Sandford halted, irresolute, and then a thin rain began to fall, of that peculiarly penetrating quality which seems to fall nowhere but in cities and when one is as far from home and shelter as possible. At this, he ran for the nearest shelter, which was of course the church.
Within, it was hung with a vast darkness: he could make out very little, but the sense of oppression was so strong that he found breathing difficult. The smell of the church was strange: it had not the calm cool austerity of stone, but was at once both musty and sour. The cold was intense. Sandford felt his way, with no clear purpose or intent, along the aisle. When he reached the front row of pews he saw vaguely to his left a small alcove. With a sense of relief that he would feel more sheltered there than in the hollow, empty church, he groped his way towards it.
It was a small, many-sided niche in which were laid several stone slabs surmounted by the usual marble effigies, their hands folded upon the hilts of their swords, which lay upon their breasts in the manner of those brasses of which schoolchildren and diligent ladies in tweeds make rubbings. At the feet of each was carved a small, unidentifiable beast.
From this point, events took on the quality of a peculiarly horrible nightmare. Sandford, still feeling his way along, touched the side of one figure and swears he felt the chain mail beneath his hand. He was unable to assimilate this at once, but the horror was undeniable when, the next moment, the stone image opposite him slowly sat up and turned its sightless head towards him.
Sandford screamed and ran. He is understandably reluctant to speak of these events, but he had a distinct impression of a figure close on his heels, a figure terribly thin and swift and silent, except for a faint clack as of bones as it reached out fleshless hands towards him. It was the silence, he says, which he found most terrible.
Drawing by A. F. Kidd
There is a stage in that progressive emotion terror which, when once reached, cannot adequately be recalled. Sandford ran until he was sure the eldritch thing no longer followed him; nor had it, to his recollection, touched him, for all its strivings. But there was a place upon his shoulder which still sends a thin pain through him when the days are dark and cold. And since that visit to the City, though Mr Udall was as unable to enlighten him about the poet Sadler as Sandford himself was to find any reference to Ashmole and Jameson, he has heard the name of Francis Magister and his unholy burial ground in terms which made him sure that that worthy did not sleep as soundly as he might. Neither is he surprised that he cannot find the page in his book upon which that church was described, although there is no break in the numerical sequence so no pages are missing.
The student upon whose essay he had noted the names saw no significance in them, either; but this may be because he did not look for them. Sic transit gloria mundi.
AS IN A GLASS DIMLY
Shane Leslie
Sir Shane Leslie (1885–1971), Irish baronet and first cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, was a very prolific author who wrote the occasional Jamesian tale and also collected a number of allegedly ‘true’ supernatural stories for his own Ghost Book in 1955. He was educated at Eton and King’s, and it was at the latter (from 1904 onwards) that he began a long friendship with M. R. James—‘the greatest of Provosts . . . now enthroned like a smiling Sphinx’, as Leslie described in his autobiography, recalling James’s gift of mimicry and first-hand recitals of his early ghost stories.
As a rule nobody enjoys better health than the race of Egyptian archaeologists. Yet they are supposed to live under a curse and to be liable to weird accidents and sudden deaths. How can they walk the streets as other men and sleep quiet of nights when it is known that they roused the vengeful passions of many disturbed mummies?
Have they not broken into the sacred resting-places of the dead and breathed the baleful air which rushes out of the tombs laden with the dust and something more than the dust of a thousand years? Regardless of the warnings and entreaties of occultists (many of advanced adeptship) who write to men of science and curators of museums, from boarding-houses in Brighton and Brixton, they live their official lives and continue sorting the mummies as though they were bird-skins or corked insects. They receive threats and curses by post from folk who believe they are reborn out of the land of Egypt into modern life. From others they receive propitiatory offerings, talismans, or money to buy flowers to lay before the desecrated dead behind glass cases. Spirits, which like tumours can be malignant, are supposed to cling to embalmed bodies which have been dispossessed of life since before Greece or Rome were, and even to possess those dry, painted coffins which adorn our museums. Our ancestors had less fear, though, perhaps, not more sense, for they pounded mummies into medicines.
In more nervous days the strangest stories have been told of the fate which indirectly reaches the vandalizer of mummies. Gossip and journalism have spread strong rumours of the succession of disasters and sudden misadventures which invariably follow the excavator or collector. Burnt houses and sunken liners are sometimes connected with the shipment of a mummy. Still, there is no record of the unexpected salvage of a mummy from the scene of a naval disaster. And the percentage of burnt mansions in which there were Egyptian curiosities is so small that it has not attracted the attention of the insurance companies.
Nevertheless, the great Egyptian myth has proceeded gaily. Who does not know a friend whose friend slipped and broke an ankle on the steps of the British Museum after peering too inquisitively into a mummy? Who has not heard of the explorer and hunter who, after shipping a mummy home, proceeded into the African bush never to be seen alive again? Years afterwards his companions relate that he was killed by a buffalo or lion and his remains hastily buried in a river bank. They returned later to find that it had been carried away by the floods. A strange corroboration follows in England. Some expert, who is quite unaware of the circumstances of the mummy, has deciphered the inscription on the coffin wood and found stated in hieroglyphics as plain as many pikestaffs that the violator of this particular mummy will perish by a sudden and violent death.
‘Out of the forest shall the destroyer come upon him, and the voice of the waters shall be lifted against him, and the place of his burial shall not be known.’
And the legend assumes a very sturdy size. It is believed and vouched for. And wherever the mummy is placed, troubles begin. One legend spreads the seed of others, and there is no sifting of the different tales. Egyptologists find themselves tripping up on staircases and on ballroom floors. Their houses are mysteriously ignited, and they do not live out the period which is set for the life of man. A series of inexplicable accidents are reserved for those who photograph mummies. Nothing seems to cause such annoyance to the dead as photography. The troubles which befall curators and van-men are nothing in comparison. Nothing is more resented by the mummy than reduplication upon sensitized plates. Curses take effect upon honest photographers, which are collected and retailed by honest journalists, and these, in turn, are investigated and pronounced upon by honest spiritualists.
The general reader accumulates a hazy memory of these yarns, but decides to wait the day until an Egyptian expert crosses his path before taking a final opinion. Such an occasion once came to us. An old Egyptian explorer had joined the same house-party in the South of England, and it was easy to draw him on the only subject about which he would speak at all.