Лучшие мистические истории на английском / The Stories of Mystery

The house itself was all that such a house should be, Jacobean[13 - Jacobean (house) – архитектурный стиль времен правления Р?акова I Рё Карла I (XVIIВ РІ.) Характеризуется смешением стилей европейского Возрождения.] and oak-panelled, with long dark passages and high vaulted rooms. It stood, also, very remote, and was encompassed by a wood of somber pines that muttered and whispered in the dark, and all the time that we were there a southwesterly gale with torrents of scolding rain had prevailed, so that by day and night weird voices moaned and fluted in the chimneys, a company of uneasy spirits held colloquy among the trees, and sudden tattoos and tappings beckoned from the window-panes.

But in spite of these surroundings, which were sufficient in themselves, one would almost say, to spontaneously generate occult phenomena, nothing of any description had occurred. I am bound to add, also, that my own state of mind was peculiarly well adapted to receive or even to invent the sights and sounds we had gone to seek, for I was, I confess, during the whole time that we were there, in a state of abject apprehension, and lay awake both nights through hours of terrified unrest, afraid of the dark, yet more afraid of what a lighted candle might show me.

Hugh Grainger, on the evening after our return to town, had dined with me, and after dinner our conversation, as was natural, soon came back to these entrancing topics.

�But why you go ghost-seeking I cannot imagine,’ he said, �because your teeth were chattering and your eyes starting out of your head all the time you were there, from sheer fright. Or do you like being frightened?’

Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways; this is one of them.

�Why, of course, I like being frightened,’ I said. �I want to be made to creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions.

One forgets all else if one is afraid.’

�Well, the fact that neither of us saw anything,’ he said, �confirms what I have always believed.’

�And what have you always believed?’

�That these phenomena are purely objective, not subjective, and that one’s state of mind has nothing to do with the perception that perceives them, nor have circumstances or surroundings anything to do with them either. Look at Osburton.