Ghost Stories

by Leslie S. Klinger

  XIV

  They left St. Sallins the next day.

  Arrived at the end of the journey, Lucy held fast by Mrs. Zant’s hand. Tears were rising in the child’s eyes.

  “Are we to bid her good-by?” she said sadly to her father.

  He seemed to be unwilling to trust himself to speak; he only said:

  “My dear, ask her yourself.”

  But the result justified him. Lucy was happy again.

  1 Not only is this location fictitious, but there is no “St. Sallins” in the Catholic Church.

  2 Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) was a famed German writer and publisher who suffered from a disorder in 1791 that caused him to hallucinate the presence of ghosts for eight weeks. Nicolai believed his delusions were the result of high blood pressure, and he cured himself by applying leeches to his buttocks (a common medical practice at the time). His literary rival Goethe parodied this episode in his classic Faust, by creating a character called the “Proktophantasmist” who Faust encounters during the wild revels of Walpurgisnacht (April 30).

  3 Sir Charles Grandison is the hero of Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), also known as Sir Charles Grandison.

  An Inhabitant of Carcosa

  by AMBROSE BIERCE

  Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) was an American journalist and short-story writer. Critic Michael Dirda ranked Bierce’s horror writing as on a par with that of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, and Lovecraft himself greatly admired Bierce’s work, calling his stories “grim and savage.” Bierce’s most famous short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” makes use of Bierce’s Civil War experiences and is one of the most anthologized American stories. In December 1913, he travelled to Mexico to embed himself in the Mexican Revolution and disappeared from sight, presumed dead. Because of his lively wit and immense talent and the mystery of his death, Bierce has appeared as a character in more than fifty novels. The following story, beloved by aficionados of weird fiction, was first published in the San Francisco Newsletter of December 25, 1886.

  For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God’s will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey—which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.

  Pondering these words of Hali1 (whom God rest) and questioning their full meaning, as one who, having an intimation, yet doubts if there be not something behind, other than that which he has discerned, I noted not whither I had strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my face revived in me a sense of my surroundings. I observed with astonishment that everything seemed unfamiliar. On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber-colored rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.

  The day, I thought, must be far advanced, though the sun was invisible; and although sensible that the air was raw and chill my consciousness of that fact was rather mental than physical—I had no feeling of discomfort. Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse. In all this there were a menace and a portent—a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.

  I observed in the herbage a number of weather-worn stones, evidently shaped with tools. They were broken, covered with moss and half sunken in the earth. Some lay prostrate, some leaned at various angles, none was vertical. They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous tomb or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion. So old seemed these relics, these vestiges of vanity and memorials of affection and piety, so battered and worn and stained—so neglected, deserted, forgotten the place, that I could not help thinking myself the discoverer of the burial-ground of a prehistoric race of men whose very name was long extinct.

  Filled with these reflections, I was for some time heedless of the sequence of my own experiences, but soon I thought, “How came I hither?” A moment’s reflection seemed to make this all clear and explain at the same time, though in a disquieting way, the singular character with which my fancy had invested all that I saw or heard. I was ill. I remembered now that I had been prostrated by a sudden fever, and that my family had told me that in my periods of delirium I had constantly cried out for liberty and air, and had been held in bed to prevent my escape out-of-doors. Now I had eluded the vigilance of my attendants and had wandered hither to—to where? I could not conjecture. Clearly I was at a considerable distance from the city where I dwelt—the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.2

  No signs of human life were anywhere visible nor audible; no rising smoke, no watch-dog’s bark, no lowing of cattle, no shouts of children at play—nothing but that dismal burial-place, with its air of mystery and dread, due to my own disordered brain. Was I not becoming again delirious, there beyond human aid? Was it not indeed ALL an illusion of my madness? I called aloud the names of my wives and sons, reached out my hands in search of theirs, even as I walked among the crumbling stones and in the withered grass.

  A noise behind me caused me to turn about. A wild animal—a lynx—was approaching. The thought came to me: If I break down here in the desert—if the fever return and I fail, this beast will be at my throat. I sprang toward it, shouting. It trotted tranquilly by within a hand’s breadth of me and disappeared behind a rock.

  A moment later a man’s head appeared to rise out of the ground a short distance away. He was ascending the farther slope of a low hill whose crest was hardly to be distinguished from the general level. His whole figure soon came into view against the background of gray cloud. He was half naked, half clad in skins. His hair was unkempt, his beard long and ragged. In one hand he carried a bow and arrow; the other held a blazing torch with a long trail of black smoke. He walked slowly and with caution, as if he feared falling into some open grave concealed by the tall grass. This strange apparition surprised but did not alarm, and taking such a course as to intercept him I met him almost face to face, accosting him with the familiar salutation, “God keep you.”

  He gave no heed, nor did he arrest his pace.

  “Good stranger,” I continued, “I am ill and lost. Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa.”

  The man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue, passing on and away.

  An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was answered by another in the distance. Looking upward, I saw through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades!3 In all this there was a hint of night—the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl. Yet I saw—I saw even the stars in absence of the darkness. I saw, but was apparently not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell did I exist?

  I seated myself at the root of a great tree, seriously to consider what it were best to do. That I was mad I could no longer doubt, yet recognized a ground of doubt in the conviction. Of fever I had no trace. I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigor altogether
unknown to me—a feeling of mental and physical exaltation. My senses seemed all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous substance; I could hear the silence.

  A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk I leaned as I sat held inclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which protruded into a recess formed by another root. The stone was thus partly protected from the weather, though greatly decomposed. Its edges were worn round, its corners eaten away, its surface deeply furrowed and scaled. Glittering particles of mica were visible in the earth about it—vestiges of its decomposition. This stone had apparently marked the grave out of which the tree had sprung ages ago. The tree’s exacting roots had robbed the grave and made the stone a prisoner.

  A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and bent to read it. God in Heaven! MY name in full!—the date of MY birth!—the date of MY death!

  A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the rosy east. I stood between the tree and his broad red disk—no shadow darkened the trunk!

  A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn. I saw them sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending to the horizon. And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

  Such are the facts imparted to the medium Bayrolles4 by the spirit Hoseib Alar Robardin.5

  1 According to Marco Frenschkowski (“Hali,” Crypt of Cthulhu 92 [Eastertide, 1966], 8–11), Hali is the name attributed to several Arabian scholars, mystics, and alchemists, including Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah. It is also a town southeast of Mecca. Robert W. Chambers, in his seminal book The King in Yellow (1895), transmutes it into a lake near the (fictional) city of Hastur, and H. P. Lovecraft references the lake in his story “The Whisperer in Darkness.”

  2 A fictional city, perhaps derived from the medieval town of Carcassonne, called Carcaso in Roman times. The city was under Arab rule from 720 to 759 C.E. Robert W. Chambers borrowed the name for his story “The King in Yellow” and placed Carcosa on the banks of Lake Hali. These fictional place-names have been subsequently adopted by other admiring writers.

  3 The Hyades is a cluster of hundreds of stars, visible in the constellation Taurus. The Hyades were the daughters of Atlas and Aethra and the half-sisters to the Pleiades. Aldebaran (the “follower”) is an orange giant star, also known as Alpha Tauri, in the same constellation and near the Hyades. The name “Aldebaran” was originally given to the entire group of the Hyades, though Aldebaran is much closer than the Hyades and simply lies in the line of sight of the latter.

  4 The medium Bayrolles also appears in Bierce’s story “The Moonlit Road.”

  5 This is not a valid Arabic name.

  The Last of Squire Ennismore

  by CHARLOTTE (MRS. J. H.) RIDDELL

  Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906) was a prolific Irish-born writer of novels and short stories. She was also co-owner of St. James’s Magazine, an influential London-based literary journal. Though she wrote more than fifty books, supernatural phenomena appeared in some of her more noteworthy novels—in particular, Fairy Water, The Uninhabited House, The Haunted River, The Disappearance of Mr. Jeremiah Redworth, and The Nun’s Curse—Riddell also wrote a number of shorter ghost stories, such as “The Open Door” and “Nut Bush Farm.” The following first appeared in her collection Idle Tales in 1887.

  Did I see it myself? No, sir; I did not see it; and my father before me did not see it; nor his father before him, and he was Phil Regan, just the same as myself. But it is true, for all that; just as true as that you are looking at the very place where the whole thing happened. My great-grandfather (and he did not die till he was ninety-eight) used to tell, many and many’s the time, how he met the stranger, night after night, walking lonesome-hike about the sands where most of the wreckage came ashore.”

  “And the old house, then, stood behind that belt of Scotch firs?”

  “Yes; and a fine house it was, too. Hearing so much talk about it when a boy, my father said, made him often feel as if he knew every room in the building, though it had all fallen to ruin before he was born. None of the family ever lived in it after the squire went away. Nobody else could be got to stop in the place. There used to be awful noises, as if something was being pitched from the top of the great staircase down in to the hall; and then there would be a sound as if a hundred people were clinking glasses and talking all together at once. And then it seemed as if barrels were rolling in the cellars;1 and there would be screeches, and howls, and laughing, fit to make your blood run cold. They say there is gold hid away in the cellars; but not one has ever ventured to find it. The very children won’t come here to play; and when the men are plowing the field behind, nothing will make them stay in it, once the day begins to change. When the night is coming on, and the tide creeps in on the sand, more than one thinks he has seen mighty queer things on the shore.”

  “But what is it really they think they see? When I asked my landlord to tell me the story from beginning to end, he said he could not remember it; and, at any rate, the whole rigmarole was nonsense, put together to please strangers.”

  “And what is he but a stranger himself? And how should he know the doings of real quality like the Ennismores? For they were gentry, every one of them—good old stock; and as for wickedness, you might have searched Ireland through and not found their match. It is a sure thing, though, that if Riley can’t tell you the story, I can; for, as I said, my own people were in it, of a manner of speaking. So, if your honour will rest yourself off your feet, on that bit of a bank, I’ll set down my creel and give you the whole pedigree of how Squire Ennismore went away from Ardwinsagh.”2

  It was a lovely day, in the early part of June; and, as the Englishman cast himself on a low ridge of sand, he looked over Ardwinsagh Bay with a feeling of ineffable content. To his left lay the Purple Headland; to his right, a long range of breakers, that went straight out into the Atlantic till they were lost from sight; in front lay the Bay of Ardwinsagh, with its bluish-green water sparkling in the summer sunlight, and here and there breaking over some sunken rock, against which the waves spent themselves in foam.

  “You see how the current’s set, Sir? That is what makes it dangerous for them as doesn’t know the coast, to bathe here at any time, or walk when the tide is flowing. Look how the sea is creeping in now, like a race-horse at the finish. It leaves that tongue of sand bars to the last, and then, before you could look round, it has you up to the middle. That is why I made bold to speak to you; for it is not alone on the account of Squire Ennismore the bay has a bad name. But it is about him and the old house you want to hear. The last mortal being that tried to live in it, my great-grandfather said, was a creature, by name Molly Leary; and she had neither kith nor kin, and begged for her bite and sup, sheltering herself at night in a turf cabin she had built at the back of a ditch. You may be sure she thought herself a made woman when the agent said, ‘Yes: she might try if she could stop in the house; there was peat and bog-wood,’ he told her, ‘and half-a-crown a week for the winter, and a golden guinea once Easter came,’ when the house was to be put in order for the family; and his wife gave Molly some warm clothes and a blanket or two; and she was well set up.

  “You may be sure she didn’t choose the worst room to sleep in; and for a while all went quiet, till one night she was wakened by feeling the bedstead lifted by the four corners and shaken like a carpet. It was a heavy four-post bedstead, with a solid top: and her life seemed to go out of her with the fear. If it had been a ship in a storm off the Headland, it couldn’t have pitched worse and then, all of a sudden, it was dropped with such a bang as nearly drove the heart into her mouth.

  “But that, she said, was nothing to the screaming and laughing, and hustling and rushing that filled the house. If a hundred people had bee
n running hard along the passages and tumbling downstairs, they could not have made greater noise.

  “Molly never was able to tell how she got clear of the place; but a man coming late home from Ballycloyne Fair found the creature crouched under the old thorn there, with very little on her—saving your honour’s presence. She had a bad fever, and talked about strange things, and never was the same woman after.”

  “But what was the beginning of all this? When did the house first get the name of being haunted?”

  “After the old Squire went away: that was what I purposed telling you. He did not come here to live regularly till he had got well on in years. He was near seventy at the time I am talking about; but he held himself as upright as ever, and rode as hard as the youngest; and could have drunk a whole roomful under the table, and walked up to bed as unconcerned as you please at the dead of the night.

  “He was a terrible man. You couldn’t lay your tongue to a wickedness he had not been in the forefront of—drinking, duelling, gambling,—all manner of sins had been meat and drink to him since he was a boy almost. But at last he did something in London so bad, so beyond the beyonds, that he thought he had best come home and live among people who did not know so much about his goings on as the English. It was said that he wanted to try and stay in this world for ever; and that he had got some secret drops that kept him well and hearty. There was something wonderful queer about him, anyhow.