The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  Back on the beat where I had always belonged, I wrote a story about a singing guinea pig named Tess and its owner, a stockbroker I referred to as “jolly and portly, if a slight bit socially retarded.” How was I supposed to know that Tess’s owner was country-club buddies with the Tribune publisher? The publisher had a talk with Sissy, who, when it came to the subject of me, didn’t need much talking to. Sissy called me into her office on a bright, spring Friday afternoon, a full year after my trip to the Ozarks.

  “As the great poet wrote,” she said, “April is the cruelest month.”

  “Huh,” I said, and then she told me that even though I’d always struggled with facts, she liked my way with words and admired my imagination and wished me nothing but the best. Then she told me to clean out my desk.

  I took a road trip, because I didn’t know what else to do. I pointed my car toward Northern California, where I had always imagined quiet, friendly little streams and springy meadows and people with good skin and strong handshakes, but somehow I ended up behind a plate of flapjacks and a steaming cup of coffee, next to a twisting stream, hard on Missouri State Highway 176. A little voice had been whispering to me ever since the otter-eyed doctor had wakened me, telling me to slow down, telling me that if I wanted happiness, happiness was waiting for me, that peace was slinging hash, that serenity had blue eyes, and that her name was Beatrice. As usual, the little voice was feeding me a line.

  Bea and I dated for a few months, until she told me she was sick to death of the country, and of the Ozarks, and she wanted to move to the big city, and what was wrong with me, and would I ever grow up and stop looking for things that never were?

  I don’t know if I ever did. I don’t know if I ever have.

  Little Boy Blue was lost, and then he was found, and now he’s an adult, older than I was when I walked into the woods and the woods claimed me. You don’t know about him because he stopped doing interviews a long time ago. He wants people to forget about him. I don’t blame him.

  Sometimes I wish I could forget about him. I’m different now. The world is different. Things have changed, even in the hidden hollows of southern Missouri. Millionaires still haul their fancy speedboats to the Lake of the Ozarks, and they tie up together and drink too much and the girls take off their shirts but now you can see it all on the Internet. Missing kids—especially cute white ones—are gone for an hour now and you can see them on the Internet, too. The only people who walk into the Ozarks’ hidden hollows these days wear Gore-Tex and carry mesh baskets and likely as not, they’re hunting for morel mushrooms and ginseng, which they sell to the fancy restaurants where the millionaires like to eat and where possum meat’s not on the menu. Gus’s Hotel is gone, and there’s a Walmart where it used to be. The diner’s a parking lot. If a five-year-old skinned a squirrel, he’d probably get his own reality TV show. No one writes mood pieces anymore.

  I think about my failed mood piece sometimes. I think about BC, too, and four or five times every year I call the Missouri State Penitentiary, in Jefferson City, to make sure he’s still locked up, and to see when his next parole hearing is, so that I can drive to The Big House, which is what folks here call the institution, and suggest it not be granted. I think about Bea, too. More often than I’d like to admit, if you want the truth. I think about her late at night, when I’m lying in bed. But I don’t ever talk about her. That wouldn’t be the right thing to do, not to Rachael. That’s Mrs. Loomis’ first name. Rachael and I have been living together for thirty years now, in the house at the end of the gravel road, just a few miles from Walnut Shade, next to the James River, deep in the shadows of Goodnight Hollow.

  I’m a middle-aged man now, recently retired from twenty-nine years of teaching fifth grade. I haven’t had a drink since that last pull of drug-laced moonshine in the clearing, next to the fire. Rachael takes her meds and I go to AA meetings and we read local history books together and we sit on lawn chairs on the banks of the James River and we fish and our sun-freckled shoulders touch. Sometimes on a warm spring afternoon we even drive up to St. Louis, to take in a Cardinals baseball game and to sit on the hood of our cherry red Buick Skylark afterward and breathe in the city smells while we slurp our vanilla milkshakes at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard Stand on Grand Avenue. And when we get home, while I’m inside measuring coffee for the morning and tidying up, Rachael makes a trip to the little ash mound down the path behind the house. She calls it her “constitutional.” I followed her once, many years ago, to see what she was doing and I saw her gently place a raw chicken, still bloody and freshly butchered, on the little pile of ashes. That was the last time I followed her.

  I think of Bea and BC and baseball games and frozen custard late at night, when Rachael is sleeping and I’m trying not to think of other things. I try not to think about the thing I saw in the woods, the thing I couldn’t possibly have seen. I try not to think about the baby’s fist with the missing fingers. I try not to think about the terrible fate of that little boy from another time.

  Trying not to think about things keeps a man awake at night. It keeps me awake. So do the sounds, the sounds from the woods next to the river. They’re still there, the rustling and the creaking, the sighing of the wind. Sometimes, in the stillness of the predawn darkness I tell myself that I have grown used to them. But then the silence will be broken—by soft weeping, by the fierce whisper of the whip, by a low, soft moaning.

  “Huh-huh-huh,” the reedy, haunted voice says, and then louder, “HUH-HUH-HUH” and I don’t even bother to put a pillow over my ears, because I know it won’t help.

  “HUH-HUH-HUH-HUNGRY!” the lost little boy screams. And then comes the rattling in the woods, the urgent scuttling. Then there is a tearing and chewing as the ghostly, damned thing in the woods falls upon its bloody sustenance, and then there is a horrible, savage slurping and then an ecstatic lip-smacking.

  The silence comes then, and I always wish it would go on forever, but it never does. After the silence comes a sigh, night after night, week after week, decade after endless decade, a sigh lonelier than the wind, sadder than the ageless river. And then, after the sigh, the last thing I hear every night, before I finally fall into an uneasy sleep. It is the sound of death, and the horror that comes after.

  “Fuh-fuh-fuh friends,” the lost little boy says. “Muh-muh-muh my friends.”

  A GHOST’S STORY

  Mark Twain

  WHETHER WRITING ABOUT CRIME, romance, religion, or ghosts, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) thought it was all just hilarious and his satiric wit often elevated the most ordinary tales into minor masterpieces. He is justly famous as a great, perhaps the great, American novelist, with such masterpieces to his credit as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), but he also savored the notion of taking genre fiction and skewing it until it became uniquely his.

  He wrote frequently in the mystery genre but reserved much of his prodigious inventiveness for tales of science fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural. He employs the notion of time travel wonderfully in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), handles afterlife fantasy in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909), and explores Gothic themes and medieval settings in The Mysterious Stranger (1916). Many short stories also contains fantastic elements, such as the present tale about the Cardiff Giant, “A Horse’s Tale” (1906) about a talking horse, and “The Canvasser’s Tale” (1876) about a man who collects echoes.

  “A Ghost’s Story” (sometimes published as “A Ghost’s Tale”) was first published in Werner’s Readings and Recitations (New York, Edgar S. Werner Company, 1888).

  A Ghost’s Story

  MARK TWAIN

  I TOOK A LARGE room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and inva
ding the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its hazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.

  I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mold and the darkness. A cheery fire was burning in the grate, and I sat down before it with a comforting sense of relief. For two hours I sat there, thinking of bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning half-forgotten faces out of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy, to voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar songs that nobody sings now. And as my reverie softened down to a sadder and sadder pathos, the shrieking of the winds outside softened to a wail, the angry beating of the rain against the panes diminished to a tranquil patter, and one by one the noises in the street subsided, until the hurrying footsteps of the last belated straggler died away in the distance and left no sound behind.

  The fire had burned low. A sense of loneliness crept over me. I arose and undressed, moving on tiptoe about the room, doing stealthily what I had to do, as if I were environed by sleeping enemies whose slumbers it would be fatal to break. I covered up in bed, and lay listening to the rain and wind and the faint creaking of distant shutters, till they lulled me to sleep.

  I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know. All at once I found myself awake, and filled with a shuddering expectancy. All was still. All but my own heart—I could hear it beat. Presently the bedclothes began to slip away slowly toward the foot of the bed, as if some one were pulling them! I could not stir; I could not speak. Still the blankets slipped deliberately away, till my breast was uncovered. Then with a great effort I seized them and drew them over my head. I waited, listened, waited. Once more that steady pull began, and once more I lay torpid a century of dragging seconds till my breast was naked again. At last I roused my energies and snatched the covers back to their place and held them with a strong grip. I waited. By and by I felt a faint tug, and took a fresh grip. The tug strengthened to a steady strain—it grew stronger and stronger. My hold parted, and for the third time the blankets slid away. I groaned. An answering groan came from the foot of the bed! Beaded drops of sweat stood upon my forehead. I was more dead than alive. Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room—the step of an elephant, it seemed to me—it was not like anything human. But it was moving from me—there was relief in that. I heard it approach the door—pass out without moving bolt or lock—and wander away among the dismal corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it passed—and then silence reigned once more.

  When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, “This is a dream—simply a hideous dream.” And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced myself that it was a dream, and then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips and I was happy again. I got up and struck a light; and when I found that the locks and bolts were just as I had left them, another soothing laugh welled in my heart and rippled from my lips. I took my pipe and lit it, and was just sitting down before the fire, when—down went the pipe out of my nerveless fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks, and my placid breathing was cut short with a gasp! In the ashes on the hearth, side by side with my own bare footprint, was another, so vast that in comparison mine was but an infant’s! Then I had had a visitor, and the elephant tread was explained.

  I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear. I lay a long time, peering into the darkness, and listening.—Then I heard a grating noise overhead, like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor; then the throwing down of the body, and the shaking of my windows in response to the concussion. In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled slamming of doors. I heard, at intervals, stealthy footsteps creeping in and out among the corridors, and up and down the stairs. Sometimes these noises approached my door, hesitated, and went away again. I heard the clanking of chains faintly, in remote passages, and listened while the clanking grew nearer—while it wearily climbed the stairways, marking each move by the loose surplus of chain that fell with an accented rattle upon each succeeding step as the goblin that bore it advanced. I heard muttered sentences; half-uttered screams that seemed smothered violently; and the swish of invisible garments, the rush of invisible wings. Then I became conscious that my chamber was invaded—that I was not alone. I heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings. Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped—two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow. They spattered, liquidly, and felt warm. Intuition told me they had turned to gouts of blood as they fell—I needed no light to satisfy myself of that. Then I saw pallid faces, dimly luminous, and white uplifted hands, floating bodiless in the air—floating a moment and then disappearing. The whispering ceased, and the voices and the sounds, and a solemn stillness followed. I waited and listened. I felt that I must have light or die. I was weak with fear. I slowly raised myself toward a sitting posture, and my face came in contact with a clammy hand! All strength went from me apparently, and I fell back like a stricken invalid. Then I heard the rustle of a garment—it seemed to pass to the door and go out.

  When everything was still once more, I crept out of bed, sick and feeble, and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a hundred years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits. I sat down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the ashes. By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up and the broad gas flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my very door and paused—the light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched it with fascinated eyes. A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its cloudy folds took shape—an arm appeared, then legs, then a body, and last a great sad face looked out of the vapor. Stripped of its filmy housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic Cardiff Giant loomed above me!

  All my misery vanished—for a child might know that no harm could come with that benignant countenance. My cheerful spirits returned at once, and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again. Never a lonely outcast was so glad to welcome company as I was to greet the friendly giant. I said:

  “Why, is it nobody but you? Do you know, I have been scared to death for the last two or three hours? I am most honestly glad to see you. I wish I had a chair—Here, here, don’t try to sit down in that thing—”

  But it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him and down he went—I never saw a chair shivered so in my life.

  “Stop, stop, you’ll ruin ev—”

  Too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved into its original elements.

  “Confound it, haven’t you got any judgment at all? Do you want to ruin all the furniture in the place? Here, here, you petrified fool—”

  But it was no use. Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed, and it was a melancholy ruin.

  “Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about the place bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which would not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a respectable theater, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex, you repay me by wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on. And why will you? You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with chips of your hams till the place looks like a marble yard. You ought to be ashamed of yourself—you are big enough to know better.”

 
“Well, I will not break any more furniture. But what am I to do? I have not had a chance to sit down for a century.” And the tears came into his eyes.

  “Poor devil,” I said, “I should not have been so harsh with you. And you are an orphan, too, no doubt. But sit down on the floor here—nothing else can stand your weight—and besides, we cannot be sociable with you away up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face.” So he sat down on the floor, and lit a pipe which I gave him, threw one of my red blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head, helmet fashion, and made himself picturesque and comfortable. Then he crossed his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat, honeycombed bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth.

  “What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your legs, that they are gouged up so?”

  “Infernal chilblains—I caught them clear up to the back of my head, roosting out there under Newell’s farm. But I love the place; I love it as one loves his old home. There is no peace for me like the peace I feel when I am there.”

  We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired, and spoke of it.

  “Tired?” he said. “Well, I should think so.

  And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it! haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me. But it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out. But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am tired out—entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!”