The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  At last, the agent had put up enormous startling bills in each of Troon’s front windows. And, suddenly, he sold the house.

  The two Kinlochs had seen it. They had money. They needed an old and mellow background. They got a first-class architect to vet the place, found a reasonable sum would make it weatherproof, beat the Irish landlord down a little—very little, for he was savage as a cornered rat. Followed a flurry of contracts, plans, and agreements, then parleyings with the local council, who mistrusted haste and people with money to spend on a damp derelict house in Seagate. And the Kinlochs were in a hurry: they wanted to settle in before Christmas.

  At last Troon House legally changed hands. The Kinlochs rented a bungalow lurking a mile away by the marshes. Troon was delivered up to the builders and decorators.

  And so we return to Jim Sanderson on this gloomy November evening.

  He had an electric torch, for no light was yet installed in the house. By its beam he prodded furiously at a patch of decayed timber by the hearthstone. A specimen was demanded by the Mycology Section of the Forest Products Research Laboratory. Dry rot was suspected in this large front room on the ground floor. Sanderson had to send his specimen by that night’s post. The other workmen were gone. He was working overtime—alone.

  Clap! Clap! Clap!

  Somewhere in the drafty darkness upstairs a door banged persistently. It got on his nerves. He was a sensitive man in spite of his big muscular frame. Temperament, imagination, nerves were part of his quick flexible intelligence. He hated this night job. He felt queer and jumpy.

  Clap! Clap! Clap!

  There! The damned door had shut itself at last. He heaved a sigh of relief. Then his scalp prickled. Was someone up there? Had they shut the door? Was that someone coming down the broken creaking staircase?

  The whites of his eyes showed like those of a frightened horse as he glanced up at the rain-blurred glass of a large bay-window on his right. Impulse seized him to dash himself at the panes, to escape to the friendly old parade just outside. Overwhelmingly he wanted to be out in the open—to exchange this dusty, musty shelter for rain and salt wind and flying scuds of foam.

  He’d had enough. Things had got worse ever since Joe Dawlish had pulled down the cupboard in the big west attic a week ago. The wall and chimney-breast had crumbled and broken with its removal. A few stout blows, and the whole false facade had come down, revealing a deep recess reaching from rafters halfway to floor. On the broad stone shelf thus formed, a skeleton lay.

  The bones of a child. Skull smashed in. A staple and chain padlocked round the bone of the left arm. The padlock was the strangest thing of all, of black smooth heavy stone with queer red markings chalked on it.

  The vicar had been summoned in a hurry. He’d brought Doctor Dick with him. They were in a great taking about the affair, and carried off the poor little bones for burial.

  From that hour things had gone wrong at Troon. Joe, who’d found the bones, was dead and buried inside a week—and what a week, too!

  Sanderson’s big brown hands fumbled as he tugged and strained at the flooring. He felt suddenly hot and weak. There was a flurry in his brain. He wrenched out the piece of wood he needed, stowed it roughly away in a torn capacious pocket of his old coat. Still on his knees, he gathered up his tools.

  He rattled and banged things about, trying to shut out other sounds … sounds on the stairs …

  The breath seemed to stop in his big body.

  Creak. Creak. Creak.

  It was someone cautiously stealing downstairs.

  Crack!

  He knew that sound. It was a broken step, third from the bottom. He tried to call out. It must be that damned oaf, Walter! The fool must have gone to sleep up there. Sanderson couldn’t make his stiff dry tongue obey him. He couldn’t hail whoever it was out there. He couldn’t—he daren’t.

  His hunted eyes sought the window. Power to move, to jump for it, had left him. He knelt there, powerful shoulders hunched, hands on the floor for support, crouched like a big frightened animal. He fought to prevent himself looking over his shoulder at the door behind. He knew it was opening. He heard stealthy fingers on the old loose knob. He heard the harsh scrape of wood on wood as the sagging door was pushed back.

  Ice-cold wind blew in, rustled bits of paper and shavings on the floor.

  Sanderson’s head jerked back to look. The door stood widely open. His eyes, filmed with terror, focused achingly on the gap between door and wall. Darkness moved there. A Thing Of Darkness. On the threshold it bulked in shapeless moving menace. Darkness made visible … blotting out everything … blotting out life itself.

  The crash of a small wooden crate on which his heavy hand rested saved Sanderson from fainting. He leaped for the window. Glass cracked and fell in sharp tinkling showers. A thick cloth cap protected his lowered head. He was through. He fell on the strip of trampled grass outside, among a tangle of ladders and buckets. He vaulted the pointed iron railing and was in the road—running—running—breath coming in deep sobbing gusts—deathly face splashed with rain and blood.

  Ahead shone the cheerful red and white lamp of the Three Mariners. He went straight for it as a fox for a familiar burrow.

  Mr. and Mrs. Burden—old Tom and old Mary to most—who kept the Three Mariners were sitting in their vast red-tiled kitchen before a blazing fire. Black hand-made rugs were spread. Oil lamps of heavy brass hung from massive black oak rafters. At a round walnut table covered with a crimson cloth, Mrs. Burden was working placidly through a pile of stockings to be mended. Solomon, a great tawny Persian cat, dozed with its leonine head on her instep. Mr. Burden, smoking a long churchwarden, sat in a wide Windsor chair glossy with age and use, his stockinged feet on a gleaming wrought-brass stool.

  Doctor Dick sprawled on a settle near by. Two or three fishermen, warming up before the tide turned and they put out for their night’s catch, completed the little company of friends.

  They all looked up at the loud bang of the outer door. Every face was turned toward the kitchen entrance when Jim Sanderson burst in.

  “For God’s sake—a drink!”

  He collapsed into a big chair and sat with head down on his hands, shivering and gasping before the hot fire. Doctor Dick was at his side in a moment. Mrs. Burden ran for a drink. Mr. Burden dropped his favorite pipe and stared. The fishermen sat forward, hands on knees, consternation on their weathered red-brown faces. Solomon stood with arched back, great feathery tail waving nervously, before seeking shelter under a distant chair to await developments.

  Sanderson told his experience in jerks between sips of the Three Mariners’ best Jamaica rum. His audience blinked, muttered, stared. Doctor Dick, that brilliant modern young man, listened with flattering and tremendous concentration, sea-blue eyes and keen face losing every trace of their habitual friendly good-humor.

  Mrs. Burden sat immobile. She had, as always, a flavor of the wild, of a remote and more instinctive age, of ancient beliefs and wisdom. She moved like a feather in a draft of wind—so light, so frail, so incalculable. She always seemed curiously unrelated to furniture and rooms and human dwelling-places in spite of making the Three Mariners the coziest inn in the whole county of Cheshire. She had the quality of some dear deep peatbrown river, nourishing the earth and nourished by it.

  Her husband, rocklike as she was fluid and quick, turned to her now.

  “What d’yer say to that, old woman? That there Troon house was always what you might say queer-like. I reckon it’s had queer folk in it and all. But I never heard tell of anything out and out bad.”

  “No? Well, I did, then.”

  Doctor Dick leaned forward, pipe in hand, his eyes bright as blue steel in the lamp-glow.

  “Now this isn’t treating me on the level, old Mary.” He waved his pipe in reproach. “You know very well the vicar and I are trying to rake up Troon’s past history. I’ve been here for the last hour and you’ve never let out one solitary squeak.”

  “No, a
nd I wouldn’t have done it if Jim hadn’t seen what he has seen this night.” Her bright dark eyes flashed round the intent faces.

  “I’ve been thinking over that business you’ve been telling about, Doctor Dick, that skeleton Joe dug out of the walls last week. Seems like as if that must have been her skeleton.”

  No one contradicted this dark surmise.

  “I’ll tell you the story as my grandfeyther’s grandfeyther wrote it. He was a scholar. Kept village school up at Keston. He’d got an old book with everything put down that happened since Seagate began. I read this story when I was a girl and never forgot a word. I can get the book from my uncle’s niece by marriage that works in a big library up to London to prove I’m right.”

  Chairs were hitched up, pipes relit. Old Tom flung a log that roused the fire to crackling flame. Solomon emerged, paced majestically back to his mistress, stretched at her feet with his yellow chin supported on them.

  “The year 1600 saw Troon put up at the end of the parade, only a low seawall then. Course Troon was naught but a little tavern then: Troon Tavern. Even for those rough times it was a bad place. They had miners over from Flint across the water—dark little devils, those Welsh men, always scrapping and more handy with knives than a butcher himself. Mostly it was miners went to Troon Tavern. The man that built it was Thomas Werne, a Seagate man that got hold of money somehow. Smuggling, most like.

  “Werne, the book said, was nothing but a block brute of a man. Treated his young wife wors’n a dog. When she died he got downright savage, and the child, Lizzy, left to him, came in for it all. I’m not going to harrow your feelings nor my own by telling what that innocent suffered. Laws weren’t much then when it came to looking after poor people’s children.

  “But there was a gentleman came to stay here at this very inn, the Three Mariners, and he was that angry when he saw Lizzy and learned about her from Seagate talk, he threatened he’d have Werne put in prison. The gentleman went back to London after that and told Werne he’d hear more about it. Well, next thing that happened was—Lizzy Werne disappeared.”

  “Ah!” Doctor Dick’s voice poignantly expressed his thought.

  “Yes. Every one was certain sure Werne had done it, same as you’re thinking yourself,” responded old Mary. “But nothing could be proved. The body of the child, not much more of it than bones Joe found, never turned up, search though they might and did! The law made a great fuss when it was too late. The gentleman from London came back and he stayed for weeks, he was that set on getting Werne hanged for murder.”

  “And he walled the child up in his own house, then!” Doctor Dick’s eyes blazed.

  “Aye. After three hundred years we’ve found what Werne did, I b’lieve!”

  “Eh, think of that!” Old Tom spat into the red fire. “And what did the murderin’ fellow say had happened to the child? What did he tell ’em?”

  “Said she was drowned. No one ever knew whether or not she was, the tides being mortal quick and dangerous here at Seagate. An’ ’twas worse then. There were quicksands down by the marshes, and more than Werne’s Lizzy had been caught and drowned. No one believed Werne’s tale, only nothing could be done to him because Lizzy’s body was never found.”

  “Quite. What I don’t see,” put in Doctor Dick, “is why he walled the body up. After smashing her skull, why not have taken the corpse out to sea and dropped it overboard one dark night?”

  Old Mary shook her head.

  “You mean he hadn’t a boat?”

  “No, I don’t mean that, Doctor Dick. All the Seagate men had boats in those days, same as you and me have a pair of shoes. Reckon you’re the only one here doesn’t know why he couldn’t put that body in the sea.”

  There were confirmatory nods all round the silent spellbound circle. Doctor Dick frowned in bewilderment.

  “Why?”

  “Well, seeing you don’t know, I’ll say the verse that was in the old book my grandfeyther’s grandfeyther wrote out;

  “A murdered body cast to sea

  May never there lie quietly,

  But every night is washed ashore,

  And standing by the murderer’s door

  It cries to be let in.

  “Of course that’s put in rhyme and it’s not quite right about the tides, not being a high tide every night anyhow. But the tide or no tide, the ghost would come back to the man who did the murder every night of his life.”

  Jim Sanderson shivered and looked with haunted eyes at the old woman.

  “You reckon I saw her then—the ghost?”

  “No. There’s one, and it’s a downright dangerous one. The child escaped, thanks be! But Werne’s caught himself now and he’s going to make people suffer for it.”

  She turned to Doctor Dick.

  “That padlock you told me about, with the red marks on it. Magic that was, black magic to keep the child’s soul a prisoner all these years. Sold her to the devil, did her father! Just so long as the child was promised, Werne himself was free.”

  Sanderson made an abrupt movement.

  “I don’t know as I get your meaning, old Mary.”

  “Plain enough. He’d sold his child to the devil, same as you’d bind an apprentice. The devil, he taught Werne how to lock her up safe so as her little ghost couldn’t escape and go wandering round, making people suspect. Well, that spell was broken when Joe Dawlish broke down the wall and the padlock and chain.”

  “As far as that goes,” Doctor Dick’s crisp voice interrupted the old woman’s uncomfortably clear exposition, “the vicar and I are equally to blame.”

  “And Werne’s not going to forget it,” warned old Mary. “Now Lizzie’s bones lie in the churchyard all safe and sound there’ll be trouble—black trouble. That’s how I see it, anyways.”

  Jim sucked in his breath on a long tremulous hiss. The fishermen got to their feet.

  “Reckon the tide’s right enough now,” said one.

  “Wait! I’ll come along.” Jim lunged clumsily in the wake of the retreating men. “You’re going my road and I’ll be glad of company tonight.”

  Old Mary’s serious withdrawn look followed the group out. As the heavy outer door banged to, she shook her head.

  “Jim Sanderson’s in for it,” she said in a low voice. “After sunset it’s asking for trouble to set foot in Troon. He’ll go like Joe Dawlish went. Poor fellow … poor fellow!”

  The next afternoon, Troon stood in a blaze of sunlight. The sky was mother-of-pearl. A slow full tide gleamed like gray satin. Troon confronted it—cold, indifferent, implacable.

  Inside its strong walls an army of workmen went about like busy scurrying ants. They were desperate to finish this job. Work that would ordinarily have lingered on for weeks was being rushed through at treble speed. One week more would see painting and decorations complete. Even the long wilderness of a garden was being dug and planted and trimmed and sown at a pace contrary to all Seagate tradition.

  Doctor Dick lingered outside the strip of grass and iron rail protecting Troon’s tall front windows on the ground floor. Lynneth had told him she was coming with the Kinlochs about three o’clock this afternoon. Elaborate juggling with his day’s appointments brought him to Troon on the stroke of the hour.

  “Afternoon, doctor!”

  A joiner called Frost touched his cap. He carried a big woven basket of tools over his shoulder. His face looked bleached. He glanced back over his shoulder as he stepped from Troon’s front door and blinked in the clear light outside the house.

  “Knocking off already?”

  “Aye, sir. Not worth going to fetch more tools for half an hour.”

  Doctor Dick stared. Laughed.

  “You don’t mean your day finishes at three-thirty, Frost? I envy you.”

  “There’s none of us works there,” he jerked a backward thumb, “after three-thirty, sir. Not these short days. All of us goes at three-thirty—before dusk,” he added with significance.

  “I see. How do yo
u square that up with regulations?”

  “We begins at seven ’stead of eight o’ mornings, sir. That’s how we does it. The boss is agreeable so long as we does a regular day all told.”

  “Leave before sundown. Yes, I see.”

  “We’ve got good reasons for it.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Aye. Not a man would stay in Troon after dusk. No—not for a ransom, not since Jim Sanderson went. A cruel death! Went like Joe Dawlish—just the same.”

  Seeing the doctor’s grave expression, Frost began speaking again.

  “Mark my words, sir, if them two iggerant foreigners—if you’ll excuse me putting it so bald-like—wot are renting the bungalow over by the marshes—”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Kinloch?”

  “Aye. If them two move into Troon next week, all I say is they’d do better to go down marsh-walk and be drowned comfortable. Might as well die natural deaths like! That’s wot I says and wot I sticks to.”

  Doctor Dick took this with gratifying seriousness. He went to his car and fiddled about with it for a minute or so to gain time, then returned with a thought he appeared to have found under the car’s hood.

  “Look here, Frost! Believing in anything makes it real. If the Kinlochs have no faith at all in old Werne and his power to hurt them, well, perhaps he can not.”

  Frost poked his head forward like a turtle emerging from its shell.

  “Noa,” his north-country accent marked strong emotion, “I doan’t hold wi’ thot and thee doesn’t neether, Doctor Dick! Thot oogly Thing a-grinnin’ and a-murderin’ there in the dark like, it’s naught to it what we b’lieves! It just bides quiet—same as a beast or summat—and then——”

  The man’s gesture, brawny fist smashing downward, was eloquent.