Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (70 page)

“I stopped again, or at least slackened my pace, to look up. And as I did, down I came, and barked my shins abominably on, what do you think? A block of stone with a big square hole in the top of it. And within a few paces there were two others just like it. The three were set in a triangle. Now, do you make out what they were put there for?”

“I think I can,” said the Squire, who was now very grave and absorbed in the story. “Sit down, Patten.”

It was time, for the old man was supporting himself by one hand, and leaning heavily on it. He dropped into a chair, and said in a very tremulous voice, “You didn’t go between them stones, did you, sir?”

“I did
not
,” said Fanshawe, emphatically. “I dare say I was an ass, but as soon as it dawned on me where I was, I just shouldered my machine and did my best to run. It seemed to me as if I was in an unholy evil sort of graveyard, and I was most profoundly thankful that it was one of the longest days and still sunlight.

“Well, I had a horrid run, even if it was only a few hundred yards. Everything caught on everything: handles and spokes and carrier and pedals—caught in them viciously, or I fancied so. I fell over at least five times. At last I saw the hedge, and I couldn’t trouble to hunt for the gate.”

“There
is
no gate on my side,” the Squire interpolated.

“Just as well I didn’t waste time, then. I dropped the machine over somehow and went into the road pretty near head-first; some branch or something got my ankle at the last moment. Anyhow, there I was out of the wood, and seldom more thankful or more generally sore.

“Then came the job of mending my punctures. I had a good outfit and I’m not at all bad at the business; but this was an absolutely hopeless case. It was seven when I got out of the wood, and I spent fifty minutes over one tire. As fast as I found a hole and put on a patch, and blew it up, it went flat again. So I made up my mind to walk. That hill isn’t three miles away, is it?”

“Not more across country, but nearer six by road.”

“I thought it must be. I thought I couldn’t have taken well over the hour over less than five miles, even leading a bike. Well, there’s my story. Where’s yours and Patten’s?”

“Mine? I’ve no story,” said the Squire. “But you weren’t very far out when you thought you were in a graveyard. There must be a good few of them up there, Patten, don’t you think? They left ’em there when they fell to bits, I fancy.”

Patten nodded, too much interested to speak.

“Don’t,” said Fanshawe.

“Now then, Patten,” said the Squire, “you’ve heard what sort of a time Mr. Fanshawe’s been having. What do you make of it? Anything to do with Mr. Baxter? Fill yourself a glass of port, and tell us.”

“Ah, that done me good, Master Henry,” said Patten, after absorbing what was before him. “If you really wish to know what were in my thoughts, my answer would be clear in the affirmative. Yes,” he went on, warming to his work, “I should say as Mr. Fanshawe’s experience of today were very largely doo to the person you named.

“And I think, Master Henry, as I have some title to speak, in view of me ’aving been many years on speaking terms with him, and swore in to be jury on the Coroner’s inquest near this time ten years ago, you being then, if you carry your mind back, Master Henry, traveling abroad, and no one ’ere to represent the family.”

“Inquest?” said Fanshawe. “An inquest on Mr. Baxter, was there?”

“Yes, sir, on—on that very person. The facts as led up to that occurrence was these. The deceased was, as you may have gathered, a very peculiar individual in ’is ’abits—in my idear, at least, but all must speak as they find. He lived very much to himself, without neither chick nor child, as the saying is. And how he passed away his time was what very few could orfer a guess at.”

“He lived unknown, and few could know when Baxter ceased to be,” said the Squire to his pipe.

“I beg pardon, Master Henry, I was just coming to that. But when I say how he passed away his time—to be sure we know ’ow intent he was in rummaging and ransacking out all the ’istry of the neighborhood and the number of things he’d managed to collect together—well, it was spoke of for miles round as Baxter’s Museum, and many a time when he might be in the mood, and I
might have an hour to spare, have he showed me his pieces of pots and what not, going back by his account to the times of the ancient Romans. However, you know more about that than what I do, Master Henry.

“Only what I was a-going to say was this: as know what he might and interesting as he might be in his talk, there was something about the man—well, for one thing, no one ever remember to see him in church nor yet chapel at service-time. And that made talk. Our rector he never come in the house but once. ‘Never ask me what the man said’—that was all anybody could ever get out of
him
. Then how did he spend his nights, particularly about this season of the year?

“Time and again the laboring men’d meet him coming back as they went out to their work, and he’d pass ’em by without a word, looking, they says, like someone straight out of the asylum. They see the whites of his eyes all round. He’d have a fish-basket with him, that they noticed, and he always come the same road. And the talk got to be that he’d made himself some business, and that not the best kind—well, not so far from where you was at seven o’clock this evening, sir.

“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 distant 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.