let down the bars and started reading the more lurid murder trial news aloud to me at breakfast. She began to leave ghastly magazines around the house. Pretty soon she was dragging me to all the mystery-pictures. Just another one of her annoy
ing habits – I could close my eyes at any time and conjure up the drone of her voice, tense with latent excitement, as she read about the Cleveland torso slayings, or the latest hatchet-killing.

  Evidently nothing was too synthetic for her tastes. Here was an old shack that in its palmiest days was no better than a tenement house for goats; a dump with a lurid side-show banner flung in front of the porch – and still she had to go in. “Haunted House” got her going. Maybe that’s what had happened to our marriage. I would have pleased her better by going around the house in a black mask, purring like Bela Lugosi with bronchitis, and caressing her with a hatchet.

  I attempted to convey some of the pathos of my thoughts in the way I replied, “What the blazes?” but it was a losing battle. Daisy had her hand on the car door. There was a smile on her face – a smile that did queer things to her lips. I used to see that smile when she read the murder-news; it reminded me, unpleasantly, of a hungry cat’s expression while creeping up on a robin. She was a shrew and she was a sadist.

  But what of it? This was a second honeymoon; no time to spoil things just when I’d fixed matters up. Kill half an hour here and then on to the hotel in Valos.

  “Come on!”

  I jerked out of my musings to find Daisy halfway up the porch. I locked the car, pocketed the keys, joined her before the dingy door. It was getting misty in the late afternoon and the clouds rolled over the sun. Daisy knocked impatiently. The door opened slowly, after a long pause in the best haunted-house tradition. This was the cue for a sinister face to poke itself out and emit a greasy chuckle. Daisy was just itching for that, I knew.

  Instead she got W. C. Fields.

  Well, not quite. The proboscis was smaller, and not so red. The cheeks were thinner, too. But the checked suit, the squint, the jowls, and above all that “step right up gentlemen” voice were all in the tradition.

  “Ah. Come in, come in. Welcome to Kluva Mansion, my friends, welcome.” The cigar fingered us forward. “Twenty-five cents, please. Thank you.”

  There we were in the dark hallway. It really was dark, and there certainly was a musty enough odor, but I knew damned well the house wasn’t haunted by anything but cockroaches. Our comic friend would have to do some pretty loud talking to convince me; but then, this was Daisy’s show.

  “It’s a little late, but I guess I’ve got time to show you around. Just took a party through about fifteen minutes ago – big party from San Diego. They drove all the way up just to see the Kluva Mansion, so I can assure you you’re getting your money’s worth.”

  All right buddy, cut out the assuring, and let’s get this over with. Trot out your zombies, give Daisy a good shock with an electric battery or something, and we’ll get out of here.

  “Just what is this haunted house and how did you happen to come by it?” asked Daisy. One of those original questions she was always thinking up. She was brilliant like that all the time. Just full of surprises.

  “Well, it’s like this, lady. Lots of folks ask me that and I’m only too glad to tell them. This house was built by Ivan Kluva – don’t know if you remember him or not – Russian movie director, came over here about ’23 in the old silent days, right after DeMille began to get popular with his spectacle pictures. Kluva was an ‘epic’ man; had quite a European reputation, so they gave him a contract. He put up this place, lived here with his wife. Aren’t many folks left in the movie colony that remember old Ivan Kluva; he never really got to direct anything either.

  “First thing he did was to mix himself up with a lot of foreign cults. This was way back, remember; Hollywood had some queer birds then. Prohibition, and a lot of wild parties; dope addicts, all kinds of scandals, and some stuff that never did get out. There was a bunch of devil-worshippers and mystics, too – not like these fakes down the road; genuine article. Kluva got in with them.

  “I guess he was a little crazy, or got that way. Because one night, after some kind of gathering here, he murdered his wife. In the upstairs room, on a kind of an altar he rigged up. He just took a hatchet to her and hacked off her head. Then he disappeared. The police looked in a couple of days later; they found her, of course, but they never did locate Kluva. Maybe he jumped off the cliffs behind the house. Maybe – I’ve heard stories – he killed her as a sort of sacrifice so he could go away. Some of the cult members were grilled, and they had a lot of wild stories about worshipping things or beings that granted boons to those who gave them human sacrifices; such boons as going away from Earth. Oh, it was crazy enough, I guess, but the police did find a damned funny statue behind the altar that they didn’t like and never showed around, and they burned a lot of books and things they got hold of here. Also they chased that cult out of California.”

  All this corny chatter rolled out in a drone and I winced. Now I’m only a two-bit gag-writer, myself, but I was thinking that if I went in for such things I could improvise a better story than this poorly-told yarn and I could ad-lib it more effectively than this bird seemed able to do with daily practice. It sounded so stale, so flat, so unconvincing. The rottenest “thriller plot” in the world.

  Or –

  It struck me then. Perhaps the story was true. Maybe this was the solution. After all, there were no supernatural elements yet. Just a dizzy Russian devil-worshipper murdering his wife with a hatchet. It happens once in a while; psychopathology is full of such records. And why not? Our comic friend merely bought the house after the murder, cooked up his “haunt” yarn, and capitalized.

  Evidently my guess was correct, because old Bugle-beak sounded off again.

  “And so, my friends, the deserted Kluva Mansion remained, alone and untenanted. Not utterly untenanted, though. There was the ghost. Yes, the ghost of Mrs. Kluva – the Lady in White.”

  Phooey! Always it has to be the Lady in White. Why not in pink, for a change, or green? Lady in White – sounds like a burlesque headliner. And so did our spieler. He was trying to push his voice down into his fat stomach and make it impressive.

  “Every night she walks the upper corridor to the murder chamber. Her slit throat shines in the moonlight as she lays her head once again on the blood-stained block, again receives the fatal blow, and with a groan of torment, disappears into thin air.”

  Hot air, you mean, buddy.

  “Oooh,” said Daisy. “She would.”

  “I say the house was deserted for years. But there were tramps, vagrants, who broke in from time to time to stay the night. They stayed the night – and longer. Because in the morning they were always found – on the murder block, with their throats chopped by the murder axe.”

  I wanted to say “Axe-ually?” but then, I have my better side. Daisy was enjoying this so; her tongue was almost hanging out.

  “After a while nobody would come here; even the tramps shunned the spot. The real estate people couldn’t sell it. Then I rented. I knew the story would attract visitors, and frankly, I’m a business man.”

  Thanks for telling me, brother. I thought you were a fake.

  “And now, you’d like to see the murder chamber? Just follow me, please. Up the stairs, right this way. I’ve kept everything just as it always was, and I’m sure you’ll be more than interested in—”

  Daisy pinched me on the dark stairway. “Ooh, sugar, aren’t you thrilled?”

  I don’t like to be called “sugar.” And the idea of Daisy actually finding something “thrilling” in this utterly ridiculous farce was almost nauseating. For a moment I could have murdered her myself. Maybe Kluva had something there at that.

  The stairs creaked, and the dusty windows allowed a sepulchral light to creep across the mouldy floor as we followed the waddling showman down the black hallway. A wind seemed to have sprung up outside, and the house shook before it, groaning in torment.

  Daisy giggled nervously. In the movie-show she always twisted my lapel-buttons off when the monster came into the room where the girl was sleeping. She was like that now – hysterical.

  I felt as excit
ed as a stuffed herring in a pawnshop.

  W. C. opened a door down the hall and fumbled around inside. A moment later he reappeared carrying a candle and beckoned us to enter the room. Well, that was a little better. Showed some imagination, anyway. The candle was effective in the gathering darkness; it cast blotches of shadow over the walls and caused shapes to creep in the corners.

  “Here we are,” he almost whispered.

  And there we were.

  Now I’m not psychic. I’m not even highly imaginative. When Orson Welles is yammering on the radio I’m down at the hamburger stand listening to the latest swing music. But when I entered that room I knew that it, at least, wasn’t a fake. The air reeked of murder. The shadows ruled over a domain of death. It was cold in here, cold as a charnel-house. And the candle-light fell on the great bed in the corner, then moved to the center of the room and covered a monstrous bulk. The murder block.

  It was something like an altar, at that. There was a niche in the wall behind it, and I could almost imagine a statue being placed there. What kind of a statue? A black bat, inverted and crucified? Devil-worshippers used that, didn’t they? Or was it another and more horrible kind of idol? The police had destroyed it. But the block was still there, and in the candle-light I saw the stains. They trickled over the rough sides.

  Daisy moved closer to me and I could feel her tremble.

  Kluva’s chamber. A man with an axe, holding a terrified woman across the block; the strength of inspired madness in his eyes, and in his hands, an axe –

  “It was here, on the night of January twelfth, nineteen twenty-four, that Ivan Kluva murdered his wife with—”

  The fat man stood by the door, chanting out his listless refrain. But for some reason I listened to every word. Here in this room, those words were real. They weren’t scareheads on a sideshow banner; here in the darkness they had meaning. A man and his wife, and murder. Death is just a word you read in the newspaper. But some day it becomes real; dreadfully real. Something the worms whisper in your ears as they chew. Murder is a word, too. It is the power of death, and sometimes there are men who exercise that power, like gods. Men who kill are like gods. They take away life. There is something cosmically obscene about the thought. A shot fired in drunken frenzy, a blow struck in anger, a bayonet plunged in the madness of war, an accident, a car-crash – these things are part of life. But a man, any man, who lives with the thought of Death; who thinks and plans a deliberate, cold-blooded murder –