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The Lock and Key Library

Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

July, 1999  [Etext #1831]


Project Gutenberg Etext The Lock and Key Library, Hawthorne, Ed.
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This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, charlie@idirect.com.





Please note:  This edition does not contain the second chapter of
the first story, "The Haunted House", by Dickens.  It can be found
in 3ghst10.txt or 3ghst10.zip, 1998, "Three Ghost Stories by
Charles Dickens."





The Lock and Key Library

Classic Mystery and Detective Stories - Old Time English

Edited by Julian Hawthorne




Table of Contents


CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70)

The Haunted House
No. I Branch Line: The Signal Man


BULWER-LYTTON (1803-73)

The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain
The Incantation


THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)

The Avenger


CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (1782-1824)

Melmoth the Wanderer


LAURENCE STERNE (1713-68)

A Mystery with a Moral


WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63)

On Being Found Out
The Notch on the Ax


ANONYMOUS

Bourgonef
The Closed Cabinet




THE HAUNTED HOUSE

IN TWO CHAPTERS


THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE


Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed
by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make
acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas
piece.  I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it.  There was
no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted
circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect.  More than that:
I had come to it direct from a railway station:  it was not more
than a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I stood
outside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I could
see the goods train running smoothly along the embankment in the
valley. I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace,
because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly
commonplace people--and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take
it on myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it,
any fine autumn morning.

The manner of my lighting on it was this.

I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop
by the way, to look at the house.  My health required a temporary
residence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and
who had happened to drive past the house, had written to me to
suggest it as a likely place.  I had got into the train at
midnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had sat
looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky,
and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find the
night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I
hadn't been to sleep at all;--upon which question, in the first
imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would
have done wager by battle with the man who sat opposite me.  That
opposite man had had, through the night--as that opposite man
always has--several legs too many, and all of them too long.  In
addition to this unreasonable conduct (which was only to be
expected of him), he had had a pencil and a pocket-book, and had
been perpetually listening and taking notes.  It had appeared to me
that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and bumps of the
carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking them,
under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering
way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head
whenever he listened.  He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a
perplexed aspect, and his demeanor became unbearable.

It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I
had out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country,
and the curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the
stars and between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller
and said:

"I BEG your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in
me?"  For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my
travelling-cap or my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.

The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if
the back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a
lofty look of compassion for my insignificance:

"In you, sir?--B."

"B, sir?" said I, growing warm.

"I have nothing to do with you, sir," returned the gentleman; "pray
let me listen--O."

He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.

At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no communication
with the guard, is a serious position.  The thought came to my
relief that the gentleman might be what is popularly called a
Rapper: one of a sect for (some of) whom I have the highest
respect, but whom I don't believe in.  I was going to ask him the
question, when he took the bread out of my mouth.

"You will excuse me," said the gentleman contemptuously, "if I am
too much in advance of common humanity to trouble myself at all
about it.  I have passed the night--as indeed I pass the whole of
my time now--in spiritual intercourse."

"O!" said I, somewhat snappishly.

"The conferences of the night began," continued the gentleman,
turning several leaves of his note-book, "with this message:  'Evil
communications corrupt good manners.'"

"Sound," said I; "but, absolutely new?"

"New from spirits," returned the gentleman.

I could only repeat my rather snappish "O!" and ask if I might be
favored with the last communication.

"'A bird in the hand,'" said the gentleman, reading his last entry
with great solemnity, "'is worth two in the Bosh.'"

"Truly I am of the same opinion," said I; "but shouldn't it be
Bush?"

"It came to me, Bosh," returned the gentleman.

The gentleman then informed me that the spirit of Socrates had
delivered this special revelation in the course of the night.  "My
friend, I hope you are pretty well.  There are two in this railway
carriage.  How do you do?  There are seventeen thousand four
hundred and seventy-nine spirits here, but you cannot see them.
Pythagoras is here.  He is not at liberty to mention it, but hopes
you like travelling."  Galileo likewise had dropped in, with this
scientific intelligence.  "I am glad to see you, amico.  Come sta?
Water will freeze when it is cold enough.  Addio!"  In the course
of the night, also, the following phenomena had occurred.  Bishop
Butler had insisted on spelling his name, "Bubler," for which
offence against orthography and good manners he had been dismissed
as out of temper.  John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification)
had repudiated