No More Learning

It
is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens
and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp. That is
the hair sitting up.

There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made
by one thing--a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at great length
with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one
bed, one table, and two chairs--all the furniture of the room next to
mine--could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards.
After another cannon, a three--cushion one to judge by the whir, I
argued no more. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have
escaped from that dak-bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the
game grew clearer.

There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a double
click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people
were playing billiards in the next room. And the next room was not big
enough to hold a billiard table!

Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward--stroke
after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that
attempt was a failure.

Do you know what fear is?
Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death,
but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see--fear that
dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat--fear that makes
you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula
at work? This is a fine Fear--a great cowardice, and must be felt to
be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dak-bungalow
proved the reality of the thing. No man--drunk or sober--could imagine a
game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a "screw-cannon. "

A severe course of dak-bungalows has this disadvantage--it
breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed
dak-bungalow-haunter:--"There is a corpse in the next room, and there's
a mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel
have just eloped from a place sixty miles away," the hearer would not
disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or
horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person
fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I
did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores
of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so
surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the
echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the
players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures
who could play in the dark would be above such superfluities. I only
know that that was my terror; and it was real.

After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept
because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept
awake.