The Third Ghost Story Megapack Read online

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  THE DEAD AND THE COUNTESS, by Gertrude Atherton

  THE CEDAR CLOSET, by Lafcadio Hearn

  THE WRAITH OF BARNJUM, by F. Anstey

  THE JOLLY CORNER, by Henry James

  THE ROLL-CALL OF THE REEF, by A. T. Quiller-Couch

  THE BOWMEN, by Arthur Machen

  OMAN, By Leopold Kompert

  THE MIDDLE TOE OF THE RIGHT FOOT, by Ambrose Bierce

  THE TOLL-HOUSE, by W.W. Jacobs

  THE HAUNTED COVE, by Sir George Douglas

  THE GHOST OF LORD CLARENCEUX, by Arnold Bennett

  THE HAUNTED AUTOMATON, by W. C. Morrow

  THE GHOSTS AT GRANTLEY, by Leonard Kip

  THE SPECTRE COOK OF BANGLETOP, by John Kendrick Bangs

  THE SUPERSTITIOUS MAN’S STORY, by Thomas Hardy

  THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM, by William Hunt

  THE SPECTRE IN THE CART, by Thomas Nelson Page

  THE TALE OF THE PORCELAIN-GOD, by Lafcadio Hearn

  THE BELL IN THE FOG, by Gertrude Atherton

  THE HAUNTING OF WHITE GATES, by G. M. Robins

  THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND, by Mrs. Alfred (Louisa) Baldwin

  NO. 5 BRANCH LINE: THE ENGINEER, by Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards

  THE SHADOW IN THE CORNER, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  THE SECRET CHAMBER, by Margaret Oliphant

  THE UPPER BERTH, by F. Marion Crawford

  MR. GRAY’S STRANGE STORY, by Louisa Murray

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Third Ghost Story Megapack is copyright © 2013 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved. For more information, contact the publisher through wildsidepress.com or the Wildside Press Forums.

  NOTE

  Language has not been updated for “political correctness” and some stories may contain language which some might find offensive. Please note that languages change and evolve, and what was acceptable in the time of original publication may prove offensive to some today.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Over the last two years, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has proved to be one of our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as free premiums to our email list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt, Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Sam Cooper, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!).

  A NOTE FOR OUR KINDLE READERS

  The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

  If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  THE MEGAPACK SERIES

  The Adventure Megapack

  The Christmas Megapack

  The Second Christmas Megapack

  The Cowboy Megapack

  The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

  The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

  The Detective Megapack

  The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

  The Ghost Story Megapack

  The Second Ghost Story Megapack

  The Third Ghost Story Megapack

  The Horror Megapack

  The Macabre Megapack

  The Martian Megapack

  The Military Megapack

  The Mummy Megapack

  The Mystery Megapack

  The Science Fiction Megapack

  The Second Science Fiction Megapack

  The Third Science Fiction Megapack

  The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Penny Parker Megapack

  The Pinocchio Megapack

  The Pulp Fiction Megapack

  The Rover Boys Megapack

  The Steampunk Megapack

  The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

  The Tom Swift Megapack

  The Vampire Megapack

  The Victorian Mystery Megapack

  The Werewolf Megapack

  The Western Megapack

  The Wizard of Oz Megapack

  AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

  The B.M. Bower Megapa pack

  The E.F. Benson Megapack

  The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

  The Wilkie Collins Megapack

  The Philip K. Dick Megapack

  The Randall Garrett Megapack

  The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

  The G.A. Henty Megapack

  The M.R. James Megapack

  The Murray Leinster Megapack

  The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

  The Andre Norton Megapack

  The H. Beam Piper Megapack

  The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

  THE DEAD AND THE COUNTESS, by Gertrude Atherton

  It was an old cemetery, and they had been long dead. Those who died nowadays were put in the new burying-place on the hill, close to the Bois d’Amour and within sound of the bells that called the living to mass. But the little church where the mass was celebrated stood faithfully beside the older dead; a new church, indeed, had not been built in that forgotten corner of Finisterre for centuries, not since the calvary on its pile of stones had been raised in the tiny square, surrounded then, as now, perhaps, by gray naked cottages; not since the castle with its round tower, down on the river, had been erected for the Counts of Croisac. But the stone walls enclosing that ancient cemetery had been kept in good repair, and there were no weeds within, nor toppling headstones. It looked cold and gray and desolate, like all the cemeteries of Brittany, but it was made hideous neither by tawdry gew-gaws nor the license of time.

  And sometimes it was close to a picture of early beauty. When the village celebrated its yearly pardon, a great procession came out of the church—priests in glittering robes, young men in their gala costume of black and silver, holding flashing standards aloft, and many maidens in flapping white head-dress and collar, black frocks and aprons flaunting with ribbons and lace. They marched, chanting, down the road beside the wall of the cemetery, where lay the generations that in their day had held the banners and chanted the service of the pardon. For
the dead were peasants and priests—the Croisacs had their burying-place in a hollow of the hills behind the castle—old men and women who had wept and died for the fishermen that had gone to the grande pêche and returned no more, and now and again a child, slept there. Those who walked past the dead at the pardon, or after the marriage ceremony, or took part in any one of the minor religious festivals with which the Catholic village enlivens its existence—all, young and old, looked grave and sad. For the women from childhood know that their lot is to wait and dread and weep, and the men that the ocean is treacherous and cruel, but that bread can be wrung from no other master.

  Therefore the living have little sympathy for the dead who have laid down their crushing burden; and the dead under their stones slumber contentedly enough. There is no envy among them for the young who wander at evening and pledge their troth in the Bois d’Amour, only pity for the groups of women who wash their linen in the creek that flows to the river. They look like pictures in the green quiet book of nature, these women, in their glistening white head-gear and deep collars; but the dead know better than to envy them, and the women—and the lovers—know better than to pity the dead.

  The dead lay at rest in their boxes and thanked God they were quiet and had found everlasting peace.

  And one day even this, for which they had patiently endured life, was taken from them.

  The village was picturesque and there was none quite like it, even in Finisterre. Artists discovered it and made it famous. After the artists followed the tourists, and the old creaking diligence became an absurdity. Brittany was the fashion for three months of the year, and wherever there is fashion there is at least one railway. The one built to satisfy the thousands who wished to visit the wild, sad beauties of the west of France was laid along the road beside the little cemetery of this tale.

  It takes a long while to awaken the dead. These heard neither the voluble working-men nor even the first snort of the engine. And, of course, they neither heard nor knew of the pleadings of the old priest that the line should be laid elsewhere. One night he came out into the old cemetery and sat on a grave and wept. For he loved his dead and felt it to be a tragic pity that the greed of money, and the fever of travel, and the petty ambitions of men whose place was in the great cities where such ambitions were born, should shatter forever the holy calm of those who had suffered so much on earth. He had known many of them in life, for he was very old; and although he believed, like all good Catholics, in heaven and purgatory and hell, yet he always saw his friends as he had buried them, peacefully asleep in their coffins, the souls lying with folded hands like the bodies that held them, patiently awaiting the final call. He would never have told you, this good old priest, that he believed heaven to be a great echoing palace in which God and the archangels dwelt alone waiting for that great day when the elected dead should rise and enter the Presence together, for he was a simple old man who had read and thought little; but he had a zigzag of fancy in his humble mind, and he saw his friends and his ancestors’ friends as I have related to you, soul and body in the deep undreaming sleep of death, but sleep, not a rotted body deserted by its affrighted mate; and to all who sleep there comes, sooner or later, the time of awakening.

  He knew that they had slept through the wild storms that rage on the coast of Finisterre, when ships are flung on the rocks and trees crash down in the Bois d’Amour. He knew that the soft, slow chantings of the pardon never struck a chord in those frozen memories, meagre and monotonous as their store had been; nor the bagpipes down in the open village hall—a mere roof on poles—when the bride and her friends danced for three days without a smile on their sad brown faces.

  All this the dead had known in life and it could not disturb nor interest them now. But that hideous intruder from modern civilization, a train of cars with a screeching engine, that would shake the earth which held them and rend the peaceful air with such discordant sounds that neither dead nor living could sleep! His life had been one long unbroken sacrifice, and he sought in vain to imagine one greater, which he would cheerfully assume could this disaster be spared his dead.

  But the railway was built, and the first night the train went screaming by, shaking the earth and rattling the windows of the church, he went out and out and sprinkled every grave with holy water.

  And thereafter twice a day, at dawn and at night, as the train tore a tunnel in the quiet air, like the plebian upstart it was, he sprinkled every grave, rising sometimes from a bed of pain, at other times defying wind and rain and hail. And for a while he believed that his holy device had deepened the sleep of his dead, locked them beyond the power of man to awake. But one night he heard them muttering.

  It was late. There were but a few stars on a black sky. Not a breath of wind came over the lonely plains beyond, or from the sea. There would be no wrecks to-night , and all the world seemed at peace. The lights were out in the village. One burned in the tower of Croisac, where the young wife of the count lay ill. The priest had been with her when the train thundered by, and she had whispered to him:

  “Would that I were on it! Oh, this lonely lonely land! this cold echoing château, with no one to speak to day after day! If it kills me, mon père, make him lay me in the cemetery by the road, that twice a day I may hear the train go by—the train that goes to Paris! If they put me down there over the hill, I will shriek in my coffin every night.”

  The priest had ministered as best he could to the ailing soul of the young noblewoman, with whose like he seldom dealt, and hastened back to his dead. He mused, as he toiled along the dark road with rheumatic legs, on the fact that the woman should have the same fancy as himself.

  “If she is really sincere, poor young thing,” he thought aloud, “I will forbear to sprinkle holy-water on her grave. For those who suffer while alive should have all they desire after death, and I am afraid the count neglects her. But I pray God that my dead have not heard that monster to-night.” And he tucked his gown under his arm and hurriedly told his rosary.

  But when he went about among the graves with the holy-water he heard the dead muttering.

  “Jean-Marie,” said a voice, fumbling among its unused tones for forgotten notes, “art thou ready? Surely that is the last call.”

  “Nay, nay,” rumnbled another voice, “that is not the sound of a trumpet, François. That will be sudden and loud and sharp, like the great blasts of the north when they come plunging over the sea from out the awful gorges of Iceland.

  Dost thou remember them, François? Thank the good God they spared us to die in our beds with our grandchildren about us and only the little wind sighing in the Bois d’Amour. Ah, the poor comrades that died in their manhood, that went to the grande pêche once too often! Dost thou remember when the great wave curled round Ignace like his poor wife’s arms, and we saw him no more? We clasped each other’s hands, for we believed that we should follow, but we lived and went again and again to the grande pêche, and died in our beds. Grâce à Dieu!”

  “Why dost thou think of that now—here in the grave where it matters not, even to the living?”

  “I know not; but it was of that night when Ignace went down that I thought as the living breath went out of me. Of what didst thou think as thou layest dying?”

  “Of the money I owed to Dominique and could not pay. I sought to ask my son to pay it, but death had come suddenly and I could not speak. God knows how they treat my name to-day in the village of St. Hilaire.”

  “Thou art forgotten,” murmured another voice. I died forty years after thee and men remember not so long in Finisterre. But thy son was my friend and I remember that he paid the money.”

  “And my son, what of him? Is he, too, here?”

  “Nay; he lies deep in the northern sea. It was his second voyage, and he had returned with a purse for the young wife, the first time. But he returned no more, and she washed in the river
for the dames of Croisac, and by-and-by she died. I would have married her but she said it was enough to lose one husband. I married another, and she grew ten years in every three that I went to the grande pêche. Alas for Brittany, she has no youth!”

  “And thou? Wert thou an old man when thou camest here?”

  “Sixty. My wife came first, like many wives. She lies here. Jeanne!”

  “Is’t thy voice, my husband? Not the Lord Jesus Christ’s? What miracle is this? I thought that terrible sound was the trumpet of doom.”

  “It could not be, old Jeanne, for we are still in our graves. When the trump sounds we shall have wings and robes of light, and fly straight up to heaven. Hast thou slept well?”

  “Ay! But why are we awakened? Is it time for purgatory? Or have we been there?”

  “The good God knows. I remember nothing. Art frightened? Would that I could hold thy hand, as when thou didst slip from life into that long sleep thou didst fear, yet welcome.”

  “I am frightened, my husband. But it is sweet to hear thy voice, hoarse and hollow as it is from the mould of the grave. Thank the good God thou didst bury me with the rosary in my hands,” and she began telling the beads rapidly.

  “If God is good,” cried François, harshly, and his voice came plainly to the priest’s ears, as if the lid of the coffin had rotted, “why are we awakened before our time? What foul fiend was it that thundered and screamed through the frozen avenues of my brain? Has God, perchance, been vanquished and does the Evil One reign in His stead?”