The Ghost Club

By William Meikle

Writers never really die; their stories live on, to be found again, to be told again, to scare again.

In Victorian London, a select group of writers, led by Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and Henry James held an informal dining club, the price of entry to which was the telling of a story by each invited guest.

These are their stories, containing tales of revenant loved ones, lost cities, weird science, spectral appearances and mysteries in the fog of the old city, all told by some of the foremost writers of the day. In here you'll find Verne and Wells, Tolstoy and Checkov, Stevenson and Oliphant, Kipling, Twain, Haggard and Blavatsky alongside their hosts.

Come, join us for dinner and a story:

 

Robert Louis Stevenson - Wee Davie Makes a Friend

Rudyard Kipling - The High Bungalow

Leo Tolstoy - The Immortal Memory

Bram Stoker - The House of the Dead

Mark Twain - Once a Jackass

Herbert George Wells - Farside

Margaret Oliphant - To the Manor Born

Oscar Wilde - The Angry Ghost

Henry Rider Haggard - The Black Ziggurat

Helena P Blavatsky - Born of Ether

Henry James - The Scrimshaw Set

Anton Checkov - At the Molenzki Junction

Jules Verne - To the Moon and Beyond

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Curious Affair on the Embankment

 

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
• Release date: Dec 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9798215389409

William Meikle

William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over thirty novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. He has books available from a variety of publishers including Dark Regions Press and Severed Press and his work has appeared in a large number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he's not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.  

Book preview

When the venerable Criterion Club in London recently went into receivership, strenuous attempts were made to find anything of interest on the premises that might be valuable enough to stave off the landlord and the other creditors and prevent the old lady from closing her doors one last time. Silver dinner services, much of the fine china crockery, a great deal of artwork including portraits of the great and good and even some of the original wood paneling were all auctioned off for the cause. But the debt was always deemed likely to be too severe to save the old club from certain closure. After many years of serving most of the glittering names of stage, screen, and literature, along with members of Parliament, and some of the wealthiest businessmen in the world, the long service seemed to be near an end.

That might be all about to change. A finding of some note has recently come to light, and it appears to be of such significance that it is almost guaranteed to revive the fortunes of the old lady.

It was found in an upstairs room, one that has seen little use except for storage since the war. Tucked away in a dusty corner behind several stacks of magazines and periodicals dating from the Sixties, a bookcase was uncovered. It contained, among other things, a shelf of signed, first editions from some of the late Victorian era’s best known authors. Those signed books, many in pristine condition, in themselves will fetch a pretty penny. But that was not the most startling of the items found.

The main hope for the future of the club ultimately rests on the tome you hold in your hands. It was almost thrown away at first, for the leather covering in which it had been stored had cracked badly and is of no value in itself. The papers found inside, however, are another matter entirely—they are a transcript of stories told around the table at a highly exclusive literary dining club. According to the notes, this Ghost Club was founded by the American writer, Henry James who was sojourning in London at the time, the then stage manager of the Lyceum, Bram Stoker, and the literary lion of the day, Arthur Conan Doyle. A study of the handwritten notes and invitations found with the book explain that the cost of a seat at the table was a story. And not just any story—the more ghostly, spooky, or outlandish, the better was the request.

As you will see for yourself, many writers of the period took up the challenge, in tales that have never appeared in any other journal, paper or collection either of the day or over the period since they were written.

The stories themselves have been transcribed on a typewriter. The ribbon was not of the best quality and the ink has faded even further in the intervening years, but it is obvious given the introductory material in the notes that Conan Doyle himself was the typist. Indeed, there seems to be more than a hint of his Lordship’s peculiar dry wit seeping into these stories alongside the voices of their original tellers, indicating that he sometimes did more than merely transcribe the originals, and went as far as embellishing some of the tales. Whatever the case, it is clearly a remarkable find of huge historical significance; a new story by any one of these writers would cause a frenzy of bidding at any literary auction, and to have fourteen is a bounty of riches indeed.

Of course, the discovery of this manuscript has been fortuitous, to say the least, for the owners of the club, and there have already been allegations of hoax and trickery. There is speculation of, pardon the pun, a ghostwriter, for some modern word choices, and phrases are said to appear scattered throughout the fourteen stories.

For my part, I can only ask that you read the tales as I have provided them here—and make up your own mind as to their provenance.

THE GHOST CLUB MEMBERS AND THEIR STORIES

PROLOGUE

WEE DAVIE MAKES A FRIEND

Robert Louis Stevenson

THE HIGH BUNGALOW

Rudyard Kipling

THE IMMORTAL MEMORY

Leo Tolstoy

IN THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

Bram Stoker

ONCE A JACKASS

Mark Twain

FARSIDE

Herbert George Wells

TO THE MANOR BORN

Margaret Oliphant

THE ANGRY GHOST

Oscar Wilde

THE BLACK ZIGGURAT

Henry Rider Haggard

BORN OF ETHER

Helena P. Blavatsky

THE SCRIMSHAW SET

Henry James

AT THE MOLENZKI JUNCTION

Anton Checkov

TO THE MOON AND BEYOND

Jules Verne

THE CURIOUS AFFAIR ON THE EMBANKMENT

Arthur Conan Doyle

When it came to deciding who should have the honor as first guest at our dining club, it was not a difficult choice at all, for all three of us are greatly enamored of his tales of daring, adventure, skullduggery, and the conflicting natures that define us as men.

When we discovered that he was to be in London for a mere week before leaving for warmer climes for the benefit of his health, we could not pass up the opportunity. I was immensely pleased when, despite his obviously crowded schedule, our Scottish friend was gracious enough to accept our invitation.

Although he ate little, the telling of the story itself seemed to sustain him though the course of the meal. He had not brought a transcript, and indeed seemed to make much of the tale up as he spoke, carried along in the tale every bit as much as his listeners. But such is his skill as a storyteller that I had no trouble when I came to sit at the typewriter, and was able to capture the thing as whole and vibrant as it was when he told it.

Here is his tale.

WEE DAVIE MAKES A FRIEND

Robert Louis Stevenson

Wee Davie Seton was a very sick boy. That, in itself, is not unusual in the cluster of busy mill towns of Lanarkshire where he was born and bred; a county of industry, chimneys and brickwork, where lads are put to work before they have got more sense than schooling by foremen who have little enough of either.

Davie was not, however, so sorely afflicted by birth as to be one of the working poor, having had the good fortune to be born into a wealthy family. The daily toil required to put bread on the table was something he’d never need to worry about. No, Davie’s sickness was not made in his father’s spinning mill on the banks of the upper Clyde, but rather came from having a difficult birthing and suffering too long with insufficient lungs. Difficulty in taking a breath is indeed a serious problem in those damp environs of Western Scotland, where you are as likely to meet a cold mist as a warm heart.

Indeed, wee Davie was deemed to have been so poorly at birth that it was thought he might not survive his first night—or his second for that matter, but the lad proved sturdier than he appeared. He was coddled and doctored through that first winter, at any moment in danger of slipping away, but better health came with the spring, and once Davie began to walk he seemed to have put the greater part of his earlier problems behind him. For several years he had as normal a childhood as any other mill owner’s son, being schooled in the classics by day and sent to bed early to avoid being any annoyance to his father. He had no friends—the only other lads of his age in the town worked in the mill, and Father would not have a son of his mixing with the workers. Davie had some books, a patient tutor and, not knowing any other life, was indeed happy enough with his lot.

The full extent of his ailments did not resurface until the damp winter of ‘85, just after his ninth birthday, which saw poor Davie taken to bed before Christmas with a fever that refused to be placated. It was only then that his much reduced lung capacity was truly noted for the first time.

Davie’s father threw the full weight of his, not unsubstantial, financial means into an attempt to ensure the lad’s good health, but no number of doctors, apothecaries, or prayers could make Wee Davie any better. Through the course of a long spring and early summer the lad was poked and prodded over most of his painfully thin torso, took more medicine than he did solid food, and slept a great deal more than he was awake.

Once it became apparent that Davie’s health was not showing any signs of improvement, and indeed seemed to be failing rapidly, the lad was dispatched across the country to his uncle, in search of drier climes and sea breezes. His father’s hope was that a change in Davie’s circumstances might bring about a change in his constitution.

It is here, along the windswept southeastern coast of the Firth of Forth, just to the south of the Bass Rock, where our story starts in earnest. It begins with Davie in a new bedroom, plagued by the same old ills of bad health and boredom that, far from being dispelled, had indeed traveled east alongside him.

Chronic illness is a sore thing to take for a young lad, more especially so for one blessed with a bountiful imagination. Although the old bed was far more comfortable and accommodating than Davie’s own back in Lanark, it was the lack of mental stimulation even more than his illness that vexed him in the long, empty days and nights spent abed.

His uncle was of little help in keeping Davie’s volatile mind occupied. During the early weeks of Davie’s confinement, his father’s brother was more concerned with the abundance of vegetables and beans that required harvesting in the wide expanse of garden to the rear of the property than with any inclination to inquire after the lad’s wellbeing. Davie could not even follow the progress of all of this frantic gardening activity, which might at least have provided him with some diversion, for his bedroom’s only view was to the front of the house. A single, small, high, window overlooked a mostly featureless landscape of sea and sky, with only the passing shipping trade in the deeper waters on the horizon or the scudding of clouds overhead to break the monotony.

The only other person Davie met during the first fortnight of his enforced confinement was the housemaid, a fresh faced lass not too many years older than Davie was himself. She brought his food at regular intervals, whether Davie was ready to eat or not—the fare was salted porridge or soup and soft breads in the main, for anything solid was anathema to Davie’s increasingly fragile digestive system. The girl’s duties also included stoking the small fire in the evening as the chill came in off the sea, and clearing the commode when required, but she never spoke, and kept her eyes averted from his while she was in the bedchamber. In the main, the sickly lad was left entirely to his own devices.

Davie quickly grew to know every nook and cranny of the room that defined his whole life. The scratched and worn floorboards told of the age and history of the property, which had been in the Seton family for as long as anyone could remember. The flock wallpaper composed of grotesquely large, gravid red and white roses spoke of the lapses in good taste of an elderly great aunt, long since departed. The dresser, armoire, and the dreaded, always cold on the flesh, commode were made of a deep brown, heavy oak that seemed to have been retrieved from some even older property in an antediluvian age now long forgotten. The small window was so high, Davie had to stand on his toes to see much of anything, and even then he had to reach up to open it wide, for the leaded glass was as old as the furniture and lent everything a warped, feverish aspect when looked though.

Not that he could afford much time at the window in any case—the sorry state of Wee Davie’s health meant that he spent the major part of each day in the big, old bed. When he was not lying on his side listening to his blood thud when he put his ear to the pillow, he became intimately familiar with the ever-changing troughs and peaks of his eiderdown. He marched imaginary armies up and down and to and fro into skirmishes that were epic in scale yet strangely bloodless. He created mountains with his knees only to have them tumble into molehills when the strain of holding up the sheets proved too much. He smoothed out the top quilt then made sand dunes with his fists where camels could be chased by cavalrymen. When he could muster the strength to rise, he watched daring sea battles in the bay just outside his window, full of cannons blasting, muskets cracking and swords clashing, all of which no one but Davie ever saw or heard. He took to having conversations with himself, playing generals in the hills or captains at sea, on opposite sides of the fighting, verbal exchanges that sometimes got heated and raised into dissension and even argument. Wee Davie succeeded in getting himself quite worked up during several of his battles, to the extent that any amelioration in his health from his new lodgings was being cancelled out by these fervid mental exercises.

With Davie being so isolated from day to day life, and with the daily tending of the garden occupying his uncle’s attentions, his family did not even realize the extent of the boy’s ongoing delusions. It took the housemaid, young Agnes Lenzie to come to the lad’s aid.

She became increasingly distraught at the sight of the boy each morning, for it did indeed seem that he was retreating so far from contact with what was real that he was in danger of slipping away altogether. Agnes may have been forbidden to talk to the invalid, it not being her place in the grand scheme of things—but no one had said that she could not show a modicum of compassion, and that was something that Agnes had no shortage of, despite her tender years. A memory came to her as she made her way home one evening—of how she too had been a sickly child, for a while, laid low with the scarlet fever and as like as not to die. She had been saved, at the age of six, by a gift, and she intended to do what she could to see that Davie was treated in at least as kindly a manner.

Like Davie, Agnes too had an uncle, a carpenter and joiner by trade, and the craftsman was only too willing to accede to her request for a toy for the boy. The very next day when taking Davie his breakfast she delivered—silently of course—a bowl of porridge— and, on the same tray, a wooden soldier.

Davie could not take his eyes off this new thing that had arrived in his world. The soldier was almost a foot high and made of polished and varnished pine. Its articulated joints were held together by thin but strong twine, and it was dressed—a red serge tunic and tartan kilt that had been made from an old uniform her uncle had in a box. The feet were clad in tartan socks that reached up to the knees and finished with a pair of tiny but exquisitely made black leather boots, polished to a shine. To top it all off, the soldier wore a bearskin hat crafted from badger hair, and carried a small, but perfectly formed sword of burnished steel in a leather scabbard.

Davie looked up to thank the girl, but she had already backed out of the room—not so fast that he did not see her put a finger to her lips, smile, and nod as she pulled the door closed behind her on the way out. A minute later the doll had Davie’s full attention—a state of affairs that was to persist for several days and nights as Davie talked to someone other than himself for the first time in several weeks.

The doll listened—at first—but it was not long at all before it started to reply, and not very much longer after that before it was the one providing the bulk of the conversation. Davie became quite content to lie back on the soft pillows, close his eyes, and listen. He learned the soldier’s name on the second night—Sandy Brown, Corporal, lately of the Queen’s Own Highlanders—and by the third night he was listening, enraptured, as the old warrior told tales of battles in far flung climes, of empire building and adventure, brigands and pirates, friendship and loss. Sandy took Davie to places he never imagined existed, and proved to be a consummate storyteller, sometimes making a simple tale last many hours but never, ever, giving Davie cause to be bored. He was, however, often shocked, for Sandy proved to have the working vocabulary of a seasoned infantryman, and was blasphemous to boot, with a turn of phrase that young Davie had not, to his knowledge, ever before encountered. It felt strange, exotic, and more than slightly exciting, although he asked Sandy to speak in whispers, for even at his age he knew it was not the kind of language that his uncle would want to be uttered in a good Christian household. The scurrilous language did, however, lend a great deal of verisimilitude to the old soldier’s tales, so much so that Davie saw the sights that Sandy had seen, smelled the odors and heard the banter of the troops and the crack of muskets. The days seemed to wheel past rapidly, each morning finding Davie waking, eager and ready for more of the old soldier’s tales. The doll proved only too willing to provide them—one day they were in Africa in the desert, the next in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, or the great forests of the Canadian territories. Davie traveled the world from between the sheets of his bed, and he had never been happier.

This new broadening of Wee Davie’s imagination also did much for his general wellbeing. Indeed, by the time his father visited, almost two months after Davie’s arrival in the house, the lad had some color in his cheeks, and was able to get up out of bed to greet his parent at the door. Unfortunately for Davie, he had brought Sandy with him in his right hand, for the two had become completely inseparable. Davie’s father’s visage went from a look of welcome joy at his son’s good health to a frown, even as Davie was still some way across the room.

What do you have there, lad? he said, and Davie’s headlong rush towards his father’s arms faltered and failed in the middle of the room. He tried to hide Sandy behind his back, but it was too late. His father put out a hand, and Davie did not have it in him to disobey, despite Sandy’s silent screaming in his head. He stepped forward and handed the puppet over.

The soldier looked much smaller in the man’s large, broad hand. His father looked at the doll,