The Case of the Gilded Fly

by Edmund Crispin

  ‘I am now going to tell you a ghost story.’

  ‘No, no!’ cried Fen, starting up in alarm. ‘That’s really not necessary, Wilkes. We can, I hope, succeed in keeping the conversation going without that.’

  ‘I think it will be of interest,’ Wilkes went on inexorably, ‘not only because it concerns this college, but because it happens to be true. Furthermore, unlike the majority of true ghost stories, it is interesting and even a little thrilling. But of course if it will bore you –’ He stared blandly about the gathering.

  ‘Certainly it won’t bore us,’ said Sir Richard, attracting to himself a baleful glance from Fen. ‘Personally, I need a little relaxation.’ He yawned. ‘I feel sleepy.’

  ‘We all do,’ said Nigel, and added hastily: ‘need a little relaxation.’

  ‘Then it will be agreeable to you if I go ahead?’ asked Wilkes.

  Vague murmurs, quite undistinguishable.

  ‘You are quite sure none of you object?’

  More murmurs, perhaps vaguer.

  ‘Very well, then. To a limited extent, this narrative is based on my own experience. I was an undergraduate at the time – towards the close of the last century – and although the minor furore which the affair caused was kept very close indeed, I knew personally several of the people concerned. There were, of course, no Societies for Physical Research in those days, that is to say that although Sidgwick and Myers did start one in 1882, it had little credit – and I have the impression that if any investigation along those lines had been attempted, crucifixes and pentagrams notwithstanding, it could have done little but make a bad business into a worse one. As it was, the President of that time, Sir Arthur Hobbes, took the commonsense view and did the commonsense thing; though whether we succeeded in shutting it in again I suppose we shall never know. Certainly nothing of the same kind has happened since, but somewhere or other there may be a jack-in-the-box waiting for someone to slip the catch a second – no, a third, – time.’

  He paused, and Nigel looked quickly round at the others. Fen, who had begun by fidgeting, was now immobile; Sir Richard lay back with his eyes closed and his hands folded; Robert was listening attentively and smoking, but Nigel had the impression that a corner of his mind was occupied with more important things; Mrs Fen was bent over her knitting. Wilkes went on:

  ‘It began when they pulled down a wall in the antechapel, which, as you know, is situated at the north-east corner of the chancel in our college chapel. The whole of the chapel was restored at that time by a not incompetent architect from London, and eventually left as we have it now. Certainly at the time the fabric was extremely unsound, and could not be left, and on the whole there was little damage done to the original beauty of the building. In any case there was a certain up-and-coming spirit in those days which a little puts to shame our frantic and endless modern attempts at preservation – symbolic, no doubt, of our consciousness of our inability to create new forms of art – and I don’t think any of the Fellows or the chapel committee objected to the renovations, with the exception of old Dr Beddoes, who objected to everything as a matter of habit and was easily enough overruled.

  ‘The history of the college buildings is poorly documented, and we had always been under the impression that the antechapel had been added by one of our Presidents under Charles I as a burial place for himself and his very numerous family. Substantially this proved to be correct, except that the antechapel turned out to be a rebuilding, in part, of an older place, possibly the robing-room of the Benedictine monks whose monastery originally stood on this site, and of which a few fragments still survive in the north quadrangle and the chapel. At all events, the removal of the facing from the north wall of the antechapel – which came down, the workmen said, with almost alarming ease once a start had been made on it – disclosed a much older wall, with a single rough stone slab set in the centre, and which could hardly have been later in date than 1300. Of course this caused a great deal of excitement, and people interested in such things came from all over Oxford to look at it, though the Chaplain, who was holding services in the nave during the restorations, was heard to complain that something or other had succeeded in making the chapel extremely damp, and indeed went down with bronchitis a day later, so that the services had to be taken by the President, and he was so unused to it that as often as not the liturgy and the thirty-fourth article went completely by the board.

  ‘The slab of which I have spoken had been inset a good deal later than the construction of the wall, and had on it four brief inscriptions – or rather three inscriptions and a later addition in indelible chalk or ink. First of all there was the date – 1556 – which showed it to have been erected about the time of the martyrdoms. Then a single name: Johannes Kettenburgus. The librarian, who was fairly well up in the college records, easily traced a reference to one John Kettenburgh, a student of the college from 1554, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Reformation party, and who, as far as could be judged from a somewhat guarded contemporary document, had been hunted through the college by a band of infuriated townsmen and fellow-students – he must have publicized his views rather too aggressively – and beaten to death against one of the chapel walls. You can have a look at the document any time you like, though of course it’s locked away now. What happened to the delinquents it doesn’t say, but presumably in the circumstances there was little in the way of reprisals. And one supposes the slab was set up as soon as the Anglican reforms were finally established, though there is no mention of that either.’

  He paused again, and Nigel suddenly had a sickeningly vivid picture of a young man crouching like a hunted animal by the wall of the antechapel, of the breaking of the bones in his wrists and fingers, and of the final blow which smashed a corner of the skull and drove its jagged edge into his brain. Despite the warmth of the evening, he felt suddenly cold, and was glad of the comforting pressure of the broad armchair against his back.

  ‘But it was the third inscription which was the most interesting,’ Wilkes continued. ‘It consisted simply of the words “Quaeram dum inveniam”, which means, I suppose, “I shall seek until I find it”. While the fourth, scrawled on in a much later hand, and apparently in a great hurry, was “Cave ne exeat”.’

  ‘ “Do not let it get out”,’ said Nigel.

  ‘Exactly. Who, or why, not specified, you notice, though later we had some suspicions of the answer to the first question. There was a good deal of excited speculation about the inscriptions, but no one could come to any definite conclusion, except that it seemed fairly obvious that the facing of the wall had been down once before and that the fourth inscription had been added on that occasion, before it was put back again. A Fellow of Magdalen, who was an expert on such things, identified the writing – from the formation of the letters and the material used, the details of which I can’t for the moment remember – as being of the eighteenth century; and the librarian spent what little spare time he had in going through the not inconsiderable mass of documents and account books relating to that period.

  ‘Nothing much happened for a day or two, except that the workmen showed an unaccountable repugnance for working in the antechapel, and one of the Decani boys had hysterics during the Venite one morning, for no very good reason that he was afterwards able to remember, and had to be taken out. Also the plaster dust which had been created by the demolitions showed little inclination to settle, although there was next to no draught in the chapel, and hung about in miniature fogs and clouds, seeming to get thicker and more obtrusive every day, so that the emergency services had to be given up altogether; much to the disgust of the Chaplain, who had formed his own opinions on the matter, and who announced from his sickbed that they had had at least a preventive value; but he was politely ignored.

  ‘We come then to Mr Archer, the Dean, an estimable man very much in the intellectual vanguard of his time, which vanguard consisted of an uncompromising adherence to rationalism, and a concomitant admiration of men
such as Spencer, Darwin, “B.V.”, and William Morris. His favourite reading, I imagine, was Gibbon on Christianity and the more solemn parts of Voltaire, and not unnaturally he had shown little interest, one way or the other, in the restoration of the chapel, only remarking, sotto voce, that he would not consider it any great loss if they knocked it down altogether. It seems that one evening (I only had this at second hand, from a don who was an intimate of his) he sat up late reading, and after knocking out his pipe preparatory for bed, put out his light and looked out of the window into the garden beyond. It was a windless night, with a few clouds and a pale, anaemic moon (to which, I believe, he quoted the appropriate lines from Shelley), and at once something unusual about the aspect of the place struck him. When questioned later, he could only say that he had the impression of a furious search. All over the garden, bushes seemed thrust aside as if by a sudden gust of wind, and his eye, fascinated and horrified, traced an irregular movement from one to another – as of someone darting between them – which was too methodical and purposive to be at all pleasant. It is fairly obvious that he was, for the moment, badly frightened, and it is much to his credit that he stayed where he was rather than go and find more agreeable company than whatever was in the garden. After a few minutes his obstinacy was rewarded. He saw a dark figure emerge from the bushes at the further end of the great lawn, peer about it, and begin to run at a tremendous pace towards the college. As the figure drew nearer, he saw that it was Parks, the undergraduate who was organ scholar at the time, and that his face was distorted with fear. He gained the buildings in safety, however, and when Archer looked up again the garden seemed restored to normal, and nothing was moving; only out of the corner of his eye he thought he caught a glimpse of something white lying by the south side of the chapel, where it looks on to the garden. But when, with some reluctance, he put his head out of the window to observe it more closely, he saw that if there had been anything there at all, it was now gone.

  ‘Well now, what was to be done? It was past one o’clock, and quite evidently Parks had been using the less normal means of entry to the college supplied by the tall, crenellated wall at the bottom of the garden. And a disciplinary reproach on the spot, as it were, would provide an excuse for discovering what had frightened him so. I ought perhaps to mention that this was the Dean’s room at that time, and that then as now, the room below this, which Fellowes has, was occupied by the organ scholar.’

  Fen grunted. Nigel looked quickly out of the window at which Archer must have stood, fifty years ago or more, and felt less comfortable than he would have believed possible. The room was very dark now, yet no one suggested turning on the lights. He very much wished someone would.

  ‘Anyway, Archer went down to see Parks, and, to cut a long story short, found him pale and shaken, but with something of his confidence restored. He admitted quite openly that he had stayed late at a beer party and had come in over the wall. But when pressed as to what it was that had disturbed him he became a good deal less coherent and seemed very little inclined to speak of it. It seems that he had climbed the outside of the wall without any special difficulty (Archer made a mental note to see about this), but that on jumping from the top of it into the garden he had found himself almost in the arms of something which was waiting for him there, and of which he could say no more than that there had been bones and teeth, that a number of these appeared to be broken, and that it had moved shamblingly, dragging one leg behind it. This, he supposed, was why it had been unable to catch up with him; though Archer, who had watched the searching, was inclined to make a private reservation on this point.

  ‘The long and the short of it was that Archer went back to bed again, a little worried at leaving Parks alone for the night and not too pleased at being alone himself, but convinced that the encounter was a chance one and that for the moment, at any rate, there was nothing more to be feared. He read a chapter of Bradlaugh before putting out his light, but it failed to give him his usual satisfaction, and sleep came with difficulty. The next morning Parks proved to be still sound in wind and limb, and even a little uppish about his adventure, since in the circumstances the Dean had thought it unwise to penalize him in any way. Late that same evening, however, a terrible screaming was heard from his room. Naturally, help was forthcoming immediately, with Archer well in the van, but it was too late. They found him lying with his head battered in, though of weapon there was no trace.’

  ‘Good God!’ said Sir Richard. ‘Murder!’

  ‘If you care to call it that, yes. It seems that all of his cries which were distinguishable consisted of the one word “arce”, which if my memory serves me right is the latin for “keep it off”. And in fact all those who had heard him were agreed on this one word, though why he should have spoken in latin, faced with what he had been faced with, no one could imagine, since he was not even a classical scholar. It could only be supposed that he had been impressed by the inscriptions found in the chapel – and in fact he had shown a keen interest in them – and that after his adventure of the night before he had thought of the phrase as a kind of talisman in case another such meeting should take place. It was, I think, established that the word does play an important part in a goetic ritual of exorcism, and he may have imagined it would be of some use, though heaven knows, it let him down badly enough.’

  ‘Was anything ever discovered?’ inquired Nigel.

  ‘Naturally there was a police investigation, but nothing came of it, and the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown.’

  ‘And what is your opinion?’

  Wilkes shrugged. ‘I tend to be of the opinion of the college authorities. After only a very brief consultation, they ordered the wall to be covered up again, which was very quickly done, and the anonymous eighteenth-century warning transferred to a little plaque on the outside, which is there now. The librarian, by the way, discovered a brief record of the earlier demolition – made to facilitate the erection of a tomb – and it appears that apart from the actual death something of the same sort happened then. I asked the Chaplain, a man who had a healthy respect for the foul fiend as well as his more normal preoccupation with Omnipotence, what he thought the object of the search was. “There is a reference in the Bible,” he said shortly, “to one who goes about seeking what he may devour”, but refused to pursue the matter further. I think his Anglican soul was shocked at the thought that an early member of his persuasion should have turned sour, as it were.’

  ‘And nothing further occurred?’ asked Robert.

  ‘Nothing, except that to everyone’s surprise the Dean began to attend chapel, and ended his life, I believe, a staunch churchman. Oh, there is one thing which perhaps I should have mentioned: in the document which gives the account of the killing of John Ketteriburgh, the ringleader is mentioned as being one Richard Pegwell, who was organist at the time. But whether that has any bearing on the matter I couldn’t say.’

  They sat in silence while Fen did the black-out and turned on the lights. Robert slipped up to him and made a whispered inquiry as to the whereabout of the nearest lavatory.

  ‘Bottom of the stairs on the right, my dear fellow. You will come back, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I shan’t be a moment.’ Robert nodded and slipped out.

  ‘A very pleasant story,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Or, conversely, a very unpleasant story. What did you think of it, Mrs Fen? I’m sure you’re the most sensible one of us here.’

  ‘I thought it was a good story,’ said Mrs Fen, ‘and very well told, Mr Wilkes. But it sounded, if you’ll forgive me, a little too neat and artificial to be true. As Mr Wilkes said, real ghosts appear to be tedious and unenterprising, though I’m sure I’ve never come across one myself, and never want to.’ She resumed her knitting.

  Fen gazed at her with something of the triumphant and sentimental pride of a dog-owner whose pet has succeeded in balancing a biscuit on its nose.

  1. Position of body.

&n
bsp; 2. Where Williams sat.

  3. Where Donald Fellowes sat.

  4. Where Nicholas Barclay sat.

  ‘Exactly my opinion!’ he said. Then somewhat suspiciously: ‘By the way, Wilkes, how is it I’ve never heard this story before? You haven’t been making it up, have you?’

  Rather to Nigel’s surprise, Wilkes shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t been making it up. There are still a few people alive who can confirm it. As I say, it was kept pretty quiet; that’s probably why you haven’t come across it.’

  ‘And do you think there’s any chance of the – thing’s – getting out again?’ asked Nigel rather shamefacedly. In the blaze of electric light the remark sounded a good deal more foolish than it would have done a few minutes before.

  But Wilkes treated it seriously. ‘Not in the same way, perhaps. People are still scared of bags of bones, but they believe that one way or another they can understand them and deal with them. Possibly it will happen some other way. It is the killing, after all, which is the essential thing, however it be contrived. Killing always engenders more killing, that is to say that the debit account is never wiped off. And John Kettenburgh has, when you come to think of it, a great many scores to settle. So I dare say that some day, somehow –’

  And it was at that moment that they heard the shot.

  6. Farewell Earth’s Bliss

  The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless,

  The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,

  The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.