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

THE DEAN’S BARGAIN Dermot Chesson Spence

One of the most neglected pre-war fantasy writers is Dermot Chesson Spence, now remembered only for his short stories ‘The House on the Rynek’ and ‘Little Red Shoes’ (which first appeared in Nightmare by Daylight, a 1936 anthology, under the pseudonym ‘Gordon Chesson’). His own collection Little Red Shoes, and other tales of the odd and unseen (1937) was ‘dedicated to my predecessors and superiors, Fryn Tennyson Jesse, Montague Rhodes James, and William Hope Hodgson, in humble emulation’.

It was after the Puffin-Mandragora wedding that the Dean of Avon unburdened himself to me.

I have always, said the Dean, been an amateur collector of old books, and you yourself know how the closes of cathedral cities abound—on their outskirts, of course—with cobwebbed windows through which divinity calf gleams dully, and open trays which offer you the wealth of the world’s best brains for sixpence. An embarrassing choice between Temple’s Sermons—incomplete; Gray, in Johnson’s series, unbacked and badly foxed; and Tarzan the Anthropoid, cheap edition, mint. Well, you admit the fascination? It is now four years since I last bought an old book, and you might be interested to know why. Collecting is a virus in the blood, and it takes more than effort of the will or a shortness in the purse to eradicate it . . . but a shock may!

Fifteen years ago, when I was a minor canon of Avon, a theologian and a bibliophile, I had agents with little commissions of mine on the look-out at all local sales. But it was at Olyfathers in the ‘entry dark’ that I myself found the book, a small duodecimo volume, that was to change my outlook on life. I was rummaging among Olyfathers’s dustiest shelves when I found this little old Bible and prayer book. It had, of course, been ruthlessly cut down, even encroaching on the type area itself . . . Some enthusiast had ruled out the chapter-heads of the bible in red ink—a conscientious, neat piece of rubricating, and more or less contemporary. Two things attracted me: at the end were the metrical psalms of Sternold and Hopkins, the earlier version and the tunes with their four-line staves and the attractive diamond-headed crotchets—but I must be boring you with these minutiae. Suffice it to say that I bought the little book for a not very large sum and took it home.

You will also have realized that I am—or rather, was—of a curious and enquiring turn of mind, and when I found that the fly-leaves at the beginning of my seventeenth-century Bible were pasted firmly down, it naturally became my one desire to unpaste them and see why this had been done. There was, for instance, no suggestion in the condition of the book of weakness in the binding to warrant it!

As a good churchman I should, I suppose, have been very shocked at what I found, for what was written there was a Commination or Curse, neatly set out in a clerkly hand, and still superbly legible. For many reasons I will not repeat the text of the course, one being that it was in monkish Latin, and that I myself still do not know what several of the words mean. But above the text was written in a different and more Italianate hand, Maledictus Maledicat (May the Accursed One Curse), and at the end, ‘This have I found most operative. Jos. Damm, 1667. Maledictus Maledicatur’ (May the Accursed One be Accursed). Joseph Damm, I may add, was a minor canon at the time, and later became a bishop. He died rather suddenly towards the end of Charles the Second’s reign. The Curse—which nothing will induce me to repeat—was short and to the point, calling upon some body unknown to me to blast a designated object or person in the name of a third person whom we all know under various other names. Doctor Joseph Damm seems otherwise to have been a very religious sort of man, and the sermons, which he later published, show mainly a tendency to overstatement as to the probable fate of all who subscribed to, or even acquiesced in, the continuance of the licence of the Metropolis. It is almost an obsession of his! But he seems to have been a capable man according to his lights. Something in the wording of the Curse seemed to indicate that a common allegiance was a condition of the contract. However fascinating this might be, it was certainly no concern of a good twentieth-century churchman, and I determined to put it out of my mind, as doubtless Joseph Damm did after he wrote his note and cautiously pasted down the fly-leaf. ‘Most operative.’ That was a queer thing to say, and a dangerous one. It smelled of the faggot!

I did succeed in forgetting, and my life went on placidly enough until, some three years later, I was asked to give a series of Ember-day sermons in one of our outlying parishes. I have always liked St Barnaby’s, as the church is called. It is a symphony in cool Gothic and they have avoided the temptation to ‘darken council’ by putting in modern stained glass. Petrie—the vicar—had thanked Heaven for this appointment after his slum parish. He was, I may say, doing equally good work here in the heart of the country. It was the first time I had ever preached in his little church, though I had helped to marry two most marriageable nieces there in the past. Careless bachelor though I am, I do take my vocation seriously, and like my sermons to be as helpful as may be. A good delivery is important, and in a small church nothing is easier than to thunder too loudly. One becomes ludicrous, the congregation restless, and the Truth is lost in a welter of sound. Excuse me for riding my hobby before you . . . Anyway, I went down to Deepdale the week before just to try out the ‘acoustics’.

I had stepped up into the pulpit to recite First Corinthians Thirteen from memory to Petrie, down by the font, when my eye lit upon the Horror. I have mentioned before the still beauty of this grey old church, and the quiet contribution to the whole peaceful atmosphere supplied by the thin windows of white glass. Now all this concord was shattered. Midway down the decani side was a hodge-podge, a fruit-salad, a kaleidoscope of coloured glass, and what colours! Rich pillar-box reds, vivacious yellows and umbers, and an imperial purple to top the lot. When I got down from the pulpit, I seized Petrie and rushed him out in the wholesome sunshine. I told him that I didn’t think I could preach with that monstrosity of ill-taste before my eyes. How could he ever have allowed it to be erected? Had he no sense of responsibility for the beautiful house that was his care? ‘The church-wardens think it very tasty,’ he said gloomily, ‘and there’s more to come; the balance of the national saints of Britain by the same artist. It was a dying bequest from one of my villagers who went away to Leeds and “made good”. Don’t, for pity’s sake, think that I have done anything to make it easy for them. But the village likes it. It encourages them to “go and do likewise”’.

I went away with a heavy heart.

However, when I sat in the choir at Deepdale and looked at my large congregation, I felt a little bit better about it; besides, I could only see the atrocity by craning my head forward in a manner most unbecoming to a visiting preacher. The service went—and why shouldn’t it?—without incident, until, during the last verse of the hymn, I gathered my notes together and mounted the pulpit stairs. As I turned to face my congregation, still lustily singing, the sun was shining straight through the yellowest part of the dragon in front of St George. I was tempted, and I fell. Fourteen short Latin words came to my lips, and I mouthed them inaudibly during the rousing ‘A-M-E-E-E-N’. Blushing like a novice, but in thankful relief that nothing untoward had happened, I gave out my text and launched my sermon. I was just coming to my peroration when something did happen. There was a sudden gust of tempest and the sun hid his face, and the window of St George fairly ‘exploded’—there is no other word for it—into the body of the church. There was consternation, but no panic. These countrymen take some shifting! Nobody was hurt, and I was able to finish my address. I say there was no panic, but I knew, to my distress, that there were two voices arguing within me: one saying, ‘You’re a silly old man, an irreverent old man, and you will do a penance for your sacrilege’; but the other was the voice of Joseph Damm, and he was rubbing his hands together and saying: ‘That was no ordinary storm, Doctor Bigod, no ordinary capful of wind. You’ll find it most operative, Mr Canon, most operative!’

What Petrie said to me later was no help, either. ‘It’s quite extraordinary, Bigod. The glass isn’t broken at all. It’s ground to an absolute powder.’ And he showed me the tiny fragments of orange and red that the verger had been able to sweep up from the aisle.

‘It must be this cheap modern synthesized glass,’ I said. But, as you may realize, I was not at all easy in my mind.

Time passed, and again slow-moving, lethargic forgetfulness took that horrible little malediction from the surface of my mind. I was able to get away from Avon for a considerable holiday. A former room-mate of mine at Oxford was now a Highland Laird of some consequence, and I had a standing but never-realized invitation to stay with him in Ross. One summer I went. There was a gay and irresponsible party of young things in the house: children, nieces, fiancés, and friends, a harmless though worldly congeries. I was introduced to a hateful game called ‘Truth’, and though, to me, the revelations of some of the maidens of the household were most surprising and hardly to be protected even by the advance dispensation of ‘privilege’, my truthful history of the stained-glass window seemed to ‘bring the house down’, a feat I had hitherto only thought ascribable to Samson. The daughter of the house, Bettina, thought otherwise. She considered the thing shatteringly delicious. She was, if you like, and I allowed myself later on to be blandished into promising to do one thing for her—as a surprise for Daddy. And that turned out to be ‘the damning of the Dougalls’s Distillery’, which spoiled her father’s view, and, she said slyly, was ruining the natives. ‘I know how strong your views on temperance are, Doctor Bigod.’ In vain did I expostulate and offer to do anything else. She was adamant, and a little imp at the back of my mind kept saying that ‘one extraordinary blast of wind abolishing a cheap glass window did not entitle me to call myself a magician—go on—don’t be an old ass—nothing can happen. So I sent her out of the room and pointed my finger at the thin yellow chimney, and the corrugated iron roofs which they had thoughtfully painted a contrasting red.

And nothing happened.

But three nights later there was a redder glow in the sky, and the distillery was burned to the ground. I made the child swear by the Wrath of God that she would keep our secret. How was I to know that the details of it were already round the house? I found it wise to leave for the south the following day. Heaven knows I wrestled with myself. Was I damned living? Or was it a quirk of coincidence, an elaborate jest played by Fate? I still do not know. I gave up collecting old books then! Sheer panic!

My Laird wrote to me some months later to tell me that Dougalls had done sufficiently well out of the insurance to start building a new, fouler, and larger distillery on the original site.

The Dean turned to me. ‘What do you think I ought to do?’ he asked. ‘My friend Struan has now asked me—jocularly, you know—to curse it again. He adds that he is prepared to pay for results, and will give five hundred pounds to the Avon Infants’ School if, as he so delicately puts it, “anything happens”.’

‘That’s good money, Doctor Bigod,’ I said. ‘It seems to my casuistic mind that more good can be done with Struan’s money here in Avon than Dougalls’s whisky can ever do!’

‘That is one way of putting it—but I think you are tempting me, in the old-fashioned way, to do evil that good may come . . .’

‘Distilleries are inflammable things,’ I said, ‘particularly when business is bad and insurance premiums have been paid! Had you thought of that, Doctor Bigod?’

‘I wish I’d never seen that miserable book,’ said the Dean, and looked at his watch. ‘Heavens! I’m due at a Council Meeting. I can’t wait for the bride. Tell her mother I thought she looked beautiful.’

I shall never know which he meant to compliment.

I thought over poor Bigod’s troubles for the rest of that week, and finally, on Tuesday I think it was, I rang him up at his house in the close. The thought of the dear old fellow being troubled over fifteen years by this silly, silly business had made me feel that I ought to rally round myself. The housekeeper, an acidulated but efficient lady of fifty or so, answered it. No, she didn’t know if the Dean would see me, but she’d certainly like me to see him. He was in a terrible taking seemingly; first a telegram, and then on top of that he’d found something in a book. Something had drove ’im crazy, if I wanted to know her opinion. I hung up on her and ordered the car at once.

I arrived in the close to find the moon-silvered grass alive with people: firemen and onlookers. The Deanery was blazing merrily. I stopped the Austin and got out. With some difficulty I forced my way through the crowd until I could catch the attention of Wigglesworth, the captain of the fire-brigade, a good friend and a patient of mine.

‘Evening, Doctor Wilfred,’ he said. ‘It’s a sad business yon, though a grand sight.’

‘Anybody c-c-caught?’ I asked him anxiously.

‘I fear so. We got that screaming hell-cat of a housekeeper out, but we couldn’t reach Doctor Bigod. The fire had got too good a hold, and it started in his library. Those old books of his burned up fine!’

I left him to his professional duties, and turned to look at the glowing shell of the Deanery. It was barely an hour since I had spoken with the housekeeper. Old houses are fine fuel for a chance spark, but the Deanery was not modernized, and surely no long-smouldering beam could suddenly flare to an instantaneous destruction like this! This was no ordinary fire—the whole house was gutted; nothing left but the four walls and the steaming skeleton of the roof. The place had been blasted!

I hung about until Wigglesworth and his men had killed the flames and it was safe for them to enter. They found sufficient evidence among the debris to prove that he was right. Doctor Bigod had died in his library. I noticed one thing which I did not feel called upon to point out. He had also died in his robes.

The following day I received a bulky letter from my dead friend, and as trustee alike of his estate, his fair name, and his secret, I feel bound to make the gist of it public.

The telegram, which I looked at first, was brief and cryptic.

It was unsigned, but was postmarked from an office in the Highlands. There was always the yet unexplored possibility of this being an obscure jest, but Bigod’s own letter has made me disinclined to have anything further to do either with speculation or proof in this horrible business.

Bigod has made up his mind to do what may be a very dangerous thing. He was, of course, able to decipher the telegram without access to his New Testament, and takes it for granted that I can do the same[3]. This proves, he says, that he is evidently possessed of a demoniac power which must be destroyed ere it destroys him and more than him ‘as it has done in the past’.

This is not the letter of a madman. As a doctor I may be allowed to know.

He will, he concludes, take certain steps to secure the safety of his small household. (I find that he actually gave them all tickets for the cinema—an unheard-of proceeding which so upset the housekeeper that she had the vapours and stayed at home!)

Bigod was going to curse the hellish little manuscript with bell and book according to the old ritual. If the cleansing fire took him also, at least it was God’s will and God’s fire. So, perhaps, he might go clean before Him and unashamed.

The second enclosure was a torn-out page from an old book on Avon Worthies, of whom, it seemed, Joseph Damm, Doctor of Divinity, was one. It describes his death-bed . . .

Bigod has scrawled across the lower margin of the page: ‘On taking a final look at this devil’s formula I find that the last word is Maledicetur—shall be accursed, my dear Wilfred, not may be.’

I have stifled any desire I might have had to collect really old books.