Twenty-Five Ghost Stories, W. Bob Holland [ebook reader txt] 📗

in it faded away. I never saw a man look more thoroughly frightened. “Yes, yes,” he said, eagerly. “In course I know who it is. Why, it’s Barksea Bill, as I pal’d with at one time—and what did he say, guv’nor—that he owed me a grudge? That we was quits at last? Right you are, ’cos he did owe me a grudge. I treated Bill very shabby—very shabby, indeed, and he swore solemn he’d have his revenge. On’y, guv’nor, what you see wasn’t Barksea Bill at all, but his ghost, ’cos Barksea Bill’s been dead and buried this three year.”

I was naturally very much exercised in my mind over this weird development of the affair, and I used to think about it long after Light Toed Jim had once more retired to the seclusion of Portland. While he was in charge at Westford I tried more than once to worm some more information out of him about the defunct Barksea Bill, but with no success. He would say no more than that “Bill was dead and buried this three year;” and with that I had to be content. Gradually I came to have a firm belief that I had indeed been visited by Barksea Bill’s ghost, and I often told the story to brother officers, and sometimes got well laughed at. That, however, mattered little to me; I felt sure that any man{73} who had gone through the same experience would have had the same beliefs.

Of course I got my promotion and was soon afterward married. Things went well with me, and I was lifted from one step to another. In my secret mind I was always sure I owed my first rise to the burglar’s ghost, and I should have continued to think so but for an incident which occurred just five years after my capture of Light Toed Jim.

I had occasion to travel to Sheffield from Westford, and had to change trains at Leeds. The carriage I stepped into was occupied by a solitary individual, who turned his face to me as I sat down. Though dressed in more respectable fashion, I immediately recognized the man who had visited me so mysteriously at my lodgings. My first feeling was one of fear, and I daresay my face showed it, for the man laughed.

“Hallo, guv’nor,” said he; “I see you knew me as soon as you come in. You owes a deal to me, guv’nor; now, don’t you, eh?”

“Look here, my man,” I said, “I’ve been taking you for a ghost these five years past. Now just tell me how you got in and out of my room that night, will you?”

He laughed long and loud at that. “A ghost?” said he. “Well, if that ain’t a good un! Why, easy enough, guv’nor. I was a-lodging for a day or two in the same house. It’s easy enough, when{74} you know how, to open a door very quiet and to slip out, too.”

“But I followed you sharp, and looked for you.”

“Ay, guv’nor; but you looked down, and I had gone up! You should ha’ come up to the attics, and there you’d ha’ found me. So you took me for a ghost? Well, I’m blowed.”

I told him what Light Toed Jim had said in the cell.

“Ay,” said he, “I dessay, guv’nor. You see, ’twas this way—it weren’t Jim’s fault as I wasn’t dead. He tried to murder me, guv’nor, he did, and left me a-lying for dead. So I ses to myself when I comes round that I’d pay him out sooner or later. But after that I quit the profession, Jim’s nasty conduck havin’ made me sick of it. So I went in for honest work at my old trade, which was draining and pipe repairing. I was on a job o’ that sort in Westford, near Miss Singleton’s house, when I see Light Toed Jim. I had a hidea what he was up to, havin’ heard o’ the plate, and I watches him one or two nights, and gets a notion ’ow he was going to work the job. Then, o’ course, you being a officer and close at hand I splits on him—and that’s all.”

“But you had got the time and details correct?”

“Why, o’ course, guv’nor. I was an old hand—served many years at Portland, I have, and I{75} knew just how Jim would work it, after seeing his perlim’nary observations. But a ghost! Ha, ha, ha! Why, guv’nor, you must ha’ been a very green young officer in them days!”

Perhaps I was. At any rate I learned a lesson from the ci-devant Barksea Bill—namely, that in searching a house it is always advisable to look up as well as down.{76}

A PHANTOM TOE.

I am not a superstitious man, far from it, but despite all my efforts to the contrary I could not help thinking, directly I had taken a survey of my chamber, that I should never quit it without going through a strange adventure. There was something in its immense size, heaviness and gloom that seemed to annihilate at one blow all my resolute skepticism as regards supernatural visitations. It appeared to me totally impossible to go into that room and disbelieve in ghosts.

The fact is, I had incautiously partaken at supper of that favorite Dutch dish, sauerkraut, and I suppose it had disagreed with me and put strange fancies into my head. Be this as it may I only know that after parting with my friend for the night I gradually worked myself up into such a state of fidgetiness that at last I wasn’t sure whether I hadn’t become a ghost myself.

“Supposing,” ruminated I, “supposing the landlord himself should be a practical robber and should have taken the lock and bolt from off this door for the purpose of entering here in the dead{77} of the night, abstracting all my property, and perhaps murdering me! I thought the dog had a very cutthroat air about him.” Now, I had never had any such idea until that moment, for my host was a fat (all Dutchmen are fat), stupid-looking fellow, who I don’t believe had sense enough to understand what a robbery or murder meant, but somehow or other, whenever we have anything really to annoy us (and it certainly was not pleasant to go to bed in a strange place without being able to fasten one’s door), we are sure to aggravate it by myriads of chimeras of our own brain.

So, on the present occasion, in the midst of a thousand disagreeable reveries, some of the most wild absurdity, I jumped very gloomily into bed, having first put out my candle (for total darkness was far preferable to its flickering, ghostly light, which transformed rather than revealed objects), and soon fell asleep, perfectly tired out with my day’s riding.

How long I lay asleep I don’t know, but I suddenly awoke from a disagreeable dream of cutthroats, ghosts and long, winding passages in a haunted inn. An indescribable feeling, such as I never before experienced, hung upon me. It seemed as if every nerve in my body had a hundred spirits tickling it, and this was accompanied by so great a heat that, inwardly cursing mine host’s sauerkraut and wondering how the Dutchmen{78} could endure such poison, I was forced to sit up in bed to cool myself. The whole of the room was profoundly dark, excepting at one place, where the moonlight, falling through a crevice in the shutters, threw a straight line of about an inch or so thick upon the floor—clear, sharp and intensely brilliant against the darkness. I leave you to conceive my horror when, upon looking at this said line of light, I saw there a naked human toe—nothing more.

For the first instant I thought the vision must be some effect of moonlight, then that I was only half awake and could not see distinctly. So I rubbed my eyes two or three times and looked again. Still there was the accursed thing—plain, distinct, immovable—marblelike in its fixedness and rigidity, but in everything else horribly human.

I am not an easily frightened man. No one who has traveled so much and seen so much and been exposed to so many dangers as I, can be, but there was something so mysterious and unusual in the appearance of this single toe that for a short time I could not think what to be at, so I did nothing but stare at it in a state of utter bewilderment.

At length, however, as the toe did not vanish under my steady gaze, I thought I might as well change my tactics, and remembering that all midnight invaders, be they thieves, ghosts or devils,{79} dislike nothing so much as a good noise I shouted out in a loud voice:

“Who’s there?”

The toe immediately disappeared in the darkness.

Almost simultaneously with my words I leaped out of bed and rushed toward the place where I had beheld the strange appearance. The next instant I ran against something and felt an iron grip round my body. After this I have no distinct recollection of what occurred, excepting that a fearful struggle ensued between me and my unseen opponent; that every now and then we were violently hurled to the floor, from which we always rose again in an instant, locked in a deadly embrace; that we tugged and strained and pulled and pushed, I in the convulsive and frantic energy of a fight for life, he (for by this time I had discovered that the intruder was a human being) actuated by some passion of which I was ignorant; that we whirled round and round, cheek to cheek and arm to arm, in fierce contest, until the room appeared to whiz round with us, and that at least a dozen people (my fellow traveler among them), roused, I suppose, by our repeated falls, came pouring into the room with lights and showed me struggling with a man having nothing on but a shirt, whose long, tangled hair and wild, unsettled eyes told me he was insane. And then, for the first time, I became aware that I had received{80} in the conflict several gashes from a knife, which my opponent still held in his hand.

To conclude my story in a few words (for I daresay all of you by this time are getting very tired), it turned out that my midnight visitor was a madman who was being conveyed to a lunatic asylum at The Hague, and that he and his keeper had been obliged to stop at Delft on their way. The poor fellow had contrived during the night to escape from his keeper, who had carelessly forgotten to lock the door of his chamber, and with that irresistible desire to shed blood peculiar to many insane people had possessed himself of a pocketknife belonging to the man who had charge of him, entered my room, which was most likely the only one in the house unfastened, and was probably meditating the fatal stroke when I saw his toe in the moonlight, the rest of his body being hidden in the shade.

After this terrible freak of his he was watched with much greater strictness, but I ought to observe, as some excuse for the keeper’s negligence, that this was the first act of violence he had ever attempted.{81}

MRS. DAVENPORT’S GHOST.

BY FREDERICK P. SCHRADER.

Dear readers, do you agree with Hamlet? Do you believe that there is more between heaven and earth than we dream of in our philosophy? Does it seem possible to you that Eliphas Levy conjured up the shade of Apollonius of Tyana, the prophet of the Magii, in a London hotel, and that the great sage, William Crookes, drank his tea at breakfast several days a week, for months in succession, in the society of the materialized spirit of a young lady, attired in white linen, with a feather turban on her head?

Do not laugh! Panic would seize you in the presence even of a turbaned spirit, and the grotesque spectacle would but intensify your terror. As for me, I did not laugh last night on reading an account in a New York newspaper of a criminal trial that will probably terminate in the death penalty of the accused.

It is a sad case. I shudder as I transcribe the records of the trial from the testimony of the hotel waiter, who heard the conversation of the two confederates through a keyhole, and of forty{82} thoroughly credible witnesses, who testified to the same facts. What would be my feelings if I had seen the beautiful victim with the gaping wound in her breast, into which she