A Ghost's Tale - Mark Twain

0:00A ghost's a tell by Mark Twain. I took a large room far up Broadway in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me. And as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobwebs swung its lazy woof in my face and clung there I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom. I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mold and the darkness.

1:03A cheery fire was burning in the great nigh sat down before it with a comforting sense of relief. For two hours I sat there thinking of bygone times. Recalling old scenes and summoning half forgotten faces out of the mists of the past. Listening in fancy to voices that long ago grew silent for all time. And to once familiar songs that nobody sings now. And as my reveries softened down to a sadder, sadder pathos, the shrieking of the winds outside softened to a whale. The angry beating of the rain against the pains diminished to a tranquil pattern. And one by one the noises in the streets subsided. Until the hurrying footsteps of the last belated straggler died away in the distance

2:06and left no sound behind. The fire had burned low. A sense of loneliness crept over me. I arose in on-dressed, moving on tiptoe about the room doing stealthily what I had to do as if I were enviromed by sleeping enemies whose slumbers it would be fatal to break. I covered up in bed and lay, listening to the rain and wind, and the faint creaking of distant shutters, till they lulled me to sleep. I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know. All at once I found myself awake and filled with a shuddering expectancy all was still all but my own heart. I could hear it beat. Presently the bed-clothes began to slip away. That slowly tore the foot of the bed.

3:08As if someone were pulling them, I could not stir. I could not speak. Still the blanket slipped deliberately away till my breast was uncovered. Then, with a great effort, I seized them and drew them over my head. I waited. Listen. Waited. Once more. That steady pull began, and once more I lay torpored, a century of dragging seconds till my breast was naked again. At last I roused my energies and snatched the covers back to their place and held them with a strong grip. I waited. By and by I felt a faint tug, and took off fresh grip. The tug strengthened to a steady strain. It grew stronger and stronger.

4:09My hold parted, and for the third time the blanket slid away. I groaned. An answering groan came from the foot of the bed. I did drops of sweat stood upon my forehead. I was more dead than alive. Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room. The step of an elephant, it seemed to me. It was not like anything human, but it was moving from me. There was relief in that. I heard it approach the door, pass out without moving bolt or lock, and wander away among the dismal corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it passed,

5:10and then silence rained once more. When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, this is a dream simpler, a hideous dream. And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced myself that it was a dream. And then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips and I was happy again. I got up and struck a light, and when I found that the locks and bolts were just as I had left them, another sous-vine laugh wailed in my heart and rippled from my lips. I took my pipe and lit it, and it was just sitting down before the fire. When down with the pipe out of my nervous fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks and my placid breathing was cut short with a gasp in the ashes on the hearth, side by side with my own

6:13bare footprint was another, so vast that in comparison mine was but an infants. Then I had a visitor, and the elephant tread was explained. I put out the light and returned to bad poles, aid with fear, all day a long time, peering into the darkness and listening. Then I heard a great teen noise overhead like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor, then the thrown down of the body and the shaking of my windows in response to the concussion. In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled slamming of doors. I heard at intervals stealthy footsteps creeping in and out among the corridors and up and

7:14down the stairs. Sometimes these noises approached my door, hesitated and went away again. I heard the clankin of chains faintly and remote passages and listened while the clankin grew nearer, while it weirdly climbed the stairways, marking each move by the loose surplus of chain that fell with an accented rattle upon each succeeding step as the gallbloon that bore it advanced. I heard muttered sentences, half utter screams that seemed smothered violently, and the swish of invisible garments the rush of invisible wings. Then I became conscious that my chamber was invaded, that I was not alone.

8:15I heard signs and breathings about my bed and mysterious whisperings. Feel the little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment and then dropped two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow they spattered liquidly and felt warm. The intuition told me that they had turned to gouts of blood as they fell. I needed no light to satisfy myself of that. Then I saw palad faces dimly luminous and white uplifted hands, floating bodyless in the air, floating a moment and then disappearing.

9:21The whispering ceased, and the voices and the sounds an all-assolumn stillness followed. I waited and listened. I felt that I must have light or die. I was weak with fear. I slowly raised myself toward a sitting posture and my face came in contact with a clammy hand. All strength went from me, apparently, and I fell back like a stricken invalid. Then I heard the rustle of a garment. It seemed to pass to the door and go out. When everything was still once more, I crept out of bed sick and feeble and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a hundred years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits.

10:24I sat down and fell into a dreary contemplation of that great footprint in the ashes. By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up, and the broad gas flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my very door and paused. The light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and presently

11:26was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched it with fascinating eyes. A pale glow stole over the thing. Gradually its cloudy folds took shape, and arm appeared. One legs then a body, and last a great sad face looked out of the vapor. Stripped of its filmy housings, naked, muscular, and calmly, the majestic card of giant loomed above me. I said, why is it nobody but you? Do you know I have been scared to death for the last two or three hours? Oh, I am most honestly glad to see you.

12:30I wish I had a chair here, don't try to sit down in that thing, but it was too late. He was in it before I could stop him, and down he went. I never saw a chair shivered so in my life, stop, stop. You'll ruin it too late again. There was another crash, and another chair was resolved into his original elements. Kind of found it, haven't you got any judgment at all? Do you want to ruin all the furniture on the place here here? You petrified fool, but it was no use. Before I could arrest him, he had sat down on the bed, and it was a melancholy ruin. Now what sort of a way is that to do? First you come lumbering about the place, bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume, which would

13:38not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people, except in a respectable theater, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex. You repay me by wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on, and why will you? You damage yourself as much as you do me. You have broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with chips of your arms till the place looks like a marble yard. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You are big enough to know better. Well, I will not break any more furniture, but what am I to do? I have not had a chance to sit down for as unsure. The tears came into his eyes. Poor devil, I said. I should not have been so harsh with you.

14:40And you are an orphan too, no doubt, but sit down on the floor here. Nothing else can stand your weight, and besides we cannot be sociable with you away up there above me. I want you down where I can perch on this high-counten-house stool and gossip with your face to face. So he sat down on the floor and lit a pipe which I gave him through one of my red blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sits-bath on his head, helmet-fashion, and made himself picture-esque and comfortable. Then he crossed his ankles while I renewed the fire and exposed the flat honey combed the bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth. What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your legs that they are gauged up so?

15:43In fernel's jowl blades I caught them clear up to the back of my head and roosting out their undernoons form, but I love the place. I love it as one loves his old home. There is no peace for me like the peace I feel when I am there. We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked tired and spoke of it. Tire, he said, well, I should think so, and now I will tell you all about it since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the petrified man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the ghost of the cart of a giant.

16:43I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do to make men satisfy this wish? Thereof I am into it, haunt the place where the body lay, so I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me. What it did no good for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight, then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing, I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that tradition could furnish.

17:46Night after night we have shivered around through these mill-lewed halls, dragging the chains, ruining, whispering, or trumping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out. But when I saw a light in your room tonight, I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. All time tired out, entirely fagged out. Oh, give me, I beseech you, give me some hope. I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement and exclaimed, this transcends everything, everything that ever did occur. Why, you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing.

18:48You have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself. The real card if giant is an Albany. A fact, the original fraud was ingeniously and fraudfully duplicated and exhibited in New York as the only genuine card of giant to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real classes, at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a museum is Albany. Can't found it, don't you know your own remains? I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiful humiliation, overspread accountants before. The petrified man rose slowly to his feet and said, honestly, is that true?

19:56As true as I am sitting here, he took the pot from his mouth and laid it on the mantle. Then stood irresolute a moment, unconsciously from old habit, thrust in his hands, where his pantaloon pockets should have been, and meditatively dropped in his chin on his breast, and finally said, well, I never felt so absurd before. The petrified man has sold everybody else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own ghost, my son. If there is any charity left in your heart for a poor, friendless phantom like me, don't let this get out.

20:59Think how you would feel if you had made such an ass of yourself. I heard his stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs, and out into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone. Poor fellow, and sorry or still, that he had carried off my red blanket and my bath tub. End of a ghost's tale.