Page:Weird Tales v01n02 (1923-04).djvu/35



ELL, the ghosts of the men hung at Is-Sur-Tille have company. For myself, I wouldn't even want a photograph of the place. No, sir, not me. I can remember it without that. That's why they've put me in this hospital with all these crazy people. Yet a tortoise shell comb is as good an alibi as any

"What? Ghosts? No sir, of course not; I don’t believe in 'em, not on this side of the Atlantic who ever told you I believed in ghosts.

"The hospital interne? If they'd kept me 'round that chateau in the woods at Is-Sur-Tille, it might 'a' been different. It had a queer story about it, that chateau. That's what set me off; that and the fact that I never did like Captain Bott.

"He was hardboiled, that guy was. No, sir; he didn't own that French chateau, although at one time he acted as though he thought he did I'm coming to that.

"Over there the frogs said the original owner of the place, in his youth. had fallen madly in love with a young girl and married her. He must 'a' been crazy about her all right because, according to their story, he often was seen combing her hair—yes, sir, the French folks are like that; that's romance—combing her long red hair as it hung over the back of her chair, touching the floor.

"I particularly remember that they said her hair was long, very long, and red, like copper is red in candle light. After a year, she died, suddenly, of heart disease—'killed by love itself,' one of the frogs said; that's romance, and he, her husband, the owner of that chateau there in the woods at Is-Sur-Tille, left that part of the country on the very day of her funeral. The place, probably, is there yet, like it was when I saw it, late in the summer of 1918.

"The house was set back from the road among the trees. It looked, then, as though it had been deserted for a long time. Most of the furniture had been removed from it, except in one room—I'm coming to that—and the gate leading into the yard had fallen open on one rusty hinge. Grass filled the paths; and you couldn’t tell the flowerbeds from the lawns except by the weeds.

"Nobody had used the place, even in wartime, until our outfit was billeted at Is-Sur-Tille. That ghost story of a dead bride begging some one to comb her hair had kept the Frenchies off the place. But Captain Bott was a hard-boiled guy.

"We went into the house late one afternoon, Captain Bott and me. He led the way into the kitchen and through the first floor into a large hall, where the stairs went up to the floor above. Dust was over everything. The only room in the house that looked at all as though it had been occupied in years was that bedroom upstairs where, they had told us, the bride had slept and died. We recognized it because it was the only room in the house where the door was shut.

"We opened it—that is, Captain Bott did—and went in. I stood in the doorway until he swore at me and ordered me to follow him in. The room smelled moldy. It smelled