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

by M. R. James

  You see—no, you do not, but I see—such curious faces; and the people to whom they belong flit about so oddly, often at your elbow when you least expect it, and looking close into your face, as if they were searching for someone—who may be thankful, I think, if they do not find him.

  “Where do they come from?” Why, some, I think, out of the water, and some out of the ground. They look like that. But I am sure it is best to take no notice of them, and not to touch them.

  Yes, I certainly prefer the daylight population of the Playing Fields to that which comes there after dark.

  There Was a Man Dwelled by a Churchyard

  THIS, YOU KNOW, is the beginning of the story about sprites and goblins which Mamilius, the best child in Shakespeare, was telling to his mother the queen, and the court ladies, when the king came in with his guards and hurried her off to prison. There is no more of the story. Mamilius died soon after without having a chance of finishing it.

  Now what was it going to have been? Shakespeare knew, no doubt, and I will be bold to say that I do. It was not going to be a new story: it was to be one which you have most likely heard, and even told. Everybody may set it in what frame he likes best.

  This is mine:

  There was a man dwelled by a churchyard. His house had a lower story of stone and an upper one of timber. The front windows looked out on the street and the back ones on the churchyard.

  It had once belonged to the parish priest, but (this was in Queen Elizabeth’s days) the priest was a married man and wanted more room. Besides, his wife disliked seeing the churchyard at night out of her bedroom window. She said she saw—but never mind what she said.

  Anyhow, she gave her husband no peace till he agreed to move into a larger house in the village street, and the old one was taken by John Poole, who was a widower, and lived there alone. He was an elderly man who kept very much to himself, and people said he was something of a miser.

  It was very likely true: he was morbid in other ways, certainly. In those days it was common to bury people at night and by torchlight. And it was noticed that whenever a funeral was toward, John Poole was always at his window, either on the ground floor or upstairs, according as he could get the better view from one or the other.

  There came a night when an old woman was to be buried. She was fairly well to do, but she was not liked in the place. The usual thing was said of her, that she was no Christian, and that on such nights as Midsummer Eve and All Hallows, she was not to be found in her house. She was red-eyed and dreadful to look at, and no beggar ever knocked at her door. Yet when she died she left a purse of money to the Church.

  There was no storm on the night of her burial: it was fair and calm. But there was some difficulty about getting bearers, and men to carry the torches, in spite of the fact that she had left larger fees than common for such as did that work.

  She was buried in woolen, without a coffin. No one was there but those who were actually needed—and John Poole, watching from his window. Just before the grave was filled in, the parson stooped down and cast something upon the body—something that clinked—and in a low voice he said words that sounded like “Thy money perish with thee.” Then he walked quickly away, and so did the other men, leaving only one torch-bearer to light the sexton and his boy while they shoveled the earth in.

  They made no very neat job of it, and next day, which was a Sunday, the churchgoers were rather sharp with the sexton, saying it was the untidiest grave in the yard. And indeed, when he came to look at it himself, he thought it was worse than he had left it.

  Meanwhile John Poole went about with a curious air, half-exulting, as it were, and half-nervous. More than once he spent an evening at the inn, which was clean contrary to his usual habit, and to those who fell into talk with him there he hinted that he had come into a little bit of money and was looking out for a somewhat better house.

  “Well, I don’t wonder,” said the smith one night, “I shouldn’t care for that place of yours. I should be fancying things all night.”

  The landlord asked him what sort of things.

  “Well, maybe somebody climbing up to the chamber window, or the like of that,” said the smith. “I don’t know—old mother Wilkins that was buried a week ago today, eh?”

  “Come, I think you might consider of a person’s feelings,” said the landlord. “It ain’t so pleasant for Master Poole, is it now?”

  “Master Poole don’t mind,” said the smith. “He’s been there long enough to know. I only says it wouldn’t be my choice. What with the passing bell, and the torches when there’s a burial, and all them graves laying so quiet when there’s no one about. Only they say there’s lights—don’t you never see no lights, Master Poole?”

  “No, I don’t never see no lights,” said Master Poole sulkily, and called for another drink, and went home late.

  That night, as he lay in his bed upstairs, a moaning wind began to play about the house, and he could not go to sleep. He got up and crossed the room to a little cupboard in the wall. He took out of it something that clinked, and put it in the breast of his robe. Then he went to the window and looked out into the churchyard.

  Have you ever seen an old brass in a church with a figure of a person in a shroud? It is bunched together at the top of the head in a curious way. Something like that was sticking up out of the earth in a spot of the churchyard which John Poole knew very well. He darted into his bed and lay there very still indeed.

  Presently something made a very faint rattling at the casement. With a dreadful reluctance John Poole turned his eyes that way. Alas! Between him and the moonlight was the black outline of the curious bunched head … Then there was a figure in the room. Dry earth rattled on the floor. A low cracked voice said “Where is it?” and steps went hither and thither, faltering steps as of one walking with difficulty. It could be seen now and again, peering into corners, stooping to look under chairs; finally it could be heard fumbling at the doors of the cupboard in the wall, throwing them open.

  There was a scratching of long nails on the empty shelves. The figure whipped around, stood for an instant at the side of the bed, raised its arms, and with a hoarse scream of “You’ve got it!”—

  At this point HRH Prince Mamilius (who would, I think, have made the story a good deal shorter than this) flung himself with a loud yell upon the youngest of the court ladies present, who responded with an equally piercing cry.

  He was instantly seized upon by HM Queen Hermione, who, repressing an inclination to laugh, shook and slapped him very severely. Much flushed, and rather inclined to cry, he was about to be sent to bed. But, on the intercession of his victim, who had now recovered from the shock, he was eventually permitted to remain until his usual hour for retiring; by which time he too had so far recovered as to assert, in bidding goodnight to the company, that he knew another story quite three times as dreadful as that one, and would tell it on the first opportunity that offered.

  A View From a Hill

  HOW PLEASANT IT CAN BE, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station.

  You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers. You marvel at the complete stillness that attends your stoppage at the stations, broken only by a footstep crunching the gravel. Yet perhaps that is best experienced after sundown, and the traveler I have in mind was making his leisurely progress on a sunny afternoon in the latter half of June.

  He was in the depths of the country. I need not particularize further than to say that if you divided the map of England into four quarters, he would have been found in the south-western of them.

  He was a man of academic pursuits, and his term was just over. He was on his way to meet a new friend, older than himself. The two of them had met first on an official inquiry in town, had found that they had many tastes and habits in common,
liked each other, and the result was an invitation from Squire Richards to Mr. Fanshawe which was now taking effect.

  The journey ended about five o’clock. Fanshawe was told by a cheerful country porter that the car from the Hall had been up to the station and left a message that something had to be fetched from half-a-mile farther on, and would the gentleman please to wait a few minutes till it came back?

  “But I see,” continued the porter, “as you’ve got your bysticle, and very like you’d find it pleasanter to ride up to the ’All yourself. Straight up the road ’ere, and then first turn to the left—it ain’t above two mile—and I’ll see as your things is put in the car for you.

  “You’ll excuse me mentioning it, only I thought it were a nice evening for a ride. Yes, sir, very seasonable weather for the haymakers: let me see, I have your bike ticket. Thank you, sir; much obliged. You can’t miss your road, etc., etc.”

  The two miles to the Hall were just what was needed, after the day in the train, to dispel somnolence and impart a wish for tea. The Hall, when sighted, also promised just what was needed in the way of a quiet resting-place after days of sitting on committees and college-meetings.

  It was neither excitingly old nor depressingly new. Plastered walls, sash-windows, old trees, smooth lawns, were the features which Fanshawe noticed as he came up the drive. Squire Richards, a burly man of sixty odd, was awaiting him in the porch with evident pleasure.

  “Tea first,” he said, “or would you like a longer drink? No? All right, tea’s ready in the garden. Come along, they’ll put your machine away. I always have tea under the lime-tree by the stream on a day like this.”

  Nor could you ask for a better place. Midsummer afternoon, shade and scent of a vast lime-tree, cool, swirling water within five yards. It was long before either of them suggested a move.

  But about six, Mr. Richards sat up, knocked out his pipe, and said: “Look here, it’s cool enough now to think of a stroll, if you’re inclined? All right: then what I suggest is that we walk up the park and get on to the hillside, where we can look over the country. We’ll have a map, and I’ll show you where things are; and you can go off on your machine, or we can take the car, according as you want exercise or not. If you’re ready, we can start now and be back well before eight, taking it very easy.”

  “I’m ready. I should like my stick, though, and have you got any binoculars? I lent mine to a man a week ago, and he’s gone off Lord knows where and taken them with him.”

  Mr. Richards pondered. “Yes,” he said, “I have, but they’re not things I use myself, and I don’t know whether the ones I have will suit you. They’re old-fashioned, and about twice as heavy as they make ’em now. You’re welcome to have them, but I won’t carry them. By the way, what do you want to drink after dinner?”

  Protestations that anything would do were overruled, and a satisfactory settlement was reached on the way to the front hall, where Mr. Fanshawe found his stick, and Mr. Richards, after thoughtful pinching of his lower lip, resorted to a drawer in the hall-table, extracted a key, crossed to a cupboard in the paneling, opened it, took a box from the shelf, and put it on the table.

  “The glasses are in there,” he said, “and there’s some dodge of opening it, but I’ve forgotten what it is. You try.”

  Mr. Fanshawe accordingly tried. There was no keyhole, and the box was solid, heavy and smooth: it seemed obvious that some part of it would have to be pressed before anything could happen.

  “The corners,” said he to himself, “are the likely places; and infernally sharp corners they are too,” he added, as he put his thumb in his mouth after exerting force on a lower corner.

  “What’s the matter?” said the Squire.

  “Why, your disgusting Borgia box has scratched me, drat it,” said Fanshawe.

  The Squire chuckled unfeelingly. “Well, you’ve got it open, anyway,” he said.

  “So I have! Well, I don’t begrudge a drop of blood in a good cause, and here are the glasses. They are pretty heavy, as you said, but I think I’m equal to carrying them.”

  “Ready?” said the Squire. “Come on then; we go out by the garden.”

  So they did, and passed out into the park, which sloped decidedly upward to the hill which, as Fanshawe had seen from the train, dominated the country. It was a spur of a larger range that lay behind.

  On the way, the Squire, who was great on earthworks, pointed out various spots where he detected or imagined traces of war-ditches and the like. “And here,” he said, stopping on a more or less level plot with a ring of large trees, “is Baxter’s Roman villa.”

  “Baxter?” said Mr. Fanshawe.

  “I forgot; you don’t know about him. He was the old chap I got those glasses from. I believe he made them. He was an old watch-maker down in the village, a great antiquary. My father gave him leave to grub about where he liked; and when he made a find he used to lend him a man or two to help him with the digging. He got a surprising lot of things together, and when he died—I dare say it’s ten or fifteen years ago—I bought the whole lot and gave them to the town museum. We’ll run in one of these days, and look over them.

  “The glasses came to me with the rest, but of course I kept them. If you look at them, you’ll see they’re more or less amateur work—the body of them. Naturally the lenses weren’t his making.”

  “Yes, I see they are just the sort of thing that a clever workman in a different line of business might turn out. But I don’t see why he made them so heavy. And did Baxter actually find a Roman villa here?”

  “Yes, there’s a pavement turfed over, where we’re standing: it was too rough and plain to be worth taking up, but of course there are drawings of it. And the small things and pottery that turned up were quite good of their kind. An ingenious chap, old Baxter: he seemed to have a quite out-of-the-way instinct for these things. He was invaluable to our archeologists.

  “He used to shut up his shop for days at a time, and wander off over the district, marking down places, where he scented anything, on the ordnance map; and he kept a book with fuller notes of the places. Since his death, a good many of them have been sampled, and there’s always been something to justify him.”

  “What a good man!” said Mr. Fanshawe.

  “Good?” said the Squire, pulling up brusquely.

  “I meant useful to have about the place,” said Mr. Fanshawe. “But was he a villain?”

  “I don’t know about that either,” said the Squire; “but all I can say is, if he was good, he wasn’t lucky. And he wasn’t liked—I didn’t like him,” he added, after a moment.

  “Oh?” said Fanshawe interrogatively.

  “No, I didn’t; but that’s enough about Baxter. Besides, this is the stiffest bit, and I don’t want to talk and walk as well.”

  Indeed it was hot, climbing a slippery grass slope that evening.

  “I told you I should take you the short way,” panted the Squire, “and I wish I hadn’t. However, a bath won’t do us any harm when we get back. Here we are, and there’s the seat.”

  A small clump of old Scotch firs crowned the top of the hill. And, at the edge of it, commanding the cream of the view, was a wide and solid seat, on which the two disposed themselves, and wiped their brows, and regained breath.

  “Now, then,” said the Squire, as soon as he was in a condition to talk connectedly, “this is where your glasses come in. But you’d better take a general look around first. My word! I’ve never seen the view look better.”

  Writing as I am now with a winter wind flapping against dark windows and a rushing, tumbling sea within a hundred yards, I find it hard to summon up the feelings and words which will put my reader in possession of the June evening and the lovely English landscape of which the Squire was speaking.

  Across a broad level plain they looked upon ranges of great hills, whose uplands—some green, some furred with woods—caught the light of a sun, westering but not yet low. And all the plain was fertile, though the river wh
ich traversed it was nowhere seen. There were copses, green wheat, hedges and pasture-land: the little compact white moving cloud marked the evening train. Then the eye picked out red farms and gray houses, and nearer home scattered cottages, and then the Hall, nestled under the hill. The smoke of chimneys was very blue and straight. There was a smell of hay in the air: there were wild roses on bushes hard by. It was the acme of summer.

  After some minutes of silent contemplation, the Squire began to point out the leading features, the hills and valleys, and told where the towns and villages lay.

  “Now,” he said, “with the glasses you’ll be able to pick out Fulnaker Abbey. Take a line across that big green field, then over the wood beyond it, then over the farm on the knoll.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Fanshawe. “I’ve got it. What a fine tower!”

  “You must have got the wrong direction,” said the Squire. “There’s not much of a tower about there that I remember, unless it’s Oldbourne Church that you’ve got hold of. And if you call that a fine tower, you’re easily pleased.”

  “Well, I do call it a fine tower,” said Fanshawe, the glasses still at his eyes, “whether it’s Oldbourne or any other. And it must belong to a largish church; it looks to me like a central tower—four big pinnacles at the corners, and four smaller ones between. I must certainly go over there. How far is it?”

  “Oldbourne’s about nine miles, or less,” said the Squire. “It’s a long time since I’ve been there, but I don’t remember thinking much of it. Now I’ll show you another thing.”

  Fanshawe had lowered the glasses, and was still gazing in the Oldbourne direction. “No,” he said, “I can’t make out anything with the naked eye. What was it you were going to show me?”

  “A good deal more to the left—it oughtn’t to be difficult to find. Do you see a rather sudden knob of a hill with a thick wood on top of it? It’s in a dead line with that single tree on the top of the big ridge.”