High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories Read online

  ‘There are a few minor errors in this thesis which you will undoubtedly notice during a calm re-reading, and a certain opaqueness of style which might profitably be amended. I am surprised that you have made so little use of the great Variorum Edition of Wilks published by Professors Fawcett and Pale, of the University of Bitter End, Idaho. Nevertheless I find it to be a piece of research of real, if limited value, which, if published, might be—yes, I shall go so far as to say, will be—seminal in the field of nineteenth century drama studies,” said I. “I congratulate you, and it will be a pleasure to recommend that you receive your degree.”

  I don’t know what I expected then. Perhaps I hoped that he would disappear, with a seraphic smile. True enough, there was an atmosphere as of a smile, but it was the smile of a giant refreshed. “Good,” he said; “now we can get on to my other subjects.”

  “Do you mean to say that nineteenth century drama isn’t your real subject?” I cried, and when I say ‘I cried,’ I really mean it; my voice came out in a loud, horrified croak.

  “Sir,” said he; “it is so long ago since my unfortunate experience at my first examination that I have utterly forgotten what my subject was. But I have had time since then to prepare myself for any eventuality. I have written theses on everything. Shall we go on now to History?”

  I was too astonished, and horrified, and by this time afraid, to say anything. We went on to History.

  My knowledge of History is that of a layman. Academically, there is nothing worse, of course, that can be said. But professor-craft did not wholly desert me. The first principle, when you don’t know anything about the subject of a thesis, is to let the candidate talk, nodding now and then with an ambiguous smile. He thinks you know, and are counting his mistakes, and it unnerves him. The Ghost was an excellent examinee; that is to say, he fell for it, and I think I shook his confidence once with a little laugh, when he was talking about Canada’s encouragement of the arts under the premiership of W. L. Mackenzie King. But finally the two hours was up, and I graciously gave him his Ph.D. in History.

  Next came classics. His thesis was on The Concept of Pure Existence in Plotinus. You don’t want to hear about it, but I must pause long enough to say that I scored rather heavily by my application of the second principle of conducting an oral, which is to pretend ignorance, and ask for explanations of very simple points. Of course your ignorance is real, but the examinee thinks you are being subtle, and that he is making an ass of himself, and this rattles him.

  And so, laboriously, we toiled through the Liberal Arts, and some of the Arts which are not so liberal. I examined him in Computer Science, and Astronomy, and Mediaeval Studies, and I rather enjoyed examining him in Fine Art. One of my best examinations was in Mathematics, though personally my knowledge stops short at the twelve-times table.

  Every examination took two hours, but my watch did not record them. The night seemed endless. As it wore on I remembered that at cockcrow all ghosts must disappear, and I cudgelled my brain trying to remember whether the kosher butchers on Spadina keep live cocks, and if so what chance we had of hearing one in the Round Room. I was wilting under my ordeal, but the Ghost was as fresh as a daisy.

  “Science, now!: he positively shouted, as a whole new mountain of theses appeared from—I suppose from Hell. Now I know nothing whatever of Science, in any of its forms. If Sir Charles Snow wants a prime example of the ignorant Arts man, who has not even heard of that wretched law of thermodynamics, which is supposed to be as fine as Shakespeare, he is at liberty to make free with my name. I don’t know and I don’t care. When the Ghost moved into Science I thought my reason would desert me.

  I needn’t have worried. The Ghost was as full of himself as a Ghost can possibly be, and he hectored and bullied and badgered me about things I had never heard of, while my head swam. But little by little—it was when the Ghost was chattering animatedly about his work on the rate of decay of cosmic rays when they are brought in contact with mesons—that I realized the truth. The Ghost did not care whether I knew what he was talking about or not. The Ghost was a typical examinee, and he wanted two things and two things only—an ear into which he could pour what he believed to be unique and valuable knowledge, and a licence to go elsewhere and pour it into the ears of students. Once I grasped this principle, my spirits rose. I began to nod, to smile, to murmur appreciatively. When the Ghost said something especially spirited about the meiosis-function in the formation of germ-cells, I even allowed myself to say “Bravo”—as if he had come upon something splendid that I had always suspected myself but had never had time to prove in my laboratory. It was a great success; I knew that dawn could not be far away, for as each examination was passed, the Ghost seemed to become a little less substantial. I could see through him, now, and I was happily confident that he could not, and never would, see through me. As he completed his last defense of a doctoral dissertation, I was moved to be generous.

  “A distinguished showing,” I said. “With a candidate of such unusual versatility I am tempted to go a little beyond the usual congratulations. Is there anything else you fancy—a Diploma in Public Health, for instance, or perhaps something advanced in Household Science?”

  But the Ghost shook his head. “I want a Ph.D. and that only,” said he. “I want a Ph.D. in everything.”

  “Consider it yours,” said I.

  “You mean that I may present myself at the next Convocation?”

  “Yes; when the Registrar kneels to take upon him the degrees granted to those who are forced by circumstances to be absent, I suggest that you momentarily invest him with your ectoplasm—or whatever it is that people in your situation do,” said I.

  “I shall; Oh, I shall,” he cried, ecstatically, and as he faded before my eyes I heard his voice from above the skylight in the Round Room, saying, “I go to a better place than this, confident that as a Ph.D. I shall have it in my power to make it better still.”

  So at last, as dawn stole over the College, I was alone in the Round Room. The night of the Holy Innocents had passed. Musing, my hand stole to my pocket and, pulling out the sugarbaby, I crunched off its head. Was it those blessed children, I wondered, who had hovered over me, protecting me from being found out? Or had it perhaps been the spirit of King Herod, notoriously the patron of examiners?

  All things considered, I think it was both great spiritual forces, watching over me during the long night. Happy in the thought that I was so variously protected, I stepped out into the first light, the last crumbs of the sugarbaby still sweet upon my lips.

  The Great Queen Is Amused

  The first Christmas we celebrated in College I told a Ghost Story on this occasion because I had had an odd experience just before the Gaudy, and thought it might amuse you. The second Christmas I told another, only because it was true and a footnote to the first. It was never my intention that these stories should multiply. The last thing I desire for Massey College is the shabby notoriety of being haunted. I am not a man who particularly likes, or seeks, ghosts: I never saw a ghost till I came here—came to a brand-new building, every brick of which I had seen set in place, and all the furnishings of which have been known to me since they came from the makers. I had always thought that ghosts were superstitions. I wish I thought so still.

  It happened a week ago last Sunday. I perceive that you have gone at once to the heart of the matter; it is a pleasure to address a truly perceptive audience. You have recognized immediately that the date was December the fifth—the Vigil of Saint Nicholas, patron of scholars, and therefore an unseen but real presence in this College. It was near to midnight, and I lay in my bed, reading myself to sleep, when I felt stealing over me that special uneasiness which I have learned—but only since I came here—to associate with a particular kind of trouble. In university life one quickly becomes expert in identifying several sorts of disquiet; I have one which I believe is all my own, and I call it the Ghost Chill. My temperature drops suddenly; my breathing is laboured; my v
ision is disturbed so that stable objects seem to advance and retreat before my eyes, and I feel a stirring in my scalp, as though my hair were rising. I see some medical men in the audience smirking; simple fright, they think. Oh no, nothing so easy as that; I am not frightened, but disagreeably aware. I know that something quite out of the ordinary—something untoward—something both inescapable and exhausting—is about to happen to me. I know that I have slipped out of the groove of one sort of life and am trapped for a time in an alien realm.

  The Ghost Chill also makes one sensitive to sounds which other people do not hear. As I lay in my bed I became conscious of sobbing and sighing and wailing—as of a great number of people shaken with grief and despair and (this was the worst of it) expecting something of me. How did I know this? I cannot tell you. But I knew it, quite clearly. I was not frightened, but I was deeply disturbed and depressed. I knew that things would be worse before they were better, and I knew also that I could not escape whatever lay before me. So I rolled up my book, put it back in its locked case, put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and set out for the scene of the disturbance.

  How did I know where to look? That is another of the characteristics of the Ghost Chill. One knows where to go. I do not make any pretentious claim that one is guided to a particular spot; one just knows where to go. So I trudged downstairs, and through the passage on the lowest floor that leads to the Lower Library.

  The lights are always burning there, with a hard, charmless blaze that should be enough to discourage the most insensitive ghost. I could see at once that there was nobody in the Reference Room, but from the room which is marked “Press Room and Stacks” the sound that was drawing me was audible—to my sensitive ear, you understand—in dreadful volume. As I unlocked the door I felt fear for the first time.

  How does fear manifest itself in you? With me it is like being stAbbed with a cruelly cold knife; for an instant it is a paralysis, then a pain, then a shock. Why was I afraid now? Because I had remembered something that was in the stacks.

  Our library has, from time to time, been given generous gifts of books. Even before the College opened one gift came to us of a hundred or more volumes, of which all but five were works of Canadian literature. We are already modestly famous for our collection of Canadian literature, you know. But those five were books to which the Librarian paid scant attention, because they did not fit into any of the categories of our collection. They were the works of a man of whom some of you will have heard, and whose name may raise a smile. It was Aleister Crowley; he died not long ago, putting an end to a life that had been spent in trying to impose himself on the world as a magician. Most people laughed at him, but there is no doubt that his career was an unsavoury one, and he was involved in scandals that were disastrous, and sometimes fatal, to people who had come under his influence. There were five of Aleister Crowley’s books in the stacks, piled together on a shelf of unclassified volumes, and once or twice I had suggested to the Librarian that we should get rid of them, or put them in the vault. But I had forgotten them, and so had he. I remembered them now with the terrible onset of fear that I have already described.

  But as I have told you, when the Ghost Chill is upon me, I have to do what lies before me, afraid or not. So I turned the key in the lock, pushed back the heavy door, and walked inside.

  There I saw a scene of such complex disorder that I do not know where to begin to describe it. The light was extraordinary, to begin with; it was not the electric glare of the Reference Room, but a wavering blue light, as though I stood in the middle of a gas flame. There was one other living creature in the stacks, and I recognized her with dismay. I cannot reveal her name, for she is well-known to many of you, and I do not wish to involve her in unseemly gossip. I must say, however, that she knows our library well, for she has spent many hours in the stacks, doing some research in Canadian literature for her husband. She stood, tall, straight and unafraid, looking about her in wonder, and as the door slammed into place she turned to look at me.

  “You had better step inside this circle if you don’t want to get into trouble,” she said, in the soft, yet deliberate and pleasing accents which tell of a childhood spent in the Hebrides. I saw that she stood in a chalk circle that had been carefully drawn on the floor, and I hastened to her side. She was calm in the midst of the frantic disturbance that surrounded us. I suppose President’s wives are always calm before scenes of despair and tumult; they learn that art at faculty receptions.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I demanded.

  “I’m afraid I’ve been careless with the books,” she replied, and in her hand I recognized one of Crowley’s volumes, opened at a drawing that looked like a mathematical diagram. “I just wanted to see if this recipe worked as well as the author said it did, and it seems to have caused a little trouble.”

  A little trouble! I detest understatement; it always seems to me to be dangerous frivolity. A little trouble! My eyes were now accustomed to the strange light, and I could see that the whole area of the stacks was filled with agitated, insubstantial figures; each one was clear to the eye, but it was also transparent. The floor stood thick with them, leaping, writhing, shoving and jostling as they attempted to stand on their hands and fell to the floor every time with shrieks of despair. Some others danced about on their hands, laughing in derisive triumph, and still others crowded all the space immediately below the ceiling. These were even stranger than the dervishes on the floor, for they were curled into balls, their heads tucked into their stomachs, their legs drawn up toward their bodies, and their hands clasped loosely before them, as they bobbed, somersaulted and turned gently in the air, like hideous balloons. And, most extraordinary circumstance of all, every one of these figures was stark naked.

  What does one say under such circumstances? Almost any remark one can think of is unequal to the occasion. Undoubtedly mine was so. “What in the world have you done?” I said.

  “Well, I’ve been reading a lot of these Canadian books, getting together material for Claude’s anthology,” she replied. “I got a bit curious about some of the authors—thought what fun it would be to talk to them, and all that—foolishness, I suppose. Then today I came across this book by this man Crowley, and he says it isn’t hard to bring back the dead if you go about it in a respectful and proper manner. For the past two weeks I’ve been wishing I could have a word or two with Sara Jeanette Duncan; there’s a bit in The Imperialist that always sounds to me as if something had been cut out of it and the gap never properly patched, and I thought—”

  “You thought you’d get hold of Miss Duncan and ask her,” I interrupted. The leisureliness of the beautiful anthologist’s explanation nettled me.

  “Well, Crowley didn’t seem to think there was much to it,” she said.

  “I think that before monkeying with Crowley you might have had the courtesy to speak to me,” said I.

  “Oh don’t be so pompous,” said she.

  Women always think that if they tell a man not to be pompous they will shut him up, but I am an old hand at that game. I know that if a man bides his time his moment will come. “Well,” I said, “if you and Crowley are such a great pair, suppose you explain what has happened.”

  “That’s just the difficulty,” she said, with terrible Scottish patience; “I don’t understand what has happened. I did all the right things, and called the name of Sara Jeanette Duncan, and these articles began to appear. Look at them, would you! Did you ever see such a sight in your life? What do you suppose they are?”

  This was my moment of triumph. You see, I knew what they were.

  It has been a lifelong habit of mine to read myself to sleep. Some people read light books—mystery stories and the like—in bed, but my custom has always been to read works of greater substance before sleeping. And not just to read them once, carelessly, but to read and re-read a group of selected classics over and over again, year in and year out, for in this way they become a part of oneself. For many years a
bedtime favourite of mine has been that very famous commentary on the Pentateuch, the Midrash of Rabbi Tanhuma bar Abba, most learned of the fourth century Talmudic mystics and sages. My copy of the Midrash is rather a nice one—a fine tenth century scroll, beautifully illuminated though not particularly suited to reading in bed, because it is fourteen feet long, and as it must be read from right to left this means a lot of winding and rewinding. It is encased at both ends in copper and gold; the rubies on the casing scratch my hands now and then, but I don’t greatly mind. It is a small price to pay for keeping my Hebrew alive. As luck would have it, I had been reading the scroll of Rabbi Tanhuma when the Ghost Chill came upon me.

  Of course you have guessed what the explanation was. Not all of you will have read the great Midrash, but certainly you have read Louis Ginzberg’s seven volume compilation of Jewish legends, and will have formed your own conclusions. But Hebrew studies are neglected in the Hebrides and so, for the sake of completeness, I must continue exactly as if you were as much in the dark as was my companion.

  She had asked me what I supposed these apparitions were. “Why,” I said, “this is hell, and these are spirits of the dead.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she replied, “it isn’t a bit like hell, except perhaps for the noise.”

  “What do you suppose hell to be?” said I. “The word merely means a dark and enclosed place, inhabited by spirits. A perfect description of the stacks in Massey College Library. Rabbi Tanhuma says it is indistinguishable from Paradise; both damned and saved pass a few millennia there. I suppose you called up a single spirit, and have received a wholesale delivery; Crowley is a most untrustworthy guide.”