The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English

Produced by Don Lainson. Text file originally posted in
January, 2000 with an html conversion added by Walter
Deboeuf in 2003. The present text and html files were
produced by Suzanne Shell, M, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net;







THE
LOCK AND KEY
LIBRARY

CLASSIC MYSTERY AND
DETECTIVE STORIES

_EDITED BY_
JULIAN HAWTHORNE

MODERN ENGLISH

    Rudyard Kipling          A. Conan Doyle

                 Egerton Castle

    Stanley J. Weyman        Wilkie Collins

            Robert Louis Stevenson


    NEW YORK
    THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS CO.
    1909

[Illustration: "And Sent out a Jet of Fire from His Nostrils"

Drawing by Power O'Malley. To illustrate "In the House of Suddhoo," by
Rudyard Kipling]




Rudyard Kipling




_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 dâk-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 dâk-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 dâk-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 dâk-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
dâk-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.