Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (44 page)

“‘Oh, rot,’ he says, ‘give me that roll,’ and he took it and shoved it in. And I don’t think ever I see anyone go so pale as he did.

“‘I say, Worby,’ he says, ‘it’s caught, or else someone’s got hold of it.’

“‘Pull it out or leave it,’ I says. ‘Come let’s get off.’

“So he gave a good pull, and it came away. Leastways most of it did, but the end was gone. Torn off it was, and Evans looked at it for a second and then he gave a sort of a croak and let it drop, and we both made off out of there as quick as ever we could.

“When we got outside Evans says to me, ‘Did you see the end of that paper?’

“‘No,’ I says, ‘only it was torn.’

“‘Yes, it was,’ he says, ‘but it was wet too, and black!’

“Well, partly because of the fright we had, and partly because that music was wanted in a day or two, and we knew there’d be a set-out about it with the organist, we didn’t say nothing to anyone else, and I suppose the workmen they swept up the bit that was left along with the rest of the rubbish.

“But Evans, if you were to ask him this very day about it, he’d stick to it he saw that paper wet and black at the end where it was torn.”

After that the boys gave the choir a wide berth, so that Worby was not sure what was the result of the mason’s renewed mending of the tomb. Only he made out from fragments of conversation dropped by the workmen passing through the choir that some difficulty had been met with, and that the governor—Mr. Palmer to wit—had tried his own hand at the job.

A little later, he happened to see Mr. Palmer himself knocking at the door of the Deanery and being admitted by the butler. A day or so after that, he gathered from a remark his father let fall at breakfast that something a little out of the common was to be done in the Cathedral after morning service on the morrow.

“And I’d just as soon it was today,” his father added. “I don’t see the use of running risks.”

“‘Father,’ I says, ‘what are you going to do in the Cathedral tomorrow?’

“And he turned on me as savage as I ever see him—he was a wonderful good-tempered man as a general thing, my poor father was. ‘My lad,’ he says, ‘I’ll trouble you not to go picking up your elders’ and betters’ talk—it’s not manners and it’s not straight. What I’m going to do or not going to do
in the Cathedral tomorrow is none of your business, and if I catch sight of you hanging about the place tomorrow after your work’s done, I’ll send you home with a flea in your ear. Now you mind that.’

“Of course I said I was very sorry and that, and equally of course I went off and laid my plans with Evans. We knew there was a stair up in the corner of the transept which you can get up to the triforium, and in them days the door to it was pretty well always open, and even if it wasn’t we knew the key usually laid under a bit of matting hard by.

“So we made up our minds we’d be putting away music and that, next morning while the rest of the boys was clearing off, and then slip up the stairs and watch from the triforium if there was any signs of work going on.

“Well, that same night I dropped off asleep as sound as a boy does, and all of a sudden the dog woke me up, coming into the bed, and thought I, now we’re going to get it sharp, for he seemed more frightened than usual.

“After about five minutes sure enough came this cry. I can’t give you no idea what it was like; and so near too—nearer than I’d heard it yet—and a funny thing, Mr. Lake, you know what a place this Close is for an echo, and particular if you stand this side of it. Well, this crying never made no sign of an echo at all. But, as I said, it was dreadful near this night; and on the top of the start I got with hearing it, I got another fright—for I heard something rustling outside in the passage.

“Now to be sure I thought I was done; but I noticed the dog seemed to perk up a bit, and next there was someone whispered outside the door, and I very near laughed out loud, for I knew it was my father and mother that had gotten out of bed with the noise.

“‘Whatever is it?’ says my mother.

“‘Hush! I don’t know,’ says my father, excited-like, ‘don’t disturb the boy. I hope he didn’t hear nothing.’

“So, me knowing they were just outside, it made me bolder, and I slipped out of bed across to my little window—giving on the Close—but the dog he bored right down to the bottom of the bed—and I looked out.

“First go off I couldn’t see anything. Then right down in the shadow under a buttress I made out what I shall always say was two spots of red—a dull red it was—nothing like a lamp or a fire, but just so as you could pick ’em out of the black shadow. I hadn’t but just sighted ’em when it seemed we
wasn’t the only people that had been disturbed, because I see a window in a house on the left-hand side become lighted up, and the light moving.

“I just turned my head to make sure of it, and then looked back into the shadow for those two red things, and they were gone, and for all I peered about and stared, there was not a sign more of them.

“Then come my last fright that night—something come against my bare leg—but that was all right: that was my little dog had come out of bed, and prancing about making a great to-do, only holding his tongue, and me seeing he was quite in spirits again, I took him back to bed and we slept the night out!

“Next morning I made out to tell my mother I’d had the dog in my room, and I was surprised, after all she’d said about it before, how quiet she took it. ‘Did you?’ she says. ‘Well, by good rights you ought to go without your breakfast for doing such a thing behind my back, but I don’t know as there’s any great harm done, only another time you ask my permission, do you hear?’

“A bit after that I said something to my father about having heard the cats again. ‘
Cats
?’ he says; and he looked over at my poor mother, and she coughed and he says, ‘Oh! Ah! Yes, cats. I believe I heard ’em myself.’

“That was a funny morning altogether: nothing seemed to go right. The organist he stopped in bed, and the minor Canon he forgot it was the 19th day and waited for the
Venite
; and after a bit the deputy he set off playing the chant for evensong, which was a minor; and then the Decani boys were laughing so much they couldn’t sing, and when it came to the anthem the solo boy he got took with the giggles, and made out his nose was bleeding, and shoved the book at me what hadn’t practiced the verse and wasn’t much of a singer if I had known it. Well, things was rougher, you see, fifty years ago, and I got a nip from the counter-tenor behind me that I remembered.

“So we got through somehow, and neither the men nor the boys weren’t by way of waiting to see whether the Canon in residence—Mr. Henslow it was—would come to the vestries and fine ’em, but I don’t believe he did. For one thing I fancy he’d read the wrong lesson for the first time in his life, and knew it.

“Anyhow, Evans and me didn’t find no difficulty in slipping up the stairs as I told you, and when we got up we laid ourselves down flat on our stomachs where we could just stretch our heads out over the old tomb, and we
hadn’t but just done so when we heard the verger that was then, first shutting the iron porch-gates and locking the south-west door, and then the transept door, so we knew there was something up, and they meant to keep the public out for a bit.

“Next thing was, the Dean and the Canon come in by their door on the north, and then I see my father, and old Palmer, and a couple of their best men, and Palmer stood a talking for a bit with the Dean in the middle of the choir. He had a coil of rope and the men had crows. All of ’em looked a bit nervous.

“So there they stood talking, and at last I heard the Dean say, ‘Well, I’ve no time to waste, Palmer. If you think this’ll satisfy Southminster people, I’ll permit it to be done. But I must say this, that never in the whole course of my life have I heard such arrant nonsense from a practical man as I have from you. Don’t you agree with me, Henslow?’

“As far as I could hear Mr. Henslow said something like ‘Oh well! We’re told, aren’t we, Mr. Dean, not to judge others?’

“And the Dean he gave a kind of sniff, and walked straight up to the tomb, and took his stand behind it with his back to the screen, and the others they come edging up rather gingerly. Henslow, he stopped on the south side and scratched on his chin, he did.

“Then the Dean spoke up: ‘Palmer,’ he says, ‘which can you do easiest, get the slab off the top, or shift one of the side slabs?’

“Old Palmer and his men they pottered about a bit looking around the edge of the top slab and sounding the sides on the south and east and west and everywhere but the north. Henslow said something about it being better to have a try at the south side, because there was more light and more room to move about in.

“Then my father who’d been watching of them, went around to the north side, and knelt down and felt of the slab by the chink, and he got up and dusted his knees and says to the Dean: ‘Beg pardon, Mr. Dean, but I think if Mr. Palmer’ll try this here slab he’ll find it’ll come out easy enough. Seems to me one of the men could pry it out with his crow by means of this chink.’

“‘Ah! Thank you, Worby,’ says the Dean. ‘That’s a good suggestion. Palmer, let one of your men do that, will you?’

“So the man come around, and put his bar in and bore on it, and just that
minute when they were all bending over, and we boys got our heads well over the edge of the triforium, there come a most fearful crash down at the west end of the choir, as if a whole stick of big timber had fallen down a flight of stairs.

“Well, you can’t expect me to tell you everything that happened all in a minute. Of course there was a terrible commotion. I heard the slab fall out, and the crowbar on the floor, and I heard the Dean say, ‘Good God!’

“When I looked down again I saw the Dean tumbled over on the floor, the men was making off down the choir, Henslow was just going to help the Dean up, Palmer was going to stop the men (as he said afterward) and my father was sitting on the altar step with his face in his hands.

“The Dean he was very cross. ‘I wish to goodness you’d look where you’re coming to, Henslow,’ he says. ‘Why you should all take to your heels when a stick of wood tumbles down I cannot imagine.’ And all Henslow could do, explaining he was right away on the other side of the tomb, would not satisfy him.

“Then Palmer came back and reported there was nothing to account for this noise and nothing seemingly fallen down, and when the Dean finished feeling of himself they gathered around—except my father, he sat where he was—and someone lighted up a bit of candle and they looked into the tomb.

“‘Nothing there,’ says the Dean, ‘what did I tell you? Stay! Here’s something. What’s this? A bit of music paper, and a piece of torn stuff—part of a dress it looks like. Both quite modern—no interest whatever. Another time perhaps you’ll take the advice of an educated man’—or something like that, and off he went, limping a bit, and out through the north door, only as he went he called back angry to Palmer for leaving the door standing open.

“Palmer called out ‘Very sorry, sir,’ but he shrugged his shoulders.

“And Henslow says, ‘I fancy Mr. Dean’s mistaken. I closed the door behind me, but he’s a little upset.’

“Then Palmer says, ‘Why, where’s Worby?” and they saw him sitting on the step and went up to him. He was recovering himself, it seemed, and wiping his forehead, and Palmer helped him up on to his legs, as I was glad to see.

“They were too far off for me to hear what they said, but my father pointed to the north door in the aisle, and Palmer and Henslow both of them looked very surprised and scared.

“After a bit, my father and Henslow went out of the church, and the others made what haste they could to put the slab back and plaster it in. And about as the clock struck twelve the Cathedral was opened again and us boys made the best of our way home.

“I was in a great taking to know what it was had given my poor father such a turn, and when I got in and found him sitting in his chair taking a glass of spirits, and my mother standing looking anxious at him, I couldn’t keep from bursting out and making confession where I’d been.

“But he didn’t seem to take on, not in the way of losing his temper. ‘You was there, was you? Well, did you see it?’

“‘I see everything, father,’ I said, ‘except when the noise came.’

“‘Did you see what it was knocked the Dean over?’ he says, ‘that what come out of the monument? You didn’t? Well, that’s a mercy.’

“‘Why, what was it, father?’ I said.

“‘Come, you must have seen it,’ he says. ‘
Didn’t
you see? A thing like a man, all over hair, and two great eyes to it?’

“Well, that was all I could get out of him that time, and later on he seemed as if he was ashamed of being so frightened, and he used to put me off when I asked him about it.

“But years after, when I was got to be a grown man, we had more talk now and again on the matter, and he always said the same thing. ‘Black it was,’ he’d say, ‘and a mass of hair, and two legs, and the light caught on its eyes.’

“Well, that’s the tale of that tomb, Mr. Lake. It’s one we don’t tell to our visitors, and I should be obliged to you not to make any use of it till I’m out of the way. I doubt Mr. Evans’ll feel the same as I do, if you ask him.”

This proved to be the case. But over twenty years have passed by, and the grass is growing over both Worby and Evans, so Mr. Lake felt no difficulty about communicating his notes—taken in 1890—to me.

He accompanied them with a sketch of the tomb and a copy of the short inscription on the metal cross which was affixed at the expense of Dr. Lyall to the center of the northern side. It was from the Vulgate of Isaiah xxxiv., and consisted merely of the three words—

IBI CUBAVIT LAMIA.

T
HE SALESROOM
of an old and famous firm of book auctioneers in London is, of course, a great meeting-place for collectors, librarians, dealers. Not only when an auction is in progress, but perhaps even more notably when books that are coming on for sale are upon view.

It was in such a salesroom that the remarkable series of events began which were detailed to me not many months ago by the person whom they principally affected—namely, Mr. James Denton, M.A., F.S.A., etc., etc., sometime of Trinity Hall, now, or lately, of Rendcomb Manor in the county of Warwick.