This seven page ghost story involves a British Presbyterian antiquarian visiting the Church of St Bertrand in the shadow of the Pyrenees Mountains in the South of France in the spring of 1883. The Englishman is guided in his search for local antiquities by a sacristan; a furtive little man with the look of a hunted soul about him.

M.R. James employs a tone of studied dispassion that sends a child down the reader’s spine with what amounts to an allusion to terror three persons removed from the doom in question. Having no desire to spoil this brief tale I will limit this review to answering my fellow reviewer’s question from this past Christmas Eve.

When suggesting this story for a review V. J. Waks asked me, “How does a man stand in a place so breathtakingly beautiful as this wonderful church and come away for the inspiration for such a horrific tale?”

First I would like to evoke the English protestant horror of many aspects of Catholicism, some of which found their way into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and much of which finds firm purchase in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Secondly, M.R. James evokes the Old Testament as well as the pagan influenced catholic cult of saints in this brief bibliophilic nightmare. His description of the horror in question is very close to a horror described by Pausanius 1800 years earlier as having haunted the Italian town of Temesa circa 450 B.C. Just as M.R. James was penning his horror stories the Loeb collection of translated classics in which this story appears were being published in England. The location specific guides of the ancient world penned by Pausanius, Strabo, and others had old folk ghost stories included in the lore and may have served as an inspiration for James’ less fantastical brand of ghost story.

As for how one person stands in a catholic church and conceives a horror story as others find peace of mind, I have much experience with this. Most of my horror tales come from my infrequent visits to various beautiful old style churches for christenings, weddings, funerals and Christmas services. I do not listen to the sermons but read the hymnals, monares, and bibles, which preserve much that is dark and haunting. I had avoided writing vampire fiction at all costs until a reading from a hymnal at my grandson’s christening in 2012 found me copying some very disturbing verse onto my program, which I used to usher in a horror story set in a puritan village.

We cannot discount how disturbed protestant British intellectuals often were with the artifices of Catholicism. At about the time that M.R. James reached adulthood the Anglican clergy in England were beginning a campaign to evangelize in the colonies, particularly in Hindu India, where many an officer of the East India Company had taken a heathen wife, gone native, and declined to return to England. So a Presbyterian vacationing in the region renowned for heresies, shadowed by the mountains that once sheltered the Cathar heretics would be cognizant of far more ancient and textured notions of evil than those held in his own time and nation.

I recommend reading M.R. James for anyone into Lovecraft, Stoker or Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror.

The link to CANON ALBERIC'S SCRAP-BOOK is below.

V. J. Waks' review of this and one other M.R. James tale will follow soon.