The Ghost Story

The library at Upper Snodsbury, where I had my first job, was a throwback to a previous age. The walls were lined with bookshelves that reached to the ceiling and the solid fixed island stacks were packed with dusty leather-bound volumes that were hardly ever borrowed.

It was not long into my time there as Assistant Librarian that I became aware of one particular “regular”, a man in his fifties who visited several times a week. He was not a library member and never borrowed anything but would take a book from the shelves and sit at a table to read it.

I was curious to see what his taste in literature was, so I looked over his shoulder as I passed by from time to time. It was always the same book, and he invariably had the book open at the same place.

It was a venerable copy of the Complete Ghost Stories of M R James, who was arguably the best ghost story writer of all time. All the stories are worth reading, but why did the man only appear to want to read the same one?

And which story was it? I knew many of them very well, such as “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and “Number 13”, which had always struck me as being particularly spine-chilling, but from how the man opened the book it appeared that it was one of the later stories that seemed to attract him.

On one occasion I was able to glance down at the book just after he had opened it, and I could see that the title was “The Death of Black Arthur”. This was not a title that I knew, so I decided one day to have a closer look at the book after the man had left.

Finding the book was not a problem, as the library only had one copy of the title, so I took it down and opened it at the table that our strange visitor always used. I turned to the place in the book where I had seen him read “The Death of Black Arthur”, but I simply could not find it. I flipped through the pages in both directions but with no luck at all. I looked at the table of contents at the front of the book, but there was no sign of any story with that title. Had I imagined it?

It was a surprise to me that the man did not pay us a visit for the whole of the following week, but on the Monday after that I was sitting behind the issue desk in the library when I became aware of something very strange happening in the bookstacks. There was no doubt about it – I could see a wisp of smoke rising above the top shelves. Could somebody have slipped in there and be having a crafty ciggie?

Of course, I rushed round to have a look and was astonished to see that one of the books appeared to be smouldering. I pulled it off the shelf and dropped it on the floor, where it fell open. As I had half expected, the volume in question was the M R James book of ghost stories that had so intrigued me, and I could see that the pages that were being engulfed in smoke were the very ones where I had searched in vain for the “Black Arthur” story.

There was a sudden burst of flame that died away instantly, leaving no sign that anything untoward had happened. The book looked just as it should do, with all the pages in just as good a condition as they had been in before the fire had started. I was on the point of reaching for the book to put it back on the shelf when I heard a cry of alarm from outside the library. I looked through the window to see that a man had collapsed on the pavement just over the road and that a group of concerned people had gathered around him.

One of them was known to me as a retired doctor and I could see him trying his best to revive the man with vigorous CPR. However, the expression on his face did not look encouraging.

Indeed, it soon emerged that the man on the pavement who, as I had feared, was my unknown reader, had died very quickly from a massive heart attack that had struck at the same instant that the mysterious Black Arthur story had vanished from the M R James book in a puff of smoke and flame. Surely there had to be a connection?

A few days later we had a visit at the library from a gentleman who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Michael Groves. He wanted to ask me what I knew about the victim of the heart attack, which was not a great deal. However, what he was able to tell me was much more illuminating.

“The man’s name was Peter White”, said Inspector Groves. “Last year he finished doing a ten-year stretch for armed robbery, but I always suspected that he was involved in a murder that went back several years before that.

“At the time he came out of prison I was very busy with several other cases, and before I could turn my attention to asking him a few questions he had vanished. He was not at any of the addresses we had for him and it looked as though the trail was going to go cold very quickly.

“However, I spoke to the few contacts I had, including his former cellmate who told me something very interesting.”

“Which was?”

“Our friend Peter White suffered from bad nightmares and had a tendency to talk in his sleep. The dreams appeared to be the same every night, and the cellmate was often kept awake as he repeated, over and over again, words that included ‘must read’, ‘read the story’ and ‘dead Arthur’.

“Last week I got a fresh lead that suggested that Peter White might be in this area, and that he was obsessed with visiting this library. I also got the impression that he realized that I was getting close and he might have to change his plans.”

“That might account for why he hasn’t been here for several days”, I said.

“But he clearly couldn’t stay away for ever”, said the Inspector. “He felt compelled to come here, for some reason I just don’t know, but the stress on his weak heart was just too much for him.

“So do you know”, the Inspector asked me, “anything that might explain this compulsion?”

I told him about the story in the M R James book and the fact that the man I now knew to be Peter White kept on reading it, even though I had never been able to do so myself. When I mentioned the title of the story the Inspector’s eyes opened very wide indeed.

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “How could I have forgotten? This is Upper Snodsbury, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is”, I said.

“The victim of Peter White’s murder came from this very village. He was born in the Rectory.”

“That’s the house next door”, I said.

“And what was that story’s title exactly?”

“The Death of Black Arthur”.

“It would appear that the victim has called his killer home and exacted his revenge. Would you believe that the house next door was the scene of the birth of the late Arthur Black?”

© John Welford