Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy

by Rudyard Kipling

  After sixteen kittens, that is to say, after one fortnight, for there were three kittens on the first day to impress the fact of the Sending, the whole camp was uplifted by a letter – it came flying through a window – from the Old Man of the Mountains – the Head of all the Creed – explaining the Manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or Asceticism who could not even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked andsanctioned by the highest Authorities within the pale of the Creed. There was great joy at this, for some of the weaker brethren, seeing that an outsider who had been working on independent lines could create kittens, whereas their own rulers had never gone beyond crockery – and broken at best – were showing a desire to break line on their own trail. In fact, there was the promise of a schism. A second Round Robin was drafted to the Englishman, beginning: ‘O Scoffer,’ and ending with a selection of curses from the Rites of Mizraim and Memphis, and the Commination of Jugana, who was a ‘fifth-rounder’ upon whose name an upstart ‘third-rounder’ once traded. A papal excommunication is a billet-doux compared with the Commination of Jugana. The Englishman had been proved, under hand and seal of the Old Man of the Mountains, to have appropriated Virtue and pretended to have Power which, in reality, belonged only to the Supreme Head. Naturally the Round Robin did not spare him.

  He handed the letter to Dana Da to translate into decent English. The effect on Dana Da was curious. At first he was furiously angry, and then he laughed for five minutes.

  ‘I had thought,’ he said, ‘that they would have come to me. In another week I would have shown that I sent the Sending, and they would have discrowned the Old Man of the Mountains who has sent this Sending of mine. Do you do nothing. The time has come for me to act. Write as I dictate, and I will put them to shame. But give me ten more rupees.’

  At Dana Da’s dictation the Englishman wrote nothing less than a formal challenge to the Old Man of the Mountains. It wound up: ‘And if this Manifestation be from your hand, then let it go forward; but if it be from my hand, I will that the Sending shall cease in two days’ time. On that day there shall be twelve kittens and thenceforward none at all. The people shall judge between us.’ This was signed by Dana Da, who added pentacles and pentagrams, and a crux ansata,and half-a-dozen swastikas,and a Triple Tau to his name, just to show that he was all he laid claim to be.

  The challenge was read out to the gentlemen and ladies, and they remembered then that Dana Da had laughed at themsome years ago. It was officially announced that the Old Man of the Mountains would treat the matter with contempt; Dana Da being an Independent Investigator without a single ‘round’ at the back of him. But this did not soothe his people. They wanted to see a fight. They were very human for all their spirituality. Lone Sahib, who was really being worn out with kittens, submitted meekly to his fate. He felt that he was being ‘kittened to prove the power of Dana Da’, as the poet says.

  When the stated day dawned the shower of kittens began. Some were white and some were tabby, and all were about the same loathsome age. Three were on his hearth-rug, three in his bathroom, and the other six turned up at intervals among the visitors who came to see the prophecy break down. Never was a more satisfactory Sending. On the next day there were no kittens, and next day and all the other days were kittenless and quiet. The people murmured and looked to the Old Man of the Mountains for an explanation. A letter, written on a palm-leaf, dropped from the ceiling, but every one except Lone Sahib felt that letters were not what the occasion demanded. There should have been cats, there should have been cats – full-grown ones. The letter proved conclusively that there had been a hitch in the Psychic Current which, colliding with a Dual Identity, had interfered with the Percipient Activity all along the main line. The kittens were still going on, but owing to some failure in the Developing Fluid, they were not materialized. The air was thick with letters for a few days afterwards. Unseen hands played Glück and Beethoven on finger-bowls and clock-shades; but all men felt that Psychic Life was a mockery without materialised kittens. Even Lone Sahib shouted with the majority on this head. Dana Da’s letters were very insulting, and if he had then offered to lead a new departure, there is no knowing what might have happened.

  But Dana Da was dying of whisky and opium in the Englishman’s godown, and had small heart for honours.

  ‘They have been put to shame,’ said he. ‘Never was such a Sending. It has killed me.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said the Englishman. ‘You are going to die,Dana Da, and that sort of stuff must be left behind. I’ll admit that you have made some queer things come about. Tell me honestly, now, how was it done?’

  ‘Give me ten more rupees,’ said Dana Da faintly, ‘and if I the before I spend them, bury them with me.’ The silver was counted out while Dana Da was fighting with Death. His hand closed upon the money and he smiled a grim smile.

  ‘Bend low,’ he whispered. The Englishman bent.

  ‘Bunnia – Mission-school – expelled – box-wallah [pedler] – Ceylon pearl-merchant – all mine English education – out-casted, and made up name Dana Da – England with American thoughtreading man and – and – you gave me ten rupees several times – I gave the Sahib’s bearer two-eight a month for cats – little, little cats. I wrote – and he put them about – very clever man. Very few kittens now in the bazar. Ask Lone Sahib’s sweeper wife.’

  So saying, Dana Da gasped and passed away into a land where, if all be true, there are no materialisations and the making of new creeds is discouraged.

  But consider the gorgeous simplicity of it all.

  MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY

  ‘As I came through the Desert thus it was –

  As I came through the Desert.’

  The City of Dreadful Night

  Somewhere in England where there are books and pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treating his ghosts – he has published half a workshopful of them – with levity. He makes his ghostseers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently towards a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.

  There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveller passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in childbed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feel are turned backwards that all sober men may recognise them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well-kerbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse-ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs.No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both, white and black.

  Nearly every other station in India owns a ghost. There aresaid to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses ‘repeats’ on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for some sorrowful ones; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not wi
th the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawar possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something – not fever – wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.

  Some of the dâk-bungalows or rest houses on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in their compound – witnesses to the ‘changes and chances of this mortal life’ in the days when men drove behind horses from Calcutta to the North-West. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty, while the butler is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib’sservice not a butler in the Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.

  In these dâk-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to live in dâk-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in ‘converted’ ones – old houses officiating as dâk-bungalows – where nothing was in its properplace and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner. I lived in secondhand palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken pane. I lived in dâk-bungalows where the last entry in the visitors’-book was fifteen months old and where they slashed off the curry-kid’s head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober-travelling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives in India acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dâk-bungalows, that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.

  In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up till that hour I had sympathised with Mr Besant’s method of handling them, as shown in The Strange Case of Mr Lucraft and other Stories. I am now in the opposition.

  We will call the bungalow Katmal dâk-bungalow. But the Katmals were the smallest part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dâk-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dâk-bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the windows were nearly black with grime. It stood on a bye-path largely used by native Sub-Deputy Assistants in the Finance and Forest Departments but real Sahibs were rare. The butler, who was nearly bent double with old age, said so.

  When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy-palms out-side. The butler completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib?He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a doublevolume of Memoirs a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.

  The day shut in and the butler went to get me food. He did not go through the pretence of calling it khana – man’s victuals. He said ratuh, and that means, among other things, ‘grub’ – dog’s rations. There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had forgotten the other word I suppose.

  While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down, after exploring the dâk-bungalow. There were three rooms, besides my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition-walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps – only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.

  For bleak, unadulterated misery that dâk-bungalow was the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy-palms rattled and roared. Half-a-dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a hyaena stood afar off and mocked them. A hyaena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead – the worst sort of Dead. Then came the ratuh – a curious meal, half native and half English in composition – with the old man babbling behind my chair about dead and gone masters and the windblown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.

  Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense. Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking Iheard the regular: ‘Let-us-take-and-heave-him-over’ grunt of doolie-bearers in the compound. First one doolie came in,then a second, and then a third. I heard the palanquins dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook. ‘That’s some one trying to come in,’ I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was the gusty wind. The shadow of the room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. ‘That’s some Sub-Deputy Assistant,’ I said, ‘and he has brought his friends with him. Now they’ll talk and spit and smoke for an hour.’

  But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his luggage into the next room. The door shut and I thanked Providence that I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly mistake – the whirr of a billiard-ball down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break. No other sound is like it. A minute afterwards, there was another whirr and I got into bed. I was not frightened – indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had become of the doolies, I jumped into bed for that reason.

  Next minute, I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up. It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting up.

  There was a whirr and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one thing – a billiard-ball. I argued the matter out at great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs – all the furniture of the room next to mine – could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards. After another cannon, a three-cushion one to judge by the whirr, I argued no more. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have escaped from that dâk-bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer. There was whirr on whirr and click on click. Sometimes there was a doubleclick and a whirr and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room.

  And the next room was not big enough to hold a billiard-table!

  Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward – stroke after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt was a failure.

  Do you know what Fear is? Not ordinary fear of
insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see – fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat – fear that makes you sweat in the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? This is a fine Fear – a great cowardice, and must be fell to be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved the reality of the thing. No man – drunk or sober – could imagine a game of billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a screw-cannon.

  A severe course of dâk-bungalows has this disadvantage – it breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dâk-bungalow-haunter: ‘There is a corpse in the next room, and there’s a mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,’ the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dâk-bungalow.

  This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game of billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.