The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

eight we sighted a rocky island, tow hundred yards ahead. We saw it for the second we were balanced on top of a wave. We didn’t get another opportunity, for it was hidden by walls of water. That island rises to twenty feet above sea level. It is about a quarter of a mile in circumference and uninhabited. From our perch on the top of the wave we saw the whole island was awash and at the northern end submerged. From that glimpse I was able to ascertain our position. We had been blown twenty-six miles north of our rough course during the night. I turned the ship head on into the sea. On a calm day the Peter could knock up fourteen knots. Her speed of advance into this sea, flat out, was half a knot.

Throughout the day we maintained the same speed – half a knot. The four of us clung together, in the same position we had been in all the time. I bawled down the voice-pipe to the coxswain, asking him if he was all right. “Fine!” came the reply, and I think I heard whistling. We all longed for something to drink, but it was out of the question. Every man in the ship was pinned to his position. How the lads in the engine-room, in that sickly smell of hot oil, stood it out I shall never know.

I cannot remember when we began to pray. When we realised, I think, that at this speed we had no hope of shelter that night, and a very good chance three or four times a minute of capsizing or being pounded to pieces. When we saw the rocky island awash, I was aware that Douglas, crouched against me, had released his hand for a moment to cross himself. That, I think, set us all – anyway, those of us on the bridge – saying the Our Father. We mingled our muttered prayers with attempts at rather bawdy music-hall songs, not in defiance of God, but to relieve our minds of the strain. By the afternoon our faces were sodden with water, puffy and raw. Our eyes were ghastly to look at and painful to keep open. One at a time we probably dropped asleep, to awake thirty seconds later wondering how many hours had gone by. So we stayed there, having no alternative. At six o’clock I tried to sing “For those in peril on the sea” – and then it occurred to me to exorcise the ship. How silly and inexplicable that sounds! I am almost ashamed to write it. I wriggled round to face the after part of the ship, which included the cabin where I had experienced that evil thing. Jimmy and Douglas clasped me round the chest while I raised my right hand, making the sign of the cross. “In the name of Jesus Christ, leave us!” I said. Poor Hopeless! That depressed him more than anything. He began to cry.

The next morning we were weak and bitterly cold. The waves were of the same menacing height and ferocity, but the wind had dropped, probably to about eighty miles an hour. And we had lost our fear. We were all convinced we would die during the day. Shortly after noon we passed very close to the battered overturned hulk of a schooner. We could make out the name, Topaz. Subsequently we learnt that every one of those twelve that had sailed up the coast had been lost with all hands. On shore aircraft had been overturned by the wind on the airfields, gun emplacements on harbour walls had been washed away, with their gun crews, and in one well-protected harbour six sailors had been drowned. Giant waves rolled up the coast, in some cases running inland for two or three hundred yards.

Visibility was as bad as ever, but something about the sea suggested we were close to land. At 15.30 the engines, overheated, failed. We were drifting hopelessly. We were all resigned. The only anxiety of which I was conscious was the fact that Able Seaman Broadstairs couldn’t swim. We all knew swimming would be of no help, but it seemed bad that he had never learnt to swim. I remember thinking, “I wish I couldn’t swim, because that will make it worse. I shall struggle for life.” It was on such lines that I tried to comfort myself about Broadstairs.

It began to get dusk. Jimmy said, “Christ! Not another night! I couldn’t!” The waves were now of a tumbling, clumsy, falling-on-top-of-each-other nature. At 17.15 we grounded, twenty yards from a rocky beach. The sea was on the beam. “Abandon ship!” I yelled. One carley float was loosed by Hopeless. It somersaulted towards the shore before anyone could grab the line that held it. Then a gigantic wave, which made the others appear ripples, picked us up and carried us right inshore, flinging us on the rocks. We heard a splitting sound. The four of us on the bridge clambered down. The Peter was lying on her side, at an angle of thirty degrees, precariously balanced. She was still surrounded by heavy surf. It was then that Stoker White came out in his true colours. He girded himself with a rope and flung himself into the filthy yellow water. It looked suicidal – but he reached the shore and lay there – a large, fat, exhausted, panting creature – a link between us and safety. “Come on, you sons of she-devils!” he croaked. “Come on, sonny!”. This last to Broadstairs. Broadstairs, grinning, caught hold of the rope and sprang from the ship’s side. He slipped, fell, cracked his skull and broke his back. He didn’t make any noise. The surf washed him away. The others wasted no time. One by one, orderly, silently, they got ashore. Jimmy was next to last. Then my turn came. I was scared, and put off the moment, though I knew to do so was taking a far greater risk than swinging on the rope. I crawled along to the cabin. Everything was broken, upside down, ruined – as if that evil presence had sought revenge on harmless, inanimate objects, the friendly possessions of a man. I have always had some decent books on board. I couldn’t resist snatching one up from the deck, where it had fallen, splayed out. In drawing-room games of Desert Island Books I had always chosen the most rewarding to spend the rest of my life with – the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, and so on. I rejected them all at this moment and took a cheap thriller I hadn’t read. That, and my diary. I stepped out on deck. The crew were all halloaing me. Managed the rope easily. So there we all were. That is, all of us except Broadstairs. We recovered his body next day, terribly battered. It was difficult getting the rings off his fingers. We sent them to his mother.

The Peter slipped on her side, rolled over, and split in two. We were five miles behind the Allied lines. Good.

One thing we all understood, each in his different way. Everyone of us had been purged of a pet vice or special fear.

4

The Ghost-Feelers

Modern Gothic Tales

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell

Edith Wharton

Location:  Brympton Place, Hudson, USA.

Time:  Autumn, 1902.

Eyewitness Description:  “The silence began to be more dreadful to me than the most mysterious sounds. I felt that someone was cowering there, behind the locked door, watching and listening as I watched and listened . . .”

Author:  Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is another writer whose ghost stories are acknowledged as “landmarks in supernatural fiction”. She was a central practitioner of the genre in the Twentieth century, redefining the old Gothic melodrama into a new form combining supernatural dread with sexual tension and founding a school of female “Ghost-Feelers” who sensed rather than saw spirits. Growing up in a haunted house in New York that instilled in her a “chronic state of fear”, Wharton later confessed that she could not bear to even sleep in the same room as a book of ghost stories until she was 28. A loveless and repressed marriage made her seek escape in writing, creating novels about the morals and private passions of American society and ghost stories that described dark and mysterious events in unstable households. These began with “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”, written in 1904, which deeply moved readers in recounting a story of adultery and supernatural protection. There can be little doubt that Wharton drew on her own experiences for this groundbreaking tale, in particular the narrator, the maid Alice Hartley’s near-fatal attack of typhoid, which she had herself survived.

I

It was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I’d been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I’d boarded for two months, hanging about the employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn’t made me fatter, and I didn’t see why my luck should ever turn. It did though – or I thought so at the time. A Mrs Railton, a friend of the