Something strange in your Christmas stocking

What's Christmas Eve without a ghost story? Well, here are two, both classics of the English New Weird by its foremost living exponent, John Whitbourn.

First "Waiting for a Bus". I heard this story in the mid-1980s when the author was one of several guests at a ghost story evening chez Morris. We had a nice dinner, a little fine wine, and settled down around the fire to entertain ourselves with some cosily spooky stories; an activity that mankind has only been doing for -- what? -- twenty thousand years and more.

Then John got up and produced the story he'd brought, the first (as it later turned out) of an ongoing series. As he read, a chill dark hand closed over the group. We were transported to a suburban street under dim street-lamps, hurrying past with just a nervous glance across the road at an ordinary but suddenly sinister bus shelter. With the final words, you could hear the sigh of long-held breath and we looked around at each other with that bright-eyed smile that says you know you've just had the bejasus scared out of you. Everyone that evening had come armed with a tale to tell, and there were talented, experienced writers there, to be sure, but there was no disputing who was the storytelling king of the fireside.

"Waiting for a Bus" not only gave a shudder to those dinner party guests who were privileged to hear it first, it was picked as one of DAW's World's Best Fantasy Stories of the very next year. It has been widely anthologized since, as have other Binscombe Tales such as "Eyes" (also known as "It Has Been Said") which might put you in mind of a certain long-running horror movie franchise, but be aware that the story was originally published by the Haunted Library over a decade before the cameras started rolling on the first in that series.

But are these ghost stories, or something stranger still? This is Wrong; we don't deal in genre. Rest assured you'll get a delicious scare that's just the thing for the time of year. Happy Christmas!

Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series

Binscombe Tales Volumes One, Two and Three

Kindle chapbooks:

Waiting For A Bus & other stories

Video Nasty & other stories

Reggie Suntan and other stories

No Truce With Kings and other stories

Rollover Night and other stories

It'll All be Over by Christmas and other stories

The City of Dreadful Night

by Rudyard Kipling

 

The dense wet heat that hung over the face of land, like a blanket, prevented all hope of sleep in the first instance. The cicalas helped the heat, and the yelling jackals the cicalas. It was impossible to sit still in the dark, empty, echoing house and watch the punkah beat the dead air. So, at ten o’clock of the night, I set my walking-stick on end in the middle of the garden, and waited to see how it would fall. It pointed directly down the moonlit road that leads to the City of Dreadful Night. The sound of its fall disturbed a hare. She limped from her form and ran across to a disused Mahomedan burial-ground, where the jawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by the July rains, glimmered like mother o’ pearl on the rain-channelled soil. The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead upward for coolness’ sake. The hare limped on; snuffed curiously at a fragment of a smoke-stained lamp-shard, and died out, in the shadow of a clump of tamarisk trees.

The mat-weaver’s hut under the lee of the Hindu temple was full of sleeping men who lay like sheeted corpses. Overhead blazed the unwinking eye of the Moon. Darkness gives at least a false impression of coolness. It was hard not to believe that the flood of light from above was warm. Not so hot as the Sun, but still sickly warm, and heating the heavy air beyond what was our due. Straight as a bar of polished steel ran the road to the City of Dreadful Night; and on either side of the road lay corpses disposed on beds in fantastic attitudes—one hundred and seventy bodies of men. Some shrouded all in white with bound-up mouths; some naked and black as ebony in the strong light; and one—that lay face upwards with dropped jaw, far away from the others—silvery white and ashen grey.

‘A leper asleep; and the remainder wearied coolies, servants, small shopkeepers, and drivers from the hack-stand hard by. The scene—a main approach to Lahore city, and the night a warm one in August.’ This was all that there was to be seen; but by no means all that one could see. The witchery of the moonlight was everywhere; and the world was horribly changed. The long line of the naked dead, flanked by the rigid silver statue, was not pleasant to look upon. It was made up of men alone. Were the women-kind, then, forced to sleep in the shelter of the stifling mud-huts as best they might? The fretful wail of a child from a low mud-roof answered the question. Where the children are the mothers must be also to look after them. They need care on these sweltering nights. A black little bullet-head peeped over the coping, and a thin—a painfully thin—brown leg was slid over on to the gutter pipe. There was a sharp clink of glass bracelets; a woman’s arm showed for an instant above the parapet, twined itself round the lean little neck, and the child was dragged back, protesting, to the shelter of the bedstead. His thin, high-pitched shriek died out in the thick air almost as soon as it was raised; for even the children of the soil found it too hot to weep.

More corpses; more stretches of moonlit, white road; a string of sleeping camels at rest by the wayside; a vision of scudding jackals; ekka-ponies asleep—the harness still on their backs, and the brass-studded country carts, winking in the moonlight—and again more corpses. Wherever a grain cart atilt, a tree trunk, a sawn log, a couple of bamboos and a few handfuls of thatch cast a shadow, the ground is covered with them. They lie—some face downwards, arms folded, in the dust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curled up dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of the grain carts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees in the full glare of the Moon. It would be a comfort if they were only given to snoring; but they are not, and the likeness to corpses is unbroken in all respects save one. The lean dogs snuff at them and turn away. Here and there a tiny child lies on his father’s bedstead, and a protecting arm is thrown round it in every instance. But, for the most part, the children sleep with their mothers on the housetops. Yellow-skinned white-toothed pariahs are not to be trusted within reach of brown bodies.

A stifling hot blast from the mouth of the Delhi Gate nearly ends my resolution of entering the City of Dreadful Night at this hour. It is a compound of all evil savours, animal and vegetable, that a walled city can brew in a day and a night. The temperature within the motionless groves of plantain and orange-trees outside the city walls seems chilly by comparison. Heaven help all sick persons and young children within the city tonight! The high house-walls are still radiating heat savagely, and from obscure side gullies fetid breezes eddy that ought to poison a buffalo. But the buffaloes do not heed. A drove of them are parading the vacant main street; stopping now and then to lay their ponderous muzzles against the closed shutters of a grain-dealer’s shop, and to blow thereon like grampuses.

Then silence follows—the silence that is full of the night noises of a great city. A stringed instrument of some kind is just, and only just audible. High overhead someone throws open a window, and the rattle of the woodwork echoes down the empty street. On one of the roofs a hookah is in full blast; and the men are talking softly as the pipe gutters. A little farther on the noise of conversation is more distinct. A slit of light shows itself between the sliding shutters of a shop. Inside, a stubble-bearded, weary-eyed trader is balancing his account-books among the bales of cotton prints that surround him. Three sheeted figures bear him company, and throw in a remark from time to time. First he makes an entry, then a remark; then passes the back of his hand across his streaming forehead. The heat in the built-in street is fearful. Inside the shops it must be almost unendurable. But the work goes on steadily; entry, guttural growl, and uplifted hand-stroke succeeding each other with the precision of clock-work.

A policeman—turbanless and fast asleep—lies across the road on the way to the Mosque of Wazir Khan. A bar of moonlight falls across the forehead and eyes of the sleeper, but he never stirs. It is close upon midnight, and the heat seems to be increasing. The open square in front of the Mosque is crowded with corpses; and a man must pick his way carefully for fear of treading on them. The moonlight stripes the Mosque’s high front of coloured enamel work in broad diagonal bands; and each separate dreaming pigeon in the niches and corners of the masonry throws a squab little shadow. Sheeted ghosts rise up wearily from their pallets, and flit into the dark depths of the building. Is it possible to climb to the top of the great Minars, and thence to look down on the city? At all events the attempt is worth making, and the chances are that the door of the staircase will be unlocked. Unlocked it is; but a deeply sleeping janitor lies across the threshold, face turned to the Moon. A rat dashes out of his turban at the sound of approaching footsteps. The man grunts, opens his eyes for a minute, turns round, and goes to sleep again. All the heat of a decade of fierce Indian summers is stored in the pitch-black, polished walls of the corkscrew staircase. Half-way up there is something alive, warm, and feathery; and it snores. Driven from step to step as it catches the sound of my advance, it flutters to the top and reveals itself as a yellow-eyed, angry kite. Dozens of kites are asleep on this and the other Minars, and on the domes below. There is the shadow of a cool, or at least a less sultry breeze at this height; and, refreshed thereby, turn to look on the City of Dreadful Night.

Doré might have drawn it! Zola could describe it—this spectacle of sleeping thousands in the moonlight and in the shadow of the Moon. The roof-tops are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air is full of undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of Dreadful Night; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued. Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch the sleepers turning to and fro; shifting their beds and again resettling them. In the pit-like courtyards of the houses there is the same movement.

The pitiless Moon shows it all. Shows, too, the plains outside the city, and here and there a hand’s-breadth of the Ravee without the walls. Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a house-top almost directly below the mosque Minar. Some poor soul has risen to throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes like heliographic signals. A small cloud passes over the face of the Moon, and the city and its inhabitants—clear drawn in black and white before—fade into masses of black and deeper black. Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest. It is only the lower-class women who sleep on the house-tops. What must the torment be in the latticed zenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling? There are footfalls in the court below. It is the Muezzin—faithful minister; but he ought to have been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that prayer is better than sleep—the sleep that will not come to the city.

The Muezzin fumbles for a moment with the door of one of the Minars, disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar—a magnificent bass thunder—tells that he has reached the top of the Minar. They must hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself! Even across the courtyard it is almost overpowering. The cloud drifts by and shows him outlined in black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad chest heaving with the play of his lungs—‘Allah ho Akbar’; then a pause while another Muezzin somewhere in the direction of the Golden Temple takes up the call—‘Allah ho Akbar.’ Again and again; four times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up already.—‘I bear witness that there is no God but God.’ What a splendid cry it is, the proclamation of the creed that brings men out of their beds by scores at midnight! Once again he thunders through the same phrase, shaking with the vehemence of his own voice; and then, far and near, the night air rings with ‘Mahomed is the Prophet of God.’ It is as though he were flinging his defiance to the far-off horizon, where the summer lightning plays and leaps like a bared sword. Every Muezzin in the city is in full cry, and some men on the roof-tops are beginning to kneel. A long pause precedes the last cry, ‘La ilaha Illallah,’ and the silence closes up on it, as the ram on the head of a cotton-bale.

The Muezzin stumbles down the dark stairway grumbling in his beard. He passes the arch of the entrance and disappears. Then the stifling silence settles down over the City of Dreadful Night. The kites on the Minar sleep again, snoring more loudly, the hot breeze comes up in puffs and lazy eddies, and the Moon slides down towards the horizon. Seated with both elbows on the parapet of the tower, one can watch and wonder over that heat-tortured hive till the dawn. ‘How do they live down there? What do they think of? When will they awake?’ More tinkling of sluiced water-pots; faint jarring of wooden bedsteads moved into or out of the shadows; uncouth music of stringed instruments softened by distance into a plaintive wail, and one low grumble of far-off thunder. In the courtyard of the mosque the janitor, who lay across the threshold of the Minar when I came up, starts wildly in his sleep, throws his hands above his head, mutters something, and falls back again. Lulled by the snoring of the kites—they snore like over-gorged humans—I drop off into an uneasy doze, conscious that three o’clock has struck, and that there is a slight—a very slight—coolness in the atmosphere. The city is absolutely quiet now, but for some vagrant dog’s love-song. Nothing save dead heavy sleep.

Several weeks of darkness pass after this. For the Moon has gone out. The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawn before making my way homeward. Again the noise of shuffling feet. The morning call is about to begin, and my night watch is over. ‘Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!’ The east grows grey, and presently saffron; the dawn wind comes up as though the Muezzin had summoned it; and, as one man, the City of Dreadful Night rises from its bed and turns its face towards the dawning day. With return of life comes return of sound. First a low whisper, then a deep bass hum; for it must be remembered that the entire city is on the house-tops. My eyelids weighed down with the arrears of long deferred sleep, I escape from the Minar through the courtyard and out into the square beyond, where the sleepers have risen, stowed away the bedsteads, and are discussing the morning hookah. The minute’s freshness of the air has gone, and it is as hot as at first.

‘Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?’ What is it? Something borne on men’s shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I stand back. A woman’s corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a bystander says, ‘She died at midnight from the heat.’ So the city was of Death as well as Night after all.

Shut In

by Dave Morris

I’m sorry. I’ll be okay in a bit. It was the confined space in there. I just have to sit it out.

Ever had an acid flashback? When I was at school I dropped tabs a few times. I don’t know why I did it. I hated the stuff, it really freaked me out while I was doing it, and then one day I said that’s it. That’s enough. ‘You’ll go cold turkey,’ somebody told me. But there were no cold sweats, no screams in the small hours. I felt fine, and I felt free. Then a week or two later, I was walking to Latin and –

A flashback is a physical thing, you see, much more than just an hallucination. It reaches up out of the flagstones and gets its clammy hands on you. You could be doing anything and there it is suddenly at your shoulder, saying, ‘Together forever.’

And that’s why I say what I’ve got isn’t claustrophobia. That’s fear of confined spaces, but it isn’t the confinement I’m frightened of. It’s what’s in there. It’s the fear of what you’re shut in with. Forever.

No, really, I want to talk about this. It might help.

We went down, a bunch of us, last year to my aunt’s holiday home in Littlehampton, which is - not really a town, just a collection of holiday homes and a shop, about twenty minutes along the coast from Bognor. We went into Bognor first. You’ve seen one Georgian crescent and you’ve seen the lot, but Sammy wanted lobster bisque or something and so we wandered around for hours looking for a café.

You know what the Prince Regent said about Bognor? He was really ill and Beau Brummel or somebody said, ‘Never mind, your Majesty, when you’re better we shall visit Bognor’ and the Prince Regent said, ‘Bugger Bognor’ and died.

Anyway, it was dark by the time we got to my aunt’s place. Once off the road and under this little lich gate there’s nothing but the sound of the waves to guide you across the lawn to the cottage. The sea’s just the other side of the hedge and down a beach of ankle-breaking pebbles, so there you are with neat little suburban lawns all around and the smell of brine thick in the air. In winter there’s nobody around and it’s great. Rubbish in summer of course – then it’s all greasy chips and ice cream and kids shrieking like they’re being drowned.

I fumbled around with half a box of Swan Vestas until I found the key, and then of course the electricity wasn’t on because it was out of season so the rest of the box went on finding the stash of candles under the sink. It’s one of those old cottages with low beams and bits that sag all over. The floorboards creak when you walk. The carpets are the same ones my aunt had when the place flooded in the storms a few years back, threadbare as Tuareg rugs. By candlelight the place didn’t look quite real.

The others were all excited but after the drive I was knackered. I got a can of beer and a joint and flopped in the armchair, and let everyone else deal with getting a fire lit and whatever. By the time Sara started with her séance routine I was half asleep. It’s so old, anyway. ‘Wake me when you’ve all grown up,’ I said before I dozed off.

Sometimes you get a dream like a film. That joint helped. This was one of those swooping shots, down over rooftops and then veering down narrow streets. No sound. No streetlights. No-one about.

Then, turning a corner in the cobbled street, there was a boy running. I thought he was fleeing from something, but he held a torch that trailed a long tail of fire and sparks and behind him came two men carrying a box. Not a coffin, a sedan chair. I flew right past the boy like a ghost. I could see his wide eyes and the way his nostrils flared as he ran. And then the men jogging across the cobblestones, and the sedan chair screen came towards me. Now I was inside the chair and it was me they were carrying.

We passed along deserted streets until we reached a door and here I knew we’d stop. The boy knocked and then plunged his torch into a bucket of sand to extinguish it, stepping aside so that the men could get the chair up the steps and in through the door which was opened by a footman in black high-collared jacket and tight breeches like from a costume drama. Through the gauze screen I saw him look sidelong at where I sat hidden in the depths of the chair.

They didn’t put the chair down in the hall, they carried it right through and up the stairs. I heard whispered voices like when someone has died, and there was the click of a door closing off the landing. I was taken through to another room and they set the chair down while the footman and the link-boy hurried about lighting candles. They didn’t like the dark, I thought at first, but that wasn’t it. They were in a hurry to be gone.

Then they were at the door. I was still in the chair. I went to open the screen and it was hard to do with fingers that felt stiff and clumsy. I eased myself out as you do in dreams, like I was weighted with lead. The men drew back into the hall but they said something to the boy and maybe he expected a tip, because he edged back in nervously and came slowly towards me, gaze pinned to the floor.

I was trying to unwind the scarf around my face that made me feel hot and choking. Seeing the boy was frightened, I tried to give him a farthing for his trouble but there wasn’t a coin in my hands. He glanced up at my hand and then he screamed -

Or actually it was Sammy screaming. I sat bolt upright and apparently said something, but I can’t remember it and no-one caught it with the racket the silly cow was making. The first thing I did was take a sip of beer. It tasted foul. I must have used the can as an ashtray while nodding off.

Sammy stopped screaming when I spat beer and sat forward into the firelight. She looked at everyone. ‘I thought I saw somebody else sitting there,’ she said.

I felt wiped out. I rubbed my hands over my face and said, ‘Did you muster up any spirits?’

‘Found half a bottle of Black Label in the sideboard,’ said Charlie. That’s not a bad joke for him. At least it got a groan of vague approval.

Sammy was still a bit freaked out, though. ‘There was something there,’ she insisted. ‘It was horrible.’

‘It still is,’ laughed Sara as I lurched to my feet.

‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘You can all doss down wherever you find a space, and nobody better wake me up until there’s cooked breakfast on the table.’

I was still confused from coming round like that, so I stumbled off to one of the bedrooms and got half-undressed before the effort of staying upright got too much. The bed was one of those box things - what do they call them? Shut beds. I was tired enough that sleeping in a cupboard made no difference. I didn’t so much get in as just grab a pile of blankets from the drawer and then just pass out sprawled across the mattress.

As I drifted off again I remembered the dream from before. I was - well, I suppose frightened. I didn’t want to go back, but I was too far gone already. I couldn’t remember what there was to dread in sleep, or what waking up even meant. I sank down and down and down...

This time I was in my sedan chair right away. It might have been afternoon – a lightless afternoon on which the sky was dark and churned with violent purple thunderclouds. The men were carrying me along the waterfront. The quayside was a wet black flank of stone besieged by crashing grey waves, but as before everything was silent and there wasn’t another soul in sight.

They put the chair down and one of them said something through the screen. I didn’t catch it. Their expressions were full of guilt and guile. I watched them put their heads together and mutter something, and the words vibrated in the otherwise dead silence:

‘We’ll do it here.’

I wanted to get out then. I couldn’t breathe. I felt trapped, wedged inside the narrow chair. My stubby fingers pulled at the catch, but something was holding it shut.

The men picked up their burden again, but for the rest of the journey I would be travelling alone. They lifted the chair up over the wall, thrust it over the edge, and abandoned me to the waves.

The chair tumbled down and lurched as it hit the water. I was tossed against the bare wooden lid of what would soon be my coffin. The grey daylight was snuffed out and the seawater closed a bone-cold grip. I sank down and down and down... Now at last I could hear sounds. The uterine booming of the sea. And something else, whispering in my ear:

‘It is a fine and private place, so stay and know eternal peace.’

Then I felt it touch me and I knew I wasn’t alone in that box. Something with ravaged flesh and putrid heart was trying to drag me down to the sea bed with it, and I was kicking and lashing out and trying to scream if only I could get a sound out of my bursting lungs.

The thing - whatever it was - put cold fingers around my throat, pressed its grotesque face into mine and tried to suck out my breath with dead lips. Its stench made me gag. It smelt like decay. I sobbed, gasped, and then I had enough breath for one scream.

I made it count. It was the mother of all screams, the sort that should shatter windows. I burst in a cluster of bubbles through the side of the sedan chair and rose with the scream, weightlessly out of the water, a disembodied spirit soaring up and up into the sky as the thing in the chair flailed its diseased limbs and died again in the secret depths of the sea.

The storm pressed down. Could I reach the clouds? A glint of light broke through. I rose towards it desperately and broke through -

- to candlelight. I was wrapped in the blanket and my face and shoulders were drenched. Sammy was sitting on the floor. An empty glass of water lay beside her. ‘You kicked me out of bed!’ she said.

I lay back and laughed out of sheer relief. ‘I thought you were a ghost,’ I said.

She got up and limped over to perch on the edge of the bed. I could see her fury giving way to a sly smile. ‘I’ve got some practice in raising the dead...’

‘Prove it,’ I said.

She flung herself into the shut bed and ripped off the wet blankets, tossed them out onto the floor, and pulled the door closed until there was just a chink of light from the candle. We were wrapped in shadows, and each other. You see, I wasn’t afraid of confined spaces yet.

‘This is a yummy bed,’ giggled Sammy. ‘Ever so snug. I think they must have made it out of driftwood, yeah? See that crest, and the screen there?’

Her finger strayed away to trace details on the board at the back. I could have forgotten all about that damned dream, but then she had to go and say it:

‘Hey, it’s like from the museum in Bognor. It’s part of an old sedan chair.’

The robots are coming - and they're spooky

I asked Wombo Dream to give me "a cover of Coven 13 magazine drawn by William Stout" and it gave me this. It's not really much in Stout's style, and it's confused to the point of being demented, but in the madness there's a touch of genius too. I wonder how long it's going to be before AI art is more common than the old-fashioned human kind?

"So what's the future of Wrong magazine?" I asked it next, and the machine oracle gave me this vision. Well, I'd buy it.

The Demon Lover

We already looked at Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover". Here's a different but equally creepy take on the theme by another fine writer, Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973). Listen above, or read it here.

My Own True Ghost Story

by Rudyard Kipling

 

As I came through the Desert thus it was—

As I came through the Desert.

— The City of Dreadful Night

 

Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treating his ghosts— he has published half a workshopful of them—with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.

 There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveller passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow [1] on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses ‘repeats’ on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse- and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.

Some of the dâk-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in their compound—witnesses to the ‘changes and chances of this mortal life’ in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah [2] is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib’s service not a khansamah in the Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.

In these dâk-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to live in dâk-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in ‘converted’ ones—old houses officiating as dâk-bungalows—where nothing was in its proper place and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken pane. I lived in dâk-bungalows where the last entry in the visitors’ book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-kid’s head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dâk-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.

In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr Besant’s method of handling them, as shown in ‘The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories.’ I am now in the Opposition.

We will call the bungalow Katmal dâk-bungalow. But that was the smallest part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dâk-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dak- bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the windows were nearly black with grime. It stood on a bypath largely used by native Sub-Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forests; but real Sahibs were rare. The khansamah, who was nearly bent double with old age, said so.

When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside. The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.

The day shut in and the khansamah went to get me food. He did not go through the pretence of calling it ‘khana’—man’s victuals. He said ‘ratub,’ and that means, among other things, ‘grub’—dog’s rations. There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had forgotten the other word, I suppose.

While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down, after exploring the dâk-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps, only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.

For bleak, unadulterated misery that dâk-bungalow was the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy palms rattled and roared. Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a hyena stood afar off and mocked them. A hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead—the worst sort of Dead. Then came the ratub—a curious meal, half native and half English in composition—with the old khansamah babbling behind my chair about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.

Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the bath-room threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.

Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking I heard the regular—’Let—us—take—and—heave—him—over’ grunt of doolie-bearers [3] in the compound. First one doolie came in, then a second, and then a third. I heard the doolies dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook. ‘That’s someone trying to come in,’ I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. ‘That’s some Sub- Deputy Assistant,’ I said, ‘and he has brought his friends with him. Now they’ll talk and spit and smoke for an hour.’

But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his luggage into the next room. The door shut, and I thanked Providence that I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly mistake—the whir of a billiard ball down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break. No other sound is like it. A minute afterwards there was another whir, and I got into bed. I was not frightened—indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had become of the doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.

 Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up. It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting up.

There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one thing—a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs—all the furniture of the room next to mine—could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards. After another cannon, a three- cushion one to judge by the whir, I argued no more. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have escaped from that dak- bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer. There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room. And the next room was not big enough to hold a billiard table!

Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward—stroke after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt was a failure.

Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see—fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat—fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? This is a fine Fear—a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved the reality of the thing. No man—drunk or sober—could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a ‘screw-cannon.’

A severe course of dâk-bungalows has this disadvantage—it breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dâk-bungalow-haunter: ’There is a corpse in the next room, and there’s a mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,’ the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dâk-bungalow.

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.

After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.

When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and inquired for the means of departure.

‘By the way, khansamah,’ I said, ‘what were those three doolies doing in my compound in the night?’

‘There were no doolies,’ said the khansamah.

I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below.

‘Has this place always been a dâk-bungalow?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said the khansamah. ‘Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard room.’

‘A how much?’

‘A billiard room for the Sahibs who built the Railway. I was khansamah then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to come across with brandy-shrab. These three rooms were all one, and they held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now, and the Railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul.’

‘Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?’

‘It is long ago, but I remember that one Sahib, a fat man and always angry, was playing here one night, and he said to me: ‘Mangal Khan, brandy-pani do,’ and I filled the glass, and he bent over the table to strike, and his head fell lower and lower till it hit the table, and his spectacles came off, and when we—the Sahibs and I myself—ran to lift him he was dead. I helped to carry him out. Aha, he was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, old Mangal Khan, am still living, by your favour.’

That was more than enough! I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dâk-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send their regular agent to investigate later on.

I went into my own room and prepared to pack after noting down the facts of the case. As I smoked I heard the game begin again,—with a miss in balk this time, for the whir was a short one.

The door was open and I could see into the room. Click—c1ick! That was a cannon. I entered the room without fear, for there was sunlight within and a fresh breeze without. The unseen game was going on at a tremendous rate. And well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the window-bolt as it shook in the breeze!

Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard balls! Impossible to mistake the whir of a ball over the slate! But I was to be excused. Even when I shut my enlightened eyes the sound was marvellously like that of a fast game.

Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sorrows, Kadir Baksh.

‘This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! No wonder the Presence was disturbed and is speckled. Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honour has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias [4] have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a dirty man!’

Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine. But Kadir Baksh has no notions of morality.

There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly lost his head, wrath gave place to pity, and pity led to a long conversation, in the course of which he put the fat Engineer- Sahib’s tragic death in three separate stations—two of them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dogcart.

If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through Bengal with his corpse.

I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong ‘hundred and fifty up.’ Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.

Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it.

That was the bitterest thought of all!

 

 

[1] A government building used as a hostel by travelling officials.

[2] Khansamah – a cook/janitor

[3] Stretcher-bearers

[4] An ethnic group; natives of Orissa.