The Ghost Story Megapack

by Various Writers

  “‘Cover the face of him,’ says the constable, for that was the sort of face he had, better than I can tell you, and havin’ nothin’ to cover it they turned him face down, and made off runnin’ to Drumboyne for the residint magistrit.

  “Well, sor, when they took that chimney down they found a room off it, all littered with bones and birds’ feathers and rats’ tails. It wouldn’t do to be tellin’ you of that room, more than it had no winda to it and had been built on purpose be Sir Michael Carey when he put the house up. He’d took to live in it, for that was the way his heart was, and at long last he took to live nowhere else, and that was how the sergeant brought him down and he must have been a matter of a hundred and tin years of age, they reckoned.

  “He had his bagpipes to cheer him and frighten away tinints and he’d be out be nights scavengin’ for food—they say they found the bones of childer in the room, but may be that was a lie got be him tryin’ to drag Pat Leftwidge up the flue—but faith I wouldn’t put it beyond him. For that chap was a spider, sor, they said his face was the face of a spider, and his arms and legs no better.

  “He’d begun in the shape of a man, maybe, but the spider in him got the bether of him. Look, there’s all there’s left of the house, sor, thim walls beyond the trees. They set a light to it to get shut o f that room and if you knew the truth of it all, you wouldn’t blame them.”

  THE DRUMMER GHOST, by John William DeForest

  A bit of village—we can hardly call it a street; at best, the mere fag-end of a street; six houses and a church spire in sight—one of the houses, brick.

  This is by no means the whole of Johnsonville, for the greater number of its dwellings lie in a neighboring hollow, clustered industriously beside the mill-dam over the Wampoosue, or loafing, as it were, at the two ends of the wooden bridge, or straggling, like picnickers, down the course of the black streamlet. But as these are all hidden from us by trees, and are, moreover, of not the least consequence to our story, we will not invade their sequestered insignificance. A young man, and also, of course, a young woman, demand our instant attention.

  “Your uncle’s appearance quite interests me,” says Mr. Adrian Underhill. “Isn’t there something—I don’t quite know how to express myself—something rather remarkable about him?”

  “I don’t perceive that there is, except his appetite for wives; he is just finishing his third.”

  To think of a girl of nineteen, and a blond, blue-eyed girl at that, making such a speech! But in Miss Marian Turner’s auburn there was a slightly disquieting dash of red, and about the corners of her rosy mouth there was a flexible twist which reminded one of the snapper of a whip-lash.

  Furthermore, she carried herself upright, in a knightly manner, always ready for joust; she had a quick, positive step, as if she knew to the ends of her little bootees what she wanted; and there was a look in her eyes which declared, “I always mean more than I say.” Clearly, if she had not seen life, she had guessed more than enough of it.

  “Is that speaking light-mindedly of uncles?” she added. “I don’t remember that it is anywhere commanded to be reverential towards them. Well, I mustn’t perplex you. Don’t mention my queerness to anyone.”

  “Of course not,” answered Mr. Underhill, meanwhile studying her with profound attention.

  Just graduated from Winslow University, and from the quiet, bookish sociables of New Boston, he had fancied himself well read up in young ladies, and was almost awed at meeting one whom he could not understand. She said and did the most original things; that is, he considered them most original; and to him what was the difference? Moreover, she had a way of ordering him which was quite new in his experience, for he had been a bit of a Grandison among the female circles of New Boston, and at home he was an only son, the natural governor of his mother and sisters. What was still more curious, and what was even alarming, he had begun to perceive that he liked to be thus ordered.

  “There he is,” she resumed, nodding towards a tall, thin, haggard man of fifty-five, who just then appeared in the veranda of the brick house; “he looks as if he wanted to see one of us. It can’t be me. You had better come in.”

  Underhill hesitated. Parents in New Boston had put it to him about his “intentions,” and perhaps Mr. Joshua Turner was waiting to ask him what he meant to do for Marian. He was aware that he had paid the girl some undeniable courtship, and still he was perplexedly conscious that he did not as yet hanker for marriage. But he drifted along, as is the manner of his unwise sex, and so presently found himself in the veranda of the brick house.

  While Marian walked haughtily into the dwelling, without speaking to or looking at her uncle, the latter arrested Underhill with a grim, skeleton-like shake of the hand. Although a landgoing citizen from his youth, Mr. Joshua Turner was as long and lean and brown as the Ancient Mariner, and had moreover somewhat of his ghostly expression of enchantment. A shock of tossled, iron-gray hair; a high, narrow, wrinkled, tawny forehead; hollow black eyes, surrounded with circle on circle of brown and yellow; a lofty Roman nose, looking across a wide, thin-lipped mouth at a projecting chin; cheeks so sunken and pitted that they put you in mind of the epithets weather-beaten and worm-eaten; the whole face discolored by bile, indigestions, and lack of exercise, and corroded by care; the expression eager, anxious, and troubled, to the verge of lunacy;—such was the awful head of Joshua Turner.

  “Mr. Underhill, come into the parlor,” he said, in a deep, tremulous voice. “I have something private, strictly private, to tell you.”

  Leading the way into a sombre, curtained room, rendered additionally funereal by that musty smell which country parlors are apt to have, he turned the key in the door, and, without inviting his guest to sit, commenced striding from corner to corner.

  “Mr. Underhill, I am almost crazy,” he said. “I don’t know but I am quite crazy. If I am, it is the drummer—the invisible, ghostly, fiendish, infernal drummer—who has made me so. Who wouldn’t be crazy with that unearthly, horrible rubadub-dub?”

  Here he began to beat upon his left hip, in the manner of one drumming, meanwhile repeating rapidly, “Rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub.”

  Underhill looked on in amazement and some slight alarm, suspecting that the man was really insane. He mustered up what anecdotes he had heard of lunatics, glanced at the door and windows, in order to settle upon his best method of escape, and finally took a chair by the fireplace, so as to have the poker within easy reach.

  “Yes, that is his devilish tune,” resumed Turner. “He began it only three days ago, and it has already driven me nearly mad. You are a college man; perhaps you can explain it all. I will tell you the whole story. I was sitting there, in that very chair where you are sitting now, when I first heard him. I was reading a paper—reading about one of Sherman’s battles—when he came drumming down the street. I thought it was a pack of boys, or a company of furloughed soldiers. But it stopped, or he stopped, or she stopped, whatever it may be, and drummed so long and loud that I laid down my candle and went to the window. I looked out; I could see the whole street by the bright moonlight; but there was no one there.”

  After two or three long sighs of profound depression, he resumed: “I thought that the boys or the soldiers had passed, and I went back to the fire. Then it began in the hall—softly, very softly—rubadub-dub. Thinking that some joker was playing pranks upon me, I rushed to the door and opened it. Nothing was there. I went through the hall; I ran upstairs and downstairs; I looked into every room;—nobody! But when I came back to the parlor, something quiet and cold, like a breath of winter wind, followed me. I slammed the door behind me, and I hoped that I had shut the thing out. Then I took up my paper and tried to read. But I was scarcely seated before I heard it again.”

  Here he stopped his march from corner to corner, and commenced circling a chair which stood in the centre of the room, his hands
meanwhile beating gently on his breast.

  “It started at the door,” he continued, “and drummed straight up to me, rubadub-dub; then it drummed all around me, twice, in a circle, rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub; then it stood between me and the hearth, chilling me through, such a dub-dub, rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub. It had begun softly, but as it went on it beat louder and louder and louder, until at last it almost deafened me with its cursed uproar.”

  Once more he drummed violently on his hips, repeating in a hurried stammer, “Rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub.”

  Underhill, as may be supposed, was thinking fast without coming to any conclusion. He made a hasty muddle of the Stratford Mysteries, Rochester Knockings, Cock Lane Ghost, and Salem Witchcraft, and did not perceive that any light was thereby shed upon the case now brought under his consideration. Meanwhile he stared at Mr. Turner, and kept within arm’s-length of the poker.

  “Since then he has never left me for a day,” resumed the Unafflicted.” “I have struck at him, and kicked at him, and thrown books at him, without touching anything, or hearing anything escape. But he has drummed; O, how he has drummed! Nothing will stop his drumming. He will drum me out of my senses; he will drum me out of my life. That is my story, Mr. Underhill. Can you make anything of it?”

  It is not judicious to tell a man that he is a maniac, especially when there is a likelihood that he is one. Instead of venturing on this slightly perilous discourtesy, our young friend meekly replied, “No, Mr. Turner, I can’t at once make anything of it. My college education doesn’t seem to come in play here,” he added. “This sort of thing wasn’t lectured upon by the professors. If I had only been a medical student! It does strike me, Mr. Turner, that this is a matter of nerves. Have you consulted your doctor? Why not call him in?

  “My doctor is an old fool,” exploded the haunted man. “He would give me a blue-pill or some morphine. What good would that do me? Do you suppose the drummer would care if I should take all the blue-pills in the universe? I won’t have any medicine. I am a well man and a sane man, whatever you think to the contrary,” he asseverated, loudly, his eyes glowing like fires within their deep, discolored hollows.

  Although his expression was not reassuring, Underhill nodded assent to his declaration of sanity, being much guided at the moment by worldly wisdom.

  “Come here tonight at ten o’clock, and you shall hear him for yourself,” continued Turner. Then judge whether drugs will stop him.”

  The seance was agreed upon, and the young man departed. As he went out, he gave the house a keener glance of investigation than he had hitherto bestowed upon it. The plan was obvious at first sight: a broad hall running from front to rear, with two rooms on each side; the second story an almost pr’ cise counterpart of the first; above, the usual pointed attic The flooring was of considerable extent, while the stories w. e not more than eight feet in height, giving to the edifice a flattened, squat appearance.

  The material was brick, originally soft, and now very old, so that the exterior had become strangely haggard and pitted, as if from a complex attack of architectural consumption and smallpox. It seemed as if the building were not only infirm with age, but infected, disfigured, and unwholesome with disease. A coat of glaring red paint, put on within the last three or four years, reminded one of rouge on the wrinkled visage of a dowager. In spite of the fresh coloring without, and the new papering within, the building had a moldering look and a musty odor. Underhill could not help conceding that the nineteenth century, as it exists in the United States of America, rarely offers a more suitable haunting-place to a ghost.

  At a quarter to ten in the evening, he returned to the house, and was received by Turner in the parlor.

  “Excuse my wife for not seeing you,” said the haunted man. “She has gone to bed. Her health is very feeble, and this mystery has nearly prostrated her. As for my niece, she has her own ways; I don’t pretend to govern her. By the way, you may think it odd, Mr. Underhill, that I should make my niece earn her own living, in part, at least, as a school-teacher. I do it from principle, sir. Young people should learn how hard it is to get money; then they will know how to keep it. I understand that people talk about it; but what business is it of theirs? My conscience tells me that my course is the right one.”

  Underhill nodded; he rather thought that the young lady might make a better wife for a poor man because of this system of education; and he, just beginning the world, was a poor man, the very one that he was thinking of for her. Not finding it easy, however, to converse concerning Miss Marian, he asked: “Any more light as to the nature of your—your ghost?”

  “Judge for yourself,” replied Turner, with an anxious glance at the clock.

  “Is he regular? Does he come at certain hours?”

  “Not always. Morning and evening. He has been thrice at ten o’clock. There!”

  Rubadub-dub! There was no doubt about it; a drum of some sort was being beaten upon by something; rubadub-dub, down the street, through the door-yard, and into the veranda; there it rattled furiously for a moment, and then stopped. Underhill was so startled by the sound—it so surprised and convinced, or deluded, his hitherto incredulous soul—that he felt his skin writhe and the roots of his hair shudder. Perhaps he would not have been so moved had he not seen all the yellowish and brownish patches of Turner’s complexion bleach to an ash-color at the first sound of the ghostly tattoo. For a full minute the two sat motionless, staring at each other with an air of sentenced criminals. When the young man recovered himself, he sprang up, and stepped softly toward the door, his idea being to steal into the veranda, and surprise some practical joker. His companion arrested him with a wave of the hand, and a hoarse whisper, “It is coming in.”

  Did it come in? Underhill was not quite satisfied as to that point. The rattle of a drum entered, no doubt; it rolled through the parlor in a distressingly audible manner; but did the mysterious agency which produced it likewise find ingress? Turner evidently believed that the drummer, whoever or whatever it might be, was in the parlor; his ghastly glare said thus much, and he vehemently asserted it afterwards; but the younger man, healthy in body and soul, was even yet only half convinced.

  Underhill’s first impulse, however, was towards faith; he believed what he saw that his companion believed. For a minute it seemed to him that the drummer entered with a soft rat-tat-ta, the mere trembling of the sticks on the sheepskin; that within a few seconds thereafter he commenced beating a march at the door and continued it straight up to Turner; then came a circling around the haunted man, followed by a furious long roll between him and the fire. This was Underhill’s first impression, and while it lasted it was a terrible one.

  He had supposed that he was a radical unbeliever in spiritual manifestations; that, if phenomena purporting to be of that nature were presented to his attention, he would receive them with perfect coolness; that he would laugh the mystery to scorn and proceed to unravel it. But on the present occasion his soul did not work in this satisfactory fashion. He was almost paralyzed intellectually; he glared about the room wherever Turner glared; he was little less than thoroughly frightened.

  Presently his mind swung back towards its normal rationality, and caught once more at the suspicion that the creator of the noise was in the hall. Rising softly and gliding to the door, he cautiously opened it. No one! nothing but the rolling of the drum; nothing but a clamor without a cause. Another remarkable fact was that the drumming did not seem quite so clear without as within. Unchecked by this observation, to which in fact he then hardly gave a thought, he walked to the lower end of the passage, severely shook a venerable overcoat which hung there upon a nail, returned as far as the foot of the stairway, and mounted to the upper hall.

  It seemed to him now as if he were nearing the mystery; and finding another stairway, he pushed on to the garret, but there the uproar grew dull again. He had in his hand
a candle which he had taken from the lower passage, and which answered in the Turner house the purpose of an entry lamp. By its light he glanced over the trunks, broken furniture, dismissed demijohns and bottles, fragments of carpets and other indescribable rubbish, which ordinarily encumber a garret, without discovering the smallest fraction of a band of music. Moreover the noise had ceased; it had died away as he set foot on the creaking garret floor; the house was as silent as a decrepit and sickly old mansion could be.

  Now back to the second floor; and here he made a discovery. Marian Turner, dressed in her every-day guise and holding a lighted candle in her hand, met him with a mournful and stern countenance which put him in mind of Lady Macbeth.

  “Tell my uncle,” she whispered, “that my brother must be dead.”

  “Your brother?” he inquired. “I didn’t know that you had a brother.”

  “I have none now,” she answered, her voice shaking with unmistakable emotion. “You will learn yet that he is dead.” After a brief hesitation she continued more firmly: “My uncle put him to a trade, and he hated it. Last year he ran away and joined the army as a drummer-boy. He would have been sixteen today, if he had lived.”

  Here her self-possession quite broke down, and she burst into a loud sobbing. Underhill tried to offer encouragement; he took her hand, and then he drew her towards him: indeed we have reason to suspect that she cried for a while upon his shoulder. At last she raised her head, and whispering, “Tell my uncle,” slipped away to her own room.

  Returning to the parlor, Underhill found Turner, his face buried in his hands, shivering in front of the fire. At the entry of the young man, the elder, without removing his bony fingers from his sunken eyes, inquired in a shuddering voice, “Did you find anything?”