My Own
True Ghost Story
As I came through
the Desert thus it was—As I came through the Desert.The City
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 traveler 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 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
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 dâk-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. Thekhansamah 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, pretense 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 oldkhansamah 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 bathroom 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 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 some one 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
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 dâk-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 favor."
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—click! 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 marvelously 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 honor has the khansamah? They tried to enter,
but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias 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
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!
Grateful thanks to Project Gutenberg.
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