The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (22 page)

“You needn’t talk to me about sleeping well,” said she. “I know something queer happened in that room last night by the way you act.”

They all looked at Mrs. Simmons inquiringly – the librarian with malicious curiosity and triumph, the minister with sad incredulity, Sophia Gill with fear and indignation, Amanda and the young girl with unmixed terror. The widow bore herself with dignity.

“I saw nothing nor heard nothing which I trust could not have been accounted for in some rational manner,” said she.

“What was it?” persisted Eliza Lippincott.

“I do not wish to discuss the matter any further,” replied Mrs. Simmons shortly. Then she passed her plate for more creamed potato. She felt that she would die before she confessed to the ghastly absurdity of that nightcap, or to having been disturbed by the flight of peacocks off a blue field of chintz. She left the whole matter so vague that in a fashion she came off the mistress of the situation.

That afternoon the young minister, John Dunn, went to Sophia Gill and requested permission to occupy the southwest chamber that night.

“I don’t ask to have my effects moved there,” said he, “for I could scarcely afford a room so much superior to the one I now occupy, but I should like, if you please, to sleep there to-night for the purpose of refuting in my own person any unfortunate superstition which may have obtained root here.”

Sophia Gill thanked the minister gratefully and eagerly accepted his offer.

That night about twelve o’clock the Reverend John Dunn essayed to go to his nightly slumber in the southwest chamber. He had been sitting up until that hour preparing his sermon.

He traversed the hall with a little night-lamp in his hand; he opened the door of the southwest chamber and essayed to enter. He might as well have essayed to enter the solid side of a house. He could look into the room full of soft lights and shadows under the moonlight which streamed in at the windows. He could see the bed in which he had expected to pass the night, but he could not enter. Whenever he strove to do so, he had a curious sensation as if he were trying to press against an invisible person who met him with a force of opposition impossible to overcome. The minister was not an athletic man, yet he had considerable strength. He squared his elbows, set his mouth hard, and strove to push his way through into the room. The opposition which he met was as sternly and mutely terrible as the rocky fastness of a mountain in his way.

For a half-hour John Dunn, doubting, raging, overwhelmed with spiritual agony as to the state of his own soul rather than fear, strove to enter the southwest chamber. He was simply powerless against this uncanny obstacle. Finally a great horror as of evil itself came over him. He was a nervous man and very young. He fairly fled to his own chamber and locked himself in like a terror-stricken girl.

The next morning he went to Miss Gill and told her frankly what had happened.

“What it is I know not, Miss Sophia,” said he, “but I firmly believe, against my will, that there is in that room some accursed evil power at work of which modern faith and modern science know nothing.”

Miss Sophia Gill listened with grimly lowering face.

“I think I will sleep in that room myself to-night,” she said, when the minister had finished.

There were occasions when Miss Sophia Gill could put on a manner of majesty, and she did now.

It was ten o’clock that night when Sophia Gill entered the southwest chamber. She had told her sister what she intended doing and had been proof against her tearful entreaties. Amanda was charged not to tell the young girl, Flora.

“There is no use in frightening that child over nothing,” said Sophia.

Sophia, when she entered the southwest chamber, set the lamp which she carried on the bureau, and began moving about the room, pulling down the curtains, taking the nice white counterpane off the bed, and preparing generally for the night.

As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she became conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were foreign to her. She began remembering what she could not have remembered, since she was not then born: the trouble over her mother’s marriage, the bitter opposition, the shutting the door upon her, the ostracizing her from heart and home. She became aware of a most singular sensation of bitter resentment, and not against the mother and sister who had so treated her own mother, but against her own mother herself, and then she became aware of a like bitterness extended to her own self. She felt malignant toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though she could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora. Evil suggestions surged in her brain – suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which still fascinated her. And all the time by a sort of double consciousness she knew that what she thought was strange and not due to her own volition. She knew that she was thinking the thoughts of some other person, and she knew who. She felt herself possessed.

But there was tremendous strength in the woman’s nature. She had inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion from the evil strength of her ancestors. They had turned their own weapons against themselves. She made an effort which seemed more than human, and was conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her. She thought her own thoughts. Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything supernatural about the terrific experience. “I am imagining everything,” she told herself.

She went on with her preparations; she went to the bureau to take down her hair. She looked in the glass and saw, instead of her own face, middle-aged and good to see, with its expression of a life of honesty and good-will to others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at life and death, at that which had been and that which was to come. She saw, instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well-known dress!

Sophia Gill left the room. She went into the one which she shared with her sister Amanda. Amanda looked up and saw her standing there with her handkerchief pressed to her face.

“Oh, Sophia, let me call in somebody. Is your face hurt? Sophia, what is the matter with your face?” fairly shrieked Amanda.

Suddenly Sophia took the handkerchief from her face.

“Look at me, Amanda Gill,” she said.

Amanda looked, shrinking.

“What is it? Oh, what is it? You don’t look hurt. What is it, Sophia?”

“What do you see?”

“Why, I see you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What did you think I would see?”

Sophia Gill looked at her sister.

“Never as long as I live will I tell you what I thought you would see, and you must never ask me,” said she. “I am going to sell this house.”

The Toll-House

W. W. Jacobs

“It’s all nonsense,” said Jack Barnes. “Of course people have died in the house; people die in every house. As for the noises – wind in the chimney and rats in the wainscot are very convincing to a nervous man. Give me another cup of tea, Meagle.”

“Lester and White are first,” said Meagle, who was presiding at the tea-table of the Three Feathers Inn. “You’ve had two.”

Lester and White finished their cups with irritating slowness, pausing between sips to sniff the aroma, and to discover the sex and dates of arrival of the “strangers” which floated in some numbers in the beverage. Mr. Meagle served them to the brim, and then, turning to the grimly expectant Mr. Barnes, blandly requested him to ring for hot water.

“We’ll try and keep your nerves in their present healthy condition,” he remarked. “For my part I have a sort of half-and-half belief in the supernatural.”

“All sensible people have,” said Lester. “An aunt of mine saw a ghost once.”

White nodded.

“I had an uncle that saw one,” he said.

“It always is somebody else that sees them,” said Barnes.

“Well, there is the house,” said Meagle, “a large house at an absurdly low rent, and nobody will take it. It has taken toll of at least one life of every family that has lived there – however short the time – and since it has stood empty caretaker after caretaker has died there. The last caretaker died fifteen years ago.”

“Exactly,” said Barnes. “Long enough ago for legends to accumulate.”

“I’ll bet you a sovereign you won’t spend the night there alone, for all your talk,” said White suddenly.

“And I,” said Lester.

“No,” said Barnes slowly. “I don’t believe in ghosts nor in any supernatural things whatever; all the same, I admit that I should not care to pass a night there alone.”

“But why not?” inquired White.

“Wind in the chimney,” said Meagle, with a grin.

“Rats in the wainscot,” chimed in Lester.

“As you like,” said Barnes, colouring.

“Suppose we all go?” said Meagle. “Start after supper, and get there about eleven? We have been walking for ten days now without an adventure – except Barnes’s discovery that ditch-water smells longest. It will be a novelty, at any rate, and, if we break the spell by all surviving, the grateful owner ought to come down handsome.”

“Let’s see what the landlord has to say about it first,” said Lester. “There is no fun in passing a night in an ordinary empty house. Let us make sure that it is haunted.”

He rang the bell, and, sending for the landlord, appealed to him in the name of our common humanity not to let them waste a night watching in a house in which spectres and hobgoblins had no part. The reply was more than reassuring, and the landlord, after describing with considerable art the exact appearance of a head which had been seen hanging out of a window in the moonlight, wound up with a polite but urgent request that they would settle his bill before they went.

“It’s all very well for you young gentlemen to have your fun,” he said indulgently; “but, supposing as how you are all found dead in the morning, what about me? It ain’t called the Toll-House for nothing, you know.”

“Who died there last?” inquired Barnes, with an air of polite derision.

“A tramp,” was the reply. “He went there for the sake of half-a-crown, and they found him next morning hanging from the balusters, dead.”

“Suicide,” said Barnes. “Unsound mind.”

The landlord nodded. “That’s what the jury brought it in,” he said slowly; “but his mind was sound enough when he went in there. I’d known him, off and on, for years. I’m a poor man, but I wouldn’t spend the night in that house for a hundred pounds.”

He repeated this remark as they started on their expedition a few hours later. They left as the inn was closing for the night; bolts shot noisily behind them, and, as the regular customers trudged slowly homewards, they set off at a brisk pace in the direction of the house. Most of the cottages were already in darkness, and lights in others went out as they passed.