The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (53 page)

“When I bought the house,” Kisstruck said, “the vendors did not mention anything about a murder or a ghost.”

“Naturally!” I couldn’t help sneering.

“O, perhaps they didn’t know,” he said, “and anyhow it wouldn’t have deterred me for I am pretty thick-skinned. Barring a daily domestic help I lived there alone. I hope I am not an unfriendly creature, but I really do enjoy that sort of existence. I soon got to hear some rumour of haunting and, of course, I scoffed at the notion.”

“Isn’t it amazing, Kisstruck,” I said, “the infernal credence still given to common superstitious bosh! Makes one despair of human nature.”

“Yes, I laughed at it,” Kisstruck said.

“The way it persists!”

“Yes, the way it persists.”

“All gas and my old grandmother!”

“Just what I thought and said. And yet, you know,” Kisstruck scratched his poll in a comical forlorn manner – “I had to modify my opinion all the same.”

Gracious heaven, at that hint of compromise I flew at Kisstruck – argumentatively, of course, and a priori. I tried to floor him on the simple question of clothes. In any spook tale there is generally some emphasis upon what the thing is supposed to be wearing. That’s to authenticate the madness.

“Kisstruck,” I said, “listen. I’ll allow you for the moment the postulate of ghost. Here we go, then. A man dies, is laid out, shrouded and coffined, and put in his grave with a ton of earth on top of him. Now, out he comes, generally dressed as he was known in life.
Dressed
, Kisstruck! How
could
a ghost have clothes? Or wear them? And why? Are they real clothes? No, he must be wearing the ghosts of his clothing, see! His coat and his collar, or his armour and chains, must have spiritual essences, his boots and braces are informed with ghostly being. How can anybody accept that foolery?”

“No,” Kisstruck agreed. “Still, you never can tell how such a thing may turn out. You remember, don’t you:

“‘
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
.’?”

“Yes, yes, but the ghost in that case, too,

“
Was armed at point, exactly, cap-a-pie
.”

“What spiritual foundation reposes in a beaver and sword and buckler, tell me that, Kisstruck? Do you believe there’s a spirit confined in a hat, or that there’s a hereafter for a pair of trousers? No bunkum, now. Ghosts, at the very least, should be naked, shouldn’t they? Always!”

“Naked,” mused Kisstruck. “What a suggestion for some of those Freudians to handle!”

“Noise, too!” I went on. “How the deuce do you obtain noise from an incorporeal thing?”

“Seems impossible, and that’s what I said,” Kisstruck answered.

“And so it couldn’t even speak.”

“No. I told him that, too, but he did all the same.”

“Him?” I asked.

“This ghost,” said Kisstruck.

“Yah!” I snorted, “Don’t try to stuff me with any of your bogies!” I took a good stare at my friend. He didn’t flinch.

“I can only tell you what happened, actually happened, and to me of all people.” said he. “Believe it or not, just as you please.”

“O, all right,” I said. “Go on with you. I’ll buy it!”

And this is what he told me.

“For the first week after I got into that house I saw no mortal soul except the woman who came in the morning to do domestic work. If I remember rightly her name was Yiggle. As you know, I’m not an unsociable being, but I enjoy such solitude. I did in those days at any rate. Not so much now, I confess, but in a small measure I still do, and it can’t be mere egotism, otherwise I’d be more expansive, I suppose. The weather was kind and it became my custom to lounge of an evening on the balcony – there was a nice iron-railed balcony, did I mention that? – a very agreeable balcony, smoking my pipe and reading or thinking poetic thoughts until the stars came out. This balcony was so narrow that I had to place my lounge chair sideways to the rail and sit facing the trellis work at the end; behind me was just the opposite trellis hung with some creeping vine. On a particular evening I sat a good while longer than usual, sprawled out, feeling superbly alone, king of all that congenial solitude, until it grew quite late and darkness hemmed all around me. Through the balcony railing I could see stars reflected below me in the lake’s dull water; the surrounding trees, whose bulging tops I could easily make out against the starred sky, were masses of whispering gloom. For the first time it became a wee bit eerie, not unpleasant to a stable mind, but rather stirring to imagine night-black panthers stealing velvet-toed under the trees, or aerial serpents writhing in combat up among the branches.

“There had been no intimation of any other presence near me, I understood there was no other soul living within a mile of the place, so there was nothing to prepare me for the sudden shock of a voice at my shoulder. I was momentarily paralysed. Somebody or something was there behind me. I didn’t believe in ghosts. I didn’t think of a ghost, but I was remotely alone, it was pretty dark, and a stranger moving in marvellous silence had crept up there behind me; I tell you, my blessed heart absolutely rattled in my ribs. ‘Mother of holy heaven!’ I gasped – though why such a phrase should escape me I can’t think; I have no religious element in my being, so why should I make that particular exclamation? Can you explain that?”

“O never mind your elements, Kisstruck, get on with the story, do!”

“‘Mother of holy heaven!’ I said. I was petrified. I was unable to rise or even turn my head. I . . . could . . . not! I was held stiff and breathless, with a feeling of horror in my very hair that seemed to be making little corkscrew spirals. There may have been a waft of iciness, some chill of the grave, but I couldn’t have felt it with my whole body seething in a sweat of apprehension. I wasn’t frightened. You may laugh, but I know you can be horrified without feeling fear. In a moment or two I got grip of myself and leapt up out of the chair and faced around.”

Kisstruck startled me by jumping up and striking an attitude to illustrate this. He stood poised and silent so long that I had to say, “Well, what then?”

He relaxed and resumed his seat.

“There was nothing there, nobody – and yet that voice spoke to me again. ‘Where are you?’ I said, pretty sharply too! ‘Who are you? What do you want? Come out of it!’ And the voice answered, and I listened, and I understood. It said: ‘I am sorry to startle you, I can’t help it; don’t be alarmed, I don’t mean any harm.’ Obviously a man’s voice. ‘But where are you?’ I shouted. It replied, ‘I’m here. Can’t you see me? Here I am.’ ‘I can’t see anything,’ I said. The voice answered: ‘I can see you plainly.’ Quite close to me, only a foot or two away. And then it seemed to get excited and anxious, and said: ‘But you must! Here I am. See now?’ And it was closer still. ‘No, nothing at all,’ I said. There was a brief silence, until I asked: ‘Are you there?’ for you know it was remarkably like telephoning, ‘Are you there?’ And that voice answered and said: ‘You do not believe in me.’ I asked: ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You are sceptical,’ it said. I asked: ‘What about?’ and it said: ‘Ghosts!’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I certainly am.’ ‘Pity,’ it said sadly, ‘I happen to be one.’ ”

At this point Kisstruck turned to that exasperating business of getting out his tobacco pouch and preparing his pipe, during which operation he suspended his narrative. Of course I pounded at him with question after question.

“What was he like, this . . . this creature?”

“I keep telling you, old chap, I could not see him. I could hear him and I could understand him, that’s all.”

“Not see anything?”

“There was nothing there to see.”

“Quite invisible?”

“Absolutely.”

“And yet he could see you?”

“So he said, and indeed he could for he told me of my own appearance, clothes and so forth – will you believe that?”

“No, Kisstruck. You may think me horridly incredulous and uncivil but I emphatically don’t believe it.”

“It sounds ridiculous to me now, I know, I know, but you have my word for it, honour bright you have. A ghost was there right enough; I could hear him and understand him, but nothing could I see although it was not so dark as all that implies and my eyesight is excellent, quite a high standard as eyesights go nowadays with all these confounded opticians prowling around. And I never
did
see him, although I had many contacts with him afterwards. Yes, I did. You are quite right on one point about them, real ghosts
are
invisible and you never see them at all, let alone see through them. I got to know this one very well, he was a friendly fellow, none of the vampire nuisance about him, nothing to shake the very core of one’s being, as they say, but an amiable creature in spite of his history. He got into the habit of joining me of an evening on the balcony, always there, never elsewhere, or at any other time; he was very obliging about that and I welcomed the visits. He, too, was so obviously – if I may use that word – obviously glad of the chance to discourse with someone after being cut off from all contacts and all possibilities of haunting anybody for so many years, all those years the house had been empty. It must have been a dreary time for him; could anything be more devitalising than the task of haunting a house that is, as it were, unhauntable through the absence of human contacts? He had grown despondent in those years, time was getting on, he had his career – such as it might be – to think of, and was anxious about his position, his status, for no spook likes to be made a fool of or to feel neglected or ignored. Also he feared he might get stale and lose his form through sheer inactivity.

“Well, now, I think I had better tell you the story, as I learned it direct from him and not from any idle rumour, of the crime which brought him low and made a wraith of him. He was – that is to say he had been – a country gentleman of small means, his family having declined from an estate of importance in the county. A queer thing is that it never once occurred to me to ask him his name, and as he never volunteered it I have not been able to verify any history of his forbears. I did ask him, more than once, what he had been like to look at, who or what he had resembled, but he – I mean the voice – would not respond to that enquiry and I concluded that it was in some way out of his power to do so.

“He had married somewhat late in life, at about the age of forty, and brought his bride to that house. She was some ten years his junior, and although he did not betray any such opinion of her I cannot think she was a very nice creature. I fancy she was one of those ladies who not being a real lady aspire to be adopted in some way by a real gentleman. Anyway, he married her and took her to the house with the balcony, the one I’ve been telling you about. The marriage turned out a failure. Within a year his wife eloped with some merchant and my poor friend, who was fatally fond of her, suffered in consequence an incurable melancholy, a sort of mania. Everything he did then, everything he saw then, he felt he was seeing or doing for the very last time. In travelling about, as he did for a while in quest of distraction from his unremitting grief, he would gaze at any well-known view and bemoan to himself: ‘This is not beautiful at all and it has no pleasant associations for me, but – I shall never see it again!’ And that would make him weep. Stupid, but uncontrollable. If he were sawing up a log or planting a flower border the same thought arose, ‘I shall never do this again’ – and much weeping. Soon it got round to immediate things like putting on his gloves or his boots, even eating his meals. It is a bad state for any man to get into; as soon as you begin to imagine you won’t see such things again you are likely to see things you never began to imagine. The end was inevitable. He found himself developing what he called ‘extinctive tendencies,’ by which I understood he had a craving to shed blood, terribly wanted to, dreamed constantly of killing people – nobody in particular, just anybody – and the desire became so insistent that in terrible fear of surrendering to indiscriminate blood-lust and the slaughter of unoffending mortals he shot
himself
. ‘Just here in my temple, see that hole!’ he said to me. I had to remind him that he was invisible to me; in the eagerness of his telling he had forgotten it. It was really rather funny, that! So there’s the story as I had it from him. Is there anything really incredible in it?”

“Certainly, Kisstruck! I’m waiting to hear how he became a ghost.”

“Ah that! My dear chap I cannot tell. I’m afraid we shall never know now.”

“And why should he haunt that house?”

“My dear chap! Isn’t that what a ghost is for? It was where he had shot himself, on that balcony. What else could you expect?”

That is a ripe instance of the logic of my friend Kisstruck. How strange to have had all that stupendous experience, to know so much, and yet understand so little! But still, I am quite fond of him although he infuriates me so often.

“Mr. Kisstruck,” I said sternly, “will you oblige me by getting to the end of this legend.”

“O, it’s not legend,” he protested, “and there’s nothing much to follow; his real-life story was what interested me, the other side of him lost its thrill after a while. For a few weeks we were friendly enough, in a sort of way, then his appearance began to drop off, because he had at least established contact with a human being – me! – and that appears to be a difficult thing for them to do; having done it he qualified for the privilege of coming and going and ranging elsewhere. He wasn’t my type, you know, he hadn’t the sort of mind I could make pleasant exchanges with, in fact he became rather vulgar-minded and servile and ingratiating, called me sir, and so on. It affected me unpleasantly, suggesting some taint in his character: he would hint coarsely and leeringly at things I do not care to hear about. The truth was that in his enlarged peregrinations he had been having an affair with another ghost, a young lady spook who had an interest in some fishmonger’s establishment – I don’t know what, and it was a long way off. I gathered there had been some impropriety on her part, and that he had succumbed, with the . . . er . . . the usual consequences, and so they . . . er . . . they had to get married.”