The ghost stories of M R James have been a spooky festive favourite for more than a century. Dating back to the days when the Cambridge scholar would read aloud to friends and students in his rooms at King’s College on Christmas Eve, James’ spine-chilling tales would later become a regular fixture of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas.
To mark the 120th anniversary of James’ first published anthology, here is a new Cambridge-set ghost story in the spirit of the great man, for readers to entertain their own friends and family with this Christmas.
*****
Will stood in front of the black door and felt the solid weight of the hefty brass key in his coat pocket. It had, he reflected, been a singularly strange morning.
Thanks to a signal failure at Royston, he’d barely had time to dump his bags at his lodgings in time to make his 10.30 appointment at the Fitzwilliam. He’d eventually tumbled, flustered and sweating, into the calm of the reference library to find everything he needed already laid out by the museum archivist, and had wasted no time in getting down to the task in hand.
More than one acquaintance had felt moved to question Will’s sanity on discovering he’d elected to spend most of Christmas week alone – and working, at that – in Cambridge. But if he was to stand any chance of getting under the skin of his subject there was, he had explained, no more profitable time or place on Earth he could possibly be.
It was a desperately unconvincing argument, even to Will: his editors were interested purely in M R James’ life as an antiquary – the hours and days and years he’d spent painstakingly cataloguing the manuscripts of the college libraries or translating New Testament Apocrypha. To them, his reputation as the world’s greatest teller of ghost stories was somewhere between an irrelevance and an embarrassment. And so it was that Will had forced his attention towards A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum, with Introduction and Indices, written in 1895 by the museum’s director, Montague Rhodes James.
He had been diligently engaged in this pursuit for some two hours when he’d become aware of a presence behind him, and had turned to find a wiry, nervous looking man hovering a few feet away.
“Can I help you?” he’d asked.
“Will? Will Grainger?”
“That’s me.”
“It’s Lewis Irving – you remember?”
Will had looked blank for a moment, then broken into a smile. “Lewis! Of course. I didn’t recognise you. You’ve…” The words had died on his lips. You’ve aged is what he’d wanted to say. And he had – aged terribly, in fact, in the 12 or so years since they’d been at Cambridge together. He appeared to Will a good 20 years older than himself.
He’d invited him to sit down – and that’s when Lewis had told him the story that had led him here, to this door, with a pocketful of brass and a head full of questions.
And what a curious story it was: According to Lewis, while M R James had been cataloguing the Fitzwilliam’s collection, he’d come across a painting that so intrigued – or, according to some, so disturbed – the great man that he had been given permission to remove it from the museum. For reasons lost in the mists of a century, the painting had then disappeared until a few years ago, when it had fallen into the hands of a private collector, who had in turn returned it to its rightful owners.
“Can I see it?” Will had asked eagerly. Despite his scepticism, he was intrigued – a little intoxicated even – to have chanced upon new information unknown to the wider world of James scholars. More than that, though, it held out the tantalising possibility of a mystery. And mystery, the nerve-jangling thrill of the unknown and the unknowable, was what had attracted Will to James in the first place – not this dusty ephemera, with its arcane talk of psalters and biblica figurate.
“It’s not here,” Lewis had told him. “I’ve had it transferred to my rooms at King’s, along with some notes James made about it. I’d really value your opinion – I’m led to believe you’re quite the expert in such matters these days.”
“Oh…” Will waved away the compliment. “Of course, I’d be happy to take a look,” he added, affecting a casual, almost offhand air to disguise his mounting excitement.
Lewis had given him directions to the room, but when Will asked why he wasn’t coming with him, he’d merely handed him a key – the large, scuffed brass door key currently in Will’s fingers – and said, in a voice Will had thought a little strange: “It’s quite a precious find – whatever you do, don’t lose this.”
And he’d placed the key in Will’s hand, without letting go.
“I’ll guard it with my life,” Will had promised him.
*****
The room was small, with little in the way of furnishings: just a bed, a wash basin and a small desk under the tiny window – which, Will discovered in a futile bid to clear the stale air, was jammed shut. He looked out across the frosted lawn to where James himself would gather his friends around a crackling fire in the wood-panelled womb of the Provost’s lodge, to chill their bones with his famed “festive entertainments”. He gave an involuntary shudder – whether from the damp chill, or the ghosts of the past, he couldn’t say.
The object of his investigation, if that wasn’t too grand a word for this impromptu adventure, was propped against the wall on the bed, covered in a dustsheet. Carefully, Will reached out and pulled back the fabric, exposing the picture beneath.
Immediately, he could see why it might have disturbed a man of James’ lively imagination. It was an ugly thing: a gloomy street scene, swathed in darkness save for a gas lamp casting its sickly yellow glow onto the painting’s sole occupant.
The figure at the centre of this dismal tableau wore a shabby coat and trousers, and was dragging a large, lumpen shape – possibly a sack of coals, possibly something unspeakably more dreadful – along the pavement behind him. But what really unnerved Will was his face: a glowering, malevolent scowl, eyes burning like black coals into his very soul.
Instinctively, he let the dustsheet fall back across the canvas, and turned his attention to the desk against the opposite wall. As Lewis had promised, there was a small, leather-bound pocketbook, filled with pages of James’ notes – his actual notes, in his own hand. This in itself had to be worth a small fortune – why was Lewis leaving it lying around, and handing out the keys to people he hadn’t seen in years? It didn’t make any sense.
The book was open at the page with the last entry. Will sat down and studied the spidery script, which read:
Title: The Vagabond (circa 1850s)
Artist: Unknown
Description: No-one knows for sure who the figure depicted represents, but it is said to bear a resemblance to Titus Soames, a vagrant and murderer hanged for his crimes at Castle Hill, Cambridge in 1852. According to local legend, Soames swore a terrible vengeance from the gibbet upon the whole town, and it is said his aspect was so murderous, several women in the crowd fell into a faint.
The final line of the page was incomplete, merely stating:
There is Some
Odd, thought Will. He took out his own notebook, and was about to start writing when he became aware of a strange noise: a soft, shuffling, dragging sound emanating from somewhere in the shadows. But as soon as he swung around in his chair, the noise stopped. Will listened, but all was quiet, save for the sound of his own heart, beating out a rapid tattoo in his chest.
He needed some air. Shrugging on his coat, he headed for the door but, as he passed, he couldn’t help lifting The Vagabond’s veil for another look.
Will frowned. Was it his imagination or… No, it couldn’t be. That was impossible. “Idiot,” he whispered to himself. And yet… he could have sworn the figure in the painting had moved nearer to the front of the canvas, that baleful stare more reproachful than ever. He shook his head. This was what you got for spending Christmas on your own, chasing ghosts.
*****
He passed the next hour or so mooching listlessly about the town in a strange humour. In the market square, the Christmas lights failed to inspire much festive cheer; instead, he found his thoughts returning to the story of Titus Soames. On this very spot, criminals condemned to a public whipping had traditionally been tied to the railings around Hobson’s Conduit – had old Titus endured such retribution?
His reverie was broken by a sting of snow on his cheek. He looked up to see white whorls corkscrewing against the gathering darkness. It was time to be getting back: he’d decided to return to Lewis’ room just long enough to jot down some notes from James’ book – and would it be wrong to sneak a couple of snaps? – then head back to his digs. He should probably phone Kate, too. Maybe he’d be able to get down to her parents’ place a bit earlier than Christmas Eve after all. Suddenly, the idea of a busy family Christmas didn’t seem so bad.
He darted into the old city passages, pulling his scarf up against the thickening snowfall. And that’s when it struck him: incredible though it seemed, he was standing in the very same alley depicted in the painting. Of course, the gas lamp was gone, replaced by the orange halo of an electric streetlight. But other than that, the scene had barely changed in a hundred and fifty years.
Spooked, he quickened his pace back to the college. When he arrived at the room, he deliberately refrained from looking at The Vagabond, instead turning his attention to hurriedly photographing James’ notebook. Except…
It wasn’t the same page he’d been looking at earlier. Which is to say, it was the same page, with the same words, except for that enigmatic final fragment, which now read:
There Is Some One
Will suddenly felt very foolish, his cheeks flushing hotly with something between shame and relief. Clearly, this whole thing was Lewis’ idea of a joke – no doubt payback for some slight against him in their undergrad days. That’s what happens when you never leave college, he thought irritably: you don’t realise when you’re too old for stupid student pranks.
He turned to the canvas, still propped up against the wall, and knew with total conviction that if he went over and threw back the sheet…
Sure enough, the figure in the painting was now looming large in the centre of the canvas, those dark features twisted into a grotesque mask of pure hatred.
“Yeah, very scary, Titus,” said Will, with a shade more bravado than he actually felt. Something about that face had made him feel distinctly uneasy again.
He turned back to the desk, half tempted to add his own caustic sign-off to the running joke, and his breath caught in he throat. The words on the page now read, in that same, hurried script:
There Is Some One Here
Will had had enough. He started to gather up his things, when the lights suddenly went out, plunging the room into darkness, save for a scrap of blue-black light in the small window.
Using his phone torch, he swept everything from the desk, priceless pocketbook and all, into his holdall. Picking his way across the room, he found the door was locked – even though he knew for a fact he’d left it open barely minutes ago – and the key he’d carefully hung on the hook had gone. After rattling uselessly at the handle, Will dropped to his knees and felt frantically around on the cold, threadbare carpet. Nothing.
And then, there it was again: that awful, wounded shuffle, like someone dragging something – something terrible – through the darkness. And this time there was something new – the sound of a heavy, laboured rasp and a smell of hot, rancid breath in the air.
Will leaped forward in terror, his phone falling onto the bed so that its torch alighted on the dustsheet, now thrown back in a discarded heap by the pillows. His heart pounding so hard it hurt, he forced himself to move the torch towards the painting. What he saw made his blood run cold.
The passage was there, the gas lamp still casting its sulphurous glow. But the figure – that face – was gone. It had completely vanished from the fame. And in its place, shining dully in the lamplight, rendered on the pavement in dirty yellow oils, was the unmistakable shape of a large brass door key.
Interesting Media 