Vintage Scary Stories for the Modern Ghost Volume 2

The Story of the Moor Road

By K. and H. Hesketh-Prichard

"The medical profession must always have its own peculiar offshoots," said Mr. Flaxman Low, "some are trades, some are mere hobbies, others, again, are allied subjects of a serious and profound nature. Now, as a student of psychological phenomena, I account myself only two degrees removed from the ordinary general practitioner."

"How do you make that out?" returned Colonel Daimley, pushing the decanter of old port invitingly across the table.

"The nerve and brain specialist is the link between myself and the man you would send for if you had a touch of lumbago," replied Low, with a slight smile. "Each division is but a higher grade of the same ladder – a step upwards into the unknown. I consider that I stand just one step above the specialist who makes a study of brain disease and insanity; he is at work on the disorders of the embodied spirit, while I deal with abnormal conditions of the free and detached spirit."

Colonel Daimley laughed aloud. "That won't do, Low! No, no! First prove that your ghosts are sick."

"Certainly," replied Low gravely. "A very small proportion of spirits return as apparitions after the death of the body. Hence we may conclude that a ghost is a spirit in an abnormal condition. Abnormal conditions of the body usually indicate disease; why not of the spirit also?"

"That sounds fair enough,' observed Lane Chaddam, the third man present. "Has the Colonel told you of our spook?"

The Colonel shook his handsome grey head in some irritation. "You haven't convinced me yet, Lane, that it is a spook,' he said dryly. "Human nature is at the bottom of most things in this world according to my opinion."

"What spook is this?" asked Flaxman Low.

"I heard nothing of it when I was down with you last year."

"It's a recent acquisition,' replied Lane Chaddam. "I wish we were rid of it, for my part."

"Have you seen it?" asked Low as he relit his long German pipe.

"Yes, and felt it!"

"What is it?"

"That's for you to say. He nearly broke my neck for me – that's all I can swear to."

Low knew Chaddam well. He was a long-limed, athletic young fellow, with a good show of cups in his rooms, and was one of the various short-distance runners mentioned in the Badminton as having done the hundred in level time, and not the sort of man whose neck is easy to break.

"How did it happen?" asked Flaxman Low.

"About a fortnight ago," replied Chaddam. "I was flight-shooting near the burn where the hounds killed the otter last year. When the light began to fail, I thought I would come home by the old quarry, and pot anything that showed itself. As I walked along the far bank of the burn, I saw a man on the near side standing on the patch of sand below the reeds and watching me. As I came nearer I heard him coughing; it sounded like a sick cow. He stood still as if waiting for me. I thought it odd, because amongst the meres and water-meadows down there one never meets a stranger."

"Could you see him pretty clearly?"

"I saw his outline pretty clearly, but not his face, because his back was toward the west. He was tall and jerry-built so to speak, and had a little head no bigger than a child's, and he wore a fur cap with queer upstanding ears. When I came close, he suddenly slipped away, he jumped behind a big dyke, and I lost sight of him. But I didn't pay much attention; I had my gun, and I concluded it was a tramp."

"Tramps don't follow men of your size," observed Low, with a smile.

"This fellow did, at any rate. When I got across to the spot where he had been standing – the sand is soft there – I looked for his tracks. I knew he was bound to have a big foot of his own considering his height. But there were no footprints!"