J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 eBook

It was there and then that she related what had occurred to her.  She had placed herself, as usual, at her little work table, and had been either working or reading—­I forget which—­for some time, and felt in her usual health and serene spirits.  Raising her eyes, and looking towards the door, she saw a horrible-looking little man enter.  He was dressed in red, was very short, had a singularly dark face, and a most atrocious countenance.  Having walked some steps into the room, with his eyes fixed on her, he stopped, and beckoning to her to follow, moved back toward the door.  About half way, again he stopped once more and turned.  She was so terrified that she sat staring at the apparition without moving or speaking.  Seeing that she had not obeyed him, his face became more frightful and menacing, and as it underwent this change, he raised his hand and stamped on the floor.  Gesture, look, and all, expressed diabolical fury.  Through sheer extremity of terror she did rise, and, as he turned again, followed him a step or two in the direction of the door.  He again stopped, and with the same mute menace, compelled her again to follow him.

She reached the narrow stone doorway of the Earl’s Hall, through which he had passed; from the threshold she saw him standing a little way off, with his eyes still fixed on her.  Again he signed to her, and began to move along the short passage that leads to the winding stair.  But instead of following him further, she fell on the floor in a fit.

The poor lady was thoroughly persuaded that she was not long to survive this vision, and her foreboding proved true.  From her bed she never rose.  Fever and delirium supervened in a few days and she died.  Of course it is possible that fever, already approaching, had touched her brain when she was visited by the phantom, and that it had no external existence.

THE VISION OF TOM CHUFF

At the edge of melancholy Catstean Moor, in the north of England, with half-a-dozen ancient poplar-trees with rugged and hoary stems around, one smashed across the middle by a flash of lightning thirty summers before, and all by their great height dwarfing the abode near which they stand, there squats a rude stone house, with a thick chimney, a kitchen and bedroom on the ground-floor, and a loft, accessible by a ladder, under the shingle roof, divided into two rooms.

Its owner was a man of ill repute.  Tom Chuff was his name.  A shock-headed, broad-shouldered, powerful man, though somewhat short, with lowering brows and a sullen eye.  He was a poacher, and hardly made an ostensible pretence of earning his bread by any honest industry.  He was a drunkard.  He beat his wife, and led his children a life of terror and lamentation, when he was at home.  It was a blessing to his frightened little family when he absented himself, as he sometimes did, for a week or more together.

On the night I speak of he knocked at the door with his cudgel at about eight o’clock.  It was winter, and the night was very dark.  Had the summons been that of a bogie from the moor, the inmates of this small house could hardly have heard it with greater terror.