The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Why should we separate?” said he; “our hearts are united; in the eye of reason and honor we are as one. What need is there of sordid forms to bind high souls together?”

  The stranger listened with emotion: she had evidently received illumination at the same school.

  “You have no home nor family,” continued he; “let me be everything to you, or rather let us be everything to one another. If form is necessary, form shall be observed—there is my hand. I pledge myself to you forever.”

  “Forever?” said the stranger, solemnly.

  “Forever!” repeated Wolfgang.

  The stranger clasped the hand extended to her. “Then I am yours,” murmured she, and sank upon his bosom.

  The next morning the student left his bride sleeping, and sallied forth at an early hour to seek more spacious apartments suitable to the change in his situation. When he returned, he found the stranger lying with her head hanging over the bed, and one arm thrown over it. He spoke to her, but received no reply. He advanced to awaken her from her uneasy posture. On taking her hand, it was cold—there was no pulsation—her face was pallid and ghastly. In a word, she was a corpse.

  Horrified and frantic, he alarmed the house. A scene of confusion ensued. The police were summoned. As the officer of police entered the room, he started back on beholding the corpse.

  “Great heaven!” cried he, “how did this woman come here?”

  “Do you know anything about her?” said Wolfgang eagerly.

  “Do I?” exclaimed the officer; “she was guillotined yesterday.”

  He stepped forward; undid the black collar round the neck of the corpse, and the head rolled on the floor!

  The student burst into a frenzy. “The fiend! the fiend has gained possession of me!” shrieked he; “I am lost forever.”

  They tried to soothe him, but in vain. He was possessed with the frightful belief that an evil spirit had reanimated the dead body to ensnare him. He went distracted, and died in a mad-house.

  THEY FOUND MY GRAVE

  Joseph Shearing

  GABRIELLE MARGARET VERE LONG (née Campbell) (1886–1952) used at least six pseudonyms (though several sources speculate that it might have been ten or more), the most famous of which are Marjorie Bowen (see “The Avenging of Ann Leete” in this collection) and, later, Joseph Shearing. Almost all the books written under the Shearing byline are historical novels, usually based on real-life criminal cases. While her other noms de plume have faded into obscurity, the Bowen and Shearing names endure, the former for the many outstanding ghost stories produced under that name and the latter for the novels of murder set in other times.

  Among her best-known crime novels as Shearing are Moss Rose (1934; released on film in 1947, starring Peggy Cummins, Victor Mature, Ethel Barrymore, and Vincent Price), set in late Victorian-era London; Blanche Fury (1939; released in 1948, starring Valerie Hobson and Stewart Granger), a Gothic romance based on the infamous early nineteenth-century Rush murder, in which the dazzlingly stupid Rush blew the head off his stepfather and forged a note by a man well known to be illiterate; Airing in a Closed Carriage (1943; released in 1947 as The Mark of Cain, starring Sally Gray, Eric Portman, and Patrick Holt, with a screenplay by the great detective fiction writer Christianna Brand); and For Her to See, published in the United States as So Evil My Love (1947; released as So Evil My Love in England in 1948 and released in the United States as The Obsessed, starring Ann Todd, Ray Milland, and Geraldine Fitzgerald), a psychological thriller set in England in 1876. Her short story “The Silk Petticoat” was televised as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1962; it starred Antoinette Bower and Michael Rennie.

  “They Found My Grave” was originally published in the author’s short story collection Orange Blossoms (London, Heinemann, 1938).

  They Found My Grave

  JOSEPH SHEARING

  ADA TRIMBLE WAS BORED with the sittings. She had been persuaded to attend against her better judgment, and the large dingy Bloomsbury house depressed and disgusted her; the atmosphere did not seem to her in the least spiritual and was always tainted with the smell of stale frying.

  The medium named herself Astra Destiny. She was a big, loose woman with a massive face expressing power and cunning. Her garments were made of upholstery material and round her cropped yellowish curls she wore a tinsel belt. Her fat feet bulged through the straps of cheap gilt shoes.

  She had written a large number of books on subjects she termed “esoteric” and talked more nonsense in half an hour than Ada Trimble had heard in a lifetime. Yet Madame gave an impression of shrewd sense and considerable experience; a formidable and implacable spirit looked through her small grey eyes and defied anyone to pierce the cloud of humbug in which she chose to wrap herself.

  “I think she is detestable,” said Ada Trimble; but Helen Trent, the woman who had introduced her to the big Bloomsbury Temple, insisted that, odious as the setting was, odd things did happen at the sittings.

  “It sounds like hens,” said Miss Trimble, “but séances are worse.”

  “Well, it is easy to make jokes. And I know it is pretty repulsive. But there are unexplained things. They puzzle me. I should like your opinion on them.”

  “I haven’t seen anything yet I can’t explain; the woman is a charlatan, making money out of fools. She suspects us and might get unpleasant, I think.”

  But Helen Trent insisted: “Well, if you’d been going as often as I have, and noticing carefully, as I’ve been noticing …”

  “Helen—why have you been interested in this nonsense?”

  The younger woman answered seriously: “Because I do think there is something in it.”

  Ada Trimble respected her friend’s judgment; they were both intelligent, middle-aged, cheerful, and independent in the sense that they had unearned incomes. Miss Trimble enjoyed every moment of her life and therefore grudged those spent in going from her Knightsbridge flat to the grubby Bloomsbury Temple. Not even Helen’s persistency could induce Ada to continue the private sittings that wasted money as well as time. Besides, Miss Trimble really disliked being shut up in the stuffy, ugly room while Madame Destiny sat in a trance and the control, a Red Indian called Purple Stream, babbled in her voice and in pidgin English about the New Atlantis, the brotherhood of man, and a few catch phrases that could have been taken from any cheap handbook on philosophy or the religions of the world.

  But Helen persuaded her to join in some experiments in what were termed typtology and lucidity that were being conducted by Madame Destiny and a circle of choice friends. These experiments proved to be what Ada Trimble had called in her youth “table turning.” Five people were present, besides Ada and Madame Destiny. The table moved, gave raps, and conversations with various spirits followed. A code was used, the raps corresponding in number to the letters of the alphabet, one for “a” and so on to twenty-six for “z.” The method was tedious, and nothing, Miss Trimble thought, could have been more dull. All manner of unlikely spirits appeared: a Fleming of the twelfth century; a President of a South American Republic, late nineteenth century; an Englishman who had been clerk to residency at Tonkin, and who had been killed by a tiger a few years before; a young schoolmaster who had thrown himself in front of a train in Devonshire; a murderer who announced in classic phrase that he had “perished on the scaffold”; a factory hand who had died of drink in Manchester; and a retired schoolmistress recently “passed over.”

  The spirit of a postman and that of a young girl “badly brought up, who had learnt to swear,” said the medium, also spoke through the rap code. These people gave short accounts of themselves and of their deaths, and some vague generalizations about their present state. “I am happy.” “I am unhappy.” “It is wonderful here.” “God does not die.” “I remain a Christian.” “When I first died it was as if I was stunned. Now I am used to it—” and so on.

  They were never asked about the future, who would win the Derby, the results of the next election, or
anything of that kind. “It wouldn’t be fair,” smiled Madame Destiny. “Besides, they probably don’t know.”

  The more important spirits were quickly identified by references to the Dictionary of National Biography for the English celebrities and Larousse for the foreign. The Temple provided potted editions of each work. These reliable tomes confirmed all that the spirits said as to their careers and ends. The obscure spirits, if they gave dates and place names, were traced by enquiries of town clerks and registrars. This method always worked out, too.

  Madame Destiny sometimes showed the letters that proved that the spirits had once had, as she hideously quoted, “a local habitation and name.”

  “I can’t think why you are interested,” said Ada Trimble to Helen Trent as they drove home together. “It is such an easy fraud. Clever, of course, but she has only to keep all the stuff in her head.”

  “You mean that she looks up the references first?”

  “Of course.” Ada Trimble was a little surprised that Helen should ask so simple a question. “And those postmen and servant girls could be got up, too, quite easily.”

  “It would be expensive. And she doesn’t charge much.”

  “She makes a living out of it,” said Ada Trimble sharply. “Between the lectures, the healings, the services, the sittings, the lending library, and those ninepenny teas, I think the Temple of Eastern Psycho-Physiological Studies does pretty well.…” She looked quickly at her companion and in a changed voice asked: “You’re not getting—drawn in—are you, Helen?”

  “Oh, no! At least I don’t think so, but last year, when you were in France, I was rather impressed—it was the direct voice. I wish it would happen again, I should like your opinion—” Helen Trent’s voice faltered and stopped; it was a cold night, she drew her collar and scarf up more closely round her delicate face. The smart comfortable little car was passing over the bridge. The two women looked out at the street and ink-blue pattern of the Serpentine, the bare trees on the banks, the piled buildings beyond, stuck with vermilion and orange lights. The November wind struck icy across Ada Trimble’s face.

  “I don’t know why I forgot the window,” she said, rapidly closing it. “I suggest that we leave Madame Destiny alone, Helen. I don’t believe that sort of thing is any good; it might easily get on one’s nerves.”

  “Well,” said Helen irrelevantly, “what are dreams, anyway?”

  Ada remembered how little she knew of the early life of her cultured, elegant friend, and how much she had forgotten of her own youthful experiences that had once seemed so warm, so important, so terrible.

  “Come next Tuesday, at least,” pleaded Helen as she left the car for the wet pavement. “She has promised the direct voice.”

  “I ought to go, because of Helen,” thought Ada Trimble. “She is beginning to be affected by this nonsense. Those rogues know that she has money.”

  So on the Tuesday the two charming women in their rich, quiet clothes, with their tasteful veils, handbags, furs, and posies of violets and gardenias were seated in the upper room in the Bloomsbury Temple with the queer shoddy folk who made up Madame Destiny’s audience.

  Ada Trimble settled into her chair; it was comfortable like all the chairs in the Temple, and she amused herself by looking round the room. The Victorian wallpaper had been covered by dark serge clumsily pinned up; dusty crimson chenille curtains concealed the tall windows. Worn linoleum was on the floor; the table stood in the centre of the room and on it was a small, old-fashioned gramophone with a horn. By it was a small red lamp; this and the light from the cheerful gas fire were the only illumination in the room.

  A joss stick smoldered in a brass vase on the mantelpiece but this sickly perfume could not disguise the eternal smell of stew and onions that hung about the Temple.

  “I suppose they live on a permanent hotpot,” thought Ada Trimble vaguely, as she looked round on the gathered company.

  The medium lay sprawled in the largest chair; she appeared to be already in a trance; her head was sunk on her broad breast, and her snorting breath disturbed the feather edging on her brocade robe. The cheap belt round her head, the cheap gilt shoes, exasperated Ada Trimble once more. “For a woman of sense—” she thought.

  Near the medium was a husband, who called himself Lemoine. He was a turnip-coloured, nondescript man, wearing a dirty collar and slippers; his manner hesitated between the shamefaced and the insolent. He was not very often seen, but Ada sometimes suspected him of being the leader of the whole concern.

  She speculated with a shudder, and not for the first time, on the private lives of this repulsive couple. What were they like when they were alone together? What did they say when they dropped the gibberish and the posing?Were they ever quite sincere or quite clean? She had heard they lived in a “flat” at the top of the house and had turned a bleak Victorian bathroom into a kitchen, and that they had “difficulties” with servants.

  Beside Mr. Lemoine was Essie Clark, a stringy, cheerful woman, who was Madame Destiny’s secretary, and, as Ada Trimble supposed, maid-of-all-work too. She had been “caught” sweeping the stairs, and Ada thought that she mixed the permanent stew.

  Essie’s taste had stopped, dead as a smashed clock, in childhood, and she wore straight gowns of faded green that fifty years before had been termed “artistic” by frustrated suburban spinsters, and bunches of little toys and posies made of nuts and leather.

  The circle was completed by the people well known to Ada: a common, overdressed little woman who called spiritualism her “hobby,” and who was on intimate terms with the spirit of her late husband, and a damp, depressed man, Mr. Maple, who had very little to say for himself beyond an occasional admission that he was “investigating and couldn’t be sure.”

  The little woman, Mrs. Penfleet, said cheerfully: “I am certain dear Arthur will come today. I dreamed of him last night,” and she eyed the trumpet coyly.

  “We don’t know who will come, if anyone,” objected Mr. Maple gloomily. “We’ve got to keep open minds.”

  Mr. Lemoine begged for silence, and Miss Clark put on a disc that played “Rock of Ages.”

  Ada Trimble’s mind flashed to the consumptive Calvinist who had written that hymn; she felt slightly sick and glanced at Helen—dreamy, elegant, sunk in her black velvet collar.

  Ada looked at the trumpet, at the medium, and whispered “Ventriloquism,” as she bent to drop and pick up her handkerchief, but Helen whispered back “Wait.”

  Essie Clark took off the record and returned to her chair with a smile of pleased expectancy. It was all in the day’s work for her, like cheapening the food off the barrows in the Portobello Road.

  Ada Trimble kept her glance from the fire and the lamp, lest, comfortable and drowsy as she was, she should be hypnotized with delusions—“Though I don’t think it likely here,” she said to herself, “in these sordid surroundings.”

  There was a pause; the obviously dramatic prelude to the drama. Madame Destiny appeared to be unconscious. Ada thought: “There ought to be a doctor here to make sure.” A humming sound came from the painted horn that had curled-back petals like a metallic flower. “Arthur!” came from Mrs. Penfleet and “Hush!” from Mr. Maple. Ada felt dull, a party to a cheap, ignoble fraud. “How dare they,” she thought indignantly, “fool with such things—supposing one of the dead did return!” The gramophone was making incoherent noises, hummings and sighings.

  “The psychic force is manifest,” whispered Mr. Lemoine reverently, in familiar phrase.

  There was another pause; Ada Trimble’s attention wandered to obtrusive details—the pattern of the braid encircling Madame Destiny’s bent head, a dull yellow in the lamp’s red glow, and the firmness with which her podgy fingers gripped the pad and pencil, even though she was supposed to be in a state of trance.

  Suddenly a deep masculine voice said:

  “Beatus qui intelligit super egenum et pauperem.”

  Ada was utterly startled; she felt as if anothe
r personality was in the room; she sat forward and looked around; she felt Helen’s cold fingers clutch hers; she had not more than half understood the Latin; nor, it seemed, had anyone else. Only Mr. Lemoine remained cool, almost indifferent. Leaning forward he addressed the gramophone.

  “That is a proverb or quotation?” The deep voice replied: “It is my epitaph.”

  “It is, perhaps, on your tomb?” asked Mr. Lemoine gently.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is your tomb?”

  “I do not choose to disclose.” The voice was speaking with a marked accent. It now added in French: “Is there no one here that speaks my language?”

  “Yes,” said Ada Trimble, almost without her own volition. French was very familiar to her and she could not disregard the direct appeal.

  “Eh, bien!” the voice which had always an arrogant, scornful tone, seemed gratified, and ran on at once in French. “I have a very fine tomb—a monument, I should say, shaded with chestnut trees. Every year, on my anniversary, it is covered with wreaths.”

  “Who are you?” asked Ada Trimble faintly, but Mr. Lemoine gently interposed:

  “As the other members of our circle don’t speak French,” he told the gramophone, “will you talk in English?”

  “Any language is easy to me,” boasted the voice in English, “but I prefer my own tongue.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Lemoine. “The lady asked you who you were—will you tell us?”

  “Gabriel Letourneau.”

  “Would you translate your epitaph?”

  “Blessed is he who understands the poor and has pity on the unfortunate.”

  “What were you?”

  “Many things.”

  “When did you die?”

  “A hundred years ago. May 12th, 1837.”

  “Will you tell us something more about yourself?”

  The voice was harsh and scornful.

  “It would take a long time to relate my exploits. I was a professor, a peer, a philosopher, a man of action. I have left my many works behind me.”