Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (50 page)

“How do you know that, Uncle?” said Mary.

“Oh, why not? It’s all in Debrett—two little fat books. But I meant the tomb by the lime walk. He’s there. What’s the story, I wonder? Do you know it, Mrs. Maple? And, by the way, look at your sawflies by the window there.”

Mrs. Maple, thus confronted with two subjects at once, was a little put to it to do justice to both. It was no doubt rash in Uncle Oldys to give her the opportunity. I could only guess that he had some slight hesitation about using the key he held in his hand.

“Oh them flies, how bad they was, Doctor and Miss, this three or four days. And you, too, sir, you wouldn’t guess, none of you! And how they come, too!

“First we took the room in hand, the shutters was up, and had been, I dare say, years upon years, and not a fly to be seen. Then we got the shutter bars down with a deal of trouble and left it so for the day, and next day I sent Susan in with the broom to sweep about, and not two minutes hadn’t passed when out she come into the hall like a blind thing, and we had regular to beat them off her. Why, her cap and her hair, you couldn’t see the color of it, I do assure you, and all clustering around her eyes, too.

“Fortunate enough she’s not a girl with fancies, else if it had been me, why only the tickling of the nasty things would have drove me out of my wits. And now there they lay like so many dead things. Well, they was lively enough on the Monday, and now here’s Thursday; is it, or no, Friday. Only to come near the door and you’d hear them pattering up against it, and once you opened it, dash at you, they would, as if they’d eat you.

“I couldn’t help thinking to myself, ‘If you was bats, where should we be this night?’ Nor you can’t cresh ’em, not like a usual
kind of a fly. Well, there’s something to be thankful for, if we could but learn by it.

“And then this tomb, too,” she said, hastening on to her second point to elude any chance of interruption, “of them two poor young lads. I say poor, and yet when I recollect myself, I was at tea with Mrs. Simpkins, the sexton’s wife, before you come, Doctor and Miss Mary, and that’s a family has been in the place, what? I dare say a hundred years in that very house, and could put their hand on any tomb or yet grave in all the yard and give you name and age.

“And his account of that young man, Mr. Simpkins, I mean to say—well!” She compressed her lips and nodded several times.

“Tell us, Mrs. Maple,” said Mary.

“Go on,” said Uncle Oldys. “What about him?” said I.

“Never was such a thing seen in this place, not since Queen Mary’s times and the Pope and all,” said Mrs. Maple. “Why, do you know he lived in this very house, him and them that was with him, and for all I can tell in this identical room” (she shifted her feet uneasily on the floor).

“Who was with him? Do you mean the people of the house?” said Uncle Oldys suspiciously.

“Not to call people, Doctor, dear no,” was the answer. “More what he brought with him from Ireland, I believe it was. No, the people in the house was the last to hear anything of his goings-on. But in the town not a family but knew how he stopped out at night: and them that was with him, why, they were such as would strip the skin from the child in its grave. And a withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost, says Mr. Simpkins.

“But they turned on him at the last, he says, and there’s the mark still to be seen on the minster door where they run him down. And that’s no more than the truth, for I got him to show it to myself, and that’s what he said. A lord he was, with a Bible name of a wicked king, whatever his godfathers could have been thinking of.”

“Saul was the name,” said Uncle Oldys.

“To be sure it was Saul, Doctor, and thank you. And now isn’t it King Saul that we read of raising up the dead ghost that was
slumbering in its tomb till he disturbed it, and isn’t that a strange thing, this young lord to have such a name, and Mr. Simpkins’ grandfather to see him out of his window of a dark night going about from one grave to another in the yard with a candle, and them that was with him following through the grass at his heels.

“And one night him to come right up to old Mr. Simpkins’ window that gives on the yard and press his face up against it to find out if there was anyone in the room that could see him. And only just time there was for old Mr. Simpkins to drop down like, quiet, just under the window and hold his breath, and not stir till he heard him stepping away again, and this rustling-like in the grass after him as he went, and then when he looked out of his window in the morning there was treadings in the grass and a dead man’s bone.

“Oh, he was a cruel child for certain, but he had to pay in the end, and after.”

“After?” said Uncle Oldys, with a frown.

“Oh yes, Doctor, night after night in old Mr. Simpkins’ time, and his son, that’s our Mr. Simpkins’ father, yes, and our own Mr. Simpkins too. Up against that same window, particular when they’ve had a fire of a chilly evening, with his face right on the panes, and his hands fluttering out, and his mouth open and shut, open and shut, for a minute or more, and then gone off in the dark yard.

“But open the window at such times, no, that they dare not do, though they could find it in their heart to pity the poor thing, that pinched up with the cold, and seemingly fading away to a nothink as the years passed on. Well, indeed, I believe it is no more than the truth what our Mr. Simpkins says on his own grandfather’s word, ‘A withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost.’”

“I dare say,” said Uncle Oldys suddenly—so suddenly that Mrs. Maple stopped short. “Thank you. Come away, all of you.”

“Why,
Uncle,”
said Mary, “are you not going to open the press after all?”

Uncle Oldys blushed, actually blushed. “My dear,” he said, “you are at liberty to call me a coward, or applaud me as a prudent man, whichever you please. But I am neither going to open that press nor
that chest of drawers myself, nor am I going to hand over the keys to you or to any other person.

“Mrs. Maple, will you kindly see about getting a man or two to move those pieces of furniture into the garret?”

“And when they do it, Mrs. Maple,” said Mary, who seemed to me—I did not then know why—more relieved than disappointed by her uncle’s decision, “I have something that I want put with the rest; only quite a small packet.”

We left that curious room not unwillingly, I think. Uncle Oldys’s orders were carried out that same day.

“And so,”
[concludes Mr. Spearman]
“Whitminster has a Bluebeard’s chamber, and, I am rather inclined to suspect, a Jack-in-the-box, awaiting some future occupant of the residence of the senior prebendary.”

I
T IS A VERY COMMON THING
, in my experience, to find papers shut up in old books; but one of the rarest things to come across any such that are at all interesting. Still it does happen, and one should never destroy them unlooked at.

Now it was a practice of mine before the war occasionally to buy old ledgers of which the paper was good, and which possessed a good many blank leaves, and to extract these and use them for my own notes and writings. One such I purchased for a small sum in 1911.

It was tightly clasped, and its boards were warped by having for years been obliged to embrace a number of extraneous sheets. Three-quarters of this inserted matter had lost all vestige of importance for any living human being: one bundle had not. That it belonged to a lawyer is certain, for it is endorsed:
The strangest case I have yet met
, and bears initials, and an address in Gray’s Inn. It is only materials for a case, and consists of statements by possible witnesses. The man who would have been the defendant or prisoner seems never to have appeared.

The
dossier
is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what you can make of it.

The following is the setting and the tale as I elicit it.

The scene is Islington in 1718, and the time the month of June: a countrified place, therefore, and a pleasant season.

Dr. Abell was walking in his garden one afternoon waiting for his horse
to be brought around so that he might set out on his visits for the day. To him entered his confidential servant, Luke Jennett, who had been with him twenty years.

“I said I wished to speak to him, and what I had to say might take some quarter of an hour. He accordingly bade me go into his study, which was a room opening on the terrace path where he was walking, and came in himself and sat down.

“I told him that, much against my will, I must look out for another place. He inquired what was my reason, in consideration I had been so long with him. I said if he would excuse me he would do me a great kindness, because (this appears to have been common form even in 1718) I was one that always liked to have everything pleasant about me.

“As well as I can remember, he said that was his case likewise, but he would wish to know why I should change my mind after so many years, and, says he, ‘You know there can be no talk of a remembrance of you in my will if you leave my service now.’ I said I had made my reckoning of that.

“‘Then,’ says he, ‘you must have some complaint to make, and if I could I would willingly set it right.’ And at that I told him, not seeing how I could keep it back, the matter of my former affidavit and of the bedstaff in the dispensing-room, and said that a house where such things happened was no place for me.

“At which he, looking very black upon me, said no more, but called me fool, and said he would pay what was owing me in the morning. And so, his horse being waiting, went out. So for that night I lodged with my sister’s husband near Battle Bridge and came early next morning to my late master, who then made a great matter that I had not lain in his house and stopped a crown out of my wages owing.

“After that I took service here and there, not for long at a time, and saw no more of him till I came to be Dr. Quinn’s man at Dodds Hall in Islington.”

There is one very obscure part in this statement—namely, the reference to the former affidavit and the matter of the bedstaff. The former affidavit is not in the bundle of papers. It is to be feared that it was taken out to be read because of its special oddity, and not put back. Of what nature the story was may be guessed later, but as yet no clue has been put into our hands.

The Rector of Islington, Jonathan Pratt, is the next to step forward. He
furnishes particulars of the standing and reputation of Dr. Abell and Dr. Quinn, both of whom lived and practiced in his parish.

“It is not to be supposed,” he says, “that a physician should be a regular attendant at morning and evening prayers, or at the Wednesday lectures, but within the measure of their ability I would say that both these persons fulfilled their obligations as loyal members of the Church of England.

“At the same time (as you desire my private mind) I must say, in the language of the schools,
distinguo
. Dr. A. was to me a source of perplexity, Dr. Q. to my eye a plain, honest believer, not inquiring over closely into points of belief, but squaring his practice to what lights he had.

“The other interested himself in questions to which Providence, as I hold, designs no answer to be given us in this state. He would ask me, for example, what place I believed those beings now to hold in the scheme of creation which by some are thought neither to have stood fast when the rebel angels fell, nor to have joined with them to the full pitch of their transgression.

“As was suitable, my first answer to him was a question: What warrant he had for supposing any such beings to exist? For that there was none in Scripture I took it he was aware. It appeared—for as I am on the subject, the whole tale may be given—that he grounded himself on such passages as that of the satyr which Jerome tells us conversed with Antony; but thought too that some parts of Scripture might be cited in support.

“‘And besides,’ said he, ‘you know ’tis the universal belief among those that spend their days and nights abroad, and I would add that if your calling took you so continuously as it does me about the country lanes by night, you might not be so surprised as I see you to be by my suggestion.’

“You are then of John Milton’s mind,” I said, “and hold that ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth | Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.’”

“‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘why Milton should take upon himself to say ‘unseen’; though to be sure he was blind when he wrote that. But for the rest, why, yes, I think he was in the right.”

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘though not so often as you, I am not seldom called abroad pretty late. But I have no mind of meeting a satyr in our Islington lanes in all the years I have been here. And if you have had the better luck, I am sure the Royal Society would be glad to know of it.’

“I am reminded of these trifling expressions because Dr. A. took them so ill, stamping out of the room in a huff with some such word as that these high and dry parsons had no eyes but for a prayer-book or a pint of wine.