Ghosts and Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James

DR HORDER’S ROOM Patrick Carleton

Among the many pre-war anthologies of horror and supernatural tales, some of the most popular were the ‘Creeps’ series, anonymously edited by Charles Lloyd Birkin, and published between 1932 and 1936 by Philip Allan. Birkin was an old Etonian in the early 1920s (during M. R. James’s provostship), but while his own stories were usually of the conte cruel variety, some excellent Jamesian tales by other writers were featured in the series. One of the best is Patrick Carleton’s ‘Dr Horder’s Room’. Carleton wrote several novels in the 1930s, including The Hawk and the Tree, Desirable Young Men, and One Breath (a colourful circus epic, encompassing the years 1785–1885).

The college of SS Cosmas and Damian, though among the smallest, is by no means the most recent foundation of the University of Cambridge. Originally endowed, by a noble lady, at the commencement of the fifteenth century, it owes—as do so many of the houses of both universities—the most striking features both of its architecture and its constitution to the zeal of a famous Master. This was Doctor Nicholas Horder who, like his great contemporary Doctor Caius, seems almost to have re-founded and entirely to have rebuilt the college over which he ruled. To him is attributed the charming wine-red brickwork of the college’s two older courts; him the Fellows, at their annual Founders’ Feast, thank for the rich endowments which enable them to dine on turtle and roast swan, served on silver; and his arms, impaling those of the original Foundress, are displayed above the college gates.

It is a curious and lamentable fact that next to nothing is known of the life and antecedents of this worthy scholar. Born in approximately 1508, he graduated at the college of which he was later to be Master in 1527. For some years afterwards, he appears to have pursued his studies abroad—noticeably at the University of Toledo, where he familiarized himself not only with Hebrew and Aramaic, but also with Arabic, a language then little understood in Europe. Subsequently, he travelled in Turkey—he is known to have been in Constantinople in 1533—and, on his return to England, was admitted as a Fellow by his old college. In 1548, the then Master, Doctor Foxhill, died very suddenly, and Dr Horder was appointed in his room. He immediately set about the rebuilding of the college. The old buildings, contemporary with the original foundation, were incontinently destroyed, and in their place there arose two splendid courts, surrounded by brick buildings with white stone quoins and casements, a towered gateway, and a chapel of noble proportions. Opposite this last, on the north side of the first court, was the doctor’s own residence—a humble enough lodging consisting only of three large panelled chambers on the first floor, approached by a steep and narrow staircase. Here he lived and exercised authority for the astonishing period of sixty-seven years; that is, until, on the lowest reckoning, he was considerably more than a centenarian. How much longer he might have continued to enjoy the work of his hands, it is impossible to say. He was found at the foot of the staircase leading to his rooms, on a morning in 1615, with his neck broken and his skull smashed, evidently as the result of a fall. The grave, on the south side of the college chapel, is marked by an inscribed slab.

The college, indeed, appears at about this time to have been continually under the shadow of wings. During the last forty years of the great Doctor’s mastership, no less than five undergraduates died in residence, and one of the few contemporary records that we possess speaks of the moving sermon which the aged master preached at the funeral service of the last of them, on the text Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.

It is time now to leave this delving into college history and turn to a typical Cambridge afternoon—grey, damp and dubious—when two members of the Governing Body of the college were discussing matters of policy for the coming term. The younger of them, Mr Milligan, was the Dean and Senior Tutor, and the elder, Dr Hollywell, was chiefly famous for his work on the Targums. When—at infrequent intervals—he could be exhumed from this study, he delivered valuable but inaudible lectures on Old Testament Exegesis and coached Divinity students in Hebrew.

‘Well, Hollywell, and how do you like your new rooms?’

‘Disgusting,’ replied Dr Hollywell. ‘The fact is, Milligan, they don’t want to learn. They just don’t care.’

The Dean knew his man.

‘Your new rooms, Hollywell, not your new pupils.’

‘Eh? What rooms? What’s wrong with them? I hadn’t heard anything about it. No one ever tells me anything.’

‘Your rooms in the second court: how do you like them?’

‘Oh—them! Thank you, yes, very nice and convenient, very suitable. I never could stand the Horder rooms; glad to be out of them. Who’s having them now, eh? One of these horrid scientist-people we’re giving Fellowships to nowadays, I suppose. I tell you, Milligan, the temple of the Lord is become a den of scientists. Disgusting.’

‘As a matter of fact, we’ve decided not to put another member of High Table into them. They’re to go to one of the second-year scholars.’

Dr Hollywell raised his large bald head and stared at the Dean as though he were seeing him for the first time and found the spectacle unwholesome. He asked slowly:

‘Did I understand you to say, Milligan, that my old rooms—Dr Horder’s rooms—are being assigned to an undergraduate?’

‘Yes—Lake’s to have them: that nice young classical scholar. We really ought to have all the scholars in college, don’t you think?’

Dr Hollywell’s already cracked and tremulous voice quavered like a parrot’s.

‘Well! Five-and-forty years have I been a Fellow of this college, and never before have I heard anyone—anyone—suggest that a young man should be allowed to occupy the Horder rooms. Upon my word, Milligan, I don’t know what’s possessing you. Why, I remember the old Master saying . . . but never mind that now. Just oblige me, Milligan, by getting out the Conclusion Book for—now let me see—for the year seventeen hundred and sixty-two.’

When, after a certain amount of further argument, conducted, on Dr Hollywell’s part, to the tune of ‘No one ever tells me anything,’ the book had been produced, the old man turned to an entry in faded ink and stately Italian script, which read: ‘Agreed: that Dr Horder’s rooms be no more assign’d as a lodging to persons in statu pupillari, but reserv’d for some Senior member of the College.’ The Dean groaned in spirit. Dr Hollywell’s familiarity with the unprofitable back-alleys of college history was a proverbial nuisance. He said patiently:

‘Well, well, I never noticed that before. Still, you can hardly expect us to be tied down by an old enactment like that. Autre temps, autres mœurs, you know.’

‘Don’t talk French to me,’ snapped the Doctor, ‘and don’t go and put an undergraduate in Dr Horder’s rooms. Reverence for the past I’ve long ceased to look for, but common sense is common sense. I’ve no doubt at all it’s these physicists or scientists or biochemists or whatever they call themselves who’re at the bottom of this.’

Poor old Hollywell, thought the Dean sadly, it was really tragic, the way he was breaking up.

Frank Shelton drank beer and looked admiringly about him.

‘The complete Ritz,’ he said slowly, ‘the complete Ritz, Peter. Fancy them giving you two sitting-rooms just because you’re a lousy scholar—and me crouching among the aspidistras in Hills Road and arguing with my landlady about the price of bacon. You’re a lucky hog.’

Peter Lake smiled and stretched his arms. He was an attractive-looking boy of twenty-one, slim and strong, with grey-blue eyes and a quantity of curling yellow hair.

‘They’re decent rooms,’ he agreed. ‘Did you know Frank, the old chap who built the college used to live in them? He broke his neck falling down those stairs. So will you, if you gulp your beer like that.’

‘Cheerful thought! Does he haunt?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice it. Pious old bird: he’s probably safe in heaven. Had a pretty taste in interior decoration, I must say.’

Indeed, the sitting-room, which had been furnished by the college authorities in a style appropriate to its period, was an impressive place. The walls were panelled with oak to their full height, and the heavy overmantel was enriched with masks and garlands and supported by two terms or caryatids with grotesque horned heads—satyrs, no doubt, or fauns. The old flooring creaked a little when trodden on, and the whole place bore gallantly but perceptibly its weight of years. It was, perhaps, a little gloomy, a little inclined to hug the shadows in its corners, and almost—if the expression be permissible—to avoid the eye like a dog with something on its conscience.

But this, no doubt, was due to the thickness and heaviness of the shades on the electric lights.

‘I had,’ said Shelton, ‘a hell of a queer dream last night.’

‘What was that?’ asked his host.

‘Dreamt I was riding a tricycle down Petty Cury in my pyjamas, and playing the saxophone. Then the scene suddenly changed, and I found I was the Bishop of Birmingham. I forget what happened after that.’

‘There’s probably something revoltingly wrong with your subconscious. As a matter of fact, I had a dream, too.’

‘Give me an opportunity of retaliating, then.’

‘Righto: it was dam’ queer, really, and rather foul. It began with a most horrible stink—ever dreamed about a smell before? I haven’t—and then I distinctly felt somebody turning back the clothes from my bed. I woke up and, sure enough, I’d kicked all the clothes off and I was shivering. It was awfully real whilst it lasted, though.’

Shelton’s proposed explanation was a ribald one, and the conversation took a turn we need not follow.

Henry, the head porter of SS Cosmas and Damian, pushed his bowler-hat to the back of his head and blinked. Then he shouted across the morning stillness of the court to his assistant.

‘George, ’as anybody been in the Chapel this morning?’

George, sorting letters in the porter’s lodge, said no.

‘Well, that’s a queer thing, then, because somebody’s gone and unlocked the door, which I’ll swear I ’aven’t, nor you neither.’

‘Nor me neither; did you remember to lock that last night, now?’ Henry snorted.

‘’Ow long ’ave I been in this ’ere college? And ’ow often ’ave I forgot to lock anything? Somebody’s been in, and that’s a fact.’

‘It’ll be the Reverent.’

‘’Im, what’s never out of ’is bed before nine of the morning, exceptin’ when it’s early service? No, that’s one of them young devils, that’s ’oo that is. I shall report this.’

In his comfortable study, the Dean was reading an old book. It was a reprint, prepared specially at the request of the college authorities, of a number of documents relating to the history of the Foundation. The passage which at the moment occupied the Dean’s attention, even to the exclusion of his breakfast, was an entry in the diary of one Master Richard Claye who had been a Fellow of the college during the later years of Dr Horder’s rule. It read as follows:

The Dean rubbed his forehead. It was queer, he thought, how one deplorable circumstance had followed another in the first court. There had been the Doctor’s own tragic end of course, and then, surely there had been a fatality of some sort in the eighteenth century? He turned the pages of his book rapidly, and found what he sought in another and drier diary, that of a certain Randolph Gibbons, Fellow of the College and afterwards a Canon of Ely. The entry, made after a gap of several days, was terse: ‘Had some talk with Mr Rose about the sudden decease of Mr Harrison, he being the first that viewed the poor young man. He told me he supposed him to have died of some sort of seizure of the nature of an apoplexy, basing this upon the circumstance of his finding him, not in his bed, but lying upon the floor beside it, and with his face much contorted. He was the first young man to lodge in Dr Horder’s rooms, as they are called, within my memory, this being accorded him on account of his being a Fellow-Commoner, and from the willingness of the Master to show some courtesy to his Guardian, Lord Mountgraine. He was an amiable and studious young gentleman, and his loss is indeed distressive. After serious reflexion, I did not think it amiss to petition an All-Merciful Providence for his repose.’

The year of this entry was 1762, and the Dean recalled with an uncomfortable suddenness that it was in this year, and evidently after Bonner’s death, that the enactment had been made to which old Dr Hollywell had referred him. Probably, he thought, young Lake was the first undergraduate to occupy the Horder rooms since then. Hollywell, no doubt, was aware of this. Poor old man, thought the Dean, he must be getting superstitious. I daresay he expects we shall find Lake dead in his bed one morning.

That Lake was, at present, still tolerably alive and active became apparent to the Dean when, at about ten o’clock that evening, he stepped into the first court for a breath of air. Lights were shining from the windows of Dr Horder’s rooms, and there was a noise of young men’s laughter. The Dean looked up quickly. Should he send a porter to request less noise? He thought that he would not. It was a raw and cloudy night, and there was something strangely poignant in this sound of young happiness floating out into the charnel dark. It made him feel old. Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth . . . what on earth had put that text into his head? His liver must be out of order, for the court seemed suddenly to have put on a very sinister and unfamiliar look. Those shadows, for example, round the Chapel door—one would positively say they were malevolent. The Dean shivered and returned with hasty steps to his own place.

About midnight, Peter Lake’s friends began to leave him. Frank Shelton, living some distance from the College, had been the first to go. Lake remembered his asking with a laugh, as he went out: ‘Been dreaming again, Peter?’ He rather wished that he had not asked that. He had given his party chiefly because he felt the need of going to bed in a cheerful frame of mind. The dream had recurred, on the previous night, with certain circumstances of an added vileness. Again, there had been the revolting stench and the sensation of the bedclothes being drawn gently back. These had been following by a conviction—which was retained vividly when he awoke—that something or somebody was bending over him with a sort of eagerness or greediness most unpleasant to recall. He looked round the splendid gloomy sitting-room in which he was now alone. The dark oak of the panels gave back the glitter of the lights, and a sudden spurt of the coal fire made the faces of the satyrs under the mantelpiece appear to smile. Peter felt suddenly very helpless and very young.

He undressed slowly before the fire, and found a number of small excuses to potter about the room, first in his shirt and then in his pyjamas, replacing books in their shelves, mustering empty bottles and glasses and generally tidying up with a meticulousness that his bedmaker could not too highly have commended. At last, however, he was left with no alternative but to go to bed, which he accordingly did, not readily, but certainly with no absolute repulsion. The evening’s jollity had made him very tired, and it was only a little time before he was asleep.

George the porter, who was on night-duty at the College gates, was accustomed, even bitterly so, to every noisy form of undergraduate activity. He could gauge by ear, and at a considerable distance, the number of young men who were amusing themselves in any given room, and the length of time that would elapse before the Dean sent word to him to go up and take their names. When, however, whilst he was making his final round of the buildings, prior to stretching himself gratefully upon the truckle-bed in the lodge, he heard a cry from Dr Horder’s rooms, no thought of Deans or discipline crossed his mind. On the contrary, as the wild noise died away into a bubbling and moaning very disturbing to hear, he began to run. He reached the stairs at the moment when the oaken outer door of the Horder rooms was burst violently open—began to climb them—and was thrust aside, choking, by a heavy shape that moved quickly but with no sound. The smell of this hurrying thing was so unpleasant that he remained for some seconds, gasping and retching, at the spot where it had passed him. In this way, he was able to hear the great doors of the Chapel—which he himself had locked a quarter of an hour before—slammed with a noise that echoed round the court.

Peter Lake did not die. True, his condition, when he was found lying senseless, half in his bedroom and half in the adjoining sitting-room, was acutely dangerous; but his magnificent constitution saved him, and in a week he was able to tell as much—it was little—as he ever did tell of what had hurt him.

The business began, he said, with the now familiar nightmare—the smell, and the sensation of the clothes being stripped gently by some bending figure, and the cold that now attacked him ended his sleep. He is insistent on this point—that he was fully conscious and awake before he realized that a cold and heavy body, whose stench was beyond all description, lay outstretched upon his own, its mouth pressed greedily to his mouth and its hands fastening his wrists. When asked to describe this horrid bedfellow in detail he vouchsafes nothing except that its flesh was damp and rubbery and that it had a long rough beard.

What he suffered at this point cannot be guessed. It was a terror and hatred far beyond the common experience of men that gave him strength to wrench himself out of that flaccid and yet rigorous embrace. For reasons that may already be clear to the reader, it seems certain that, had he not done so, he would have suffered the same fate as young Harrison.

There remains still a little to be told. On the day that Lake was sufficiently recovered to tell his story, the Governing Body of the College, at an extra-ordinary meeting, unanimously adopted two motions proposed by the Dean and seconded by Dr Hollywell. These were: that the Horder rooms should in future be used as an annexe to the College library, to which undergraduates should have admission only at stated times; and that certain repairs should be undertaken to the floor of the Chapel, on the south side. These latter were at once begun, and occasioned no little adverse comment in the University. It was commonly stated that the work of moving the old floor had been so carelessly and irreverently carried out that a grave had been broken into and its contents cruelly disturbed. Some, indeed, even alleged that a certain object—it was generally described as a leaden cylinder of the type used, sometimes, for preserving manuscripts—had been removed from this grave and was now in the possession of the Governing body.

The last scene is laid in the Master’s Lodge, mansion a pleasant adjoining the second court and built in the time of Queen Anne. There were present in the study, on a certain evening, the Master, the Dean and Dr Hollywell. The latter had in his hands a roll of ancient and yellowed parchment inscribed in staring Hebrew characters and wrapped round a small stick. Presently, he spoke in a clearer and more incisive tone than was his wont.

‘The manuscript which you required me to examine, Master, is written in unpointed Hebrew, and has the signature of a certain Kabbalist whose name—Ahimelech-ben-Gittai—may not be familiar to you. It appears to have been written at Constantinople in the early part of the fifteenth century, and its title is Sepher-Hennephesh, which, er, with reference to the context, I would venture to translate as The Book of the Essence of Life.’

‘And its contents?’ asked the Master.

‘With your permission, Master, I shall not offer you a translation. The work is a species of Kabbalistic or magical commentary upon the miracle of Elisha. After describing how the prophet stretched himself upon the body of the dead boy and breathed the breath of life into his mouth, this abominable—er, the writer of the book goes on to discuss a reverse process by which, subject to certain magical conditions which are minutely specified, he claims that an aged man could absorb the, er, vital essences of a vigorous youth and so prolong his own life beyond the normal span. Certain formula and instructions are given. They are atrocious. With your approval, Master . . .’

Dr Hollywell, whose face wore a very serious expression, leaned forward and thrust the roll into the midmost of the study fire. It crackled brightly and was soon consumed.