The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  The voice interrupted her furiously: “You are doing a very foolish thing!”

  “I see,” said Mr. Lemoine coolly, “you are still an earthbound spirit. You are afraid that something hurtful to your vanity is about to be revealed.”

  “You should be free from this material delusion. We,” added the turnip-faced man pompously, “are neither noble nor learned. We shall not think the less of you if it is true you have boasted.”

  “I am not a boaster!” stormed the voice.

  “Your grave is in the cemetery at Sceaux,” said Ada Trimble rapidly. “You died in 1858, not 1837; you were neither peer nor professor—no one visits your grave. It is miserable, neglected, covered with weeds. It took the keeper an hour’s work even to cut away the rubbish sufficiently to see your epitaph.”

  “Now we know that,” said Mr. Lemoine smoothly, “we can help you to shake off these earthly chains.”

  “These are lies.” The voice rose to a hum like the sound of a spinning top. “Lies—”

  “No,” cried Ada. “You have lied; you have never seen God, either.”

  “You may,” suggested Mr. Lemoine, “have seen a fluid personage in a bright illumination, but how can you have been sure it was God?”

  The humming sound grew louder; then the horn flew over, as if wrenched off, and toppled onto the table, then onto the floor. Mr. Lemoine crossed the platform and switched on the light.

  “An evil spirit,” he said in his routine voice. “Now that he has been exposed I don’t suppose that he will trouble us again.” And he congratulated Ada on her shrewd and careful investigations, though the stare he gave her through his glasses seemed to express a mild wonder as to why she had taken so much trouble. The meeting broke up; there was coffee for a few chosen guests upstairs in the room lined with books on the “occult”; no one seemed impressed by the meeting; they talked of other things; only Ada Trimble was profoundly moved.

  This was the first time she had come to these banal coffee-drinkings. Hardly knowing what she did, she had come upstairs with these queer, self-possessed people who seemed to own something she had not got. They were neither obsessed nor afraid. Was she afraid? Had not Gabriel Letourneau vanished for ever? Had he not broken the means of communication between them? Undoubtedly she had exorcized him; she would be free now of this miserable, humiliating, and expensive obsession. She tried to feel triumphant, released, but her spirit would not soar. In the back of her mind surged self-contempt. “Why did I do it? There was no need. His lies hurt no one. To impress these people was his one pleasure—perhaps he is in hell, and that was his one freedom from torment—but I must think sanely.”

  This was not easy to do; she seemed to have lost all will-power, all judgment. “I wish Helen had not escaped.” She used the last word unconsciously; her fingers were cold round the thick cup, her face in the dingy mirror above the fireplace looked blurred and odd. She tried to steady herself by staring at the complacent features of Astra Destiny, who was being distantly gracious to a circle of admirers, and then by talking to commonplace Mr. Lemoine, whose indifference was certainly soothing. “Oh, yes,” he said politely, “we get a good deal of that sort of thing. Malicious spirits—evil influences—”

  “Aren’t you afraid?” asked Ada faintly.

  “Afraid?” asked Mr. Lemoine, as if he did not know what the word meant. “Oh, dear no, we are quite safe—” he added, then said: “Of course, if one was afraid, if one didn’t quite believe, there might be danger. Any weakness on one’s own part always gives the spirits a certain power over one—”

  All this was, Ada knew, merely “patter”; she had heard it, and similar talk, often enough, and never paid much attention to it; now it seemed to trickle through her inner consciousness like a flow of icy water. She was afraid, she didn’t quite believe; yet how could she even but think that? Now she must believe. Astra Destiny could not have “faked” Gabriel Letourneau. Well, then, he was a real person—a real spirit? Ada Trimble’s mind that had once been so cool and composed, so neat and tidy, now throbbed in confusion.

  “Where do they go?” she asked childishly. “These evil spirits? I mean—today—will he come again?”

  “I don’t suppose so, not here. He will try to do all he can elsewhere. Perhaps he will try to impose on other people. I am afraid he has wasted a good deal of our time.”

  “How can you say ‘wasted’!” whispered Ada Trimble bleakly. “He proves that the dead return.”

  “We don’t need such proof,” said Mr. Lemoine, meekly confident and palely smiling.

  “I had better go home now,” said Ada; she longed to escape and yet dreaded to leave the warmth, the light, the company; perhaps these people were protected, and so were safe from the loathed, prowling, outcast spirit. She said good-bye to Madame Destiny, who was pleasant, as usual, without being effusive, and then to the others. She could not resist saying to Essie Clark: “Do you think that I did right?”

  “Right?” the overworked woman smiled mechanically, the chipped green coffee-pot suspended in her hand.

  “In exposing—the voice—the spirit?”

  “Oh, that! Of course. You couldn’t have done anything else, could you?” And Miss Clark poured her coffee and handed the cup, with a tired pleasantry, to a tall Indian who was the only elegant looking person present. Ada Trimble went out on to the landing; the smell of frying, of stew, filled the gaunt stairway; evidently one of the transient servants was in residence; through the half-open door behind her Ada could hear the babble of voices, then another voice, deep, harsh, that whispered in her ear: “Canaille!”

  She started forward, missed her foot-hold, and fell.

  Mr. Lemoine, always efficient, was the first to reach the foot of the stairs. Ada Trimble had broken her neck.

  “A pure accident,” said Astra Destiny, pale, but mistress of the situation. “Everyone is witness that she was quite alone at the time. She has been very nervous lately, and those high heels …”

  MRS. MORREL’S LAST SÉANCE

  Edgar Jepson

  IT IS LIKELY THAT the most widely read works of Edgar (Alfred) Jepson (1863–1938) are not the rather dull, lightweight detective novels he began to write soon after the turn of the nineteenth century, nor the pedestrian adventure novels with which he began his career as a novelist, but his translations from the French of novels and stories by Maurice Leblanc, for whom he brought to the English reading public many of the famous Arsene Lupin adventures, and the once-popular novel The Man with the Black Feather (1912) by Gaston Leroux.

  Born in London, Jepson graduated from Baliol College, Oxford, then spent five years in Barbados before returning to take a job as editor at Vanity Fair, where he worked with Richard Middleton and the libidinous Frank Harris. He became involved, albeit tangentially, with members of the Decadent Movement, such as Ernest Dawson, John Gawsworth (with whom he collaborated on several short stories), and Arthur Machen. The first novel he wrote under his own name, Sibyl Falcon (1895), features a female adventurer, and he followed this with such fantasy novels as The Horned Shepherd (1904), which features the worship of Pan, and No. 19 (1910; published in the United States as The Garden at 19), in which a Londoner brings to life a statue of Pan. Among his better thrillers are The Mystery of the Myrtles (1909), which involves human sacrifice, and The Moon Gods (1930), a lost race novel. His son, Selwyn Jepson, was a prolific mystery writer, and his granddaughter is the noted British novelist Fay Weldon.

  “Mrs. Morrel’s Last Séance” was originally published in the February 1912 issue of The London Magazine.

  Mrs. Morrel’s Last Séance

  EDGAR JEPSON

  I HAD ATTENDED ALL the séances of Mrs. Joaquine Morrel during the two previous winters; and of all the mediums I have sat with, in the States or in Europe, she was the best. Sometimes, of course, she was not in the right mood or condition, or whatever it is; and the phenomena were trivial; sometimes we got mere trickery, and that poorly done. Like most other mediums,
public or even private, if real phenomena did not come, Mrs. Morrel would do her best to produce imitations. Sometimes she would quite deliberately use trickery rather than endure the exhaustion and nausea which always followed the genuine exercise of her powers.

  But often at her séances I had seen phenomena which I did not believe to have been produced by trickery. I did not profess to be able to find any explanation of them; and I was profoundly sceptical about their having anything to do with the spirits of the dead. I inclined to the theory that they were produced by the obscure and mysterious action of the subconscious, or, if you prefer it, the subliminal self. But whatever their cause, I saw phenomena which I accounted genuine; and, as I say, after these Mrs. Morrel was in a state of utter prostration. She seemed not only to have lost vital force, but actually to have lost blood, so weak and pale and shrunken was she.

  I came to the séance on the fourth of last December with no great expectations: for it was a mere chance whether the phenomena would be interesting, or more or less trickery. Besides, the night was very cold, and the weather had been abominable; and that was against Mrs. Morrel’s being in a favourable condition for the best exercise of her powers. But I had not been in the room with her three minutes before I was sure that she was in uncommonly good spirits; and I began to expect a good sitting.

  I was the first to arrive; and we chatted for a few minutes about what she had been doing since the last séance I had attended, and about the members of the circle which was to sit that night. I became aware that one of the reasons of her good spirits was that she was wearing a new dress, a black, watered silk. I complimented her on it; and she made me feel the material, what a good, thick, serviceable silk it was. She was plainly so proud of it that I again complimented her on her taste, and congratulated her on having got so exactly what she wanted and such an excellent fit. Indeed, the dress suited her very well, for she was a dark, almost swarthy, black-haired, biggish woman, and stout, weighing over eleven stone. Her rather heavy face lighted up and grew quite animated at my compliments.

  Then the other members of the circle began to arrive, singly or two at a time. There was Eric Magnus, who was even more sceptical than I, though for the last year he had ceased to deny, in anything like his old tone of conviction, that we did sometimes get genuine, inexplicable phenomena at Mrs. Morrel’s séances. There were Harold Beveridge and Walters, the Professor of Mathematics, both of them very careful and shrewd observers of psychical phenomena; and there were Dr. and Mrs. Paterson, Mrs. Grant, Admiral Norton, and a man of the name of Thompson of whom I knew very little, since he had only lately attended the séances. These five were of the credulous type which sees, or makes itself see, anything, and were of very little account in matters psychical.

  Of course, the circle was rather too large. I have always seen the best phenomena when the circle has been composed of three men and two women.

  Last of all came two strangers, who, I gathered, had never sat with Mrs. Morrel, or with anyone else—a Mr. and Mrs. Longridge. Longridge was a man of about forty-five, of a short, square, stout figure, clean-shaven, with a heavy, masterful jaw, thin lips, and keen black eyes, deep-set under projecting brows. He looked a man of uncommon force of character; and I hoped that Mrs. Morrel would keep off trickery, for he was the very man, if he detected it, to make a row. I fancied that I had seen his face among a set of portraits of captains of industry in a magazine.

  His wife was a very pretty, even beautiful, woman of about twenty-eight, with large, dark-brown eyes and dark-brown hair. Her cheeks were pale and she looked fragile; she gave me the impression of having been broken down by some great trouble. It was plain that she was strung up to the highest pitch; her eyes were restless and excited, and her lips kept twitching. Longridge looked rather bored.

  Mrs. Morrel welcomed them with great deference, and Mrs. Longridge came into the room wearing a cloak of sables over her black evening gown. All the members of the circle, except Professor Walters, are rich people, but not to the point of being able to pay two thousand pounds for a sable cloak. I took it that Longridge was a millionaire. When his wife found that the room was quite warm, she gave him the cloak, and he laid it on the little writing-table, against the wall, by the door.

  We were all assembled by a quarter to nine; and I explained to the Longridges the conditions of the séance, especially begging them on no account, whatever happened, to break the circle by loosing the hand of the person on either side of them. Then we settled down on our chairs in a half-circle before the cabinet, which was formed by a curtain hung on a rod across a corner of the room. The curtain was drawn back and it was quite plain that but for Mrs. Morrel’s chair the cabinet was empty.

  Mrs. Morrel went into it and drew the curtain. Magnus turned out two of the gas-jets of the chandelier, and left the third burning about three-quarters of an inch. It gave less light than a candle would have done.

  We joined hands, and Mrs. Grant went to the piano and began to play softly. We talked quietly. I had placed myself between Mr. and Mrs. Longridge. Magnus sat on the other side of Longridge. I realised even more clearly that Mrs. Longridge was strung up to a pitch of extraordinary tenseness. She answered my occasional remarks to her in strained tones; and her hand was rigid, and so cold that it kept mine chilled. Two or three times I begged her to let herself relax, but it was no use.

  Every now and then I felt her quiver. Longridge was relaxed enough; he was leaning back in his chair, his hand was warm and limp in mine, and two or three times I heard him sigh impatiently. It was plain that he had only come to please his wife, and expected nothing.

  We sang the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light,” and then we went on talking. It was about half an hour after we had sat down that I heard in the cabinet the sound of scratching which always preceded Mrs. Morrel’s going into a trance.

  The talk died down in a momentary hush; Mrs. Grant left the piano and sat down on her chair at the end of the half-circle nearest the piano; and Mrs. Longridge said, in a shaky whisper:

  “Is it going to begin?”

  “Very soon,” I said, and I felt that she was quivering, or, to be exact, trembling violently; and after that she was trembling most of the time.

  The first phenomenon was a ball of light. It began in a faint luminousness about three feet from the floor in front of the curtain of the cabinet, and grew stronger and stronger till it was a ball of greenish, phosphorescent light, some six inches in diameter, and about the strength of the light given out by those marine animalculae which are called sea-stars; not, that is, as bright as the light of a glow-worm. Longridge sat upright in his chair.

  The ball of light disappeared suddenly, and from beyond the end of the half-circle a voice began to speak, the voice of Thomas. We were familiar with it; sometimes he would materialise and move about the room, an odd, dwarfish figure; sometimes we only heard his voice. Mrs. Longridge was still, no longer trembling, but breathing quickly.

  I knew that we were going to have an interesting sitting. But it seemed to me that the atmosphere was different from that of any other sitting at which I had been present. There was a sense of strain in it, rather oppressive and unnerving. I thought Mrs. Longridge’s emotion had infected me.

  Two or three lights floated across the room and faded; as one of them passed it, I caught a glimpse of Thomas’s rather impish face—only his face.

  He talked for a while, the usual aimless, trivial, and rather tiresome talk, chiefly to Admiral Norton, who wanted to know what would be the upshot of a naval scandal which was agitating the public mind. Thomas’s views on it were those of a schoolboy of fourteen.

  Then he said: “Sister Sylvia is coming.”

  There came from the cabinet the figure of a nun, a familiar figure at Mrs. Morrel’s séances. She went by the name of Sister Sylvia. She talked to one and another of us. There was very little more to her talk than to that of Thomas. Mrs. Longridge was panting softly, and holding my hand tighter; Longridge, too, had tightened h
is grip, and was leaning forward.

  There was a breath of cold air (a very common phenomenon at séances), then Sister Sylvia said: “There’s a little girl here. She wants——”

  I heard Mrs. Longridge gasp, and without finishing her sentence, Sister Sylvia went back into the cabinet with quite unusual swiftness. It was almost, if one might say so, as if she had been sucked back into it.

  Another light floated across the room and faded. Then the rings of the curtain grated softly along the rod, and there came out of the cabinet the figure of a child, a little girl. Then I saw that the curtain was half-drawn, a thing which had never happened at one of Mrs. Morrel’s séances before, and I could see dimly the figure of Mrs. Morrel on her chair in the cabinet.

  The child came straight to Mrs. Longridge. Mrs. Longridge sank back in her chair, gasping painfully, and her nerveless hand would have slipped from mine had I not held it firmly.

  The child stood before her, and said in a faint, shrill voice: “Oh, Mummy!”

  Mrs. Longridge burst out sobbing, tried vainly to tear her hand from mine, and cried wildly: “Oh, Maisie! Maisie!”

  I heard Mrs. Morrel shuffle in the cabinet. Then suddenly Longridge’s hand gripped mine with a vicelike, crushing grip. He said hoarsely: “Don’t go back, Maisie! Stay with us—try to stay with us—hard!” Then he hissed: “Will her to stay, Grace! Hold her! Will her to stay!”

  He crouched forward, and I saw the glimmer of his eyes staring at the dim figure of Mrs. Morrel.

  Mrs. Longridge and the child were murmuring to one another in broken, staccato voices, just repeating one another’s names. When Longridge had spoken, Mrs. Longridge was silent. She seemed to stiffen, and her breathing was slower, coming in long-drawn gasps; plainly she was concentrating herself in the effort of will.

  Longridge was crushing my hand; I thought that the bones would go. The pain was confusing.I thought that the child had her arms round Mrs. Longridge’s neck.