The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“A daughter of the regiment like yourself. Well, I mustn’t discuss patients. I call on her now and then.”

He walked up the side lane waving the tweed hat and left me. As he reached the point where the little lane bent out of sight he turned and cheerfully waved again, and I turned too and walked the two miles back to my car. As I reached it the land-rover passed me going very fast and the doctor made no signal and I could not see his face. I thought he must be reckless to drive at that lick on a sheep-strewn road but soon forgot it in the pleasure of the afternoon – the bright fire I’d light at home and the smell of wood smoke and supper with a book ahead. No telephone, thank God. As I turned into my yard I found I was very put out to see Mrs Metcalfe coming across it with yet another great basket of beans.

“Tek ’em or leave ’em,” she said. ‘But we’ve more than we’ll ever want and they’ll just get the worm in. Here, you could do wi’ a few taties too from the look of you. Oh aye – and I’ve just heard. That daft woman up near Mealbeck. She’s dead. The doctor’s just left her. Or I hear tell. She hanged herself.”

It was no story.

Or rather it is the most detestable, inadmissible story. For I don’t yet know half the facts and I don’t feel I want to invent any. It would be a story so easy to improve upon. There are half a dozen theories about poor Rose’s hanging and half a dozen about the reason for her growing isolation and idleness and seclusion. There is only one view about her character though, and that is odd because the whole community in the fells and Dales survives on firmly-grounded assessment of motives and results; the gradations and developments of character are vital to life and give validity to passing years. Reputations change and rise and fall. But Rose – Rose had always been very well-liked and had very much liked living here. Gertie and Millicent said she had fitted in round here as if she were country born. She had been one of the few southerners they said who had seemed to belong. She had loved the house – a queer place. It had been the heart of a Quaker settlement. Panes of glass so thick you could hardly see out. She had grown more and more attached to it. She didn’t seem able to leave it in the end.

“The marriage broke up after the War,” said the doctor. We were sitting back after dinner in the housekeeper’s room among the Thomas Lawrences. ‘He was always on the move. Rose had no quarrel with him you know. She just grew – well, very taken with the place. It was – yes, possession. Greek idea – possession by local gods. The Romans were here you know. They brought a Greek legend or two with them.”

I said, “How odd, when I saw her I thought of the Greeks, though I hadn’t known what I meant. It was the way she moved – so old. And the way she held her hands out. Like, – well, sort of like on the walls of Troy.”

“Not Troy,” said the doctor. “More like hell, poor thing. She was quite gone. You know – these fells, all the little isolated houses, I’m not that sure how good for you they are, unless you’re farming folk.”

Millicent said rubbish.

“No,” he said, “I mean it. D’you remember C. S. Lewis’s hell? A place where people live in isolation unable to reach each other. Where the houses get further and further apart?”

“Everyone reaches each other here,” I said. “Surely?”

The doctor was looking at me and I noticed he was looking at me very hard. He said, “What was it you said?”

“Everyone reaches each other—”

“No,” he said. “You said you saw her.”

“Yes I did. I saw her on the way home from here, the night before she died. Then I saw her again the next day, the very afternoon. That’s what is so terrible. I must have seen her, just before she – did it. I must be the last person to have seen her.”

“I wonder,” he said, “if that could be true.” Gertie and Millicent were busy with coffee cups. They turned away.

“ ‘Could be true?’ But it is certainly true. I know exactly when. She asked me the time that afternoon. I told her. It was just after three. She seemed very – bewildered about it. You called upon her hardly a quarter of an hour later. She’d hardly been back in the house a quarter of an hour.”

“She’d been in it longer than that,” he said, “When I found her she’d been dead for nearly three weeks. Maybe since hay-time.”

I went to Hong Kong.

5

Entertaining Spooks

Supernatural High Jinks

The Inexperienced Ghost

H. G. Wells

Location:  The Mermaid Golf Club, Surrey.

Time:  March, 1902.

Eyewitness Description:  “I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was towards me and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost. He was transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see the glimmer of the little window at the end . . .”

Author:  Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), the Bromley shopkeeper’s son who is now one of England’s major literary figures, has been credited with being the “Founding Father” of Science Fiction and a significant influence on both the horror and fantasy story. It would be a surprise, therefore, if he had not contributed to the ghost story genre. Apart from the haunted “The Red Room” (1896) and the unsettling “The Presence by the Fire” (1918), “The Inexperienced Ghost” is one of the earliest humorous ghost stories and was first published in the Strand magazine, March 1902. (The earliest, though, are probably the interjected tales in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1836), “The Lawyer and the Ghost”, “The Queer Chair”, “The Ghosts of the Mail” and the bizarre “Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”.) Wells’ story of a golfer and the jaded phantom he meets one night at his club has deservedly been praised for its comic originality and was filmed in the movie, Dead of Night (1945). It has also proved a template for many subsequent humorous supernatural tales and admired by authors from Jerome K. Jerome who spoofed the Victorian tradition in Told After Supper (1891) to Terry Pratchett.

The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time, in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, and Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore his name. There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who is also a modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that Saturday morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight – which indeed gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing was invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil kindliness when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell one, we naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he was lying – of that the reader will speedily be able to judge as well as I. He began, it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact anecdote, but that we thought was only the incurable artifice of the man.

“I say!” he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward rain of sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped, “you know I was alone here last night?”

“Except for the domestics,” said Wish.

“Who sleep in the other wing,” said Clayton. “Yes. Well—” He pulled at his cigar for some little time as though he still hesitated about his confidence. Then he said, quite quietly, “I caught a ghost!”

“Caught a ghost, did you?” said Sanderson. “Where is it?”

And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in America, shouted, “Caught a ghost, did you, Clayton? I’m glad of it! Tell us all about it right now.”

Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.

He looked apologetically at me. “There’s no eavesdropping, of course, but we don’t want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours of ghosts in the place. There’s too much shadow and oak panelling to trifle with