After-Supper Ghost Stories Read online

  And he put his money on the middle card and turned it up.

  Sure enough, it really was the queen!

  We were all very much surprised, especially the curate.

  He said that it did sometimes happen that way, though – that a man did sometimes lay on the right card by accident.

  Our curate said it was, however, the most unfortunate thing a man could do for himself, if he only knew it, because, when a man tried and won, it gave him a taste for the so-called sport and it lured him on into risking again and again; until he had to retire from the contest, a broken and ruined man.

  Then he did the trick again. Mr Coombes said it was the card next the coal scuttle this time, and wanted to put five shillings on it.

  We laughed at him, and tried to persuade him against it. He would listen to no advice, however, but insisted on plunging.

  Our curate said very well then: he had warned him, and that was all that he could do. If he (Mr Coombes) was determined to make a fool of himself, he (Mr Coombes) must do so.

  Our curate said he should take the five shillings and that would put things right again with the blanket fund.

  So Mr Coombes put two half-crowns on the card next the coal scuttle and turned it up.

  Sure enough, it was the queen again!

  After that, Uncle John had a florin on, and he won.

  And then we all played at it, and we all won. All except the curate, that is. He had a very bad quarter of an hour. I never knew a man have such hard luck at cards. He lost every time.

  We had some more punch after that; and Uncle made such a funny mistake in brewing it: he left out the whisky. Oh, we did laugh at him, and we made him put in double quantity afterwards, as a forfeit.

  Oh, we did have such fun that evening!

  And then, somehow or other, we must have got on to ghosts; because the next recollection I have is that we were telling ghost stories to each other.

  Teddy Biffles’s Story

  Teddy Biffles told the first story. I will let him repeat it here in his own words.

  (Do not ask me how it is that I recollect his own exact words – whether I took them down in shorthand at the time, or whether he had the story written out, and handed me the MS afterwards for publication in this book, because I should not tell you if you did. It is a trade secret.)

  Biffles called his story:

  Johnson and Emily

  or

  The Faithful Ghost

  (Teddy Biffles’s Story)

  I was little more than a lad when I first met with Johnson. I was home for the Christmas holidays and, it being Christmas Eve, I had been allowed to sit up very late. On opening the door of my little bedroom, to go in, I found myself face to face with Johnson, who was coming out. It passed through me, and uttering a long low wail of misery, disappeared out of the staircase window.

  I was startled for the moment – I was only a schoolboy at the time, and had never seen a ghost before – and felt a little nervous about going to bed. But, on reflection, I remembered that it was only sinful people that spirits could do any harm to, and so tucked myself up and went to sleep.

  In the morning I told the Pater what I had seen.

  “Oh yes, that was old Johnson,” he answered. “Don’t you be frightened of that: he lives here.” And then he told me the poor thing’s history.

  It seemed that Johnson, when it was alive, had loved, in early life, the daughter of a former lessee of our house, a very beautiful girl, whose Christian name had been Emily. Father did not know her other name.

  Johnson was too poor to marry the girl, so he kissed her goodbye, told her he would soon be back and went off to Australia to make his fortune.

  But Australia was not then what it became later on. Travellers through the bush were few and far between in those early days, and even when one was caught, the portable property found upon the body was often of hardly sufficiently negotiable value to pay the simple funeral expenses rendered necessary. So that it took Johnson nearly twenty years to make his fortune.

  The self-imposed task was accomplished at last, however, and then, having successfully eluded the police and got clear out of the colony, he returned to England, full of hope and joy, to claim his bride.

  He reached the house to find it silent and deserted. All that the neighbours could tell him was that, soon after his own departure, the family had, on one foggy night, unostentatiously disappeared, and that nobody had ever seen or heard anything of them since, although the landlord and most of the local tradesmen had made searching enquiries.

  Poor Johnson, frenzied with grief, sought his lost love all over the world. But he never found her and, after years of fruitless effort, he returned to end his lonely life in the very house where, in the happy bygone days, he and his beloved Emily had passed so many blissful hours.

  He had lived there quite alone, wandering about the empty rooms, weeping and calling to his Emily to come back to him; and when the poor old fellow died, his ghost still kept the business on.

  It was there, the Pater said, when he took the house, and the agent had knocked ten pounds a year off the rent in consequence. After that, I was continually meeting Johnson about the place at all times of the night, and so, indeed, were we all. We used to walk round it and stand aside to let is pass, at first; but, when we grew more at home with it, and there seemed no necessity for so much ceremony, we used to walk straight through it. You could not say it was ever much in the way.

  It was a gentle, harmless old ghost too, and we all felt very sorry for it, and pitied it. The womenfolk, indeed, made quite a pet of it for a while. Its faithfulness touched them so.

  But as time went on, it grew to be a bit of a bore. You see it was full of sadness. There was nothing cheerful or genial about it. You felt sorry for it, but it irritated you. It would sit on the stairs and cry for hours at a stretch; and, whenever we woke up in the night, one was sure to hear it pottering about the passages and in and out of the different rooms, moaning and sighing, so that we could not get to sleep again very easily. And when we had a party on, it would come and sit outside the drawing-room door and sob all the time. It did not do anybody any harm exactly, but it cast a gloom over the whole affair.

  “Oh, I’m getting sick of this old fool,” said the Pater, one evening (the Dad can be very blunt, when he is put out, as you know), after Johnson had been more of a nuisance than usual, and had spoilt a good game of whist by sitting up the chimney and groaning, till nobody knew what were trumps or what suit had been led, even. “We shall have to get rid of him somehow or other. I wish I knew how to do it.”

  “Well,” said the Mater, “depend upon it, you’ll never see the last of him until he’s found Emily’s grave. That’s what he is after. You find Emily’s grave, and put him on to that, and he’ll stop there. That’s the only thing to do. You mark my words.”

  The idea seemed reasonable, but the difficulty in the way was that we none of us knew where Emily’s grave was any more than the ghost of Johnson himself did. The Governor suggested palming off some other Emily’s grave upon the poor thing, but, as luck would have it, there did not seem to have been an Emily of any sort buried anywhere for miles round. I never came across a neighbourhood so utterly destitute of dead Emilies.

  I thought for a bit, and then I hazarded a suggestion myself.

  “Couldn’t we fake up something for the old chap?” I queried. “He seems a simple-minded old sort. He might take it in. Anyhow, we could but try.”

  “By Jove, so we will,” exclaimed my father, and the very next morning we had the workmen in and fixed up a little mound at the bottom of the orchard with a tombstone over it, bearing the following inscription:

  Sacred

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  EMILY

  HER LAST WORDS WERE:

  “TELL JOHNSON I LOVE HIM”

  “That ought to fetch him,” mused the dad as he surveyed the work when finished. “I am sure I hope it does.”

  It did!

  We lured him down there that very night; and – well, there, it was one of the most pathetic things I have ever seen, the way Johnson sprang upon that tombstone and wept. Dad and old Squibbins, the gardener, cried like children when they saw it.

  Johnson has never troubled us any more in the house since then. It spends every night now, sobbing on the grave, and seems quite happy.

  “There still?” Oh yes. I’ll take you fellows down and show you it, next time you come to our place: ten p.m. to four a.m. are its general hours, ten to two on Saturdays.

  The Doctor’s Story

  It made me cry very much, that story; young Biffles told it with so much feeling. We were all a little thoughtful after it, and I noticed even the old doctor covertly wipe away a tear. Uncle John brewed another bowl of punch, however, and we gradually grew more resigned.

  The Doctor, indeed, after a while became almost cheerful, and told us about the ghost of one of his patients.

  I cannot give you his story. I wish I could. They all said afterwards that it was the best of the lot – the most ghastly and terrible – but I could not make any sense of it myself. It seemed so incomplete.

  He began all right and then something seemed to happen, and then he was finishing it. I cannot make out what he did with the middle of the story.

  It ended up, I know, however, with somebody finding something, and that put Mr Coombes in mind of a very curious affair that took place at an old mill, once kept by his brother-in-law.

  Mr Coombes said he would tell us his story, and before anybody could stop him, he had begun.

  Mr Coombes said the sto
ry was called:

  The Haunted Mill

  or

  The Ruined Home

  (Mr Coombes’s Story)

  Well, you all know my brother-in-law, Mr Parkins (began Mr Coombes, taking the long clay pipe from his mouth, and putting it behind his ear: we did not know his brother-in-law, but we said we did, so as to save time), and you know of course that he once took a lease of an old mill in Surrey, and went to live there.

  Now you must know that, years ago, this very mill had been occupied by a wicked old miser, who died there, leaving – so it was rumoured – all his money hidden somewhere about the place. Naturally enough, every one who had since come to live at the mill had tried to find the treasure, but none had ever succeeded, and the local wiseacres said that nobody ever would, unless the ghost of the miserly miller should, one day, take a fancy to one of the tenants and disclose to him the secret of the hiding place.

  My brother-in-law did not attach much importance to the story, regarding it as an old woman’s tale, and, unlike his predecessors, made no attempt whatever to discover the hidden gold.

  “Unless business was very different then from what it is now,” said my brother-in-law, “I don’t see how a miller could very well have saved anything, however much of a miser he might have been – at all events, not enough to make it worth the trouble of looking for it.”

  Still, he could not altogether get rid of the idea of that treasure.

  One night he went to bed. There was nothing very extraordinary about that, I admit. He often did go to bed of a night. What was remarkable, however, was that exactly as the clock of the village church chimed the last stroke of twelve, my brother-in-law woke up with a start, and felt himself quite unable to go to sleep again.

  Joe (his Christian name was Joe) sat up in bed, and looked around.

  At the foot of the bed something stood very still, wrapped in shadow.

  It moved into the moonlight, and then my brother-in-law saw that it was the figure of a wizened little old man, in knee breeches and a pigtail.

  In an instant the story of the hidden treasure and the old miser flashed across his mind.

  “He’s come to show me where it’s hid,” thought my brother-in-law, and he resolved that he would not spend all this money on himself, but would devote a small percentage of it towards doing good to others.

  The apparition moved towards the door: my brother-in-law put on his trousers and followed it. The ghost went downstairs into the kitchen, glided over and stood in front of the hearth, sighed and disappeared.

  Next morning, Joe had a couple of bricklayers in, and made them haul out the stove and pull down the chimney, while he stood behind with a potato sack in which to put the gold.

  They knocked down half the wall, and never found so much as a fourpenny bit. My brother-in-law did not know what to think.

  The next night the old man appeared again, and again led the way into the kitchen. This time, however, instead of going to the fireplace, it stood more in the middle of the room and sighed there.

  “Oh, I see what he means now,” said my brother-in-law to himself. “It’s under the floor. Why did the old idiot go and stand up against the stove, so as to make me think it was up the chimney?”

  They spent the next day in taking up the kitchen floor, but the only thing they found was a three-pronged fork, and the handle of that was broken.

  On the third night, the ghost reappeared, quite unabashed, and for a third time made for the kitchen. Arriving there, it looked up at the ceiling and vanished.

  “Umph! He don’t seem to have learnt much sense where he’s been to,” muttered Joe, as he trotted back to bed. “I should have thought he might have done that at first.”

  Still, there seemed to be no doubt now where the treasure lay, and the first thing after breakfast they started pulling down the ceiling. They got every inch of the ceiling down, and they took up the boards of the room above.

  They discovered about as much treasure as you would expect to find in an empty quart pot.

  On the fourth night, when the ghost appeared, as usual, my brother-in-law was so wild that he threw his boots at it, and the boots passed through the body and broke a looking glass.

  On the fifth night, when Joe awoke, as he always did now at twelve, the ghost was standing in a dejected attitude, looking very miserable. There was an appealing look in its large sad eyes that quite touched my brother-in-law.

  “After all,” he thought, “perhaps the silly chap’s doing his best. Maybe he has forgotten where he really did put it, and is trying to remember. I’ll give him another chance.”

  The ghost appeared grateful and delighted at seeing Joe prepare to follow him, and led the way into the attic, pointed to the ceiling and vanished.

  “Well, he’s hit it this time, I do hope,” said my brother-in-law, and next day they set to work to take the roof off the place.

  It took them three days to get the roof thoroughly off, and all they found was a bird’s nest, after securing which they covered up the house with tarpaulins to keep it dry.

  You might have thought that would have cured the poor fellow of looking for treasure. But it didn’t.

  He said there must be something in it all, or the ghost would never keep on coming as it did; and that, having gone so far, he would go on to the end and solve the mystery, cost what it might.

  Night after night, he would get out of his bed and follow that spectral old fraud about the house. Each night, the old man would indicate a different place; and, on each following day, my brother-in-law would proceed to break up the mill at the point indicated and look for the treasure. At the end of three weeks there was not a room in the mill fit to live in. Every wall had been pulled down, every floor had been taken up, every ceiling had had a hole knocked in it. And then, as suddenly as they had begun, the ghost’s visits ceased, and my brother-in-law was left in peace, to rebuild the place at his leisure.

  “What induced the old image to play such a silly trick upon a family man and a ratepayer?” Ah! That’s just what I cannot tell you.

  Some said that the ghost of the wicked old man had done it to punish my brother-in-law for not believing in him at first, while others held that the apparition was probably that of some deceased local plumber and glazier, who would naturally take an interest in seeing a house knocked about and spoilt. But nobody knew anything for certain.

  Interlude

  We had some more punch, and then the curate told us a story.

  I could not make head or tail of the curate’s story, so I cannot retail it to you. We none of us could make head or tail of that story. It was a good story enough, so far as material went. There seemed to be an enormous amount of plot, and enough incident to have made a dozen novels. I never before heard a story containing so much incident, nor one dealing with so many varied characters.

  I should say that every human being our curate had ever known or met, or heard of, was brought into that story. There were simply hundreds of them. Every five seconds he would introduce into the tale a completely fresh collection of characters accompanied by a brand-new set of incidents.

  This was the sort of story it was:

  “Well, then, my uncle went into the garden, and got his gun, but of course it wasn’t there, and Scroggins said he didn’t believe it.”

  “Didn’t believe what? Who’s Scroggins?”

  “Scroggins! Oh, why he was the other man, you know – it was his wife.”

  “What was his wife – what’s she got to do with it?”

  “Why, that’s what I’m telling you. It was she that found the hat. She’d come up with her cousin to London – her cousin was my sister-in-law, and the other niece had married a man named Evans, and Evans, after it was all over, had taken the box round to Mr Jacobs’s, because Jacobs’s father had seen the man, when he was alive, and when he was dead, Joseph—”

  “Now look here, never you mind Evans and the box – what’s become of your uncle and the gun?”