The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“Now, although we close at six o’clock, if I’m busy I’m very often on the premises until eight or even later. The boy goes off at six sharp, but Merton used to stay on for another half hour or so. I was always the last to leave. That evening I was hard at work trying to trace an obscure coat-of-arms on a German binding. I never could find my way about Rietstap. It was about half-past seven, and I assumed that Merton had gone home, although I usually heard the door when he let himself out. It was, of course, quite dark outside. Suddenly I heard a cry from downstairs. It was Merton’s voice, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a degree of fear infused into a single scream; it expressed the very essence of terror. I opened my door quickly and looked down over the bannisters into the well of the staircase. The switch is at the foot of the stairs and the light was off. I could hear him pulling the door handle of his room, and as I watched the door was flung open. His room too was in darkness so I got only a glimpse of what happened then; for the light coming over my shoulder from the open door behind me shone only halfway down the stairs. Merton ran through the shop, and I heard the bell ring as he opened the outer door. I was going to shout after him, when I saw something else emerge from his room. At least I can’t say that I saw it; I thought I discerned a shadowy figure come through the doorway, but apart from an impression of grey colouring I could not describe it. But it wasn’t what I saw that made me shudder, it was a smell – one that I had met only once before in my life, and that was forty years ago. When I was a boy, we had an exhumation in the village churchyard, and being an inquisitive child I crept up between the tombstones as the grave-diggers were raising the coffin. I only got a glimpse because the village policeman spotted me, and I got a clout on the side of the head for my pains. But I smelt a smell that I didn’t meet again until it floated up the well of these stairs on the night before last – a dank, sickening, fœtid reek of rottenness and decay. I nearly fainted with revulsion. In a second I was back in my room with the door shut. I sat here for a few minutes, and then I thought of Merton and wondered what had become of him. I plucked up courage and went downstairs – the place was deserted and the shop door still open. I went outside and hurried down the passage towards Holborn. I remember thinking, as I did so, how quiet everything seemed. When I emerged into Holborn I discovered the reason. The traffic was stationary and in the middle of the road a group of people were gathered round a prone figure. I pushed my way through the crowd and saw that it was Merton. A policeman told me that he had run headlong from the passage straight under the wheels of a bus, and had been killed instantly.

“You can imagine how shaken I was when I came back to the shop. I went into Merton’s room and there on his desk was that damned manuscript. From the place at which it was open and from some notes on his pad, it was obvious that the poor devil had been experimenting with one of the formula: set out there. Something had occurred to frighten him out of his wits, and in his nervous state this wasn’t perhaps surprising. I suppose that some obscure telepathy communicated his panic to me – at least I prefer to believe that than credit the implications of what I thought I sensed at the foot of the stairs. Anyhow, I was taking no chances, and before I went home I burned every particle of the manuscript and of Merton’s notes. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. And although I’ve always found occult books a lucrative sideline, it’s a class of literature that I shall be avoiding for the future.”

2

Ghost Writers

The “Golden Era”

Playing With Fire

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Location:  Badderly Gardens, Merton, Surrey.

Time:  14 April 1900.

Eyewitness Description:  “Then suddenly a sound came out of the darkness – a low, sibilant sound, the quick, thin breathing of a woman. Quicker and thinner yet it came, as between clenched teeth, to end in a loud gasp with a dull rustle of cloth . . .”