The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“Tek ’em or leave ’em,” she said. ‘But we’ve more than we’ll ever want and they’ll just get the worm in. Here, you could do wi’ a few taties too from the look of you. Oh aye – and I’ve just heard. That daft woman up near Mealbeck. She’s dead. The doctor’s just left her. Or I hear tell. She hanged herself.”

It was no story.

Or rather it is the most detestable, inadmissible story. For I don’t yet know half the facts and I don’t feel I want to invent any. It would be a story so easy to improve upon. There are half a dozen theories about poor Rose’s hanging and half a dozen about the reason for her growing isolation and idleness and seclusion. There is only one view about her character though, and that is odd because the whole community in the fells and Dales survives on firmly-grounded assessment of motives and results; the gradations and developments of character are vital to life and give validity to passing years. Reputations change and rise and fall. But Rose – Rose had always been very well-liked and had very much liked living here. Gertie and Millicent said she had fitted in round here as if she were country born. She had been one of the few southerners they said who had seemed to belong. She had loved the house – a queer place. It had been the heart of a Quaker settlement. Panes of glass so thick you could hardly see out. She had grown more and more attached to it. She didn’t seem able to leave it in the end.

“The marriage broke up after the War,” said the doctor. We were sitting back after dinner in the housekeeper’s room among the Thomas Lawrences. ‘He was always on the move. Rose had no quarrel with him you know. She just grew – well, very taken with the place. It was – yes, possession. Greek idea – possession by local gods. The Romans were here you know. They brought a Greek legend or two with them.”

I said, “How odd, when I saw her I thought of the Greeks, though I hadn’t known what I meant. It was the way she moved – so old. And the way she held her hands out. Like, – well, sort of like on the walls of Troy.”

“Not Troy,” said the doctor. “More like hell, poor thing. She was quite gone. You know – these fells, all the little isolated houses, I’m not that sure how good for you they are, unless you’re farming folk.”

Millicent said rubbish.

“No,” he said, “I mean it. D’you remember C. S. Lewis’s hell? A place where people live in isolation unable to reach each other. Where the houses get further and further apart?”

“Everyone reaches each other here,” I said. “Surely?”

The doctor was looking at me and I noticed he was looking at me very hard. He said, “What was it you said?”

“Everyone reaches each other—”

“No,” he said. “You said you saw her.”

“Yes I did. I saw her on the way home from here, the night before she died. Then I saw her again the next day, the very afternoon. That’s what is so terrible. I must have seen her, just before she – did it. I must be the last person to have seen her.”

“I wonder,” he said, “if that could be true.” Gertie and Millicent were busy with coffee cups. They turned away.

“ ‘Could be true?’ But it is certainly true. I know exactly when. She asked me the time that afternoon. I told her. It was just after three. She seemed very – bewildered about it. You called upon her hardly a quarter of an hour later. She’d hardly been back in the house a quarter of an hour.”

“She’d been in it longer than that,” he said, “When I found her she’d been dead for nearly three weeks. Maybe since hay-time.”

I went to Hong Kong.

5

Entertaining Spooks

Supernatural High Jinks

The Inexperienced Ghost

H. G. Wells

Location:  The Mermaid Golf Club, Surrey.

Time:  March, 1902.

Eyewitness Description:  “I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was towards me and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost. He was transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see the glimmer of the little window at the end . . .”