Never did a psychic hunting-ground provide less clues. The structure of the church proved drab, modern, and featureless. The boards were taken down from the suspected window. We arranged mirrors in a number of positions to catch the stained glass, but the effect was always the same. The young man with the loaves and the fishes always preserved his well-mannered look. When the light threw the colours against the opposite wall they seemed blurred but not in the least ghastly or unpleasant. Suddenly I heard a groan from the Rector, who was holding a mirror in a far corner of the church. We both hurried to his side where he stood petrified with terror. It seemed obvious, at the moment, that the solution of everything lay in his own nervous disposition. He stood there holding out the mirror and clasping it with both hands. We glanced over his shoulder. The stained-glass window was reflected small and clearly against the quicksilver. Every detail was discernible, including one which was not in the original—a wagging tongue. It was so uncalled for and so unexplicable that we both uttered a cry of bewilderment, passing into a groan. This was too much for the Rector, who dropped the mirror with a crash to the floor and sank upon his knees in the nearest pew.
We hurried back to the original and scrutinized with eye and finger. It was exactly as when it left the Birmingham makers. But we made no further experiments with mirrors.
There was nothing more to be done, and the next morning the boards were restored to the window, and church services were resumed. We put ourselves into communication with the manufacturers. Our correspondence conveyed, of course, not the least hint that their fine work of art had been behaving in such disorderly fashion. But we represented that we were interested in the work and would be anxious to know if the firm could reproduce a similar window from the old designs. In any case we wished to know the name of the designer. The firm replied that they would be happy to supply us with a similar, or, rather, better example of their art. Unfortunately the designs for the particular window we mentioned could not be found. They were able to put their hands on any others of their work during the past fifty years. It was very curious (to us a little more than curious) that it should be so, but they were not to be found. So scent failed there at an important point.
A few weeks passed, and we received a letter from the firm to say that the reason why they had not been able to find the designs of the window in which we were interested was that, unlike all others produced by the firm, this one had been drawn by a brother of the former Rector, the Deputy Governor of a certain gaol. This was the first unusual fact we had discovered, and the next step was to visit the gaol in question. Though the Deputy Governor was dead, there were several warders who remembered him. I fell into conversation with one of these and asked him if the late Deputy were very fond of drawing. The warder thought for a moment, and said: ‘Well, now I think about him, he was, and he sometimes drew sketches of the prisoners here.’
I tried a long shot. ‘Do you remember if he ever made any designs for the prison chapel?’
‘Why, yes,’ replied the warder, ‘he most certainly did. The whole of the altar was painted by him and he drew pictures for the walls from faces in the prison.’
We visited the chapel, and the warder was amused, pointing out the pictures of various characters, such as the previous Governor, warders he had known, and several prisoners who had been used as models. Suddenly my eye fell on a visage which I remembered in a flash. In one of the frescoes was a young, perfectly expressionless, face, identical with the young man who had given us so much trouble in the window of the London church. I asked very quietly if he remembered the model who had been used.
‘It’s curious you should ask that,’ answered the warder, ‘for, though you would never think it, that was a young and desperate criminal. I was in the prison when he was executed; and very unpleasant it was. The Deputy Governor was taken by his looks—from an artistic point of view—and tried to draw him when he was in his cell. But the prisoner objected so much that the Governor came one day with an old camera and photographed him while he was asleep, and I believe he used the photograph to make a drawing for the picture on the chapel wall. It certainly looks uncommonly like that prisoner . . .’
There was no need to tell the warder that the photograph must have been later enlarged and used to fill a light in a London church. When we returned, we told the Rector the curious clue we had discovered. He could judge for himself whether the glass were haunted and whether the spirit of the hanged man had been able to possess itself of the texture of the glass. I do not know whether hanging has any effect on a man’s tongue or whether it could cause it to protrude. We decided that would be an unnecessary inquiry. We also forwent any research into the career of the prisoner. It was sufficient once to have heard his name. But, at our advice, the Rector removed the whole window, which we buried subsequently in a country churchyard and left to its fate.
I always connected the evil possession of this glass with the curious story I had heard about the negative plates of the Egyptian coffin-board. In each case some malefic power had installed itself invisibly in the glass. There was no conclusion to come to except that they were parallels. Neither really made a story, but the two episodes remained not utterly unrelated in my memory. I could still say that two and two make four, but further I could not carry any calculation into the world of ghostly relativity.
BETWEEN SUNSET AND MOONRISE
R. H. Malden
Educated at Eton and King’s, Richard Henry Malden (1879–1951) had an active and varied career within the Church of England. He was, at different periods, a Royal Navy chaplain, Principal of Leeds Clergy School, chaplain to King George V, Canon of Ripon Cathedral, and finally Dean of Wells. He also found the time to marry a rector’s daughter and to produce several books on theology and ecclesiology. The volume Nine Ghosts, first published by Edward Arnold in 1943, contains his only ghost stories and is intended as a tribute to M. R. James, who was his friend for over thirty years. ‘Between Sunset and Moonrise’ is arguably the most original of the nine excellent tales in this collection.
During the early part of last year it fell to me to act as executor for an old friend. We had not seen much of each other of late, as he had been living in the west of England, and my own time had been fully occupied elsewhere. The time of our intimacy had been when he was vicar of a large parish not very far from Cambridge. I will call it Yaxholme, though that is not its name.
The place had seemed to suit him thoroughly. He had been on the best of terms with his parishioners, and with the few gentry of the neighbourhood. The church demanded a custodian of antiquarian knowledge and artistic perception, and in these respects too my friend was particularly well qualified for his position. But a sudden nervous breakdown had compelled him to resign. The cause of it had always been a mystery to his friends, for he was barely middle-aged when it took place, and had been a man of robust health. His parish was neither particularly laborious nor harassing; and, as far as was known, he had no special private anxieties of any kind. But the collapse came with startling suddenness, and was so severe that, for a time, his reason seemed to be in danger. Two years of rest and travel enabled him to lead a normal life again, but he was never the man he had been. He never revisited his old parish, or any of his friends in the county; and seemed to be ill at ease if conversation turned upon the part of England in which it lay. It was perhaps not unnatural that he should dislike the place which had cost him so much. But his friends could not but regard as childish the lengths to which he carried his aversion.