Chilling Ghost Short Stories Read online

  This is a FLAME TREE Book

  Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells

  Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck

  Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker

  Thanks to Will Rough

  Publisher’s Note: Due to the historical nature of the text, we’re aware that there may be some language used which has the potential to cause offence to the modern reader. However, wishing overall to preserve the integrity of the text, rather than imposing contemporary sensibilities, we have left it unaltered.

  FLAME TREE PUBLISHING

  6 Melbray Mews, Fulham, London SW6 3NS, United Kingdom

  www.flametreepublishing.com

  First published 2015

  Copyright © 2015 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

  Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78361-375-5

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78664-508-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The cover image is created by Flame Tree Studio, based on artwork by Slava Gerj and Gabor Ruszkai.

  A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.

  Introducing our new fiction list:

  FLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS

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  Horror, Crime, Science Fiction & Fantasy

  www.flametreepress.com

  Contents

  Foreword by Dr Dale Townshend

  Publisher’s Note

  Stay Away from the Accordion Girl

  Jonathan Balog

  The Man Who Went Too Far

  E.F. Benson

  Audio Tour

  Trevor Boelter

  The Messenger

  Robert W. Chambers

  Ghost Farm

  Zach Chapman

  Mrs Zant and the Ghost

  Wilkie Collins

  The Return of Gunnar Kettilson

  Vonnie Winslow Crist

  Flaming Fuses

  Donna Cuttress

  The House, the Garden, and Occupants

  Amanda C. Davis

  The Signal-Man

  Charles Dickens

  Victorians

  James Dorr

  The New Catacomb

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Mourners

  Kurt Bachard

  The Figure on the Sidewalk

  Tim Foley

  The Shadows on the Wall

  Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

  The Wind in the Rose-Bush

  Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

  The Overcoat

  Nikolai Gogol

  The Waiting Room

  Philip Brian Hall

  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

  Washington Irving

  The Monkey’s Paw

  W.W. Jacobs

  The Altar of the Dead

  Henry James

  Count Magnus

  M.R. James

  Lost Hearts

  M.R. James

  The Five Jars

  M.R. James

  An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House

  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  The Spirit’s Whisper

  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  An Englishman in St. Louis

  Raymond Little

  Death and Champagne

  Luke Murphy

  The Mystery of the Semi-Detached

  Edith Nesbit

  Lost Souls

  Jeff Parsons

  The Skeleton Crew

  Michael Penkas

  Ligeia

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Black Cat

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Songs for the Lost

  Brian Rappatta

  An Unquiet Slumber

  Rhiannon Rasmussen

  Almost

  M. Regan

  The Bulge in the Wall

  Annette Siketa

  The Psychic Fair

  Cathy Smith

  Unclaimed

  Lesa Pascavis Smith

  The Bottle Imp

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Bewitched

  Edith Wharton

  The Bolted Door

  Edith Wharton

  The Canterville Ghost

  Oscar Wilde

  Biographies & Sources

  Foreword:

  Chilling Ghost Stories

  While the spectre may have entered mainstream popular fiction with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto on Christmas Eve in 1764, it was really only in the nineteenth century that the ghost story came most fully into its own. In Gothic fictions of the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, tales of spirits, ghosts and hauntings had often occupied only a smaller inset narrative in a much longer piece, such as the notorious ghost of the Bleeding Nun in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Gothic romance, The Monk (1796), or ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’, the frequently anthologized ghostly episode from Walter Scott’s historical novel, Redgauntlet (1824). Implicit in these aesthetic choices was the assumption that tales of ghosts, spectres and sprites could most effectively be handled in shorter literary forms, such as ballads, fragments and tales, since the frisson, that distinctive narrative tension or ‘chill’ upon which the ghost story so depends, could not always be effectively sustained across longer works.

  To this opportunity, writers of shorter fiction in the nineteenth century eagerly responded, inviting into their tales the spectral beings that had been uniformly exorcised and expelled, explained away and parodied in such texts as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). Between the years 1830 and 1890, the ghost story in Britain and America became one of the most popular literary modes; its appeal was exploited in the middle of the century by writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu and Margaret Oliphant. Closely linked with the rise of the professional female writer in the Victorian period, ghost stories were central to the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, Vernon Lee, Amelia Edwards and Charlotte Riddell. Unlike the ghosts of earlier Gothic writing, which had often been decidedly wooden, theatrical affairs, the spectres of the Victorian and Edwardian ghost story assume a certain ‘realistic’ air: no longer located in the far-flung regions of medieval Europe, these are the ghosts that haunt the contemporary British present, the spirits that return to vex and plague the everyday realms of modern domestic existence. Dickens’s ‘The Signal-Man’ (1866), for example, tells the story of a haunting that occurs in the prosaic, seemingly unromantic realms of the modern railway industry. Similarly, in a story such as W.W. Jacobs’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (1902), the occultic and near-ghostly happenings occur not in the haunted castles and abbeys of the eighteenth-century Gothic tradition, but rather in the suburban home of an ordinary bourgeois family.

  Much the same applies to the chilling turns of Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House’ (1862), set as it is in a middle-class suburban home in a British seaside town. And yet, as the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson famously put it, ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted, / One need not be a house; / The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.’ Indeed, with increasing frequency as the century wears on, the ghost enters the dark recesses of the human mind, assuming particularly psychological significance in the work of M.R. James, Walter de la Mare, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, Algernon Blackwood, Elizabeth Bowen and others. It is striking in this regard to note that a ghost story such as Henry James’s ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895) contains no ‘actual’ spectre so much as the ghosts of the dead that haunt the mind of the mournful protagonist, George Stransom, rendering him, too, somewhat spectral in the process. Ever more ambiguous in both their provenance and their demands, these spirits on the limits of consciousness come to occupy the shadowy place between dream and wakefulness, rationalism and superstition; in some instances, they are the projections of a guilty psyche, in others, the figure of justice and revenge. Though the subject of light-hearted parody in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887), as well as in stories by Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Jerome K. Jerome from the 1880s onwards, the ghost returns in the fractured, anxious psyches of early twentieth-century modernism, in the works of Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair. As Freud somewhat categorically declared in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ in 1919, “All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits.”

  As much as it had challenged the spirit of human optimism, the Great War had shattered a belief in ghosts. For the ghost story, however, the notion of belief has never been at stake. Prior to the rise of the Gothic, so-called ‘apparition narratives’ of the early eighteenth century employed tales of supernatural activity so as to drive home certain religiou
s truths: to believe in ghosts was also to embrace Christian conceptualisations of the afterlife, a defiant clinging to a form of religious faith in the face of materialist and rationalist philosophy. From Horace Walpole onwards, though, the ghost becomes merely an object of popular entrainment, stripped of all the theological significance that it once had. The form of the ghost story continues to survive and, indeed, thrive on the basis of the horrors and terrors, the characteristic thrills and chills of the Gothic mode, that lie at its heart. In what, though, do its curious pleasures consist? Perhaps the one characteristic that is common to all of the stories in this collection is a sense of obscurity, ambivalence and indecision. While the ghost story may often contain within itself means of validating and verifying the supernatural events that it relates, the reader is always left in a state of ambiguity at the tale’s end. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret of the form’s charm and appeal: the sheer pleasure of mystery and uncertainty in a world that is increasingly dominated by reason, rationality and science.

  Dale Townshend, 2015

  Publisher’s Note

  This collection of Gothic Fantasy stories is part of a new anthology series, which includes sumptuous hardcover editions on Horror, Ghosts and Science Fiction. Each one carries a potent mix of classic tales and new fiction, forming a path from the origins of the gothic in the early 1800s, with the dystopian horror of Mary Shelley’s ‘The Mortal Immortal’ to the chill of M.R. James’s classic ghost stories, and the fine stories of the many modern writers featured in our new series. We have tried to mix some renowned classic stories (Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’), with the less familiar (E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’), and a healthy dose of previously unpublished modern stories from the best of those writing today.

  Our 2015 call for new submissions was met by a tidal wave of entries, so the final selection was made to provide a wide and challenging range of tales for the discerning reader. Our editorial board of six members read each entry carefully, and it was difficult to turn down so many good stories, but inevitably those which made the final cut were deemed to be the best for our purpose, and we’re delighted to be able to publish them here.

  Stay Away from the Accordion Girl

  Jonathan Balog

  Once there was a young man who carried his pack across the country. He took work where he could find it, usually manual labor of one kind or another, and left when he felt it was time to move on. Since he’d left home at the age of fifteen he’d dug ditches for the county, washed dishes in restaurants, manned a cotton gin all through the night, and picked more strawberries than there were stars in the sky. When he worked in town his employers usually set him up with a bed. In the summer, when help was in high demand in the countryside, he slept outside with his pack for a pillow and God’s green earth for a bed.

  One year he was traveling through the valley and he came across a farm house with a Help Wanted sign nailed to a fence post out front. He walked through the gate and up the stone pathway to the porch and knocked on the door. He was greeted by the farmer, a tall weather-beaten old man with a warm smile, and welcomed inside. As they sat drinking coffee at the kitchen table, the farmer told him he was in need of a hand for the coming season. He needed help plowing, planting, and harvesting the corn and soybeans in the coming Fall, as well as a hand with the hundred other jobs that needed doing with the chickens, goats, and sheep they raised. The farmer and his wife could offer him a room plus three meals a day, on top of a five dollar daily wage. After the harvest he was welcome to stay for the winter or leave as he saw fit. The young man accepted the job, and they shook on it.

  After they’d spent an hour or so getting to know each other, the young man excused himself to explore the grounds. He walked under the twin apple trees on the front lawn, past the barn, and up and down the unplowed fields with which he’d be intimately connected for the next eight months.

  By the time he got back the sun had set behind the mountains. The farmer’s wife had prepared a glorious dinner for the three of them, and that night he ate better than he had all year. When they were finished, wanting to stay on their good side, he offered to wash the dishes himself. He thanked them both for their hospitality, gave a yawn, and said that he was ready to turn in. The farmer nodded, and said it would be wise to get a full night’s sleep, as they’d be rising early the next day. He stood, and told the young man he’d show him to his room.

  The young man followed the farmer up the stairs and into a small room with a cot and a bedside table. He thanked the farmer yet again, but told him that while he wouldn’t mind stashing his pack in the room, he was used to sleeping outside.

  For a moment the warmth went out of the farmer’s eyes.

  “That wouldn’t be a good idea. I’ll have to insist that you stay indoors.”

  “Why?”

  “Jackals have been known to prowl the land at night. Earlier this year we had to rewire the chicken coop after they’d broken in and slaughtered every last one. My wife went out to feed the chickens the next morning, and the whole place was a mess. Just feathers and guts and splintered wood everywhere. God, it was awful.”

  The young man nodded and agreed to the bed. As soon as his head hit the pillow, he was enveloped in the fatigue of the day.

  * * *

  Virginia

  Dexter almost spilled his coffee playing with the GPS on his dashboard. It had been operating perfectly since the start of the trip, but ten minutes after they left the interstate it seemed like they’d traveled into a satellite black hole.

  “Could you please not do that?” Rob asked.

  “Just give me a sec.”

  “OK, something like six thousand people die every year due to distracted driving. Would it kill you to just pull over?”

  Dexter bit his tongue. The whole point of the trip was to give themselves a breather. They’d both been taking comfort in the hope that their constant arguments were rooted more in the stress of day-to-day living than in anything inherently wrong in their relationship. If they had a fight this soon, they may as well turn around and admit defeat.

  “Do me a favor and get those directions out of the glove box.”

  Rob found the print-out and scanned the first page.

  “It looks like we’re gonna be on this road for an hour. After you cross the county line, take the second exit. Then there’s gonna be a bunch of quick turns, and we should be there.”

  For the entire stretch of highway they saw nothing but forest. There was no one behind them, and they passed a car going the opposite direction every few minutes. Dexter wondered briefly how many trees had been cut down to build this passageway just so a few city people could get back to nature every year.

  By the time they reached Black Willow Farm it was almost noon. He steered the Toyota down the mile of unpaved driveway, lined neatly with the trees of the farm’s namesake.

  * * *

  He awoke just after midnight. Perhaps he’d heard a noise, or perhaps it was just the disorientation that comes with sleeping in a new place. Either way, he figured it would be a while before he could drift off again, so he decided to step outside for a smoke.

  He padded across the kitchen floor in his bare feet, and tried to turn the knob without making any noise. The night air was cool but still with the mountains blocking the breeze. The only noise was the distant rustling of animals and crickets.

  He sat on the porch steps and rolled a cigarette, watching his own private night-time wilderness. Living in town had its pleasures, but there was something majestic about being alone for miles in every direction at night. There was a sense that everything was yours, that you could do whatever you wanted, to say nothing of the infinite mysteries hidden in the dark.

  A faint hum drifted over the air. He cocked an ear, trying to discern what kind of animal it could be, and realized it wasn’t an animal at all, but music. Someone was playing a slow country ballad. Most people would have wondered who could possibly be out and about at this hour, and so far from the nearest town, but over the last ten years he’d had plenty of encounters with his fellow travelers on the back-roads of life, and one thing they had in common was that they kept their own hours. They were just as likely to travel under moonlight as any other time.

  It was coming from the direction of the road. He pitched his cigarette and walked across the lawn, the cool grass feeling good on his callused feet. He passed the gate and approached the oak trees that declared the property line, and peered around the corner at the path that had led him there earlier that day. There was a certain number of vagabond archetypes he’d expected to see. What he saw was none of them.