THE HAUNT, by Manly Banister

Originally published in The Nekromanticon, 1950.

There is one thing of this world—perhaps I should say out of this world—concerning which every man, great and small, will hazard an opinion. Perhaps he possesses no political color; likely he would not dream of passing judgment upon the Epicurean merit of anchovies or olives; but he will be certain to declaim at length, and in no uncertain terms, upon the pro or the con of haunted houses.

A haunted house is, you might say, a matter of opinion.

I have a positive opinion, I believe in haunted houses. In the course of reading this story, you will learn why I do.

I know a house that is haunted. It is a tumble-down affair (the best kind for haunts, really), located at the edge of the town of Acton, where miners’ modest dwelling houses yield in a thin straggle to the encroaching prairie, grown head-high with grass.

I refer to Acton as a “town” out of pure advisement. Acton is hardly more than a village. Yet, it is a planned village, nicely laid out, its streets radiating squarely with the points of the compass from the Plaza in front of the City Hall. The latter is a grandiose structure, really more than the urban unimportance of Acton calls for, constructed of gray granite, standing two stories high with Gothic arched windows trimmed in white.

The most noteworthy achievement of the town elders has been to install a red and green traffic light in front of the City Hall, so you can see the place is really quite modern and not the proper setting for a ghost story at all.

Although I have not been into town proper in some time, I recall very well the neat rows of shining bungalows that were the pride of the town. Most of the local citizenry labored in the iron mines. None hungered in this exemplary town, none was without work or other means of subsistence.

Happily to my mind comes the analogy that the town of Acton was very like a gorgeous social pie, well-baked and palatable to all. There was—is, I should say—the solid crust of work-a-day miners, the nourishing filling of well-to-do middle class, and over all a spread of luscious cream in the form of Acton society, the Bates family, owners and operators of the Bates Mining and Industrial Corporation.

The Bateses, in short, were the meringue of this tasty pie; while out at the edge of town, like an evil black bug subsisting upon the fruity richness of this delectable confection, stood ancient, ghost-ridden Acton Castle, shunned by man and beast.

Acton Castle was as vacant as a medieval suit of armor in the Twentieth Century (and for much the same reason). Situated at the remote end of an avenue of pretty trees, it was a quarter of a mile removed from its nearest neighbor, the aforementioned miners’ cottages, and scarcely a stone’s throw from the town’s pioneer burying ground. Crassly, it was called the Old Graveyard, being neglected, weedy, overgrown with weeping willows and beset by leaning of the gravestones.

Acton Castle had been built in the 1870’s by one Captain Ebenezer Acton, founder of the town and rumored to have been a pirate of sorts. Obeying an unpredictable whimsy, the old pirate had added from year to year to the original Castle. In time, it developed into a rambling structure, made up of a multiplicity of rooms and apartments, of consiguent sections with adjacent ells, tipped-on balconies, cupolas, and blind towers complete with Doric columns and Roman arches—but blind by virtue of having no steps leading to them.

Once a sight of grandeur, Acton Castle in ruins was now something less than impressive. It sagged in the middle and exuded an atmosphere of mildewed rottenness, like an ancient carriage rolled to the middle of an unused pasture and left there to the appetite of the elements. Weedy looking vines crawled precariously upon the bleached, splintered facing from which the paint had long since peeled away. Windows, sans frames and glass, goggled upon cheerless environs of encroaching grass and tangled bushes. From the roof the shingles were lifted, like scabs of a vile disease wrought by the tenure of Time. Toppled chimneys strewed the roof with bricks and rubble; the balconies had come unstuck and were fallen; the cupolas sagged; the towers leaned.

Grisly enough by day, by night the Castle became a crouching shadow of hideous menace. It seemed as if it gathered itself to heave erect and sprint the length of the sad little avenue of pretty trees. Dreadful and malign was the appearance of it, a blight upon the day, a purulent sore festering in the womb of night.

All this was in accordance with the moribund desire of Captain Ebenezer Acton. The dead Captain’s will specifically requested the neglecting and rotting away of his former abode for a significant purpose which I shall shortly reveal.

During his lifetime, the Captain had owned all the land upon which the town of Acton was built. In spite of his generous grants of land to the town—he had even deeded over the cemetery acreage west of the Castle—his personality was not a generous one, for his was a nature beset by peculiarities and whimsicalities.

His outlook upon life and the living had been crabbed, not to say sour. He had lived alone in his monstrous Castle, spending his time, folks said, marching from room to deserted room, from apartment to vacant apartment, thundering in his heavy sea boots up one stair and down another, gloating with satisfaction over his peculiarly fantastic home.

As he had lived, so the Captain died—alone. When, after an undetermined interval, the corpse was taken out and buried, he lay alone in the somewhat ornate, if run down, crypt a hundred yards from the edge of the necropolis. This placed it atop a slight rise in the ground, the highest grave in the acreage. The location had been chosen by the Captain himself. His burial there had been provided for in the same last will and testament that had given all the property he had possessed (with one exception) to the town.

The mausoleum was sturdily constructed of the regionally prevalent gray granite. It had an iron gate, pompous looking with its grill of intertwined serpents supporting in their coils a letter “A.”

Atop the crypt were some globular looking things that had iron spearheads thrust up out of them, and the very middle of the stone roof was a granite dome surmounted by a blazing star of gold. It was not really gold, but stone covered with a species of gilt, the secret of which the Captain took to the grave with him; for instead of showing wear under the influence of time and weather, it seemed to grow brighter with the years.

The golden star was so situate at the highest point of the oldest part of the burying ground that it caught the last rays of the westering sun, whatever the season. The environs were in a ruinous state after three generations of positive neglect, choked with weeds and grass until neighboring graves were lost in the sea of undulant herbage, grown up with trees, vines, bushes and brambles until the sun scarcely ever shone upon the sombre earth beneath.

Nonetheless, every evening that the sun was visible, its horizontal rays managed somehow to strike through the leafy screen of interlaced branches and briars and set the golden star to blazing and scintillating as if it glowed by itself.

It is called “The Captain’s Signal” and gaffers of Acton will tell you it is like an alarm clock to the sleeping-in-death Captain, telling him it is time to awaken from his cold sleep of the day and be up and about for a night of serious haunting.

Incredible as it may seem, the Captain had provided in his will for his posthumous spook. He had realized in wily fashion that no town desires the daily burden of having to laugh off a haunted house. It is too easy a matter to tear the spectral dwelling down, to stamp it out, to eradicate it utterly—when there is no legal owner extant to protect the property. Therefore, upon willing his earthly property to the town, the Captain had omitted the property on which the Castle stood. Further, he made the bequest contingent upon this request: that Acton Castle be permitted to stand without hindrance or repairs, to be the wandering hall of his own restless spirit, until dust and decay should claim the structure and it be no longer fit, even for haunting.

As if this provision were not sufficient to insure undisturbed haunting by his departed spirit, the Captain had written into his will the unmentionable “horror clause.” He threatened with nameless terror and death any who should be rash enough to disregard his injunction. None should trespass or lurk upon the “ghost property” under pain of a similar horrid fate.

The Actonites smiled at this clause when it was made public; but after the furniture had been hauled away and sold at auction and proper trespassing notices had been posted at door and gate, the villagers strictly shunned the place.

* * * *

It was a long time later, after the death of the Captain, that is, that four boys decided it would be great fun to brave the mysteries of the Captain’s bequest to his own ghost.

A tramp was the only witness. At dawn, he stumbled out of the supposed sanctuary in dazed horror. The boys hung in a neat row down the middle of the central living room, suspended by new hempen ropes from iron hooks imbedded in the ceiling.

The frightful revenant of Captain Ebenezer Acton had fulfilled the promise of its earthly progenitor.

Much grief and disorganized travail followed in the wake of this incident. Naturally, nobody believed a ghost responsible. The tramp, having spread the news, took to his heels and was never seen again. Therefore the tramp was considered the culpable criminal, and to this day, it is not safe for a tramp to approach the limits of the town of Acton.

As for the tramp, innocent fellow, he died years later on a bed of old newspapers in a boxcar, screaming in a delirium that re-enacted in his fevered brain the horrid scene which he, and he alone, had witnessed that long ago night in Acton Castle.

* * * *

The affair might have ended there had it not been for Joshua Benton, a farmer of the neighborhood and, incidentally, the father of one of the dead boys.

Joshua was an emaciated individual, already past the prime of life. He and Harry, the boy, had lived alone in their farmhouse a half-mile from the limit of Acton, the boy’s mother having died when the lad was a baby.

After a fortnight of dry-eyed grieving, Joshua took up his venerable shotgun, weighed his pockets with a dozen rounds of buckshot, and betook himself to the macabre Castle of Death.

It was just at sunset that he pursued his ungainly way through the overgrown yard, and the Captain’s Signal was blazing balefully atop the hill in the graveyard. Joshua groped his way to the room where with his own hands he had cut down his son’s stiffened corpse and he settled down to await the coming of he knew not what, in the middle of the night.

Residents of the nearest house a quarter of a mile away heard the booming of Joshua’s shotgun. This was followed by a prolonged, blubbering scream…then silence for the space of ten heartbeats, followed by another agonized roar from Joshua’s ancient blunderbuss. After that came stillness absolute.

It was a dark night, without a moon. Clouds had come driving up since sunset and these obscured the feeble light of stars. The neighbors were loth to turn out and investigate. In spite of this and owing to much telephoning and mutual curiosity, a group was finally formed to look into the matter. These men armed themselves with clubs, shotguns, lanterns and flashlights, and sallied forth to discover what had happened.

They found Joshua Benton very dead indeed, hanging to a single iron hook in the middle of the ceiling. In Joshua’s head was a great hole, blown out by force of a charge of buckshot. Blood had gushed from the terrible wound, drenching his garments, and the shotgun lay in a pool of gore beneath his twisted feet.

Later examination of this weapon proved, by means of fingerprints, that no man’s hand save Joshua’s had touched the gun, and it was obvious he had blown out his own brains to avoid the horror of strangulation at the hands of some nameless Thing.

Farmers and townsmen shuddered as they cut Joshua down. They were infuriated with themselves for not having removed the hooks before this. They told themselves that the father, crazed with grief, had deliberately hanged and shot himself.

One disturbing factor was noted but passed over. Somebody had removed three of the hooks. Only one remained, and Joshua had hung from it. And when they tried to remove it from the rotten beam in the ceiling, it resisted their noblest efforts. They had to leave the hook in the ceiling perforce.

The group left hurriedly then, bearing Joshua on the remains of an old door, and each man feeling a cold, dreadful prickling at the back of his neck. That was the last time anybody defied the dying injunction of the scoundrelly Captain.

* * * *

Things are different today, but the story is still gaffed about in Acton, with more or less variation, but substantially as I have related it here. There is, however, a difference from the old days. Present generation scoffers ridicule the affair in a more or less enlightened manner.

My own position on the matter is a delicate one. It is true that I have never allied myself with the scoffing crowd. Nor yet have I consorted with superstitious belief. I know what I know. I become mixed at this point and am likely to lose sight of tenses unless I watch myself.

Let us drop back to a month ago. I was then belabored by a feeling of blind horror with respect to the haunt of Acton Castle, I was goaded by a desire to stifle this terror that breathed a miasmic fetor upon the clean air of the town.

For years I had looked forward with terror and loathing to an ultimate grappling with the sinister problem. Yet I dreaded the thought as much as the action. Long before this I had sworn one day to lay the ghost of Captain Ebenezer Acton, yet I had tarried. Why? I feared the frightful and factual fate that were mine should I fail!

Too, I had lacked the opportunity. To do as I desired required the forcing of matters to a head. I preferred to wait and let events shape their own course.

I have mentioned the Bateses, the cream of the Acton pie. It must be senility that made me omit the Gilmans. Where the Bateses were the top of the heap, the Gilmans were of those who kept the top from being the bottom, Joe Gilman worked in the mine office, and he had a son named Peter, attending Acton High School, senior class. The Bates clan, personified in the towering, lion-maned figure of Tom Bates, progenitor, joyed in the future’s promise for pretty Betty Bates, his daughter, Betty was tiny, a little doll of a thing, and just eighteen.

She had a lot of yellow hair, and tempestuous blue eyes that belied the softness of her delicately curved body. She had a firm little chin, too, showing the innate strength of the Bates character. The Bates clan would have been horrified to know that Betty set her cap for young Peter Gilman.

Young love is a wonderful thing! What possible connection could it have with the revenant of Captain Ebenezer Acton?

Here is how it came about. Peter, of course, was one of those who scoffed at the notion of haunts. A bunch of the youngsters were discussing the subject one day—it had something to do with their school work—and as a result, Peter found himself faced with a dare to spend the night in Acton Castle.

“I will,” said Peter solemnly, “if one of you will stay with me—and no tricks!”

They guyed him unmercifully for this weakness, and kept it up until Betty jumped up in a swirl of rose-colored lawn and declared she was not afraid if Peter wasn’t, and she would share the vigil with him.

The idea made Peter pleasantly uncomfortable. Peter was not the kind who could have entertained a dishonorable concept for an instant. But if there was a person with whom he would rather pass a night in a haunted house, that person was Betty Bates.

“If we stick it out,” he told the crowd, and added parenthetically “—which we will—the cokes, ice cream, and juke-box platters are on the gang for the next month!”

The price was cheap enough when distributed. Everybody hilariously agreed. But if the pair got “scared out”, the reverse was to be true. Peter’s penniless condition was no bar to his affirmation, for he knew he could not lose with Betty at his side.

The opposition at this point had a super-brilliant thought. If the two failed to maintain their vigil, Peter and Betty must agree to announce their engagement by the close of the school term.

Peter turned red and stammered. Betty pinked prettily, stuck out that positive Bates chin of hers, and said flatly, “All right, we will!”

And that brought down the house, as the saying goes.

* * * *

I heard all about this in a round-about way, and the news nearly shocked me into a trance. Not that I cared anything either for the Bates or the Gilmans, or that I had any concern for the safety or morals of the two children. What shocked me was the knowledge that now I would have to act, and I must not fail!

The Captain’s revenant had to date claimed five victims with its astral noose. Unless I acted, the noose would claim two more. I knew this. Worse, my chance to lay the Captain’s ghost might not reappear for Heaven knew how long. The outraged citizens of Acton might even tear the haunted Castle down, and what they might set loose upon the town by doing so, only the rascally Captain knew.

In the process of foiling the wicked spirit, I would be faced with extreme peril. This I also knew. I knew, moreover, that I had to succeed, not only for my own sake, but also for that of the two innocent youngsters involved, I was not entirely selfish in my feelings.

It was just after sunset that I approached Acton Castle from the side toward the burying ground. There was a hint of storm in the air, as upon another such evening long ago, and the great, piled masses of black cumuli shut out every bit of light from the darkling sky.

The wind moaned and rattled among the scabby limbs of an ancient apple tree, rippled the deep grasses, and rustled the mass of vines and creepers that covered this wall of the loathsome structure.

I had often approached the house in just this manner, but I had not summoned the courage to enter. Always I had fallen back, biting my lip and wondering was there not another way.

Lightning flared and revealed the old house in all its hideous dilapidation. It crouched like a malignant monster, stark bones thrust through rents in its scabbed epidermis, withered in vein and ligament, fat-pouched with the pregnancy of terror.

I half turned then, and made as if to scuttle away in fright, and lightning flared again in company with a vibrating roll of thunder.

The blue-purple of that sizzling flare limned the rotting crypt atop the graveyard hill, ringed it with skeletal silhouettes of decadent trees.

Horror mounted upon my terror and rode it like a beast of burden. In that momentary, fitful glow I had seen that the serpentine grill of the Acton crypt hung open!

I crouched and listened to the low moan that rose upon the wind and died before it became a shriek…and I did not know until it had been uttered that the cry was my own.

The pitiful ululation of fright merged with the roll of thunder; lightning flared feebly a time or two more. The haunted Castle rocked and rattled with the concussion of thunder.

I crept on, trembling and afraid. In the blackness, a greater, more noisome dark yawned horridly. I listened at the door of Acton Castle. The lightning had momentarily ceased. The thunder had quieted its rumble, night poised on hot, threatening wings. In the silence, I heard a rat scurry over a rotting beam somewhere inside the Castle. The air smelled of age and decay. Inside, dust lay deep upon the warped, brittle flooring.

I glided quickly through the door. The darkness of the grave engulfed me. The stillness was of the crypt as well, and the oppressive fetor that oozed from the riven walls.

I hated the house, I detested it and loathed it utterly. It was a thing of sentience, alive, mocking, threatening. IT was the Thing—the Captain’s grisly revenant was only its tool, IT had dominated the man alive—IT dominated his spirit dead!

A warning voice seemed to whisper to me to go back whence I had come, to leave this abode of abomination before it would suck me into its greedy trap and I should indeed be lost.

I took a firmer grip on my purpose—squared myself away with my own soul, so to speak. Upon my courage, or the lack of it, depended the fate of a boy and a girl. I carried the future happiness and well being of the entire town upon my shoulders. I could not fail in my duty.

Afar off, a dog howled dolorously. Others took up the mournful refrain. I knew why they howled. I forged on until I reached the room that had claimed five victims from the world of the living.

Here indeed was the evil heart of this ancient pile. The very air pulsed with wickedness and the lust for cruelty. I was afraid.

Lightning sheeted from the leaden sky, purpling the room with a harshly vivid light. What I saw in that fractional, timeless instant made me reel.

Death was prepared! Instead of a single hook, upon which, long ago, Joshua Benton had been suspended, now there were two—ugly and grim. The trap was set.

I heard them come in, and I hid in a closet filled with cobwebs.

They stumbled over the rotten flooring, lighting their hesitant way with a pocket flashlight. They were quiet, and they breathed quickly. In the reflected shine of the light, their young faces looked pale, and their eyes were big and dark.

Lightning split the gloom to the accompaniment of a roar of thunder, and the rain came battering down, drumming a diapason of unleashed fury on the roof, hissing in the grasses and brambles that choked the yard. A fine spray blew in through the gaping windows. The air cooled as a draft swept through the place, bringing with it the raw, bitter smell of wet growing things.

“We’re in for it now,” Peter mumbled, squeezing the girl’s arm with reassurance. “At least, it’s dry in here.” He essayed a brittle laugh that lacked every aspect of being genuine.

Outside, the flare and flicker of lightning made hard, glistening pencils of the rain. The old house banged and rocked to the concussion of thunder and wind.

Betty Bates whimpered with honest fright.

Peter said, “Let’s sit down and take it easy.”

They sat down, and after a moment he switched off the light.

Betty said nothing, but I could hear the breath sucking softly into her lungs.

The storm calmed, finally. Then in the midst of deathly stillness, the old house rocked and a thunderous noise rent the air. The sound came from inside the house!

Fear wormed at me. I knew what the sound portended. A grisly fiend stalked the halls upstairs. The house echoed hollowly to the sound of boots, rough seaman’s boots, clumping upon the crumbled floor. The evil old house rattled and swayed.

The children slept. I had not observed when first they dropped off. Surely they must awaken now, I thought. That noise would wake the dead! But no, the innocents slumbered on, hand loosely clasping hand, the girl’s golden head relaxed upon the boy’s sturdy shoulder.

I awaited the ordeal.

Would I succeed? Would the fires of Hell once and for all claim the revenant of the fiendish Captain? Or would mine be the fate, and his the victory?

A chill seeped through the ancient Castle. A reeking odor of the grave eddied on the gusty draft. Measured, rhythmic, step by step upon the rotting stairs, the Captain’s footsteps approached the sleeping pair. Awake! Awake! Oh, God! Awake and fly this place!

And they did awake, just as the Captain’s boots clattered upon the landing outside the door.

“Some of the guys,” whispered Peter nervously, “trying to trick us after they promised they wouldn’t!”

I admired him for that. You see, in that moment, I knew that he knew, and I no longer had any thought of vacillating.

“I—I—don’t care!” the frightened girl wailed softly, “I don’t c-care about that bet, anyway. I’d rather lose it, Peter. Peter—I love you! T-take me away from here!”

Peter’s reply was a firm pressure upon her hand.

“When it—they reach the doorway,” he whispered, “I’ll turn on the light.”

The thundering footsteps halted. The house creaked ominously. A malignant rattling rippled through every rotted board and timber. Something dark, bloated, fantastically repulsive hovered in the door.

“It’s c-cold,” chattered the girl, “and—and it smells, and—” she shrieked. “There’s something there!”

Peter panted heavily, “The light won’t work! I—”

Unspeakably loathsome, radiant with black evil, the spectre hovered at the door, I could see it. They with their weak organs of sight, thank God, could not. But they knew it was there.

The fiend advanced, clutching a noose of hemp in each hand…and at that moment I stepped from hiding. My crucial moment had come.

The fiend made foul, slopping noises as it advanced upon the stricken pair, nooses blindly outstretched, and I shrieked!

The frightful sound of my voice rang through the house.

The phantom moaned with despair. The boy and the girl looked at me, and there were hate, horror and loathing in their eyes.

I wanted to tell them to run, to save themselves while they yet might, but I could only groan and shriek in agony.

Peter galvanized into action, seized the fainting girl in his arms, and with her sprang through the gutted window, into the fresh, clean air of the outdoors.

Quickly then I mumbled the curse, the hideous awful curse I had tried once before to inflict upon the hateful Captain, but fear had frozen my tongue and I had been defeated. Fearlessly now I droned through the ritual with that Thing gibbering, cowering and wailing before me. And then, the final words, “Avaunt thee, fiend!”

And the revenant of Captain Acton laughed with howling glee.

“A worse condemned fiend than I are you. I was unwillingly bound with the shackles of Hell, but now I am free because of you! You have burst my astral gyves—for even in Hell is greater freedom than this torment I have suffered. You have failed again, for, by freeing me, you have bound yourself! Take this—my parting gift!” Straight toward me he hurled those two damnable nooses of hemp! “To you, my successor,” slobbered the Thing, “condemned to haunt forever more this crumbling Castle!”

The Captain disappeared in a fierce puff of heat, a clap of thunder, and a billowing cloud of smoke.

In the following silence a chuckling grew and bounded from wall to wall, a hideous, mad cachinnation of hellish mirth that bubbled from my lips and sprayed into froth the ever-flowing rivulet of blood that gushes from the shotgun wound in my head.

I am sane now. I, Joshua Benton, have twice condemned myself with vain meddling, but now I am sane, I too can be free—some day. I know what I must do, I must hang the right man, woman or child—one who knows the secret ritual that I know. That one, alive or dead, will pronounce the holy words that will burst my shackles asunder. Who? When? How many will I hang before…do you know the words that will set me free…?