“Remorseless Vengeance” (1902)

I like this story by Guy Boothby, though maybe not as much as the title, which is so grim it’s comical. It’s another horror story set at Christmastime that is hard to call Christmassy. Perhaps it’s more in the spirit if read aloud after dark. It has an exotic setting with a sailor’s story of being down and out in Batavia (now Jakarta), Indonesia. The juxtaposition with Christmas as we know it is much of what makes the story work (albeit in a somewhat colonialist frame). As you probably guessed from the title, it’s a story of betrayal and retribution, with lots of intrigue and shady motivations. Our first-person narrator is stranded by sickness. Now just recovering and in debt, he is approached by a Captain Berringer who is well known in the story. He wants help abducting a certain general because, as revealed later, this general executed Berringer’s brother by hanging him the year before on Christmas day. We’re not told why. Once the general has been taken and is aboard Berringer’s ship it turns out Berringer intends to hang him in revenge, also on Christmas. Our guy (the first-person narrator and stranded sailor) is part of it now and tries to talk Berringer out of the murder. But Berringer is set on it. That night the ghost of the dead brother appears to Berringer and tells him to back off—the revenge is his to take. Berringer disagrees. “I’ve passed my word, and I’ll not depart from it,” he says. “Ghost or no ghost, he hangs at sunrise.” The next morning, as preparation for the hanging goes forward, Berringer sees something that frightens him to death. Meanwhile the general has died in his bed. A witness says, “God help me—you never saw such a sight! It looked as if he were fighting with someone whom we could not see, and was being slowly strangled.” That’s pretty much the end of the story. Good night, children, sleep tight! Santa Claus comes tonight. And so forth. In fact, I’m a little surprised, now that I have figured out these things exist, that I could not find anyone reading it aloud for a youtube video. It works reasonably well, even if I prefer horror stories that feel at least a little Christmassy, if they’re going to use the holiday. I also like the untidiness of this story, with things left unexplained. Why was the brother hanged? Why wouldn’t the living brother, Captain Berringer, defer to his ghost brother? Why did Berringer die? Don’t know, don’t know—and that’s the way it should be, when you can pull it off, as I would say this story does. Balancing explanation and the lack of it is tricky business. Here it’s used to confuse us a little and throw us off just when the story, which requires a fair amount of setup, seems to be getting predictable. The ending does not feel predictable at all even though in many ways it is.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Story not available online.