Ghost Stories

by E. F. Benson

  They read this unique document together by the fading light, strung up to the highest pitch of professional interest, and yet peering awfully round from time to time in vague apprehension of what might happen next. During the séance the wind had got up, and now it was moaning round the corners of the house, and dusk was falling rapidly, with prospects of a wild night to follow. The curtains bulged and bellied in the draught, hollow voices sounded in the chimney, and Sylvia clung to her brother.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ she wailed. ‘I don’t like this spirit of Spinach; Violetta and Asteria are far preferable. And then there’s “It”. It is somewhere about, and it may be anywhere.’

  Ludovic made an attempt at gaiety.

  ‘It may be anywhere, as you say,’ he remarked, ‘but it actually is somewhere. And we’ve got to find it, dear. Better find it before it gets dark. And think of the sensation there will be when we publish the account of how, in answer to the entreaty of a remorseful spirit – ’

  ‘But he isn’t remorseful,’ said Sylvia. ‘There’s not a word of remorse, but only terror at being haunted. There’s not only a corpse about, but the spirit of an unrepentant murderer. It isn’t pleasant. I would sooner be in expensive lodgings than here.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Ludovic. ‘Besides, young Spinach is friendly enough to us. We’re his one hope. And if we find it he will certainly be very grateful. I shouldn’t wonder if he sent us many more revelations. Even as it is, how deeply interesting! Nobody ever guessed that there were material ghosts in the spiritual world. But now we must get busy and search for Alexander. Fix your mind on what a tremendously paying experience this will be. Now, where shall we begin? There’s the house and the garden – ’

  ‘Oh, I hope it will be in the garden,’ said Sylvia. ‘But there’s no chance of that, for he meant to bury it in the garden afterwards.’

  ‘True. We’ll begin with the house, then. Now most murderers bury the body under the floor of the kitchen, cover it with quicklime, and fill in with cement.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t have had time for that,’ said Sylvia. ‘Besides, this was to be only a temporary resting-place.’

  ‘Perhaps he cut it up,’ said Ludovic, ‘and we shall find a piece here and a piece there.’

  The search began. In the growing dusk, with the wild wind increasing to a gale, they annealed themselves for the gruesome business. They investigated the coal-cellar, they peered into housemaids’ cupboards, and with quaking hearts examined the woodshed. Here there were signs that its contents had been disturbed, and the sight of an old boot peeping out from behind some logs nearly caused Sylvia to collapse. Then Ludovic got a ladder, and, climbing up to the roof, interrogated the water-tank, from the contents of which they had already drunk. But all their explorations were in vain; there was no sign of the corpse. For a nerve-racking hour they persevered, and a dismal idea occurred to Ludovic.

  ‘It can’t be a practical joke on the part of Spinach, can it?’ he said. ‘That would be in the worst possible taste. Good gracious, what’s that?’

  There came a loud tapping at the front door, and Sylvia hid her face on his shoulder.

  ‘That’s Spinach,’ she whispered. ‘That terrible Spinach!’

  They tottered to the door and opened it. On the threshold was a man, who told them he was the carrier from Rye, and brought a note for Miss Byron.

  ‘I’m going back in half an hour, miss,’ he said, ‘if there’s any answer. A box, I understood.’

  The note was from Gramsby, who, though unwilling to ‘upset’ them, declined to come back to the cottage. She had heard things, and she didn’t like it, and she would be obliged if they would pack her box and send it in.

  ‘The coward!’ said Sylvia, trembling violently. ‘She shan’t have her box unless she comes to fetch it.’

  They went back into the sitting-room, lit the fire, and made it as cheerful as they could with many candles. Their flames wagged ominously in the eddying draughts, and the two drew their chairs close to the hearth. By now the full fury of the gale was unloosed, the whole house shuddered at the blasts, doors creaked, curtains whispered, flurries of rain were flung against the windows, and strange noises and stirrings muttered in the chimney.

  ‘I shall just get warm,’ said Ludovic, ‘and then go on with the search. I shan’t know a moment’s peace till I find it.’

  ‘I shan’t know a moment’s peace when you do!’ wailed Sylvia.

  They were sitting in the fire almost, and suddenly something up the chimney caught Ludovic’s eye.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  He got a candle and held it up the chimney.

  ‘It’s a rope,’ he said, ‘tied round a staple in the wall.’

  His look met hers, and read the answering horror there.

  ‘I’m going to undo it,’ he said. ‘Step back, Sylvia.’

  There was no need to say that, for she had already retreated to the farthest corner of the room. He pulled the rope off the staple and let it go.

  There was a scrambling, shuffling noise from high up in the chimney, and in a cloud of soot ‘It’ fell, with a heavy thud, sprawling across the hearth.

  They fled into the night; the carrier had only just got to the garden gate.

  ‘Take us into Rye,’ cried Ludovic. ‘Take us to the police-station. Murder has been done!’

  *

  The account of these amazing events duly appeared in all the psychical papers and many others. Long queues of would-be sitters formed up for the Byron séances, in the hopes of getting fresh revelations from young Spinach. But from association with Asteria and Violetta he gradually became quite common-place, and only told them about thought-flowers and white robes.

  In the Tube

  ‘It’s a convention,’ said Anthony Carling cheerfully, ‘and not a very convincing one. Time, indeed! There’s no such thing as Time really; it has no actual existence. Time is nothing more than an infinitesimal point in eternity, just as space is an infinitesimal point in infinity. At the most, Time is a sort of tunnel through which we are accustomed to believe that we are travelling. There’s a roar in our ears and a darkness in our eyes which makes it seem real to us. But before we came into the tunnel we existed for ever in an infinite sunlight, and after we have got through it we shall exist in an infinite sunlight again. So why should we bother ourselves about the confusion and noise and darkness which only encompass us for a moment?’

  For a firm-rooted believer in such immeasurable ideas as these, which he punctuated with brisk application of the poker to the brave sparkle and glow of the fire, Anthony has a very pleasant appreciation of the measurable and the finite, and nobody with whom I have acquaintance has so keen a zest for life and its enjoyments as he. He had given us this evening an admirable dinner, had passed round a port beyond praise, and had illuminated the jolly hours with the light of his infectious optimism. Now the small company had melted away, and I was left with him over the fire in his study. Outside the tattoo of wind-driven sleet was audible on the window-panes, over-scoring now and again the flap of the flames on the open hearth, and the thought of the chilly blasts and the snow-covered pavement in Brompton Square, across which, to skidding taxicabs, the last of his other guests had scurried, made my position, resident here till tomorrow morning, the more delicately delightful. Above all there was this stimulating and suggestive companion, who, whether he talked of the great abstractions which were so intensely real and practical to him, or of the very remarkable experiences which he had encountered among these conventions of time and space, was equally fascinating to the listener.

  ‘I adore life,’ he said. ‘I find it the most entrancing plaything. It’s a delightful game, and, as you know very well, the only conceivable way to play a game is to treat it extremely seriously. If you say to yourself, “It’s only a game”, you cease to take the slightest interest in it. You have to know that it’s only a game, and behave as if it was the one object of existence. I should like it to g
o on for many years yet. But all the time one has to be living on the true plane as well, which is eternity and infinity. If you come to think of it, the one thing which the human mind cannot grasp is the finite, not the infinite, the temporary, not the eternal.’

  ‘That sounds rather paradoxical,’ said I.

  ‘Only because you’ve made a habit of thinking about things that seem bounded and limited. Look it in the face for a minute. Try to imagine finite Time and Space, and you find you can’t. Go back a million years, and multiply that million of years by another million, and you find that you can’t conceive of a beginning. What happened before that beginning? Another beginning and another beginning? And before that? Look at it like that, and you find that the only solution comprehensible to you is the existence of an eternity, something that never began and will never end. It’s the same about space. Project yourself to the farthest star, and what comes beyond that? Emptiness? Go on through the emptiness, and you can’t imagine it being finite and having an end. It must needs go on for ever: that’s the only thing you can understand. There’s no such thing as before or after, or beginning or end, and what a comfort that is! I should fidget myself to death if there wasn’t the huge soft cushion of eternity to lean one’s head against. Some people say – I believe I’ve heard you say it yourself – that the idea of eternity is so tiring; you feel that you want to stop. But that’s because you are thinking of eternity in terms of Time, and mumbling in your brain, “And after that, and after that?” Don’t you grasp the idea that in eternity there isn’t any “after”, any more than there is any “before”? It’s all one. Eternity isn’t quantity: it’s a quality.’

  Sometimes, when Anthony talks in this manner, I seem to get a glimpse of that which to his mind is so transparently clear and solidly real, at other times (not having a brain that readily envisages abstractions) I feel as though he was pushing me over a precipice, and my intellectual faculties grasp wildly at anything tangible or comprehensible. This was the case now, and I hastily interrupted.

  ‘But there is a “before” and “after”, ’ I said. ‘A few hours ago you gave us an admirable dinner, and after that – yes, after – we played bridge. And now you are going to explain things a little more clearly to me, and after that I shall go to bed – ’

  He laughed.

  ‘You shall do exactly as you like,’ he said, ‘and you shan’t be a slave to Time either tonight or tomorrow morning. We won’t even mention an hour for breakfast, but you shall have it in eternity whenever you awake. And as I see it is not midnight yet, we’ll slip the bonds of Time, and talk quite infinitely. I will stop the clock, if that will assist you in getting rid of your illusion, and then I’ll tell you a story, which to my mind, shows how unreal so-called realities are; or, at any rate, how fallacious are our senses as judges of what is real and what is not.’

  ‘Something occult, something spookish?’ I asked, pricking up my ears, for Anthony has the strangest clairvoyances and visions of things unseen by the normal eye.

  ‘I suppose you might call some of it occult,’ he said, ‘though there’s a certain amount of rather grim reality mixed up in it.’

  ‘Go on; excellent mixture,’ said I.

  He threw a fresh log on the fire.

  ‘It’s a longish story,’ he said. ‘You may stop me as soon as you’ve had enough. But there will come a point for which I claim your consideration. You, who cling to your “before” and “after”, has it ever occurred to you how difficult it is to say when an incident takes place? Say that a man commits some crime of violence, can we not, with a good deal of truth, say that he really commits that crime when he definitely plans and determines upon it, dwelling on it with gusto? The actual commission of it, I think we can reasonably argue, is the mere material sequel of his resolve: he is guilty of it when he makes that determination. When, therefore, in the term of “before” and “after”, does the crime truly take place? There is also in my story a further point for your consideration. For it seems certain that the spirit of a man, after the death of his body, is obliged to re-enact such a crime, with a view, I suppose we may guess, to his remorse and his eventual redemption. Those who have second sight have seen such re-enactments. Perhaps he may have done his deed blindly in this life; but then his spirit re-commits it with its spiritual eyes open, and able to comprehend its enormity. So, shall we view the man’s original determination and the material commission of his crime only as preludes to the real commission of it, when with eyes unsealed he does it and repents of it? . . . . That all sounds very obscure when I speak in the abstract, but I think you will see what I mean, if you follow my tale. Comfortable? Got everything you want? Here goes, then.’

  He leaned back in his chair, concentrating his mind, and then spoke.

  ‘The story that I am about to tell you,’ he said, ‘had its beginning a month ago, when you were away in Switzerland. It reached its conclusion, so I imagine, last night. I do not, at any rate, expect to experience any more of it. Well, a month ago I was returning late on a very wet night from dining out. There was not a taxi to be had, and I hurried through the pouring rain to the tube-station at Piccadilly Circus, and thought myself very lucky to catch the last train in this direction. The carriage into which I stepped was quite empty except for one other passenger, who sat next the door immediately opposite to me. I had never, to my knowledge, seen him before, but I found my attention vividly fixed on him, as if he somehow concerned me. He was a man of middle age, in dress-clothes, and his face wore an expression of intense thought, as if in his mind he was pondering some very significant matter, and his hand which was resting on his knee clenched and unclenched itself. Suddenly he looked up and stared me in the face, and I saw there suspicion and fear, as if I had surprised him in some secret deed.

  ‘At that moment we stopped at Dover Street, and the conductor threw open the doors, announced the station and added, “Change here for Hyde Park Corner and Gloucester Road.” That was all right for me since it meant that the train would stop at Brompton Road, which was my destination. It was all right apparently, too, for my companion, for he certainly did not get out, and after a moment’s stop, during which no one else got in, we went on. I saw him, I must insist, after the doors were closed and the train had started. But when I looked again, as we rattled on, I saw that there was no one there. I was quite alone in the carriage.

  ‘Now you may think that I had had one of those swift momentary dreams which flash in and out of the mind in the space of a second, but I did not believe it was so myself, for I felt that I had experienced some sort of premonition or clairvoyant vision. A man, the semblance of whom, astral body or whatever you may choose to call it, I had just seen, would sometime sit in that seat opposite to me, pondering and planning.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Why should it have been the astral body of a living man which you thought you had seen? Why not the ghost of a dead one?’

  ‘Because of my own sensations. The sight of the spirit of someone dead, which has occurred to me two or three times in my life, has always been accompanied by a physical shrinking and fear, and by the sensation of cold and of loneliness. I believed, at any rate, that I had seen a phantom of the living, and that impression was confirmed, I might say proved, the next day. For I met the man himself. And the next night, as you shall hear, I met the phantom again. We will take them in order.

  ‘I was lunching, then, the next day with my neighbour Mrs Stanley: there was a small party, and when I arrived we waited but for the final guest. He entered while I was talking to some friend, and presently at my elbow I heard Mrs Stanley’s voice –

  ‘ “Let me introduce you to Sir Henry Payle,” she said.

  ‘I turned and saw my vis-à-vis of the night before. It was quite unmistakably he, and as we shook hands he looked at me I thought with vague and puzzled recognition.

  ‘ “Haven’t we met before, Mr Carling?” he said. “I seem to recollect – ”

  ‘For the moment I fo
rgot the strange manner of his disappearance from the carriage, and thought that it had been the man himself whom I had seen last night.

  ‘ “Surely, and not so long ago,” I said. “For we sat opposite each other in the last tube-train from Piccadilly Circus yesterday night.”

  ‘He still looked at me, frowning, puzzled, and shook his head.

  ‘ “That can hardly be,” he said. “I only came up from the country this morning.”

  ‘Now this interested me profoundly, for the astral body, we are told, abides in some half-conscious region of the mind or spirit, and has recollections of what has happened to it, which it can convey only very vaguely and dimly to the conscious mind. All lunch-time I could see his eyes again and again directed to me with the same puzzled and perplexed air, and as I was taking my departure he came up to me.

  ‘ “I shall recollect some day,” he said, “where we met before, and I hope we may meet again. Was it not – ?” and he stopped. “No: it has gone from me,” he added.’

  The log that Anthony had thrown on the fire was burning bravely now, and its high-flickering flame lit up his face.

  ‘Now, I don’t know whether you believe in coincidences as chance things,’ he said, ‘but if you do, get rid of the notion. Or if you can’t at once, call it a coincidence that that very night I again caught the last train on the tube going westwards. This time, so far from my being a solitary passenger, there was a considerable crowd waiting at Dover Street, where I entered, and just as the noise of the approaching train began to reverberate in the tunnel I caught sight of Sir Henry Payle standing near the opening from which the train would presently emerge, apart from the rest of the crowd. And I thought to myself how odd it was that I should have seen the phantom of him at this very hour last night and the man himself now, and I began walking towards him with the idea of saying, “Anyhow, it is in the tube that we meet tonight.” . . . And then a terrible and awful thing happened. Just as the train emerged from the tunnel he jumped down on to the line in front of it, and the train swept along over him up the platform.