subject, and was laughingly informed that she might go anywhere about
the place she pleased, saving to one spot, namely, "Bluebeard's
Chamber"; and there she could certainly never succeed in poking her
nose, as its locality was known only to three people, all of whom were
pledged never to reveal it. At the commencement of her tour of
inspection, Mrs. Gibbons was disappointed--she was disappointed in the
Tower. She had expected to see a gaunt, grim place, crumbling to
pieces with age, full of blood-curdling, spiral staircases, and deep,
dark dungeons; whereas everything was the reverse. The walls were in
an excellent state of preservation--absolutely intact; the rooms
bright and cheerful and equipped in the most modern style; there were
no dungeons, at least none on view, and the passages and staircases
were suggestive of nothing more alarming than--bats! She was
accompanied for some time by her relative, but, on the latter being
called away, Mrs. Gibbons continued her rambles alone. She had
explored the lower premises, and was leisurely examining a handsomely
furnished apartment on the top floor, when, in crossing from one side
of the room to the other, she ran into something. She looked
down--nothing was to be seen. Amazed beyond description, she thrust
out her hands, and they alighted on an object, which she had little
difficulty in identifying. It was an enormous cask or barrel lying in
a horizontal position.

She bent down close to where she felt it, but she could see
nothing--nothing but the well-polished boards of the floor. To make
sure again that the barrel was there, she gave a little kick--and drew
back her foot with a cry of pain. She was not afraid--the sunshine in
the room forbade fear--only exasperated. She was certain a barrel was
there--that it was objective--and she was angry with herself for not
seeing it. She wondered if she were going blind; but the fact that
other objects in the room were plainly visible to her, discountenanced
such an idea. For some minutes she poked and jabbed at the Thing, and
then, seized with a sudden and uncontrollable panic, she turned round
and fled. And as she tore out of the room, along the passage and down
the seemingly interminable flight of stairs, she heard the barrel
behind her in close pursuit-bump--bump--bump!

At the foot of the staircase Mrs. Gibbons met her cousin, and, as she
clutched the latter for support, the barrel shot past her, still
continuing its descent--bump--bump--bump! (though the steps as far as
she could see had ended)--till the sounds gradually dwindled away in
the far distance.

Whilst the manifestations lasted, neither Mrs. Gibbons nor her cousin
spoke; but the latter, as soon as the sounds had ceased, dragged Mrs.
Gibbons away, and, in a voice shaking with terror, cried: "Quick,
quick--don't, for Heaven's sake, look round--worse has yet to come."
And, pulling Mrs. Gibbons along in breathless haste, she
unceremoniously hustled her out of the Tower.

"That was no barrel!" Mrs. Gibbons's cousin subsequently remarked by
way of explanation. "I saw it--I have seen it before. Don't ask me to
describe it. I dare not--I dare not even think of it. Whenever it
appears, a certain thing happens shortly afterwards. Don't, don't on
any account say a word about it to any one here." And Mrs. Gibbons, my
mother told me, came away from Glamis a thousand times more curious
than she was when she went.

The last story I have to relate is one I heard many years ago, when I
was staying near Balmoral. A gentleman named Vance, with strong
antiquarian tastes, was staying at an inn near the Strathmore estate,
and, roaming abroad one afternoon, in a fit of absent-mindedness
entered the castle grounds. It so happened--fortunately for him--that
the family were away, and he encountered no one more formidable than a
man he took to be a gardener, an uncouth-looking fellow, with a huge
head covered with a mass of red hair, hawk-like features, and high
cheek-bones, high even for a Scot. Struck with the appearance of the
individual, Mr. Vance spoke, and, finding him wonderfully civil, asked
whether, by any chance, he ever came across any fossils, when digging
in the gardens.

"I dinna ken the meaning of fossils," the man replied. "What are
they?"

Mr. Vance explained, and a look of cunning gradually pervaded the
fellow's features. "No!" he said, "I've never found any of those
things, but if you'll give me your word to say nothing about it, I'll
show you something I once dug up over yonder by the Square Tower."

"Do you mean the Haunted Tower?--the Tower that is supposed to contain
the secret room?" Mr. Vance exclaimed.

An extraordinary expression--an expression such as Mr. Vance found it
impossible to analyse--came into the man's eyes. "Yes! that's it!" he
nodded. "What people call--and rightly call--the Haunted Tower. I got
it from there. But don't you say naught about it!"

Mr. Vance, whose curiosity was roused, promised, and the man, politely
requesting him to follow, led the way to a cottage that stood near by,
in the heart of a gloomy wood. To Mr. Vance's astonishment the
treasure proved to be the skeleton of a hand--a hand with abnormally
large knuckles, and the first joint--of both fingers and thumb--much
shorter than the others. It was the most extraordinarily shaped hand
Mr. Vance had ever seen, and he did not know in the least how to
classify it. It repelled, yet interested him, and he eventually
offered the man a good sum to allow him to keep it. To his
astonishment the money was refused. "You may have the thing, and
welcome," the fellow said. "Only, I advise you not to look at it late
at night; or just before getting into bed. If you do, you may have bad
dreams."

"I will take my chance of that!" Mr. Vance laughed. "You see, being a
hard-headed cockney, I am not superstitious. It is only you
Highlanders, and your first cousins the Irish, who believe nowadays in
bogles, omens, and such-like"; and, packing the hand carefully in his
knapsack, Mr. Vance bid the strange-looking creature good morning, and
went on his way.

For the rest of the day the hand was uppermost in his
thoughts--nothing had ever fascinated him so much. He sat pondering
over it the whole evening, and bedtime found him still examining
it--examining it upstairs in his room by candlelight. He had a hazy
recollection that some clock had struck twelve, and he was beginning
to feel that it was about time to retire, when, in the mirror opposite
him, he caught sight of the door--it was open.

"By Jove! that's odd!" he said to himself. "I could have sworn I shut
and bolted it." To make sure, he turned round--the door was closed.
"An optical delusion," he murmured; "I will try again."

He looked into the mirror--the door reflected in it was--open. Utterly
at a loss to know how to explain the phenomenon, he leaned forward in
his seat to examine the glass more carefully, and as he did so he
gave a start. On the threshold of the doorway was a shadow--black and
bulbous. A cold shiver ran down Mr. Vance's spine, and just for a
moment he felt afraid, terribly afraid; but he quickly composed
himself--it was nothing but an illusion--there was no shadow there in
reality--he had only to turn round, and the thing would be gone. It
was amusing--entertaining. He would wait and see what happened.

The shadow moved. It moved slowly through the air like some huge
spider, or odd-shaped bird. He would not acknowledge that there was
anything sinister about it--only something droll--excruciatingly droll.
Yet it did not make him laugh. When it had drawn a little nearer, he
tried to diagnose it, to discover its material counterpart in one of
the objects around him; but he was obliged to acknowledge his attempts
were failures--there was nothing in the room in the least degree like
it. A vague feeling of uneasiness gradually crept over him--was the
thing the shadow of something with which he was familiar, but could not
just then recall to mind--something he feared--something that was
sinister? He struggled against the idea, he dismissed it as absurd; but
it returned--returned, and took deeper root as the shadow drew nearer.
He wished the house was not quite so silent--that he could hear some
indication of life--anything--anything for companionship, and to rid
him of the oppressive, the very oppressive, sense of loneliness and
isolation.

Again a thrill of terror ran through him.

"Look here!" he exclaimed aloud, glad to hear the sound of his own
voice. "Look here! if this goes on much longer I shall begin to think
I'm going mad. I have had enough, and more than enough, of magic
mirrors for one night--it's high time I got into bed." He strove to
rise from his chair--to move; he was unable to do either; some
strange, tyrannical force held him a prisoner.

A change now took place in the shadow; the blurr dissipated, and the
clearly defined outlines of an object--an object that made Mr. Vance
perfectly sick with apprehension--slowly disclosed themselves. His
suspicions were verified--it was the HAND!--the hand--no longer
skeleton, but covered with green, mouldering flesh--feeling its way
slyly and stealthily towards him--towards the back of his chair! He
noted the murderous twitching of its short, flat finger-tips, the
monstrous muscles of its hideous thumb, and the great, clumsy hollows
of its clammy palm. It closed in upon him; its cold, slimy, detestable
skin touched his coat--his shoulder--his neck--his head! It pressed
him down, squashed, suffocated him! He saw it all in the glass--and
then an extraordinary thing happened. Mr. Vance suddenly became
animated. He got up and peeped furtively round. Chairs, bed, wardrobe,
had all disappeared--so had the bedroom--and he found himself in a
small, bare, comfortless, queerly constructed apartment without a
door, and with only a narrow slit of a window somewhere near the
ceiling.

He had in one of his hands a knife with a long, keen blade, and his
whole mind was bent on murder. Creeping stealthily forward, he
approached a corner of the room, where he now saw, for the first
time--a mattress--a mattress on which lay a huddled-up form. What the
Thing was--whether human or animal--Mr. Vance did not know--did not
care--all he felt was that it was there for him to kill--that he
loathed and hated it--hated it with a hatred such as nothing else
could have produced. Tiptoeing gently up to it, he bent down, and,
lifting his knife high above his head, plunged it into the Thing's
body with all the force he could command.

He recrossed the room, and found himself once more in his apartment at
the inn. He looked for the skeleton hand--it was not where he had left
it--it had vanished. Then he glanced at the mirror, and on its
brilliantly polished surface saw--not his own face--but the face of
the gardener, the man who had given him the hand! Features, colour,
hair--all--all were identical--wonderfully, hideously identical--and
as the eyes met his, they smiled--devilishly.

Early the next day, Mr. Vance set out for the spinney and cottage;
they were not to be found--nobody had ever heard of them. He continued
his travels, and some months later, at a loan collection of pictures
in a gallery in Edinburgh, he came to an abrupt--a very abrupt--halt,
before the portrait of a gentleman in ancient costume. The face
seemed strangely familiar--the huge head with thick, red hair--the
hawk-like features--the thin and tightly compressed lips. Then, in a
trice, it all came back to him: the face he looked at was that of the
uncouth gardener--the man who had given him the hand. And to clinch
the matter, the eyes--leered.

                _Printed by_
            MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED
                _Edinburgh_

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    | Typographical errors corrected in text:                   |
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    | Page  79: 'made a dash as it' at replaced with            |
    |           'made a dash at it'                             |
    | Page  93: spritualist replaced with spiritualist          |
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    | Further Notes:                                            |
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    | For those who may wonder about the word 'lolled' on page  |
    | 84, it really is a word! It means: 1. To move, stand, or  |
    | recline in an indolent or relaxed manner. 2. To hang      |
    | or droop laxly.                                           |
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    | In the original book, each chapter header is on a         |
    | separate page, followed by a blank page and then the      |
    | chapter header again, and then the chapter text. The      |
    | duplicate header has been removed in this document.       |
    |                                                           |
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End of Project Gutenberg's Scottish Ghost Stories, by Elliott O'Donnell