I hung about until Wigglesworth and his men had killed the flames and it was safe for them to enter. They found sufficient evidence among the debris to prove that he was right. Doctor Bigod had died in his library. I noticed one thing which I did not feel called upon to point out. He had also died in his robes.
The following day I received a bulky letter from my dead friend, and as trustee alike of his estate, his fair name, and his secret, I feel bound to make the gist of it public.
The telegram, which I looked at first, was brief and cryptic.
‘REVELATIONS NINETEEN THREE THANK YOU.’
It was unsigned, but was postmarked from an office in the Highlands. There was always the yet unexplored possibility of this being an obscure jest, but Bigod’s own letter has made me disinclined to have anything further to do either with speculation or proof in this horrible business.
Bigod has made up his mind to do what may be a very dangerous thing. He was, of course, able to decipher the telegram without access to his New Testament, and takes it for granted that I can do the same[3]. This proves, he says, that he is evidently possessed of a demoniac power which must be destroyed ere it destroys him and more than him ‘as it has done in the past’.
This is not the letter of a madman. As a doctor I may be allowed to know.
He will, he concludes, take certain steps to secure the safety of his small household. (I find that he actually gave them all tickets for the cinema—an unheard-of proceeding which so upset the housekeeper that she had the vapours and stayed at home!)
Bigod was going to curse the hellish little manuscript with bell and book according to the old ritual. If the cleansing fire took him also, at least it was God’s will and God’s fire. So, perhaps, he might go clean before Him and unashamed.
The second enclosure was a torn-out page from an old book on Avon Worthies, of whom, it seemed, Joseph Damm, Doctor of Divinity, was one. It describes his death-bed . . .
‘My Lord Bishop dyed in ye October of 1677 in his Palace. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but it is said that he made an unedifying End, calling aloud upon All & Sundry to hear that he was ye Agent of God’s recent scouring Plague and Fire upon our Capital City, an odd and insubstantial Boasting for a Man of God in the last dread Howre, as was told him to his Face by those who heard him, amongst these being my Uncle his Chaplain who has written down all that passed at this sad Time in his Private Papers, fully intending, so he advised my Father, to set these Matters forth for the Admonishment of a loose-living Generation. My Lord dyed in Anger, it appeared, at Their Unbelief, turning black in ye Face. He was duly interred . . .’ and so forth.
Bigod has scrawled across the lower margin of the page: ‘On taking a final look at this devil’s formula I find that the last word is Maledicetur—shall be accursed, my dear Wilfred, not may be.’
I have stifled any desire I might have had to collect really old books.
THE HORN OF VAPULA
Lewis Spence
Lewis Spence, renowned poet and folklorist, acquired a vast knowledge of the arcane and esoteric during his long career. Among his many books are a monumental Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920) and a series of attractively bound volumes on the mythologies of Ancient Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, Mexico and Peru, and other countries. He also contributed many fine occult tales to the Grand and other magazines of the 1920s, later collected in The Archer in the Arras (1932). Some of them were submerged beneath an overdose of Scottish dialect, but of the others ‘The Horn of Vapula’ is one of his best stories, and the most Jamesian.
Ebberswale is on the edge of the moorland, a bright patch against the rolling, purple sea of heath, an isolated community, still retaining many customs and characteristics of medieval days. Its folk are simple and superstitious to a degree, and it is a rich mine of folklore. This it was in fact which drew me to the place and led me to rent a modest dwelling on its outskirts, not far from the almost unique old Norman church for which it is so justly celebrated. But I found the natives difficult to draw. Centuries of isolation had rendered them a suspicious and almost a taciturn race, and when I compared the scanty results of my folklore labours among them with those undertaken in other localities, I became a little regretful that I had bound myself down to a six months’ tenancy of my cottage. Neither did my sister Margaret relish residence at Ebberswale, but for profoundly different reasons. She disliked the inhabitants, whom she professed to regard as little better than savages, the village she found unspeakably dull, and the wives of the vicar and doctor she merely tolerated.
To me the ever-changing beauty of the moor appealed as the sea to the sailor, and I discovered infinite variety in exploring it in all directions, frequently returning from these excursions at a late hour. It was on such an occasion that there occurred the first of those strange happenings, the improbable nature of which renders them so exceedingly difficult to chronicle. I was passing the church just as the last lines of daylight barred the shadows of night, and thinking what a wonderful picture the beautiful old building presented, outlined as it was against the silver and sable of late twilight, when I stopped short with a little gasp of astonishment, for along the peaked roof of the church a weird and grotesque figure was slowly crawling, supporting itself by clinging with hands and toes to the sharp angle made by the apex of the roof. The black silhouette of the shape bore an odd resemblance to a human figure, and the idea of burglary at once entered my mind.
‘Hello!’ I called brusquely. ‘What do you want up there? What mischief are you up to?’
There was no reply. The thing, whatever it was, turned its head, and I could feel that it surveyed me attentively. Then, to my horror, it raised itself on a pair of slender legs, extended long, wasted arms, and literally dived from the roof. I could see a black shadow, attenuated and sharp of rib, stand poised as if for a leap, and then disappear. No sound as of a falling body reached my ears, but I was too alarmed to notice this at the time. I had, I thought, so startled an unfortunate criminal that in a mad attempt to escape he had taken his own life.
I thrust open the lich-gate of the churchyard and, hastily entering, made a scrupulous search. But I encountered no crushed and maimed body, nor did the least sign of anyone having fallen upon the surrounding gravel present itself. I resolved to return at once to the village, and having procured lights and assistance make an exhaustive search of the churchyard.
Hurrying along the highroad, with the thought of rescue uppermost in my mind, I did not at first pay much attention to a noise behind me, which I can liken only to a kind of soft trotting. It was so very light, a mere pit-pat, as almost to be indistinguishable beside the echo of my own footsteps, but shortly I began to find it riveting my attention in the most remarkable way. At first I thought it must be made by some animal broken loose, for in Ebberswale cattle and beasts of all kinds are but perfunctorily secured, even at nights. Irritated, I could not have told why, I stopped to assure myself regarding the precise nature of the sound, and as I did so it immediately ceased.