Is Any Diary Safe?

Reading MR James has gotten to be a seasonal tradition with me. This year, my mother sent me a hardback collection of his ghost stories, which makes the experience of reading them even better. When you're reading stories about antiquarians poring over manuscripts and carvings and abnormal adornments in abandoned churches, it's nicer to do so on real pages instead of on an electronic screen.

Yesterday I read "The Diary of Mr Poynter", first published in 1910. A young man and his elderly aunt move into a new manor so the young man purchases a diary of someone who resided in the neighbourhood over a century earlier. Inside the diary, he finds a scrap of cloth with a pattern that enchants his aunt who insists that drapes be made from the pattern. Like all of James' stories, he finds ways of letting the horror elements subtly creep in while you read about a fairly normal, but slightly unstable, academic or domestic situation. This one ends up being a bit more explicit than usual and delightfully so. The ghost that manifests reminded me of Sadako from The Ring or any number of other Japanese movie ghosts with long hair veiling their faces. Or Cousin It, I suppose, but effectively eerie.

Previous to "The Diary of Mr Poynter" I read "The Residence at Whitminster", a story about a young Irish lord who comes to stay in England and brings some kind of shiny tablet with him he apparently procured from a witch. The story ends in a remarkable way with a housemaid, speaking with transcribed colloquial dialect, rattling off suggestive reminiscences. That one may have been too subtle but it was entertaining.

The Phantom of the Transcript

Several students pointed out the setting sun to me as I left school yesterday. So I took a picture.

On the train home, I read MR James' "Martin's Close", a short ghost story from 1911 mostly told in the format of a murder trial transcript. James takes his usual penchant for suggestion to new levels as hints of the murdered woman's ghost turning up are mentioned casually as incidental aspects of the evidence presented to establish the murderer's guilt. James really knows how to make the reader's imagination work for him.

Then the Lord Chief Justice called upon the prisoner to make his defence; which he did, though at no great length, and in a very halting way, saying that he hoped the jury would not go about to take his life on the evidence of a parcel of country people and children that would believe any idle tale; and that he had been very much prejudiced in his trial; at which the L. C. J. interrupted him, saying that he had had singular favour shown to him in having his trial removed from Exeter, which the prisoner acknowledging, said that he meant rather that since he was brought to London there had not been care taken to keep him secured from interruption and disturbance. Upon which the L. C. J. ordered the Marshal to be called, and questioned him about the safe keeping of the prisoner, but could find nothing: except the Marshal said that he had been informed by the underkeeper that they had seen a person outside his[315] door or going up the stairs to it: but there was no possibility the person should have got in. And it being inquired further what sort of person this might be, the Marshal could not speak to it save by hearsay, which was not allowed. And the prisoner, being asked if this was what he meant, said no, he knew nothing of that, but it was very hard that a man should not be suffered to be at quiet when his life stood on it. But it was observed he was very hasty in his denial.

But my favourite part is in a witness testimony, a woman from the inn where the murderer, Squire Martin, was staying:

S. Sir, it was this. It was about nine o'clock the evening after that Ann did not come home, and I was about my work in the house; there was no company there only Thomas Snell, and it was foul weather. Esquire Martin came in and called for some drink, and I, by way of pleasantry, I said to him, "Squire, have you been looking after your[305] sweetheart?" and he flew out at me in a passion and desired I would not use such expressions. I was amazed at that, because we were accustomed to joke with him about her.

L. C. J. Who, her?

S. Ann Clark, my lord. And we had not heard the news of his being contracted to a young gentlewoman elsewhere, or I am sure I should have used better manners. So I said nothing, but being I was a little put out, I begun singing, to myself as it were, the song they danced to the first time they met, for I thought it would prick him. It was the same that he was used to sing when he came down the street; I have heard it very often: "Madam, will you walk, will you talk with me?" And it fell out that I needed something that was in the kitchen. So I went out to get it, and all the time I went on singing, something louder and more bold-like. And as I was there all of a sudden I thought I heard someone answering outside the house, but I could not be sure because of the wind blowing so high. So then I stopped singing, and now I heard it plain, saying, "Yes, sir, I will walk, I will talk with you," and I knew the voice for Ann Clark's voice.

Att. How did you know it to be her voice?

S. It was impossible I could be mistaken. She had a dreadful voice, a kind of a squalling voice, in particular if she tried to sing. And there was nobody in the village that could counterfeit it, for they often tried.

What I liked about this is the blending of the suggested ghost encounter with the flirtation of a suggestive song being sung. It seems to connect two unrelated things that were living in the same part of the brain all along.

The Dead Gold in the Cipher

Those who like their horror couched in an authentic sense of doing scrupulous research will enjoy "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" by M.R. James. Included in James' 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, it's a story of one man devoted to research going to the assistance of another man devoted to research--in this case, with the aim of discovering the hidden treasure of a long dead abbot. The beginning of the story opening with a big block of Latin text followed by one character ruminating on the process of translating it, there's a wonderful sense of the real work involved, which then and now involves more than Googling. The verisimilitude lends a great chill to the supernatural occurrences, which are kept to a minimum and told mostly second hand.

In his essay on supernatural horror, H.P. Lovecraft devotes a whole section, several long paragraphs, to James. It sounds like Lovecraft was likely more influenced by James' "Count Magnus" which, in Lovecraft's synopsis, sounds a lot like "Rats in the Walls" and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. But he does spend a whole paragraph on "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas".

In “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some Renaissance painted windows, and thereby discovers a centuried hoard of gold in a niche half way down a well in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafty depositor had set a guardian over that treasure, and something in the black well twines its arms around the searcher’s neck in such a manner that the quest is abandoned, and a clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer feels a stealthy presence and detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door of his hotel room, till finally the clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the stone at the mouth of the treasure-vault in the well—out of which something had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of old Abbot Thomas’s gold. As he completes his work the cleric observes a curious toad-like carving on the ancient well-head, with the Latin motto “Depositum custodi—keep that which is committed to thee.”

Lovecraft doesn't mention the peculiar and lively diction of the antiquary's servant or the sense of irrepressible pride with which the antiquary describes unravelling the clues to the treasure's location, even after he's been traumatised by the experience. Much of the horror is in the man's evident discomfort. Through the dialogue, James does a great job of bringing out the sense of sinister with effective indirectness. One gets so caught up in the antiquary's glee for decoding a cipher that the relatively simple horrific encounter feels strangely personal. I suppose that's because, even in a fictional story, the cipher itself is real.