Creepy tales of things that go bump in the dark
Chetna Keer Banerjee

The Rupa Book of Haunted Houses
edited by Ruskin Bond. Rupa. Pages 234. Rs 295.

READING The Rupa Book of Haunted Houses is akin to having a bunch of friends narrate creepy ghost stories by the side of a bonfire to kill time on a chilly night. Apparitions with fresh contours leap and twist out of the lurking shadows, or the pages as it were, with each new voice, each new raconteur. The queasy atmosphere that pervades this volume gets sharpened as each narrator brings to it his individual stamp of eeriness or poignancy.

This anthology lines up some of the famous haunted houses in fiction to give the reader a peep into spooky goings-on in country mansions and manors, outhouses, a school dormitory and even a doll’s house.

Here, Ruskin Bond has put together some gems from the masters of the ghost fiction. And what better place for him to have selected this collection than from a creaking, haunted rocking chair that once belonged to a maharani!

Opening with Walter de la Mare’s aptly titled poem The Ghost, the book moves on to an endearing tale A Pair of Hands by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. More than causing goose pimples, this tender tale tugs at the heartstrings with its touching description of the antics of the "most harmless ghost in the world." The pair of hands that show up in the house rented by the narrator belong to a girl Margaret, who had died of diptheria at the tender age of seven. Ever since, her little hands appear every now and then to dust and clean the house with an almost obsessive desire to keep it free of infection. So unobtrusive and gentle is the dead girl’s presence that hers is the friendliest ghost in the entire collection. As the narrator says of this sweet spirit: she "smoothed my pillow, touched and made my table comely, in summers lifted the heads of the flowers as I passed`85"

From here, the book moves on to more startling encounters. Interestingly, Eleanor Scott’s The Room is more indirect in its treatment of the supernatural. It describes, not the actual sighting of an apparition, but the effect a haunted room has on a bunch of six men. What starts off as a game, or rather experiment, to check out whether the house is haunted, turns into a grim drama when the men begin to lose their nerves as, turn by turn, they spend a night alone in the room.

A School Story by M.R. James is more in the line of old schoolboy yarns that do the rounds of dormitories and get passed on from generation to generation.

In A.M. Burrage’s Nobody’s House the phantoms of the past are disturbed into wakefulness when its owner returns to it after completing 20 years in prison for murder. The events that had taken place in its library on an evening two decades ago are relived as the killer keeps a tryst with the ghost of the killed. The author’s vivid imagery sharpens the flavour of suspense as the caretaker takes the former owner towards the fateful room and "`85all manner of sleeping horrors, shapeless abominations of the night-world, seemed to waken and listen and draw near."

The macabre element touches a high with The Judge’s House written by Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula. A student, Malcolmson, takes up quarters in a desolate house to pursue his studies in seclusion. As he buries himself in his books in its long dining room at night, the room comes alive with queer noises of rats that "gnawed and scratched." And holding centrestage in this sinister nocturnal drama is a big rat which comes and seats itself on a high-backed oak chair and glares at Malcolmson with "baleful eyes". On being struck it escapes up the thick rope of an alarm bell. One night, even the plucky Malcolmson gets immobilised with terror when he sees the same baleful eyes staring back at him from a picture of the scarlet-robed judge. Lo behold! The dead judge suddenly comes alive and those same baleful eyes glow like "hot coals" with "diabolical anger" as he advances towards Malcolmson with the rope, which is nothing but the hangman’s noose. Stoker’s graphic details and unexpected climax make this the most horrifying rollercoaster ride in this collection.

Blackwood’s The Decoy eases the reader’s taut nerves somewhat with its love triangle that unfolds in a country mansion. To dispel the ghost rumours surrounding his property, John Burley and his wife decide to spend a night there. Their decision to include Captain Mortimer, a "cheery lad" who’s besotted with Mrs Burley, in their plan adds the third dimension to the drama. Ardour, suspicion and fear lengthen the shadows of the night as fate lays a trap for the protagonists and one of them slips into its cruel hands`85

The anthology acquires a refreshingly different flavour as Flaxman Low, known as the Sherlock Holmes of ghost fiction, puts in an appearance in the next two tales by E and H Heron. The Story of Yand Manor House and The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith make for an engrossing read as Low employs psychological detection and logical reasoning to uncover unnatural events in country mansions.

M.R. James’ The Haunted Doll’s House is an unusual tale where the dead come to habit a doll’s house in a replay of the past. The Staircase by Hugh Walpole lends a different angle to ghost writing as here events are seen through the eyes not of people but the house. It’s the Italian lamp, the Turkish rug, tables and chairs who do the talking and finally, the staircase that steps in to stall a lurking danger.

There’s nothing sinister in Belloc Lowndes The Unbolted Door, a rather poignant tale about parents who’re unable to come to terms with the loss of their young son in war, and a father who awaits the child’s return through the unbolted door.

Ruskin Bond marks his presence in this collection with the story Gone Fishing and a poem In the Crowd at the Station. This tour into the realm of ghosts winds up with another Walter de la Mare poem Nothing. The poems, however, seem out of place in the anthology as their sheer brevity fails to lend tautness to the thread of suspense that binds the tales.

The concluding poem’s title signifies the essence of ghost fiction though. That, masters of the thriller genre, by giving definite shape to the world of spirits with powerful literary strokes, can certainly make readers believe that something exists even where there’s Nothing.

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