Things That Go Bump
Saturday October 13, 2007 in ghost stories |
Following on from my last post I underwent a spot of detective work to investigate if there were any more ghost stories from the pen of H.G.Wells. And I found a classic. Written in 1894, The Red Room is a superb little tale.
“It’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm once more.
I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an arm-chair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.
“I said – it’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, when the coughing had ceased for a while.
“It’s my own choosing,” I answered.
The Red Room has a fantastic build up, where the old people who warn the narrator against his wishes to visit a haunted room are as creepy as any ghosts he may or may not encounter. It’s the repetition that makes it work, the endless questioning about whether he really wants to go through with this, by his own choosing. I’m putting it in my top ten of ghost stories.
Another gem I found this week was The Coat by AED Smith. Dating, I think, from the early 1930s, this short story concerns a self confessed loner who embarks on a cycling holiday abroad. Escaping a sudden downpour, he takes refuge in an abandoned house. There, he sees small unsettling details. The orange fungus growing across a carpet, strange patterns in the dust and an old military coat:
I discovered that just below the left shoulder there was a round hole as big as a penny, surrounded by an area of scorched and stained cloth, as though a heavy pistol had been fired into it at point-blank range. If a pistol bullet had indeed made that hole, then obviously, the old coat at one period of its existance had clothed a dead man.
Superb stuff, and Cook has the knack of putting the reader right in the scared man’s shoes…