Dr Peter Whitfield looks at the ghost story writer M R James and his connection with maps.
Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance
by M R James
Montagu Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a prolific British scholar, medievalist and palaeographer, who catalogued all the important manuscript collections in Cambridge, England. He became Provost of King’s College and then of Eton. He never married, but lived his entire life in the enclosed male realm of academic scholarship and college administration.
He also wrote some two dozen ghost stories which have carried his name far beyond the world of scholarship. But to call them ghost stories is misleading, for no white figures glide silently through darkened passages, or are glimpsed in the moonlight. James’s ghosts are demons, bestial and horrifying, and their power is physical, capable of stripping their victims’ flesh from their bones, after hunting them down and reducing them to terror. A typical James narrative shows this demonic thing escaping, getting out from the place where it has been imprisoned.
With a scholar’s delight in antiquarian detail, James invariably chooses a historical artefact – a picture, a piece of jewellery, a stained-glass window, a manuscript, an ancient well – as the prison, and it is invariably a curious scholar whose over-eager researches release the terror, and who pays the price. Not all the stories are successful by any means: some are wooden in their characterisation and over-fussy in detail, but when they work, the best of them distil an atmosphere that is not easily forgotten.
Given James’s typical approach – the fascination with manuscripts and with historical detail – it might be expected that an old map should form the mainspring of one of his plots, the focus of a haunting. Although James never used an identifiable historical map in quite that way, in his story Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance, the plan of a maze drawn by its owner does indeed act as the vehicle by which a demon lurking within the maze is released. There is a double cartographic interest in this story, because it transpires that the demon has been imprisoned in a decorative globe, which has been set up at the maze’s centre. It should be explained that Mr Humphreys has recently inherited an old house whose gardens contain the maze. The maze was laid out by his grandfather, a mysterious figure who died abroad and has no known grave or tomb. The maze has been locked and barred for years, and Mr. Humphreys has just penetrated it for the first time, finding the ancient bronze globe at the centre:
The column was featureless, resembling those on which sundials are usually placed. Not so the globe. I have said that it was finely engraved with figures and inscriptions, and that on first glance Mr.Humphreys had taken it for a celestial globe: but he soon found that it did not answer to his recollection of such things. One feature seemed familiar: a winged serpent – Draco – encircled about the place which on a terrestrial globe is occupied by the equator: but on the other hand, a good part of the upper hemisphere was covered by the outspread wings of a large figure whose head was concealed by a ring at the pole or summit of the whole. Around the place of the head the words “princeps tenebrarum” could be deciphered. In the lower hemisphere there was a space hatched all over with cross-lines and marked as “umbra mortis”. Near it was a range of mountains , and among them a valley with flames rising from it. This was lettered (will you be surprised to hear it ?) “vallis filiorum Hinnom”. Above and below Draco were various figures not unlike the pictures of the ordinary constellations, but not the same. Thus a nude man with a raised club was described not as Hercules but as “Cain”. Another, plunged up to his middle in earth and stretching out despairing arms, was “Chore” not Ophiucus, and a third, hung by his hair to a snaky tree was Absalom. Near the last, a man in long robes and high cap, standing in a circle and addressing two shaggy demons who hovered outside, was described as “Hostanes magus” (a character unfamiliar to Humphreys). The scheme of the whole indeed seemed to be an assemblage of the patriarchs of evil, perhaps not uninfluenced by a study of Dante. Humphreys reflected that it was an unusual exhibition of his grandfather’s taste, but reflected that he had probably picked it up in Italy.
Far from being a globe of the heavens, the writer is making it clear that Humphreys has stumbled on a globe of hell. All the characters named above are figures of evil, now damned in a Dantean inferno. Humphreys fails to realise the sinister significance of what he has seen, and plans to re-open the maze and show it to his neighbours. As a first step, he spends an afternoon drawing a plan of the maze in situ, and later that night he settles down in his library – by lamplight with bats flitting by the window – to copy it:
It was a still, stuffy evening: windows had to stand open, and he had more than one grisly encounter with a bat. These unnerving episodes made him keep the tail of his eye on the window. Once or twice it was a question whether there was – not a bat, but something more considerable – that had a mind to jolt him. How unpleasant it would be if someone had slipped noiselessly over the sill and was crouching on the floor!
The tracing of the plan was done: it remained to compare it with the original, and see whether any paths had been closed or left open. With one finger on each paper, he traced out the course that must be followed from the entrance. There were one or two slight mistakes, but here near the centre, was a bad confusion, probably due to the entry of the second or third bat. Before correcting the copy, he followed out the last turnings of the path on the original. These at least were right; they led without a hitch to the middle space. Here was a feature which need not be repeated on the copy – an ugly black spot about the size of a shilling. Ink ? No. It resembled a hole, but how should a hole be there ? He stared at it with tired eyes: the work of tracing had been very laborious, and he was drowsy and oppressed….But surely this was a very odd hole. It seemed to go not only through the paper, but through the table on which it lay. Yes, and through the floor below that, down, and still down, even into infinite depths. He craned over it, utterly bewildered. Just as, when you were a child, you may have pored over a square inch of counterpane until it became a landscape with wooded hills and perhaps even churches and houses, and you lost all thought of the size of yourself and it, so this hole seemed to Humphreys for the moment the only thing in the world. For some reason it was hateful to him from the first, but he had gazed at it for some moments before any feeling of anxiety came upon him; and then it did come, stronger and stronger – a horror lest something might emerge from it, and a really agonizing conviction that a terror was on its way, from the sight of which he would not be able to escape. Oh yes, far, far down there was a movement, and the movement was upwards – towards the surface. Nearer and nearer it came, and it was of a blackish-grey colour, with more than one dark hole. It took shape as a face – a human face – a burnt human face: and with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple, there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them. With a convulsion of despair, Humphreys threw himself back, struck his head against a hanging lamp and fell.
Humphreys is in shock for some days, then recovers sufficiently to order the globe to be broken open: inside are found ashes, evidently remains of a human cremation. In some unexplained way, his ancestor’s remains had been hidden in the globe, and the drawing of the map allowed his spirit to escape out of the hell where it had been confined. The implication is that Humphreys’ ancestor was some kind of necromancer, a devotee of the occult, who had suffered the appropriate punishment. In this instance, Humphreys sustained no harm, but the other scholars in James’s stories usually suffer death – and a death so horrifying that those who see the body are haunted forever by the memory.
There is no ultimate explanation of the curse or the haunting: everything proceeds by hints and by suspicion. The pieces of the jigsaw are placed before the reader, but the author never quite puts them together for us. The intriguing thing about these stories is James’s fixed belief that a haunting requires a historical focus as its vehicle: a globe, a manuscript, a picture, or an inscription, becomes the focus of the demonic power. James seems to have seen in the artefacts of the past a concentration of old, pagan, demonic forces, which he delights in releasing into modern England. The temptation to psycho-analyse James himself is irresistible: in the composition of these stories, what was this disciplined and fastidious scholar releasing from the depths of his psyche.
Author: Peter Whitfield
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