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Title: The horror in the burying-ground
Author: Hazel Heald
Release date: May 18, 2025 [eBook #76113]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1937
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HORROR IN THE BURYING-GROUND ***
The Horror in the Burying-Ground
By HAZEL HEALD
_A bizarre and outré story of a gruesome
happening in the old town of Stillwater--a
blood-chilling tale of a double burial._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales May 1937.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Four years ago Hazel Heald made her bow to the readers of Weird
Tales with an eery story called "The Horror in the Museum," which
established her at once among the most popular writers of weird
fiction. She followed this with "Winged Death," a story of the
African tse-tse fly, and another tale of a weird monster from
"the dark backward and abysm of time." The story published here,
"The Horror in the Burying-Ground," is as weird and compelling as
anything this talented author has yet written. We recommend this
fascinating story to you, for we know you will not be disappointed
in it.
When the state highway to Rutland is closed, travelers are forced to
take the old Stillwater road past Swamp Hollow. The scenery is superb
in places, yet somehow the route has been unpopular for years. There
is something depressing about it, especially near Stillwater itself.
Motorists feel subtly uncomfortable about the tightly shuttered
farmhouse on the knoll just north of the village, and about the
white-bearded half-wit who haunts the old burying-ground on the south,
apparently talking to the occupants of some of the graves.
Not much is left of Stillwater, now. The soil is played out, and most
of the people have drifted to the towns across the distant river or to
the city beyond the distant hills. The steeple of the old white church
has fallen down, and half of the twenty-odd straggling houses are empty
and in various stages of decay. Normal life is found only around Peck's
general store and filling-station, and it is here that the curious stop
now and then to ask about the shuttered house and the idiot who mutters
to the dead.
Most of the questioners come away with a touch of distaste and
disquiet. They find the shabby loungers oddly unpleasant and full of
unnamed hints in speaking of the long-past events brought up. There is
a menacing, portentous quality in the tones which they use to describe
very ordinary events--a seemingly unjustified tendency to assume
a furtive, suggestive, confidential air, and to fall into awesome
whispers at certain points--which insidiously disturbs the listener.
Old Yankees often talk like that; but in this case the melancholy
aspect of the half-moldering village, and the dismal nature of the
story unfolded, give these gloomy, secretive mannerisms an added
significance. One feels profoundly the quintessential horror that lurks
behind the isolated Puritan and his strange repressions--feels it, and
longs to escape precipitately into clearer air.
The loungers whisper impressively that the shuttered house is that
of old Miss Sprague--Sophie Sprague, whose brother Tom was buried
on the seventeenth of June, back in '85. Sophie was never the same
after that funeral--that and the other thing which happened the same
day--and in the end she took to staying in all the time. Won't even be
seen now, but leaves notes under the back-door mat and has her things
brought from the store by Ned Peck's boy. Afraid of something--the old
Swamp Hollow burying-ground most of all. Never could be dragged near
there since her brother--and the other one--were laid away. Not much
wonder, though, seeing the way crazy Johnny Dow rants. He hangs around
the burying-ground all day and sometimes at night, and claims he talks
with Tom--and the other. Then he marches by Sophie's house and shouts
things at her--that's why she began to keep the shutters closed. He
says things are coming from somewhere to get her sometime. Ought to
be stopped, but one can't be too hard on poor Johnny. Besides, Steve
Barbour always had his opinions.
Johnny does his talking to two of the graves. One of them is Tom
Sprague's. The other, at the opposite end of the graveyard, is that of
Henry Thorndike, who was buried on the same day. Henry was the village
undertaker--the only one in miles--and never liked around Stillwater.
A city fellow from Rutland--been to college and full of book learning.
Read queer things nobody else ever heard of, and mixed chemicals for no
good purpose. Always trying to invent something new--some new-fangled
embalming-fluid or some foolish kind of medicine. Some folks said he
had tried to be a doctor but failed in his studies and took to the next
best profession. Of course, there wasn't much undertaking to do in a
place like Stillwater, but Henry farmed on the side.
Mean, morbid disposition--and a secret drinker if you could judge by
the empty bottles in his rubbish heap. No wonder Tom Sprague hated him
and blackballed him from the Masonic lodge, and warned him off when
he tried to make up to Sophie. The way he experimented on animals was
against nature and Scripture. Who could forget the state that collie
dog was found in, or what happened to old Mrs. Akeley's cat? Then there
was the matter of Deacon Leavitt's calf, when Tom had led a band of
the village boys to demand an accounting. The curious thing was that
the calf came alive after all in the end, though Tom had found it as
stiff as a poker. Some said the joke was on Tom, but Thorndike probably
thought otherwise, since he had gone down under his enemy's fist before
the mistake was discovered.
Tom, of course, was half drunk at the time. He was a vicious brute
at best, and kept his poor sister half cowed with threats. That's
probably why she is such a fear-racked creature still. There were only
the two of them, and Tom would never let her leave because that meant
splitting the property. Most of the fellows were too afraid of him to
shine up to Sophie--he stood six feet one in his stockings--but Henry
Thorndike was a sly cuss who had ways of doing things behind folk's
backs. He wasn't much to look at, but Sophie never discouraged him any.
Mean and ugly as he was, she'd have been glad if anybody could have
freed her from her brother. She may not have stopped to wonder how she
could get clear of him after he got her clear of Tom.
* * * * *
Well, that was the way things stood in June of '86. Up to this point,
the whisperers of the loungers at Peck's store are not so unbearably
portentous; but as they continue, the element of secretiveness and
malign tension grows. Tom Sprague, it appears, used to go to Rutland
on periodic sprees, his absences being Henry Thorndike's great
opportunities. He was always in bad shape when he got back, and old
Doctor Pratt, deaf and half blind though he was, used to warn him about
his heart, and about the danger of delirium tremens. Folks could always
tell by the shouting and cursing when he was home again.
It was on the ninth of June--on a Wednesday, the day after young Joshua
Goodenough finished building his new-fangled silo--that Tom started out
on his last and longest spree. He came back the next Tuesday morning,
and folks at the store saw him lashing his bay stallion the way he did
when whisky had a hold of him. Then there came shouts and shrieks and
oaths from the Sprague house, and first thing anybody knew Sophie was
running over to old Doctor Pratt's at top speed.
The doctor found Thorndike at Sprague's when he got there, and Tom was
on the bed in his room, with eyes staring and foam around his mouth.
Old Pratt fumbled around and gave the usual tests, then shook his head
solemnly and told Sophie she had suffered a great bereavement--that her
nearest and dearest had passed through the pearly gates to a better
land, just as everybody knew he would if he didn't let up on his
drinking.
Sophie kind of sniffled, the loungers whisper, but didn't seem to
take on much. Thorndike didn't do anything but smile--perhaps at the
ironic fact that he, always an enemy, was now the only person who could
be of any use to Thomas Sprague. He shouted something in old Doctor
Pratt's half-good ear about the need of having the funeral early on
account of Tom's condition. Drunks like that were always doubtful
subjects, and any extra delay--with merely rural facilities--would
entail consequences, visual and otherwise, hardly acceptable to
the deceased's loving mourners. The doctor had muttered that Tom's
alcoholic career ought to have embalmed him pretty well in advance, but
Thorndike assured him to the contrary, at the same time boasting of
his own skill, and of the superior methods he had devised through his
experiments.
It is here that the whispers of the loungers grow acutely disturbing.
Up to this point the story is usually told by Ezra Davenport, or Luther
Fry, if Ezra is laid up with chilblains, as he is apt to be in winter;
but from now on old Calvin Wheeler takes up the thread, and his voice
has a damnably insidious way of suggesting hidden horror. If Johnny Dow
happens to be passing by there is always a pause, for Stillwater does
not like to have Johnny talk too much with strangers.
Calvin edges close to the traveler and sometimes seizes a coat-lapel
with his gnarled, mottled hand while he half shuts his watery blue
eyes.
"Well, sir," he whispers, "Henry he went home an' got his undertaker's
fixin's--crazy Johnny Dow lugged most of 'em, for he was always doin'
chores for Henry--an' says as Doc Pratt an' crazy Johnny should help
lay out the body. Doc always did say as how he thought Henry talked too
much--a-boastin' what a fine workman he was, an' how lucky it was that
Stillwater had a reg'lar undertaker instead of buryin' folks jest as
they was, like they do over to Whitby.
"'Suppose,' says he, 'some fellow was to be took with some of them
paralyzin' cramps like you read about. How'd a body like it when they
lowered him down and begun shovelin' the dirt back? How'd he like it
when he was chokin' down there under the new headstone, scratchin' an'
tearin' if he chanced to get back the power, but all the time knowin'
it wasn't no use? No, sir, I tell you it's a blessin' Stillwater's got
a smart doctor as knows when a man's dead and when he ain't, and a
trained undertaker who can fix a corpse so he'll stay put without no
trouble.'
"That was the way Henry went on talkin', most like he was talkin' to
poor Tom's remains; and old Doc Pratt he didn't like what he was able
to catch of it, even though Henry did call him a smart doctor. Crazy
Johnny kept watchin' of the corpse, and it didn't make it none too
pleasant the way he'd slobber about things like, 'He ain't cold, Doc,'
or 'I see his eyelids move,' or 'There's a hole in his arm jest like
the ones I git when Henry gives me a syringe full of what makes me feel
good.' Thorndike shut him up on that, though we all knowed he'd been
givin' poor Johnny drugs. It's a wonder the poor fellow ever got clear
of the habit.
"But the worst thing, accordin' to the doctor, was the way the body
jerked up when Henry begun to shoot it full of embalmin'-fluid. He'd
been boastin' about what a fine new formula he'd got practisin' on
cats and dogs, when all of a sudden Tom's corpse began to double up
like it was alive and fixin' to wrassle. Land of Goshen, but Doc says
he was scared stiff, though he knowed the way corpses act when the
muscles begin to stiffen. Well, sir, the long and short of it is, that
the corpse sat up an' grabbed a holt of Thorndike's syringe so that
it got stuck in Henry hisself, an' give him as neat a dose of his own
embalmin'-fluid as you'd wish to see. That got Henry pretty scared,
though he yanked the point out and managed to get the body down again
and shot full of the fluid. He kept measurin' more of the stuff out
as though he wanted to be sure there was enough, and kept reassurin'
himself as not much had got into him, but crazy Johnny begun singin'
out, 'That's what you give Lige Hopkins's dog when it got all dead an'
stiff an' then waked up agin. Now you're a-goin' to get dead an' stiff
like Tom Sprague be! Remember it don't set to work till after a long
spell if you don't get much.'
"Sophie, she was downstairs with some of the neighbors--my wife
Matildy, she that's dead an' gone this thirty year, was one of them.
They were all tryin' to find out whether Thorndike was over when Tom
came home, and whether findin' him there was what set poor Tom off.
I may as well say as some folks thought it mighty funny that Sophie
didn't carry on more, nor mind the way Thorndike had smiled. Not as
anybody was hintin' that Henry helped Tom off with some of his queer
cooked-up fluids and syringes, or that Sophie would keep still if she
thought so--but you know how folks will guess behind a body's back.
We all knowed the nigh crazy way Thorndike had hated Tom--not without
reason, at that--and Emily Barbour says to my Matildy as how Henry was
lucky to have ol' Doc Pratt right on the spot with a death certificate
as didn't leave no doubt for nobody."
When old Calvin gets to this point he usually begins to mumble
indistinguishably in his straggling, dirty white beard. Most listeners
try to edge away from him, and he seldom appears to heed the gesture.
It is generally Fred Peck, who was a very small boy at the time of the
events, who continues the tale.
Thomas Sprague's funeral was held on Thursday, June seventeenth, only
two days after his death. Such haste was thought almost indecent in
remote and inaccessible Stillwater, where long distances had to be
covered by those who came, but Thorndike had insisted that the peculiar
condition of the deceased demanded it. The undertaker had seemed
rather nervous since preparing the body, and could be seen frequently
feeling his pulse. Old Doctor Pratt thought he must be worrying about
the accidental dose of embalming-fluid. Naturally, the story of the
"laying out" had spread, so that a double zest animated the mourners
who assembled to glut their curiosity and morbid interest.
Thorndike, though he was obviously upset, seemed intent on doing his
professional duty in magnificent style. Sophie and others who saw the
body were most startled by its utter lifelikeness, and the mortuary
virtuoso made doubly sure of his job by repeating certain injections at
stated intervals. He almost wrung a sort of reluctant admiration from
the town-folk and visitors, though he tended to spoil that impression
by his boastful and tasteless talk. Whenever he administered to his
silent charge he would repeat that eternal rambling about the good luck
of having a first-class undertaker. What--he would say as if directly
addressing the body--if Tom had had one of those careless fellows
who bury their subjects alive? The way he harped on the horrors of
premature burial was truly barbarous and sickening.
* * * * *
Services were held in the stuffy best room--opened for the first time
since Mrs. Sprague died. The tuneless little parlor organ groaned
disconsolately, and the coffin, supported on trestles near the hall
door, was covered with sickly-smelling flowers. It was obvious that
a record-breaking crowd was assembling from far and near, and Sophie
endeavored to look properly grief-stricken for their benefit. At
unguarded moments she seemed both puzzled and uneasy, dividing her
scrutiny between the feverish-looking undertaker and the life-like body
of her brother. A slow disgust at Thorndike seemed to be brewing within
her, and neighbors whispered freely that she would soon send him about
his business now that Tom was out of the way--that is, if she could,
for such a slick customer was sometimes hard to deal with. But with her
money and remaining looks she might be able to get another fellow, and
he'd probably take care of Henry well enough.
As the organ wheezed into _Beautiful Isle of Somewhere_ the Methodist
church choir added their lugubrious voices to the gruesome cacophony,
and everyone looked piously at Deacon Leavitt--everyone, that is,
except crazy Johnny Dow, who kept his eyes glued to the still form
beneath the glass of the coffin. He was muttering softly to himself.
Stephen Barbour--from the next farm--was the only one who noticed
Johnny. He shivered as he saw that the idiot was talking directly to
the corpse, and even making foolish signs with his fingers as if to
taunt the sleeper beneath the plate glass. Tom, he reflected, had
kicked poor Johnny around on more than one occasion, though probably
not without provocation. Something about this whole event was getting
on Stephen's nerves. There was a suppressed tension and brooding
abnormality in the air for which he could not account. Johnny ought not
to have been allowed in the house--and it was curious what an effort
Thorndike seemed to be making to look at the body. Every now and then
the undertaker would feel his pulse with an odd air.
The Reverend Silas Atwood droned on in a plaintive monotone about the
deceased--about the striking of Death's sword in the midst of this
little family, breaking the earthly tie between this loving brother and
sister. Several of the neighbors looked furtively at one another from
beneath lowered eyelids, while Sophie actually began to sob nervously.
Thorndike moved to her side and tried to reassure her, but she seemed
to shrink curiously away from him. His motions were distinctly uneasy,
and he seemed to feel acutely the abnormal tension permeating the air.
Finally, conscious of his duty as master of ceremonies, he stepped
forward and announced in a sepulchral voice that the body might be
viewed for the last time.
Slowly the friends and neighbors filed past the bier, from which
Thorndike roughly dragged crazy Johnny away. Tom seemed to be resting
peacefully. That devil had been handsome in his day. A few genuine
sobs--and many feigned ones--were heard, though most of the crowd
were content to stare curiously and whisper afterward. Steve Barbour
lingered long and attentively over the still face, and moved away
shaking his head. His wife, Emily, following after him, whispered that
Henry Thorndike had better not boast so much about his work, for Tom's
eyes had come open. They had been shut when the services began, for she
had been up and looked. But they certainly looked natural--not the way
one would expect after two days.
When Fred Peck gets this far he usually pauses as if he did not like to
continue. The listener, too, tends to feel that something unpleasant
is ahead. But Peck reassures his audience with the statement that what
happened isn't as bad as folks like to hint. Even Steve never put into
words what he may have thought, and crazy Johnny, of course, can't be
counted at all.
* * * * *
It was Luella Morse--the nervous old maid who sang in the choir--who
seems to have touched things off. She was filing past the coffin like
the rest, but stopped to peer a little closer than anyone else except
the Barbours had peered. And then, without warning, she gave a shrill
scream and fell in a dead faint.
Naturally, the room was at once a chaos of confusion. Old Doctor Pratt
elbowed his way to Luella and called for some water to throw in her
face, and others surged up to look at her and at the coffin. Johnny Dow
began chanting to himself, "He knows, he knows, he kin hear all we're
a-sayin' and see all we're a-doin', and they'll bury him that way"--but
no one stopped to decipher his mumbling except Steve Barbour.
In a very few moments Luella began to come out of her faint, and could
not tell exactly what had startled her. All she could whisper was, "The
way he looked--the way he looked." But to other eyes the body seemed
exactly the same. It was a gruesome sight, though, with those open eyes
and that high coloring.
And then the bewildered crowd noticed something which put both Luella
and the body out of their minds for a moment. It was Thorndike--on
whom the sudden excitement and jostling crowd seemed to be having
a curiously bad effect. He had evidently been knocked down in the
general bustle, and was on the floor trying to drag himself to a
sitting posture. The expression on his face was terrifying in the
extreme, and his eyes were beginning to take on a glazed, fishy
expression. He could scarcely speak aloud, but the husky rattle of his
throat held an ineffable desperation which was obvious to all.
"Get me home, quick, and let me be. That fluid I got in my arm by
mistake ... heart action ... this damned excitement ... too much ...
wait ... wait ... don't think I'm dead if I seem to ... only the
fluid--just get me home and wait ... I'll come to later, don't know how
long ... all the time I'll be conscious and know what's going on ...
don't be deceived...."
As his words trailed off into nothingness old Doctor Pratt reached him
and felt his pulse--watching a long time and finally shaking his head.
"No use doing anything--he's gone. Heart no good--and that fluid he got
in his arm must have been bad stuff. I don't know what it is."
A kind of numbness seemed to fall on all the company. New death in the
chamber of death! Only Steve Barbour thought to bring up Thorndike's
last choking words. Was he surely dead, when he himself had said he
might falsely seem so? Wouldn't it be better to wait awhile and see
what would happen? And for that matter, what harm would it do if Doc
Pratt were to give Tom Sprague another looking over before burial?
Crazy Johnny was moaning, and had flung himself on Thorndike's body
like a faithful dog. "Don't ye bury him, don't ye bury him! He ain't
dead no more not Lige Hopkins's dog nor Deacon Leavitt's calf was when
he shot 'em full. He's got some stuff he puts into ye to make ye seem
like dead when ye ain't! Ye seem like dead but ye know everything
what's a-goin' on, and the next day ye come to as good as ever. Don't
ye bury him--he'll come to under the earth an' he can't scratch up!
He's a good man, an' not like Tom Sprague. Hope to Gawd Tom scratches
an' chokes for hours an' hours...."
But no one save Barbour was paying any attention to poor Johnny.
Indeed, what Steve himself had said had evidently fallen on deaf ears.
Uncertainty was everywhere. Old Doc Pratt was applying final tests and
mumbling about death certificate blanks, and unctuous Elder Atwood
was suggesting that something be done about a double interment. With
Thorndike dead there was no undertaker this side of Rutland, and it
would mean a terrible expense if one were to be brought from there,
and if Thorndike were not embalmed in this hot June weather--well,
one couldn't tell. And there were no relatives or friends to be too
critical unless Sophie chose to be--but Sophie was on the other side
of the room, staring silently, fixedly and almost morbidly into her
brother's coffin.
Deacon Leavitt tried to restore a semblance of decorum, and had poor
Thorndike carried across the hall to the sitting-room, meanwhile
sending Zenas Wells and Walter Perkins over to the undertaker's house
for a coffin of the right size. The key was in Henry's trousers pocket.
Johnny continued to whine and paw at the body, and Elder Atwood busied
himself with inquiring about Thorndike's denomination--for Henry had
not attended local services. When it was decided that his folks in
Rutland--all dead now--had been Baptists, the Reverend Silas decided
that Deacon Leavitt had better offer the brief prayer.
It was a gala day for the funeral-fanciers of Stillwater and vicinity.
Even Luella had recovered enough to stay. Gossip, murmured and
whispered, buzzed busily while a few composing touches were given to
Thorndike's cooling, stiffening form. Johnny had been cuffed out of the
house, as most agreed he should have been in the first place, but his
distant howls were now and then wafted gruesomely in.
When the body was encoffined and laid out beside that of Thomas
Sprague, the silent, almost frightening-looking Sophie gazed intently
at it as she had gazed at her brother's. She had not uttered a word for
a dangerously long time, and the mixed expression on her face was past
all describing or interpreting. As the others withdrew to leave her
alone with the dead she managed to find a sort of mechanical speech,
but no one could make out the words, and she seemed to be talking first
to one body and then the other.
And now, with what would seem to an outsider the acme of gruesome
unconscious comedy, the whole funeral mummery of the afternoon was
listlessly repeated. Again the organ wheezed, again the choir screeched
and scraped, again a droning incantation arose, and again the morbidly
curious spectators filed past a macabre object--this time a dual array
of mortuary repose. Same of the more sensitive people shivered at the
whole proceeding, and again Stephen Barbour felt an underlying note of
eldritch horror and demoniac abnormality. God, how life-like both of
those corpses were ... and how in earnest poor Thorndike had been about
not wanting to be judged dead ... and how he had hated Tom Sprague ...
but what could one do in the face of common sense--a dead man was a
dead man, and there was old Doc Pratt with his years of experience ...
if nobody else bothered, why should one bother oneself?... Whatever Tom
had got he had probably deserved ... and if Henry had done anything to
him, the score was even now ... well, Sophie was free at last....
As the peering procession moved at last toward the hall and the outer
door, Sophie was alone with the dead once more. Elder Atwood was out
in the road talking to the hearse-driver from Lee's livery stable,
and Deacon Leavitt was arranging for a double quota of pall-bearers.
Luckily the hearse would hold two coffins. No hurry--Ed Plummer and
Ethan Stone were going ahead with shovels to dig the second grave.
There would be three livery hacks and any number of private rigs in the
cavalcade--no use trying to keep the crowd away from the graves.
Then came that frantic scream from the parlor where Sophie and the
bodies were. Its suddenness almost paralyzed the crowd and brought back
the same sensation which had surged up when Luella had screamed and
fainted. Steve Barbour and Deacon Leavitt started to go in, but before
they could enter the house Sophie was bursting forth, sobbing and
gasping about "That face at the window!... that face at the window!..."
At the same time a wild-eyed figure rounded the corner of the house,
removing all mystery from Sophie's dramatic cry. It was, very
obviously, the face's owner--poor crazy Johnny, who began to leap up
and down, pointing at Sophie and shrieking, "She knows! She knows!
I seen it in her face when she looked at 'em and talked to 'em! She
knows, and she's a-lettin' 'em go down in the earth to scratch an' claw
for air.... But they'll talk to her so's she kin hear 'em ... they'll
talk to her, an' appear to her ... and some day they'll come back an'
git her!"
Zenas Wells dragged the shrieking half-wit to a woodshed behind the
house and bolted him in as best he could. His screams and poundings
could be heard at a distance, but nobody paid him any further
attention. The procession was made up, and with Sophie in the first
hack it slowly covered the short distance past the village to the Swamp
Hollow burying-ground.
Elder Atwood made appropriate remarks as Thomas Sprague was laid
to rest, and by the time he was through, Ed and Ethan had finished
Thorndike's grave on the other side of the cemetery--to which the crowd
presently shifted. Deacon Leavitt then spoke ornamentally, and the
lowering process was repeated. People had begun to drift off in knots,
and the clatter of receding buggies and carry-alls was quite universal,
when the shovels began to fly again. As the earth thudded down on
the coffin-lids, Thorndike's first, Steve Barbour noticed the queer
expressions flitting over Sophie Sprague's face. He couldn't keep track
of them all, but behind the rest there seemed to lurk a sort of wry,
perverse, half-suppressed look of vague triumph. He shook his head.
* * * * *
Zenas had run back and let crazy Johnny out of the woodshed before
Sophie got home, and the poor fellow at once made frantically for
the graveyard. He arrived before the shovelmen were through, and
while many of the curious mourners were still lingering about. What
he shouted into Tom Sprague's partly-filled grave, and how he clawed
at the loose earth of Thorndike's freshly-finished mound across the
cemetery, surviving spectators still shudder to recall. Jotham Blake,
the constable, had to take him back to the town farm by force, and his
screams waked dreadful echoes.
This is where Fred Peck usually leaves off the story. What more, he
asks, is there to tell? It was a gloomy tragedy, and one can scarcely
wonder that Sophie grew queer after that. That is all one hears if the
hour is so late that old Calvin Wheeler has tottered home, but when he
is still around he breaks in again with that damnably suggestive and
insidious whisper. Sometimes those who hear him dread to pass either
the shuttered house or the graveyard afterward, especially after dark.
"Heh, heh ... Fred was only a little shaver then, and don't remember no
more than half of what was goin' on! You want to know why Sophie keeps
her house shuttered, and why crazy Johnny still keeps a-talkin' to the
dead and a-shoutin' at Sophie's windows? Well, sir, I don't know's I
know all there is to know, but I hear what I hear."
Here the old man ejects his cud of tobacco and leans forward to
buttonhole the listener.
"It was that same night, mind ye--toward mornin', and just eight hours
after them burials--when we heard the first scream from Sophie's house.
Woke us all up--Steve and Emily Barbour and me and Matildy goes over
hot-footin', all in night gear, and finds Sophie all dressed and dead
fainted on the settin'-room floor. Lucky she hadn't locked her door.
When we got her to she was shakin' like a leaf, and wouldn't let on by
so much as a word what was ailin' her. Matildy and Emily done what they
could to quiet her down, but Steve whispered things to me as didn't
make me none too easy. Come about an hour when we allowed we'd be goin'
home soon, that Sophie she begun to tip her head on one side like she
was a-listenin' to somethin'. Then on a sudden she screamed again, and
keeled over in another faint.
"Well, sir, I'm tellin' what I'm tellin', and won't do no guessin' like
Steve Barbour would a done if he dared. He always was the greatest
hand for hintin' things ... died ten year ago of pneumony....
"What we heard so faint-like was just poor crazy Johnny, of course.
'Taint more than a mile to the buryin'-ground, and he must a got out
of the window where they'd locked him up at the town farm--even if
Constable Blake says he didn't get out that night. From that day to
this he hangs around them graves a-talkin' to the both of them--cussin'
and kickin' at Tom's mound, and puttin' posies and things on Henry's.
And when he ain't a-doin' that he's hangin' around Sophie's shuttered
windows howlin' about what's a-comin' some day to git her.
"She wouldn't never go near the buryin'-ground, and now she won't come
out of the house at all nor see nobody. Got to sayin' there was a
curse on Stillwater--and I'm dinged if she ain't half right, the way
things is a-goin' to pieces these days. There certainly was somethin'
queer about Sophie right along. Once when Sally Hopkins was a-callin'
on her--in '97 or '98, I think it was--there was an awful rattlin' at
her winders--and Johnny was safe locked up at the time--at least, so
Constable Dodge swore up and down. But I ain't takin' no stock in their
stories about noises every seventeenth of June, or about faint shinin'
figures a-tryin' Sophie's door and winders every black mornin' about
two o'clock.
"You see, it was about two o'clock in the mornin' that Sophie heard the
sounds and keeled over twice that first night after the buryin'. Steve
and me, and Matildy and Emily, heard the second lot, faint as it was,
just like I told you. And I'm a-tellin' of you again as how it must a
been crazy Johnny over to the buryin'-ground, let Jotham Blake claim
what he will. There ain't no tellin' the sound of a man's voice so far
off, and with our heads full of nonsense it ain't no wonder we thought
there was two voices--and voices that hadn't ought to be speakin' at
all.
"Steve, he claimed to have heard more than I did. I verily believe he
took some stock in ghosts. Matildy and Emily was so scared they didn't
remember what they heard. And curious enough, nobody else in town--if
anybody was awake at that ungodly hour--never said nothin' about
hearin' no sounds at all.
"Whatever it was, was so faint it might have been the wind if there
hadn't been words. I made out a few, but don't want to say as I'd back
up all Steve claimed to have caught....
[Illustration: "Then there was that awful 'Comin' again some day,' in a
death-like squawk."]
"'She-devil' ... 'all the time' ... 'Henry' ... and 'alive' was
plain ... and so was 'you know' ... 'said you'd stand by' ... 'get rid
of him' and 'bury me' ... in a kind of changed voice.... Then there was
that awful 'comin' again some day'--in a death-like squawk ... but you
can't tell me Johnny couldn't have made those sounds....
"Hey, you! What's takin' you off in such a hurry? Mebbe there's more I
could tell you if I had a mind...."
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