The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  Every day, fired with a noble ardour, he carried to his worthy instructor, Albertus Kilian, long pieces harmonious enough, but of which every phrase was “cribbed.” His master, Albertus, seated in his armchair, his feet on the fender, his elbow on a corner of the table, smoking his pipe all the time, set himself to erase, one after the other, the singular discoveries of his pupil. Karl cried with rage, he got very angry, and disputed the point; but the old master quietly opened one of his numerous music-books, and putting his finger on the passage, said:

  “Look there, my boy.”

  Then Karl bowed his head and despaired of the future.

  But one fine morning, when he had presented to his master as his own composition a fantasia of Boccherini, varied with Viotti, the good man could no longer remain silent.

  “Karl,” he exclaimed, “do you take me for a fool? Do you think that I cannot detect your larcenies? This is really too bad!”

  And then perceiving the consternation of his pupil, he added—“Listen. I am willing to believe that your memory is to blame, and that you mistake recollection for originality, but you are growing too fat decidedly; you drink too generous a wine, and, above all, too much beer. That is what is shutting up the avenues of your intellect. You must get thinner!”

  “Get thinner!”

  “Yes, or give up music. You do not lack science, but ideas, and it is very simple; if you pass your whole life covering the strings of your violin with a coat of grease how can they vibrate?”

  These words penetrated the depths of Hâfitz’s soul.

  “If it is necessary for me to get thin,” exclaimed he, “I will not shrink from any sacrifice. Since matter oppresses the mind I will starve myself.”

  His countenance wore such an expression of heroism at that moment that Albertus was touched; he embraced his pupil and wished him every success.

  The very next day Karl Hâfitz, knapsack on his back and bâton in hand, left the hotel of the Three Pigeons and the brewery sacred to King Gambrinus, and set out upon his travels.

  He proceeded towards Switzerland.

  Unfortunately at the end of six weeks he was much thinner, but inspiration did not come any the more readily for that.

  “Can any one be more unhappy than I am?” he said. “Neither fasting nor good cheer, nor water, wine, or beer can bring me up to the necessary pitch; what have I done to deserve this? While a crowd of ignorant people produce remarkable works, I, with all my science, all my application, all my courage, cannot accomplish anything. Ah! Heaven is not good to me; it is unjust.”

  Communing thus with himself, he took the road from Brück to Freibourg; night was coming on; he felt weary and footsore. Just then he perceived by the light of the moon an old ruined inn half-hidden in trees on the opposite side of the way; the door was off its hinges, the small window-panes were broken, the chimney was in ruins. Nettles and briars grew around it in wild luxuriance, and the garret window scarcely topped the heather, in which the wind blew hard enough to take the horns off a cow.

  Karl could also perceive through the mist that a branch of a fir-tree waved above the door.

  “Well,” he muttered, “the inn is not prepossessing, it is rather ill-looking indeed, but we must not judge by appearances.”

  So, without hesitation, he knocked at the door with his stick.

  “Who is there? what do you want?” called out a rough voice within.

  “Shelter and food,” replied the traveller.

  “Ah ha! very good.”

  The door opened suddenly, and Karl found himself confronted by a stout personage with square visage, grey eyes, his shoulders covered with a great-coat loosely thrown over them, and carrying an axe in his hand.

  Behind this individual a fire was burning on the hearth, which lighted up the entrance to a small room and the wooden staircase, and close to the flame was crouched a pale young girl clad in a miserable brown dress with little white spots on it. She looked towards the door with an affrighted air; her black eyes had something sad and an indescribably wandering expression in them. Karl took all this in at a glance, and instinctively grasped his stick tighter.

  “Well, come in,” said the man; “this is no time to keep people out of doors.”

  Then Karl, thinking it bad form to appear alarmed, came into the room and sat down by the hearth.

  “Give me your knapsack and stick,” said the man.

  For the moment the pupil of Albertus trembled to his very marrow; but the knapsack was unbuckled and the stick placed in the corner, and the host was seated quietly before the fire ere he had recovered himself.

  This circumstance gave him confidence.

  “Landlord,” said he, smiling, “I am greatly in want of my supper.”

  “What would you like for supper, sir?” asked the landlord.

  “An omelette, some wine and cheese.”

  “Ha, ha! you have got an excellent appetite, but our provisions are exhausted.”

  “You have no cheese, then?”

  “No.”

  “No butter, nor bread, nor milk?”

  “No.”

  “Well, good heavens! what have you got?”

  “We can roast some potatoes in the embers.”

  Just then Karl caught sight of a whole regiment of hens perched on the staircase in the gloom of all sorts, in all attitudes, some pluming themselves in the most nonchalant manner.

  “But,” said Hâfitz, pointing at this troop of fowls, “you must have some eggs surely?”

  “We took them all to market this morning.”

  “Well, if the worst comes to the worst you can roast a fowl for me.”

  Scarcely had he spoken when the pale girl, with dishevelled hair, darted to the staircase, crying:

  “No one shall touch the fowls! no one shall touch my fowls! Ho, ho, ho! God’s creatures must be respected.”

  Her appearance was so terrible that Hâfitz hastened to say:

  “No, no, the fowls shall not be touched. Let us have the potatoes. I devote myself to eating potatoes henceforth. From this moment my object in life is determined. I shall remain here three months—six months—any time that may be necessary to make me as thin as a fakir.”

  He expressed himself with such animation that the host cried out to the girl:

  “Genovéva, Genovéva, look! The Spirit has taken possession of him; just as the other was—”

  The north wind blew more fiercely outside; the fire blazed up on the hearth, and puffed great masses of grey smoke up to the ceiling. The hens appeared to dance in the reflection of the flame while the demented girl sang in a shrill voice a wild air, and the log of green wood, hissing in the midst of the fire, accompanied her with its plaintive sibilations.

  Hâfitz began to fancy that he had fallen upon the den of the sorcerer Hecker; he devoured a dozen potatoes, and drank a great draught of cold water. Then he felt somewhat calmer; he noticed that the girl had left the chamber, and that only the man sat opposite to him by the hearth.

  “Landlord,” he said, “show me where I am to sleep.”

  The host lit a lamp and slowly ascended the worm-eaten staircase; he opened a heavy trapdoor with his grey head, and led Karl to a loft beneath the thatch.

  “There is your bed,” he said, as he deposited the lamp on the floor; “sleep well, and above all things beware of fire.”

  He then descended, and Hâfitz was left alone, stooping beneath the low roof in front of a great mattress covered with a sack of feathers.

  He considered for a few seconds whether it would be prudent to sleep in such a place, for the man’s countenance did not appear very prepossessing, particularly as, recalling his cold grey eyes, his blue lips, his wide bony forehead, his yellow hue, he suddenly recalled to mind that on the Golzenberg he had encountered three men hanging in chains, and that one of them bore a striking resemblance to the landlord; that he had also those grave eyes, the bony elbows, and that the great toe of his left foot protruded from his shoe, cracked by
the rain.

  He also recollected that that unhappy man named Melchior had been a musician formerly, and that he had been hanged for having murdered the landlord of the Golden Sheep with his pitcher, because he had asked him to pay his scanty reckoning.

  This poor fellow’s music had affected him powerfully in former days. It was fantastic, and the pupil of Albertus had envied the Bohemian; but just now when he recalled the figure on the gibbet, his tatters agitated by the night wind, and the ravens wheeling around him with discordant screams, he trembled violently, and his fears augmented when he discovered, at the farther end of the loft against the wall, a violin decorated with two faded palm-leaves.

  Then indeed he was anxious to escape, but at that moment he heard the rough voice of the landlord.

  “Put out that light, will you?” he cried; “go to bed. I told you particularly to be cautious about fire.”

  These words froze Karl; he threw himself upon the mattress and extinguished the light. Silence fell on all the house.

  Now, notwithstanding his determination not to close his eyes, Hâfitz, in consequence of hearing the sighing of the wind, the cries of the night-birds, the sound of the mice pattering over the floor, towards one o’clock fell asleep; but he was awakened by a bitter, deep, and most distressing sob. He started up, a cold perspiration standing on his forehead.

  He looked up, and saw crouched up beneath the angle of the roof a man. It was Melchior, the executed criminal. His hair fell down to his emaciated ribs; his chest and neck were naked. One might compare him to a skeleton of an immense grasshopper, so thin was he; a ray of moonlight entering through the narrow window gave him a ghastly blue tint, and all around him hung the long webs of spiders.

  Hâfitz, speechless, with staring eyes and gaping mouth, kept gazing at this weird object, as one might be expected to gaze at Death standing at one’s bedside when the last hour has come!

  Suddenly the skeleton extended its long bony hand and took the violin from the wall, placed it in position against its shoulder, and began to play.

  There was in this ghostly music something of the cadence with which the earth falls upon the coffin of a dearly-loved friend—something solemn as the thunder of the waterfall echoed afar by the surrounding rocks, majestic as the wild blasts of the autumn tempest in the midst of the sonorous forest trees; sometimes it was sad—sad as never-ending despair. Then, in the midst of all this, he would strike into a lively measure, persuasive, silvery as the notes of a flock of goldfinches fluttering from twig to twig. These pleasing trills soared up with an ineffable tremolo of careless happiness, only to take flight all at once, frightened away by the waltz, foolish, palpitating, bewildering—love, joy, despair—all together singing, weeping, hurrying pell-mell over the quivering strings!

  And Karl, notwithstanding his extreme terror, extended his arms and exclaimed:

  “Oh, great, great artist! oh, sublime genius! oh, how I lament your sad fate, to be hanged for having murdered that brute of an innkeeper who did not know a note of music!—to wander through the forest by moonlight!—never to live in the world again—and with such talents! O Heaven!”

  But as he thus cried out he was interrupted by the rough tones of his host.

  “Hullo up there! will you be quiet? Are you ill, or is the house on fire?”

  Heavy steps ascended the staircase, a bright light shone through the chinks of the door, which was opened by a thrust of the shoulder, and the landlord appeared.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Hâfitz, “what things happen here! First I am awakened by celestial music and entranced by heavenly strains; and then it all vanishes as if it were but a dream.”

  The innkeeper’s face assumed a thoughtful expression.

  “Yes, yes,” he muttered, “I might have thought as much. Melchior has come to disturb your rest. He will always come. Now we have lost our night’s sleep; it is no use to think of rest any more. Come along, friend; get up and smoke a pipe with me.”

  Karl waited no second bidding; he hastily left the room. But when he got downstairs, seeing that it was still dark night, he buried his head in his hands and remained for a long time plunged in melancholy meditation. The host relighted the fire, and taking up his position in the opposite corner of the hearth, smoked in silence.

  At length the grey dawn appeared through the little diamond-shaped panes; then the cock crew, and the hens began to hop down from step to step of the staircase.

  “How much do I owe you?” asked Karl, as he buckled on his knapsack and resumed his walking-staff.

  “You owe us a prayer at the chapel of St. Blaise,” said the man, with a curious emphasis—“one prayer for the soul of Melchior, who was hanged, and another for his fiancée, Genovéva, the poor idiot.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That is all.”

  “Well, then, good-bye—I shall not forget.”

  And, indeed, the first thing that Karl did on his arrival at Freibourg was to offer up a prayer for the poor man and for the girl he had loved, and then he went to the Grape Hotel, spread his sheet of paper upon the table, and, fortified by a bottle of “rikevir,” he wrote at the top of the page The Murderer’s Violin, and then on the spot he traced the score of his first original composition.

  THE OPEN WINDOW AND LAURA

  Saki

  A TROUBLED CHILDHOOD OF persecution and abuse can mold the sweetest boy into something of a monster, and H(ector) H(ugh) Munro (1870–1916) was all of that—even if he (fortunately) confined his malevolence to his stories, which are some of the cruelest and most cynical in the English language, made no less beastly by their humorous tone. Born in Burma, he was sent to England at the age of two when his mother died. He lived there with two prim, over-controlling aunts whom he tortured and murdered again and again in his fiction. After traveling abroad with his father, he returned to Burma to join the police force but, always sickly, he soon returned to London, where he had a successful career as a journalist, writing Lewis Carroll–like political sketches for The Westminster Gazette (collected in book form in 1902 as The Westminster Alice) and short stories for the same newspaper (collected in book form in 1904 as Reginald). He worked for several other papers, including six years as a foreign correspondent in Russia, the Balkans, and Paris. He joined the British army at the outset of World War I and was killed in France in 1916.

  Munro never made clear how he came to choose the pseudonym “Saki.” It is possible that it was taken from a character, the cupbearer, in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It is also possible that it is a reference to a saki, a small South American monkey which is a central character in his short story “The Remoulding of Groby Lington” (contained in The Chronicles of Clovis, 1912).

  “The Open Window” was first published in the November 18, 1911, issue of The Westminster Gazette. It and “Laura” were first collected in Beasts and Super Beasts (London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1914).

  The Open Window

  SAKI

  “MY AUNT WILL BE down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”

  Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

  “I know how it will be,” his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; “you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice.”

  Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction came into the nice division.

  “Do you know many of the people round here?” asked the n
iece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

  “Hardly a soul,” said Framton. “My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here.”

  He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.

  “Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?” pursued the self-possessed young lady.

  “Only her name and address,” admitted the caller. He was wondering whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.

  “Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,” said the child; “that would be since your sister’s time.”

  “Her tragedy?” asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.

  “You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon,” said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a lawn.

  “It is quite warm for the time of the year,” said Framton; “but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?”

  “Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.” Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back someday, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window—”