The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Read online

  Mark of the Beast

  & Other Fantastical Tales

  Rudyard Kipling

  Fantasy Masterworks Volume 50

  eGod

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Neil Gaiman

  The Vampire

  The Dream of Duncan Parrenness

  The City of Dreadful Night

  An Indian Ghost Story in England

  The Phantom ’Rickshaw

  The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes

  The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau

  In the House of Suddhoo

  The Bisara of Pooree

  Haunted Subalterns

  By Word of Mouth

  The Recurring Smash

  The Dreitarbund

  Bubbling Well Road

  The Sending of Dana Da

  My Own True Ghost Story

  Sleipner, Late Thurinda

  The Man Who Would Be King

  The Solid Muldoon

  Baboo Mookerji’s Undertaking

  The Joker

  The Wandering Jew

  The Courting of Dinah Shadd

  The Mark of the Beast

  At the End of the Passage

  The Recrudescence of Imray

  The Finances of the Gods

  The Finest Story in the World

  Children of the Zodiac

  The Lost Legion

  A Matter of Fact

  The Bridge-Builders

  The Brushwood Boy

  The Tomb of His Ancestors

  Wireless

  ‘They’

  With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD

  The House Surgeon

  The Knife and the Naked Chalk

  In the Same Boat

  As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD

  Swept and Garnished

  Mary Postgate

  The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat

  A Madonna of the Trenches

  The Wish House

  The Gardener

  The Eye of Allah

  On the Gate: A Tale of ’16

  The Appeal

  Afterword: Rudyard Kipling: A Life in Stories by Stephen Jones

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following individuals for their help and inspiration in the compiling of this volume: Jo Fletcher, Mandy Slater, Peter Haining, Sara and Randy Broecker, Kim Newman and The Kipling Society (www.kipling.org.uk). Very special thanks to Mike Ashley.

  Introduction: Neil Gaiman copyright © September 2006.

  ‘The Vampire’ from The Vampire (1897).

  ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ from Civil and Military Gazette, December 25, 1884.

  ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ from Civil and Military Gazette, September 10, 1885.

  ‘An Indian Ghost Story in England’ from Pioneer, December 10,1885.

  ‘The Phantom ’Rickshaw’ from Quartette, December 1885.

  ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ from Quartette, December 1885.

  ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau’ from Quartette, December 1885.

  ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ from Civil and Military Gazette, April 30, 1886.

  ‘The Bisara of Pooree’ from Civil and Military Gazette, March 4,1887.

  ‘Haunted Subalterns’ from Civil and Military Gazette, May 27, 1887.

  ‘By Word of Mouth’ from Civil and Military Gazette, June 10, 1887.

  ‘The Recurring Smash’ from Civil and Military Gazette, October 13,1887.

  ‘The Dreitarbund’ from Civil and Military Gazette, October 22, 1887.

  ‘Bubbling Well Road’ from Civil and Military Gazette, January 18,1888.

  ‘The Sending of Dana Da’ from The Week’s News, February 11, 1888.

  ‘My Own True Ghost Story’ from The Week’s News, February 25,1888.

  ‘Sleipner, Late Thurinda’ from The Week’s News, May 12,1888.

  ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ from The Phantom ’Rickshaw & Other Eerie Tales(1888).

  ‘The Solid Muldoon’ from The Week’s News, June 2, 1888.

  ‘Baboo Mookerji’s Undertaking’ from Civil and Military Gazette, September 1, 1888.

  ‘The Joker’ from Pioneer, January 1, 1889.

  ‘The Wandering Jew’ from Civil and Military Gazette, April 4,1889.

  ‘The Courting of Dinah Shadd’ from Macmillan’s Magazine and Harper’s Weekly, March 1890.

  ‘The Mark of the Beast’ from Pioneer, July 12 and 14, 1890.

  ‘At the End of the Passage’ from The Boston Herald, July 20,1890.

  ‘The Recrudescence of Imray’ from Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (1891).

  ‘The Finances of the Gods’ from Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People(1891).

  ‘The Finest Story in the World’ from The Contemporary Review, July 1891.

  ‘Children of the Zodiac’ from Harper’s Weekly, December 1891.

  ‘The Lost Legion’ from The Strand Magazine, May 1892.

  ‘A Matter of Fact’ from A Matter of Fact (1892).

  ‘The Bridge-Builders’ from Illustrated London News, Christmas Number, 1893.

  ‘The Brushwood Boy’ from Century Magazine, December 1895.

  ‘The Tomb of His Ancestors’ from Pearson’s Magazine and McClure’s Magazine, December 1897.

  ‘Wireless’ from Scribner’s Magazine, August 1902.

  ‘They’ from Scribner’s Magazine, August 1904.

  ‘With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD’from Mclure’s Magazine, November 1905.

  ‘The House Surgeon’ from Harper’s Magazine, September and October 1909.

  ‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk’ from Rewards and Fairies (1910).

  ‘In the Same Boat’ from Harper’s Magazine, December 1911.

  ‘As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD’from Family Magazine, February-March 1912.

  ‘Swept and Garnished’ from Pall Mall Magazine and Century Magazine, January 1915.

  ‘Mary Postgate’ from Nash’s Magazine and Century Magazine, September 1915.

  ‘The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat’ from A Diversity of Creatures (1917).

  ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ from Pall Mall Magazine, September 1924.

  ‘The Wish House’ from Maclean’s Magazine, October 15, 1924.

  ‘The Gardener’ from McCall’sMagazine, April 1925.

  ‘The Eye of Allah’ from McCall’s Magazine and The Strand Magazine, September 1925.

  ‘On the Gate: A Tale of ‘16’ from McCall’s Magazine, June 1926.

  ‘The Appeal’ from Collected Verse (1939).

  Afterword: ‘Rudyard Kipling: A Life in Stories’ copyright © Stephen Jones 2006.

  Your Gods and my Gods –

  do you of I know which are the stronger?

  —Native Proverb

  INTRODUCTION

  Years ago, back when I was just starting to write Sandman, I was interviewed, and in the interview I was asked to name some of my favourite authors. I listed happily and with enthusiasm. Several weeks later, when the interview had been printed, a fan letter arrived at DC Comics for me, and was forwarded to me. It was from three young men who wanted to know how I could possibly have listed Kipling as a favourite author, given that I was a trendy young man and Kipling was, I was informed, a fascist and a racist and a generally evil person.

  It was obvious from the letter that they had never actually read any Kipling. More to the point, they had been told not to.

  I doubt I am the only person who writes replies to letters in his head he never sends. In my head I wrote many pages in reply, and then I never wr
ote it down or sent it.

  In truth, Kipling’s politics are not mine. But then, it would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place. Kipling was many things that I am not, and I like that in my authors. And besides, Kipling is an astonishing writer, and was arguably at his best in the short story form.

  I wanted to explain to my correspondents why ‘The Gardener’ had affected me so deeply, as a reader and as a writer – it’s a story I read once, believing every word, all the way to the end, where I understood the encounter the woman had had, then started again at the beginning, understanding now the tone of voice and what I was being told. It was a tour de force. It’s a story about loss, and lies, and what it means to be humanand to have secrets, and it can and does and should break your heart.

  I learned from Kipling. At least two stories of mine (and a children’s book I am currently writing) would not exist had he not written.

  Kipling wrote about people, and his people feel very real. His tales of the fantastic are chilling, or illuminating or remarkable or sad, because his people breathe and dream. They were alive before the story started, and many of them live on once the last line has been read. His stories provoke emotion and reaction – at least one of the stories in this volume revolts me on a hundred levels, and has given me nightmares, and I would not have missed reading it for worlds. Besides, I would not have told my correspondents, Kipling was a poet, as much a poet of the dispossessed as he was a poet of Empire.

  I said none of those things back then, and I wished that I had. So when Steve Jones asked me to write the introduction to this book, I said yes. Because I’ve said them now, to you. Trust the tale, not the teller, as Stephen King reminded us. And the best of Rudyard Kipling’s tales are, simply, in the first rank of stories written in the English language.

  Enjoy them.

  Neil Gaiman

  THE VAMPIRE

  A fool there was and he made his prayer

  (Even as you or I!)

  To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,

  (We called her the woman who did not care),

  But the fool he called her his lady fair—

  (Even as you or I!)

  Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste,

  And the work of our head and hand

  Belong to the woman who did not know

  (And now we know that she never could know)

  And did not understand!

  A fool there was and his goods he spent,

  (Even as you or I!)

  Honour and faith and a sure intent

  (And it wasn’t the least what the lady meant),

  But a fool must follow his natural bent

  (Even as you or I!)

  Oh, the toil we lost and the spoil we lost

  And the excellent things we planned

  Belong to the woman who didn’t know why

  (And now we know that she never knew why)

  And did not understand!

  The fool was stripped to his foolish hide,

  (Even as you or I!)

  Which she might have seen when she threw him aside—

  (But it isn’t on record the lady tried)

  So some of him lived but the most of him died—

  (Even as you or I!)

  ‘And it isn’t the shame and it isn’t the blame

  That stings like a white-hot brand—

  It’s coming to know that she never knew why

  (Seeing, at last, she could never know why)

  And never could understand!’

  THE DREAM OF DUNCAN PARRENNESS

  Like Mr Bunyan of old, I, Duncan Parrenness, Writer to the most Honourable the East India Company, in this God-forgotten city of Calcutta, have dreamed a dream, and never since that Kitty my mare fell lame have I been so troubled. Therefore, lest I should forget my dream, I have made shift to set it down here. Though Heaven knows how unhandy the pen is to me who was always readier with sword than ink-horn when I left London two long years since.

  When the Governor-General’s great dance (that he gives yearly at the latter end of November) was finisht, I had gone to mine own room which looks over that sullen, un-English stream, the Hoogly, scarce so sober as I might have been. Now, roaring drunk in the West is but fuddled in the East, and I was drunk Nor’-Nor’ Easterly as Mr Shakespeare might have said. Yet, in spite of my liquor, the cool night winds (though I have heard that they breed chills and fluxes innumerable) sobered me somewhat; and I remembered that I had been but a little wrung and wasted by all the sickness of the past four months, whereas those young bloods that came eastward with me in the same ship had been all, a month back, planted to Eternity in the foul soil north of Writers’ Buildings. So then, I thanked God mistily (though, to my shame, I never kneeled down to do so) for license to live, at least till March should be upon us again. Indeed, we that were alive (and our number was less by far than those who had gone to their last account in the hot weather late past) had made very merry that evening, by the ramparts of the Fort, over this kindness of Providence; though our jests were neither witty nor such as I should have liked my Mother to hear.

  When I had laid down (or rather thrown me on my bed) and the fumes of my drink had a little cleared away, I found that I could get no sleep for thinking of a thousand things that were better left alone. First, and it was a long time since I had thought of her, the sweet face of Kitty Somerset, drifted as it might have been drawn in a picture, across the foot of my bed, so plainly, that I almost thought she had been present in the body. Then I remembered how she drove me to this accursed country to get rich, that I might the more quickly marry her, our parents on both sides giving their consent; and then how she thought better (or worse may be) of her troth, and wed Tom Sanderson but a short three months after I had sailed. From Kitty I fell a musing on Mrs Vansuythen, a tall pale woman with violet eyes that had come to Calcutta from the Dutch Factory at Chinsura, and had set all our young men, and not a few of the factors, by the ears. Some of our ladies, it is true, said that she had never a husband or marriage-lines at all; but women, and specially those who have led only indifferent good lives themselves, are cruel hard one on another. Besides, Mrs Vansuythen was far prettier than them all. She had been most gracious to me at the Governor-General’s rout and indeed I was looked upon by all as her preux chevalier – which is French for a much worse word. Now, whether I cared so much as the scratch of a pin for this same Mrs Vansuythen (albeit I had vowed eternal love three days after we met) I knew not then nor did till later on; but mine own pride, and a skill in the small sword that no man in Calcutta could equal, kept me in her affections. So that I believed I worshipt her.

  When I had dismist her violet eyes from my thoughts, my reason approacht me for ever having followed her at all; and I saw how the one year that I had lived in this land had so burnt and seared my mind with the flames of a thousand bad passions and desires, that I had aged ten months for each one in the Devil’s school. Whereat I thought of my Mother for a while, and was very penitent: making in my sinful tipsy mood a thousand vows of reformation – all since broken, I fear me, again and again. Tomorrow, says I to myself, I will livecleanly for ever. And I smiled dizzily (the liquor being still strong in me) to think of the dangers I had escaped; and built all manner of fine Castles in Spain, whereof a shadowy Kitty Somerset that had the violet eyes and the sweet slow speech of Mrs Vansuythen, was always Queen.

  Lastly, a very fine and magnificent courage (that doubtless had its birth in Mr Hastings’ Madeira) grew upon me, till it seemed that I could become Governor-General, Nawab, Prince, ay, even the Great Mogul himself, by the mere wishing of it. Wherefore, taking my first steps, random and unstable enough, towards my new kingdom, I kickt my servants sleeping without till they howled and ran from me, and called Heaven and Earth to witn
ess that I, Duncan Parrenness, was a Writer in the service of the Company and afraid of no man. Then, seeing that neither the Moon nor the Great Bear were minded to accept my challenge, I lay down again and must have fallen asleep.

  I was waked presently by my last words repeated two or three times, and I saw that there had come into the room a drunken man, as I thought, from Mr Hastings’ rout. He sate down at the foot of my bed in all the world as it belonged to him, and I took note, as well as I could, that his face was somewhat like mine own grown older, save when it changed to the face of the Governor-General or my father, dead these six months. But this seemed to me only natural, and the due result of too much wine; and I was so angered at his entry all unannounced, that I told him, not over civilly, to go. To all my words he made no answer whatever, only saying slowly, as though it were some sweet morsel: ‘Writer in the Company’s service and afraid of no man.’ Then he stops short, and turning round sharp upon me, says that one of my kidney need fear neither man nor devil; that I was a brave young man, and like enough, should I live so long, to be Governor-General. But for all these things (and I suppose that he meant thereby the changes and chances of our shifty life in these parts) I must pay my price. By this time I had sobered somewhat, and being well waked out of my first sleep, was disposed to look upon the matter as a tipsy man’s jest. So, says I merrily: ‘And what priceshall I pay for this palace of mine, which is but twelve feet square, and my five poor pagodas a month? The devil take you and your jesting: I have paid my price twice over in sickness.’ At that moment my man turns full towards me: so that by the moonlight I could see every line and wrinkle of his face. Then my drunken mirth died out of me, as I have seen the waters of our great rivers die away in one night; and I, Duncan Parrenness, who was afraid of no man, was taken with a more deadly terror than I hold it has ever been the lot of mortal man to know. For I saw that his face was my very own, but marked and lined and scarred with the furrows of disease and much evil living – as I once, when I was (Lord help me) very drunk indeed, have seen mine own face, all white and drawn and grown old, in a mirror. I take it that any man would have been even more greatly feared than I; for I am, in no way wanting in courage.