He swung round on his heel and hurried off. Needless to say he did not inform the police.
On returning to town, Radcliffe made great search for material relative to Ebberswale, and at last, in the records of the see in which it is situated, he ran the legend to earth. It concerned one Bishop Brachet, prelate and voluptuary, who, cherishing his charge, desired to have within it one of the richest architectural gems in England. Despairing of success at Ebberswale, which he had himself designed, he at last bartered his soul to the Evil One in exchange for the fruition of his desires. Satan had come to his assistance, but when too late Bishop Brachet had repented, and had by dint of art magic immured Vapula, the demon familiar whom his dreadful master had given him to assist in his task, in a gargoyle which he had carved to represent the fiend in question. But all to no purpose, for only by day had he power to enclose his fell servant in the stone. The record was silent as to the Bishop’s ultimate fate—perhaps it is better so.
We left the district shortly afterwards, and to the best of my belief the manifestations have entirely ceased and the grim, horned denizen of the church roof no longer flashes into life at sunset. Strangely enough, I discovered long afterwards that the bamboo stick I carried on the night Radcliffe and I encountered the demon had once been the property of a Burmese wizard—which circumstance perhaps accounts for the reluctance the creature showed to attack me when we met it beside the farm on that memorable night of fear in old-world Ebberswale.
THE GRIMOIRE
Montague Summers
The other Montague in the scholarly world of gothic literature was the Revd Montague Summers (1880–1948), authority on vampires, demonology and witchcraft, and an excellent anthologist of early ghost stories. He held M. R. James’s stories in very high repute, calling him ‘a skilled and profound master of the supernatural’. Summers tried his hand at writing fiction only twice: the story reprinted here, and (anonymously) ‘The Man on the Stairs’, which both appeared in 1936. His ideas on the construction of ghostly tales were carefully followed on both these tales, especially in ‘The Grimoire’, with the cathedral setting and the evil influence of a rare book: the grimoire of the title.
‘Anything in my line today, Merritt?’
The bookseller, a spare, spectacled old man, looked up quickly from The Clique which he was studying, blue pencil in hand, at his desk, and shot forward his scraggy neck not unlike the protruding head of some ancient tortoise, to peer hesitatingly through the half-gloom of his little shop. Even on this sunny afternoon it was not an over-light place, but shadowy and full of those dark nooks and mysterious corners stacked with bundles of dusty tomes such as the adventurer in old bookshops loves, where one hopes to find at last that uncut quarto play by D’Urfey, that elusive eighteenth-century pamphlet, or that novel of Eliza Haywood’s for which one has been searching so patiently and so long.
‘Good afternoon, sir. Why, yes, I have got something put aside for you. Only came in yesterday. I was posting you a card this evening about it.’
‘Lucky I looked in, for I shouldn’t have had time to call tomorrow as I’m off to Silchester for ten days or a fortnight. Let’s see it.’
Mr Merritt gingerly lowering himself from the high office-stool upon which he was perched, shambled towards a small glass-fronted Chippendale bookcase at the back of the shop. Taking a ring of labelled keys from his pocket he unlocked the door, and selected from among the array of morocco and calf-gilt bindings a podgy octavo vellum volume.
‘There you are, sir.’
‘Not another Bodin, I hope, or one of the later editions of the Malleus . . . ah, I see,’ and the speaker did indeed see that he was handling something altogether uncommon and rare, since in spite of the fact that he had been a collector of books on alchemy, witchcraft and the occult sciences generally for a good many years he could not recollect ever before having come across the treatise whose title-page he was now scanning with such eager attention. Nor was it a work he would have been likely to forget. Mysterium Arcanum, seu de daemonibus rite evocandis cum quibusdam aliis secretis abditissimis, Romae, sine permissu superiorum. ‘The Secret Mystery, or the Art of Evoking Evil Spirits with certain other Most Curious and Close Matters, printed at Rome—that’s fudge—no date, without the permission of the authorities. Well, whoever the writer was, and I can’t place him for the moment, he had a sense of humour at any rate. Early seventeenth-century printing I should guess. And the contents—they sound appetizing enough, but it may only be a hash-up of the Petit Albert and that wretched Pope Honorius.’
‘As you say, sir. You know more about that sort of thing than I do. Anyhow I think it’s a scarce item, and I’ve had a good many of these books through my hands in the past five-and-twenty years. Yet it’s the first time I’ve seen that one.’
‘What date do you give it, Merritt?’
The bookseller took up the Mysterium, and moving to the door for a better light, held it within a few inches of his nose, blinking uncertainly. ‘To tell the truth, sir, I haven’t examined it closely. As soon as I saw it, I said to myself, “Now that’s a bit for Dr Hodsoll. Dr Hodsoll will take that book.” And so I snapped it up sharp.’
‘And how much do you propose to stick Dr Hodsoll for it, eh?’
Mr Merritt, his head slightly inclined to one side, regarded the book for a minute in silence. ‘Ah, if you’re asking me for a figure, Doctor, I am telling you that I should catalogue this item at six guineas, not a penny less. But I am going to let you have it for five.’
Dr Hodsoll and Mr Merritt were old friends, but a little histrionic palaver seemed called for by the occasion.
‘Come, come,’ said Hodsoll, turning over the leaves carelessly, ‘here we have a book with no date and a sham imprint, which is very probably as I’ve just said not much more than an adaptation of Solomon’s Clavicule’—and as he spoke he lied and he knew that he lied, but such are the ways of collectors—‘and you are going to ask me five pounds for it. Pooh!’
‘Five guineas, sir, guineas.’
‘That’s worse. Hang it all, Merritt, it’s buying a pig in a poke.’
‘Well, sir, if you don’t think it’s worth that to you . . . but I made sure you’d like it for your collection, that is supposing you already haven’t a copy. I shan’t keep it long, anyhow. I expect Mr Spicer will be interested,’ and the wily old man made as if to return the little volume to its shelf.
At the mention of his rival’s name, Dr Hodsoll bristled like a porcupine, and quickly put out a restraining hand. ‘Here, not so quick, Merritt,’ he cried, ‘let’s have another peep at it first.’
A very cursory glance sufficed. Five notes and two half-crowns exchanged hands, and whilst a neat parcel was being made, Dr Hodsoll queried: ‘Look here, Merritt, you said it only came in yesterday, didn’t you? Have you any objection to my asking where it came from?’
‘Not the slightest, sir, only I’m afraid I can’t tell you much. A young fellow, quite a stranger to me, brought it in just before closing time, and asked me what I’d give for it there and then. So I bought it over the counter, as you may say.’