The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  Oh, how dismal! To hover here, to be a boneless fleshless aching presence here, to be a kind of ectoplasmic mildew seeping through the days and nights, alone, unending, a stupid pain-racked misery-filled observer of the comings and goings of strangers—she would sell the house, she’d have to, I was sure of that. Was this my punishment? The punishment of the suicide, the solitary hell of him who takes his own life. To remain forever a sentient nothing, bound by a force greater than gravity itself to the place of one’s finish.

  I was distracted from this misery by a sudden agitation in the key on this side of the lock. I saw it quiver and jiggle like something alive, and then it popped out—it seemed to leap out, itself a suicide leaping from a cliff—and clattered to the floor, and an instant later the door was pushed open and Greg’s ashen face stared at my own purple face, and after the astonishment and horror, his expression shifted to revulsion—and contempt?—and he backed out, slamming the door. Once more the key turned in the lock, and I heard him hurry away downstairs.

  The clock read 9:58. Now he was telling her. Now he was giving her a drink to calm her. Now he was phoning the police. Now he was talking to her about whether or not to admit their affair to the police; what would they decide?

  “Nooooooooo!”

  The clock read 10:07. What had taken so long? Hadn’t he even called the police yet?

  She was coming up the stairs, stumbling and rushing, she was pounding on the door, screaming my name. I shrank into the corners of the room, I felt the thuds of her fists against the door, I cowered from her. She can’t come in, dear God don’t let her in! I don’t care what she’s done, I don’t care about anything, just don’t let her see me! Don’t let me see her!

  Greg joined her. She screamed at him, he persuaded her, she raved, he argued, she demanded, he denied. “Give me the key. Give me the key.”

  Surely he’ll hold out, surely he’ll take her away, surely he’s stronger, more forceful.

  He gave her the key.

  No. This cannot be endured. This is the horror beyond all else. She came in, she walked into the room, and the sound she made will always live inside me. That cry wasn’t human; it was the howl of every creature that has ever despaired. Now I know what despair is, and why I called my own state mere truculence.

  Now that it was too late, Greg tried to restrain her, tried to hold her shoulders and draw her from the room, but she pulled away and crossed the room toward—not toward me. I was everywhere in the room, driven by pain and remorse, and Emily walked toward the carcass. She looked at it almost tenderly, she even reached up and touched its swollen cheek. “Oh, Ed,” she murmured.

  The pains were as violent now as in the moments before my death. The slashing torment in my throat, the awful distension in my head, they made me squirm in agony all over again; but I could not feel her hand on my cheek.

  Greg followed her, touched her shoulder again, spoke her name, and immediately her face dissolved, she cried out once more and wrapped her arms around the corpse’s legs and clung to it, weeping and gasping and uttering words too quick and broken to understand. Thank God they were too quick and broken to understand!

  Greg, that fool, did finally force her away, though he had great trouble breaking her clasp on the body. But he succeeded, and pulled her out of the room and slammed the door, and for a little while the body swayed and turned, until it became still once more.

  That was the worst. Nothing could be worse than that. The long days and nights here—how long must a stupid creature like myself haunt his death-place before release?—would be horrible, I knew that, but not so bad as this. Emily would survive, would sell the house, would slowly forget. (Even I would slowly forget.) She and Greg could marry. She was only thirty-six, she could still be a mother.

  For the rest of the night I heard her wailing, elsewhere in the house. The police did come at last, and a pair of grim silent white-coated men from the morgue entered the room to cut me—it—down. They bundled it like a broken toy into a large oval wicker basket with long wooden handles, and they carried it away.

  I had thought I might be forced to stay with the body, I had feared the possibility of being buried with it, of spending eternity as a thinking nothingness in the black dark of a casket, but the body left the room and I remained behind.

  A doctor was called. When the body was carried away the room door was left open, and now I could plainly hear the voices from downstairs. Tony was among them now, his characteristic surly monosyllable occasionally rumbling, but the main thing for a while was the doctor. He was trying to give Emily a sedative, but she kept wailing, she kept speaking high hurried frantic sentences as though she had too little time to say it all. “I did it!” she cried, over and over. “I did it! I’m to blame!”

  Yes. That was the reaction I’d wanted, and expected, and here it was, and it was horrible. Everything I had desired in the last moments of my life had been granted to me, and they were all ghastly beyond belief. I didn’t want to die! I didn’t want to give Emily such misery! And more than all the rest I didn’t want to be here, seeing and hearing it all.

  They did quiet her at last, and then a policeman in a rumpled blue suit came into the room with Greg, and listened while Greg described everything that had happened. While Greg talked, the policeman rather grumpily stared at the remaining length of rope still knotted around the beam, and when Greg had finished the policeman said, “You’re a close friend of his?”

  “More of his wife’s. She works for me. I own The Bibelot, an antique shop out on the New York road.”

  “Mmm. Why on earth did you let her in here?”

  Greg smiled; a sheepish embarrassed expression. “She’s stronger than I am,” he said. “A more forceful personality. That’s always been true.”

  It was with some surprise I realized it was true. Greg was something of a weakling, and Emily was very strong. (I had been something of a weakling, hadn’t I? Emily was the strongest of us all.)

  The policeman was saying, “Any idea why he’d do it?”

  “I think he suspected his wife was having an affair with me.” Clearly Greg had rehearsed this sentence, he’d much earlier come to the decision to say it and had braced himself for the moment. He blinked all the way through the statement, as though standing in a harsh glare.

  The policeman gave him a quick shrewd look. “Were you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was getting a divorce?”

  “No. She doesn’t love me, she loved her husband.”

  “Then why sleep around?”

  “Emily wasn’t sleeping around,” Greg said, showing offense only with that emphasized word. “From time to time, and not very often, she was sleeping with me.”

  “Why?”

  “For comfort.” Greg too looked at the rope around the beam, as though it had become me and he was awkward speaking in its presence. “Ed wasn’t an easy man to get along with,” he said carefully. “He was moody. It was getting worse.”

  “Cheerful people don’t kill themselves,” the policeman said.

  “Exactly. Ed was depressed most of the time, obscurely angry now and then. It was affecting his business, costing him clients. He made Emily miserable but she wouldn’t leave him, she loved him. I don’t know what she’ll do now.”

  “You two won’t marry?”

  “Oh, no.” Greg smiled, a bit sadly. “Do you think we murdered him, made it look like suicide so we could marry?”

  “Not at all,” the policeman said. “But what’s the problem? You already married?”

  “I am homosexual.”

  The policeman was no more astonished than I. He said, “I don’t get it.”

  “I live with my friend; that young man downstairs. I am—capable—of a wider range, but my preferences are set. I am very fond of Emily, I felt sorry for her, the life she had with Ed. I told you our physical relationship was infrequent. And often not very successful.”

  Oh, Emily. Oh, poor Emily.

 
; The policeman said, “Did Thornburn know you were, uh, that way?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t make a public point of it.”

  “All right.” The policeman gave one more half-angry look around the room, then said, “Let’s go.”

  They left. The door remained open, and I heard them continue to talk as they went downstairs, first the policeman asking, “Is there somebody to stay the night? Mrs. Thornburn shouldn’t be alone.”

  “She has relatives in Great Barrington. I phoned them earlier. Somebody should be arriving within the hour.”

  “You’ll stay until then? The doctor says she’ll probably sleep, but just in case—”

  “Of course.”

  That was all I heard. Male voices murmured awhile longer from below, and then stopped. I heard cars drive away.

  How complicated men and women are. How stupid are simple actions. I had never understood anyone, least of all myself.

  The room was visited once more that night, by Greg, shortly after the police left. He entered, looking as offended and repelled as though the body were still here, stood the chair up on its legs, climbed on it, and with some difficulty untied the remnant of rope. This he stuffed partway into his pocket as he stepped down again to the floor, then returned the chair to its usual spot in the corner of the room, picked the key off the floor and put it in the lock, switched off both bedside lamps, and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

  Now I was in darkness, except for the faint line of light under the door, and the illuminated numerals of the clock. How long one minute is! That clock was my enemy, it dragged out every minute, it paused and waited and paused and waited till I could stand it no more, and then it waited longer, and then the next number dropped into place. Sixty times an hour, hour after hour, all night long. I couldn’t stand one night of this, how could I stand eternity?

  And how could I stand the torment and torture inside my brain? That was much worse now than the physical pain, which never entirely left me. I had been right about Emily and Greg, but at the same time I had been hopelessly brainlessly wrong. I had been right about my life, but wrong; right about my death, but wrong. How much I wanted to make amends, and how impossible it was to do anything anymore, anything at all. My actions had all tended to this, and ended with this: black remorse, the most dreadful pain of all.

  I had all night to think, and to feel the pains, and to wait without knowing what I was waiting for or when—or if—my waiting would ever end. Faintly I heard the arrival of Emily’s sister and brother-in-law, the murmured conversation, then the departure of Tony and Greg. Not long afterward the guest room door opened, but almost immediately closed again, no one having entered, and a bit after that the hall light went out, and now only the illuminated clock broke the darkness.

  When next would I see Emily? Would she ever enter this room again? It wouldn’t be as horrible as the first time, but it would surely be horror enough.

  Dawn grayed the window shade, and gradually the room appeared out of the darkness, dim and silent and morose. Apparently it was a sunless day, which never got very bright. The day went on and on, featureless, each protracted minute marked by the clock. At times I dreaded someone’s entering this room, at other times I prayed for something, anything—even the presence of Emily herself—to break this unending boring absence. But the day went on with no event, no sound, no activity anywhere—they must be keeping Emily sedated through this first day—and it wasn’t until twilight, with the digital clock reading 6:52, that the door again opened and a person entered.

  At first I didn’t recognize him. An angry-looking man, blunt and determined, he came in with quick ragged steps, switched on both bedside lamps, then shut the door with rather more force than necessary, and turned the key in the lock. Truculent, his manner was, and when he turned from the door I saw with incredulity that he was me. Me! I wasn’t dead, I was alive! But how could that be?

  And what was that he was carrying? He picked up the chair from the corner, carried it to the middle of the room, stood on it—

  No! No!

  He tied the rope around the beam. The noose was already in the other end, which he slipped over his head and tightened around his neck.

  Good God, don’t!

  He kicked the chair away.

  The instant I kicked the chair away I wanted it back, but gravity was turning my former wish to its present command; the chair would not right itself from where it lay on the floor, and my 193 pounds would not cease to urge downward from the rope thick around my neck.

  There was pain, of course, quite horrible pain centered in my throat, but the most astounding thing was the way my cheeks seemed to swell. I could barely see over their round red hills, my eyes staring in agony at the door, willing someone to come in and rescue me, though I knew there was no one in the house, and in any event the door was carefully locked. My kicking legs caused me to twist and turn, so that sometimes I faced the door and sometimes the window, and my shivering hands struggled with the rope so deep in my flesh I could barely find it and most certainly could not pull it loose.

  I was frantic and horrified, yet at the same time my brain possessed a cold corner of aloof observation. I seemed now to be everywhere in the room at once, within my writhing body but also without, seeing my frenzied spasms, the thick rope, the heavy beam, the mismatched pair of lit bedside lamps throwing my convulsive double shadow on the walls, the closed locked door, the white-curtained window with its shade drawn all the way down. This is death.

  THE GHOST OF DR. HARRIS

  Nathaniel

  Hawthorne

  GENERALLY RANKED AT OR near the top of every list of the greatest American novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Hathorne) (1804–1864) endowed most of his major work with classic elements of occult happenings, superstition, allegory, horror, and the supernatural. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the great-great-grandson of a judge in the Salem witch trials. He was extremely solitary as a child, a state which endured throughout most of his life. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), is filled with such fantastic elements as a great glowing “A” in the sky, and another apparently burned into the chest of the cowardly minister. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) also contains numerous if nuanced overtones of Gothic fantasy, including a well whose water turns foul when an injustice is done, the hereditary curse of a wizard, a skeleton with a missing hand, and a portrait that seems to change expressions. In his short stories, especially those collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837; expanded in 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852), otherworldly creatures such as ghosts, demons, witches, etc., abound, though they are often rationalized or made to seem as no more than entities in dreams. In his finest short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” the title character encounters a witch, a coven attended by virtually everyone he knows, and the devil himself—or, in fact, he encounters no one, having either fantasized the episode or dreamed it; Hawthorne does not resolve whether or not it occurred, leaving it to the reader to decide.

  “The Ghost of Dr. Harris” was written in a single day on August 17, 1856, but remained unpublished until a small printing of a chapbook in 1900. Hawthorne claimed the story to be a true account of his own real-life experience.

  The Ghost of Dr. Harris

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

  I AM AFRAID THIS ghost story will be a very faded aspect when transferred to paper. Whatever effect is had on you, or whatever charm it retains in your memory, is perhaps to be attributed to the favorable circumstances under which it was originally told.

  We were sitting, I remember, late in the evening, in your drawing-room, where the lights of the chandelier were so muffled as to produce a delicious obscurity through which the fire diffused a dim red glow. In this rich twilight the feelings of the party had been properly attuned by some tales of English superstition, and the lady of Smithills Hall had just been describing that Bloody Footstep which marks the threshold of her old mans
ion, when your Yankee guest (zealous for the honour of his country, and desirous of proving that his dead compatriots have the same ghostly privileges as other dead people, if they think it worth while to use them) began a story of something wonderful that long ago happened to himself. Possibly in the verbal narrative he may have assumed a little more licence than would be allowable in a written record. For the sake of the artistic effect, he may then have thrown in, here and there, a few slight circumstances which he will not think it proper to retain in what he now puts forth as the sober statement of a veritable fact.

  A good many years ago (it must be as many as fifteen, perhaps more, and while I was still a bachelor) I resided at Boston, in the United States. In that city there is a large and long-established library, styled the Athenaeum, connected with which is a reading-room, well supplied with foreign and American periodicals and newspapers. A splendid edifice has since been erected by the proprietors of the institution; but, at the period I speak of, it was contained within a large old mansion, formerly the town residence of an eminent citizen of Boston. The reading-room (a spacious hall, with the group of the Laocoon at one end, and the Belvedere Apollo at the other) was frequented by not a few elderly merchants, retired from business, by clergymen and lawyers, and by such literary men as we had amongst us. These good people were mostly old, leisurely, and somnolent, and used to nod and doze for hours together, with the newspapers before them, ever and anon recovering themselves as far as to read a word or two of the politics of the day, sitting, as as it were, on the boundary of the Land of Dreams, and having little to do with this world, except through the newspapers which they so tenaciously grasped.

  One of these worthies, whom I occasionally saw there, was the Reverend Doctor Harris, a Unitarian clergyman of considerable repute and eminence. He was very far advanced in life, not less than eighty years old, and probably more; and he resided, I think, at Dorchester, a suburban village in the immediate vicinity of Boston.