Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M.R. James

  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.

  “But this was not the only time that our conversation took a remarkable turn. There was an evening when he came in, at first seeming gay and in good spirits, but afterward as he sat and smoked by the fire falling into a musing way. Out of which to rouse him I said pleasantly that I supposed he had had no meetings of late with his odd friends.

  “A question which did effectually arouse him, for he looked most wildly, and as if scared, upon me, and said, ‘You were never there? I did not see you. Who brought you?’ And then in a more collected tone, ‘What was this about a meeting? I believe I must have been in a doze.’ To which I answered that I was thinking of fauns and centaurs in the dark lane, and not of a witches’ Sabbath; but it seemed he took it differently.

  “‘Well,’ said he, ‘I can plead guilty to neither; but I find you very much more of a skeptic than becomes your cloth. If you care to know about the dark lane you might do worse than ask my housekeeper that lived at the other end of it when she was a child.’

  “‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and the old women in the almshouse and the children in the kennel. If I were you, I would send to your brother Quinn for a bolus to clear your brain.’

  “‘Damn Quinn,’ says he. ‘Talk no more of him: he has embezzled four of my best patients this month. I believe it is that cursed man of his, Jennett, that used to be with me, his tongue is never still—it should be nailed to the pillory if he had his deserts.’

  “This, I may say, was the only time of his showing me that he had any grudge against either Dr. Quinn or Jennett, and as was my business, I did my best to persuade him he was mistaken in them. Yet it could not be denied that some respectable families in the parish had given him the cold shoulder, and for no reason that they were willing to allege.

  “The end was that he said he had not done so ill at Islington but that he could afford to live at ease elsewhere when he chose, and anyhow he bore Dr. Quinn no malice.

  “I think I now remember what observation of mine drew him into the train of thought which he next pursued. It was, I believe, my mentioning some juggling tricks which my brother in the East Indies had seen at the court of the Rajah of Mysore.

  “‘A convenient thing enough,’ said Dr. Abell to me, ‘if by some arrangement a man could get the power of communicating motion and energy to inanimate objects.’

  “‘As if the ax should move itself against him that lifts it—something of that kind?’

  “‘Well, I don’t know that that was in my mind so much. But if you could summon such a volume from your shelf or even order it to open at the right page.’

  “He was sitting by the fire—it was a cold evening—and stretched out his hand that way, and just then the fire-irons, or at least the poker, fell over toward him
with a great clatter, and I did not hear what else he said. But I told him that I could not easily conceive of an arrangement, as he called it, of such a kind that would not include as one of its conditions a heavier payment than any Christian would care to make; to which he assented.

  “‘But,’ he said, ‘I have no doubt these bargains can be made very tempting, very persuasive. Still, you would not favor them, eh, Doctor? No, I suppose not.’

  “This is as much as I know of Dr. Abell’s mind, and the feeling between these men. Dr. Quinn, as I said, was a plain, honest creature, and a man to whom I would have gone—indeed I have before now gone to him—for advice on matters of business. He was, however, every now and again, and particularly of late, not exempt from troublesome fancies.

  “There was certainly a time when he was so much harassed by his dreams that he could not keep them to himself, but would tell them to his acquaintances and among them to me. I was at supper at his house, and he was not inclined to let me leave him at my usual time.

  “‘If you go,’ he said, ‘there will be nothing for it but I must go to bed and dream of the chrysalis.’

  “‘You might be worse off,’ said I.

  “‘I do not think it,’ he said, and he shook himself like a man who is displeased with the complexion of his thoughts.

  “‘I only meant,’ said I, ‘that a chrysalis is an innocent thing.’

  “‘This one is not,’ he said, ‘and I do not care to think of it.’

  “However, sooner than lose my company he was fain to tell me (for I pressed him) that this was a dream which had come to him several times of late, and even more than once in a night.

  “It was to this effect, that he seemed to himself to wake under an extreme compulsion to rise and go out of doors. So he would dress himself and go down to his garden door. By the door there stood a spade which he must take, and go out into the garden, and at a particular place in the shrubbery, somewhat clear, and upon which the moon shone (for there was always in his dream a full moon), he would feel himself forced to dig.

  “And after some time the spade would uncover something light-colored, which he would perceive to be a stuff, linen or woolen, and this he must clear with his hands. It was always the same: of the size of a man and shaped like the chrysalis of a moth, with the folds showing a promise of an opening at one end.

  “He could not describe how gladly he would have left all at this stage and run to the house, but he must not escape so easily.

  “So with many groans, and knowing only too well what to expect, he parted these folds of stuff, or, as it sometimes seemed to be, membrane, and disclosed a head covered with a smooth pink skin, which breaking as the creature stirred, showed him his own face in a state of death.

  “The telling of this so much disturbed him that I was forced out of mere compassion to sit with him the greater part of the night and talk with him upon indifferent subjects.

  “He said that upon every recurrence of this dream he woke and found himself, as it were, fighting for his breath.”

  Another extract from Luke Jennett’s long continuous statement comes in at this point.

  “I never told tales of my master, Dr. Abell, to anybody in the neighborhood. When I was in another service I remember to have spoken to my fellow-servants about the matter of the bedstaff, but I am sure I never said either I or he were the persons concerned, and it met with so little credit that I was affronted and thought best to keep it to myself.

  “And when I came back to Islington and found Dr. Abell still there, who I was told had left the parish, I was clear that it behooved me to use great discretion, for indeed I was afraid of the man, and it is certain I was no party to spreading any ill report of him.

  “My master, Dr. Quinn, was a very just, honest man, and no maker of mischief. I am sure he never stirred a finger nor said a word by way of inducement to a soul to make them leave going to Dr. Abell and come to him. Nay, he would hardly be persuaded to attend them that came, until he was convinced that if he did not they would send into the town for a physician rather than do as they had hitherto done.

  “I believe it may be proved that Dr. Abell came into my master’s house more than once. We had a new chambermaid out of Hertfordshire, and she asked me who was the gentleman that was looking after the master, that is Dr. Quinn, when he was out, and seemed so disappointed that he was out.

  “She said whoever he was he knew the way of the house well, running at once into the study and then into the dispensing-room, and last into the bedchamber. I made her tell me what he was like, and what she said was suitable enough to Dr. Abell; but besides she told me she saw the same man at church, and someone told her that was the Doctor.

  “It was just after this that my master began to have his bad nights, and complained to me and other persons, and in particular what discomfort he suffered from his pillow and bedclothes. He said he must buy some to suit him, and should do his own marketing. And accordingly brought home a parcel which he said was of the right quality, but where he bought it we had then no knowledge, only they were marked in thread with a coronet and a bird.

  “The women said they were of a sort not commonly met with and very fine, and my master said they were the comfortablest he ever used, and he slept now both soft and deep. Also the feather pillows were the best sorted and his head would sink into them as if they were a cloud: which I have myself remarked several times when I came to wake him of a morning, his face being almost hid by the pillow closing over it.

  “I had never any communication with Dr. Abell after I came back to Islington, but one day when he passed me in the street and asked me whether I was not looking for another service, to which I answered I was very well suited where I was, but he said I was a tickleminded fellow and he doubted not he should soon hear I was on the world again, which indeed proved true.”

  Dr. Pratt is next taken up where he left off.

  “On the 16th I was called up out of my bed soon after it was light—that is about five—with a message that Dr. Quinn was dead or dying. Making my way to his house I found there was no doubt which was the truth. All the persons in the house except the one that let me in were already in his chamber and standing about his bed, but none touching him.

  “He was stretched in the midst of the bed, on his back, without any disorder, and indeed had the appearance of one ready laid out for burial. His hands, I think, were even crossed on his breast. The only thing not usual was that nothing was to be seen of his face, the two ends of the pillow or bolster appearing to be closed quite over it.

  “These I immediately pulled apart, at the same time rebuking those present, and especially the man, for not at once coming to the assistance of his master. He, however, only looked at me and shook his head, having evidently no more hope than myself that there was anything but a corpse before us.

  “Indeed it was plain to anyone possessed of the least experience that he was not only dead, but had died of suffocation. Nor could it be conceived that his death was accidentally caused by the mere folding of the pillow over his face. How should he not, feeling the oppression, have lifted his hands to put it away? Whereas not a fold of the sheet which was closely gathered about him, as I now observed, was disordered. The next thing was to procure a physician.

  “I had bethought me of this on leaving my house, and sent on the messenger who had come to me to Dr. Abell. But I now heard that he was away from home, and the nearest surgeon was got, who, however, could tell no more, at least without opening the body, than we already knew.

  “As to any person entering the room with evil purpose (which was the next point to be cleared), it was visible that the bolts of the door were burst from their stanchions, and the stanchions broken away from the door-post by main force. And there was a sufficient body of witness, the smith among them, to testify that this had been done but a few minutes before I came.

  “The chamber being, moreover, at the top of the house, the window was neither easy of access nor did i
t show any sign of an exit made that way, either by marks upon the sill or footprints below upon soft mold.”

  The surgeon’s evidence forms of course part of the report of the inquest, but since it has nothing but remarks upon the healthy state of the larger organs and the coagulation of blood in various parts of the body, it need not be reproduced.

  The verdict was “Death by the visitation of God.”

  Annexed to the other papers is one which I was at first inclined to suppose had made its way among them by mistake. Upon further consideration I think I can divine a reason for its presence.

  It relates to the rifling of a mausoleum in Middlesex which stood in a park (now broken up), the property of a noble family which I will not name. The outrage was not that of an ordinary resurrection man. The object, it seemed likely, was theft.

  The account is blunt and terrible. I shall not quote it. A dealer in the North of London suffered heavy penalties as a receiver of stolen goods in connection with the affair.

  The Uncommon Prayer-book

  I

  MR. DAVIDSON WAS SPENDING the first week in January alone in a country town. A combination of circumstances had driven him to that drastic course: his nearest relations were enjoying winter sports abroad, and the friends who had been kindly anxious to replace them had an infectious complaint in the house.

  Doubtless he might have found someone else to take pity on him. “But,” he reflected, “most of them have made up their parties, and after all it is only for three or four days at most that I have to fend for myself, and it will be just as well if I can get a move on with my introduction to the Leventhorp Papers.

  “I might use the time by going down as near as I can to Gaulsford and making acquaintance with the neighborhood. I ought to see the remains of the Leventhorp house, and the tombs in the church.”

  The first day after his arrival at the Swan Hotel at Longbridge was so stormy that he got no farther than the tobacconist’s. The next, comparatively bright, he used for his visit to Gaulsford, which interested him more than a little, but had no ulterior consequences. The third, which was really a pearl of a day for early January, was too fine to be spent indoors.