Tales from the Dead of Night Read online

  TALES FROM THE DEAD OF NIGHT

  A beautiful antique that gives its owner a show he’d rather forget. A sinister masked ball with one too many guests. A ghost hunter whose exorcism goes horribly wrong. These are some of the classic tales of supernatural terror that will make you shiver, thrill and look under the bed tonight.

  From rural England to colonial India, in murky haunted mansions and under modern electric lighting, thirteen master storytellers pull back the veil of everyday life to reveal the nightmares which lurk just out of sight. They are lessons in ingenuity and surprise, sometimes building slowly to a chilling climax, sometimes springing horror on you from the utterly ordinary.

  And these stories are more than simply frightening – they are also unsettling revelations of loneliness, love, mortality and the human capacity for both evil and remorse.

  We wish you pleasant dreams.

  CECILY GAYFORD studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, and now works in publishing. Her interest in Gothic and supernatural literature extends from Horace Walpole to Hilary Mantel. She once saw a ghost in a hotel in Ecuador. She lives in London.

  TALES FROM THE DEAD OF NIGHT

  THIRTEEN CLASSIC GHOST STORIES

  Selected by Cecily Gayford

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London ECIR OJH

  www.profilebooks.com

  This eBook edition published in 2013

  Selection copyright © Cecily Gayford

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ‘The Crown Derby Plate’ © Estate of Majorie Bowen

  ‘The Cotillon’ © Estate of L. P. Hartley

  ‘The Black Veil’ © Chico Kidd

  ‘The Haunting of Shawley Rectory’ © Ruth Rendell

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced,

  transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in

  any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as

  allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as

  strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised

  distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s

  and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 84765 982 8

  While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders, the editor and

  publishers would be grateful for information where they have been unable to

  trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.

  Two travellers sat alone in a train carriage.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ asked one, by way

  of conversation.

  ‘Yes’, said the other, and vanished.

  Anon.

  CONTENTS

  The Shadow

  E. Nesbit

  The Clock

  W. F. Harvey

  Pirates

  E. F. Benson

  The Crown Derby Plate

  Marjorie Bowen

  The Tarn

  Hugh Walpole

  The Haunting of Shawley Rectory

  Ruth Rendell

  The Cotillon

  L. P. Hartley

  The Haunted Dolls’ House

  M. R. James

  Pomegranate Seed

  Edith Wharton

  The Phantom ’Rickshaw

  Rudyard Kipling

  The Toll-House

  W. W. Jacobs

  The Black Veil

  A. F. Kidd

  The Hedgehog

  Saki

  The Bell

  Ryan Price

  E. NESBIT

  (1858–1924)

  Best known now as the author of The Railway Children, Edith Nesbit was in her lifetime a formidable, and formidably eccentric, woman. She was a founder of the socialist Fabian Society, where she formed close relationships with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, as well as a writer of short stories, novels and poems and a mother to five children (two of whom were the illegitimate offspring of her husband, Hubert Bland). She was also intensely interested in the supernatural: there are suggestions that she was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where her fellow initiates included W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and the occultist Aleister Crowley, and she complained that Well Hall, where she wrote her most famous stories for children, was haunted by a ghost who sighed over her shoulder as she worked.

  THE SHADOW

  THIS IS NOT an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects – no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story.

  There were three of us and another, but she had fainted suddenly at the second extra of the Christmas dance, and had been put to bed in the dressing room next to the room which we three shared. It had been one of those jolly, old-fashioned dances where nearly everybody stays the night, and the big country house is stretched to its utmost containing – guests harbouring on sofas, couches, settles and even mattresses on floors. Some of the young men actually, I believe, slept on the great dining table. We had talked of our partners, as girls will, and then the stillness of the manor house, broken only by the whisper of the wind in the cedar branches, and the scraping of their harsh fingers against our windowpanes, had pricked us to such luxurious confidence in our surroundings of bright chintz and candle-flame and firelight, that we had dared to talk of ghosts – in which, we all said, we did not believe one bit. We had told the story of the phantom coach, and the horribly strange bed, and the lady in the sacque, and the house in Berkeley Square.

  We none of us believed in ghosts, but my heart, at least, seemed to leap to my throat and choke me there when a tap came to our door – a tap faint, not to be mistaken.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said the youngest of us, craning a lean neck towards the door. It opened slowly, and I give you my word the instant of suspense that followed is still reckoned among my life’s least confident moments. Almost at once the door opened fully, and Miss Eastwich, my aunt’s housekeeper, companion and general stand-by, looked in on us.

  We all said, ‘Come in,’ but she stood there. She was, at all normal hours, the most silent woman I have ever known. She stood and looked at us, and shivered a little. So did we – for in those days corridors were not warmed by hot-water pipes and the air from the door was keen.

  ‘I saw your light,’ she said at last, ‘and I thought it was late for you to be up – after all this gaiety. I thought perhaps –’ her glance turned towards the door of the dressing room.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s fast asleep.’ I should have added a goodnight, but the youngest of us forestalled my speech. She did not know Miss Eastwich as we others did; did not know how her persistent silence had built a wall round her – a wall that no one dared to break down with the commonplaces of talk, or the littlenesses of mere human relationship. Miss Eastwich’s silence had taught us to treat her as a machine; and as other than a machine we never dreamed of treating her. But the youngest of us had seen Miss Eastwich for the first time that day. She was young, crude, ill-balanced, subject to blind, calf-like impulses. She was also the heiress of a rich tallow-chandler, but that has nothing to do with this part of the story. She jumped up from the hearth rug, her unsui
tably rich silk lace-trimmed dressing gown falling back from her thin collarbones, and ran to the door and put an arm round Miss Eastwich’s prim, lisse-encircled neck. I gasped. I should as soon have dared to embrace Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Come in,’ said the youngest of us – ‘come in and get warm. There’s lots of cocoa left.’ She drew Miss Eastwich in and shut the door.

  The vivid light of pleasure in the housekeeper’s pale eyes went through my heart like a knife. It would have been so easy to put an arm round her neck, if one had only thought she wanted an arm there. But it was not I who had thought that – and indeed, my arm might not have brought the light evoked by the thin arm of the youngest of us.

  ‘Now,’ the youngest went on eagerly, ‘you shall have the very biggest, nicest chair, and the cocoa pot’s here on the hob as hot as hot – and we’ve all been telling ghost stories, only we don’t believe in them a bit; and when you get warm you ought to tell one too.’

  Miss Eastwich – that model of decorum and decently done duties – tell a ghost story!

  ‘You’re sure I’m not in your way,’ Miss Eastwich said, stretching her hands to the blaze. I wondered whether housekeepers have fires in their rooms even at Christmas time. ‘Not a bit,’ I said it, and I hope I said it as warmly as I felt it. ‘I – Miss Eastwich – I’d have asked you to come in other times – only I didn’t think you’d care for girls’ chatter.’

  The third girl, who was really of no account, and that’s why I have not said anything about her before, poured cocoa for our guest. I put my fleecy Madeira shawl round her shoulders. I could not think of anything else to do for her and I found myself wishing desperately to do something. The smiles she gave us were quite pretty. People can smile prettily at forty or fifty, or even later, though girls don’t realise this. It occurred to me, and this was another knife thrust, that I had never seen Miss Eastwich smile – a real smile – before. The pale smiles of dutiful acquiescence were not of the same blood as this dimpling, happy, transfiguring look.

  ‘This is very pleasant,’ she said, and it seemed to me that I had never before heard her real voice. It did not please me to think that at the cost of cocoa, a fire, and my arm round her neck, I might have heard this new voice any time these six years.

  ‘We’ve been telling ghost stories,’ I said. ‘The worst of it is, we don’t believe in ghosts. No one we know has ever seen one.’

  ‘It’s always what somebody told somebody, who told somebody you know,’ said the youngest of us, ‘and you can’t believe that, can you?’

  ‘What the soldier said is not evidence,’ said Miss Eastwich. Will it be believed that the little Dickens quotation pierced one more keenly than the new smile or the new voice?

  ‘And all the ghost stories are so beautifully rounded off – a murder committed on the spot – or a hidden treasure, or a warning … I think that makes them harder to believe. The most horrid ghost story I ever heard was one that was quite silly.’

  ‘Tell it.’

  ‘I can’t – it doesn’t sound anything to tell. Miss Eastwich ought to tell one.’

  ‘Oh, do,’ said the youngest of us, and her salt cellars loomed dark, as she stretched her neck eagerly and laid an entreating arm on our guest’s knee.

  ‘The only thing that I ever knew of was – was hearsay,’ she said slowly, ‘till just the end.’

  I knew she would tell her story, and I knew she had never before told it, and I knew she was only telling it now because she was proud, and this seemed the only way to pay for the fire and the cocoa and the laying of that arm round her neck.

  ‘Don’t tell it,’ I said suddenly. ‘I know you’d rather not.’

  ‘I dare say it would bore you,’ she said meekly, and the youngest of us, who, after all, did not understand everything, glared resentfully at me.

  ‘We should just love it,’ she said. ‘Do tell us. Never mind if it isn’t a real, proper, fixed-up story. I’m certain anything you think ghostly would be quite too beautifully horrid for anything.’

  Miss Eastwich finished her cocoa and reached up to set the cup on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I can’t do any harm,’ she said half to herself, ‘they don’t believe in ghosts, and it wasn’t exactly a ghost either. And they’re all over twenty – they’re not babies.’

  There was a breathing time of hush and expectancy. The fire crackled and the gas suddenly glared higher because the billiard lights had been put out. We heard the steps and voices of the men going along the corridors.

  ‘It is really hardly worth telling,’ Miss Eastwich said doubtfully, shading her faded face from the fire with her thin hand.

  We all said, ‘Go on – oh, go on – do!’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘twenty years ago – and more than that – I had two friends, and I loved them more than anything in the world. And they married each other –’

  She paused, and I knew just in what way she had loved each of them. The youngest of us said, ‘How awfully nice for you. Do go on.’

  She patted the youngest’s shoulder, and I was glad that I had understood, and that the youngest of all hadn’t. She went on.

  ‘Well, after they were married, I did not see much of them for a year or two; and then he wrote and asked me to come and stay, because his wife was ill, and I should cheer her up, and cheer him up as well; for it was a gloomy house, and he himself was growing gloomy too.’

  I knew, as she spoke, that she had every line of that letter by heart.

  ‘Well, I went. The address was in Lee, near London; in those days there were streets and streets of new villa houses growing up round old brick mansions standing in their own grounds, with red walls round, you know, and a sort of flavour of coaching days, and post-chaises, and Blackheath highwaymen about them. He had said the house was gloomy, and it was called The Firs, and I imagined my cab going through a dark, winding shrubbery, and drawing up in front of one of these sedate, old, square houses. Instead, we drew up in front of a large, smart villa, with iron railings, gay encaustic tiles leading from the iron gate to the stained-glass-panelled door, and for shrubbery only a few stunted cypresses and aucubas in the tiny front garden. But inside it was all warm and welcoming. He met me at the door.’

  She was gazing into the fire and I knew she had forgotten us. But the youngest girl of all still thought it was to us she was telling her story.

  ‘He met me at the door,’ she said again, ‘and thanked me for coming, and asked me to forgive the past.’

  ‘What past?’ said that high priestess of the inàpropos, the youngest of all.

  ‘Oh – I suppose he meant because they hadn’t invited me before, or something,’ said Miss Eastwich worriedly, ‘but it’s a very dull story, I find, after all, and –’

  ‘Do go on,’ I said – then I kicked the youngest of us, and got up to rearrange Miss Eastwich’s shawl, and said in blatant dumb show, over the shawled shoulder, ‘Shut up, you little idiot!’

  After another silence, the housekeeper’s new voice went on.

  ‘They were very glad to see me and I was very glad to be there. You girls, now, have such troops of friends, but these two were all I had – all I had ever had. Mabel wasn’t exactly ill, only weak and excitable. I thought he seemed more ill than she did. She went to bed early and before she went, she asked me to keep him company through his last pipe, so we went into the dining room and sat in the two armchairs on each side of the fireplace. They were covered with green leather, I remember. There were bronze groups of horses and a black marble clock on the mantelpiece – all wedding presents. He poured out some whisky for himself, but he hardly touched it. He sat looking into the fire.

  At last I said, “What’s wrong? Mabel looks as well as you could expect.”

  ‘He said, “Yes – but I don’t know from one day to another that she won’t begin to notice something wrong. That’s why I wanted you to come. You were always so sensible and strong-minded, and Mabel’s like a little bird on a flower.”

  ‘I said ye
s, of course, and waited for him to go on. I thought he must be in debt, or in trouble of some sort. So I just waited. Presently he said, “Margaret, this is a very peculiar house –” He always called me Margaret. You see, we’d been such old friends. I told him I thought the house was very pretty, and fresh, and home-like – only a little too new – but that fault would mend with time. He said, “It is new: that’s just it. We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house, Margaret, I should think it was haunted.”

  ‘I asked if he had seen anything. “No,” he said, “not yet.”

  ‘“Heard then?” said I.

  ‘“No – not heard either,” he said, “but there’s a sort of feeling: I can’t describe it – I’ve seen nothing and I’ve heard nothing, but I’ve been so near to seeing and hearing, just near, that’s all. And something follows me about – only when I turn round, there’s never anything, only my shadow. And I always feel that I shall see the thing next minute – but I never do – not quite – it’s always just not visible.”

  ‘I thought he’d been working rather hard – and tried to cheer him up by making light of all this. It was just nerves, I said. Then he said he had thought I could help him, and did I think anyone he had wronged could have laid a curse on him, and did I believe in curses. I said I didn’t – and the only person anyone could have said he had wronged forgave him freely, I knew, if there was anything to forgive. So I told him this too.’

  It was I, not the youngest of us, who knew the name of that person, wronged and forgiving.

  ‘So then I said he ought to take Mabel away from the house and have a complete change. But he said no; Mabel had got everything in order, and he could never manage to get her away just now without explaining everything – “and, above all,” he said, “she mustn’t guess there’s anything wrong. I dare say I shan’t feel quite such a lunatic now you’re here.”