The Second Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®: 20 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors

by Fritz Leiber

  Somehow the thought that the police would find Kirkham made him feel a little better. There was something secure in the thought of the police, the protectors of society. That was one of the things the police were for: to round up escaped lunatics. He went back to the office, sat down at the desk to write a report on Kirkham’s escape.

  “Patient suffering from emotional disturbances with paranoid characteristics,” he wrote. “Visual hallucinations of an unusual type—”

  He was alone in the little office. He thought about Kirkham’s hallucination. The patient had imagined something was watching him from behind.

  Suddenly the doctor had the impression that something was watching him from behind.

  He ignored the feeling.

  It grew stronger. It became so, strong he was forced to turn around in his chair.

  Flesh crawled all over his body as he turned.

  Something was watching him from behind.

  A circle of misty light hung in the air. Beyond this circle, an unimaginable distance away yet at the same time right here in the room with him, was a creature that had the yellow eyes of a goat.

  The doctor could see the yellow orbs, the slitted pupils.

  The eyes regarded him approvingly.

  “I want to thank you,” the voice of the eyes whispered in his mind.

  “Thank you!” the doctor choked.

  “Yes. For not releasing him. If he had gotten away from us again, we might not have found him until it was too late. But we’ve got him now, thanks to you.”

  “Uh!”

  “He was very dangerous,” the voice of the yellow eyes continued. “He had actually made a most important discovery. If he had been permitted to use his discovery, he might have destroyed the whole human race. You were very helpful when you refused to release him.”

  “Uh?” the doctor’s voice was a croak. “Who—what are you?”

  The yellow eyes smiled at him. “You may think of me as a sort of supernal policeman,” the voice whispered. “As a kind of supernatural watchman set to guard your people.”

  The voice whispered off into a vast distance and was gone. Then the circle of light began to disappear. The last thing the doctor saw were the two yellow eyes watching him approvingly from some far-off space. Then they vanished too, and he was alone in the room.

  * * * *

  A year later Dr. Cavanaugh’s book, “Visual Hallucinations in Paranoia,” was published.

  It did not include a discussion of the case of Kirkham, the patient who had thought he had seen goat eyes watching him from inside a misty circle.

  THE HAUNT, by Manly Banister

  Originally published in The Nekromanticon, 1950.

  There is one thing of this world—perhaps I should say out of this world—concerning which every man, great and small, will hazard an opinion. Perhaps he possesses no political color; likely he would not dream of passing judgment upon the Epicurean merit of anchovies or olives; but he will be certain to declaim at length, and in no uncertain terms, upon the pro or the con of haunted houses.

  A haunted house is, you might say, a matter of opinion.

  I have a positive opinion, I believe in haunted houses. In the course of reading this story, you will learn why I do.

  I know a house that is haunted. It is a tumble-down affair (the best kind for haunts, really), located at the edge of the town of Acton, where miners’ modest dwelling houses yield in a thin straggle to the encroaching prairie, grown head-high with grass.

  I refer to Acton as a “town” out of pure advisement. Acton is hardly more than a village. Yet, it is a planned village, nicely laid out, its streets radiating squarely with the points of the compass from the Plaza in front of the City Hall. The latter is a grandiose structure, really more than the urban unimportance of Acton calls for, constructed of gray granite, standing two stories high with Gothic arched windows trimmed in white.

  The most noteworthy achievement of the town elders has been to install a red and green traffic light in front of the City Hall, so you can see the place is really quite modern and not the proper setting for a ghost story at all.

  Although I have not been into town proper in some time, I recall very well the neat rows of shining bungalows that were the pride of the town. Most of the local citizenry labored in the iron mines. None hungered in this exemplary town, none was without work or other means of subsistence.

  Happily to my mind comes the analogy that the town of Acton was very like a gorgeous social pie, well-baked and palatable to all. There was—is, I should say—the solid crust of work-a-day miners, the nourishing filling of well-to-do middle class, and over all a spread of luscious cream in the form of Acton society, the Bates family, owners and operators of the Bates Mining and Industrial Corporation.

  The Bateses, in short, were the meringue of this tasty pie; while out at the edge of town, like an evil black bug subsisting upon the fruity richness of this delectable confection, stood ancient, ghost-ridden Acton Castle, shunned by man and beast.

  Acton Castle was as vacant as a medieval suit of armor in the Twentieth Century (and for much the same reason). Situated at the remote end of an avenue of pretty trees, it was a quarter of a mile removed from its nearest neighbor, the aforementioned miners’ cottages, and scarcely a stone’s throw from the town’s pioneer burying ground. Crassly, it was called the Old Graveyard, being neglected, weedy, overgrown with weeping willows and beset by leaning of the gravestones.

  Acton Castle had been built in the 1870’s by one Captain Ebenezer Acton, founder of the town and rumored to have been a pirate of sorts. Obeying an unpredictable whimsy, the old pirate had added from year to year to the original Castle. In time, it developed into a rambling structure, made up of a multiplicity of rooms and apartments, of consiguent sections with adjacent ells, tipped-on balconies, cupolas, and blind towers complete with Doric columns and Roman arches—but blind by virtue of having no steps leading to them.

  Once a sight of grandeur, Acton Castle in ruins was now something less than impressive. It sagged in the middle and exuded an atmosphere of mildewed rottenness, like an ancient carriage rolled to the middle of an unused pasture and left there to the appetite of the elements. Weedy looking vines crawled precariously upon the bleached, splintered facing from which the paint had long since peeled away. Windows, sans frames and glass, goggled upon cheerless environs of encroaching grass and tangled bushes. From the roof the shingles were lifted, like scabs of a vile disease wrought by the tenure of Time. Toppled chimneys strewed the roof with bricks and rubble; the balconies had come unstuck and were fallen; the cupolas sagged; the towers leaned.

  Grisly enough by day, by night the Castle became a crouching shadow of hideous menace. It seemed as if it gathered itself to heave erect and sprint the length of the sad little avenue of pretty trees. Dreadful and malign was the appearance of it, a blight upon the day, a purulent sore festering in the womb of night.

  All this was in accordance with the moribund desire of Captain Ebenezer Acton. The dead Captain’s will specifically requested the neglecting and rotting away of his former abode for a significant purpose which I shall shortly reveal.

  During his lifetime, the Captain had owned all the land upon which the town of Acton was built. In spite of his generous grants of land to the town—he had even deeded over the cemetery acreage west of the Castle—his personality was not a generous one, for his was a nature beset by peculiarities and whimsicalities.

  His outlook upon life and the living had been crabbed, not to say sour. He had lived alone in his monstrous Castle, spending his time, folks said, marching from room to deserted room, from apartment to vacant apartment, thundering in his heavy sea boots up one stair and down another, gloating with satisfaction over his peculiarly fantastic home.

  As he had lived, so the Captain died�
�alone. When, after an undetermined interval, the corpse was taken out and buried, he lay alone in the somewhat ornate, if run down, crypt a hundred yards from the edge of the necropolis. This placed it atop a slight rise in the ground, the highest grave in the acreage. The location had been chosen by the Captain himself. His burial there had been provided for in the same last will and testament that had given all the property he had possessed (with one exception) to the town.

  The mausoleum was sturdily constructed of the regionally prevalent gray granite. It had an iron gate, pompous looking with its grill of intertwined serpents supporting in their coils a letter “A.”

  Atop the crypt were some globular looking things that had iron spearheads thrust up out of them, and the very middle of the stone roof was a granite dome surmounted by a blazing star of gold. It was not really gold, but stone covered with a species of gilt, the secret of which the Captain took to the grave with him; for instead of showing wear under the influence of time and weather, it seemed to grow brighter with the years.

  The golden star was so situate at the highest point of the oldest part of the burying ground that it caught the last rays of the westering sun, whatever the season. The environs were in a ruinous state after three generations of positive neglect, choked with weeds and grass until neighboring graves were lost in the sea of undulant herbage, grown up with trees, vines, bushes and brambles until the sun scarcely ever shone upon the sombre earth beneath.

  Nonetheless, every evening that the sun was visible, its horizontal rays managed somehow to strike through the leafy screen of interlaced branches and briars and set the golden star to blazing and scintillating as if it glowed by itself.

  It is called “The Captain’s Signal” and gaffers of Acton will tell you it is like an alarm clock to the sleeping-in-death Captain, telling him it is time to awaken from his cold sleep of the day and be up and about for a night of serious haunting.

  Incredible as it may seem, the Captain had provided in his will for his posthumous spook. He had realized in wily fashion that no town desires the daily burden of having to laugh off a haunted house. It is too easy a matter to tear the spectral dwelling down, to stamp it out, to eradicate it utterly—when there is no legal owner extant to protect the property. Therefore, upon willing his earthly property to the town, the Captain had omitted the property on which the Castle stood. Further, he made the bequest contingent upon this request: that Acton Castle be permitted to stand without hindrance or repairs, to be the wandering hall of his own restless spirit, until dust and decay should claim the structure and it be no longer fit, even for haunting.

  As if this provision were not sufficient to insure undisturbed haunting by his departed spirit, the Captain had written into his will the unmentionable “horror clause.” He threatened with nameless terror and death any who should be rash enough to disregard his injunction. None should trespass or lurk upon the “ghost property” under pain of a similar horrid fate.

  The Actonites smiled at this clause when it was made public; but after the furniture had been hauled away and sold at auction and proper trespassing notices had been posted at door and gate, the villagers strictly shunned the place.

  * * * *

  It was a long time later, after the death of the Captain, that is, that four boys decided it would be great fun to brave the mysteries of the Captain’s bequest to his own ghost.

  A tramp was the only witness. At dawn, he stumbled out of the supposed sanctuary in dazed horror. The boys hung in a neat row down the middle of the central living room, suspended by new hempen ropes from iron hooks imbedded in the ceiling.

  The frightful revenant of Captain Ebenezer Acton had fulfilled the promise of its earthly progenitor.

  Much grief and disorganized travail followed in the wake of this incident. Naturally, nobody believed a ghost responsible. The tramp, having spread the news, took to his heels and was never seen again. Therefore the tramp was considered the culpable criminal, and to this day, it is not safe for a tramp to approach the limits of the town of Acton.

  As for the tramp, innocent fellow, he died years later on a bed of old newspapers in a boxcar, screaming in a delirium that re-enacted in his fevered brain the horrid scene which he, and he alone, had witnessed that long ago night in Acton Castle.

  * * * *

  The affair might have ended there had it not been for Joshua Benton, a farmer of the neighborhood and, incidentally, the father of one of the dead boys.

  Joshua was an emaciated individual, already past the prime of life. He and Harry, the boy, had lived alone in their farmhouse a half-mile from the limit of Acton, the boy’s mother having died when the lad was a baby.

  After a fortnight of dry-eyed grieving, Joshua took up his venerable shotgun, weighed his pockets with a dozen rounds of buckshot, and betook himself to the macabre Castle of Death.

  It was just at sunset that he pursued his ungainly way through the overgrown yard, and the Captain’s Signal was blazing balefully atop the hill in the graveyard. Joshua groped his way to the room where with his own hands he had cut down his son’s stiffened corpse and he settled down to await the coming of he knew not what, in the middle of the night.

  Residents of the nearest house a quarter of a mile away heard the booming of Joshua’s shotgun. This was followed by a prolonged, blubbering scream…then silence for the space of ten heartbeats, followed by another agonized roar from Joshua’s ancient blunderbuss. After that came stillness absolute.

  It was a dark night, without a moon. Clouds had come driving up since sunset and these obscured the feeble light of stars. The neighbors were loth to turn out and investigate. In spite of this and owing to much telephoning and mutual curiosity, a group was finally formed to look into the matter. These men armed themselves with clubs, shotguns, lanterns and flashlights, and sallied forth to discover what had happened.

  They found Joshua Benton very dead indeed, hanging to a single iron hook in the middle of the ceiling. In Joshua’s head was a great hole, blown out by force of a charge of buckshot. Blood had gushed from the terrible wound, drenching his garments, and the shotgun lay in a pool of gore beneath his twisted feet.

  Later examination of this weapon proved, by means of fingerprints, that no man’s hand save Joshua’s had touched the gun, and it was obvious he had blown out his own brains to avoid the horror of strangulation at the hands of some nameless Thing.

  Farmers and townsmen shuddered as they cut Joshua down. They were infuriated with themselves for not having removed the hooks before this. They told themselves that the father, crazed with grief, had deliberately hanged and shot himself.

  One disturbing factor was noted but passed over. Somebody had removed three of the hooks. Only one remained, and Joshua had hung from it. And when they tried to remove it from the rotten beam in the ceiling, it resisted their noblest efforts. They had to leave the hook in the ceiling perforce.

  The group left hurriedly then, bearing Joshua on the remains of an old door, and each man feeling a cold, dreadful prickling at the back of his neck. That was the last time anybody defied the dying injunction of the scoundrelly Captain.

  * * * *

  Things are different today, but the story is still gaffed about in Acton, with more or less variation, but substantially as I have related it here. There is, however, a difference from the old days. Present generation scoffers ridicule the affair in a more or less enlightened manner.

  My own position on the matter is a delicate one. It is true that I have never allied myself with the scoffing crowd. Nor yet have I consorted with superstitious belief. I know what I know. I become mixed at this point and am likely to lose sight of tenses unless I watch myself.

  Let us drop back to a month ago. I was then belabored by a feeling of blind horror with respect to the haunt of Acton Castle, I was goaded by a desire to stifle this terror that breathed a m
iasmic fetor upon the clean air of the town.

  For years I had looked forward with terror and loathing to an ultimate grappling with the sinister problem. Yet I dreaded the thought as much as the action. Long before this I had sworn one day to lay the ghost of Captain Ebenezer Acton, yet I had tarried. Why? I feared the frightful and factual fate that were mine should I fail!

  Too, I had lacked the opportunity. To do as I desired required the forcing of matters to a head. I preferred to wait and let events shape their own course.

  I have mentioned the Bateses, the cream of the Acton pie. It must be senility that made me omit the Gilmans. Where the Bateses were the top of the heap, the Gilmans were of those who kept the top from being the bottom, Joe Gilman worked in the mine office, and he had a son named Peter, attending Acton High School, senior class. The Bates clan, personified in the towering, lion-maned figure of Tom Bates, progenitor, joyed in the future’s promise for pretty Betty Bates, his daughter, Betty was tiny, a little doll of a thing, and just eighteen.

  She had a lot of yellow hair, and tempestuous blue eyes that belied the softness of her delicately curved body. She had a firm little chin, too, showing the innate strength of the Bates character. The Bates clan would have been horrified to know that Betty set her cap for young Peter Gilman.

  Young love is a wonderful thing! What possible connection could it have with the revenant of Captain Ebenezer Acton?

  Here is how it came about. Peter, of course, was one of those who scoffed at the notion of haunts. A bunch of the youngsters were discussing the subject one day—it had something to do with their school work—and as a result, Peter found himself faced with a dare to spend the night in Acton Castle.

  “I will,” said Peter solemnly, “if one of you will stay with me—and no tricks!”