Unknown - The Empty House

Ruskin Bond has been writing for over sixty years, and now has over 120 titles in printnovels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, received the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Award in 1957. He has also received the Padma Shri (1999), the Padma Bhushan (2014) and two awards from Sahitya Akademione for his short stories and another for his writings for children. In 2012, the Delhi government gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Born in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Shimla, New Delhi and Dehradun. Apart from three years in the UK, he has spent all his life in India, and now lives in Mussoorie with his adopted family.

Selected and Compiled by

RUSKIN BOND

Published by

Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2016

7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

New Delhi 110002

Copyright Ruskin Bond 2016

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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: 97881291

First impression 2016

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 publishers prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Rudyard Kipling

Alice Perrin

Algernon Blackwood

Lady Eleanor Smith

Herbert A. Miles

R. L. Stevenson

Anonymous

Perceval Landon

H. Russell Wakefield

Frederick Marryat

Ruskin Bond

Strange creatures that appear as if from nowhere, travelling companions with hair-raising supernatural tales, people with terrible deep dark secretsthese are some of the common threads in the stories in this collection. I must admit I am partial to stories where the suspense is heightened by the writers use of exotic locations. Some poor man or woman dropped into this mysterious locale has to contend with terrible uncanny spectacles.

The Empty House is a classic story of this kind, though there the writer-narrator doesnt have to travel anywhere too far. His aunt summons him to come explore the empty house with her. It looks like every other house on that street but has a dreadful past and holds its secrets close. As soon as the narrators enter the house, they know that something or someone is watching them. A someone who clearly doesnt like their presence there.

The story of Chuniya, Ayah is from Alice Perrins highly readable and engaging collection of tales from her travels during the Raj. East of Suez is full of exciting and eccentric characters and the account of this ayah, in particular, shows that if she had stayed well away from children, it would have ended on a happier note for everyone.

Vengeful animals or those that carry the spirit of something out of the ordinary appear in a few stories. In The Return of Imray there are plenty of such creatures, from deadly kraits to a dog who can sense the malevolent presence of a dead man. The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains is a particularly hair-raising story set in a stark landscape. The extreme anxiety of the children in the story, the desperation of the father dealing with poverty and his own instincts and then the appearance of the white wolf in their lonely and friendless lives have the makings of an exotic story of revenge and retribution.

I have included here some authors I have read extensively over the yearsKipling, Perrin, R. L. Stevenson. I do hope they are still read today, for their stories though old, contain ideas and thoughts that have lived on. They will appeal to anyone who likes a good tale. As for some of the others whose works are included here, maybe reading them in this book will make you go out and search out their other writings.

This collection is for every reader who has been mesmerized by the possibility of something extraordinary living and breathing out there that we barely sense as we go about our everyday lives. I hope you enjoy this collection as much as I had reading these stories once again while choosing them for you.

Ruskin Bond

The doors were wide, the story saith,

Out of the night came the patient wraith,

He might not speak, and he could not stir

A hair of the Barons minniver

Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin,

He roved the castle to seek his kin.

And oh, twas a piteous thing to see

The dumb ghost follow his enemy!

THE BARON

I mray achieved the impossible. Without warning, for no conceivable motive, in his youth, at the threshold of his career he chose to disappear from the worldwhich is to say, the little Indian station where he lived.

Upon a day he was alive, well, happy, and in great evidence among the billiard-tables at his Club. Upon a morning, he was not, and no manner of search could make sure where he might be. He had stepped out of his place; he had not appeared at his office at the proper time, and his dog cart was not upon the public roads. For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray. Ponds were dragged, wells were plumbed, telegrams were despatched down the lines of railways and to the nearest seaport towntwelve hundred miles away; but Imray was not at the end of the drag-ropes nor the telegraph wires. He was gone, and his place knew him no more.

Then the work of the great Indian Empire swept forward, because it could not be delayed, and Imray from being a man became a mysterysuch a thing as men talk over at their tables in the Club for a month, and then forget utterly. His guns, horses and carts were sold to the highest bidder. His superior officer wrote an altogether absurd letter to his mother, saying that Imray had unaccountably disappeared, and his bungalow stood empty.

After three or four months of the scorching hot weather had gone by, my friend Strickland, of the Police, saw fit to rent the bungalow from the native landlord. This was before he was engaged to Miss Youghalan affair which has been described in another placeand while he was pursuing his investigations into native life. His own life was sufficiently peculiar, and men complained of his manners and customs. There was always food in his house, but there were no regular times for meals. He ate, standing up and walking about, whatever he might find at the sideboard, and this is not good for human beings. His domestic equipment was limited to six rifles, three shotguns, five saddles, and a collection of stiff-jointed mahseer-rods, bigger and stronger than the largest salmon-rods. These occupied half of his bungalow, and the other half was given up to Strickland and his dog Tietjensan enormous Rampur slut who devoured daily the rations of two men. She spoke to Strickland in a language of her own; and whenever, walking abroad, she saw things calculated to destroy the peace of Her Majesty the QueenEmpress, she returned to her master and laid information. Strickland would take steps at once, and the end of his labours was trouble and fine and imprisonment for other people. The natives believed that Tietjens was a familiar spirit, and treated her with the great reverence that is born of hate and fear. One room in the bungalow was set apart for her special use. She owned a bedstead, a blanket, and a drinking-trough, and if any one came into Stricklands room at night her custom was to knock down the invader and give tongue till someone came with a light. Strickland owed his life to her, when he was on the frontier, in search of a local murderer, who came in the gray dawn to send Strickland much farther than the Andaman Islands. Tietjens caught the man as he was crawling into Stricklands tent with a dagger between his teeth; and after his record of iniquity was established in the eyes of the law he was hanged. From that date, Tietjens wore a collar of rough silver, and employed a monogram on her night-blanket; and the blanket was of double woven Kashmir cloth, for she was a delicate dog.