So it was with some surprise that I received a note from her, quite polite and formal as you might expect, explaining that she would no longer be on the rota for flower-arranging in the parish church, as she was moving to a New Town which was not that many miles away. She had left the college library for a post in a Public Library in the brand new town centre, amid the glass and steel instead of the old mellow stone and wooden beams. What could cause such an upheaval?
I heard the story eventually, from her own lips. Just before
Christmas I had occasion to go to the New Town in search of a
present that a niece had particularly requested from a shop
for teenagers, and I called into the Public Library out of
curiosity. The lady was willing enough to come and have lunch
in the shopping-centre with me; I think she was lonely since
the move; at any rate, she unburdened herself to me.
She had worked in the library of St. Ambrose's College for about twenty years, with never a strange happening, unless you count the occasional student throwing paper streamers from the windows, or the Fellows who once, after a too-good Founders' Dinner accompanied by Founder's Port, spent the night peacefully on the library floor.
I've seen that Library since she told me the story of what happened to her. Even in daylight, I did not care to walk very far into it. I stood just inside the doorway and looked down the room that stretched in front of me, full of shadows. It's a long library with cases projecting into the room on both sides, forming quiet little enclaves for the studious, but making the library quite dark, although of course they do have electric lighting now. The cases and shelves are of oak, the ceiling of great oak beams. This ceiling is very high; the library is lined with books for the whole height of the walls, and all around the room runs a gallery about twelve feet from the ground, so that the books on the higher shelves can be accessible. The gallery is reached by a spiral staircase corkscrewing up at one end of the room. The librarian has a study on the ground floor, a cosy little den packed with books, a kettle, biscuits, and other necessities of the scholarly life. There aren't many libraries left which preserve the old arrangements, and the special thing about St. Ambrose's is that it also has a lot of its original books; it hasn't sold them off over the years, as happened in so many colleges. It has some famous early medical books, for it was celebrated in the sixteenth century for training physicians: I always imagine somehow that the doctor who was called in to treat Lady Macbeth might have been taught his trade here and quizzed on his knowledge within these walls, and here also might have been asked the greater question, "Cans't not minister to a mind diseas'd?"
Anyway, my librarian friend did not much care for dipping into the medical books: she said they had the most horrible engravings. I think she especially mentioned an early treatise on dentistry with straps and claws and hooks that looked like instruments for a torture chamber, and perhaps economically doubled as such.
But to return to the story of how she came to make such an utterly out-of-character decision as to suddenly up and leave her job at St. Ambrose's after all those years.
One night in November she was, as usual intending to lock up the library at about six o'clock. The Fellows had their own keys to the library, so it was not uncommon to find one or two of them still working at their books, and it was her habit to ask them if they had their library key safely in their pocket before she locked them in, for they were a forgetful species.
On this particular evening, she thought there was no-one left in the library. It was not surprising, for it was a raw Oxford evening, the mists drifting up from the river and through the college gardens, weather to make old bones ache, cats creep close to the fire, and Fellows to make for the safety of tea and toast before a welcome sherry began the long winter evening. So she walked the length of the library, and was suprised to see a table-light burning at the end of the room, in one of the bays formed by the projecting shelving. Standing over the light, with a book held in his hands and a pile of leather-bound tomes on the table in front of him, was a tall man in a dark loose coat or a college gown - she is not sure exactly what sort of garment it was, only that it seemed somehow to be in keeping with the surroundings. She had a quick impression of a thin white face with deep lines around the mouth and a kind of blurry darkness about the eyes. She did not recognise him, and was approaching to ask him if he had a key, when she happened to glance up at the gallery and was distracted. Up in the gallery, on a far wall, there was a section of bare shelf where half a row of books must have been removed. How curious, she thought, and, without thinking too much about it, but with a feeling of anxiety that all was not as it should be in this well-ordered little world, she mounted the wooden spiral staircase to investigate. She walked along, the boards of the gallery creaking under her steps, to the empty shelf, and realised that the books that had been removed were old medical texts, of the kind that she disliked dipping into, but knew that it was her duty to cherish, because of their rarity.
Of course, she immediately connected this odd occurrence with the stranger downstairs. She walked a little further along the gallery, so that she was directly above where he was standing, and it was then that she began to feel a turbulent combination of pity and revulsion. For as she looked down, the stranger was directly beneath her and she could see the poor man had a terrible affliction. His head, like that of so many fellows of St. Ambrose's, was bald as an egg, with stray cobweb-like wisps fringing his skull, but that was not what stirred such a feeling of nausea in my friend. No, what horrified her was that she could see from her vantage point that the top of his head was covered with the most dreadful sores and boils, angry red sores, the skin peeling away and yellow pus glistening in the light that fell from the dim bulb in the ceiling above, and the boils standing proud on his scalp like miniature volcanoes.
She managed to conquer the dreadful feeling of nausea that overcame her pity for his condition, and descended, or rather, staggered down, the wooden stairs, holding to the rail. Once at ground level, she felt a little better and told herself sternly that she must overcome her feelings - after all, the man was greatly to be pitied - and treat him as she would any other person in her domain. In other words, she must go up to him and explain that she was about to lock up the library. She forced her feet to carry her down the library between the rows of books. As she neared the end bay, where she had seen the stranger, she was conscious of a feeling of dread not accountable for by his appearance alone. Each foot-step seemed to be carrying her into a nightmare: each board that creaked under her feet groaned a warning; the journey of a few yards seemed to take years, centuries. As she came closer to the stranger, an odour began to creep up to her nostrils: she said it was such a smell as she had experienced when walking near the river, when things were rotting in mud and slime - things she could not see, only imagine under their thin layers of ooze. She forced herself along, and suddenly she was at the last bay in the room and a face was staring into hers, a white thin face with great dark vacancies for eyes and wisps of grey hair around it: the lips were open and the terrible smell seemed to stream out of the wide-open black-toothed mouth. She began to stammer something:
"I..I think ..it's six o'clock... time to lock up..I'm afraid you must leave.."
The last thing she remembers was quite horrible. The face came even closer, the breath seemed even fouler, and out of that wide-open mouth there suddenly started to pour a high-pitched sound. It was a second or two before she realised what the sound was: it was laughter.
"Lock me out? That's a good one! Lock me in or lock me out, my dear, it makes no difference, you'll see. Lock me out! Me!"
The cracked voice ended in another high-pitched scream of laughter; she remembers no more of what happened next. She awoke on the wooden floor, beside the place where the creature - she could no longer think of him as a man - had been standing. When she did at last get up and look round, there was no sign of him.
She stood there in the chilly dark library, clinging to the table. There was a pile of books higgledy-piggledy; she recognised the leather bindings. But on top was a small book which she had not seen before: she did not think it belonged to the library. It had a worn red leather cover, very soft and greasy. When she picked it up, it was a hand-written note-book, with blots and scribbles and scrawls in a sharp jagged writing. Much of it she could not make out, but as she leafed through it, words and phrases here and there sprung out at her from the spotted and torn pages. "THE LEAPING BUBOES. HOW THEY DO JUMP FROM HEAD TO HEAD AND REMEDY NOT FOUND" was one entry, in big black letters. And again "This I got fro. old Mother Garb, yr. 1672: she do swear by the same."
Old Mother Garb had perjured herself, it seemed, for at the side of a list of compounds that included arsenical water, fat hen picked by moonlight and the grease of a weasel, was scrawled in a slashing hand: "USELESS!!"
She turned the page: "Skull pox. Doctor Henger of Basel says this be due to ye casting of boils upon thine head by some enemy that makes ye scrofulous Eruptions to Come Forth. Unguentum armarium, but if that application be of no avail, thy remedy only to cut out the skin from the head, the Shocke of Whiche hard Chirurgery may kill."
Doctor Henger seemed to have been of no more use than Mother Garb, for the notes and scrawls and slashes continued. Blasphemous attempts had been tried: "Conceal the Host in the Mouth and after spit it out and Nayle it to a yew Tree in the Kirkyard. It will bleed anon" suggested a Scottish origin. At the end of the book a crudely printed leaflet had been tucked in:
"Prodger's Universal Water. For all Cutaneous Afflictions. Our own compound, pleasantly perfumed with bay and laurel. With mercury added for gentlemen's difficulties."
Prodger's deserved reporting to the Advertising Standards Authority, for clearly the head of the creature my friend had seen was the finest crop of Cutaneous Afflictions outside a hospital for Tropical Diseases.
My friend did not pursue her research in the nasty little note-book. She dropped it and made for the door as fast as she could, her legs still so weak that she had to hold on to the shelves as she went. She fell out into the damp Oxford night and breathed in the cold and foggy air as if it were Alpine oxygen.
She did not go back. She wrote to the Fellows and handed in her notice. They, if surprised at the sudden loss of a staid and long-serving employee, did not show it. They sent her a book-token and the Bursar's secretary bought a nice "Farewell" card with dried flowers on it. Within a month, she was installed in the chrome and glass surroundings of New Town Public Library.
"But why did you have to leave?" I asked. "After all, poor man, he only wanted a cure."
She stared at me, then lowered her voice to a whisper. "There were other things in that book. Foul things. Horrible things, as well as silly ones, like the serpent's tongues and the arsenic water. There was something you had to do with the intestines of a cat. There was an ointment made of boiling living creatures. There was a drink... You see, he's still searching for a cure... And you can't lock him out.." her voice trailed off.
Well, I thought, perhaps she had made the right decision. Even if the whole thing was some horrible delusion, her nerves were clearly shattered. She was quite safe now.
Quite safe. Except that as I passed through the brightly-lit shopping-centre, the essence of modern life, there was a book-shop, with brightly coloured shiny piles of new books. A title caught my eye:
"The home doctor. Advice on all aspects of first aid, minor complaints, skin problems. Essential for your family's health care."
He might be anywhere, of course. Anywhere with medical books would draw him like a magnet. Nowhere's safe, no book-shop or library, if he's still looking for a cure. And you can't lock him out.
This story first appeared in Ghosts and Scholars 22 (1996), a magazine devoted to the traditional ghost story as found in the pages of the great Victorian story-teller, M.R. James. If you enjoyed it, Ghosts and Scholars will delight you with more stories of this kind. Explore their web-site and find out how to subscribe to the magazine by clicking here.