The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  No surprise showed on the Brigadier’s face. Instead there was an abrupt show of fear. Then the muscles about his mouth tightened, leaving no emotion at all.

  “It’s a very old story around here,” he said. He spoke crisply and very precisely as if conscious of his office and that he should speak correctly. He kept his face masklike; so calm it gave me the impression he was afraid to be natural lest belief should show in his eyes.

  “Bill Wales,” the Brigadier said, “was supposed to be an English sailor marooned on Saba years ago. His ship had stayed here for a while and he’d married one of the native girls. The captain took Bill’s girl and left him here. The next few ships that came—only one every six months or so in those days—were low on water or food, couldn’t get any on this island and refused to take him. He went crazy and died swearing he’d kill every sailor and every sailor’s sweetheart that landed here.”

  “And has he”—Hammer’s voice was slow, deliberate—“kept his vow?”

  The Brigadier looked nervous. “Of course I—I don’t believe the story. But sailors are afraid of this island. A number of them have been killed accidentally here. The natives claim that if Bill Wales fails to kill them the first time, he comes back and makes good. The local boatmen always keep a cross in the back of their rowboats, claim it keeps Wales from going with them out to the ships. And—and—” The muscles around the Negro’s mouth relaxed, trembled for one moment, then froze hard again. He tried to smile. “And it’s true that as long as sailors stay ashore they keep meeting accidents. Of course, the walks around here are dangerous, if one is not used to them.”

  We thanked him and left. Once outside the building I said, “That was a swell story he told,” and laughed.

  Hammer looked at me without speaking and the laughter died in my throat. His face was like that of a man who looks at certain death and watches it coming toward him.

  We ate supper at the little hospital and afterward all three of us sat around Wayne’s bed. He was conscious now and suffering terribly. Whenever he caught one of us looking at him he tried to grin, but at other times there was a strange, drawn expression on his face. Not pain exactly, but bewilderment and something very close to fear. It was the same look that had been on his face when we reached him at the foot of the cliff. I kept remembering the thing he had said: “He never touched me. He just turned and I—I was afraid.”

  And I kept wondering what had happened to our guide. He’d never shown up, and our description had been too vague for the Brigadier to tell who he might be.

  Mary got up from her chair beside the bed and tiptoed to a small window. “There’s a moon just over the mountain-top,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything and in the silence I could hear Hammer’s breathing. It wasn’t natural and I turned to look at him. He was leaning forward, black eyes glittering, head cocked to one side.

  “Listen,” he said. The word quivered in the room.

  I said, “I don’t hear anything.”

  Hammer didn’t make a sound but his thin lips were moving, framing the words, “If he fails, he comes back and makes good.”

  Wayne stirred on the bed then, and we all turned to look at him. His head was raised, his shoulders almost off the pillow. At first he seemed to be listening, but slowly his face changed. The corners of his mouth began to tremble, his eyes to dilate. Even as I looked beads of sweat started to break out on his forehead.

  “God!” he whispered. “It’s him!”

  Mary came toward him with a rush. “John! John!” she was saying. “Lie still! What is it, John?”

  Wayne whispered again, “It’s him.” His whole life seemed to go into those words.

  And then I heard it, still soft and barely audible, drifting in with the breeze through the open window. At first there was only the tune, the rhythm of the sea chantey. Then I began to catch an occasional word. “… first … died … second … went to a watery grave.”

  I didn’t move when I first heard those words. They were like cold iron bands around my chest, stopping my lungs. I just sat there and I could see my hands tightening around the arms of the chair. All at once I knew that I was afraid.

  I shook myself then and stood up quickly. “I’m acting like a kid,” I thought, “getting afraid of stories.”

  Mary had her arms about Wayne now, her fingers on his mouth, but he was saying, “You’ll have to leave the island. You’ll have to!”

  “Be quiet,” Mary said. “Just lie still …” She stopped, her head raised, her eyes growing wide. She too had heard the song.

  “I’ll go see that fellow,” I muttered. I turned toward the door. Not until I reached the small porch did I realize that Hammer and Mary were following me.

  Moonlight flooded softly over the village, showing the small white houses and their red roofs like dim shadows. We could see the stone walls that separated most of the houses, low and dark. A breadfruit tree made a rustling sound in the wind.

  “Oh, the first man died in a fall from the cliff.”

  The line rang loud, clear. There was something horribly vicious about the sound, something undefinable yet deadly, the way there is in the burr of a rattlesnake. But there was more than that in these words. They weren’t earthly.

  Then I saw the man who had called himself Bill. He was standing just beyond the left corner of the stone wall around the hospital. He was dressed as he had been in the afternoon, the cap pulled down over his temples, the ragged blue overalls. His head was thrown back, bathed in moonlight, mouth open as he sang. And even now I could see the strange pallor of his face, and his eyes, as utterly lifeless as those of a fish, showed palely blue. Even at that second I wondered why I could see his eyes so plainly by the moonlight.

  “And the second man died the same.”

  The words broke, each as clear and distinct as a glass ball. They hammered at my ears with a terrible meaningfulness. They jerked at my nerves, sent fear and anger flooding through me.

  “The third man went to a watery grave.”

  The man had never moved, but stood, head thrown back, singing. And even then I had the weird impression that I was looking through him and seeing the moonlight spilling over the ground beyond.

  “Oh God!” Mary cried. “Stop him! Stop him!”

  “I’ll stop him,” I said. I didn’t know then why I was so angry or why I was so afraid, but I went off the porch with a rush and down the path toward the gate. Behind me I heard Hammer and Mary running.

  “And the woman died from shame!”

  I went through the gate moving fast, stumbled where the path dropped to the sidewalk, caught myself and whirled toward the left.

  I took three steps, still running, before I could stop. My eyes were getting big in my face. I could feel the eyelids stretching. Perhaps I had stopped breathing altogether. I took one long step and reached the corner of the wall.

  The man had vanished!

  There was no sound for a long time—utterly no sound in the whole world. Even the moonlight had taken on a stiff frigidity. It lay on the leaves of the breadfruit tree, stiff and cold. The little white hospital with its red roof seemed frozen, taut, waiting for something to happen.

  After a long while I heard breathing behind me and turned. Mary and Hammer were standing at the end of the stone wall, staring at the place where the man had been. And in Mary’s face was reflected the look I had seen in Hammer’s. Her hair seemed as white as the moonlight, as white as her cheeks, and very still.

  Then suddenly she moved. “Oh God!” she said. “John! Alone …!” She was turning even as she spoke.

  We heard the voice before she could finish turning, before she could take one step. It wasn’t the booming voice that had sung the other lines. It was low and tense. It was clear, hideously clear, yet it was little more than a whisper.

  “Oh, the first man died in a fall from the cliff.”

  That one line and no more. Not even a ghost moved in this world of death.

  Some
thing made a jarring noise inside the hospital. Mary and Hammer were running along the walk toward the gate. I was jumping the wall, in the air, striking the ground, running. The porch boomed under my steps, the door banged. I stopped just inside the room where John Wayne lay.

  I never heard Mary and Hammer come up behind me. I don’t know if Mary cried out at first; but before she reached him, moving slowly, stiffly, she knew he was dead. He lay there beside the bed, his body bent in a half circle, the sheets tangled about him, and his face turned upward with the eyes wide, the mouth open, fear showing in every stiffening muscle. Carl Hammer knew it and I knew it. We stood in the door motionless, watching.

  After a minute Mary knelt beside him, began to sob, very quietly. I went and put my arms around her and lifted her up and carried her out of the room. Hammer must have gone for the doctor, for he came soon and gave Mary a sedative and got her to sleep.

  It was the fall from the bed, he said, which had killed John Wayne.

  We buried Wayne at sea the next day. He’d always said, the big, good-natured grin showing on his face, that he wanted to be buried at sea. He liked liquid and he wanted to spend eternity in it.

  We rowed out in the small boat, Mary sitting beside the body, a priest in the stern. Before we reached the schooner we could see Pete, the Negro cook, standing at the rail. We told him Wayne had fallen from a cliff accidentally. Then we upped anchor, sailed out about a quarter of the way to St. Eustatius, and slid the body overboard. We went back and dropped anchor off Fort Bay.

  Hammer and I were forward, ready to lower the small boat and row the priest ashore, when I said, “I’m going to wander around that island for a while. I’m going to find the fellow that does the singing.”

  Both the priest and Hammer turned swiftly to look at me. Hammer said, “You fool.”

  The priest was a small man with a face all angles and lean, wrinkled fingers. For a moment the fingers twisted the crucifix about his neck. He said slowly, “I advise you to leave the island—without coming ashore.”

  “And you believe that legend?” I demanded scornfully.

  The priest looked down at the deck and his wrinkled fingers kept twisting the beads, toying with the cross. Almost suddenly he looked up.

  “If I didn’t believe in a life after death, I wouldn’t be a priest,” he said simply. “All religion is founded on an after-life. Man has believed in it from the dawn of history. The Bible has innumerable references to ‘The Spirit’ of a departed person, and that can be only what we call a ghost today. A number of your scientists believe also. There are things which they can’t explain otherwise. Conan Doyle always believed. The German physicist Von Bernuth came to that belief after years of study. Your own Dr. Tillingham in California, probably the greatest of American scientists, has recently come to believe in the life after death.”

  I made a grunting sound and gestured with both hands as if I thought the man a fool. And yet there was a cold hollow deep in my chest. I couldn’t believe that the man we had seen was the ghost of Bill Wales, and yet … How else was one to explain what had happened? I think that even then the awful certainty was forming itself in my brain, but I had laughed at the idea for so many years that now it was almost impossible to believe.

  Hammer spoke then, his voice bitterly contemptuous. “You don’t believe in spirits because you don’t understand them. It’s like saying there can’t be a radio because you can’t understand how it works. And you don’t understand because you’ve never tried, you’ve never thought. You were told once that what you call a ‘ghost’ could not be, and you’ve shut your mind to any other belief, closed your eyes against the evidence which every day of your life piles up around you. It’s only those of us who study, who face the problem …” He was looking now as I had seen him look while painting, the muscles in his dark face grown taut, his lips thin across white teeth, his black eyes glittering as though they saw a thing great and awful beyond human vision.

  Seeing him made fear crawl along my back. The muscles in my throat began to tighten. But even then I wouldn’t believe. There weren’t any ghosts! I shut my mind on that idea, tightly, refused to look beyond. Sometimes now, gazing into the mirror, seeing the thing that is reflected there and remembering that moment while I still had a chance to escape, I feel like tearing my own throat. But I did not know then what was to happen.

  “You’re both crazy,” I said. “I’m going ashore and finding the man that killed Wayne.”

  Part of the life went out of Carl Hammer then. He raised his right hand with its thin, long fingers halfway to my arm, stopped. His lips twitched. “All right,” he said. “If you’re going, I’ll go along.”

  We dropped the boat over, helped the priest in, followed him. We were halfway to the shore when, looking back, I saw that Mary had come up from the cabin and was standing in the cockpit. The Negro cook was on the deck amidships, gazing out after us.

  I didn’t have any idea where to look for the man who bellowed a sea chantey before death struck. I had an eerie feeling that he would come looking for me and the thought made my heart contract. But Hammer and I followed the priest all the way up to the Bottom, the misnamed little village situated eight hundred feet up that rocky mountain-side, without anything happening.

  It was late afternoon by then. We told the priest good-bye. “Maybe we better start back now,” I said to Hammer. “We don’t want to leave Mary alone too long.”

  Hammer nodded, but he didn’t speak. I don’t believe he could have spoken at that moment. The skin on his face was as taut as parchment and wet with perspiration. I could see a vein beating in his throat. His mouth was thin, but the left corner kept twitching. All at once I remembered what Wayne used to say as he watched Hammer painting: “That man has a hair trigger brain. He’ll go off it some day.”

  There wasn’t anybody along the narrow winding steps that lead down to the sea. The sun was out of sight below the mountain, but the tops of the cliffs were white gold. Goats bleated from above and below us. The path went downward, one edge against the cliff, the other sometimes above a gradual slope, sometimes bordered by a sheer drop of two hundred feet or more. The wind had died and there was no sound except for the mournful cry of the goats.

  It may have been the twilight, it may have been the silence, it may have been some premonition of the thing which was about to happen that made me feel the way I did. With each step toward the point where Wayne had fallen, the feeling grew on me. I was having to draw my breath consciously and the effort hurt my throat and lungs. It was hot and it was hard exercise going down that precipitous path; but the sweat that broke out on my shoulders was cold.

  All at once I noticed that the goats were not bleating anymore. There was no sound except the scuff of our shoes as we went downward. I had several Dutch quarter-gilders in my pocket and in the silence I could hear them clinking as I walked. Ahead of me Carl Hammer was moving stiff-kneed. He seemed to force each leg the way a man does who is wading upstream. His back was rigid, head high. His long fingers were held stiffly at his side and I saw a bead of sweat slide from one to make a dark spot on the ground.

  And then I heard it!

  Chapter Three

  “And the Second Man Died the Same”

  It was very soft at first, more a stirring of the wind than a whispering of leaves, not as loud as the murmur of the sea heard from far away, or the notes of a death march dying into thick twilight.

  It seemed to me that Carl Hammer’s body grew more stiff than ever. His fingers seemed to get longer and more rigid at his side. The motion of his legs was heavier, pushing through the thick current of fear which flowed about him. But he did not hesitate, did not look around.

  The sound grew slowly, becoming more distinct as the wind puffs and fades and puffs again, coming more strongly each time until the hurricane strikes. Hardly knowing that I did so I glanced to the left of the path. It dropped away for a hundred feet or more, straight down.

  “We must be near t
he spot where Wayne fell.” I heard the words without knowing I had spoken them. Hammer did not pause, did not look around.

  The tune was very distinct now. It seemed to keep an eerie, death-march time with the crunching of our steps. I didn’t hear the words, but I knew them.

  “Hammer,” I said. “Hammer!” I stopped. It couldn’t have been long since I first heard the sound and yet it seemed like years that I had walked straight toward it, moving like a somnambulist without realizing I was walking.

  Carl Hammer kept going, moving with that awkward motion like pushing his way through water or against a heavy wind. “Hammer,” I said again. He kept going and never turned his head.

  “Carl Hammer!” I screamed the words.

  He hesitated, swayed as though drunk. The fingers at his side were clenched. Veins stood high on them and the knuckles showed white. Little muscles jerked in his wrist. Then he stepped forward again.

  Ahead of us the song was a booming volley, sweeping down on us, crashing about our ears.

  “And the woman died from shame!”

  Then came the silence. It seemed to creep on cold and brittle feet through eternity. It froze me standing there on the brink between life and death, standing there motionless and watching the man ahead of me.

  There was a sharp bend in the path. Hammer went toward it. He was there when I remembered.

  It was here that Wayne had plunged over!

  “Hammer!” I screamed.

  He took two more short, awkward steps. They brought him to the curve and half around it.

  “And the second man died the same!”

  Even before it happened I knew then there was no stopping it; I knew that a power beyond life, beyond the touch of a human being, had control of us, was closing about us. I knew that one of us would die quickly, for that last line had been as tense and low and soft as the hiss of a snake.

  Carl Hammer was half around the curve when he stopped. For one half second he stood there. Then he reeled. His hands, stiff and claw-like, came up in front of his chest. He staggered backward.