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This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, charlie@idirect.com.





Please note: This edition does not contain the second chapter of
the first story, "The Haunted House", by Dickens. It can be found
in 3ghst10.txt or 3ghst10.zip, 1998, "Three Ghost Stories by
Charles Dickens."





The Lock and Key Library

Classic Mystery and Detective Stories - Old Time English

Edited by Julian Hawthorne




Table of Contents


CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70)

The Haunted House
No. I Branch Line: The Signal Man


BULWER-LYTTON (1803-73)

The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain
The Incantation


THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)

The Avenger


CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (1782-1824)

Melmoth the Wanderer


LAURENCE STERNE (1713-68)

A Mystery with a Moral


WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63)

On Being Found Out
The Notch on the Ax


ANONYMOUS

Bourgonef
The Closed Cabinet




THE HAUNTED HOUSE

IN TWO CHAPTERS


THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE


Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed
by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make
acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas
piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was
no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted
circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect. More than that:
I had come to it direct from a railway station: it was not more
than a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I stood
outside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I could
see the goods train running smoothly along the embankment in the
valley. I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace,
because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly
commonplace people--and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take
it on myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it,
any fine autumn morning.

The manner of my lighting on it was this.

I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop
by the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporary
residence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and
who had happened to drive past the house, had written to me to
suggest it as a likely place. I had got into the train at
midnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had sat
looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky,
and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find the
night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I
hadn't been to sleep at all;--upon which question, in the first
imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would
have done wager by battle with the man who sat opposite me. That
opposite man had had, through the night--as that opposite man
always has--several legs too many, and all of them too long. In
addition to this unreasonable conduct (which was only to be
expected of him), he had had a pencil and a pocket-book, and had
been perpetually listening and taking notes. It had appeared to me
that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and bumps of the
carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking them,
under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering
way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head
whenever he listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a
perplexed aspect, and his demeanor became unbearable.

It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I
had out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country,
and the curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the
stars and between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller
and said:

"I BEG your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in
me?" For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my
travelling-cap or my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.

The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if
the back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a
lofty look of compassion for my insignificance:

"In you, sir?--B."

"B, sir?" said I, growing warm.

"I have nothing to do with you, sir," returned the gentleman; "pray
let me listen--O."

He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.

At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no communication
with the guard, is a serious position. The thought came to my
relief that the gentleman might be what is popularly called a
Rapper: one of a sect for (some of) whom I have the highest
respect, but whom I don't believe in. I was going to ask him the
question, when he took the bread out of my mouth.

"You will excuse me," said the gentleman contemptuously, "if I am
too much in advance of common humanity to trouble myself at all
about it. I have passed the night--as indeed I pass the whole of
my time now--in spiritual intercourse."

"O!" said I, somewhat snappishly.

"The conferences of the night began," continued the gentleman,
turning several leaves of his note-book, "with this message: 'Evil
communications corrupt good manners.'"

"Sound," said I; "but, absolutely new?"

"New from spirits," returned the gentleman.

I could only repeat my rather snappish "O!" and ask if I might be
favored with the last communication.

"'A bird in the hand,'" said the gentleman, reading his last entry
with great solemnity, "'is worth two in the Bosh.'"

"Truly I am of the same opinion," said I; "but shouldn't it be
Bush?"

"It came to me, Bosh," returned the gentleman.

The gentleman then informed me that the spirit of Socrates had
delivered this special revelation in the course of the night. "My
friend, I hope you are pretty well. There are two in this railway
carriage. How do you do? There are seventeen thousand four
hundred and seventy-nine spirits here, but you cannot see them.
Pythagoras is here. He is not at liberty to mention it, but hopes
you like travelling." Galileo likewise had dropped in, with this
scientific intelligence. "I am glad to see you, amico. Come sta?
Water will freeze when it is cold enough. Addio!" In the course
of the night, also, the following phenomena had occurred. Bishop
Butler had insisted on spelling his name, "Bubler," for which
offence against orthography and good manners he had been dismissed
as out of temper. John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification)
had repudiated the authorship of Paradise Lost, and had introduced,
as joint authors of that poem, two Unknown gentlemen, respectively
named Grungers and Scadgingtone. And Prince Arthur, nephew of King
John of England, had described himself as tolerably comfortable in
the seventh circle, where he was learning to paint on velvet, under
the direction of Mrs. Trimmer and Mary Queen of Scots.

If this should meet the eye of the gentleman who favored me with
these disclosures, I trust he will excuse my confessing that the
sight of the rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent
Order of the vast Universe, made me impatient of them. In a word,
I was so impatient of them, that I was mightily glad to get out at
the next station, and to exchange these clouds and vapors for the
free air of Heaven.

By that time it was a beautiful morning. As I walked away among
such leaves as had already fallen from the golden, brown, and
russet trees; and as I looked around me on the wonders of Creation,
and thought of the steady, unchanging, and harmonious laws by which
they are sustained; the gentleman's spiritual intercourse seemed to
me as poor a piece of journey-work as ever this world saw. In
which heathen state of mind, I came within view of the house, and
stopped to examine it attentively.

It was a solitary house, standing in a sadly neglected garden: a
pretty even square of some two acres. It was a house of about the
time of George the Second; as stiff, as cold, as formal, and in as
bad taste, as could possibly be desired by the most loyal admirer
of the whole quartet of Georges. It was uninhabited, but had,
within a year or two, been cheaply repaired to render it habitable;
I say cheaply, because the work had been done in a surface manner,
and was already decaying as to the paint and plaster, though the
colors were fresh. A lop-sided board drooped over the garden wall,
announcing that it was "to let on very reasonable terms, well
furnished." It was much too closely and heavily shadowed by trees,
and, in particular, there were six tall poplars before the front
windows, which were excessively melancholy, and the site of which
had been extremely ill chosen.

It was easy to see that it was an avoided house--a house that was
shunned by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church
spire some half a mile off--a house that nobody would take. And
the natural inference was, that it had the reputation of being a
haunted house.

No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and night is so
solemn to me, as the early morning. In the summer-time, I often
rise very early, and repair to my room to do a day's work before
breakfast, and I am always on those occasions deeply impressed by
the stillness and solitude around me. Besides that there is
something awful in the being surrounded by familiar faces asleep--
in the knowledge that those who are dearest to us and to whom we
are dearest, are profoundly unconscious of us, in an impassive
state, anticipative of that mysterious condition to which we are
all tending--the stopped life, the broken threads of yesterday, the
deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but abandoned
occupation, all are images of Death. The tranquillity of the hour
is the tranquillity of Death. The color and the chill have the
same association. Even a certain air that familiar household
objects take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of
the night into the morning, of being newer, and as they used to be
long ago, has its counterpart in the subsidence of the worn face of
maturity or age, in death, into the old youthful look. Moreover, I
once saw the apparition of my father, at this hour. He was alive
and well, and nothing ever came of it, but I saw him in the
daylight, sitting with his back towards me, on a seat that stood
beside my bed. His head was resting on his hand, and whether he
was slumbering or grieving, I could not discern. Amazed to see him
there, I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and watched
him. As he did not move, I spoke to him more than once. As he did
not move then, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder,
as I thought--and there was no such thing.

For all these reasons, and for others less easily and briefly
statable, I find the early morning to be my most ghostly time. Any
house would be more or less haunted, to me, in the early morning;
and a haunted house could scarcely address me to greater advantage
than then.

I walked on into the village, with the desertion of this house upon
my mind, and I found the landlord of the little inn, sanding his
door-step. I bespoke breakfast, and broached the subject of the
house.

"Is it haunted?" I asked.

The landlord looked at me, shook his head, and answered, "I say
nothing."

"Then it IS haunted?"

"Well!" cried the landlord, in an outburst of frankness that had
the appearance of desperation--"I wouldn't sleep in it."

"Why not?"

"If I wanted to have all the bells in a house ring, with nobody to
ring 'em; and all the doors in a house bang, with nobody to bang
'em; and all sorts of feet treading about, with no feet there; why,
then," said the landlord, "I'd sleep in that house."

"Is anything seen there?"

The landlord looked at me again, and then, with his former
appearance of desperation, called down his stable-yard for "Ikey!"

The call produced a high-shouldered young fellow, with a round red
face, a short crop of sandy hair, a very broad humorous mouth, a
turned-up nose, and a great sleeved waistcoat of purple bars, with
mother-of-pearl buttons, that seemed to be growing upon him, and to
be in a fair way--if it were not pruned--of covering his head and
overrunning his boots.

"This gentleman wants to know," said the landlord, "if anything's
seen at the Poplars."

"'Ooded woman with a howl," said Ikey, in a state of great
freshness.

"Do you mean a cry?"

"I mean a bird, sir."

"A hooded woman with an owl. Dear me! Did you ever see her?"

"I seen the howl."

"Never the woman?"

"Not so plain as the howl, but they always keeps together."

"Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly as the owl?"

"Lord bless you, sir! Lots."

"Who?"

"Lord bless you, sir! Lots."

"The general-dealer opposite, for instance, who is opening his
shop?"

"Perkins? Bless you, Perkins wouldn't go a-nigh the place. No!"
observed the young man, with considerable feeling; "he an't
overwise, an't Perkins, but he an't such a fool as THAT."

(Here, the landlord murmured his confidence in Perkins's knowing
better.)

"Who is--or who was--the hooded woman with the owl? Do you know?"

"Well!" said Ikey, holding up his cap with one hand while he
scratched his head with the other, "they say, in general, that she
was murdered, and the howl he 'ooted the while."

This very concise summary of the facts was all I could learn,
except that a young man, as hearty and likely a young man as ever I
see, had been took with fits and held down in 'em, after seeing the
hooded woman. Also, that a personage, dimly described as "a hold
chap, a sort of one-eyed tramp, answering to the name of Joby,
unless you challenged him as Greenwood, and then he said, 'Why not?
and even if so, mind your own business,'" had encountered the
hooded woman, a matter of five or six times. But, I was not
materially assisted by these witnesses: inasmuch as the first was
in California, and the last was, as Ikey said (and he was confirmed
by the landlord), Anywheres.

Now, although I regard with a hushed and solemn fear, the
mysteries, between which and this state of existence is interposed
the barrier of the great trial and change that fall on all the
things that live; and although I have not the audacity to pretend
that I know anything of them; I can no more reconcile the mere
banging of doors, ringing of bells, creaking of boards, and such-
like insignificances, with the majestic beauty and pervading
analogy of all the Divine rules that I am permitted to understand,
than I had been able, a little while before, to yoke the spiritual
intercourse of my fellow- traveller to the chariot of the rising
sun. Moreover, I had lived in two haunted houses--both abroad. In
one of these, an old Italian palace, which bore the reputation of
being very badly haunted indeed, and which had recently been twice
abandoned on that account, I lived eight months, most tranquilly
and pleasantly: notwithstanding that the house had a score of
mysterious bedrooms, which were never used, and possessed, in one
large room in which I sat reading, times out of number at all
hours, and next to which I slept, a haunted chamber of the first
pretensions. I gently hinted these considerations to the landlord.
And as to this particular house having a bad name, I reasoned with
him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and how easy
it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I
were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking
old drunken tinker of the neighborhood had sold himself to the
Devil, he would come in time to be suspected of that commercial
venture! All this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the
landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead a failure as ever
I made in my life.

To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted
house, and was already half resolved to take it. So, after
breakfast, I got the keys from Perkins's brother-in-law (a whip and
harness maker, who keeps the Post Office, and is under submission
to a most rigorous wife of the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel
persuasion), and went up to the house, attended by my landlord and
by Ikey.

Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The
slowly changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were
doleful in the last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built,
ill-planned, and ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry
rot, there was a flavor of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim
of that indescribable decay which settles on all the work of man's
hands whenever it's not turned to man's account. The kitchens and
offices were too large, and too remote from each other. Above
stairs and below, waste tracts of passage intervened between
patches of fertility represented by rooms; and there was a mouldy
old well with a green growth upon it, hiding like a murderous trap,
near the bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row of bells.
One of these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded white
letters, MASTER B. This, they told me, was the bell that rang the
most.

"Who was Master B.?" I asked. "Is it known what he did while the
owl hooted?"

"Rang the bell," said Ikey.

I was rather struck by the prompt dexterity with which this young
man pitched his fur cap at the bell, and rang it himself. It was a
loud, unpleasant bell, and made a very disagreeable sound. The
other bells were inscribed according to the names of the rooms to
which their wires were conducted: as "Picture Room," "Double Room,"
"Clock Room," and the like. Following Master B.'s bell to its
source I found that young gentleman to have had but indifferent
third-class accommodation in a triangular cabin under the cock-
loft, with a corner fireplace which Master B. must have been
exceedingly small if he were ever able to warm himself at, and a
corner chimney-piece like a pyramidal staircase to the ceiling for
Tom Thumb. The papering of one side of the room had dropped down
bodily, with fragments of plaster adhering to it, and almost
blocked up the door. It appeared that Master B., in his spiritual
condition, always made a point of pulling the paper down. Neither
the landlord nor Ikey could suggest why he made such a fool of
himself.

Except that the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top,
I made no other discoveries. It was moderately well furnished, but
sparely. Some of the furniture--say, a third--was as old as the
house; the rest was of various periods within the last half-
century. I was referred to a corn-chandler in the market-place of
the county town to treat for the house. I went that day, and I
took it for six months.

It was just the middle of October when I moved in with my maiden
sister (I venture to call her eight-and-thirty, she is so very
handsome, sensible, and engaging). We took with us, a deaf stable-
man, my bloodhound Turk, two women servants, and a young person
called an Odd Girl. I have reason to record of the attendant last
enumerated, who was one of the Saint Lawrence's Union Female
Orphans, that she was a fatal mistake and a disastrous engagement.

The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a
raw cold day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house
was most depressing. The cook (an amiable woman, but of a weak
turn of intellect) burst into tears on beholding the kitchen, and
requested that her silver watch might be delivered over to her
sister (2 Tuppintock's Gardens, Liggs's Walk, Clapham Rise), in the
event of anything happening to her from the damp. Streaker, the
housemaid, feigned cheerfulness, but was the greater martyr. The
Odd Girl, who had never been in the country, alone was pleased, and
made arrangements for sowing an acorn in the garden outside the
scullery window, and rearing an oak.

We went, before dark, through all the natural--as opposed to
supernatural--miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting
reports ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and
descended from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there
was no salamander (which failed to surprise me, for I don't know
what it is), there was nothing in the house; what there was, was
broken, the last people must have lived like pigs, what could the
meaning of the landlord be? Through these distresses, the Odd Girl
was cheerful and exemplary. But within four hours after dark we
had got into a supernatural groove, and the Odd Girl had seen
"Eyes," and was in hysterics.

My sister and I had agreed to keep the haunting strictly to
ourselves, and my impression was, and still is, that I had not left
Ikey, when he helped to unload the cart, alone with the women, or
any one of them, for one minute. Nevertheless, as I say, the Odd
Girl had "seen Eyes" (no other explanation could ever be drawn from
her), before nine, and by ten o'clock had had as much vinegar
applied to her as would pickle a handsome salmon.

I leave a discerning public to judge of my feelings, when, under
these untoward circumstances, at about half-past ten o'clock Master
B.'s bell began to ring in a most infuriated manner, and Turk
howled until the house resounded with his lamentations!

I hope I may never again be in a state of mind so unchristian as
the mental frame in which I lived for some weeks, respecting the
memory of Master B. Whether his bell was rung by rats, or mice, or
bats, or wind, or what other accidental vibration, or sometimes by
one cause, sometimes another, and sometimes by collusion, I don't
know; but, certain it is, that it did ring two nights out of three,
until I conceived the happy idea of twisting Master B.'s neck--in
other words, breaking his bell short off--and silencing that young
gentleman, as to my experience and belief, for ever.

But, by that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers
of catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very
inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes
endowed with unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would
address the servants in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I
had painted Master B.'s room and balked the paper, and taken Master
B.'s bell away and balked the ringing, and if they could suppose
that that confounded boy had lived and died, to clothe himself with
no better behavior than would most unquestionably have brought him
and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance
in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also
suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those
contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the
disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?--I say I would
become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such
an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd
Girl's suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring among
us like a parochial petrifaction.

Streaker, the housemaid, too, had an attribute of a most
discomfiting nature. I am unable to say whether she was of an
usually lymphatic temperament, or what else was the matter with
her, but this young woman became a mere Distillery for the
production of the largest and most transparent tears I ever met
with. Combined with these characteristics, was a peculiar tenacity
of hold in those specimens, so that they didn't fall, but hung upon
her face and nose. In this condition, and mildly and deplorably
shaking her head, her silence would throw me more heavily than the
Admirable Crichton could have done in a verbal disputation for a
purse of money. Cook, likewise, always covered me with confusion
as with a garment, by neatly winding up the session with the
protest that the Ouse was wearing her out, and by meekly repeating
her last wishes regarding her silver watch.

As to our nightly life, the contagion of suspicion and fear was
among us, and there is no such contagion under the sky. Hooded
woman? According to the accounts, we were in a perfect Convent of
hooded women. Noises? With that contagion downstairs, I myself
have sat in the dismal parlor, listening, until I have heard so
many and such strange noises, that they would have chilled my blood
if I had not warmed it by dashing out to make discoveries. Try
this in bed, in the dead of the night: try this at your own
comfortable fire-side, in the life of the night. You can fill any
house with noises, if you will, until you have a noise for every
nerve in your nervous system.

I repeat; the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us, and
there is no such contagion under the sky. The women (their noses
in a chronic state of excoriation from smelling-salts) were always
primed and loaded for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair-
triggers. The two elder detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions
that were considered doubly hazardous, and she always established
the reputation of such adventures by coming back cataleptic. If
Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark, we knew we should
presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took place so
constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go
about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe
is called The Auctioneer, to every domestic he met with.

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