MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY
As I came through the Desert thus it was--
As I came through the Desert.
The City of Dreadful Night.
Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and
pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of
men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a
gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people;
and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon
treating his ghosts he has published half a workshopful of them--
with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some
cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat
anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but
you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an
Indian one.
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold,
pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler
passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also
terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These
wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a
village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in
this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all
sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children
who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the
fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the
wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse
ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack
Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to
have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have
scared the life out of both white and black.
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two
at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree
dak-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of
a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-
watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her
houses "repeats" on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible
horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now
that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful
one; there are Officers' Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open
without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not
with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come
to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will
willingly rent; and there is something--not fever--wrong with a big
bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with
haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main
thoroughfares.
Some of the dak-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy
little cemeteries in their compound--witnesses to the "changes and
chances of this mortal life" in the days when men drove from
Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalows are objectionable
places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty,
while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow. He either
chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both
moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some
Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he
was in that Sahib's service not a khansamah in the Province could
touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets
among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.
In these dak-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and
when found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was
my business to live in dak-bungalows. I never inhabited the same
house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed.
I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail
ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an
excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in
"converted" ones--old houses officiating as dak-bungalows--where
nothing was in its proper place and there wasn't even a fowl for
dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew
through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as
through a broken pane. I lived in dak-bungalows where the last
entry in the visitors' book was fifteen months old, and where they
slashed off the curry-kid's head with a sword. It was my good luck
to meet all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and
deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who
threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good
fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair
proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dak-
bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that
would voluntarily hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of
course; but so many men have died mad in dak-bungalows that
there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two
of them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant's
method of handling them, as shown in "The Strange Case of Mr.
Lucraft and Other Stories." I am now in the Opposition.
We will call the bungalow Katmal dak-bungalow. But THAT was
the smallest part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no
right to sleep in dak-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dak-
bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of
worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the windows were nearly
black with grime. It stood on a bypath largely used by native Sub-
Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forests; but real
Sahibs were rare. The khansamah, who was nearly bent double
with old age, said so.
When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of
the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a
noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside.
The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. He had
served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the
name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a
quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of
that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of
him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before,
and I felt ancient beyond telling.
The day shut in and the khansamah went to get me food. He did
not go through the pretense of calling it "khana"--man's victuals.
He said "ratub," and that means, among other things, "grub"--dog's
rations. There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had
forgotten the other word, I suppose.
While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled
myself down, after exploring the dak-bungalow. There were three
rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving
into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron
bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls of
the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or
bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and
every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this
reason I shut the door. There were no lamps--only candles in long
glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.
For bleak, unadulterated misery that dak-bungalow was the worst
of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and
the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have
been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and
moaned round the house, and the toddy palms rattled and roared.
Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a
hyena stood afar off and mocked them. A hyena would convince a
Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead--the worst sort of Dead.
Then came the ratub--a curious meal, half native and half English
in composition--with the old khansamah babbling behind my chair
about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles
playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains.
It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of
every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he
intended to commit if he lived.
Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the
bath-room threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the
wind was beginning to talk nonsense.
Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking I heard the
regular--"Let--us--take--and--heave--him--over" grunt of doolie-
bearers in the compound. First one doolie came in, then a second,
and then a third. I heard the doolies dumped on the ground, and
the shutter in front of my door shook. "That's some one trying to
come in," I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it
was the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next to mine was
attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. "That's some
Sub-Deputy Assistant," I said, "and he has brought his friends with
him. Now they'll talk and spit and smoke for an hour."
But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his
luggage into the next room. The door shut, and I thanked
Providence that I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to
know where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed and looked into
the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as I was
getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, the sound that no
man in his senses can possibly mistake--the whir of a billiard ball
down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for
break. No other sound is like it. A minute afterwards there was
another whir, and I got into bed. I was not frightened--indeed I
was not. I was very curious to know what had become of the
doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.
Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat
up. It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head
tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the
scalp. That is the hair sitting up.
There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have
been made by one thing--a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at
great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it
seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs--all the furniture of
the room next to mine--could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a
game of billiards. After another cannon, a three- cushion one to
judge by the whir, I argued no more. I had found my ghost and
would have given worlds to have escaped from that dak-
bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer.
There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a
double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of
doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room. And the
next room was not big enough to hold a billiard table!
Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward--
stroke after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices;
but that attempt was a failure.
Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or
death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot
see--fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat--
fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in
order to keep the uvula at work? This is a fine Fear--a great
cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The very
improbability of billiards in a dak-bungalow proved the reality of
the thing. No man--drunk or sober--could imagine a game at
billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a "screw-cannon."
A severe course of dak-bungalows has this disadvantage--it breeds
infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dak-bungalow-
haunter:--"There is a corpse in the next room, and there's a mad
girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel
have just eloped from a place sixty miles away," the hearer would
not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild,
grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.
This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person
fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept.
I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the
scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my
heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards
played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My
dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an
absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would
be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror;
and it was real.
After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I
slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred
to have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have
dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.
When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and
wisely, and inquired for the means of departure.
"By the way, khansamah," I said, "what were those three doolies
doing in my compound in the night?"
"There were no doolies," said the khansamah.
I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the
open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have
played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down
below.
"Has this place always been a dak-bungalow?" I asked.
"No," said the khansamah. "Ten or twenty years ago, I have
forgotten how long, it was a billiard room."
"A how much?"
"A billiard room for the Sahibs who built the Railway. I was
khansamah then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs
lived, and I used to come across with brandy-shrab. These three
rooms were all one, and they held a big table on which the Sahibs
played every evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now, and the
Railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul."
"Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?"
"It is long ago, but I remember that one Sahib, a fat man and
always angry, was playing here one night, and he said to me:--
'Mangal Khan, brandy-pani do,' and I filled the glass, and he bent
over the table to strike, and his head fell lower and lower till it hit
the table, and his spectacles came off, and when we--the Sahibs
and I myself--ran to lift him he was dead. I helped to carry him
out. Aha, he was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, old Mangal
Khan, am still living, by your favor."
That was more than enough! I had my ghost--a firsthand,
authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical
Research--I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I
would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between
myself and that dak-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might
send their regular agent to investigate later on.
I went into my own room and prepared to pack after noting down
the facts of the case. As I smoked I heard the game begin again,--
with a miss in balk this time, for the whir was a short one.
The door was open and I could see into the room. Click--c1ick!
That was a cannon. I entered the room without fear, for there was
sunlight within and a fresh breeze without. The unseen game was
going on at a tremendous rate. And well it might, when a restless
little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, and
a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the
window-bolt as it shook in the breeze!
Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard balls! Impossible to
mistake the whir of a ball over the slate! But I was to be excused.
Even when I shut my enlightened eyes the sound was marvelously
like that of a fast game.
Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sorrows, Kadir Baksh.
"This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! No wonder the
Presence was disturbed and is speckled. Three sets of doolie-
bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping
outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set
apart for the English people! What honor has the khansamah?
They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these
Oorias have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is
shame, and the work of a dirty man!"
Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two
annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten
them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before
divine. But Kadir Baksh has no notions of morality.
There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly
lost his head, wrath gave place to pity, and pity led to a long
conversation, in the course of which he put the fat Engineer-
Sahib's tragic death in three separate stations--two of them fifty
miles away. The third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib
died while driving a dogcart.
If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all
through Bengal with his corpse.
I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night,
while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt
played a ding-dong "hundred and fifty up." Then the wind ran out
and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one
genuine, hall-marked ghost story.
Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything
out of it.
That was the bitterest thought of all!
