The Rupa Book of Great Suspense & Snappy Surprise Stories 2 In 1 Read online

  RUSKIN BOND’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far), essays, poems and children’s books. He has also written over five hundred short stories and articles, which have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, a collection of short stories, and the Padma Shri in 1999.

  Other Ruskin Bond Titles

  Angry River

  A Little Night Music

  A Long Walk for Bina

  Hanuman to the Rescue

  Ghost Stories from the Raj

  Strange Men, Strange Places

  The India I Love

  Tales and Legends from India

  The Blue Umbrella

  Ruskin Bond’s Children’s Omnibus

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-I

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-II

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-III

  Rupa Book of Great Animal Stories

  The Rupa Book of True Tales of Mystery and Adventure

  The Rupa Book of Ruskin Bond’s Himalayan Tales

  The Rupa Book of Great Suspense Stories

  The Rupa Laughter Omnibus

  The Rupa Book of Scary Stories

  The Rupa Book of Haunted Houses

  The Rupa Book of Travellers’ Tales

  The Rupa Book of Great Crime Stories

  The Rupa Book of Nightmare Tales

  The Rupa Book of Shikar Stories

  The Rupa Book of Love Stories

  The Rupa Book of Wicked Stories

  The Rupa Book of Heartwarming Stories

  The Rupa Book of Thrills and Spills

  The Carnival of Terror

  The Rupa Book of

  SNAPPY SURPRISES

  Edited by Ruskin Bond

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd. 2010

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

  New Delhi 110002

  Introduction and selection copyright for Great Suspense Stories © Ruskin Bond 2003

  Introduction and selection copyright for Snappy Surprises © Ruskin Bond 2007

  Copyright of individual stories/pieces/poems/translations vest with the individual authors/translators.

  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: 978-81-291-1589-8

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  Great Suspense Stories typeset in 11 pts. Classical Garamond by Mindways Design, New Delhi

  Snappy Surprises typeset in 11 pts. Charter by Mindways Design, New Delhi

  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

  MASTER OF THE MACABRE

  The Boarded Window

  One Summer Night

  Staley Fleming’s Hallucination

  The Stranger

  Four Stories by Ambrose Bierce

  THE PERFECT CRIME

  Death in the Kitchen

  Milward Kennedy

  H2, etc.

  A.J. Alan

  Coroner’s Inquest

  Marc Connelly

  A Worm’s Turning

  John Eyton

  IN LIGHTER VEIN

  The Two Horns

  T.F. Powys

  ‘Yoked with an Unbeliever’

  Rudyard Kipling

  Dusk

  ‘Saki’ (H.H. Munro)

  The Amorous Ghost

  Enid Bagnold

  The Man Who Came Back

  William Gerhardi

  GHOSTS AND GHOULS

  The Vampire

  Sydney Horler

  Night of the Millennium

  Ruskin Bond

  ‘I Will Pay You All To-morrow’

  Lord Halifax

  The Bordeaux Diligence

  Lord Halifax

  The Doctor’s Ghost

  Dr Norman Macleod

  CLASSIC SHORTS

  The Eyes Have It

  Ruskin Bond

  The Vampire

  Jan Neruda

  The Four-Fingered Hand

  Barry Pain

  The Third Performance

  Anthony Gittins

  Torture by Hope

  Count Villiers De L’Isle Adam

  The Statement of Randolph Carter

  H.P. Lovecraft

  The Interlopers

  ‘Saki’ (H.H. Munro)

  The Shifting Growth

  Edgar Jepson and John Gawsworth

  The Story of Muhammad Din

  Rudyard Kipling

  His First Flight

  Liam O’Flaherty

  INTRODUCTION

  For the popularity of the short short story, or super short as I like to call it, we must thank the newspapers of the early and mid-twentieth century. It was customary for many newspapers to carry short fiction in their weekend or evening supplements. Many young writers came to the fore in this way. As the fees were respectable, established authors did not shy away from these pages, which commanded a wide reading pubic.

  Space was at a premium, and a writer had to use all his skills to compose an effective short story that would take up no more than a column or two. The stories seldom exceeded 1,500 words. They were usually read during short journeys on buses or in the tube train. They had to be short and crisp, preferably with a ‘surprise ending’. Among the earliest and finest exponents of this form were Poe, ‘Saki’, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, and Rudyard Kipling, most of whom had worked in newspapers as correspondents or editors. Later, many successful authors tried their hand at the super short.

  In the 1950s, when I lived in London, a paper called The Evening News carried a short story in almost every issue. And in India, in the ‘60s, most of the Sunday papers carried short fiction, enabling me to make a modest living with my stories. There were also a number of weekly and monthly magazines which carried short stories. This market has now almost disappeared. The family magazine has given way to televised entertainment. Publishers prefer long novels to shorter forms of fiction. And for some strange reason modern writers find it increasingly difficult to tell a story in a limited number of words. Perhaps the computer encourages them to ramble on interminably.

  For those who like their stories neat, and without too many frills, there is much to fall back upon, as this collection will testify.

  Here are twenty-eight of my favourite super shorts, starting with that master of the macabre, Ambrose Bierce, whose reputation rests almost entirely on his short fiction and his highly original and entertaining Devil’s Dictionary. Bierce’s own end was as mysterious as one of his story endings. He slipped into Mexico to cover a revolutionary war, and was never seen again. There was a lot of speculation as to what might have become of him, but to this day his disappearance remains a mystery.

  Rudyard Kipling’s early stories were written for the Civil and Military Gazette, of Lahore, and he had to tailor them to fit a limited column length. Hardly any of them exceed 2,000 words. They were later published in the collection Plain Tales from
the Hills, and were acclaimed as being among his best work.

  Saki’s brilliant tales were written for the Westminster Gazette. He too had an end that was worthy of one of his stories—hit by a stray bullet while enjoying a mug of tea in a trench during World War I.

  A.J. Alan made his name as a raconteur of short stories on BBC radio when I was still a boy. Hence his easy, conversational style. The BBC introduced a 5-minute story slot on its Home Service programme in the 1950s, and some of my own early efforts found a place here. It’s quite a challenge writing an effective story with a reading time of five minutes. There is no scope for long descriptions, philosophical diversions, or padding of any sort.

  I think I have exceeded my five minutes, so I will sign off by saying that the reader will be hard put to it to find a dull moment or a dull sentence in any of the stories that follow.

  Ruskin Bond

  5 September 2006

  MASTER OF THE MACABRE

  Four Stories by Ambrose Bierce

  THE BOARDED WINDOW

  In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than, impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meager comforts which they had voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow upon the land, which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of undisturbed possession. There were evidences of ‘improvement’—a few acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the ax. Apparently the man’s zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes.

  The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its ‘chinking’ of clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter, however, was boarded up—nobody could remember a time when it was not. And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the occupant’s dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living to-day who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.

  The man’s name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his aging. His hair and long, full beard were white, his gray, lusterless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders—a burden bearer. I never saw him; these particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got the man’s story when I was a lad. He had known him when living near by in that early day.

  One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter of this true story—excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier chapter—that supplied by my grandfather.

  When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his ax to hew out a farm—the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support—he was young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man’s widowed life; for what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit to a lot like that?

  One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was no physician within miles, no neighbour; nor was she in a condition to be left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness and so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.

  From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar natural laws. He was surprised, too, that he did not weep—surprised and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said aloud, ‘I shall have to make the coffin and dig the grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but now—she is dead, of course, but it is all right—it must be all right, somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem.’

  He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness ran an undersense of conviction that all was right—that he should have her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know he was so hard struck; that knowledge would come later, and never go. Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life: to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon the table’s edge, and dropped his face into them. Tearless yet and unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window a long, waiting sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the darkening wood! But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than before, sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild beast; perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep.

  Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher awoke a
nd lifting his head from his arms intently listened—he knew not why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all without a shock, he strained his eyes to see—he knew not what. His senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood had stilled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who—what had waked him, and where was it?

  Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step—another—sounds as of bare feet upon the floor!

  He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he waited—waited there in the darkness through seeming centuries of such dread as one may know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the dead woman’s name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same instant he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe. Murlock had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there!

  There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little groping seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth fixed in her throat! Then there was darkness blacker than before, and silence; and when he returned to consciousness the sun was high and the wood vocal with songs of birds.

  The body lay near the window, where the beast had left it when frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The clothing was deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow. From the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was broken; the hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal’s ear.