The Empty House Read online

  The Empty House

  Ruskin Bond has been writing for over sixty years, and now has over 120 titles in print—novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, received the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Award in 1957. He has also received the Padma Shri (1999), the Padma Bhushan (2014) and two awards from Sahitya Akademi—one for his short stories and another for his writings for children. In 2012, the Delhi government gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award.

  Born in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Shimla, New Delhi and Dehradun. Apart from three years in the UK, he has spent all his life in India, and now lives in Mussoorie with his adopted family.

  The Empty House

  Selected and Compiled by

  RUSKIN BOND

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2016

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

  New Delhi 110002

  Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978—81—291—×××—××

  First impression 2016

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Return of Imray

  Rudyard Kipling

  Chunia, Ayah

  Alice Perrin

  The Empty House

  Algernon Blackwood

  Mrs Raeburn’s Waxwork

  Lady Eleanor Smith

  Football On The Tung—T’ing Lake

  Herbert A. Miles

  The Isle of Voices

  R. L. Stevenson

  Some Early Australian Ghosts

  Anonymous

  Thurnley Abbey

  Perceval Landon

  The Frontier Guards

  H. Russell Wakefield

  The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains

  Frederick Marryat

  Gone Fishing

  Ruskin Bond

  Introduction

  Strange creatures that appear as if from nowhere, travelling companions with hair-raising supernatural tales, people with terrible deep dark secrets—these are some of the common threads in the stories in this collection. I must admit I am partial to stories where the suspense is heightened by the writer’s use of exotic locations. Some poor man or woman dropped into this mysterious locale has to contend with terrible uncanny spectacles.

  ‘The Empty House’ is a classic story of this kind, though there the writer-narrator doesn’t have to travel anywhere too far. His aunt summons him to come explore the empty house with her. It looks like every other house on that street but has a dreadful past and holds its secrets close. As soon as the narrators enter the house, they know that something or someone is watching them. A someone who clearly doesn’t like their presence there.

  The story of ‘Chuniya, Ayah’ is from Alice Perrin’s highly readable and engaging collection of tales from her travels during the Raj. East of Suez is full of exciting and eccentric characters and the account of this ayah, in particular, shows that if she had stayed well away from children, it would have ended on a happier note for everyone.

  Vengeful animals or those that carry the spirit of something out of the ordinary appear in a few stories. In ‘The Return of Imray’ there are plenty of such creatures, from deadly kraits to a dog who can sense the malevolent presence of a dead man. ‘The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains’ is a particularly hair-raising story set in a stark landscape. The extreme anxiety of the children in the story, the desperation of the father dealing with poverty and his own instincts and then the appearance of the white wolf in their lonely and friendless lives have the makings of an exotic story of revenge and retribution.

  I have included here some authors I have read extensively over the years—Kipling, Perrin, R. L. Stevenson. I do hope they are still read today, for their stories though old, contain ideas and thoughts that have lived on. They will appeal to anyone who likes a good tale. As for some of the others whose works are included here, maybe reading them in this book will make you go out and search out their other writings.

  This collection is for every reader who has been mesmerized by the possibility of something extraordinary living and breathing out there that we barely sense as we go about our everyday lives. I hope you enjoy this collection as much as I had reading these stories once again while choosing them for you.

  Ruskin Bond

  The Return of Imray

  Rudyard Kipling

  The doors were wide, the story saith,

  Out of the night came the patient wraith,

  He might not speak, and he could not stir

  A hair of the Baron’s minniver—

  Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin,

  He roved the castle to seek his kin.

  And oh, ‘twas a piteous thing to see

  The dumb ghost follow his enemy!

  THE BARON

  Imray achieved the impossible. Without warning, for no conceivable motive, in his youth, at the threshold of his career he chose to disappear from the world—which is to say, the little Indian station where he lived.

  Upon a day he was alive, well, happy, and in great evidence among the billiard-tables at his Club. Upon a morning, he was not, and no manner of search could make sure where he might be. He had stepped out of his place; he had not appeared at his office at the proper time, and his dog cart was not upon the public roads. For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray. Ponds were dragged, wells were plumbed, telegrams were despatched down the lines of railways and to the nearest seaport town—twelve hundred miles away; but Imray was not at the end of the drag-ropes nor the telegraph wires. He was gone, and his place knew him no more.

  Then the work of the great Indian Empire swept forward, because it could not be delayed, and Imray from being a man became a mystery—such a thing as men talk over at their tables in the Club for a month, and then forget utterly. His guns, horses and carts were sold to the highest bidder. His superior officer wrote an altogether absurd letter to his mother, saying that Imray had unaccountably disappeared, and his bungalow stood empty.

  After three or four months of the scorching hot weather had gone by, my friend Strickland, of the Police, saw fit to rent the bungalow from the native landlord. This was before he was engaged to Miss Youghal—an affair which has been described in another place—and while he was pursuing his investigations into native life. His own life was sufficiently peculiar, and men complained of his manners and customs. There was always food in his house, but there were no regular times for meals. He ate, standing up and walking about, whatever he might find at the sideboard, and this is not good for human beings. His domestic equipment was limited to six rifles, three shotguns, five saddles, and a collection of stiff-jointed mahseer-rods, bigger and stronger than the largest salmon-rods. These occupied half of his bungalow, and the other half was given up to Strickland and his dog Tietjens—an enormous
Rampur slut who devoured daily the rations of two men. She spoke to Strickland in a language of her own; and whenever, walking abroad, she saw things calculated to destroy the peace of Her Majesty the Queen–Empress, she returned to her master and laid information. Strickland would take steps at once, and the end of his labours was trouble and fine and imprisonment for other people. The natives believed that Tietjens was a familiar spirit, and treated her with the great reverence that is born of hate and fear. One room in the bungalow was set apart for her special use. She owned a bedstead, a blanket, and a drinking-trough, and if any one came into Strickland’s room at night her custom was to knock down the invader and give tongue till someone came with a light. Strickland owed his life to her, when he was on the frontier, in search of a local murderer, who came in the gray dawn to send Strickland much farther than the Andaman Islands. Tietjens caught the man as he was crawling into Strickland’s tent with a dagger between his teeth; and after his record of iniquity was established in the eyes of the law he was hanged. From that date, Tietjens wore a collar of rough silver, and employed a monogram on her night-blanket; and the blanket was of double woven Kashmir cloth, for she was a delicate dog.

  Under no circumstances would she be separated from Strickland; and once, when he was ill with fever, made great trouble for the doctors, because she did not know how to help her master and would not allow another creature to attempt aid. Macarnaght, of the Indian Medical Service, beat her over her head with a gun-butt before she could understand that she must give room for those who could give quinine.

  A short time after Strickland had taken Imray’s bungalow, my business took me through that station, and naturally, the Club quarters being full, I quartered myself upon Strickland. It was a desirable bungalow, eight-roomed and heavily thatched against any chance of leakage from rain. Under the pitch of the roof ran a ceiling cloth which looked just as neat as a whitewashed ceiling. The landlord had repainted it when Strickland took the bungalow. Unless you knew how Indian bungalows were built, you would never have suspected that above the cloth lay the dark three-cornered cavern of the roof, where the beams and the underside of the thatch harboured all manner of rats, bats, ants, and foul things.

  Tietjens met me in the verandah with a bay like the boom of the bell of St. Paul’s, putting her paws on my shoulder to show she was glad to see me. Strickland had contrived to claw together a sort of meal which he called lunch, and immediately after it was finished went out about his business. I was left alone with Tietjens and my own affairs. The heat of the summer had broken up and turned to the warm damp of the rains. There was no motion in the heated air, but the rain fell like ramrods on earth, and flung up a blue mist when it splashed back. The bamboos, and the custard apples, the poinsettias, and the mango trees in the garden stood still while the warm water lashed through them, and the frogs began to sing among the aloe hedges. A little before the light failed, and when the rain was at its worst, I sat in the back verandah and heard the water roar from the eaves, and scratched myself because I was covered with the thing called prickly heat. Tietjens came out with me and put her head in my lap and was very sorrowful; so I gave her biscuits when tea was ready, and I took tea in the back verandah on account of the little coolness found there. The rooms of the house were dark behind me. I could smell Strickland’s saddlery and the oil on his guns, and I had no desire to sit among these things. My own servant came to me in the twilight, the muslin of his clothes clinging tightly to his drenched body, and told me that a gentleman had called and wished to see some one. Very much against my will, but only because of the darkness of the rooms, I went into the naked drawing room, telling my man to bring the lights. There might or might not have been a caller waiting—it seemed to me that I saw a figure by one of the windows—but when the lights came there was nothing save the spikes of the rain without, and the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils. I explained to my servant that he was no wiser than he ought to be, and went back to the verandah to talk to Tietjens. She had gone out into the wet, and I could hardly coax her back to me; even with biscuits with sugar tops. Strickland came home, dripping wet, just before dinner, and the first thing he said was:

  ‘Has anyone called?’

  I explained, with apologies, that my servant had summoned me into the drawing room on a false alarm; or that some loafer had tried to call on Strickland, and thinking better of it had fled after giving his name. Strickland ordered dinner, without comment, and since it was a real dinner with a white tablecloth attached, we sat down.

  At nine o’clock Strickland wanted to go to bed, and I was tired too. Tietjens, who had been lying underneath the table, rose up, and swung into the least exposed verandah as soon as her master moved to his own room, which was next to the stately chamber set apart for Tietjens. If a mere wife had wished to sleep out of doors in that pelting rain it would not have mattered; but Tietjens was a dog, and therefore the better animal. I looked at Strickland, expecting to see him flay her with a whip. He smiled queerly, as a man would smile after telling some unpleasant domestic tragedy. ‘She has done this ever since I moved in here,’ said he. ‘Let her go.’

  The dog was Strickland’s dog, so I said nothing, but I felt all that Strickland felt in being thus made light of. Tietjens encamped outside my bedroom window, and storm after storm came up, thundered on the thatch, and died away. The lightning spattered the sky as a thrown egg spatters a barn door, but the light was pale blue, not yellow; and, looking through my split bamboo blinds, I could see the great dog standing, not sleeping, in the verandah, the hackles alift on her back and her feet anchored as tensely as the drawn wire-rope of a suspension bridge. In the very short pauses of the thunder I tried to sleep, but it seemed that someone wanted me very urgently. He, whoever he was, was trying to call me by name, but his voice was no more than a husky whisper. The thunder ceased, and Tietjens went into the garden and howled at the low moon. Somebody tried to open my door, walked about and about through the house and stood breathing heavily in the verandahs, and just when I was falling asleep I fancied that I heard a wild hammering and clamouring above my head or on the door.

  I ran into Strickland’s room and asked him whether he was ill, and had been calling for me. He was lying on his bed half dressed, a pipe in his mouth. ‘I thought you’d come,’ he said. ‘Have I been walking round the house recently?’

  I explained that he had been tramping in the dining room and the smoking room and two or three other places, and he laughed and told me to go back to bed. I went back to bed and slept till the morning, but through all my mixed dreams I was sure I was doing someone an injustice in not attending to his wants. What those wants were I could not tell; but a fluttering, whispering, bolt-fumbling, lurking, loitering. Someone was reproaching me for my slackness, and, half awake, I heard the howling of Tietjens in the garden and the threshing of the rain.

  I lived in that house for two days. Strickland went to his office daily, leaving me alone for eight or ten hours with Tietjens for my only companion. As long as the full light lasted I was comfortable, and so was Tietjens; but in the twilight she and I moved into the back verandah and cuddled each other for company. We were alone in the house, but none the less it was much too fully occupied by a tenant with whom I did not wish to interfere. I never saw him, but I could see the curtains between the rooms quivering where he had just passed through; I could hear the chairs creaking as the bamboos sprung under a weight that had just quit them; and I could feel when I went to get a book from the dining room that somebody was waiting in the shadows of the front verandah till I should have gone away. Tietjens made the twilight more interesting by glaring into the darkened rooms with every hair erect, and following the motions of something that I could not see. She never entered the rooms, but her eyes moved interestedly and that was quite sufficient. Only when my servant came to trim the lamps and make all light and habitable, she would come in with me and spend her time sitting on her haunches, watching an invisible extra man as he mo
ved about behind my shoulder. Dogs are cheerful companions.

  I explained to Strickland, gently as might be, that I would go over to the Club and find for myself quarters there. I admired his hospitality, was pleased with his guns and rods, but I did not much care for his house and its atmosphere. He heard me out to the end, and then smiled very wearily, but without contempt, for he is a man who understands things. ‘Stay on,’ he said, ‘and see what this thing means. All you have talked about I have known since I took the bungalow. Stay on and wait. Tietjens has left me. Are you going too?’

  I had seen him through one little affair, connected with a heathen idol, that had brought me to the doors of a lunatic asylum, and I had no desire to help him through further experiences. He was a man to whom unpleasantnesses arrived as do dinners to ordinary people.

  Therefore I explained more clearly than ever that I liked him immensely, and would be happy to see him in the daytime; but that I did not care to sleep under his roof. This was after dinner, when Tietjens had gone out to lie in the verandah.

  “Pon my soul, I don’t wonder,’ said Strickland, with his eyes on the ceiling cloth. ‘Look at that!’

  The tails of two brown snakes were hanging between the cloth and the cornice of the wall. They threw long shadows in the lamplight.

  ‘If you are afraid of snakes of course—’ said Strickland.

  I hate and fear snakes, because if you look into the eyes of any snake you will see that it knows all and more of the mystery of man’s fall, and that it feels all the contempt that the Devil felt when Adam was evicted from Eden. Besides which, its bite is generally fatal, and it twists up trouser legs.

  ‘You ought to get your thatch overhauled,’ I said.

  ‘Give me a mahseer-rod, and we’ll poke them down.’

  ‘They’ll hide among the roofbeams,’ said Strickland. ‘I can’t stand snakes overhead. I’m going up into the roof. If I shake them down, stand by with a cleaning rod and break their backs.’