Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James

by M. R. James

  When he left the chamber of death, it was to walk across the quadrangle of the residence to the sexton’s house. A passing bell, the greatest of the minster bells, must be rung, a grave must be dug in the minster yard, and there was now no need to silence the chiming of the minster clock.

  As he came slowly back in the dark, he thought he must see Lord Saul again. That matter of the black cockerel—trifling as it might seem—would have to be cleared up. It might be merely a fancy of the sick boy, but if not, was there not a witch-trial he had read, in which some grim little rite of sacrifice had played a part? Yes, he must see Saul.

  I rather guess these thoughts of his than find written authority for them. That there was another interview is certain; certain also that Saul would (or, as he said, could) throw no light on Frank’s words: though the message, or some part of it, appeared to affect him horribly. But there is no record of the talk in detail.

  It is only said that Saul sat all that evening in the study, and when he bid good night, which he did most reluctantly, asked for the doctor’s prayers.

  The month of January was near its end when Lord Kildonan, in the Embassy at Lisbon, received a letter that for once gravely disturbed that vain man and neglectful father.

  Saul was dead.

  The scene at Frank’s burial had been very distressing. The day was awful in blackness and wind: the bearers, staggering blindly along under the flapping black pall, found it a hard job, when they emerged from the porch of the minster, to make their way to the grave.

  Mrs. Ashton was in her room—women did not then go to their kinsfolk’s funerals—but Saul was there, draped in the mourning cloak of the time, and his face was white and fixed as that of one dead, except when, as was noticed three or four times, he suddenly turned his head to the left and looked over his shoulder. It was then alive with a terrible expression of listening fear.

  No one saw him go away, and no one could find him that evening.

  All night the gale buffeted the high windows of the church, and howled over the upland and roared through the woodland. It was useless to search in the open: no voice of shouting or cry for help could possibly be heard. All that Dr. Ashton could do was to warn the people about the college, and the town constables, and to sit up, on the alert for any news, and this he did.

  News came early next morning, brought by the sexton, whose business it was to open the church for early prayers at seven, and who sent the maid rushing upstairs with wild eyes and flying hair to summon her master.

  The two men dashed across to the south door of the minster, there to find Lord Saul clinging desperately to the great ring of the door, his head sunk between his shoulders, his stockings in rags, his shoes gone, his legs torn and bloody.

  This was what had to be told to Lord Kildonan, and this really ends the first part of the story.

  The tomb of Frank Sydall and of the Lord Viscount Saul—only child and heir to William Earl of Kildonan—is one: a stone altar tomb in Whitminster churchyard.

  Dr. Ashton lived on for over thirty years in his prebendal house, I do not know how quietly, but without visible disturbance.

  His successor preferred a house he already owned in the town, and left that of the senior prebendary vacant. Between them these two men saw the 18th century out and the 19th in; for Mr. Hindes, the successor of Ashton, became prebendary at nine-and-twenty and died at nine-and-eighty.

  So that it was not till 1823 or 1824 that anyone succeeded to the post who intended to make the house his home.

  The man who did so was Dr. Henry Oldys, whose name may be known to some of my readers as that of the author of a row of volumes labeled Oldys’s Works, which occupy a place that must be honored, since it is so rarely touched, upon the shelves of many a substantial library.

  Dr. Oldys, his niece, and his servants took some months to transfer furniture and books from his Dorsetshire parsonage to the quadrangle of Whitminster, and to get everything into place. But eventually the work was done, and the house (which, though untenanted, had always been kept sound and weather-tight) woke up, and like Monte Cristo’s mansion at Auteuil, lived, sang, and bloomed once more.

  On a certain morning in June it looked especially fair, as Dr. Oldys strolled in his garden before breakfast and gazed over the red roof at the minster tower with its four gold vanes, backed by a very blue sky, and very white little clouds.

  “Mary,” he said, as he seated himself at the breakfast-table and laid down something hard and shiny on the cloth, “here’s a find which the boy made just now. You’ll be sharper than I if you can guess what it’s meant for.”

  It was a round and perfectly smooth tablet—as much as an inch thick—of what seemed clear glass.

  “It is rather attractive, at all events,” said Mary. She was a fair woman, with light hair and large eyes, rather a devotee of literature.

  “Yes,” said her uncle, “I thought you’d be pleased with it. I presume it came from the house. It turned up in the rubbish-heap in the corner.”

  “I’m not sure that I do like it, after all,” said Mary, some minutes later.

  “Why in the world not, my dear?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps it’s only fancy.”

  “Yes, only fancy and romance, of course. What’s that book, now—the name of that book, I mean, that you had your head in all yesterday?”

  “The Talisman, Uncle. Oh, if this should turn out to be a talisman, how enchanting it would be!”

  “Yes, The Talisman. Ah, well, you’re welcome to it, whatever it is. I must be off about my business. Is all well in the house? Does it suit you? Any complaints from the servants’ hall?”

  “No, indeed, nothing could be more charming. The only soupçon of a complaint besides the lock of the linen closet, which I told you of, is that Mrs. Maple says she cannot get rid of the sawflies out of that room you pass through at the other end of the hall.

  “By the way, are you sure you like your bedroom? It is a long way off from anyone else, you know.”

  “Like it? To be sure I do. The farther off from you, my dear, the better. There, don’t think it necessary to beat me: accept my apologies.

  “But what are sawflies? Will they eat my coats? If not, they may have the room to themselves for what I care. We are not likely to be using it.”

  “No, of course not. Well, what she calls sawflies are those reddish things like a daddy-long-legs, but smaller,† and there are a great many of them perching about that room, certainly. I don’t like them, but I don’t fancy they are mischievous.”

  “There seem to be several things you don’t like this fine morning,” said her uncle, as he closed the door.

  Miss Oldys remained in her chair looking at the tablet, which she was holding in the palm of her hand. The smile that had been on her face faded slowly from it and gave place to an expression of curiosity and almost strained attention.

  Her reverie was broken by the entrance of Mrs. Maple, and her invariable opening, “Oh, Miss, could I speak to you a minute?”

  A letter from Miss Oldys to a friend in Lichfield, begun a day or two before, is the next source for this story. It is not devoid of traces of the influence of that leader of female thought in her day, Miss Anna Seward, known to some as the Swan of Lichfield.

  My sweetest Emily will be rejoiced to hear that we are at length—my beloved uncle and myself settled in the house that now calls us master—nay, master and mistress—as in past ages it has called so many others. Here we taste a mingling of modern elegance and hoary antiquity, such as has never ere now graced life for either of us.

  The town, small as it is, affords us some reflection, pale indeed, but veritable, of the sweets of polite intercourse: the adjacent country numbers amid the occupants of its scattered mansions some whose polish is annually refreshed by contact with metropolitan splendor, and others whose robust and homely geniality is, at times, and by way of contrast, not less cheering and acceptable.

  Tired of the parlors and
drawing rooms of our friends, we have ready to hand a refuge from the clash of wits or the small talk of the day amid the solemn beauties of our venerable minster, whose silver chimes daily “knoll us to prayer,” and in the shady walks of whose tranquil graveyard we muse with softened heart, and ever and anon with moistened eye, upon the memorials of the young, the beautiful, the aged, the wise, and the good.

  Here there is an abrupt break both in the writing and the style.

  But my dearest Emily, I can no longer write with the care which you deserve, and in which we both take pleasure. What I have to tell you is wholly foreign to what has gone before.

  This morning my uncle brought in to breakfast an object which had been found in the garden. It was a glass or crystal tablet of this shape [a little sketch is given], which he handed to me, and which, after he left the room, remained on the table by me.

  I gazed at it, I know not why, for some minutes, till called away by the day’s duties; and you will smile incredulously when I say that I seemed to myself to begin to descry reflected in it objects and scenes which were not in the room where I was.

  You will not, however, think it strange that after such an experience I took the first opportunity to seclude myself in my room with what I now half-believed to be a talisman of mickle might. I was not disappointed.

  I assure you, Emily, by that memory which is dearest to both of us, that what I went through this afternoon transcends the limits of what I had before deemed credible. In brief, what I saw, seated in my bedroom, in the broad daylight of summer, and looking into the crystal depth of that small round tablet, was this.

  First, a prospect, strange to me, of an enclosure of rough and hillocky grass, with a gray stone ruin in the midst, and a wall of rough stones about it. In this stood an old, and very ugly, woman in a red cloak and ragged skirt, talking to a boy dressed in the fashion of maybe a hundred years ago. She put something which glittered into his hand, and he something into hers, which I saw to be money, for a single coin fell from her trembling hand into the grass.

  The scene passed. I should have remarked, by the way, that on the rough walls of the enclosure I could distinguish bones, and even a skull, lying in a disorderly fashion.

  Next, I was looking upon two boys: one the figure of the former vision, the other younger. They were in a plot of garden, walled around, and this garden, in spite of the difference in arrangement, and the small size of the trees, I could clearly recognize as being that upon which I now look from my window.

  The boys were engaged in some curious play, it seemed. Something was smoldering on the ground. The elder placed his hands upon it, and then raised them in what I took to be an attitude of prayer. And I saw, and started at seeing, that on them, were deep stains of blood. The sky above was overcast.

  The same boy now turned his face toward the wall of the garden, and beckoned with both his raised hands, and as he did so I was conscious that some moving objects were becoming visible over the top of the wall—whether heads or other parts of some animal or human forms I could not tell.

  Upon the instant the elder boy turned sharply, seized the arm of the younger (who all this time had been poring over what lay on the ground), and both hurried off. I then saw blood upon the grass, a little pile of bricks, and what I thought were black feathers scattered about.

  That scene closed, and the next was so dark that perhaps the full meaning of it escaped me. But what I seemed to see was a form, at first crouching low among trees or bushes that were being threshed by a violent wind, then running very swiftly, and constantly turning a pale face to look behind him, as if he feared a pursuer: and, indeed, pursuers were following hard after him.

  Their shapes were but dimly seen, their number—three or four, perhaps—only guessed. I suppose they were on the whole more like dogs than anything else, but dogs such as we have seen they assuredly were not. Could I have closed my eyes to this horror, I would have done so at once, but I was helpless.

  The last I saw was the victim darting beneath an arch and clutching at some object to which he clung. And those that were pursuing him overtook him, and I seemed to hear the echo of a cry of despair. It may be that I became unconscious: certainly I had the sensation of awaking to the light of day after an interval of darkness.

  Such, in literal truth, Emily, was my vision—I can call it by no other name—of this afternoon. Tell me, have I not been the unwilling witness of some episode of a tragedy connected with this very house?’

  The letter is continued next day.

  The tale of yesterday was not completed when I laid down my pen. I said nothing of my experiences to my uncle—you know, yourself, how little his robust common sense would be prepared to allow of them, and how in his eyes the specific remedy would be a black draft or a glass of port.

  After a silent evening, then—silent, not sullen—I retired to rest. Judge of my terror, when, not yet in bed, I heard what I can only describe as a distant bellow, and knew it for my uncle’s voice, though never in my hearing so exerted before.

  His sleeping-room is at the farther extremity of this large house, and to gain access to it one must traverse an antique hall some eighty feet long, a lofty paneled chamber, and two unoccupied bedrooms.

  In the second of these—a room almost devoid of furniture—I found him, in the dark, his candle lying smashed on the floor. As I ran in, bearing a light, he clasped me in arms that trembled for the first time since I have known him, thanked God, and hurried me out of the room. He would say nothing of what had alarmed him.

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” was all I could get from him.

  A bed was hastily improvised for him in the room next to my own. I doubt if his night was more restful than mine. I could only get to sleep in the small hours, when daylight was already strong, and then my dreams were of the grimmest—particularly one which stamped itself on my brain, and which I must set down on the chance of dispersing the impression it has made.

  It was that I came up to my room with a heavy foreboding of evil oppressing me, and went with a hesitation and reluctance I could not explain to my chest of drawers. I opened the top drawer, in which was nothing but ribbons and handkerchiefs, and then the second, where was as little to alarm, and then, O heavens, the third and last: and there was a mass of linen neatly folded, upon which, as I looked with a curiosity that began to be tinged with horror, I perceived a movement in it, and a pink hand was thrust out of the folds and began to grope feebly in the air.

  I could bear it no more, and rushed from the room, clapping the door after me, and strove with all my force to lock it. But the key would not turn in the wards, and from within the room came a sound of rustling and bumping, drawing nearer and nearer to the door. Why I did not flee down the stairs I know not. I continued grasping the handle, and mercifully, as the door was plucked from my hand with an irresistible force, I awoke.

  You may not think this very alarming, but I assure you it was so to me.

  At breakfast today my uncle was very uncommunicative, and I think ashamed of the fright he had given us. But afterward he inquired of me whether Mr. Spearman was still in town, adding that he thought that was a young man who had some sense left in his head.

  I think you know, my dear Emily, that I am not inclined to disagree with him there, and also that I was not unlikely to be able to answer his question. To Mr. Spearman he accordingly went, and I have not seen him since.

  I must send this strange budget of news to you now, or it may have to wait over more than one post.

  The reader will not be far out if he guesses that Miss Mary and Mr. Spearman made a match of it not very long after this month of June. Mr. Spearman was a young spark, who had a good property in the neighborhood of Whitminster, and not unfrequently about this time spent a few days at the King’s Head, ostensibly on business.

  But he must have had some leisure, for his diary is copious, especially for the days of which I am telling the story. It is probable to me that he wrote this episode as full
y as he could at the bidding of Miss Mary.

  Uncle Oldys (how I hope I may have the right to call him so before long!) called this morning. After throwing out a good many short remarks on indifferent topics, he said, “I wish, Spearman, you’d listen to an odd story and keep a close tongue about it just for a bit, till I get more light on it.”

  “To be sure,” said I, “you may count on me.”

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” he said. “You know my bedroom. It is well away from everyone else’s, and I pass through the great hall and two or three other rooms to get to it.”

  “Is it at the end next the minster, then?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is. Well, now, yesterday morning my Mary told me that the room next before it was infested with some sort of fly that the housekeeper couldn’t get rid of. That may be the explanation, or it may not. What do you think?”

  “Why,” said I, “you’ve not yet told me what has to be explained.”

  “True enough, I don’t believe I have; but by the by, what are these sawflies? What’s the size of them?”

  I began to wonder if he was touched in the head.

  “What I call a sawfly,” I said very patiently, “is a red animal, like a daddy-long-legs, but not so big, perhaps an inch long, perhaps less. It is very hard in the body, and to me”—I was going to say “particularly offensive”—but he broke in.

  “Come, come; an inch or less. That won’t do.”

  “I can only tell you,” I said, “what I know. Would it not be better if you told me from first to last what it is that has puzzled you, and then I may be able to give you some kind of an opinion.”

  He gazed at me meditatively. “Perhaps it would,” he said. “I told Mary only today that I thought you had some vestiges of sense in your head.” (I bowed my acknowledgments.) “The thing is, I’ve an odd kind of shyness about talking of it. Nothing of the sort has happened to me before.

  “Well, about eleven o’clock last night, or after, I took my candle and set out for my room. I had a book in my other hand—I always read something for a few minutes before I drop off to sleep. A dangerous habit: I don’t recommend it, but I know how to manage my light and my bed curtains.