The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  First Alex went out to his car and popped the trunk, then he went back inside where he found poor Agatha squirming across the floor. Trying to escape, apparently. He walked past her, got the throw blanket from the couch and laid it on the floor beside her, rolled her into it even as she squirmed and bucked. “Agatha, just try to relax,” he said, but she didn’t. Stubborn, stubborn, she could be so stubborn.

  He threw her over his shoulder. He was not accustomed to carrying much weight and immediately felt the stress, all the way down his back to his knees. He shut the apartment door behind him and didn’t worry about locking it. He lived in a safe neighborhood.

  When they got to the car, he put her into the trunk, only then taking the blanket away from her beautiful face. “Don’t worry, it won’t be long,” he said as he closed the hood.

  He looked through his CDs, trying to choose something she would like, just in case the sound carried into the trunk, but he couldn’t figure out what would be appropriate so he finally decided just to drive in silence.

  It took about twenty minutes to get to the beach; it was late, and there was little traffic. Still, the ride gave him an opportunity to reflect on what he was doing. By the time he pulled up next to the pier, he had reassured himself that it was the right thing to do, even though it looked like the wrong thing.

  He’d made a good choice, deciding on this place. He and Tessie used to park here, and he was amazed that it had apparently remained undiscovered by others seeking dark escape.

  When he got out of the car he took a deep breath of the salt air and stood, for a moment, staring at the black waves, listening to their crash and murmur. Then he went around to the back and opened up the trunk. He looked over his shoulder, just to be sure. If someone were to discover him like this, his actions would be misinterpreted. The coast was clear, however. He wanted to carry Agatha in his arms, like a bride. Every time he had pictured it, he had seen it that way, but she was struggling again so he had to throw her over his shoulder where she continued to struggle. Well, she was stubborn, but he was too, that was part of the beauty of it, really. But it made it difficult to walk, and it was windier on the pier, also wet. All in all it was a precarious, unpleasant journey to the end.

  He had prepared a little speech but she struggled against him so hard, like a hooked fish, that all he could manage to say was, “I love you,” barely focusing on the wild expression in her face, the wild eyes, before he threw her in and she sank, and then bobbed up like a cork, only her head above the black waves, those eyes of hers, locked on his, and they remained that way, as he turned away from the edge of the pier and walked down the long plank, feeling lighter, but not in a good way. He felt those eyes, watching him, in the car as he flipped restlessly from station to station, those eyes, watching him, when he returned home, and saw the clutter of their night together, the burned-down candles, the covers to the I Love Lucy and Annie Hall DVDs on the floor, her crazy sweater on the dining room table, those eyes, watching him, and suddenly Alex was cold, so cold his teeth were chattering and he was shivering but sweating besides. The black water rolled over those eyes and closed them and he ran to the bathroom and only just made it in time, throwing up everything he’d eaten, collapsing to the floor, weeping, What have I done? What was I thinking?

  He would have stayed there like that, he determined, until they came for him and carted him away, but after a while he became aware of the foul taste in his mouth. He stood up, rinsed it out, brushed his teeth and tongue, changed out of his clothes, and went to bed, where, after a good deal more crying, and trying to figure out exactly what had happened to his mind, he was amazed to find himself falling into a deep darkness like the water, from which, he expected, he would never rise.

  But then he was lying there, with his eyes closed, somewhere between sleep and waking, and he realized he’d been like this for some time. Though he was fairly certain he had fallen asleep, something had woken him. In this half state, he’d been listening to the sound he finally recognized as dripping water. He hated it when he didn’t turn the faucet tight. He tried to ignore it, but the dripping persisted. So confused was he that he even thought he felt a splash on his hand and another on his forehead. He opened one eye, then the other.

  She stood there, dripping wet, her hair plastered darkly around her face, her eyes smudged black. “I found a sharp rock at the bottom of the world,” she said and she raised her arms. He thought she was going to strike him, but instead she showed him the cut rope dangling there.

  He nodded. He could not speak.

  She cocked her head, smiled, and said, “Okay, you were right. You were right about everything. Got any room in there?”

  He nodded. She peeled off the wet T-shirt and let it drop to the floor, revealing her small breasts white as the moon, unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, wiggling seductively out of the tight wet fabric, taking her panties off at the same time. He saw when she lifted her feet that the rope was no longer around them and she was already transparent below the knees. When she pulled back the covers he smelled the odd odor of saltwater and mud, as if she were both fresh and loamy. He scooted over, but only far enough that when she eased in beside him, he could hold her, wrap her wet cold skin in his arms, knowing that he was offering her everything, everything he had to give, and that she had come to take it.

  “You took a big risk back there,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She pressed her lips against his and he felt himself growing lighter, as if all his life he’d been weighed down by this extra breath, and her lips were cold but they grew warmer and warmer and the heat between them created a steam until she burned him and still, they kissed, all the while Alex thinking, I love you, I love you, I love you, until, finally, he could think it no more, his head was as light as his body, lying beside her, hot flesh to hot flesh, the cinder of his mind could no longer make sense of it, and he hoped, as he fell into a black place like no other he’d ever been in before, that this was really happening, that she was really here, and the suffering he’d felt for so long was finally over.

  MR. SAUL

  H. R. F. Keating

  ONE OF THE MOST honored mystery writers of the twentieth century, H(enry) R(eymond) F(itzwalter) Keating (1926–2011) created the popular Bombay detective, Inspector Ganesh Ghote, in The Perfect Murder (1964), which won a Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) and was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America; the modest policeman appeared in twenty-five subsequent novels. Keating has produced more than fifty mystery novels, several non-mysteries, short story collections, and a half-dozen reference books, including Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His World (1979), Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987), and a biography of Agatha Christie titled Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime (1977).

  Born in East Sussex, England, Keating wrote his first story at the age of eight. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he served in the army and moved to London to work as a journalist on the Daily Telegraph and later was the mystery reviewer for The Times for fifteen years. He married the actress Sheila Mitchell in 1953. He served as chairman of the CWA (1970–71), chairman of the Society of Authors (1983–1984), president of the prestigious Detection Club (1985–2000), and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1996 the CWA awarded him its highest honor, the Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature.

  “Mr. Saul” was originally published in The Thirteenth Ghost Book, edited by James Hale (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1977).

  Mr. Saul

  H. R. F. KEATING

  IT BEGAN IN TEWKESBURY. Mr. Saul had not exactly gone there of his own free will. Visiting an ancient romantic West Country town was not what Mr. Saul would have done if he had been, as the poet says, master of his fate and captain of his soul. But he had known ever since he had first set eyes, at a “hop” in a wartime canteen nearly thirty-five years before, on Gwennie Peters, as she was then, a lively C
orporal in the ATS, that the mastership and captaincy of that seaworthy but indisputably coastal craft was in other hands. A quiet pint or two at the pub was Mr. Saul’s idea of an outing and a deck-chair facing the briny his notion of a holiday. But Gwennie Saul was a creature of romance, despite a now hardly romantic appearance, and for her it was visiting and savouring places of romance that time free from the everyday round should be consecrated to. And battles long ago.

  But Mr. Saul was happy enough to wander along in her wake, and she knew him well enough to be able to calculate to within ten minutes the time when castle or keep, hallowed abbey or craggy moorland view should be abandoned in favour of the weight off the feet and the glass in the hand. And then she let him have his pleasures entirely cheerfully and joined him in them (lager and lime in summer, rum and Coke in winter) wholeheartedly.

  So, that day in August brought them to Tewkesbury and they went into the wonderful old Abbey church and Gwennie Saul breathed in the calm of its cool stonework, airy vaulted roof, and dimly radiant stained glass and then scuttered delightedly round its monuments, while Mr. Saul sat in a pew near the entrance doors and wondered whether it would be all right to light up a pipe. And when his wife came clattering back down the whole length of the stone-floored nave to tell him there was “something you’ve really got to see, you’ve got to” he ambled down with her uncomplainingly and looked long and steadily at the gruesome effigy of a monk in a state of partial decay with a frog on his neck, a beetle on his arm, and a mouse at work on the tummy. But Mr. Saul was never put out by any of the more grisly and blood-spattered aspects of his wife’s passion for the past. “That’s a mouse,” he commented. “You can see it’s a mouse.”

  Then, after they had made sure the car was still all right in the municipal car park, they looked over the Mill and stared down into the tumbling waters of its race and Mrs. Saul, consulting the little guide-book she had bought, wondered out loud whether she would be able to find a copy of Mrs. Craik’s old novel John Halifax Gentleman in her local library “if it’s got all the places we’ve seen in it, I mean it’d be an added interest, wouldn’t it?”

  “I dare say,” Mr. Saul agreed.

  Then they had lunch at the old post-inn visited by the immortal travellers of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and with a board up outside to prove it. Mr. Saul waited patiently while his wife read every word of this, and grunted sagely at each ooh or ah. And afterwards they strolled along to the town’s little museum and Mr. Saul peered when Mrs. Saul peered and looked upwards when she looked up and uncomplainingly mounted the narrow stairs to the small first-floor rooms behind her despite the way his not inconsiderable lunch was lying on his stomach.

  And in one of those upper rooms Mrs. Saul found the panorama of the Battle of Tewkesbury, May 4, 1471, made out of cunningly painted toy soldiers by the local Boy Scouts to commemorate the Coronation. It entranced her. There was nothing she loved more than a battle, if it was sufficiently long ago, and this was certainly that, and it had wonderful pennons carried on high with quarterings and lions rampant gules and heaven knows what and knights in armour at the full charge and little notices telling you what was happening with marvellous old names on them, the Lords Wenlock and St. John, William Viscount de Beaumont, Jasper Tudor Earl of Pembroke, Sir Robert Whittingham, Sir John Lewkenor.

  She was so enthusiastic indeed that the attendant that day, a fellow who in the ordinary way had a somewhat jaundiced view of tourists, actually spoke to her. “The site of the battle’s not far out of the town,” he said. “You can go there easily if you’ve got a car. Not much to see, but perhaps you’ll be interested.” Mrs. Saul said that she was. “The actual place,” she said to her husband. “Standing there, only fancy.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Saul.

  So off they went straight away. Luckily the car had been in the shade and wasn’t too hot inside, and without much difficulty—there was a signpost or two—they found the area.

  “Stop. Stop the car,” Mrs. Saul hallooed.

  Obediently Mr. Saul drew into a gateway and carefully parked.

  “Oh, it’d be sacrilege to go down there in a car,” Mrs. Saul explained, even though “down there” was to the unseeing eye no more than two or three very green-looking fields and some neatly cropped hedges.

  So out they got and, despite the sun, Mr. Saul, a portly figure, walked with his wife—she kept darting ahead, but always stopped and waited for him—down to the place, as far as they could make out, where the actual armed encounter had occurred all those many years before. And there, “at the very spot,” Mrs. Saul was in her element. She had run on a bit at the end. She hadn’t been able to stop herself. And when Mr. Saul arrived, sweating a little and rather red in the face, still plainly feeling the effects of that large lunch, she was triumphant.

  “I can see it all,” she exclaimed, her voice ringing out over the somnolent fields. “There’s the King—Edward the Fourth, you know, or was it Fifth, no, Fourth—with all his forces coming galloping down that way, and the Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker—no, he’d been killed already in another battle just before, we could go to that some day, it’s only at Barnet, not far from London—well, the other lot then, Queen Margaret’s lot, they’d come charging this way. And there, just about there I think, they’d meet and gore, gore would stain all that little stream that goes under the bridge now. Gore.”

  She turned to Mr. Saul to receive his customary appreciation.

  Mr. Saul had turned a terrible whitish-grey. He looked as if every drop of blood he possessed had taken refuge in his heart. His very clothes seemed all of a sudden to be hanging from his stout body as if they had been draped there.

  It had cast rather a blight over the day. Of course, Mrs. Saul had got him back to the car, though he had been a leaden weight on her arm at first, and after a quarter of an hour or so he had been fit to drive, more or less. But the heart had gone out of him and instead of the pleasant couple of hours at a pub they had been thinking of—they had seen a place called the Berkeley Arms in the morning that had looked ideal, good beer for him, oak beams and tottering gable-ends for her—he settled for a strong cup of tea and making straight for the next hotel on their route.

  He had been able to tell her little about the mysterious attack. Only that it wasn’t the sun, and it wasn’t his inside. “I just suddenly came over queer,” he said. “I don’t know why. I don’t want to talk about it.” And only looking back long afterwards did Mrs. Saul come to see that that moment was the terrible beginning of it all.

  But at the time the incident seemed perfectly insignificant. As, really, did the business of the Townswomen’s Guild lecture some four or five months later. Mrs. Saul liked to go to her nearest guild when the speaker had any vaguely historical subject, and when a meeting occurred in bad weather she would tell her husband that he could come too and drive her back afterwards. Mr. Saul never complained at the loss of his couple of hours at the pub on such occasions. “She keeps me very comfortable,” he would say to his cronies there, “so if I have to turn out for her once in a way, well, fair’s fair.” And on this particular night, with a lecture entitled “Clothing Through the Ages” and a cold rain sleeting down, Mrs. Saul had no hesitation in calling on his services.

  The lecturer, a lady with more enthusiasm than platform skill, all too apt to signal for the next slide earlier than she meant to, suited Mrs. Saul down to the ground, and Mr. Saul beside her sat in the darkened hall with eyelids gradually drooping, thinking, as he liked to do, about nothing much. They had reached the late medieval period and, for once, the correct picture had come up on the screen the right way up at the time it was wanted. It was of a fashionably dressed nobleman of the period and the lecturer happily pointed out his pelisse and drew attention to its long exaggerated sleeves almost touching the ground. And then she came to deal with his headgear.

  “It’s what we call a capuchon,” she said, in her clear ringing voice. “From the French, meaning ‘hood’ or ‘cowl.
’ Capuchon.”

  There was an appreciative murmur at such erudition.

  “And you see now,” the lecturer continued, “that the tail of the capuchon has also become much exaggerated, like the sleeves of the pelisse, so much so that it winds right round his neck and even trails down to the ground. This piece was called … was named … Oh dear, silly me, I’ve quite forgotten what it was called, but …”

  Then from the audience in the dark, from indeed right beside Mrs. Saul, there came a growling masculine voice.

  “Liripipe,” it said.

  “Ah, yes, quite right. Thank you, sir. How very clever of you to know. The liripipe. Next picture, please.”

  The evening after, Mrs. Saul asked him about it. “I looked it up in the dictionary,” she said, “after Mrs. Anstruther who dropped in for coffee wanted to know how you knew, and it’s not there. Not at all. How ever did you do it?”

  But Mr. Saul was not at all as pleased as she had expected him to be with her praise. Indeed, at first he attempted to deny he had spoken at all, but, when his wife cheerfully insisted, all he would say was that he just knew it, “that’s all, I just knew, don’t keep nagging at me, Gwennie.”