The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

REGGIE OLIVER Quieta Non Movere

ONE OF MY first clerical positions was that of a curate to a parish just outside the cathedral city of Morchester. Being of a naturally studious inclination, I devoted my spare time to researching the history of the district and, in particular, the cathedral. I even proposed to write a short monograph on some of the more curious funerary monuments to be found in that building. One in particular attracted my attention because of its strange inscription and carving. My enquiries about this particular monument elicited a story of some very shocking events connected with that tomb which happened some ten years prior to my arrival in Morchester. Despite the passing of a decade, the events were still very clear in the minds of those who witnessed them and who were willing to speak to me. Their accounts are the foundations of the story I am about to tell.

Let me therefore remove you a while to the ancient city of Morchester in the County of Morsetshire in the year 1863. Though the railway had arrived some fifteen years previously, it could be said that in all other respects time had stood still in the city for many decades. It had been and remained a prosperous market town; it boasted a fine cathedral, mostly in the Early English and Decorated styles. Rooks cawed among its towers and in the immemorial elms that punctuated the sward of its fine old close.

One cloudless afternoon in the July of that year the great bell of the cathedral began to sound its bass note, summoning the city to the funeral of one of its servants. The Dean was dead. That ancient knell, that call to remembrance and reminder of mortality, would no doubt have seemed to Morchester’s inhabitants no more than a slight eddy in the changeless flow of life and death which washed about its walls. Who could have foreseen that it tolled the commencement of a series of horribly inexplicable events?

In all conscience, the passing of The Very Rev. William Ainsley, Dean of Morchester was greeted with little sadness, and was the occasion, in some quarters, of no small relief. Dean Ainsley had for many years been infirm and fulfilled his decanal duties with a listlessness only just short of rank incompetence. When, on the day of his funeral, the Very Rev. Stephen Coombe, acceded to the position and sat in his stall in the choir, there was much talk of new brooms sweeping clean. Even those who did not find such a metaphor entirely reassuring were compelled to admit that anything was preferable to the disarray of the previous regime.

Dean Coombe was a tall lean man in his forties, heavily whiskered as was the fashion in those days, and of High Church leanings. He was in possession of a wife and a daughter, almost as angular as he was. He was an upright man, but stiff and overbearing; he inspired respect perhaps, but no great affection. Being active and zealous in all his dealings, he very soon began to turn his attention to the fabric of Morchester Cathedral which was indeed in a woeful state of disrepair.

The tenure of Dean Ainsley had been marked by neglect towards the great building he was appointed to maintain, so it was perhaps only just that this legacy of dereliction should be mitigated by his posthumous one. The late Dean had left his entire and considerable fortune to the cathedral, with the provision that a chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, in the north transept should be made as a permanent memorial to him. As the legacy more than amply provided for this, it was resolved, by the dean and chapter, to accept it. There had been murmurings from some of the more low church canons that the building of a Lady Chapel might give rise to accusations of popery, but these were properly dismissed as old fashioned. The Dean was a forceful man and was used to carrying all before him.

An architect was engaged and there needed only a decision to be made over the location of the chapel. The obvious place was an area closest to the crossing and facing east. This would entail the partial destruction of the eastern wall of the north transept, an exercise which would require the relocation of a number of 327 funereal plaques and stones, the most significant of which was a sixteenth century memorial to a Canon of Morchester Cathedral, one Jeremiah Staveley. It was quite an elaborate affair in polished black basalt about seven foot in height overall, set into the wall some three feet above the ground. It consisted in a slab topped with scrollwork, crudely classical in feel with a niche in which was set a painted alabaster image of the Canon, standing upright in his clerical robes with his arms crossed over his chest. The figure was tall and narrow, the bearded face gaunt: a somewhat disconcerting image which looked as if it portrayed the corpse rather than the living being. Beneath this on the polished slab an inscription had been incised, the lettering picked out in white. It read:

It was followed by these verses in bold capital letters:

The implication of these lines, that the body of Canon Staveley was actually entombed behind the slab, was borne out by the cathedral records and one of the old vergers whose family had been connected with the cathedral since time immemorial. Dean Coombe was disposed to be rather benevolent towards this worthy whose name was Wilby. The man was a repository of cathedral history and lore and the Dean was content to listen politely to Wilby’s ramblings, but he did not expect his condescension to be rewarded by opposition to his plans.

“Mr Dean,” said Wilby one afternoon, as they stood before the memorial in the north transept. “You don’t want to go a moving of that there stone, begging your pardon, sir.”

“My dear man, why ever not?”

“Don’t it say so plain as brass on that there ’scription? ’Tis ill luck to move the bones of the wicked. So said my granfer, and his before him.”

“And who says this Canon Staveley was a wicked man?”

“Why ’tis well known. There are tales that have passed down about Jeremiah Staveley, which I might blush to tell you, Mr Dean. The poor women of this city were not safe in their beds from him, they say. A harsh man too, to those below him. But he was a fair man of music and when I were a lad in the choir they still sang his setting to the Psalm one hundred and thirty seven. ‘By the waters of Babylon. ’, all nine verses too. With the dashing of children agin the stones and all. Some said he would have fain dinged his choir lads agin the stones, too, when they were singing awry. Certain it was, he spared not the rod among them. And there were tales of meeting at night in the church with a man all in black and a gold treasure that he found under the earth in a field that the black man took him to. But it weren’t no good for him, for soon as he was by way of enjoying his gold, the plague fell on him and he wasted to a wraith of skin and bone, and him as tall and narrow as may be already. And when at last he came to be in extreme, as you say, and within a hand’s breadth of mortality, he summons the Dean, as it might be you, sir, a man with whom he had had some mighty quarrel, and begs him for forgiveness and to be shriven of his many sins. And all his treasure they say he left to the dean and chapter but saying he must be buried upright, to keep him awake, he says. Because in the last days he suffered terribly from dreams and was as mortally afeared of sleep as he was of death. So he begged to be buried upright that he might not sleep till the Last Judgement, even as a dead man. And when the Dean of that time, Dean Cantwell, as I think it was, came out from seeing Canon Staveley in his deathbed, they say the Dean’s face was as white as a linen altar cloth and he spoke not a word to a mortal soul for seven days. This I had from my granfer who had it from his, and it came down in the family with a warning, as my old father used to say. ‘Don’t you touch the Staveley stone, nor go nigh it at night, nor suffer his bones to be moved.’ And that’s what I say to you, begging your pardon, Mr Dean.”

“Well, well, Wilby,” said Dean Coombe who was rather more shaken by this recitation than he cared to admit, “that is indeed a most fascinating legend. Most interesting. I must write some of it down.”

“It weren’t no legend, Mr Dean,” said old Wilby. “I had it from my granfer, and he—”

“Quite so, quite so, my dear man,” said the Dean hurriedly. “Nevertheless, move this old monument we must. But make no mistake, we shall re-site it well, for it is certainly a curiosity, and if there are any human remains behind it we shall lay them to rest with all due respect. Goodness me! What was that noise?”

Both Wilby and Dean Coombe heard it, a sound like a long inhalation of breath, ragged and rattling, somewhat as if the breather — if such there was — was experiencing difficulty in drawing in air. It was magnified and distorted by the cathedral’s echo which was particularly reverberant in that part of the building. Dean Coombe was not a fanciful man but he had been at his father’s deathbed and he knew the sound of a man’s breathing as he nears the end. This sound was uncomfortably like it.

“Dear me,” said the Dean. “I really must have that organ seen to.”

Wilby gave the Dean a quizzical stare, then, bidding him a hurried “Good day, Mr Dean”, he began to shuffle off in the direction of the west door with surprising swiftness. Dean Coombe remained behind standing before the monument. A passer-by was surprised to hear him mutter.

“Hah! You won’t affright me that easy, Master Staveley. We shall see!”

The following day the workmen moved in and began the demolition of the eastern wall of the north transept. Dean Coombe had given explicit instructions that the memorial slabs were to be most carefully removed, and, towards evening, he was on hand when the dismantling of the Staveley Memorial began. Palmer, the head mason, had set up scaffolding and constructed a wooden cradle in which to take the stone.

Dean Coombe suggested that the painted alabaster effigy in the niche be removed first, but this proved unexpectedly troublesome. The statue had been very securely cemented to its base, and one of the workmen cut himself on one of the folds of the statue’s long gown. The workmanship was unusually precise and unworn by time.

When the effigy was finally removed, Dean Coombe was intrigued to find that it had been carved all round and that the back of the figure, which had been unseen by any living soul since it had been placed in the niche over two hundred and fifty years ago, had been carved with as much care as the visible front. He noted with particular interest the minuteness with which the sculptor had represented every snaking strand of the subject’s unusually long black hair. He had also taken care to represent a gold seal ring on the third finger of the left hand, even incising the seal with a strange geometrical figure.

The face too repaid closer inspection. As Dean Coombe remarked to a colleague the following day, in a rather striking phrase, it would seem to have been “done from the death rather than from life”. The skin had been painted white, with a slight yellow tinge, the cheeks were sunken and gaunt and — a rather troubling detail — the mouth gaped slightly, revealing a tiny set of jagged greenish teeth. Then there were the eyes.

Dean Coombe did not care to dwell long on the eyes. There was, as he later remarked, something “not quite dead” about them. Under the heavy lids an area of creamy white showed punctuated by the pinpoint of a pupil in a cloudy, greyish iris. The impression given was of a last wild stare at life. The painter of the statue had somehow managed to convey the terror of the sinner at the very point of death.

Despite a certain distaste (as he chose to call it) Dean Coombe was impressed by the remarkably fine workmanship of the image. In the few moments of leisure that he allowed himself he was something of an antiquarian which was why one of his many projects for the cathedral was the setting up of a museum in the chapter house where some of the old plate and vestments of the cathedral could be displayed for the benefit of both the public and the cathedral which would take its sixpences.

“This is such fine work,” said the Dean, in reality thinking aloud, but ostensibly addressing Palmer the mason. “I wonder if the craftsmanship could be Spanish, though they tended to carve in wood rather than alabaster. Certainly whoever did the painting, not necessarily the sculptor, for the painting of sculpture was a specialised art in those days, you know, looks to have been trained in the peninsular. Most unusual. I must get up something to one of the learned journals on the subject. Now then, Palmer, I want you to set this aside. Take great care of it. I shall have a plaster copy made. The replica we will put back in the niche and we can display the original in my chapter house museum, in a glass case where it may be appreciated from all angles — Good gracious, what was that?”

There had been a cry of pain accompanied by — had it been an oath? Palmer and the Dean looked around much startled as they had been absorbed in the contemplation of the effigy. However they soon discovered the cause: it was one of the workmen who had accidentally dropped a lump hammer on his foot. He was much rebuked both by Palmer for carelessness and by Dean Coombe for making an unseemly noise in a sacred building. The man protested that some mysterious force had knocked the hammer from his hand, but he was not listened to, for by this time the light was dimming and it was decided to abandon work for the day.

And so Dean Coombe began to make his way home to the Deanery across the darkling close on that cool March evening. Picture him if you will as he takes this journey, a man you might say not much given to strange fears and frets. Here is a man who walks in life both inwardly and outwardly straight ahead, looking neither to left nor right, untroubled by fancy. This is what you would have said had you seen him stride out from the west door to face a sun which was falling behind the ancient elms in an untidy wrack of clouds. Now he turns a little to his left, and sets forth diagonally across the grass to where the Deanery is situated at the south-west corner of the great close which surrounds the edifice of St Anselm’s, Morchester.

Barely has he begun on this journey when a whole crowd of rooks, a “building” of them, if I may use the correct ornithological term, rises as one from the elms and begins to wheel about above the trees uttering their distinctive “kaa, kaa” sound. Dean Coombe must have witnessed this behaviour countless times, and yet he starts and stops for a moment to consider those birds. Their flappings across the ensanguined sky of evening appear to him more than usually agitated and chaotic, and their strange, forlorn cries, more desolate even than normal. But these thoughts occupy him for no longer than a few seconds, and then he is on his way once more.

He quickens his pace, now more resolved than ever to reach his destination. Yet once or twice we see him glance quickly behind him, so quickly that one wonders if he truly wants to see if anything follows. By the time he reaches the gate of the Deanery passers-by are amazed to see that this very sober divine is almost running. The housemaid is equally astonished to open the door to a breathless man.

We will pass over the Dean’s next few hours. Let us say only that the Deanery, though spacious, is a chilly, damp old house, rather too near the river for comfort. Its physical atmosphere, moreover, is matched by that which exists among its inhabitants. Relations between the Dean and his wife have become distant over the years, and his daughter is a silent creature who longs to escape the Deanery but possesses neither the youth, nor the looks, nor the accomplishments to do so.

After dinner the Dean spends some time in his study before retiring to bed writing letters and making notes for the forthcoming chapter meeting. His wife passes by his study door twice bearing an oil lamp. She has taken to these nocturnal perambulations lately because she cannot sleep. On the second occasion, it being close on midnight, she looks in to remind her husband of the fact and finds him not writing, but staring dully at the dying embers of his fire. When he becomes aware of her presence he starts violently and stares at her as if she were a stranger. Coolly Mrs Coombe reminds him of the hour, a remark which he dismisses with a perfunctory: “Thank you, my dear.” Soon afterwards she hears his heavy tread on the stairs as he goes to his bedroom.

Unlike his wife Dean Coombe is accustomed to sleeping soundly, and it is one of the reasons why he sleeps apart from his wife. She would plague him far into the night with troublesome questions and admonitions if they still shared a bed. She has acquired a habit of discontent of late and he lacks the imagination to supply the remedy.

His own bedroom is small, for Mrs Coombe occupies the offi-cial matrimonial chamber, but it has a fine view over the close, and from the bed, if the curtains are open, you may just see the western front of St Anselm’s. Dean Coombe does not close the curtains because he likes to imagine himself the guardian of this great edifice, keeping watch over it by day and night.

Once his night-shirt is on the Dean feels suddenly exhausted, but still he kneels dutifully by the bed to say his prayers. But when he has climbed into bed he falls almost immediately into a heavy sleep from which two hours later he is awakened with almost equal suddenness.

The moon is up and shines across his bedchamber with a clear cold light. Coombe thinks he has been awakened by a noise, but all is silence. Then he hears a sound. It is like wings fluttering in a confined space, a bird trapped in a box perhaps, but he cannot tell whether it comes from within the room or just outside the window. He chooses to believe the latter and sits up in bed to see out. There is not a cloud in the sky and the pitiless stars are out. The west front of the cathedral, whose details he can barely make out, looks to him like a hunched old man in rags, the dark rents in his clothing formed by the windows and niches of its elaborate façade. He is invaded by a feeling of infinite solitude, and in the silence that follows his ears become increasingly alert to any noise, but none comes. The stillness now seems to him unnatural.

As he continues to stare at the view beyond the window, screwing and unscrewing his eyes to get a better sight of it, he begins to be troubled by what he is looking at. For some moments he tries to find a rational explanation. At length his eyes become concentrated upon a dark bump or lump at the bottom of the window and beyond the glass. It looks to him as if he is staring at the top of a man’s head, the greater part of which is below the window. He even thinks he can make out a few wayward strands of hair upon it.

“Nonsense!” he says to himself several times. “Ridiculous! Impossible!” But the fancy does not leave him. Then the head begins to move and lift itself up, as if to look at him.

With a great cry Coombe leaps out of bed and dashes to the window in time to see a rook, which had been perched on the sill, flap away towards its building among the elms. It was only a rook! But then, rooks are not in the habit of perching on windowsills at dead of night.

Nothing more happened to the Dean that night, but he did not sleep. At breakfast the following morning his wife noted how pale and drawn he looked, but she offered no solicitude. That would have been to break the barrier that had arisen between them, and she could not do that. She felt safer behind it. The Dean would have been glad of some comfort, but he, like her, had passed the point of being able to ask for it.

That afternoon in the cathedral Dean Coombe was present when Palmer and his men began to ease away the memorial slab to Jeremiah Staveley. All had been prepared for the possibility of human remains being found in a recess behind the stone, but no one had anticipated the smell. As the slab, supported by ropes, came slowly away to be laid on a specially constructed wooden cradle, an overpowering odour pervaded not only the north transept but the whole cathedral. The organist stopped playing and several of the workmen took their hands off the stone slab to put handkerchiefs up to their noses. For a moment the memorial stone swung free on its ropes and threatened to crash into the wall and break into fragments, but just in time Palmer called his men to order and the object was laid to rest in its cradle on the scaffolding.

For almost half a minute after this had happened, nothing could be heard in that great cathedral but the sound of coughing and retching. One of the apprentice boys was violently ill into the font. Those who recalled the incident to me describe the odour as being one of mould, more vegetable than animal, “like,” as one told me, “a heap of decaying cucumbers in a damp cellar.” Others offered different similes, but all agreed that the scent stayed with them, on their clothes and in their nostrils for several days. Another told me that from that day forward he could never so much as look at a ripe cheese without feeling ill.

It was a while therefore before those present could bear to look at what the removal of the slab had revealed. When they did they found themselves looking at a figure that strikingly resembled the painted alabaster effigy which had been removed the previous day.

It was the body of a man in a black clerical gown with his arms crossed over his chest. The skin was still present, but dark yellow, leathery and stretched tightly over the bones. The eyes had fallen into the skull, the nose was somewhat flattened, but otherwise the face was in a remarkable state of preservation. As with the alabaster effigy, the mouth gaped slightly to reveal a set of jagged and discoloured teeth. The hair and beard were an intense and almost lustrous black. Even the nails were still present on the digits of the skeletal hands and feet. A seal ring on the third finger of the left hand was of bright, untarnished gold incised with an unusually elaborate geometrical figure.

In silence the company wondered at this strange vision, and it occurred to several of them that it was astonishing that the corpse still remained upright. Then, as they looked the body began to collapse and disintegrate before their eyes. The first thing to go was the lower jaw, which fell off the face and shattered into a thousand dusty fragments on the cathedral floor. Then, almost like a living thing, the corpse buckled at the knees, lurched slightly forward and plunged to the ground from its recess. A dreary sound, half way between a rattle and a sigh, accompanied this final dissolution.

It was a shocking moment, but the Dean was the first to recover from it. He commanded that the remains should be gathered up and placed in the long deal box which had been provided for the purpose.

While this was being done the Dean suddenly uttered a sharp: “No you don’t, young man!” and sprang upon one of the apprentices who had been putting Canon Staveley’s bones into the box. Dean Coombe thrust his hand into one of the boy’s pockets and brought out a bright, golden object. It was Staveley’s seal ring.

When I interviewed that boy ten years later, he was by then a most respectable young man, and the owner of a thriving building business in Morchester. He told me honestly that he had intended to steal the ring and sell it to buy medicine for his sick mother. Nevertheless, he said, he came to be very glad that he had been caught out in the theft. He also told me that Dean Coombe had not returned the ring to the deal box but had placed it in his waistcoat pocket, muttering something about “the cathedral museum”. I can testify that there is no sixteenth century seal ring among the antiquities on display in the Morchester Cathedral Museum.

When he left the cathedral later that day Dean Coombe seemed in more than usually good spirits. So we will leave him for a moment and return to the young apprentice whom I have mentioned. His name was Unsworth and he told me that Palmer, the head mason, a strict but fair man, had spoken to him sharply about the attempted theft, but knowing his situation with a sick mother and no father, said he would not dismiss him. Nevertheless, as a punishment, he made the boy stay on in the cathedral to sweep and tidy up after the other workmen had gone. Never, Unsworth told me, had he performed a task with greater reluctance.

If there had not been a verger or somebody about — Unsworth heard footsteps occasionally and some fragments of dry, muttered conversation — the boy might have fled the scene and braved the consequences. As it was, he did his work conscientiously in spite of the smell which was still all-pervasive.

One of his last tasks was to nail down the lid of the deal box which held the remains of Canon Staveley. Before the body was hidden forever from public gaze Unsworth felt a compulsion to take a last look at the corpse. Much of it had turned to dust but parts of the skull and the long thin limbs were intact with shreds of parchment skin still clinging to the bone. Curiously, the black gown in which Staveley was clothed had suffered even more than the body from exposure to the air. It was now in rags and tatters, no longer recognisable as a cassock.

Unsworth covered the deal box with the lid and banged in the nails with a hammer to secure it. With each blow of the hammer Unsworth fancied he heard a cry, distant, perhaps coming from a dog or a cat outside the cathedral. He finished his work with reckless speed.

As he left the cathedral, Unsworth told me, some sort of choir practice was in progress. He remembers the groan of the organ and a piercingly high treble voice singing in a style that was unfamiliar to him. Nevertheless he remembered the words because he knew that they came from the end of the 137th Psalm:

“Happy shall he be that taketh thy children and dasheth them against the stones.”

As he stepped outside the cathedral Unsworth saw that the sun was low in the horizon sinking through a yellow sky dappled with purple cloudlets. He breathed the untainted evening air with relief. There were not many people about in the close and the noise of the day was hushed. The rooks had settled into their nests in the elms. It was a still evening with very little wind, perhaps even a trifle oppressive.

Unsworth had come out of the west door of the cathedral, the only one open at that time of day, but his home lay to the east of it. His quickest route home took him around the northern side of the cathedral with the setting sun behind him. Unsworth remembers feeling a vague sense of apprehension as he set off.

Along the northern side of the close were a few private dwellings and a long low stretch of almshouses occupied by the poor pensioners of the diocese. Unsworth could see a few of their windows dimly glowing. In front of these almshouses were little gardens bordered by a low stone wall with gates in them for each dwelling. Most of these gates were wooden and painted white which showed up against the grey stone houses and the deepening violet of the northern sky. As he rounded the north transept of the cathedral Unsworth had to pass quite near to these gates and it was then that he saw a human figure silhouetted against one of them.

He took the figure to be that of a man because he could see the legs which were unnaturally long and thin, almost stick-like in appearance. The arms were similarly emaciated and the head narrow and oblong. He could not see any clothes on the creature except for a few black rags, which fluttered faintly in the mild evening breeze.

He did not care to look too closely, but he took it to be some drunken vagrant, not simply because of the rags but because of the way it moved. It was swaying uneasily from side to side and waving its arms about. Unsworth told me that he was reminded of some long-legged insect, perhaps a spider, that has become stuck in a pool of jam and is making frantic efforts to escape from its entrapment. The thinness of those writhing legs and arms appalled him.

Unsworth started to run, but was brought up short by the sound of a cry. It was perfectly expressive, but so high above a human pitch that it resembled a dog whistle. It pierced his brain and stopped him from moving. The noise spoke to him of desolation and rage, like that of a child that has been left to scream in its cot, except that the cry was even more shrill and had no innocence to it. It was the shrieking fury of an old, old man. Unsworth found that his legs could not move. Looking behind him he saw that the stick creature had begun to stagger stiffly towards him, still uncertain on its feet, but with growing confidence.

A succession of little screams accompanied these staggering steps which seemed to indicate that movement was causing it pain, but that it was determined to stir. With its long attenuated legs it began to make strides towards him. It was coming on, but still Unsworth told me, he could not stir, “like in those dreams, sir,” he said, “when you want to fly but cannot.”

Suddenly the great bell of the cathedral boomed out the hour of seven and Unsworth was released from his paralysis. He ran and ran until he reached the gatehouse at the eastern end of the close where he stopped for breath and looked back. The creature was no longer coming towards him. He could see its starved outline clearly against the last of the setting sun. It had turned south-west and with long, slightly staggering strides was making its way, as Unsworth thought, towards the Deanery.

Let us now go there ourselves before whatever it was that Unsworth saw arrives.

Dean Coombe sups, as usual, with his wife and daughter. Conversation, even by Deanery standards, is not lively during this meal. It is plain to Mrs Coombe and her daughter Leonora that their master is preoccupied and anxious to escape from them to his study. Perhaps he has a sermon to write, thinks Mrs Coombe idly, half remembering a time when she interested herself passionately in his doings. Even the fact that her husband seems quite indifferent to her company no longer troubles her.

The Dean has barely taken his last mouthful when, with a muttered apology, he wipes his mouth with his napkin and excuses himself from the table. A few minutes later we find him in his study. A fire is glowing in the grate and an oil lamp illumines the desk on which it has been placed. Outside the uncurtained window dusk is falling rapidly over the cathedral close.

The Dean begins to take several volumes down from his shelves. One of those he needs is on the very topmost shelf, and to obtain it he makes use of a set of library steps. He plucks the book from its eyrie and, for some moments, he leafs through it rapidly on the top of the steps until we hear a little sigh of satisfaction. He descends the steps with his book which he places beneath the lamp on his desk. The work is Barrett’s Magus and the page at which it is open has many sigils and diagrams printed on it. The Dean now takes the gold seal ring from his waistcoat pocket and begins to compare the design incised upon it with those in the book.

There is a rap at the door. The Dean looks up sharply and plunges the golden ring back into his pocket.

“Yes!” he says in a voice, half-irritable, half-fearful.

The door opens. It is his wife. She says: “Stephen, did you hear that dreadful noise just now?”

“What noise, my dear?”

“A sort of shrieking sound. From the close. Do you think it is those boys from the workhouse making a nuisance of themselves again? Hadn’t you better see what is going on?”

“My dear, I heard nothing. Are you sure it wasn’t a bird of some kind?”

“No, of course, it wasn’t a bird. It was nothing like a bird. I would have said if it was a bird. Are you sure you heard nothing?”

“Quite sure, my dear,” says Dean Coombe in his mildest voice, though inwardly he seethes with impatience. The truth is, he has heard something, but he does not want to prolong the conversation with his wife. Mrs Coombe expresses her incredulity with a pronounced sniff and leaves the room, shutting the door in a marked manner.

As soon as she is gone the Dean has taken the ring from his pocket once again and begins to pore over the designs in the book. So intent is he on his studies that at first he really does not hear the odd crackling noise that begins to manifest itself outside his window. It is a sound like the snapping of dry twigs. Slowly however, he becomes vaguely aware of some mild irritant assaulting the outer reaches of his consciousness, but he applies himself all the more ferociously to his research. Then something taps on his window.

Startled he looks up. What was it? The beak of a bird? There it is again! No, it is not a bird. Some sort of twig-like object or objects were rattling against the pane. Perhaps his wife had been right and it was those wretched workhouse boys up to their pranks. Dean Coombe goes to the window and opens it.

It was at this moment that a Mrs Meggs happened to be passing the Deanery. She was the wife of a local corn merchant and a woman of irreproachable respectability. I had the good fortune to interview her at some length about what she saw that evening, and, after some initial reluctance, she proved to be a most conscientious witness.

Despite the gathering dusk, she told me, there was still light enough to see by. What she saw first was something crouching in the flowerbed below the window of the Dean’s study. It appeared to be a man in rags, “though ’twas all skin and bone, and more like a scarecrow than a living being,” she told me. The man’s hands were raised above his head, and with his immensely long and narrow fingers he appeared to be rattling on the Dean’s window. Then Mrs Meggs saw the Dean open the window and look out, “very cross in the face,” as she put it. Immediately the figure that had been crouched below the windowsill reared up and appeared to embrace the Dean with its long thin arms. It might have looked like a gesture of affection except that for a moment Mrs Meggs saw the expression on Dean Coombe’s face which, she said, was one of “mortal terror”.

“Next moment,” Mrs Meggs told me, “the thin fellow in rags had launched himself through the window after the Dean and I heard a crash inside. Then I heard some shouting and some words, not distinct, but I do remember hearing the Dean cry out, ‘God curse you, take your ring back, you fiend!’ And I remember thinking such were not the words that should be uttered by a Man of God, as you might say. Then comes another crashing, and a cry such as I never hope to hear again as long as I live. It was agony and terror all in one. Well, by this time I was got to the door of the Deanery and banging on it with my umbrella for dear life. The maid lets me in, all of a flutter, and when we come to the Dean’s study, Mrs Dean and Miss Leonora, the Dean’s daughter, were there already, and Miss Leonora screaming fit to wake the dead. And who could blame her, poor mite? For I saw the Dean and he was all stretched back in his chair, his head twisted, and his mouth open and black blood coming out of it. There was no expression in the eyes, for he had no eyes, but only black and scorched holes as if two burning twigs had been thrust into their sockets.”

Only one thing remains to tell. At the Dean’s funeral in the cathedral some weeks later it was noticed that, though the widow was present, Dean Coombe’s daughter, Leonora was not. However, as the congregation were leaving the cathedral after the service, they heard a cry in the air above them. Looking up they saw a tiny figure on the south tower of the west front. It appeared to be that of a woman waving her arms in the air. Some of the more sharp-sighted among the crowd recognised the figure as that of Miss Leonora Coombe.

In horrified impotence they watched as Leonora mounted the battlements of the tower and hurled herself off it onto the flagstone path at the base of the cathedral. Her skirts billowed out during the fall but did nothing to break it, and, as she descended, all the rooks in the elms of the close seemed to rise as one and set up their hoarse cries of “kaa, kaa, kaa”.

When Leonora hit the ground her head was shattered, and the only mercy of it was that she had died instantly.

Later, in recalling this final episode of the tragedy, several witnesses quoted to me, as if compelled by some inner voice, those final words of the 137th psalm:

“Happy shall he be that taketh thy children and dasheth them against the stones.”