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

by M. R. James

  “Well, now, after such a night as that, Mr. Baxter he’d shut up the shop, and the old lady that did for him had orders not to come in. And knowing what she did about his language, she took care to obey them orders.

  “But one day it so happened, about three o’clock in the afternoon, the house being shut up as I said, there come a most fearful to-do inside, and smoke out of the windows, and Baxter crying out seemingly in an agony. So the man as lived next door he run round to the back premises and burst the door in, and several others come too.

  “Well, he tell me he never in all his life smelt such a fearful—well, odor, as what there was in that kitchen-place. It seem as if Baxter had been boiling something in a pot and overset it on his leg. There he laid on the floor, trying to keep back the cries, but it was more than he could manage, and when he seen the people come in—oh, he was in a nice condition. If his tongue warn’t blistered worse than his leg it warn’t his fault.

  “Well, they picked him up, and got him into a chair, and run for the medical man, and one of ’em was going to pick up the pot, and Baxter, he screams out to let it alone. So he did, but he couldn’t see as there was anything in the pot but a few old brown bones.

  “Then they says ‘Dr. Lawrence’ll be here in a minute, Mr. Baxter; he’ll soon put you to rights.’ And then he was off again. He must be got up to his room, he couldn’t have the doctor come in there and see all that mess—they must throw a cloth over it—anything—the tablecloth out of the parlor. Well, so they did. But that must have been poisonous stuff in that pot, for it was pretty near on two months afore Baxter were about agin.

  “Beg pardon, Master Henry, was you going to say something?”

  “Yes, I was,” said the Squire. “I wonder you haven’t told me all this before. However, I was going to say I remember old Lawrence telling me he’d attended Baxter. He was a queer card, he said. Lawrence was up in the bedroom one day, and picked up a little mask covered with black velvet, and put it on in fun and went to look at himself in the glass. He hadn’t time for a proper look, for old Baxter shouted out to him from the bed: ‘Put it down, you fool! Do you want to look through a dead man’s eyes?’ And it startled him so that he did put it down, and then he asked Baxter what he meant. And Baxter insisted on him handing it over, and said the man he bought it from was dead, or some such nonsense.

  “But Lawrence felt it as he handed it over, and he declared he was sure it was made out of the front of a skull. He bought a distilling apparatus at Baxter’s sale, he told me, but he could never use it: it seemed to taint everything, however much he cleaned it. But go on, Patten.”

  “Yes, Master Henry, I’m nearly done now, and time, too, for I don’t know what they’ll think about me in the servants’ ’all. Well, this business of the scalding was some few years before Mr. Baxter was took, and he got about again, and went on just as he’d used. And one of the last jobs he done was finishing up them actual glasses what you took out last night.

  “You see he’d made the body of them some long time, and got the pieces of glass for them, but there was somethink wanted to finish ’em, whatever it was, I don’t know, but I picked up the frame one day, and I says: ‘Mr. Baxter, why don’t you make a job of this?’

  “And he says, ‘Ah, when I’ve done that, you’ll hear news, you will: there’s going to be no such pair of glasses as mine when they’re filled and sealed,’ and there he stopped.

  “And I says: ‘Why, Mr. Baxter, you talk as if they was wine bottles: filled and sealed—why, where’s the necessity for that?’

  “‘Did I say filled and sealed?’ he says. ‘O, well, I was suiting my conversation to my company.’

  “Well, then come round this time of year, and one fine evening, I was passing his shop on my way home, and he was standing on the step, very pleased with hisself, and he says: ‘All right and tight now: my best bit of work’s finished, and I’ll be out with ’em tomorrow.’

  “‘What, finished them glasses?’ I says, ‘might I have a look at them?’

  “‘No, no,’ he says, ‘I’ve put ’em to bed for tonight, and when I do show ’em you, you’ll have to pay for peepin’, so I tell you.” And that, gentlemen, were the last words I heard that man say.

  “That were the 17th of June, and just a week after, there was a funny thing happened, and it was doo to that as we brought in ‘unsound mind’ at the inquest, for barring that, no one as knew Baxter in business could anyways have laid that against him.

  “But George Williams, as lived in the next house, and do now, he was woke up that same night with a stumbling and tumbling about in Mr. Baxter’s premises, and he got out o’ bed, and went to the front window on the street to see if there was any rough customers about. And it being a very light night, he could make sure as there was not.

  “Then he stood and listened, and he hear Mr. Baxter coming down his front stair one step after another very slow, and he got the idear as it was like someone bein’ pushed or pulled down and holdin’ on to everythin’ he could. Next thing he hear the street door come open, and out come Mr. Baxter into the street in his day-clothes, ’at and all, with his arms straight down by his sides, and talking to hisself, and shakin’ his head from one side to the other, and walking in that peculiar way that he appeared to be going as it were against his own will.

  “George Williams put up the window, and hear him say: ‘O mercy, gentlemen!’ and then he shut up sudden as if, he said, someone clapped his hand over his mouth, and Mr. Baxter threw his head back, and his hat fell off. And Williams see his face looking something pitiful, so as he couldn’t keep from calling out to him: ‘Why, Mr. Baxter, ain’t you well?’ and he was goin’ to offer to fetch Dr. Lawrence to him, only he heard the answer: ‘’Tis best you mind your own business. Put in your head.’ But whether it were Mr. Baxter said it so hoarse-like and faint, he never could be sure.

  “Still there weren’t no one but him in the street, and yet Williams was that upset by the way he spoke that he shrank back from the window and went and sat on the bed. And he heard Mr. Baxter’s step go on and up the road, and after a minute or more he couldn’t help but look out once more and he see him going along the same curious way as before. And one thing he recollected was that Mr. Baxter never stopped to pick up his ’at when it fell off, and yet there it was on his head.

  “Well, Master Henry, that was the last anybody see of Mr. Baxter, leastways for a week or more. There was a lot of people said he was called off on business, or made off because he’d got into some scrape, but he was well known for miles round, and none of the railway people nor the public-house people hadn’t seen him.

  “And then ponds was looked into and nothink found; and at last one evening Fakes the keeper come down from over the hill to the village, and he says he seen the Gallows Hill planting black with birds, and that were a funny thing, because he never see no sign of a creature there in his time. So they looked at each other a bit, and first one says: ‘I’m game to go up,’ and another says: ‘So am I, if you are,’ and half-a-dozen of ’em set out in the evening time, and took Dr. Lawrence with them, and you know, Master Henry, there he was between them three stones with his neck broke.”

  Useless to imagine the talk which this story set going. It is not remembered. But before Patten left them, he said to Fanshawe: “Excuse me, sir, but did I understand as you took out them glasses with you today? I thought you did; and might I ask, did you make use of them at all?”

  “Yes. Only to look at something in a church.”

  “Oh, indeed, you took ’em into the church, did you, sir?”

  “Yes, I did; it was Lambsfield church. By the way, I left them strapped on to my bicycle, I’m afraid, in the stable-yard.”

  “No matter for that, sir. I can bring them in the first thing tomorrow, and perhaps you’ll be so good as to look at ’em then.”

  Accordingly, before breakfast, after a tranquil and well-earned sleep, Fanshawe took the glasses into the garden and directed them to a di
stant hill. He lowered them instantly, and looked at top and bottom, worked the screws, tried them again and yet again, shrugged his shoulders and replaced them on the hall-table.

  “Patten,” he said, “they’re absolutely useless. I can’t see a thing: it’s as if someone had stuck a black wafer over the lens.”

  “Spoiled my glasses, have you?” said the Squire. “Thank you: the only ones I’ve got.”

  “You try them yourself,” said Fanshawe, “I’ve done nothing to them.”

  So after breakfast the Squire took them out to the terrace and stood on the steps. After a few ineffectual attempts, “Lord, how heavy they are!” he said impatiently, and in the same instant dropped them on to the stones, and the lens splintered and the barrel cracked. A little pool of liquid formed on the stone slab. It was inky black, and the odor that rose from it is not to be described.

  “Filled and sealed, eh?” said the Squire. “If I could bring myself to touch it, I dare say we should find the seal. So that’s what came of his boiling and distilling, is it? Old Ghoul!”

  “What in the world do you mean?”

  “Don’t you see, my good man? Remember what he said to the doctor about looking through dead men’s eyes? Well, this was another way of it. But they didn’t like having their bones boiled, I take it, and the end of it was they carried him off whither he would not. Well, I’ll get a spade, and we’ll bury this thing decently.”

  As they smoothed the turf over it, the Squire, handing the spade to Patten, who had been a reverential spectator, remarked to Fanshawe: “It’s almost a pity you took that thing into the church: you might have seen more than you did. Baxter had them for a week, I make out, but I don’t see that he did much in the time.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Fanshawe, “there is that picture of Fulnaker Priory Church.”

  A Warning to the Curious

  THE PLACE ON THE EAST COAST which the reader is asked to consider is Seaburgh. It is not very different now from what I remember it to have been when I was a child. Marshes intersected by dykes to the south, recalling the early chapters of Great Expectations; flat fields to the north, merging into heath; heath, fir woods, and, above all, gorse, inland. A long sea-front and a street: behind that a spacious church of flint, with a broad, solid western tower and a peal of six bells.

  How well I remember their sound on a hot Sunday in August, as our party went slowly up the white, dusty slope of road toward them, for the church stands at the top of a short, steep incline. They rang with a flat clacking sort of sound on those hot days, but when the air was softer they were mellower too.

  The railway ran down to its little terminus farther along the same road. There was a gay white windmill just before you came to the station, and another down near the shingle at the south end the town, and yet others on higher ground to the north.

  There were cottages of bright red brick with slate roofs … but why do I encumber you with these commonplace details? The fact is that they come crowding to the point of the pencil when it begins to write of Seaburgh. I should like to be sure that I had allowed the right ones to get on to the paper. But I forgot. I have not quite done with the word-painting business yet.

  Walk away from the sea and the town, pass the station, and turn up the road on the right. It is a sandy road, parallel with the railway, and if you follow it, it climbs to somewhat higher ground. On your left (you are now going northward) is heath, on your right (the side toward the sea) is a belt of old firs, wind-beaten, thick at the top, with the slope that old seaside trees have. Seen on the skyline from the train they would tell you in an instant, if you did not know it, that you were approaching a windy coast.

  Well, at the top of my little hill, a line of these firs strikes out and runs toward the sea, for there is a ridge that goes that way. And the ridge ends in a rather well-defined mound commanding the level fields of rough grass, and a little knot of fir trees crowns it. And here you may sit on a hot spring day, very well content to look at blue sea, white windmills, red cottages, bright green grass, church tower, and distant Martello tower on the south.

  As I have said, I began to know Seaburgh as a child; but a gap of a good many years separates my early knowledge from that which is more recent. Still it keeps its place in my affections, and any tales of it that I pick up have an interest for me.

  One such tale is this: it came to me in a place very remote from Seaburgh, and quite accidentally, from a man whom I had been able to oblige—enough in his opinion to justify his making me his confidant to this extent.

  I know all that country more or less (he said). I used to go to Seaburgh pretty regularly for golf in the spring. I generally put up at the Bear, with a friend—Henry Long it was, you knew him perhaps—(“Slightly,” I said) and we used to take a sitting room and be very happy there. Since he died I haven’t cared to go there. And I don’t know that I should anyhow after the particular thing that happened on our last visit.

  It was in April, 19—, we were there, and by some chance we were almost the only people in the hotel. So the ordinary public rooms were practically empty, and we were the more surprised when, after dinner, our sitting room door opened, and a young man put his head in.

  We were aware of this young man. He was rather a rabbity anemic subject—light hair and light eyes—but not unpleasing. So when he said: “I beg your pardon, is this a private room?” we did not growl and say: “Yes, it is,” but Long said, or I did—no matter which: “Please come in.” “Oh, may I?” he said, and seemed relieved. Of course it was obvious that he wanted company; and as he was a reasonable kind of person—not the sort to bestow his whole family history on you—we urged him to make himself at home.

  “I dare say you find the other rooms rather bleak,” I said.

  Yes, he did; but it was really too good of us, and so on. That being got over, he made some pretense of reading a book. Long was playing Patience, I was writing. It became plain to me after a few minutes that this visitor of ours was in rather a state of fidgets or nerves, which communicated itself to me, and so I put away my writing and turned to at engaging him in talk.

  After some remarks, which I forget, he became rather confidential.

  “You’ll think it very odd of me” (this was the sort of way he began), “but the fact is I’ve had something of a shock.”

  Well, I recommended a drink of some cheering kind, and we had it. The waiter coming in made an interruption (and I thought our young man seemed very jumpy when the door opened), but after a while he got back to his woes again.

  There was nobody he knew in the place, and he did happen to know who we both were (it turned out there was some common acquaintance in town), and really he did want a word of advice, if we didn’t mind.

  Of course we both said: “By all means,” or “Not at all,” and Long put away his cards. And we settled down to hear what his difficulty was.

  “It began,” he said, “more than a week ago, when I bicycled over to Froston, only about five or six miles, to see the church. I’m very much interested in architecture, and it’s got one of those pretty porches with niches and shields.

  “I took a photograph of it, and then an old man who was tidying up in the churchyard came and asked if I’d care to look into the church. I said yes, and he produced a key and let me in.

  “There wasn’t much inside, but I told him it was a nice little church, and he kept it very clean, ‘but,’ I said, ‘the porch is the best part of it.’

  “We were just outside the porch then, and he said, ‘Ah, yes, that is a nice porch. And do you know, sir, what’s the meanin’ of that coat of arms there?’

  “It was the one with the three crowns, and though I’m not much of a herald, I was able to say yes, I thought it was the old arms of the kingdom of East Anglia.

  “‘That’s right, sir,’ he said, ‘and do you know the meanin’ of them three crowns that’s on it?’

  “I said I’d no doubt it was known, but I couldn’t recollect to have heard
it myself.

  “‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘for all you’re a scholard, I can tell you something you don’t know. Them’s the three ’oly crowns what was buried in the ground near the coast to keep the Germans from landing—ah, I can see you don’t believe that. But I tell you, if it hadn’t have been for one of them ’oly crowns bein’ there still, them Germans would a landed here time and again, they would. Landed with their ships, and killed man, woman and child in their beds. Now then, that’s the truth what I’m telling you, that is. And if you don’t believe me, you ast the rector. There he comes: you ast him, I says.’

  “I looked around, and there was the rector, a nice-looking old man, coming up the path. And before I could begin assuring my old man, who was getting quite excited, that I didn’t disbelieve him, the rector struck in, and said: ‘What’s all this about, John? Good day to you, sir. Have you been looking at our little church?’

  “So then there was a little talk which allowed the old man to calm down, and then the rector asked him again what was the matter.

  “‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it warn’t nothink, only I was telling this gentleman he’d ought to ast you about them ’oly crowns.’

  “‘Ah, yes, to be sure,’ said the rector, ‘that’s a very curious matter, isn’t it? But I don’t know whether the gentleman is interested in our old stories, eh?’

  “‘Oh, he’ll be interested fast enough,’ says the old man, ‘he’ll put his confidence in what you tells him, sir. Why, you known William Ager yourself, father and son too.’

  “Then I put in a word to say how much I should like to hear all about it, and before many minutes I was walking up the village street with the rector, who had one or two words to say to parishioners, and then to the rectory, where he took me into his study.

  “He had made out, on the way, that I really was capable of taking an intelligent interest in a piece of folklore, and not quite the ordinary tripper. So he was very willing to talk, and it is rather surprising to me that the particular legend he told me has not made its way into print before.