‘The next day I was sorry to receive word that the gentleman who was developing my negatives had had an accident in his family. A daughter of his had fallen through a glass window and severely cut her face. I remember pulling myself together and resolutely assuring myself that these were both accidental happenings and that neither could have had anything to do with the coffin-plank they had shared in photographing.
‘I waited till my spiritualist friends applied to see the results and I went round to the shop where they were to have been developed. The head of the firm talked with me for half an hour before we touched on the photographs. I was glad to hear that his daughter was well on the way to recovery. It was now only a question of scars. As for the negatives, he had developed them successfully and placed them in the box, which he had locked and left in his safe. His safe was never interfered with and, indeed, he had unlocked it that morning and found the box exactly as he had stored it. He had unlocked it only an hour back. He was sorry he had not studied the negatives when they were first developed. They were now impossible to make out!
‘“What,” I insisted, “they haven’t changed colour since you put them away?” He was silent for a minute. Then he said very quietly: “They have not only changed colour, but they have changed substance. There are six thin trails of dust where the glass plates stood last night. I am very sorry, and that is all that is to be said about it. Such a thing has never happened to me before.”
‘He showed the box to me, and I touched the thin grey dust with my finger-tip.
‘As I say, there has been one occurrence in my life which remains absolutely inexplicable to this day. I leave it there.’
Some time had passed after recording the Egyptian experience and that at second-hand. I had recorded it in a cell of memory, for one does incline to save up little fragments of the supernatural during life in the hope that one may meet a clue or a piece of the missing jig-saw later.
I was asked by a friend to visit a church in the Diocese of London which was giving the Rector a considerable amount of trouble. Not a mile from Kensington, it was a peaceful little church in its way, but it had become disagreeable spiritually. Moderate in ritual, and old-fashioned in doctrine, it lay in an ecclesiastical backwater. My friend called me on the telephone and asked me to come round and have a talk with the Rector. I agreed at a few hours’ notice, and we found ourselves passing rapidly out of the maelstrom of a bus route through narrow and short streets until we caught sight of a Georgian chapel with Victorian additions. It was a dull and drab edifice, and if it were a haunted building this was its only distinction.
There are, of course, many haunted churches in London. There is a Catholic Church where the interior confessional bell is frequently rung at night and Masses are said as though in response to the call of unknown souls. There is an Anglican Church where the stamp of the lame clergyman, long dead, is heard pacing round his aisles as though for ever counting his absent congregation. But this was a different case, we were told, and impossible to explain.
We called on the Rector, who said he would show us over his church before he gave us any indication of what was worrying him. We passed solemnly up and down the quiet, dusty pews. There had not been many improvements and there was little beauty to restore from the beginning. Except for some stained-glass windows of recent origin there was nothing of colour to relieve the dull walls. These the Rector pointed out to us, and begged us to take stock of them. Besides the conventional English saints, whose dullness in the case of Bishops, and plainness in the case of Holy Virgins, seems to ensure against any temptation to invoke their aid, there was a Last Supper, in which the only lifelike figure was that of Judas as he hurried from the upper room. There was also a scene from the Miracles, which was concealed by a board partition. We glimpsed behind it at the conventional picture—quite unnoteworthy. Then we searched the whole church very thoroughly, and, finding less than nothing to remark, we withdrew to the Rectory.
Over a strong brew of tea the Rector explained his difficulties. Morning Prayer was all right and Evening Prayer likewise. His troubles always came at the Communion Service.
‘I might tell you that in the eighteen months I have been quartered here I have not yet been able to bring the most sacred of services to a decorous finish. The service is held in the early morning to very small congregations. The majority prefer the choral Matins with a very short sermon.’
I asked him whether the assistants were troubled as well as he was. He answered that there were different communicants at the services. Some had perceived these incidents once or twice and had mistaken them for accidents. But he had celebrated on each occasion and felt that the strange hand of coincidence could not have been exerted Sunday after Sunday. In the end he had abandoned the early service for some months, but he felt uneasy about having done so, and was anxious to resume it. It was some time before he would give us any inkling into his past experiences. But they had not been pleasant. On one occasion the window covered by the boarding had blown in and an icy air had penetrated as far as the Communion Table, where he felt too chilly to proceed, and had dismissed the communicants. On another occasion the Cup had been snatched from his hands and the unconsecrated wine poured over the cloth. He had never commenced the service without a feeling of dread creeping upon him. He never felt nervous at the services later in the day. The climax had come when he turned towards the congregation and, as he believed, noticed one of the figures in the boarded window standing reflected against the opposite wall with its tongue hanging out. It gave him so considerable a shock that he had abandoned the service straight away, and had the window boarded under the pretext that it was in need of repairs.
We returned to the church and examined the window carefully. He showed us the figure which had, in his imagination, apparently become separated from its glazing. But there were two remarkable things about it. First of all, it was impossible that the sun could ever have thrown the shape like a magic-lantern, because the window looked out on a blank wall. Secondly, the leaded mouth in the figure was tightly closed. It was apparently meant to represent the young man with the loaves and fishes.
It was puzzling to know why such an innocent figure should have taken upon itself so gruesome an aspect. Again the Rector assured us that on two occasions he had seen the window reflected almost in facsimile upon the opposite wall, but with the awful change in the tongue which he was certain was hanging out of the lips. Under careful examination we elicited the fact that the two appearances had occurred at the same service, and that the glass had been made by a reputable firm in Birmingham, though the designs had been suggested by the Rector’s predecessor. About him we knew nothing, but fortunately the old pew-opener, who had accompanied us, was at this juncture able to offer a valuable comment—to wit, that the last Rector of the church, in her opinion, went mad, and that was why he resigned the living. It turned out that he was dead, or he would have afforded a valuable witness. The pew-opener, on being further examined, remembered that the late Rector had been interested in prison work and that his brother had been a Deputy Governor in some gaol. That was all that could be remembered.