The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  I had a chance to study the territory over which we traveled. Back in my mind I remembered Plone’s remark about his melon patches, and looked about for sight of them. We were halfway to the Steamboat Coulee entrance, yet I hadn’t seen a melon patch or anything that remotely resembled one. Though I knew absolutely nothing about farming, I would have sworn that this ground hadn’t been cultivated for many years. It had been plowed once upon a time, but the plowing had been almost obliterated by scattered growths of wild hollyhocks, heavy with their fiery blooms. Plone’s farm was nothing but a desert on the coulee floor.

  But we were approaching Steamboat Coulee entrance, and the nearer we strode the less I liked the bargain I had made, for the entrance looked more like a huge mouth than ever. But those red spots were dancing before my eyes again and may have helped me to imagine things.

  When we reached the entrance its mouth-like appearance was not so pronounced, and the rock which had looked like a steamboat did not resemble a steamboat at all. The floor of this coulee was a dry stream-bed which, when the spring freshets came, must have been a roaring torrent.

  Before entering the coulee behind Reuben I looked back at the house of Plone, and shouted in amazement.

  “Reuben! Where is the house? I can see all of that end of the coulee, and your house is not in sight!”

  “We come over a rise, a high one, that’s all,” he replied carelessly; “if we go back a piece we can see the house. Only we ain’t got time. I want to show you the cabin and get back before dark. This coulee ain’t nice to get caught in after dark.”

  “It isn’t?” I questioned. “Why not?”

  But Reuben had begun the entrance to Steamboat Coulee and did not answer. I was very hesitant about following him now, for I knew that he had lied to me. We hadn’t come over any rise, and I should have been able to see the farmhouse! What had happened to my eyes? Were they, like my lungs, failing me? I stopped dead still, there in the bottom of that dry stream-bed. Reuben stopped, ahead of me, and looked silently back. He smiled at me insolently, a sort of challenging smile. Just stood there smiling. What else could I do? I strode on after Reuben.

  I liked this coulee less and less as we went deeper into it. Walls rose straight on either hand, and they were so close that they seemed to be pressing over upon me. The stream-bed narrowed and deepened. On its banks grew thickets of wild willow, interspersed with clumps of squawberry bushes laden with pink fruit. Behind these thickets arose the talus slope of shell-rock.

  I studied the slopes for signs of pathways which might lead out of this coulee in case a heavy rain should fill the stream-bed and cut off my retreat by the usual way, but saw none. I saw instead something that filled me with a sudden feeling of dread, causing a sharp constriction of my throat. It was just a mottled mass on a large rock; but as I looked at it the mass moved, untwisted itself, and a huge snake glided out of sight in the rocks.

  “Reuben,” I called, “are there many snakes in this coulee?”

  “Thousands!” he replied without looking back. “Rattlers, blue racers, and bull whips—but mostly rattlers. Keep your shanty closed at night and stay in the stream-bed in the daytime and they won’t be any danger to you!”

  Well, I was terribly tired, else I would have turned around and quitted this coulee—yes, though I fell dead from exhaustion ten minutes later. As it was I followed Reuben, who turned aside finally and climbed out of the stream-bed. I followed him and stood upon a trail which led down a gloomy aisle into a thicket of willows. Heavy shadows hung in this moody aisle, but through these I could make out the outline of a squatty log cabin.

  Ten minutes later I had a fire going in the cracked stove which the house boasted, and its light was driving away the shadows in the corners. There was one chair in the house, and a rough bed against the wall. The board floor was well laid—no cracks through which venturesome rattlers might come. I made sure of this before I would let Reuben get away, and that the door could be closed and bolted.

  “Well,” said Reuben, who had stood by while I put the place rapidly to rights, “you’ll be all right now. Snug as a bug in a rug—if you ain’t afraid of ghosts!”

  His hand had dropped to the door-knob as he began to talk, and when he had uttered this last sinister sentence he opened the door and slipped out before I could stop him. Those last six words had sent a chill through my whole body. In a frenzy of fear which I could not explain, I rushed to the door and looked out, intending to call Reuben back.

  I swear he hadn’t had time to reach the stream-bed and drop into it out of sight; but when I looked out he was nowhere to be seen, and when I shouted his name until the echoes rang to right and left through the coulee, there was no answer! He must have fairly flown out of that thicket!

  I closed the door and barred it, placed the chair-back under the door-knob, and sat down upon the edge of the bed, gazing into the fire.

  What sort of place had I wandered into?

  For a time the rustling of the wind through the willows outside the log cabin was my only answer. Then a gritty grating sound beneath the floor, slow and intermittent, told me that a huge snake, sluggish with the coolness of the evening, was crawling there and was at that moment scraping alongside one of the timbers which supported the floor.

  I was safe from these, thank God!

  The feeling of security which now descended upon me, together with the cheery roaring of the fire in the stove, almost lulled me to sleep. My eyes were closing wearily and my head was sinking upon my breast.…

  A cry that the wildest imagination would never have expected to hear in this place, came suddenly from somewhere in the darkness outside.

  It was a cry as of a little baby that awakes in the night and begs plaintively to be fed. And it came from somewhere out there in the shell-rock of the talus slopes.

  Merciful heaven! How did it happen that a wee small child such as I guessed this to be had wandered out into the darkness of the coulee? Whence had it come? Were there other inhabitants in Steamboat? But Plone had told me that there were not. Then how explain that eery cry? A possible explanation, inspired by frayed nerves, came to me, and froze the marrow in my bones before I could reason myself out of it.

  “If you ain’t afraid of ghosts!”

  What had Reuben of the unknown surname meant by this remark? And by what means had he so swiftly disappeared after he had quitted my new home?

  Just as I asked myself the question, that wailing cry came again, from about the same place, as near as I could judge, on the talus slope in the rear of my cabin. Unmistakably the cry of a lost baby, demanding by every means of expression in its power, the attention of its mother. Out there alone and frightened in the darkness, in the heart of Steamboat Coulee, which Reuben had told me was infested by great numbers of snakes, at least one kind of which was venomous enough to slay.

  Dread tugged at my throat. My tongue became dry in my mouth, cleaving to the palate. I knew before I opened the door that the coulee was now as dark as Erebus, and the moving about would be like groping in some gigantic pocket. But there was a feeble child out there on the talus slope, lost in the darkness, wailing for its mother. And I prided myself upon being at least the semblance of a man.

  Mentally girding myself, I strode to the door and flung it open. A miasmatic mist came in immediately, cold as the breath from a sunless marsh, chilling me anew. Instinctively I closed the door as if to shut out some loathsome presence—I knew not what. The heat of the fire absorbed the wisps of vapor that had entered. I leaned against the door, panting with a nameless terror, when, from the talus slope outside, plain through the darkness came again that eery wailing.

  Gulping swiftly, swallowing my terrible fear, I closed my eyes and flung the door wide open. Nor did I close it until I stood outside and opened my eyes against an opaque blanket of darkness. When Plone had told me the coulee was cold after nightfall, he had not exaggerated. It was as cold as the inside of a tomb.

  The crying of the babe
came again, from directly behind my cabin. The cliff bulked large there, while above its rim, high up, I made out the soft twinkling of a pale star or two.

  Before my courage should fail me and send me back into the cheery cabin, thrice cheery now that I was outside it, I ran swiftly around the cabin, not stopping until I had begun to clamber up the talus slope, guided by my memory of whence that wailing cry had come. The shell-rock shifted beneath me, and I could hear the shale go clattering down among the brush about the bases of the willows below. I kept on climbing.

  Once I almost fell when I stepped upon something round, which writhed beneath my foot, causing me to jump straight into the air with a half-suppressed cry of fear. I was glad now that the coulee was cold after nightfall, else the snake could have struck me a death-blow. The cold, however, made the vile creature sluggish.

  When I thought I had climbed far enough I bent over and tried to pierce the heavy gloom, searching the talus intently for a glimpse of white—white which should discover to me the clothing of the baby which I sought. Failing in this, I remained quiet, waiting for the cry to come again. I waited amid a silence that could almost be felt, a silence lasting so long that I began to dread a repetition of that cry. What if there were no baby—flesh and blood, that is? Reuben had spoken of ghosts. Utter nonsense! No grown man believes in ghosts! And if I didn’t find the child before long the little tot might die of the cold. Where had the child gone? Why this eery silence? Why didn’t the child cry again? It was almost as though it had found that which it sought, there in the darkness. The cry had spoken eloquently of a desire for sustenance.

  If the child did not cry, what was I to believe? Who, or what, was suckling the baby out on the cold talus slope?

  I became as a man turned to stone when the eery cry came again. It was not a baby’s whimper, starting low and increasing in volume; it was a full-grown wail as it issued from the unseen mouth. And it came from at least a hundred feet higher up on the talus! I, a grown man, had stumbled heavily in the scramble to reach this height; yet a baby so small that it wailed for its milk had crept a hundred feet farther up the slope! It was beyond all reason; weird beyond the wildest imagination. But undoubtedly the wailing of a babe.

  I did not believe in ghosts. I studied the spot whence the wail issued, but could see no blotch of white. Only two lambent dots, set close together, glowing like resting fireflies among the shale. I saw them for a second only. Undoubtedly mating fireflies, and they had flown.

  I began to climb once more, moving steadily toward the spot where I had heard the cry.

  I stopped again when the shell-rock above me began to flow downward as though something, or somebody, had started it moving. What, in God’s name, was up there at the base of the cliff? Slowly, my heart in my mouth, I climbed on.

  There was a rush, as of an unseen body, along the face of the talus. I could hear the contact of light feet on the shale; but the points of contact were unbelievably far apart. No baby in the world could have stepped so far—or jumped. Of course the cry might have come from a half-witted grown person; but I did not believe it.

  The cry again, sharp and clear; but at least two hundred yards up the coulee from where I stood, and on about a level with me. Should I follow or not? Did some nocturnal animal carry the babe in its teeth? It might be; I had heard of such things, and had read the myth of Romulus and Remus. Distorted fantasies? Perhaps; but show me a man who can think coolly while standing on the talus slopes of Steamboat after dark, and I will show you a man without nerves.

  Once more I took up the chase. I had almost reached the spot whence the cry had come last, when I saw again those twin balls of lambent flame. They seemed to blink at me—off and on, off and on.

  I bent over to pick up a bit of shale to hurl at the dots, when, almost in my ears, that cry came once more; but this time the cry ended in a spitting snarl as of a tom-cat when possession of food is disputed!

  With all my might I hurled the bit of shale I had lifted, straight at those dots of flame. At the same time I gave utterance to a yell that set the echoes rolling the length and breadth of the coulee. The echoes had not died away when the coulee was filled until it rang with that eery wailing—as though a hundred babies cried for mothers who did not come!

  Then I knew!

  Bobcats! The coulee was alive with them! I was alone on the talus, two hundred yards from the safe haven of my cabin, and though I knew that one alone would not attack a man in the open, I had never heard whether they hunted in groups. For all I knew they might. At imminent risk of breaking my neck, I hurled myself down the slope and into the thicket of willows at the base. Through these and into the dry stream-bed I blundered, still running. I kept this mad pace until I had reached the approximate point where the trail led to my cabin, climbed the bank of the dry stream and sought for the aisle through the willows.

  Though I searched carefully for a hundred yards on each hand I could not find the path. And I feared to enter the willow thicket and beat about. The ominous wailing had stopped suddenly, as though at a signal, and I believed that the bobcats had taken to the trees at the foot of the talus. I studied the dark shadows for dots of flame in pairs, but could see none. I knew from reading about them that bobcats have been known to drop on solitary travelers from the limbs of trees. Their sudden silence was weighted with ponderous menace.

  I was afraid—afraid! Scared as I had never been in my life before—and I had gone through a certain town in Flanders without a gas mask.

  Why the sudden, eery silence? I would have welcomed that vast chorus of wailing, had it begun again.

  When I crept back to the bank of the stream-bed a pale moon had risen, partly dispelling the shadows in Steamboat Coulee. The sand in the stream-bed glistened frostily in the moonlight, making me think of the blinking eyes of a multitude of toads.

  Where, in Steamboat, was the cabin with its cheery fire? I had closed the door to keep my courage from failing me, and now there was no light to guide me.

  I sat down on the high bank, half sidewise so that I could watch the shadows among the willows, and tried mentally to retrace my steps, hoping that I could reason out the exact location of the cabin in the thicket.

  Sitting as I was, I could see for a hundred yards or so down the stream-bed. I studied its almost straight course for a moment or two, for no reason that I can assign. I saw a black shadow dart across the open space, swift as a breath of wind, and disappear in the thicket on the opposite side. It was larger than a cat, smaller than the average dog. A bobcat had changed its base hurriedly, and in silence.

  Silence! That was the thing that was now weighing upon me, more even than thought of my failure to locate the little cabin. Why had the cats stopped their wailing so suddenly, as though they waited for something? This thought deepened my feeling of dread. If the cats were waiting, for what were they waiting?

  Then I breathed a sigh of relief. For, coming around a bend in the stream-bed, there strode swiftly toward me the figure of a man. He was a big man who looked straight before him. He walked as a countryman walks when he hurries home to a late supper. Then there were other people in this coulee, after all! Plone, like Reuben, had lied.

  But what puzzled me about this newcomer was his style of dress. He was garbed after the manner of the first pioneers who had come into this country from the East. From his high-topped boots, into which his trousers were tucked loosely, to his broad-brimmed hat, he was dressed after the manner of those people who had vanished from this country more than a decade before my time. An old prospector evidently, who had clung to the habiliments of his younger days. But he did not walk like an old man; rather he strode, straight-limbed and erect, like a man in his early thirties. There was a homely touch about him, though, picturesque as he was; for he smoked a corn-cob pipe, from the bowl of which a spiral of blue smoke eddied into the chill night air. I knew from this that, if I called him, his greeting in return would be bluffly friendly.

  I waited for him to c
ome closer, hoping that he would notice me first. As he approached I noticed with a start that two huge revolvers, the holsters tied back, swung low upon his hips. People now days did not carry firearms openly. In an instant I had decided to let this stranger pass, even though I spent the remainder of the night on the bank of the dry stream. Sight of those weapons had filled me with a new and different kind of dread.

  Then I started as another figure, also of a man, came around the self-same bend of the watercourse, for there was something oddly familiar about that other figure. He moved swiftly, his body almost bent double as he hurried forward. As he came around the bend and saw the first man who had come into my range of vision, he bent lower still.

  As he did so the moonlight glowed dully on something that he carried in the crook of his arm. I knew instantly that what he carried was a rifle. Once more that chill along my spine, for there was no mistaking his attitude.

  He was stalking the first man.

  It did not take his next action to prove this to me. I knew it, even as the second man knelt swiftly in the sand of the watercourse and flung the rifle to his shoulder, its muzzle pointing at the man approaching me.

  As the kneeling man aimed the deadly weapon, his head was drawn back and the moonlight shone for a moment on his face. I cried out, loudly and in terrible fear, as much to warn the unconscious man as in surprise at my discovery. For the man with the rifle was my Moses Coulee benefactor—Plone.

  Again I cried out, this time with all the power of my shattered lungs. And the man ahead, all unconscious of the impending death at his heels, paid me absolutely no attention. He was no more than twenty yards from me when I shouted, yet he did not turn his head. For all the attention he paid me I might as well have remained silent. It was as though he were stone-deaf.

  As this thought came to me the first man raised his head and looked directly into my eyes, and through and beyond me as though I had not been there. I saw his eyes plainly, and in them was no sign that he noted my presence.