The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Number Seventy-Nine

A. N. L. Munby

Location: Red Lion Square, London.

Time: Autumn, 1935.

Eyewitness Description: “I saw something else emerge from his room. At least I can’t say that I saw it; I thought I discerned a shadowy figure come through the doorway, but apart from an impression of grey colouring I could not describe it”

Author: Alan Noel Latimer Munby (1913–74) has been described as “the man who came closest to inheriting the mantle of M. R. James” by Mike Ashley. The son of an architect, he was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, where his fascination with antiquarian books began, and he later became librarian of the college. Munby also became a leading figure in the antiquarian book trade and for many years was associated with the legendary dealer, Bernard Quaritch. He wrote several bibliographical studies as well as a number of stories featuring books and book dealers. “Number Seventy-Nine” combines Munby’s interest in books and the supernatural and is written in an elegant and scholarly style reminiscent of his model. Curiously, Munby’s subsequent collection of ghost stories, The Alabaster Hand, published in 1949, were largely written to pass the time away while he was a German POW at Eichstatt in Upper Franconia from 1943–5. This collection also acknowledged the author’s debt to his inspiration with a dedication to M. R. James: Collegii Nostri Olim Praepositi Huiusce Generis Fabularum Sine Aemulo Creatoris.

“I’m sorry, sir, but number seventy-nine isn’t available.”

The bookseller’s young assistant shook his head complacently he pronounced the words. I was bitterly disappointed. It wasn’t as though I had wasted any time. The catalogue had reached my breakfast-table only half an hour before, and I had gulped down my coffee and made a beeline for Egerton’s bookshop, an old firm whose premises were situated in one of the passages just off Red Lion Square. The item which had so aroused my interest was a manuscript of the mid-seventeenth century, dealing with the sombre subject of necromancy. From the cataloguer’s description it seemed possible to me that it was a transcript of one of the lost manuscripts of Dr John Dee, the Elizabethan astrologer. If this were the case, the price of fifteen pounds was by no means excessive, and I had set my heart on securing the book. Hence my disappointment.

“Was it sold before the catalogue was sent out?” I asked.

The young man shook his head again.

“If it’s been ordered but is still on the premises, perhaps I could see it?” I continued eagerly. The assistant seemed embarrassed.

“I am afraid it isn’t available,” he repeated evasively. “I can’t tell you any more than that.” Then his face lit up with relief.

“Ah, here is Mr Egerton coming in now,” he said. “You’d better ask him about it.”

I turned to greet the proprietor as he came through the shop door.

“What’s all this mystery about number seventy-nine?” I said, waving my catalogue at him. “I gather it hasn’t been sold yet. Can I have a look at it? Surely that’s not much to ask, after all the years I’ve dealt with you.”

The bookseller’s usually genial face clouded over, and he hesitated before replying. Finally he said:

“Will you come upstairs to my room?”

I accompanied him through the shop and past the little cataloguer’s room behind it, and we mounted the stairs together. I’d always liked the firm of Egerton. The bulk of their business was in legal books, but their catalogues usually had something in them of interest to me, and over a period of fifteen years I’d bought a number of books from them. Egerton himself had become quite a personal friend. We often met in the reading-room of the British Museum. We entered his room on the first floor lined with reference books, and he waved me into a chair.

“The manuscript you want to see has been destroyed,” he said.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I replied. “What an unfortunate accident!”

“It wasn’t an accident,” he said abruptly; “it was burned by – myself.”

I looked at him. He was obviously upset and reluctant to discuss the matter, but why on earth a businessman like Egerton should have destroyed a book worth fifteen pounds was beyond my comprehension.

He realised that some explanation was due, but seemed to be undecided whether to give it to me. Finally he said:

“I’ll tell you about it, if you like. In fact, it’s rather more in your line than mine.”

He paused, and I waited hopefully.

“You knew Merton?” he resumed.

“Your cataloguer?” I said. “Why, of course I know him – you’ve had him with you for years.”

Merton was one of those enigmatic figures that one occasionally meets in the rare-book business – a man of considerable ability and apparently not the slightest ambition.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you his history,” said Egerton. “He came down from Oxford in 1913, and got caught up in the war before he’d settled down to anything. He was badly shell-shocked in France, and when he got his discharge in 1918 he was a nervous wreck. He came to me temporarily while he was looking round for something to do, and stayed for twenty years. Of course he was eccentric, but extremely able. In fact, he was so eccentric that I tried never to let him deal with customers, but if he kept in his room behind the shop he did really excellent work. I think I can justifiably claim a very high standard for our catalogues, and this was due to Merton. Of course he was undeniably odd – he was normally moody, but sometimes he’d get fits of depression for weeks on end, during which he literally would hardly speak a word to a soul. He wasn’t a very cheerful member of the firm, but his excellence at his job compensated for his other failings.

“About a year ago he came to me one morning and announced that he was engaged to be married. I was astounded, but also delighted for his sake. I felt that if anything could help him to overcome his moodiness and eccentricity, married life would do it for him. I congratulated him warmly and agreed to raise his salary. His fiancée came to the shop several times and he introduced her to me. She struck me as being just the sort of wife he needed – about twenty-five and obviously extremely capable and sensible. He was devoted to her and became a new man. I’ve never seen such a transformation as his. You would never have recognized him as the shy, tongue-tied recluse that he was before.”

I shifted uneasily in my chair, wondering what all this had to do with the book I wanted. Egerton must have sensed my unspoken impatience, for he continued:

“Don’t think that all this is irrelevant. You’ll see soon how the manuscript fits into the story. But first I must tell you more about Merton.

“Four months ago his fiancée was killed – in a motoring accident. Naturally any man would be deeply upset in such circumstances, but you’ve no conception of the effect it had on Merton. All his past depression returned a hundred-fold accentuated. He’d sit in his room for hours on end with his head buried in his hands. He seemed to have lost all interest in life. I got seriously concerned about him, and tried to persuade him to see a doctor. I offered him a month’s holiday by the sea, but he refused to take it. If he hadn’t been such an old and tried member of the firm, I should really have had to consider getting rid of him.

“From a conversation I had with him at this time I learned that some quack medium had got hold of him and that he was attending séances. He asked me my view on spiritualism on one occasion, and from his remarks I gathered that he wasn’t himself deriving much solace from it. The medium had, of course, promised that he should be put in touch with his dead fiancée, but the contact had still to be established. It was really pitiful to see a grown man taking such stuff seriously.

“Merton’s state of mind was particularly unfortunate at this time, as I had bought a private library in Shropshire early in the summer. The catalogue I sent you last night represents only about half of it – I had hoped to have offered the whole collection for sale by now. I don’t suppose Merton catalogued more than a third of the items. I did the rest; the boy down in the shop isn’t up to such work yet. I expect you noticed a small section of occult books, of which number seventy-nine was one. Those were the only books in which Merton showed any interest – he spent hours on them, far more time than their value justified, but I didn’t mind. I was so glad to see him at work again, and hoped it would be a prelude to returning to his normal output.

“One night about a week ago Merton came up to my room at closing time, and made me an offer of ten pounds for the manuscript. I was surprised at this – he wasn’t a collector, and I knew that he couldn’t afford it. I refused – rather brusquely, I’m afraid. When he had gone I had a good look at it. It was full of the usual cabbalistic mumbo-jumbo, the pentacle, the secrets of Solomon, and the like, but the section on necromancy, which comprised the bulk of the book, was much fuller than I’ve seen in other manuscripts of this class, and included a lot of the dog-Latin incantations and conjurations to be employed by the practitioner of the black art to invoke the spirits of the dead. I put it away in the safe and thought no more about it.

“The day before yesterday Merton asked me for the key of the safe at lunch-time. This was such a common occurrence that I gave it to him quite automatically, without asking him what he wanted. There are always a few good things in there awaiting cataloguing, and I assumed that he was going to make a start on one of them.

“Now, although we close at six o’clock, if I’m busy I’m very often on the premises until eight or even later. The boy goes off at six sharp, but Merton used to stay on for another half hour or so. I was always the last to leave. That evening I was hard at work trying to trace an obscure coat-of-arms on a German binding. I never could find my way about Rietstap. It was about half-past seven, and I assumed that Merton had gone home, although I usually heard the door when he let himself out. It was, of course, quite dark outside. Suddenly I heard a cry from downstairs. It was Merton’s voice, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a degree of fear infused into a single scream; it expressed the very essence of terror. I opened my door quickly and looked down over the bannisters into the well of the staircase. The switch is at the foot of the stairs and the light was off. I could hear him pulling the door handle of his room, and as I watched the door was flung open. His room too was in darkness so I got only a glimpse of what happened then; for the light coming over my shoulder from the open door behind me shone only halfway down the stairs. Merton ran through the shop, and I heard the bell ring as he opened the outer door. I was going to shout after him, when I saw something else emerge from his room. At least I can’t say that I saw it; I thought I discerned a shadowy figure come through the doorway, but apart from an impression of grey colouring I could not describe it. But it wasn’t what I saw that made me shudder, it was a smell – one that I had met only once before in my life, and that was forty years ago. When I was a boy, we had an exhumation in the village churchyard, and being an inquisitive child I crept up between the tombstones as the grave-diggers were raising the coffin. I only got a glimpse because the village policeman spotted me, and I got a clout on the side of the head for my pains. But I smelt a smell that I didn’t meet again until it floated up the well of these stairs on the night before last – a dank, sickening, fœtid reek of rottenness and decay. I nearly fainted with revulsion. In a second I was back in my room with the door shut. I sat here for a few minutes, and then I thought of Merton and wondered what had become of him. I plucked up courage and went downstairs – the place was deserted and the shop door still open. I went outside and hurried down the passage towards Holborn. I remember thinking, as I did so, how quiet everything seemed. When I emerged into Holborn I discovered the reason. The traffic was stationary and in the middle of the road a group of people were gathered round a prone figure. I pushed my way through the crowd and saw that it was Merton. A policeman told me that he had run headlong from the passage straight under the wheels of a bus, and had been killed instantly.

“You can imagine how shaken I was when I came back to the shop. I went into Merton’s room and there on his desk was that damned manuscript. From the place at which it was open and from some notes on his pad, it was obvious that the poor devil had been experimenting with one of the formula: set out there. Something had occurred to frighten him out of his wits, and in his nervous state this wasn’t perhaps surprising. I suppose that some obscure telepathy communicated his panic to me – at least I prefer to believe that than credit the implications of what I thought I sensed at the foot of the stairs. Anyhow, I was taking no chances, and before I went home I burned every particle of the manuscript and of Merton’s notes. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. And although I’ve always found occult books a lucrative sideline, it’s a class of literature that I shall be avoiding for the future.”