Lost Souls Short Stories

Contents

Foreword by Roger Luckhurst

Publisher’s Note

They Lived in the House on Cherry Street

Sara Dobie Bauer

The Outcast

E.F. Benson

An Inhabitant of Carcosa

Ambrose Bierce

The Moonlit Road

Ambrose Bierce

The Cold Embrace

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Joined

Sarah L. Byrne

The Doll’s Ghost

F. Marion Crawford

Some Souls Stay

Rachael Cudlitz

Purgatorio (First Terrace – Pride)

Dante

The Trial for Murder

Charles Dickens

Was It an Illusion?

Amelia B. Edwards

Shut-In

C.R. Evans

The Child That Went with the Fairies

Sheridan le Fanu

The Pontianak’s Doll

Geneve Flynn

The Lost Ghost

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Soul Cakes

Adele Gardner

Perfect Mother

Anne Gresham

Thalassa’s Pool

Sara M. Harvey

The Beast with Five Fingers

W.F. Harvey

The Searcher of the End House

William Hope Hodgson

The Elementary Spirit

E.T.A. Hoffmann

Mary Burnet

James Hogg

Only Bella

Kurt Hunt

The Adventure of the German Student

Washington Irving

The Jolly Corner

Henry James

The Haunted Dolls’ House

M.R. James

The Man of Science

Jerome K. Jerome

Thurnley Abbey

Perceval Landon

The Death-Bride

Friedrich Laun

The Strange High House in the Mist

H.P. Lovecraft

The Inmost Light

Arthur Machen

The Bowmen

Arthur Machen

Until There Is Only Hunger

Michael Matheson

Melmoth the Wanderer (abridged version)

Charles Maturin

Every Time She Kills Him

J.A.W. McCarthy

The Price of Forever

John M. McIlveen

Man-Size in Marble

E. Nesbit

The Obstinate One

Jessica Nickelsen

The Open Door

Margaret Oliphant

Orpheus and Eurydice

A Retelling of the Myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The Phone Call

Michael Penncavage

Morella

Edgar Allan Poe

Last Long Night

Lina Rather

A Good Thing and a Right Thing

Alexandra Renwick

Scare Tactics

Aeryn Rudel

The Tapestried Chamber

Walter Scott

This House Is My Cage

Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi

Lullaby for the Dead

Erin Skolney

Abandonment Option

Lucy A. Snyder

Casualty of Peace

David Tallerman

The Storm

Sarah Elizabeth Utterson

Sing Me Your Scars

Damien Angelica Walters

The Triumph of Night

Edith Wharton

Biographies & Sources

Foreword: Lost Souls Short Stories

In the nineteenth century, science declared war on old-time superstitions. Charles Darwin offered a purely biological explanation of the origins of man: there was no divine spark, no soul, only the process of evolution through natural selection. Geologists read in the stones that the Earth was far older than Biblical history suggested. Folklorists collected old stories and myths because they believed the accelerating progress of the modern world would shortly kill off all memory of them. Anthropologists suggested that superstitions about ghosts and wandering spirits, or hexes needed to ward off evil, were evidence of ‘survivals’ from the mind of savages – a scientific education would end the more primitive beliefs.

Yet even as Enlightenment philosophers became more confident in expressing these modern positions, superstition and magical thinking persisted: suicides were still buried outside church grounds and sometimes staked to the earth to stop their spirits from floating around; murderers were buried at crossroads, to confuse their souls damned to eternal wandering. A whole new religious movement called Spiritualism emerged in the 1840s, which promised to put the bereaved in touch with their dead relatives and friends, and hundreds of thousands of eminently respectable Victorians explored the world of the séance. Earnest Cambridge dons invented ‘psychical research’ in the 1880s to use scientific methods to ‘prove’ the existence of survival of bodily death.

And there was also an explosion of supernatural fiction. The first wave of the Gothic (running from the 1760s to the 1820s) was often written in a religious framework. It was full of tyrannical Catholic priests, torturers from the Inquisition, and scary nuns doing unspeakable things in mouldering convents. This was the kind of stuff that scared readers in the relatively young democracies of Protestant England and America.

This has never quite gone away. ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ in this collection was written by the Irish Protestant minister Charles Maturin, who wrote rabid anti-Catholic tracts. But in the main the Gothic was transformed by the rapid arrival of the modern world. Instead of being set in the deep past and in ruins and castles in Italy or Spain, ghost stories began to appear in modern houses and in the present day. Writers like Charles Dickens and Mary Braddon began to shift the locations into a recognizable contemporary world, the more to spook a wider readership. Modern horror was about the fears of the physical body, of decay, of the very absence of religious consolation – a significant change that is represented in the work of writers like Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce. The famous doyen of ‘weird fiction’, H.P. Lovecraft, was an implacable atheist: for him, horror came from the utter indifference of the universe to the puny man, not from the terrors of eternal damnation.

Haunting became the problem less of ancient family curses and more of rental properties long off the market (as in E.F. Benson’s ‘The Outcast’) or anonymous houses in horrible suburban developments (as in Arthur Machen’s ‘The Inmost Light’). Ghosts did less lecturing on moral wrongs – like Hamlet’s father – and became more fugitive, wispy and uncertain. They started to be emanations of psychological states, and sometimes we’re not even sure if they exist at all. In Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ it might even be that the main character who inherits this New York house is somehow haunting himself.

After 1880, it is often said that we enter the ‘golden age’ of the ghost story. A new magazine market wanted short sensational tales, and the lost souls in stories about haunting became perfectly poised between offering a shudder of old superstitions revived and a new way of talking about dreamy psychological states. As Sigmund Freud reflected, we might be living in the modern world, but the creak of a floorboard or the glimpse of a figure on the landing might instantly plunge us back into primitive psychological states of dread or terror.

This is part of the pleasure of reading fiction about lost souls, of course. May I wish you plentiful shivers as you read through this selection of stories.

Roger Luckhurst

Publisher’s Note

Lost souls have long intrigued us – whether it be ghostly apparitions, wanderings in the afterlife or Faustian deals – this fantastic new collection evokes haunting tales from the darkest corners of literature and legend. Musings on the afterlife and visitations from the dead are infused in mythologies all over the world, and we’ve included one such example from the Greeks here. That fascination has stayed with us, culminating in nineteenth and early twentieth century ghost stories, which turned out to be a particularly golden age for female writers like Edith Wharton, E. Nesbit and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, to name but a few. We also could not consider an anthology on lost souls without looking at Dante’s seminal work The Divine Comedy, and his vivid imaginings of Purgatory in particular. The dark scenes within mingle seamlessly with the later tales of William Hope Hodgson or Arthur Machen.

We received an incredible number of new submissions for this anthology, and have loved plunging into the icy chills of wraiths, spirits and shadows. It is always fascinating to see the different takes on a theme – do those that return seek revenge, justice, or simply recognition? Just where do souls go when they leave this earthly plane? Making the final selection is always an incredibly hard decision, but ultimately we chose a collection of stories we hope sit alongside each other and with the classic fiction, to provide a fantastic Lost Souls book for all to enjoy.

They Lived in the House on Cherry Street

Sara Dobie Bauer

After the funeral, I explained to my husband I wanted time alone in the homestead – the place I grew up. He understood, of course, and took our teenage daughters home.

I don’t know why the old house held such wonder for me still. My mother had been in assisted living for months. With the help of my husband, we’d removed every trace of her and my father from the place where I grew up – the brick monument on Cherry Street Daddy designed and built for us.

I expected nothing but silence and the stale smell of age when I walked through the breezeway and turned the familiar key in the familiar side door lock. Imagine my surprise when I smelled cigarettes and heard the rickety echo of Glenn Miller’s orchestra on a turntable.

The side door led into the kitchen, which I could see was filled with blue smoke, illuminated by early evening light through windows that led to the backyard.

Then, I heard her voice: Mom.

Home at last, she said.

The kitchen was as it once was: filled with blooming cacti and framed cross-stitch phrases in Italian. Beneath the cigarette smoke, I smelled tomato sauce. My mother stood at the counter, salting pasta, dousing it in olive oil, and stirring, stirring with a wooden spoon.

She must have been thirty years old: carefully curled black hair, red lipstick, a tiny waist, and a simple stained apron that belonged to my father but that she claimed was her favorite.

Mom turned to face me and smiled. She wiped her hands on her apron and opened her arms. Give me a hug, Sandi. And why are you so late from school?

We’d burned her decrepit, sick body three days before. She was ashes in the ground at St. Rose Cemetery, where all the Catholics ended up.

One of my knees gave out, so I reached for the edge of the stove for balance. I shouted and pulled my hand back from the heat, which made my mother run to me and yell, Albert!

I felt her hands on me – not the paper-thin flesh of a dying old woman but the strong, supple hands of a lifetime cook who kept our Cherry Street house clean and made my bed every morning. Her hands wrapped around my thin wrists and led me to the kitchen table that wasn’t supposed to be there. No, we’d sold the family table at the estate sale.

She pushed me into a wrought iron chair with a cream-colored pillow and rushed to the sink to wet a washcloth. She pressed the cloth to my hand, and I smelled her perfume: Chanel No. 5.

What’s all the ruckus, Ella?

Dad stood in the doorway that led from kitchen to living room – the place where we’d spent over forty Christmas morns. His head was already bald, but his hair was still brown around the sides of his head. He looked strong, the Naval officer he once was, not the wasted sack of bones he became the night he died in their bedroom ten years before.

I ignored the cold cloth on my scalded hand and ran to him. He almost dropped his newspaper at my exuberance. He smelled like smoke and Old Spice. He felt warm and soft, full around the middle from all the new-fangled light beer. He stuck his face in my hair and whispered, Sandi, baby, are you all right?

I cried, and Mom tutted. She just burned her hand, silly thing. She grabbed at me and again shoved the cloth against my palm. Now, sit down, you two. Time to eat.

With shaking hands and knees, I sat at the kitchen table. Dad sat at the head and folded his paper, leaving it to soak up extra tomato sauce near the edge of his plate. Mom sat across from me and smiled, not a wrinkle in her young, tanned skin. She reached for me. We all joined hands and said grace. Daddy crossed himself and said, Amen.

I watched them eat in fascination.

How was your day at school, Sandi? Dad asked.

What?

Your day at school, Mom repeated. And why were you late? You weren’t spending time with James, were you?

I took a bite of steaming spaghetti. My tongue tingled at the memory of the sweet sauce Mom made before she got old and started burning things. We had to get live-in help then, and the food was never the same. By the time I thought to ask for a recipe, she was too far gone.

You look beautiful, Mom, I said.

She tilted her chin down and gave me the smile she saved only for me, her only child.

After dinner, Mom made a pot of decaf coffee. We sat around the dinner table and played Scrabble. Daddy won. I watched in wonder as his hands didn’t shake, not like the last time we played together, a month before he died.

The new pastel green fridge hummed in the corner: a special gift for Mom’s thirty-fifth birthday. There were only two photos so far: one of Mom and Dad on a beach in Hawaii and one of me – my senior picture, all glasses and big teeth.

Mom said, Off to bed, baby. School in the morning.

Yes, I said.

She ushered me up the steep staircase that led to my bedroom and the spare room for guests. It was all there: my posters of the Beatles, of far-off beaches. A flower wreath decorated the small lamp by my bed. Mom pulled down the covers and picked up my aged red teddy bear I’d slept with since birth. She tucked me in tight but not before I gave her a hug.

I love you, Mom, I said.

Love you, Sandi. She kissed my nose and glanced back at me from the door. I didn’t remember her like this, beautiful and young, smelling of smoke, tomatoes, and perfume. I only remembered her as the woman in the sick bed: tired and tortured, unable to speak. In the sick bed, she used to pretend to sleep when I was there. The nurses said she was embarrassed.

* * *

I woke on the carpeted living room floor. My cell phone rang and rang. I sat up, and my parents’ house was empty. The horrible smell was there again: the smell of age. The house was silent except for the ringing. I answered, Hello?

Sandi. Where are you? my husband said.

I looked at the bare walls. I fell asleep. I’m sorry.

It’s okay. Just come home.

I stood in my wrinkled black funeral suit and dragged my feet across the carpet into the kitchen – empty, empty. I drove home, only a couple blocks, but it seemed much further. As soon as I walked into our two-story dream house, my twins wandered in from the TV room and gave me quiet, muttering hugs.

I kissed their foreheads. My babies. I hid my shaking hands by running my fingers through their soft, long hair.

James stood behind them. His lips wore a smile but his eyes worried. I walked past my daughters and hugged him. I heard footsteps as the girls returned to the TV, happy to have a day away from the pressures of their senior year.

Are you all right? he whispered.

I buried my nose against his neck and smelled the familiar scent of bar soap and coffee. Yeah. I mean….

He rubbed his hands up and down my back. I know. Your family’s coming over at noon.

Shit.

He brushed the hair away from my face. You look like a wreck. Go take a shower. I’ll make another pot of coffee.

I nodded and drifted upstairs. It was only when I turned on the water in the shower that I realized my hand was burnt.

* * *

The afternoon was spent discussing financial details and the sale of the house on Cherry Street. Since I had no siblings, I was in charge of everything – the executor of the will. Every decision deferred to me, but thank God I had James to calm aunts and uncles if things got heated. I kept looking at my hand, wrapped in a bandage. I told James I didn’t know how it happened, and he got that look: the one he used to get back when we first married, when I was drinking too much and cutting my skin to deal with stress. Long before the twins.

Everyone left around three, most of them to the local bar where people in town were known to celebrate births, deaths, and weddings. I went to Cherry Street. James offered to come, and I told him no.

From the outside, the house looked empty. I told myself it was empty. I walked through the breezeway and unlocked the front door. I pushed inside and heard laughter. Must have been Wednesday.

Mom and Dad danced through a haze of smoke to the tune of Frank Sinatra. Empty martini glasses were on the kitchen counter, and when Dad saw me, he dipped Mom halfway to the floor. Her hair was longer; Dad’s was gray. He twirled her, and she shouted, Sandi! in that singsong way she did when she’d had half a martini.

Sandi, baby! Dad echoed.

Mom spun toward me and took both my hands in hers. She had slight wrinkles on the outside of her eyes, and the red lipstick of her thirties had changed to a deep orange. Where’s James?

I glanced at the green fridge and saw our wedding picture front and center: me in a bodice of lace and James with his moustache and shaggy haircut. God, five years had passed in an afternoon.

He couldn’t make it, I said.

You want a martini? Light on the vermouth. Dad did a cha-cha toward the family shaker, decorated with men on horseback in red and black polo attire. He was in his gold chain phase. He’d picked up the habit in Key West, where all the older guys wore gold chains to decorate copious chest hair.

No thanks, Daddy. I hadn’t touched a drink in years.

Mom took my elbows in her hands. Her skin felt less supple. She moved my arms back and forth until I danced with her. You’re just in time for a fast dinner! She laughed, revealing rows of white teeth, stained on the edges from all the cigarettes.

Fast dinner was what she called dinner consisting of eggs and bacon. My whole life I hated Mom’s eggs. No one made a less thrilling pile of yellow fluff. In that moment, I couldn’t wait. All I wanted was my mom’s eggs to the tune of ‘The Way You Look Tonight’.

I knew I couldn’t spend another night sleeping there, which of course, my parents understood. I was a married woman, after all, Mom said, with a handsome husband waiting. Mom gave me one of her sloppy lipstick kisses that stained my cheek. Daddy leaned in and gave me a gentle peck on the forehead.

Before I left, I turned and watched them from the side door. They danced like I wasn’t there. I left like they weren’t.

Back in my car, I looked in the rearview mirror. I wiped the lipstick off before I got home.

* * *

Due to family tragedy, I didn’t have to go back to work at the newspaper – not yet. I had a full week before going back to the office, so the next morning, once the girls returned to school and James went into the city to pour over legal briefs, I went to the house on Cherry Street.

I was surprised to find our real estate agent, Leslie, in the front yard. She grinned when she saw me. Sandi! You’re looking well. She leaned in for an awkward hug. She wore some flowery perfume that reminded me of funerals.

Leslie. What are you doing here?

Well, James said it’s time to put up the sign. She gestured to the base of the ancient pine tree in my parents’ front yard. Underneath was a placard that announced, loudly, FOR SALE.

Oh. He didn’t mention it to me.

I don’t think he wanted you to have to think about it. Losing your mother is so hard. She ran her hand up and down my arm. Her skin felt cold through my t-shirt.

I nodded.

Let’s hope we get some bites. It’s such a beautiful neighborhood and a very historic house. It’s so romantic that your family lived here all these years. Some young couple will probably fall in love with the story more than the house. She smiled. Her gums showed when she smiled. Anyway, you’ll be hearing from me for showings. I told James you might want to light candles inside. People like the smell of candles.

She meant that people don’t like the smell of old people.

I nodded again.

You doing okay, Sandi?

I’m fine. Thank you.

She waddled off toward her swanky blue car and gave me a wave. One of the diamonds on her hand shimmered in the sun.

I walked through the breezeway and unlocked the front door. The kitchen was empty but clean. Dishes dried in the sink rack. A glass mobile hung in the window and cast rainbows on a bouquet of pink tulips on the counter.

Sandi? I heard Daddy’s voice from the TV room.

There were more pictures of James and me on the fridge: one from when he got his law degree.

So seven years gone.

In the back room, they sat in their respective recliners watching tennis. Pictures of family were everywhere and even a painting I did in college of a decrepit house I’d seen down by the river. The family ficus tree stood in the corner, mauled by Mom’s sheering. It was the only thing I’d ever seen my parents fight about: the way she chopped that poor tree within an inch of its life.

Andre Agassi was on the television with his long, Samson hair.

I looked at my parents, looked at them close. Daddy’s hair was bright white. He wore glasses. He was losing weight already. Mom had dyed her hair from gray to a deep orange that matched her lipstick. She carried weight around her middle. Her tiny toes were painted the color of a shell’s insides.

Daddy moved to stand. Sandi, baby! He held his arms open, and I crushed him in my embrace. He still smelled like Old Spice, mixed with some menthol gel he used on his lower back. The house didn’t smell like smoke; they’d given up the habit by then.

I sat on the couch between their chairs. I reached out and took my mother’s hand, already on its way to fragility.

I couldn’t leave the house on Cherry Street. I couldn’t lose them again.

* * *

I was helping Mom do dishes in the kitchen when someone knocked on the side door. We’d just finished rolling ravioli. Mom insisted we make it from scratch. We’d used her homemade stuffing: spinach, ground beef, garlic, and ricotta. I dried my hands on a towel and said, I’ll get it.

When I answered the door, my husband was there. His light brown eyes were wide. He hadn’t shaved in perhaps two days, and his light hair stood up around the edges. He never could get it to behave in the summer heat. He’d come right from work, still in a suit and tie, although the tie was crooked. He smelled like sweat.

Where the hell have you been? He walked past me.

When I turned to follow, my mom was gone. So were the dishes. So was the smell of garlic.

You haven’t been answering your phone. I thought…. He reached for my hand and looked at my wrist. He pulled me to him, crushed me against his chest. Sandi, it’s been two days.

What? I backed away. No, I was just….

I wanted to give you space, he said. I know how hard this is. I remember what it was like when we lost your dad, but you need to come home. There’s nothing here.

What could I say?

There have been calls about the house. Leslie is ready to show it, but she needs your approval, and since you haven’t been answering your phone…. He shook his head and put his hands on his hips.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I touched his face and pressed my lips to his. He responded, holding me in his arms.

I can’t lose you, he said.

No. I hugged him back.

Please come home.

I nodded. I went to see my daughters.

* * *

Four different couples walked through the house on Cherry Street. Leslie said there was a lot of discussion about updates. The stove would need replacing. The basement smelled like mold. The windows didn’t insulate well in winter. We might have to drop the price.

I busied myself being a mother and wife. I made love to James. I gave the twins cash for their school lunches and talked about college. We watched Jeopardy! as a family at night. I laughed when the girls made up answers. I pretended to sleep.

Two days later, I made it back to my parents’ house alone.

I walked through the breezeway, unlocked the door. The house was silent. I thought maybe I’d imagined the whole thing until I smelled cigarette smoke. My mom started smoking again after…

She was at the kitchen table. Her hair was gray. Her skin had begun to sag, and her orange lipstick was crooked. On the fridge were pictures of my girls back when they were short, smiling, and in soccer uniforms.

Mom? I said.

He’s dead, she said. Your father is dead.

Salt burned my eyes. No.

Her voice caught before she asked, Where have you been? She stared up at me, nothing but malice in her gaze. Where have you been, Sandra?

I’m sorry, Mom.

You should have been here, she said.

Mom, I –

You should have been here! She hit the table with her fist.

The night my father died, I went home to get some sleep. He’d been sick for weeks. Their marriage bed was his prison. He stopped eating. He barely recognized any of us. I couldn’t take it. I had to get away. I went home and I slept and he died.

She lit another cigarette. How did I get so old, Sandi? How did this happen to us?

I stepped closer, afraid to touch her.

Remember how we used to dance?

I nodded.

Your father was the best dancer. He loved dancing with his little girl. She looked up at me.

I shuddered out a sob. Mom, please don’t go.

Then, stay with me, Sandi.

I heaved a breath. I knew how it went from here. I knew what happened after Daddy died, how Mom started drinking again – how she would get so drunk she wouldn’t remember he was dead. I would have to remind her, again and again. Then, she would slowly give in. She would eat to fill the space he’d left, her husband of fifty-five years. She would grow obese until she became bedridden. Then, she would turn ugly and angry. She would yell at me, at the hospice nurses. On Christmas, she would have a stroke and stop talking. She would live for nine months in an unfamiliar hospital that smelled of piss and vomit. Then, one night, she would open her eyes wide, stare into the corner of her hospice room, and die.

Don’t make me watch, I begged. I don’t want to do this again, Mom. Don’t make me remember you like this.

The ghost of my mother looked at me knowingly. She knew what awaited her, awaited me. She lit another cigarette. We were happy here, weren’t we, baby?

So happy.

You should go home, she said. Go home to James and your girls. Don’t waste a day.

I love you.

She hid behind a veil of smoke.

I faced the green fridge and looked at the old, curled photos from Hawaii, the new ones they’d stacked one on top of another as their little girl grew up, married, had little girls of her own. There was one I’d scanned and tried to retouch: one photo of Mom and Daddy on a beach with an inner tube wrapped around their waists, before I was even born.

I walked away from her and knew she was dead.

* * *

The couple that bought the house on Cherry Street have a daughter. I heard from the neighbors they gutted the kitchen and replaced the old windows. They cut down the pine tree out front. I wouldn’t know. I don’t drive past the homestead anymore, because it’s not mine.

I spend a lot of time looking at James and wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed in the house with my parents. I could have stayed for years before anyone got sick – gotten to know them again the way they were before diapers and drool and death.

I wonder if I would have grown younger, too. Or died with them.

The Outcast

E.F. Benson

When Mrs. Acres bought the Gate-house at Tarleton, which had stood so long without a tenant, and appeared in that very agreeable and lively little town as a resident, sufficient was already known about her past history to entitle her to friendliness and sympathy. Hers had been a tragic story, and the account of the inquest held on her husband’s body, when, within a month of their marriage, he had shot himself before her eyes, was recent enough, and of as full a report in the papers as to enable our little community of Tarleton to remember and run over the salient grimness of the case without the need of inventing any further details – which, otherwise, it would have been quite capable of doing.

Briefly, then, the facts had been as follows. Horace Acres appeared to have been a heartless fortune-hunter – a handsome, plausible wretch, ten years younger than his wife. He had made no secret to his friends of not being in love with her but of having a considerable regard for her more than considerable fortune. But hardly had he married her than his indifference developed into violent dislike, accompanied by some mysterious, inexplicable dread of her. He hated and feared her, and on the morning of the very day when he had put an end to himself he had begged her to divorce him; the case he promised would be undefended, and he would make it indefensible. She, poor soul, had refused to grant this; for, as corroborated by the evidence of friends and servants, she was utterly devoted to him, and stated with that quiet dignity which distinguished her throughout this ordeal, that she hoped that he was the victim of some miserable but temporary derangement, and would come to his right mind again. He had dined that night at his club, leaving his month-old bride to pass the evening alone, and had returned between eleven and twelve that night in a state of vile intoxication. He had gone up to her bedroom, pistol in hand, had locked the door, and his voice was heard screaming and yelling at her. Then followed the sound of one shot. On the table in his dressing-room was found a half-sheet of paper, dated that day, and this was read out in court. The horror of my position, he had written, is beyond description and endurance. I can bear it no longer: my soul sickens…. The jury, without leaving the court, returned the verdict that he had committed suicide while temporarily insane, and the coroner, at their request, expressed their sympathy and his own with the poor lady, who, as testified on all hands, had treated her husband with the utmost tenderness and affection.

For six months Bertha Acres had travelled abroad, and then in the autumn she had bought Gate-house at Tarleton, and settled down to the absorbing trifles which make life in a small country town so busy and strenuous.

* * *

Our modest little dwelling is within a stone’s throw of the Gate-house; and when, on the return of my wife and myself from two months in Scotland, we found that Mrs. Acres was installed as a neighbour, Madge lost no time in going to call on her. She returned with a series of pleasant impressions. Mrs. Acres, still on the sunny slope that leads up to the tableland of life which begins at forty years, was extremely handsome, cordial, and charming in manner, witty and agreeable, and wonderfully well dressed. Before the conclusion of her call Madge, in country fashion, had begged her to dispose with formalities, and, instead of a frigid return of the call, to dine with us quietly next day. Did she play bridge? That being so, we would just be a party of four; for her brother, Charles Alington, had proposed himself for a visit….

I listened to this with sufficient attention to grasp what Madge was saying, but what I was really thinking about was a chess-problem which I was attempting to solve. But at this point I became acutely aware that her stream of pleasant impressions dried up suddenly, and she became stonily silent. She shut speech off as by the turn of a tap, and glowered at the fire, rubbing the back of one hand with the fingers of another, as is her habit in perplexity.

Go on, I said.

She got up, suddenly restless.

All I have been telling you is literally and soberly true, she said. I thought Mrs. Acres charming and witty and good-looking and friendly. What more could you ask from a new acquaintance? And then, after I had asked her to dinner, I suddenly found for no earthly reason that I very much disliked her; I couldn’t bear her.

You said she was wonderfully well dressed, I permitted myself to remark…. If the Queen took the Knight –

Don’t be silly! said Madge. I am wonderfully well dressed too. But behind all her agreeableness and charm and good looks I suddenly felt there was something else which I detested and dreaded. It’s no use asking me what it was, because I haven’t the slightest idea. If I knew what it was, the thing would explain itself. But I felt a horror – nothing vivid, nothing close, you understand, but somewhere in the background. Can the mind have a ‘turn’, do you think, just as the body can, when for a second or two you suddenly feel giddy? I think it must have been that – oh! I’m sure it was that. But I’m glad I asked her to dine. I mean to like her. I shan’t have a ‘turn’ again, shall I?

No, certainly not, I said…. If the Queen refrained from taking the tempting Knight –

Oh, do stop your silly chess-problem! said Madge. Bite him, Fungus!

Fungus, so-called because he is the son of Humour and Gustavus Adolphus, rose from his place on the hearth-rug, and with a horse laugh nuzzled against my leg, which is his way of biting those he loves. Then the most amiable of bull-dogs, who has a passion for the human race, lay down on my foot and sighed heavily. But Madge evidently wanted to talk, and I pushed the chessboard away.

Tell me more about the horror, I said.

It was just horror, she said – a sort of sickness of the soul….

I found my brain puzzling over some vague reminiscence, surely connected with Mrs. Acres, which those words mistily evoked. But next moment that train of thought was cut short, for the old and sinister legend about the Gate-house came into my mind as accounting for the horror of which Madge spoke. In the days of Elizabethan religious persecutions it had, then newly built, been inhabited by two brothers, of whom the elder, to whom it belonged, had Mass said there every Sunday. Betrayed by the younger, he was arrested and racked to death. Subsequently the younger, in a fit of remorse, hanged himself in the panelled parlour. Certainly there was a story that the house was haunted by his strangled apparition dangling from the beams, and the late tenants of the house (which now had stood vacant for over three years) had quitted it after a month’s occupation, in consequence, so it was commonly said, of unaccountable and horrible sights. What was more likely, then, than that Madge, who from childhood has been intensely sensitive to occult and psychic phenomena, should have caught, on that strange wireless receiver which is characteristic of ‘sensitives’, some whispered message?

But you know the story of the house, I said. Isn’t it quite possible that something of that may have reached you? Where did you sit, for instance? In the panelled parlour?

She brightened at that.

Ah, you wise man! she said. I never thought of that. That may account for it all. I hope it does. You shall be left in peace with your chess for being so brilliant.

* * *

I had occasion half an hour later to go to the post-office, a hundred yards up the High Street, on the matter of a registered letter which I wanted to despatch that evening. Dusk was gathering, but the red glow of sunset still smouldered in the west, sufficient to enable me to recognise familiar forms and features of passers-by. Just as I came opposite the post-office there approached from the other direction a tall, finely built woman, whom, I felt sure, I had never seen before. Her destination was the same as mine, and I hung on my step a moment to let her pass in first. Simultaneously I felt that I knew, in some vague, faint manner, what Madge had meant when she talked about a ‘sickness of the soul’. It was no nearer realisation to me than is the running of a tune in the head to the audible external hearing of it, and I attributed my sudden recognition of her feeling to the fact that in all probability my mind had subconsciously been dwelling on what she had said, and not for a moment did I connect it with any external cause. And then it occurred to me who, possibly, this woman was….

She finished the transaction of her errand a few seconds before me, and when I got out into the street again she was a dozen yards down the pavement, walking in the direction of my house and of the Gate-house. Opposite my own door I deliberately lingered, and saw her pass down the steps that led from the road to the entrance of the Gate-house. Even as I turned into my own door the unbidden reminiscence which had eluded me before came out into the open, and I cast my net over it. It was her husband, who, in the inexplicable communication he had left on his dressing-room table, just before he shot himself, had written ‘my soul sickens’. It was odd, though scarcely more than that, for Madge to have used those identical words.

* * *

Charles Alington, my wife’s brother, who arrived next afternoon, is quite the happiest man whom I have ever come across. The material world, that perennial spring of thwarted ambition, physical desire, and perpetual disappointment, is practically unknown to him. Envy, malice, and all uncharitableness are equally alien, because he does not want to obtain what anybody else has got, and has no sense of possession, which is queer, since he is enormously rich. He fears nothing, he hopes for nothing, he has no abhorrences or affections, for all physical and nervous functions are in him in the service of an intense inquisitiveness. He never passed a moral judgment in his life, he only wants to explore and to know. Knowledge, in fact, is his entire preoccupation, and since chemists and medical scientists probe and mine in the world of tinctures and microbes far more efficiently than he could do, as he has so little care for anything that can be weighed or propagated, he devotes himself, absorbedly and ecstatically, to that world that lies about the confines of conscious existence. Anything not yet certainly determined appeals to him with the call of a trumpet: he ceases to take an interest in a subject as soon as it shows signs of assuming a practical and definite status. He was intensely concerned, for instance, in wireless transmission, until Signor Marconi proved that it came within the scope of practical science, and then Charles abandoned it as dull. I had seen him last two months before, when he was in a great perturbation, since he was speaking at a meeting of Anglo-Israelites in the morning, to show that the Scone Stone, which is now in the Coronation Chair at Westminster, was for certain the pillow on which Jacob’s head had rested when he saw the vision at Bethel; was addressing the Psychical Research Society in the afternoon on the subject of messages received from the dead through automatic script, and in the evening was, by way of a holiday, only listening to a lecture on reincarnation. None of these things could, as yet, be definitely proved, and that was why he loved them. During the intervals when the occult and the fantastic do not occupy him, he is, in spite of his fifty years and wizened mien, exactly like a schoolboy of eighteen back on his holidays and brimming with superfluous energy.

I found Charles already arrived when I got home next afternoon, after a round of golf. He was betwixt and between the serious and the holiday mood, for he had evidently been reading to Madge from a journal concerning reincarnation, and was rather severe to me….

Golf! he said, with insulting scorn. What is there to know about golf? You hit a ball into the air –

I was a little sore over the events of the afternoon.

That’s just what I don’t do, I said. I hit it along the ground!

Well, it doesn’t matter where you hit it, said he. It’s all subject to known laws. But the guess, the conjecture: there’s the thrill and the excitement of life. The charlatan with his new cure for cancer, the automatic writer with his messages from the dead, the reincarnationist with his positive assertions that he was Napoleon or a Christian slave – they are the people who advance knowledge. You have to guess before you know. Even Darwin saw that when he said you could not investigate without a hypothesis!

So what’s your hypothesis this minute? I asked.

Why, that we’ve all lived before, and that we’re going to live again here on this same old earth. Any other conception of a future life is impossible. Are all the people who have been born and have died since the world emerged from chaos going to become inhabitants of some future world? What a squash, you know, my dear Madge! Now, I know what you’re going to ask me. If we’ve all lived before, why can’t we remember it? But that’s so simple! If you remembered being Cleopatra, you would go on behaving like Cleopatra; and what would Tarleton say? Judas Iscariot, too! Fancy knowing you had been Judas Iscariot! You couldn’t get over it! You would commit suicide, or cause everybody who was connected with you to commit suicide from their horror of you. Or imagine being a grocer’s boy who knew he had been Julius Caesar…. Of course, sex doesn’t matter: souls, as far as I understand, are sexless – just sparks of life, which are put into physical envelopes, some male, some female. You might have been King David, Madge and poor Tony here one of his wives.

That would be wonderfully neat, said I.

Charles broke out into a shout of laughter.

It would indeed, he said. "But I won’t talk sense any more to you scoffers. I’m absolutely tired out, I will confess, with thinking. I want to have a pretty lady to come to dinner, and talk to her as if she was just herself and I myself, and nobody else. I want to win two-and-sixpence at bridge with the expenditure of enormous thought. I want to have a large breakfast tomorrow and read The Times afterwards, and go to Tony’s club and talk about crops and golf and Irish affairs and Peace Conferences, and all the things that don’t matter one straw!"

You’re going to begin your programme tonight, dear, said Madge. A very pretty lady is coming to dinner, and we’re going to play bridge afterwards.

Madge and I were ready for Mrs. Acres when she arrived, but Charles was not yet down. Fungus, who has a wild adoration for Charles, quite unaccountable, since Charles has no feelings for dogs, was helping him to dress, and Madge, Mrs. Acres, and I waited for his appearance. It was certainly Mrs. Acres whom I had met last night at the door of the post-office, but the dim light of sunset had not enabled me to see how wonderfully handsome she was. There was something slightly Jewish about her profile: the high forehead, the very full-lipped mouth, the bridged nose, the prominent chin, all suggested rather than exemplified an Eastern origin. And when she spoke she had that rich softness of utterance, not quite hoarseness, but not quite of the clear-cut distinctness of tone which characterises northern nations. Something southern, something Eastern….

I am bound to ask one thing, she said, when, after the usual greetings, we stood round the fireplace, waiting for Charles – but have you got a dog?

Madge moved towards the bell.

Yes, but he shan’t come down if you dislike dogs, she said. He’s wonderfully kind, but I know –

Ah, it’s not that, said Mrs. Acres. I adore dogs. But I only wished to spare your dog’s feelings. Though I adore them, they hate me, and they’re terribly frightened of me. There’s something anti-canine about me.

It was too late to say more. Charles’s steps clattered in the little hall outside, and Fungus was hoarse and amused. Next moment the door opened, and the two came in.

Fungus came in first. He lolloped in a festive manner into the middle of the room, sniffed and snorted in greeting, and then turned tail. He slipped and skidded on the parquet outside, and we heard him bundling down the kitchen stairs.

Rude dog, said Madge. Charles, let me introduce you to Mrs. Acres. My brother, Mrs. Acres: Sir Charles Alington.

* * *

Our little dinner-table of four would not permit of separate conversations, and general topics, springing up like mushrooms, wilted and died at their very inception. What mood possessed the others I did not at that time know, but for myself I was only conscious of some fundamental distaste of the handsome, clever woman who sat on my right, and seemed quite unaffected by the withering atmosphere. She was charming to the eye, she was witty to the ear, she had grace and gracefulness, and all the time she was something terrible. But by degrees, as I found my own distaste increasing, I saw that my brother-in-law’s interest was growing correspondingly keen. The ‘pretty lady’ whose presence at dinner he had desired and obtained was enchaining him – not, so I began to guess, for her charm and her prettiness; but for some purpose of study, and I wondered whether it was her beautiful Jewish profile that was confirming to his mind some Anglo-Israelitish theory, whether he saw in her fine brown eyes the glance of the seer and the clairvoyante, or whether he divined in her some reincarnation of one of the famous or the infamous dead. Certainly she had for him some fascination beyond that of the legitimate charm of a very handsome woman; he was studying her with intense curiosity.

And you are comfortable in the Gate-house? he suddenly rapped out at her, as if asking some question of which the answer was crucial.

Ah! But so comfortable, she said – such a delightful atmosphere. I have never known a house that ‘felt’ so peaceful and homelike. Or is it merely fanciful to imagine that some houses have a sense of tranquillity about them and others are uneasy and even terrible?

Charles stared at her a moment in silence before he recollected his manners.

No, there may easily be something in it, I should say, he answered. One can imagine long centuries of tranquillity actually investing a home with some sort of psychical aura perceptible to those who are sensitive.

She turned to Madge.

And yet I have heard a ridiculous story that the house is supposed to be haunted, she said. If it is, it is surely haunted by delightful, contented spirits.

Dinner was over. Madge rose.

Come in very soon, Tony, she said to me, and let’s get to our bridge.

But her eyes said, Don’t leave me long alone with her.

Charles turned briskly round when the door had shut.

An extremely interesting woman, he said.

Very handsome, said I.

Is she? I didn’t notice. Her mind, her spirit – that’s what intrigued me. What is she? What’s behind? Why did Fungus turn tail like that? Queer, too, about her finding the atmosphere of the Gate-house so tranquil. The late tenants, I remember, didn’t find that soothing touch about it!

How do you account for that? I asked.

There might be several explanations. You might say that the late tenants were fanciful, imaginative people, and that the present tenant is a sensible, matter-of-fact woman. Certainly she seemed to be.

Or – I suggested.

He laughed.

Well, you might say – mind, I don’t say so – but you might say that the – the spiritual tenants of the house find Mrs. Acres a congenial companion, and want to retain her. So they keep quiet, and don’t upset the cook’s nerves!

Somehow this answer exasperated and jarred on me.

What do you mean? I said. The spiritual tenant of the house, I suppose, is the man who betrayed his brother and hanged himself. Why should he find a charming woman like Mrs. Acres a congenial companion?

Charles got up briskly. Usually he is more than ready to discuss such topics, but tonight it seemed that he had no such inclination.

Didn’t Madge tell us not to be long? he asked. You know how I run on if I once get on that subject, Tony, so don’t give me the opportunity.

But why did you say that? I persisted.

Because I was talking nonsense. You know me well enough to be aware that I am an habitual criminal in that respect.

* * *

It was indeed strange to find how completely both the first impression that Madge had formed of Mrs. Acres and the feeling that followed so quickly on its heels were endorsed by those who, during the next week or two, did a neighbour’s duty to the newcomer. All were loud in praise of her charm, her pleasant, kindly wit, her good looks, her beautiful clothes, but even while this Lob-gesang was in full chorus it would suddenly die away, and an uneasy silence descended, which somehow was more eloquent than all the appreciative speech. Odd, unaccountable little incidents had occurred, which were whispered from mouth to mouth till they became common property. The same fear that Fungus had shown of her was exhibited by another dog. A parallel case occurred when she returned the call of our parson’s wife. Mrs. Dowlett had a cage of canaries in the window of her drawing-room. These birds had manifested symptoms of extreme terror when Mrs. Acres entered the room, beating themselves against the wires of their cage, and uttering the alarm-note…. She inspired some sort of inexplicable fear, over which we, as trained and civilised human beings, had control, so that we behaved ourselves. But animals, without that check, gave way altogether to it, even as Fungus had done.

Mrs. Acres entertained; she gave charming little dinner-parties of eight, with a couple of tables at bridge to follow, but over these evenings there hung a blight and a blackness. No doubt the sinister story of the panelled parlour contributed to this.

This curious secret dread of her, of which as on that first evening at my house, she appeared to be completely unconscious differed very widely in degree. Most people, like myself, were conscious of it, but only very remotely so, and we found ourselves at the Gate-house behaving quite as usual, though with this unease in the background. But with a few, and most of all with Madge, it grew into a sort of obsession. She made every effort to combat it; her will was entirely set against it, but her struggle seemed only to establish its power over her. The pathetic and pitiful part was that Mrs. Acres from the first had taken a tremendous liking to her, and used to drop in continually, calling first to Madge at the window, in that pleasant, serene voice of hers, to tell Fungus that the hated one was imminent.

Then came a day when Madge and I were bidden to a party at the Gate-house on Christmas evening. This was to be the last of Mrs. Acres’s hospitalities for the present, since she was leaving immediately afterwards for a couple of months in Egypt. So, with this remission ahead, Madge almost gleefully accepted the bidding. But when the evening came she was seized with so violent an attack of sickness and shivering that she was utterly unable to fulfil her engagement. Her doctor could find no physical trouble to account for this: it seemed that the anticipation of her evening alone caused it, and here was the culmination of her shrinking from our kindly and pleasant neighbour. She could only tell me that her sensations, as she began to dress for the party, were like those of that moment in sleep when somewhere in the drowsy brain nightmare is ripening. Something independent of her will revolted at what lay before her….

* * *

Spring had begun to stretch herself in the lap of winter when next the curtain rose on this veiled drama of forces but dimly comprehended and shudderingly conjectured; but then, indeed, nightmare ripened swiftly in broad noon. And this was the way of it.

Charles Alington had again come to stay with us five days before Easter, and expressed himself as humorously disappointed to find that the subject of his curiosity was still absent from the Gate-house. On the Saturday morning before Easter he appeared very late for breakfast, and Madge had already gone her ways. I rang for a fresh teapot, and while this was on its way he took up The Times.

I only read the outside page of it, he said. The rest is too full of mere materialistic dullnesses – politics, sports, money-market –

He stopped, and passed the paper over to me.

There, where I’m pointing, he said – among the deaths. The first one.

What I read was this:

Acres, Bertha. Died at sea, Thursday night, 30th March, and by her own request buried at sea. (Received by wireless from P. & O. steamer Peshawar.)

He held out his hand for the paper again, and turned over the leaves.

Lloyd’s, he said. "The Peshawar arrived at Tilbury yesterday afternoon. The burial must have taken place somewhere in the English Channel."

* * *

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday Madge and I motored out to the golf links three miles away. She proposed to walk along the beach just outside the dunes while I had my round, and return to the club-house for tea in two hours’ time. The day was one of most lucid spring: a warm south-west wind bowled white clouds along the sky, and their shadows jovially scudded over the sandhills. We had told her of Mrs. Acres’s death, and from that moment something dark and vague which had been lying over her mind since the autumn seemed to join this fleet of the shadows of clouds and leave her in sunlight. We parted at the door of the club-house, and she set out on her walk.

Half an hour later, as my opponent and I were waiting on the fifth tee, where the road crosses the links, for the couple in front of us to move on, a servant from the club-house, scudding along the road, caught sight of us, and, jumping from his bicycle, came to where we stood.

You’re wanted at the club-house, sir, he said to me. Mrs. Carford was walking along the shore, and she found something left by the tide. A body, sir. ’Twas in a sack, but the sack was torn, and she saw – it’s upset her very much, sir. We thought it best to come for you.

I took the boy’s bicycle and went back to the club-house as fast as I could turn the wheel. I felt sure I knew what Madge had found, and, knowing that, realised the shock…. Five minutes later she was telling me her story in gasps and whispers.

The tide was going down, she said, and I walked along the high-water mark…. There were pretty shells; I was picking them up…. And then I saw it in front of me – just shapeless, just a sack…and then, as I came nearer, it took shape; there were knees and elbows. It moved, it rolled over, and where the head was the sack was torn, and I saw her face. Her eyes were open, Tony, and I fled…. All the time I felt it was rolling along after me. Oh, Tony! She’s dead, isn’t she? She won’t come back to the Gate-house? Do you promise me…? There’s something awful! I wonder if I guess. The sea gives her up. The sea won’t suffer her to rest in it….

The news of the finding had already been telephoned to Tarleton, and soon a party of four men with a stretcher arrived. There was no doubt as to the identity of the body, for though it had been in the water for three days no corruption had come to it. The weights with which at burial it had been laden must by some strange chance have been detached from it, and by a chance stranger yet it had drifted to the shore closest to her home. That night it lay in the mortuary, and the inquest was held on it next day, though that was a bank-holiday. From there it was taken to the Gate-house and coffined, and it lay in the panelled parlour for the funeral on the morrow.

Madge, after that one hysterical outburst, had completely recovered herself, and on the Monday evening she made a little wreath of the spring-flowers which the early warmth had called into blossom in the garden, and I went across with it to the Gate-house. Though the news of Mrs. Acres’s death and the subsequent finding of the body had been widely advertised, there had been no response from relations or friends, and as I laid the solitary wreath on the coffin a sense of the utter loneliness of what lay within seized and encompassed me. And then a portent, no less, took place before my eyes. Hardly had the freshly gathered flowers been laid on the coffin than they drooped and wilted. The stalks of the daffodils bent, and their bright chalices closed; the odour of the wallflowers died, and they withered as I watched…. What did it mean, that even the petals of spring shrank and were moribund?

* * *

I told Madge nothing of this; and she, as if through some pang of remorse, was determined to be present next day at the funeral. No arrival of friends or relations had taken place, and from the Gate-house there came none of