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The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

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Title: The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

Author: Algernon Blackwood

 
Release date: December 26, 2004 [eBook #14471]
 Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EMPTY HOUSE AND OTHER GHOST STORIES ***

THE EMPTY HOUSE

AND OTHER GHOST STORIES

BY

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

AUTHOR OF

"JOHN SILENCE" "THE LOST VALLEY" ETC.

LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH COMPANY
LIMITED

1916

First Printed 1906
Uniform Edition 1915
Reprinted 1916

CONTENTS

THE EMPTY HOUSE

A HAUNTED ISLAND

A CASE OF EAVESDROPPING

KEEPING HIS PROMISE

WITH INTENT TO STEAL

THE WOOD OF THE DEAD

SMITH: AN EPISODE IN A LODGING-HOUSE

A SUSPICIOUS GIFT

THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PRIVATE SECRETARY IN NEW YORK

SKELETON LAKE: AN EPISODE IN CAMP

THE EMPTY HOUSE

Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once
their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular
feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an
ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the
unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with
their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate
an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their
immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.

And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the
aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the
actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the
hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of
the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher,
and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin,
and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent
cause.

There was manifestly nothing in the external appearance of this
particular house to bear out the tales of the horror that was said to
reign within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood, crowded into
a corner of the square, and looked exactly like the houses on either
side of it. It had the same number of windows as its neighbours; the
same balcony overlooking the gardens; the same white steps leading up to
the heavy black front door; and, in the rear, there was the same narrow
strip of green, with neat box borders, running up to the wall that
divided it from the backs of the adjoining houses. Apparently, too, the
number of chimney pots on the roof was the same; the breadth and angle
of the eaves; and even the height of the dirty area railings.

And yet this house in the square, that seemed precisely similar to its
fifty ugly neighbours, was as a matter of fact entirely
different--horribly different.

Wherein lay this marked, invisible difference is impossible to say. It
cannot be ascribed wholly to the imagination, because persons who had
spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared
positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die
than enter them again, and that the atmosphere of the whole house
produced in them symptoms of a genuine terror; while the series of
innocent tenants who had tried to live in it and been forced to decamp
at the shortest possible notice, was indeed little less than a scandal
in the town.

When Shorthouse arrived to pay a "week-end" visit to his Aunt Julia in
her little house on the sea-front at the other end of the town, he found
her charged to the brim with mystery and excitement. He had only
received her telegram that morning, and he had come anticipating
boredom; but the moment he touched her hand and kissed her apple-skin
wrinkled cheek, he caught the first wave of her electrical condition.
The impression deepened when he learned that there were to be no other
visitors, and that he had been telegraphed for with a very special
object.

Something was in the wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear
fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical
research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she
usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon
after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along
the sea-front in the dusk.

"I've got the keys," she announced in a delighted, yet half awesome
voice. "Got them till Monday!"

"The keys of the bathing-machine, or--?" he asked innocently, looking
from the sea to the town. Nothing brought her so quickly to the point as
feigning stupidity.

"Neither," she whispered. "I've got the keys of the haunted house in the
square--and I'm going there to-night."

Shorthouse was conscious of the slightest possible tremor down his back.
He dropped his teasing tone. Something in her voice and manner thrilled
him. She was in earnest.

"But you can't go alone--" he began.

"That's why I wired for you," she said with decision.

He turned to look at her. The ugly, lined, enigmatical face was alive
with excitement. There was the glow of genuine enthusiasm round it like
a halo. The eyes shone. He caught another wave of her excitement, and a
second tremor, more marked than the first, accompanied it.

"Thanks, Aunt Julia," he said politely; "thanks awfully."

"I should not dare to go quite alone," she went on, raising her voice;
"but with you I should enjoy it immensely. You're afraid of nothing, I
know."

"Thanks _so_ much," he said again. "Er--is anything likely to happen?"

"A great deal _has_ happened," she whispered, "though it's been most
cleverly hushed up. Three tenants have come and gone in the last few
months, and the house is said to be empty for good now."

In spite of himself Shorthouse became interested. His aunt was so very
much in earnest.

"The house is very old indeed," she went on, "and the story--an
unpleasant one--dates a long way back. It has to do with a murder
committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in
the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and
when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants' quarters,
chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come
to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below."

"And the stableman--?"

"Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder; but 

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