The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, [email protected].

Please note: This edition does not contain the second chapter of the first
story, "The Haunted House", by Dickens. It can be found in 3ghst10.txt
or 3ghst10.zip, 1998, "Three Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens."

The Lock and Key Library
Classic Mystery and Detective Stories - Old Time English
Edited by Julian Hawthorne

Table of Contents
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70)
The Haunted House No. I Branch Line: The Signal Man

BULWER-LYTTON (1803-73)
The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain The
Incantation
THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859)
The Avenger
CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (1782-1824)
Melmoth the Wanderer
LAURENCE STERNE (1713-68)
A Mystery with a Moral
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63)
On Being Found Out The Notch on the Ax
ANONYMOUS
Bourgonef The Closed Cabinet

THE HAUNTED HOUSE
IN TWO CHAPTERS
THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE
Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by
none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make
acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas
piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind,
no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance,
of any kind, to heighten its effect. More than that: I had come to it
direct from a railway station: it was not more than a mile distant from

the railway station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back
upon the way I had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly
along the embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was
utterly commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to
utterly commonplace people--and there my vanity steps in; but, I will
take it on myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it,
any fine autumn morning.
The manner of my lighting on it was this.
I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop by
the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporary residence
in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who had
happened to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a
likely place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep,
and had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant
Northern Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke
up again to find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction
on me that I hadn't been to sleep at all;--upon which question, in the
first imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would
have done wager by battle with the man who sat opposite me. That
opposite man had had, through the night--as that opposite man always
has--several legs too many, and all of them too long. In addition to this
unreasonable conduct (which was only to be expected of him), he had
had a pencil and a pocket-book, and had been perpetually listening and
taking notes. It had appeared to me that these aggravating notes related
to the jolts and bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned
myself to his taking them, under a general supposition that he was in
the civil-engineering way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over
my head whenever he listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a
perplexed aspect, and his demeanor became unbearable.
It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I had
out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country, and the
curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the stars and
between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller and said:
"I BEG your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in

me?" For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my
travelling-cap or my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.
The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if
the back of the carriage were a hundred miles off,