Ghostly: Stories by Audrey Niffenegger
‘I can’t get through. Do you want me to stay?’
Upon which, as he stood helplessly there, the boy turned on him again the brilliant, open, confiding, beautiful desired smile.
‘LAURA’
‘THE OPEN WINDOW’
Saki (Hector Hugh Monro, British, 1870–1916)
Both stories were first published in the 1914 collection Beasts and Super-Beasts.
Saki’s dark and mischievous stories satirise Edwardian culture and the class system. Saki was born in Burma and was sent to live in England after his mother died (she was frightened by a charging cow). He began his writing career as a journalist and was a foreign correspondent stationed in Warsaw, the Balkans and Russia. He fought in the First World War, though he was officially overage, and died in France during the Battle of Ancre.
LAURA
Saki
‘You are not really dying, are you?’ asked Amanda.
‘I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,’ said Laura.
‘But today is Saturday; this is serious!’ gasped Amanda.
‘I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,’ said Laura.
‘Death is always serious,’ said Amanda.
‘I never said I was going to die. I am presumably going to leave off being Laura, but I shall go on being something. An animal of some kind, I suppose. You see, when one hasn’t been very good in the life one has just lived, one reincarnates in some lower organism. And I haven’t been very good, when one comes to think of it. I’ve been petty and mean and vindictive and all that sort of thing when circumstances have seemed to warrant it.’
‘Circumstances never warrant that sort of thing.’ said Amanda hastily.
‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ observed Laura, ‘Egbert is a circumstance that would warrant any amount of that sort of thing. You’re married to him – that’s different; you’ve sworn to love, honour, and endure him: I haven’t.’
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with Egbert,’ protested Amanda.
‘Oh, I dare say the wrongness has been on my part,’ admitted Laura dispassionately; ‘he has merely been the extenuating circumstance. He made a thin, peevish kind of fuss, for instance, when I took the collie puppies from the farm out for a run the other day.
‘They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex and drove two sitting hens off their nests, besides running all over the flower beds. You know how devoted he is to his poultry and garden.
‘Anyhow, he needn’t have gone on about it for the entire evening and then have said, “Let’s say no more about it” just when I was beginning to enjoy the discussion. That’s where one of my petty vindictive revenges came in,’ added Laura with an unrepentant chuckle; ‘I turned the entire family of speckled Sussex into his seedling shed the day after the puppy episode.’
‘How could you?’ exclaimed Amanda.
‘It came quite easy,’ said Laura; ‘two of the hens pretended to be laying at the time, but I was firm.’
‘And we thought it was an accident!’
‘You see,’ resumed Laura, ‘I really have some grounds for supposing that my next incarnation will be in a lower organism. I shall be an animal of some kind. On the other hand, I haven’t been a bad sort in my way, so I think I may count on being a nice animal, some thing elegant and lively, with a love of fun. An otter, perhaps.’
‘I can’t imagine you as an otter,’ said Amanda.
‘Well, I don’t suppose you can imagine me as an angel, if it comes to that,’ said Laura.
Amanda was silent. She couldn’t.
‘Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable,’ continued Laura; ‘salmon to eat all the year around, and the satisfaction of being able to fetch the trout in their own homes without having to wait for hours till they condescend to rise to the fly you’ve been dangling before them; and an elegant svelte figure –’
‘Think of the otter hounds,’ interposed Amanda, ‘how dreadful to be hunted and harried and finally worried to death!’
‘Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive – a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should think.’
‘I wish you would be serious,’ sighed Amanda; ‘you really ought to be if you’re only going to live till Tuesday.’
As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.
‘So dreadfully upsetting,’ Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir Lulworth Quayne. ‘I’ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best.’
‘Laura always was inconsiderate,’ said Sir Lulworth; ‘she was born during Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies.’
‘She had the maddest kind of ideas,’ said Amanda; ‘do you know if there was any insanity in her family?’
‘Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in West Kensington, but I believe he’s sane on all other subjects.’
‘She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter,’ said Amanda.
‘One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in the West,’ said Sir Lulworth, ‘that one can hardly set them down as being mad. And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that I should not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doing in an after state.’
‘You think she really might have passed into some animal form?’ asked Amanda. She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily from the standpoint of those around them.
Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air of bereavement that Laura’s demise would have been insufficient, in itself, to account for.
‘Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed,’ he exclaimed; ‘the very four that were to go to the show on Friday. One of them was dragged away and eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I’ve been to such trouble and expense over. My best flower bed and my best fowls singled out for destruction; it almost seems as if the brute that did the deed had special knowledge how to be as devastating as possible in a short space of time.’
‘Was it a fox, do you think?’ asked Amanda.
‘Sounds more like a polecat,’ said Sir Lulworth.
‘No,’ said Egbert, ‘there were marks of webbed feet all over the place, and we followed the tracks down to the stream at the bottom of the garden; evidently an otter.’
Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir Lulworth.
Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintend the strengthening of the poultry yard defences.
‘I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,’ said Amanda in a scandalised voice.
‘It’s her own funeral, you know,’ said Sir Lulworth; ‘it’s a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortal remains.’
Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to further lengths next day; during the absence of the family at the funeral ceremony the remaining survivors of the speckled Sussex were massacred. The marauder’s line of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flower beds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower garden had also suffered.
‘I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the earliest possible moment,’ said Egbert savagely.
‘On no account! You can’t dream of such a thing!’ exclaimed Amanda. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t do, so soon after a funeral in the house.’
‘It’s a case of necessity,’ said Egbert; ‘once an otter takes to that sort of thing it won’t stop.’
‘Perhaps it will go elsewhere now that there are no more fowls left,’ suggested Amanda.
‘One would think you wanted to shield the beast,’ said Egbert.
‘There’s bee
‘Good gracious!’ fumed Egbert, ‘I’m not thinking about sport. I want to have the animal killed as soon as possible.’
Even Amanda’s opposition weakened when, during church time on the following Sunday, the otter made its way into the house, raided half a salmon from the larder and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persian rug in Egbert’s studio.
‘We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feet before long,’ said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particular otter she felt that the possibility was not a remote one.
On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt Amanda spent a solitary hour walking by the banks of the stream, making what she imagined to be hound noises. It was charitably supposed by those who overheard her performance, that she was practising for farmyard imitations at the forthcoming village entertainment.
It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who brought her news of the day’s sport.
‘Pity you weren’t out; we had quite a good day. We found it at once, in the pool just below your garden.’
‘Did you – kill?’ asked Amanda.
‘Rather. A fine she-otter. Your husband got rather badly bitten in trying to “tail it”. Poor beast, I felt quite sorry for it, it had such a human look in its eyes when it was killed. You’ll call me silly, but do you know who the look reminded me of? My dear woman, what is the matter?’
When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from her attack of nervous prostration Egbert took her to the Nile Valley to recuperate. Change of scene speedily brought about the desired recovery of health and mental balance. The escapades of an adventurous otter in search of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda’s normally placid temperament reasserted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from her husband’s dressing-room, in her husband’s voice, but hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening in a Cairo hotel.
‘What is the matter? What has happened?’ she asked in amused curiosity.
‘The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath! Wait till I catch you, you little –’
‘What little beast?’ asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh; Egbert’s language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outraged feelings.
‘A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy,’ spluttered Egbert.
And now Amanda is seriously ill.
THE OPEN WINDOW
Saki
‘My aunt will be down presently, Mr Nuttel,’ said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; ‘in the meantime you must try and put up with me.’
Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.
‘I know how it will be,’ his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to this rural retreat; ‘you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice.’
Framton wondered whether Mrs Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice division.
‘Do you know many of the people round here?’ asked the niece, when she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.
‘Hardly a soul,’ said Framton. ‘My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the people here.’
He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.
‘Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?’ pursued the self-possessed young lady.
‘Only her name and address,’ admitted the caller. He was wondering whether Mrs Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.
‘Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,’ said the child; ‘that would be since your sister’s time.’
‘Her tragedy?’ asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place.
‘You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October afternoon,’ said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a lawn.
‘It is quite warm for the time of the year,’ said Framton; ‘but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?’
‘Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.’ Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. ‘Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing, ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window –’
She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.
‘I hope Vera has been amusing you?’ she said.
‘She has been very interesting,’ said Framton.
‘I hope you don’t mind the open window,’ said Mrs Sappleton briskly; ‘my husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way. They’ve been out for snipe in the marshes today, so they’ll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you men-folk, isn’t it?’
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton, it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary,
‘The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,’ announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably wide-spread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one’s ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. ‘On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement,’ he continued.
‘No?’ said Mrs Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention – but not to what Framton was saying.
‘Here they are at last!’ she cried. ‘Just in time for tea, and don’t they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!’
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twiligh
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.
‘Here we are, my dear,’ said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window; ‘fairly muddy, but most of it’s dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?’
‘A most extraordinary man, a Mr Nuttel,’ said Mrs Sappleton; ‘could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost.’
‘I expect it was the spaniel,’ said the niece calmly; ‘he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make any one lose their nerve.’
Romance at short notice was her speciality.
‘THE SPECIALIST’S HAT’
KELLY LINK (AMERICAN, 1969–)
First published in Event Horizon in 1998.
‘The Specialist’s Hat’ is the best spooky-babysitter story ever written. Kelly Link is a master of a deadpan humour that deftly prevents us from understanding the awfulness of the events that befall her characters until it is extremely too late. I was torn between this story and another of Link’s masterpieces, ‘Stone Animals’ (which features a haunted toothbrush), but ‘The Specialist’s Hat’ is perfect, so here it is.
THE SPECIALIST’S HAT
Kelly Link