Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (73 page)

Yet, in all this quiet, an acute, an acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash that might be let go at any moment.

Paxton pulled himself out of the hole, and stretched a hand back to us. “Give it to me,” he whispered, “unwrapped.”

We pulled off the handkerchiefs, and he took the crown. The moonlight just fell on it as he snatched it.

We had not ourselves touched that bit of metal, and I have thought since that it was just as well.

In another moment Paxton was out of the hole again and busy shoveling back the soil with hands that were already bleeding. He would have none of our help, though. It was much the longest part of the job to get the place to look undisturbed. Yet—I don’t know how—he made a wonderful success of it.

At last he was satisfied and we turned back.

We were a couple of hundred yards from the hill when Long suddenly said to him: “I say, you’ve left your coat there. That won’t do. See?”

And I certainly did see it—the long dark overcoat lying where the tunnel had been.

Paxton had not stopped, however. He only shook his head, and held up the coat on his arm. And when we joined him, he said, without any excitement, but as if nothing mattered anymore: “That wasn’t my coat.”

And, indeed, when we looked back again, that dark thing was not to be seen.

Well, we got out on to the road, and came rapidly back that way. It was well before twelve when we got in, trying to put a good face on it, and saying—Long and I—what a lovely night it was for a walk. The boots was on the look-out for us, and we made remarks like that for his edification as we entered the hotel.

He gave another look up and down the sea-front before he locked the front door, and said: “You didn’t meet many people about, I s’pose, sir?”

“No, indeed, not a soul,” I said, at which I remember Paxton looked oddly at me.

“Only I thought I see someone turn up the station road after you gentlemen,” said the boots. “Still, you was three together, and I don’t suppose he meant mischief.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Long merely said “Good night,” and we went off upstairs, promising to turn out all lights, and to go to bed in a few minutes.

Back in our room, we did our very best to make Paxton take a cheerful view. “There’s the crown safe back,” we said; “very likely you’d have done better not to touch it” (and he heavily assented to that), “but no real harm has been done, and we shall never give this away to anyone who would be so mad as to go near it.

“Besides, don’t you feel better yourself? I don’t mind confessing,” I said, “that on the way there I was very much inclined to take your view about—well, about being followed. But going back, it wasn’t at all the same thing, was it?”

No, it wouldn’t do: “
You’ve
nothing to trouble yourselves about,” he said,

“but I’m not forgiven. I’ve got to pay for that miserable sacrilege still. I know what you are going to say. The Church might help. Yes, but it’s the body that has to suffer.

“It’s true I’m not feeling that he’s waiting outside for me just now. But—” Then he stopped. Then he turned to thanking us, and we put him off as soon as we could.

And naturally we pressed him to use our sitting room next day, and said we should be glad to go out with him. Or did he play golf, perhaps? Yes, he did, but he didn’t think he should care about that tomorrow.

Well, we recommended him to get up late and sit in our room in the morning while we were playing, and we would have a walk later in the day. He was very submissive and
piano
about it all—ready to do just what we thought best, but clearly quite certain in his own mind that what was coming could not be averted or palliated.

You’ll wonder why we didn’t insist on accompanying him to his home and seeing him safe into the care of brothers or someone. The fact was he had nobody. He had had an apartment in town, but lately he had made up his mind to settle for a time in Sweden, and he had dismantled his apartment and shipped off his belongings, and was whiling away a fortnight or three weeks before he made a start.

Anyhow, we didn’t see what we could do better than sleep on it—or not sleep very much, as was my case—and see what we felt like tomorrow morning.

We felt very different, Long and I, on as beautiful an April morning as you could desire. And Paxton also looked very different when we saw him at breakfast.

“The first approach to a decent night I seem ever to have had,” was what he said. But he was going to do as we had settled—stay in probably all the morning, and come out with us later.

We went to the links. We met some other men and played with them in the morning, and had lunch there rather early, so as not to be late back. All the same, the snares of death overtook him.

Whether it could have been prevented, I don’t know. I think he would have been got at somehow, do what we might. Anyhow, this is what happened.

We went straight up to our room. Paxton was there, reading quite peaceably.

“Ready to come out shortly?” said Long, “say in half-an-hour’s time?”

“Certainly,” he said, and I said we would change first, and perhaps have baths, and call for him in half-an-hour.

I had my bath first, and went and lay down on my bed, and slept for about ten minutes. We came out of our rooms at the same time, and went together to the sitting room.

Paxton wasn’t there—only his book.

Nor was he in his room, nor in the downstair rooms.

We shouted for him.

A servant came out and said: “Why, I thought you gentlemen was gone out already, and so did the other gentleman. He heard you a-calling from the path there, and run out in a hurry, and I looked out of the coffee-room window, but I didn’t see you. ’Owever, he run off down the beach that way.”

Without a word we ran that way too—it was the opposite direction to that of last night’s expedition.

It wasn’t quite four o’clock, and the day was fair, though not so fair as it had been, so that was really no reason, you’d say, for anxiety. With people about, surely a man couldn’t come to much harm.

But something in our look as we ran out must have struck the servant, for she came out on the steps, and pointed, and said, “Yes, that’s the way he went.”

We ran on as far as the top of the shingle bank, and there pulled up. There was a choice of ways: past the houses on the sea-front, or along the sand at the bottom of the beach, which, the tide being now out, was fairly broad. Or of course we might keep along the shingle between these two tracks and have some view of both of them, only that was heavy going.

We chose the sand, for that was the loneliest, and someone
might
come to harm there without being seen from the public path.

Long said he saw Paxton some distance ahead, running and waving his stick, as if he wanted to signal to people who were on ahead of him. I couldn’t be sure: one of these sea-mists was coming up very quickly from the south. There was someone, that’s all I could say.

And there were tracks on the sand as of someone running who wore shoes; and there were other tracks made before those—for the shoes sometimes
trod in them and interfered with them—of someone not in shoes.

Oh, of course, it’s only my word you’ve got to take for all this: Long’s dead, we’d no time or means to make sketches or take casts, and the next tide washed everything away. All we could do was to notice these marks as we hurried on. But there they were over and over again, and we had no doubt whatever that what we saw was the track of a bare foot, and one that showed more bones than flesh.

The notion of Paxton running after—after anything like this, and supposing it to be the friends he was looking for, was very dreadful to us.

You can guess what we fancied: how the thing he was following might stop suddenly and turn around on him, and what sort of face it would show, half-seen at first in the mist—which all the while was getting thicker and thicker.

And as I ran on wondering how the poor wretch could have been lured into mistaking that other thing for us, I remembered his saying, “He has some power over your eyes.” And then I wondered what the end would be, for I had no hope now that the end could be averted, and—well, there is no need to tell all the dismal and horrid thoughts that flitted through my head as we ran on into the mist.

It was uncanny, too, that the sun should still be bright in the sky and we could see nothing. We could only tell that we were now past the houses and had reached that gap there is between them and the old Martello tower.

When you are past the tower, you know, there is nothing but shingle for a long way—not a house, not a human creature, just that spit of land, or rather shingle, with the river on your right and the sea on your left.

But just before that, just by the Martello tower, you remember there is the old battery, close to the sea. I believe there are only a few blocks of concrete left now—the rest has all been washed away, but at this time there was a lot more, though the place was a ruin.

Well, when we got there, we clambered to the top as quick as we could to take breath and look over the shingle in front if by chance the mist would let us see anything. But a moment’s rest we must have. We had run a mile at least.

Nothing whatever was visible ahead of us, and we were just turning by common consent to get down and run hopelessly on, when we heard what I
can only call a laugh. And if you can understand what I mean by a breathless, a lungless laugh, you have it. But I don’t suppose you can.

It came from below, and swerved away into the mist. That was enough. We bent over the wall.

Paxton was there at the bottom.

You don’t need to be told that he was dead. His tracks showed that he had run along the side of the battery, had turned sharp around the corner of it, and, small doubt of it, must have dashed straight into the open arms of someone who was waiting there.

His mouth was full of sand and stones, and his teeth and jaws were broken to bits. I only glanced once at his face.

At the same moment, just as we were scrambling down from the battery to get to the body, we heard a shout, and saw a man running down the bank of the Martello tower.

He was the caretaker stationed there, and his keen old eyes had managed to descry through the mist that something was wrong. He had seen Paxton fall, and had seen us a moment after, running up—fortunate this, for otherwise we could hardly have escaped suspicion of being concerned in the dreadful business.

Had he, we asked, caught sight of anybody attacking our friend?

He could not be sure.

We sent him off for help, and stayed by the dead man till they came with the stretcher.

It was then that we traced out how he had come, on the narrow fringe of sand under the battery wall. The rest was shingle, and it was hopelessly impossible to tell whither the other had gone.

What were we to say at the inquest?

It was a duty, we felt, not to give up, there and then, the secret of the crown, to be published in every paper.

I don’t know how much you would have told, but what we did agree upon was this: to say that we had only made acquaintance with Paxton the day before, and that he had told us he was under some apprehension of danger at the hands of a man called William Ager.

Also that we had seen some other tracks besides Paxton’s when we
followed him along the beach. But of course by that time everything was gone from the sands.

No one had any knowledge, fortunately, of any William Ager living in the district. The evidence of the man at the Martello tower freed us from all suspicion. All that could be done was to return a verdict of willful murder by some person or persons unknown.

Paxton was so totally without connections that all the inquiries that were subsequently made ended in a No Thoroughfare.

And I have never been at Seaburgh, or even near it, since.

N
OTHING IS MORE COMMON FORM
in old-fashioned books than the description of the winter fireside, where the aged grandam narrates to the circle of children that hangs on her lips story after story of ghosts and fairies, and inspires her audience with a pleasing terror. But we are never allowed to know what the stories were. We hear, indeed, of sheeted specters with saucer eyes, and—still more intriguing—of “Rawhead and Bloody Bones” (an expression which the
Oxford Dictionary
traces back to 1550), but the context of these striking images eludes us.

Here, then, is a problem which has long obsessed me; but I see no means of solving it finally. The aged grandams are gone, and the collectors of folklore began their work in England too late to save most of the actual stories which the grandams told. Yet such things do not easily die quite out, and imagination, working on scattered hints, may be able to devise a picture of an evening’s entertainment, such an one as Mrs. Marcet’s
Evening Conversations
, Mr. Joyce’s
Dialogues on Chemistry
and somebody else’s
Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest
aimed at extinguishing by substituting for Error and Superstition the light of Utility and Truth; in some such terms as these: