The Laying of a Red-Haired Ghost
It was a strange and incredible story, Jim thought, as he sat opposite his sister in the firelight, and listened to her nervous and disjointed telling of it. They held little in common, these two, and had not met for some years; she was greatly his senior, and when she had married Captain Blundell, who combined a love of spirits with a credulous belief in spiritualism, Jim sheered off altogether. He could not stand a man who came drunk to his own table, and who, in his sober moments, could talk of nothing but the vulgar claptrap of séances and spirit rapping.
But now, six months after the funeral, Jim found himself summoned down by a pathetic little letter; and there he was after tea, in a corner of the big drawing room, watching his sister’s pale, emotional face in the firelight, and wondering how any woman could possibly believe all she was telling him.
In spite of this “wonder,” however, he was beginning to feel conscious of a certain “creepiness” down the back, and several times he caught himself wishing that the footman would bring the lamps, and be quick about it.
“As you know, Jim, Harry was a tremendous spiritualist,” she went on, with a little show of natural embarrassment. “He was always having séances and what he called ‘experiments’ in the house, up to the day of his seizure.”
“Mediums?” asked Jim, feeling the old contempt stir in him.
She nodded, with a gesture imploring his patience.
“Every professional medium in the United Kingdom has slept in this house,” she answered. “They came down, male and female, in endless succession for week end visits, and for two years I kept a diary of all their phenomena.”
Jim shuffled nervously, fearing a detailed account.
“But a few months before his death,” she went on, “all this came to a sudden stop. He gave up having paid mediums—”
“You must have been glad,” said Jim, with genuine sympathy.
“Because he said he had found something better. You see, our circles were made up of people staying in the house—always devout believers—and when there were not enough of these he brought in recruits from among the servants. First the upper servants, then anybody. Gardeners, grooms, upper housemaids, and even cooks have all sat at various times with us round the table or cabinet, watching hands, faces, and sometimes full-form figures flit about the room. Oh, it was very wonderful!”
Jim poked the fire, and lit another cigarette hastily. He believed nothing; but it was foolish, he considered, for nervous persons like his sister to talk of such things after dark, especially in a lonely country house with ill-lighted corridors and ghostly staircases. Moreover, she was always peering over her shoulder as though she saw something in the great darkened room behind her.
“It was on one of these occasions,” she continued, lowering her voice, “he discovered that one of the servants was a medium of exceptional powers. After that no professional ever entered the house again.”
“And this medium—servant—?” asked her brother impatiently.
“Was Masters.”
“What?” he cried: “Masters, the old housekeeper?”
“Yes; she began by going into a trance at one of the séances, and my husband said she possessed most unusual powers and must sit for development.”
“And you got the same results with that old woman?”
“Even better. Oh, Masters was extraordinary!” replied his sister with enthusiasm. “Simply extraordinary! But it’s not that I want to tell you about. It’s something very different.”
Jim noticed her hesitation and embarrassment, and wondered what he was going to hear next. He suggested ringing for the lights, but his sister objected that she did not want the servants to overhear a single word. Her manner became more mysterious. She drew her chair closer, and began to speak in a hushed voice, but with great earnestness.
“It’s what has gone on since—that I want to tell you,” she whispered. “Since my husband’s death, I mean—what goes on now—”
“Now!” repeated Jim, feeling more and more uncomfortable.
“And I sent for you because you are the only one of the family left. I could never speak to a stranger of this.”
“Of course not,” he said hurriedly.
“You say things go on now, do you?” He glanced quickly at her face, and noted its sudden pallor and the unmistakable signs of fear in her manner. “Do you mean in this house?”
He got up to ring the bell for the lamps, but she drew him back into the chair.
“Wait till I’ve finished, please, Jim. You know, this is a very large house,” she went on disconnectedly, still under her breath for fear of listeners. “And a very lonely one; and I’ve been living here since my husband died.”
“Yes,” he said emphatically.
“I only use a small part of it. The rest—his part—is shut up.”
“Naturally.”
“I have fewer servants too.”
“Of course.”
“And the greatest difficulty in keeping them. They won’t stay. They are always hearing noises in the unused part of the house—his part. And some of them swear they have met it on the stairs.”
Jim looked up quickly; he was alarmed at her tone of voice.
“Met what?” he asked aloud.
“Him,” she whispered back across the firelight. “He’s been about all the time. He’s always about now. He’s not far from you and me at this very moment, probably.”
Her brother sprang up, and faced the darkening room with his back to the fire. Her serious manner dismayed him a good deal.
“You mean—” he began.
“Harry still lives here—still comes here.”
“Helen!” he said severely—“your nerves are unstrung. What in the world you mean by talking in this way?”
“Exactly what I say, Jim. Harry is still in this house,” she answered quietly, in a tone that sent the shivers down his back.
“The house is h—h—aunted, you mean!”
“I mean that Harry is still about in it,” she whispered.
“But have you seen him?”
“Often,” she went on, her excitement growing as she saw her brother’s interest. “And he’s always telling me to do things. He says his happiness depends on my doing them. He says this all the time. He comes at night to my room; and even when I don’t see him, I hear his voice in the dark whispering at me.”
Jim straightened himself up, and drew a long, deep breath. He was slowly forming his own conclusions. He knew a splendid nerve specialist in town, who would soon know how to put the matter right. He was not subtle-minded himself, and hardly knew how to deal with such a case, but the doctor would manage all that. So, for the moment, he said nothing, and schooled himself to listen with sympathy and patience. In spite of his conclusions, however, he regretted that his sister looked to him for protection in such a matter, and almost wished he had not come.
“Then, only a month ago,” she went “Masters herself came to give warning. She cried a lot, and declared she really could not stand it any longer.”
“Masters sees him too?”
“As often as I do nearly. The very night she gave notice he came into my room and said I must not let her go on any account, for she was such a wonderful medium, and he could not manifest at all without a medium. If Masters left he would be unable to come back, and he would suffer—and be very unhappy.”
“So the wretched woman is still here?”
“I was obliged to double her wages before she’d consent to stay, and even now I’m always afraid she’ll go out of her mind or do something dreadful like that.”
The entrance of the footman with the much longed-for lamps put an end to their conversation for the moment, and the dressing-gong postponed it still further; but after a depressing tête-à-tête dinner, Jim asked to see Masters alone in the smoking-room. His sister was not there, for he did not wish her nerves to be further excited before going to bed.
He talked to Masters about family matters that interested them both, before approaching the topic of main interest. She volunteered little, but answered all his questions frankly, and he soon saw that she believed in it all even more implicitly than did his sister. She was less intelligent, and of course more credulous, and she told him some amazing bits of information about her late master which only confirmed Jim in his theory that these two hysterically-inclined women were completely hypnotised into the belief that Captain Blundell had returned to the scene of his orgies and “experiments,” and still walked the rooms and passages of the old family mansion. She mentioned that even with her higher wages she did not think she could stand it much longer.
Jim asked her particularly about the first séance at which she went into a trance.
“I simply felt kind of faint,” she told him, “and then turned of a sudden all unconscious. That’s all I knew till I woke up and they told me all what had ’appened while I was asleep. ‘In a trance’ the poor Captain called it. And after that I used to sit twice a week regular for him.”
Jim felt sure she believed every word she uttered. Her descriptions of her meeting with the Captain since his death were very vivid, and she turned pale and trembled all over while she spoke of seeing his red head and bloated face bending over her bed in the night time. And when she told how she saw him moving silently down the corridors, sometimes overtaking and passing her without a word, and vanishing in the doorway of his old room, Jim was distinctly sorry that he had not waited for her recital until the morning.
But it did not in the least shake his belief that both women were entirely deluded, and his mind was already at work on a plan to send the foolish old housekeeper off on a holiday, while he got his sister up to London, and induced her to see a specialist.
He avoided further conversation on the subject that night—for his own sake as much as for theirs, and he felt quite angry with himself to note that his nerves gave an involuntary start when his sister led him to his lofty panelled bedroom, and informed him that this was the very room her husband had died in six months previously.
“There is far more chance of your seeing him if you sleep here,” she explained, “and then you can judge for yourself. Masters, who sleeps just across the passage so as to be near me, tried hard to prevent me putting you here; but I knew you wouldn’t feel the least afraid. But, do please remember, Jim,” she added pleadingly, “if he comes, not to speak roughly or unkindly to him.”
She was gone and the door closed behind her.
Jim’s reflections for the next few minutes were very far from pleasant. He believed none of it, but he had nerves for all that; and to be put to sleep in the death-room, with a medium servant opposite and a hysterical sister a little farther up the passage—this was more than he had bargained for. His mind and imagination were alive with all the stories of the evil apparition he had heard; and even his bedroom, he noticed, was littered with spiritualist journals and cheap occult magazines, dealing with the marvellous and terrifying side of this class of things.
No wonder, he reflected, that these women, living alone in the country, their minds still dominated by the bluster and superstition of the bibulous Blundell—no wonder they still saw him walking the floors and whispering at them in the darkness of the night. It was matter for surprise they did not see and hear a great deal more.
And, although Jim possessed a strong will, and had soon reduced his imagination to order, it required considerable effort on his part to crawl between the sheets of old Blundell’s bed and blow the candles out on the table beside him. And the last picture in his mind as he finally fell asleep took the form of this man as he had seen him at his sister’s wedding years ago—with his flaming red hair, his bloated cheeks, and his small, pig-like eyes.
For all that, however, he slept undisturbed, and during the following day he tried to divert his sister’s thoughts as much as possible to other things than spirits. He also contrived that Masters should never once see her alone.
For three days the household moved along normal and unexciting channels of ordinary country life, but the fourth morning Helen came down to breakfast pale and trembling, and declared her husband had appeared to her in the night, and had whispered that he could not come as before so long as Jim was in the house, and that he was suffering and very unhappy. Her brother’s sceptical attitude, he said, destroyed the conditions, and made it almost impossible for him to materialise.
“That explains, you see, why he has not appeared to you,” she said weepingly.
Jim did not care what the explanation might be, so long as the apparition did not actually come; and this only made him feel more than ever that his theory was correct, and that the whole story was a tissue of moonshine and hysteria.
But that very night something happened that compelled him to reconsider his theories, and, if possible, to readjust them.
It was after midnight when he came up from the smoking-room, where an interesting novel had detained him far beyond his usual hour. In order not to disturb his sister, whose room he had to pass, he took off his shoes and walked on tiptoe up the stairs. The house was dark and silent, and the great hall he had to pass through seemed unusually large. Its proportions seemed almost to have altered. To find his way he was obliged to keep his hand on the rail; but halfway up he became so confused as to his exact whereabouts that he decided to return to the smoking-room and get a candle.
It was at this very moment that his nerves signalled a warning to him. His heart suddenly began to beat very fast, and as he turned to grope his way downstairs he became aware that “something” had moved up directly in front of him out of the darkness.
Something, he felt positive, was standing within two feet, or less, of his person. In another second he would touch it. Everything was pitch-black; and at once his mind was flooded with the details of what his sister and Masters had seen. With terrible vividness the horrible stories came before him. The hair rose on his head, and he felt his knees shake. The theory about hypnotised and hysterical women, so convincing in the daylight, seemed in a second to have become inadequate and absurd. The frightened face of the housekeeper and his sister’s pallor occurred to him with new meaning.
He tried hard to pull himself together, and began to fumble in his pocket for a match; but he only just had time to move a little to one side and get his back up against the wall, when the darkness before him grew faintly luminous, and he plainly saw a figure moving slowly past him down the stairs.
Jim felt the sweat trickling down his neck as he stared. Something with human shape passed him slowly, silently, with a sort of dim light of its own just sufficient to make it visible. It made absolutely no sound, but he felt the air stir on his cheek; and, just at the second when it was closest to him, it turned slowly round and showed him its face.
Jim almost screamed aloud. It was a man with bloated cheeks, small shining eyes, and red hair!
He thought every instant the figure would spring at him out of the darkness, and he almost fell forward onto it, and feared he would collapse on the floor from sheer fright. But, in the same second, it passed him and was gone; moving by with soundless feet as though his own presence had been quite unobserved.
His first thought was to rush to his sister or to Masters, and tell them what he had seen. But cooler thoughts followed quickly, when he reflected how mortified he would be to confess that he was too frightened to follow the figure and speak to it. Instead, his trembling fingers found a match, and he at once struck a light and peered about him.
The shadows ran away on all sides, and he saw a long empty corridor, lined with pictures, but devoid of all doors or furniture, and certainly destitute of any other human figure than his own. But it was not the passage he knew! Evidently he had taken the wrong turning in the dark. He ought to have gone up another flight of stairs before turning, and he forthwith began to retrace his steps by the light of the match, and happily reached his own door before its last flicker left him in the darkness again.
And, once within his own room, he locked the door, poked the fire into a blaze, lit every candle he could find—and then sat down to think it all over.
After thinking it over for half an hour, safe from the paralysing effects of fear, Jim realised honestly enough that his theories needed readjusting. He, therefore, readjusted them to the best of his ability—and then got into bed and slept peacefully till morning.
Next day he told his sister what he had seen, but assured her at the same time that he had a plan for making the unhappy spirit return to its grave and rest quietly.
“It was Harry, you see, as I told you.”
“It gave me an awful turn,” said Jim. “Eyes, face, hair and all. It was exactly like him.”
“And you really think you can stop it without making him unhappy?” she asked plaintively.
“I’ll try. It won’t make him unhappy, I promise that. Don’t let Masters know I’ve seen him, or she’ll have hysterics.”
Jim arranged with his sister that he should slip into her room late that night, unobserved, and sleep on the sofa behind the curtains. She was to wake him when the apparition came, in case he was asleep. For the rest she must have confidence in him—and wait results.
At a few minutes past eleven Jim took up his position on the sofa behind the curtains, making himself comfortable with rugs and pillows. His sister was soon asleep. But he himself lay there with every sense alert, waiting for the first signs of the apparition. The room was in complete darkness, the house silent as the grave.
It was well after one o’clock when the sound of a door-handle being turned roused him out of a light doze and made his hand seek the dark lantern ready for use. Very cautiously and quietly the door was opened and someone moved stealthily into the room.
The darkness was too great to allow him to see a vestige of anything, but from the sound of drapery brushing against the wardrobe he knew that the intruder was standing somewhere between him and the front of the bed.
An instant later he knew that this was correct, for the faint, pale, luminous glow he had seen three nights before on the stairs made itself visible just where the bed ended, and Jim was able to make out by its aid the indistinct outline of a human head and shoulders.
At the same moment his sister moved uneasily in her sleep. The bed was being gently shaken; and almost immediately afterwards the jolting awakened her, and he heard her terrified voice from the bedclothes:
“Harry, is that you, dear?”
A sepulchral whisper replied from the shape at the foot of the bed:
“It is. But I cannot come again while your brother is in the house.”
The light shifted a little, and Jim plainly saw the mass of red hair on the figure’s head.
“I will tell him,” answered Helen, in a terrified whisper. “Please do not be angry with me.”
“I am angry only because you do not obey me,” continued the hoarse whisper.
“You do not carry out what I say.”
“But what have I not done?”
“The money I want left to my faithful old housekeeper is still not arranged for. You have not altered the will as I directed.”
“But I will do so tomorrow, Harry dear at once,” said the other with a gulp of terror.
Meanwhile Jim had stealthily left his hiding-place on tiptoe and come close up to the apparition of Captain Blundell. He was almost touching it, and as his sister uttered these last words, he encircled the figure with his arms, and clapped his handkerchief over its mouth. There was a smothered cry, and a wild rush across the room in the darkness. Helen uttered a piercing scream, and when the door slammed behind him, Jim found himself out in the passage, with a very solid apparition struggling in his arms most violently.
“If you don’t keep quiet, I’ll stun you, d’ye hear?” he whispered.
The figure made no reply, and he dragged and carried the still struggling “Captain Blundell” down the passage into his own room. Once in, he produced the rope he had already provided in view of this very climax, and tied up the apparition so that it could not possibly move. Then he ran back to his sister’s room as fast as his legs could carry him, first locking his door on the outside.
He found her with every candle alight, sobbing with terror, and in a condition certainly bordering on hysteria.
“Oh, Jim, did you see him that time? But what happened, and did he try to injure you? It was all so terrible. …”
“Come quickly,” cried her brother. “Come to my room. I’ve laid the ghost. You never need be afraid again.”
He dragged her by the hand, clad in a dressing-gown and shaking like a leaf, down the passage to his own room. He unlocked the door and they went in together. Silence and darkness met them.
“Now, Helen,” he said, “I’ll give you a light and you shall see the spirit better than you’ve ever seen it before.”
There was a sound of heavy shuffling in the darkness. He turned his dark lantern on the scene at the same moment.
Helen gave a long scream and caught his arm for support. There, in front of them, leaning in a half-faint against the bedpost, just as Jim had left her, stood Masters, the old housekeeper! She had a villainous red wig on her head; her cheeks were rouged violently, and her eyes painted. And at her feet lay a faintly luminous slate, and the sheet she had used to wrap round her neck and shoulders.
Before releasing her, Jim insisted on Helen taking him at once to the woman’s bedroom, where, as he suspected, they found further paraphernalia, consisting of a second red wig, grease paint, rubber hands, a couple of slates, and white sheets with loose arms carefully sewed on to them. She had learned all the tricks from the “professionals,” and had played them at their own game and beaten them clean out of the market.
But Helen Blundell was never troubled again by the apparition of her late husband, and Masters, the faithful old housekeeper, had to seek another place without a character.