The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories
when the time came for me to leave, the necessary reading had been
accomplished, and my nerves had completely recovered their balance.
On the day of my departure the farmer started early in his big boat with
my belongings to row to the point, twelve miles distant, where a little
steamer ran twice a week for the accommodation of hunters. Late in the
afternoon I went off in another direction in my canoe, wishing to see
the island once again, where I had been the victim of so strange an
experience.
In due course I arrived there, and made a tour of the island. I also
made a search of the little house, and it was not without a curious
sensation in my heart that I entered the little upstairs bedroom. There
seemed nothing unusual.
Just after I re-embarked, I saw a canoe gliding ahead of me around the
curve of the island. A canoe was an unusual sight at this time of the
year, and this one seemed to have sprung from nowhere. Altering my
course a little, I watched it disappear around the next projecting point
of rock. It had high curving bows, and there were two Indians in it. I
lingered with some excitement, to see if it would appear again round the
other side of the island; and in less than five minutes it came into
view. There were less than two hundred yards between us, and the
Indians, sitting on their haunches, were paddling swiftly in my
direction.
I never paddled faster in my life than I did in those next few minutes.
When I turned to look again, the Indians had altered their course, and
were again circling the island.
The sun was sinking behind the forests on the mainland, and the
crimson-coloured clouds of sunset were reflected in the waters of the
lake, when I looked round for the last time, and saw the big bark canoe
and its two dusky occupants still going round the island. Then the
shadows deepened rapidly; the lake grew black, and the night wind blew
its first breath in my face as I turned a corner, and a projecting bluff
of rock hid from my view both island and canoe.
A CASE OF EAVESDROPPING
Jim Shorthouse was the sort of fellow who always made a mess of things.
Everything with which his hands or mind came into contact issued from
such contact in an unqualified and irremediable state of mess. His
college days were a mess: he was twice rusticated. His schooldays were a
mess: he went to half a dozen, each passing him on to the next with a
worse character and in a more developed state of mess. His early boyhood
was the sort of mess that copy-books and dictionaries spell with a big
"M," and his babyhood--ugh! was the embodiment of howling, yowling,
screaming mess.
At the age of forty, however, there came a change in his troubled life,
when he met a girl with half a million in her own right, who consented
to marry him, and who very soon succeeded in reducing his most messy
existence into a state of comparative order and system.
Certain incidents, important and otherwise, of Jim's life would never
have come to be told here but for the fact that in getting into his
"messes" and out of them again he succeeded in drawing himself into the
atmosphere of peculiar circumstances and strange happenings. He
attracted to his path the curious adventures of life as unfailingly as
meat attracts flies, and jam wasps. It is to the meat and jam of his
life, so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all
pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the
interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became
regular as the sun's instead of erratic as a comet's.
The first experience in order of time that he related to me shows that
somewhere latent behind his disarranged nervous system there lay psychic
perceptions of an uncommon order. About the age of twenty-two--I think
after his second rustication--his father's purse and patience had
equally given out, and Jim found himself stranded high and dry in a
large American city. High and dry! And the only clothes that had no
holes in them safely in the keeping of his uncle's wardrobe.
Careful reflection on a bench in one of the city parks led him to the
conclusion that the only thing to do was to persuade the city editor of
one of the daily journals that he possessed an observant mind and a
ready pen, and that he could "do good work for your paper, sir, as a
reporter." This, then, he did, standing at a most unnatural angle
between the editor and the window to conceal the whereabouts of the
holes.
"Guess we'll have to give you a week's trial," said the editor, who,
ever on the lookout for good chance material, took on shoals of men in
that way and retained on the average one man per shoal. Anyhow it gave
Jim Shorthouse the wherewithal to sew up the holes and relieve his
uncle's wardrobe of its burden.
Then he went to find living quarters; and in this proceeding his unique
characteristics already referred to--what theosophists would call his
Karma--began unmistakably to assert themselves, for it was in the house
he eventually selected that this sad tale took place.
There are no "diggings" in American cities. The alternatives for small
incomes are grim enough--rooms in a boarding-house where meals are
served, or in a room-house where no meals are served--not even
breakfast. Rich people live in palaces, of course, but Jim had nothing
to do with "sich-like." His horizon was bounded by boarding-houses and
room-houses; and, owing to the necessary irregularity of his meals and
hours, he took the latter.
It was a large, gaunt-looking place in a side street, with dirty windows
and a creaking iron gate, but the rooms were large, and the one he
selected and paid for in advance was on the top floor. The landlady
looked gaunt and dusty as the house, and quite as old. Her eyes were
green and faded, and her features large.
"Waal," she twanged, with her electrifying Western drawl, "that's the
room, if you like it, and that's the price I said. Now, if you want it,
why, just say so; and if you don't, why, it don't hurt me any."
Jim wanted to shake her, but he feared the clouds of long-accumulated
dust in her clothes, and as the price and size of the room suited him,
he decided to take it.
"Anyone else on this floor?" he asked.
She looked at him queerly out of her faded eyes before she answered.
"None of my guests ever put such questions to me before," she said; "but
I guess you're different. Why, there's no one at all but an old gent
that's stayed here every bit of five years. He's over thar," pointing
to the end of the passage.
"Ah! I see," said Shorthouse feebly. "So I'm alone up here?"
"Reckon you are, pretty near," she twanged out, ending the conversation
abruptly by turning her back on her new "guest," and going slowly and
deliberately downstairs.
The newspaper work kept Shorthouse out most of the night. Three times a
week he got home at 1 a.m., and three times at 3 a.m. The room proved
comfortable enough, and he paid for a second week. His unusual hours had
so far prevented his meeting any inmates of the house, and not a sound
had been heard from the "old gent" who shared the floor with him. It
seemed a very quiet house.
One night, about the middle of the second week, he came home tired after
a long day's work. The lamp that usually stood all night in the hall had
burned itself out, and he had to stumble upstairs in the dark. He made
considerable noise in doing so, but nobody seemed to be disturbed. The
whole house was utterly quiet, and probably everybody was asleep. There
were no lights under any of the doors. All was in darkness. It was after
two o'clock.
After reading some English letters that had come during the day, and
dipping for a few minutes into a book, he became drowsy and got ready
for bed. Just as he was about to get in between the sheets, he stopped
for a moment and listened. There rose in the night, as he did so, the
sound of steps somewhere in the house below. Listening attentively, he
heard that it was somebody coming upstairs--a heavy tread, and the owner
taking no pains to step quietly. On it came up the stairs, tramp, tramp,
tramp--evidently the tread of a big man, and one in something of a
hurry.
At once thoughts connected somehow with fire and police flashed through
Jim's brain, but there were no sounds of voices with the steps, and he
reflected in the same moment that it could only be the old gentleman
keeping late hours and tumbling upstairs in the darkness. He was in the
act of turning out the gas and stepping into bed, when the house resumed
its former stillness by the footsteps suddenly coming to a dead stop
immediately outside his own room.
With his hand on the gas, Shorthouse paused a moment before turning it
out to see if the steps would go on again, when he was startled by a
loud knocking on his door. Instantly, in obedience to a curious and
unexplained instinct, he turned out the light, leaving himself and the
room in total darkness.
He had scarcely taken a step across the room to open the door, when a
voice from the other side of the wall, so close it almost sounded in his
ear, exclaimed in German, "Is that you, father? Come in."
The speaker was a man in the next room, and the knocking, after all, had
not been on his own door, but on that of the adjoining chamber, which he
had supposed to be vacant.
Almost before the man in the passage had time to answer in German, "Let
me in at once," Jim heard someone cross the floor and unlock the door.
Then it was slammed to with a bang, and there was audible the sound of
footsteps about the room, and of chairs being drawn up to a table and
knocking against furniture on the way. The men seemed wholly regardless
of their neighbour's comfort, for they made noise enough to waken the
dead.
"Serves me right for taking a room in such a cheap hole," reflected Jim
in the darkness. "I wonder whom she's let the room to!"
The two rooms, the landlady had told him, were originally one. She had
put up a thin partition--just a row of boards--to increase her income.
The doors were adjacent, and only separated by the massive upright beam
between them. When one was opened or shut the other rattled.
With utter indifference to the comfort of the other sleepers in the
house, the two Germans had meanwhile commenced to talk both at once and
at the top of their voices. They talked emphatically, even angrily. The
words "Father" and "Otto" were freely used. Shorthouse understood
German, but as he stood listening for the first minute or two, an
eavesdropper in spite of himself, it was difficult to make head or tail
of the talk, for neither would give way to the other, and the jumble of
guttural sounds and unfinished sentences was wholly unintelligible.
Then, very suddenly, both voices dropped together; and, after a moment's
pause, the deep tones of one of them, who seemed to be the "father,"
said, with the utmost distinctness--
"You mean, Otto, that you refuse to get it?"
There was a sound of someone shuffling in the chair before the answer
came. "I mean that I don't know how to get it. It is so much, father. It
is _too_ much. A part of it--"
"A part of it!" cried the other, with an angry oath, "a part of it, when
ruin and disgrace are already in the house, is worse than useless. If
you can get half you can get all, you wretched fool. Half-measures only
damn all concerned."
"You told me last time--" began the other firmly, but was not allowed to
finish. A succession of horrible oaths drowned his sentence, and the
father went on, in a voice vibrating with anger--
"You know she will give you anything. You have only been married a few
months. If you ask and give a plausible reason you can get all we want
and more. You can ask it temporarily. All will be paid back. It will