The 7th Ghost Story
Page 1
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER, by R.A. Lafferty
FROM THE TOMB, by Guy De Maupassant
THE VENGEANCE OF A TREE, by Eleanor F. Lewis
YOU CAN’T KILL A GHOST, by Frank Belknap Long
A FIGHT WITH A GHOST, by Q.E.D.
A CRY ACROSS THE BLACK WATER, by S. R. Crockett
A FRIENDLY EXORCISE, by Talmage Powell
MRS. DAVENPORT’S GHOST, by Frederick P. Schrader
COUSIN KELLY, by Fletcher Flora
GHOST OF BUCKSTOWN INN, by Arnold M. Anderson
THE HUNGRY GHOST, by Emil Petaja
GRAND-DAME’S GHOST STORY, by C.D.
THE STONE CHAMBER OF TAVERNDALE MANOR HOUSE, by Lady Mabel Howard
THE WATER GHOST OF HARROWBY HALL, by John Kendrick Bangs
THE PARLOR-CAR GHOST, by A Lady
THE THIRTEENTH BOAT, by George J. Rawlins
THE RETURN OF YEN-TCHIN-KING, by Lafcadio Hearn
THE SPECTRE OF TAPPINGTON, by Thomas Ingoldsby
I HAD A HUNCH, AND…, by Talmage Powell
THE BURGLAR’S GHOST, by Anonymous
A PHANTOM TOE, by Anonymous
THE PHANTOM WOMAN, by Anonymous
THE GHOSTS OF RED CREEK, by S.T.
THE PHANTOM HAG, by Anonymous
THE SPECTRE BRIDE, by Anonymous
HOW HE CAUGHT THE GHOST, by Anonymous
COLONEL HALIFAX’S GHOST STORY, by Anonymous
THE GHOST OF THE COUNT, by Anonymous
THE OLD MANSION, by Anonymous
A MISFIT GHOST, by Anonymous
AN UNBIDDEN GUEST, by Anonymous
THE DEAD WOMAN’S PHOTOGRAPH, by Anonymous
THE GHOST OF A LIVE MAN, by Anonymous
THE GHOST OF WASHINGTON, by Anonymous
The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series
COPYRIGHT INFO
The 7th Ghost Story MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2016 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
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The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
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“You Can’t Kill a Ghost,” by Frank Belknap Long, originally appeared in Weird Tales, August 1928. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
“A Friendly Exorcise,” by Talmage Powell, originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Talmage Powell. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
“Cousin Kelly,” by Fletcher Flora, originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1967. Copyright © 1968 by Fletcher Flora. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
“I Had a Hunch, and…”, by Talmage Powell, originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1959. Copyright © 1959, renewed 1987 by Talmage Powell. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
Welcome to The Seventh Ghost Story MEGAPACK®! Once more we have a wide-ranging assortment of supernatural fiction, with setting across the world—Europe, the Americas, Asia—and across the centuries. You will note that we have a larger than normal number of “Anonymous” stories. No, the authors weren’t embarrassed by their contributions. Victorian-era literary magazines and newspapers often ran fiction without crediting the author, or with only vague names like “By a Lady,” the author’s initials, or humorous pseudonyms (as with the story by “Q.E.D.” in this volume). Authors later collected their stories in books, and that’s when readers discovered who had actually written what. If a story never got reprinted, its author remained a mystery. Modern scholars are still researching these anonymous stories, but many authors will never be properly identified.
Enjoy!
—John Betancourt
Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
ABOUT THE SERIES
Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”
The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)
RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?
Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).
Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.
TYPOS
Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.
If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at wildsidepress@yahoo.com or use the message boards above.
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER, by R.A. Lafferty
Stephen Knight held favorable field position in the game of life. He was inordinately lucky, though he himself said (and with a straight face) that lucky was only another word for logical. Though spared the burden of excessive wealth with its entailments and baggage, yet he had a talent for money, both in the acquisition and spending of it. The world is full of otherwise sound men who lack this talent, and a well-balanced man like Stephen is rare.
He had a healthy digestion, an appetite of wide range, a tolerably clear conscience, and a measure of youth. His mind had a clarity and directness that was disconcerting to one who had fallen into the pattern. And he had an almost automatic gift for coming up with the right answer, in the manner of a cat always landing on its feet.
His life was full of brimming small passions for all the direct and sudden things in the world: the paintings of Tsinnahjinnie and Woody Crumbo (for the logic of the line of the American Indian artists never fails), the music of the Cimmaron Valley Boys and of Victor Herbert (if one possesses these two peaks, let the lesser folks own the dim valley between), Louisiana Rice-Ribby, Indian Barbecue, choc beer (Stephen did not have stomach trouble), jug-fishing (the only effective and therefore the only logical sort), the annual rattlesnake round-up at Okeene (for Stephen was fascinated by this most direct of all creatures with its logic of lightning), Bowling with the Black Knights (his own team), membership in the Engineer’s Club and the Neo-Thomists Society (the only two clubs in town where the philosopher’s key fits the locks), pidgeon flying (the poetry of the proficient), and affiliation with the Brain Busters, a small group of petroleum geologists with a penchant for startling theories. Stephen was interested, interesting, and happy.
And he had Vivian.
At any one time (by the nature of a monogamous world) it is possible for only one man to have the finest wife in the world. That man at that particular time was Stephen Knight. It had been planned: a clear thinking man will stake out the best part for himself and take thought to obtain it, and a logical man will see the logic of havi
ng the best wife possible.
There are tools unsuited to certain tasks, and words are inadequate tools to describe Vivian Knight. She made her presence and her comings felt. Other men, friends or strangers, would lift their heads like colts before she was even in sight. She was the heart of any group. When she was gone she left nothing at all tangible; but O the intangibles that surrounded that woman like an aura!
Actually, as Professor Schlauch had told Stephen, she was a rather stupid person with a high vitality, brimming friendliness, and a magnetism that should have flicked instruments on Mars. But Stephen, who analyzed her as he did all things, knew that she was not stupid, knew that intelligence (like icebergs and the mounting of diamonds) should be four-fifths below the surface. With Vivian her intelligence was entirely below the surface, deeply hidden and of subliminal force.
But on the surface she was a scatterbrain, a small intense cyclone with a curious calm at her center. Nobody who really understands such things could doubt that Stephen Knight had the finest wife in the world.
And she was coming now. Stephen could sense it from a distance as any man could sense it; but he could analyze the sensing of it, sorting out the complex of sounds that was her coming, dredging the subliminal up over the limen. He liked to break up sensations into their component parts.
On the two or three evenings a week when they were not together, he was sometimes in bed before she was. Now he was in bed, for in four more hours he must be up and off on a field trip. He was a petroleum geologist with a peculiar flair for seeing below surface indications, five thousand feet below surface indications. His talent for preliminary survey was unequaled; fine logic and sound information can reach very deep.
He was right, as always, as to her coming. Her small car turned in. He saw the sweep of the lights past his window, and heard the car crunch on the soft snow. Vivian, brimful and bubbling!
The bird downstairs broke into excited song; it always became excited when Vivian arrived. And just as her key was in the door its whistled song turned into ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ as she had taught it.
Vivian was in with a loud rustle, and her footsteps like music as she started up the stair (the tone of her footfall at a frequency of 265, just above middle C, compounded with a vagrant, two harmonics, and a mute). Few men could so analyze their wives’ footsteps. Everything about her was in tune, and she hummed the ‘Dreamer’ as she ascended.
A ringing knife cut across the rustle, a frequency of 313 wedded to a false harmonic 30 vibrations higher. The phone. The extension was on the stairs and she would be right at it. It rang again and the rustle had stopped. But she did not answer it.
“Catch it, Vivian,” he called. But she did not. It rang again and again and he rose grumbling to answer it.
“Knight here.”
“Steady yourself, Mr. Knight. Something has happened to your wife. We will ask you to come down to the main station.”
“My wife is here. She has just arrived.”
“In that case there has been a misidentification, and another woman was carrying her credentials. Are you sure she is there?”
“Yes. Just a minute.”
He left the phone and went to the top of the stairs and switched on the light. He called loudly for Vivian there, and down the hall, and downstairs. He went down, switched on the outside light, and went out on the front porch.
There were no footprints there but his own of an hour before now sifted over with a quarter inch of fresh snow. Her car was not in the drive, nor had any car turned in after his own. He went back in to the waiting phone.
“I was mistaken. She is not here. I will be down at once.”
* * * *
Vivian Knight was dead in a brutal and senseless murder. That was the fact that could not be undone. But that was not the fact that seemed primary to Stephen. Indeed, to his friends, he appeared to be a little callous about the whole thing. Such a shock does not affect all men the same, and an interior desolation may be covered by an outward dullness.
Still it was thought that he should have showed a little more emotion.
“It may be, Stephen, that you still do not realize that she is dead,” one friend told him.
“No. I am not absolutely sure of it, but for reasons too formless to even try to voice.”
“You surely do not doubt the identity?”
“Oh no. That is her body. There is no doubt of that. What I feel is something else. I always knew that I would lose her.”
“You did?”
“Yes. She was too good to be true. I never believed that she was real.”
After that people began to think of Stephen Knight as a little odd. He took no interest in the funeral arrangements.
“Oh, put her anywhere. She won’t mind. Wherever she’s gone she already has them charmed.”
Nor was he vengeful nor even particularly curious as to who her killer might be.
“Any man might have done it. There’s an impulse to take any perfect piece apart to see what motivates it, and to mar what is perfect. She hadn’t a flaw in her. If she’d had any fault at all she might not have been killed. Can’t you understand the feeling that nobody has the right to be perfect? I can understand it.”
“Man, that was your wife that was murdered.”
“I know that. I am not as far gone as you imagine. But I also understand that it had to happen; if not by that unknown, then by another; if not now, then at a later time.”
From the funeral Stephen went directly to the doctor. He was not one to keep mysteries bottled up inside himself, and he knew that time is no ally in things like this. He told the whole story, completely and dully.
“Well, I don’t pretend to understand this, Knight,” the doctor told him. “It isn’t a new story to me in its essentials. An old doctor never hears anything new. In literature and lore there are a few hundred cases (none of them really authenticated by their very nature) of death… instant visitations of the Departed to the one closest. Are you sure you were awake?”
“Of course I’m not sure, in the light of what I know to have happened. But I have never been mistaken in my state before. I have no history of hallucinations, and I have always been considered a well-balanced man. I realize that the latter is meaningless, and that there is no such thing.”
“True enough, there is not. But a few come closer to what we believe should be the norm, and you come quite close. In other words you are less crazy than almost anyone I know. You are hardly crazy at all. In a long life in the practice (and I was born to the profession) I have never known a single human who I could call unqualifiedly sane.”
“Vivian was sane. That was the whole strange thing about her.”
“Possibly. The Scatterbrain may be only another name for a wide-ranging intuitive comprehension. Now then, Knight, there is a set of things which you must say to yourself, and say over and over till you come to believe them. I do not know whether they are true, but you must accept them as true.
“On that night, three nights ago, you were asleep. You stirred to a feeling of anticipation, and you lay half-awake waiting. The bird (tuned to the life of you two) caught your anticipation and broke into song, and this served as a feedback to your own sensations, for the bird only whistled the ‘Dreamer’ when it felt that Vivian was nearing. It was a bright night with the snow mantle, and the light on your window might have been a more distant reflection. It was a gusty night, and the rustle that you thought was your wife was only the wind having its way with the wooden house, and her footsteps were likewise. But she was dead, and had been dead for at least a half hour. You are a comparatively sane man, and you must go over that and over it until you believe it implicitly.”
“But we do not know if it is actually true, do we?”
“No, we do not. But we turn that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ by careful credulity. The world is built on such a syste
m of credulities and we have no wish to pull it down. Now then, this is what happened, and there is no alternative. You may well have fifty years ahead of you, and there is no point in your making problems where there are none.”
“Then you can assure me that she is dead?”
“Yes. And, more important, you must also assure yourself of it. It is closed. You had a wonderful wife and you will have none but wonderful memories of her.”
“I have not slept in the house since that night.”
“Then you must sleep in it tonight. Even if you intend to sell the house and make other arrangements yet you cannot have it hanging over you that you were afraid to go back.”
“Yes, I will stay there tonight.”
* * * *
But he did not go there early, and the hours were hard to fill. He thought of shooting a few games of pool, it often relaxed him when he was tense, but it seemed an unfeeling thing for one to do who has just buried his wife. He thought of dropping into one of the clubs for a few drinks, but that seemed not quite right either. He was an incomplete man without Vivian, and he knew it. He drove west through town and out the river road where the snow glistened on the trees and hills.
“Well, I had her for a few years, and nobody else had her at all. There is no one in the world who knows how pleasurable those years were. But also there is nobody who has lost as much as I have just lost.”
He went home and opened the house again after dark. He had an ascetic’s supper of tea and dry toast. The bird needed nothing, nothing that he could do for it. It essayed a few bars of the ‘Dreamer’, but its heart was not in it. Still, it was something, to have the bird. It’s voice was really an extension of that of Vivian.
Stephen played some of the stark dry fragments of Strilke. Stephen played the piano incomparably better than Vivian, yet he was sure that the playing that the piano would remember was that of Vivian and not his own.
He went to bed. He wrote on the bedside pad the figure he would ask for the house. He slept fitfully, and when he woke he marked out that figure and wrote another one two thousand dollars lower. People would not understand that it had been a magic house; and vanished magic is not a marketable commodity.