The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

The bookseller’s young assistant shook his head complacently he pronounced the words. I was bitterly disappointed. It wasn’t as though I had wasted any time. The catalogue had reached my breakfast-table only half an hour before, and I had gulped down my coffee and made a beeline for Egerton’s bookshop, an old firm whose premises were situated in one of the passages just off Red Lion Square. The item which had so aroused my interest was a manuscript of the mid-seventeenth century, dealing with the sombre subject of necromancy. From the cataloguer’s description it seemed possible to me that it was a transcript of one of the lost manuscripts of Dr John Dee, the Elizabethan astrologer. If this were the case, the price of fifteen pounds was by no means excessive, and I had set my heart on securing the book. Hence my disappointment.

“Was it sold before the catalogue was sent out?” I asked.

The young man shook his head again.

“If it’s been ordered but is still on the premises, perhaps I could see it?” I continued eagerly. The assistant seemed embarrassed.

“I am afraid it isn’t available,” he repeated evasively. “I can’t tell you any more than that.” Then his face lit up with relief.

“Ah, here is Mr Egerton coming in now,” he said. “You’d better ask him about it.”

I turned to greet the proprietor as he came through the shop door.

“What’s all this mystery about number seventy-nine?” I said, waving my catalogue at him. “I gather it hasn’t been sold yet. Can I have a look at it? Surely that’s not much to ask, after all the years I’ve dealt with you.”

The bookseller’s usually genial face clouded over, and he hesitated before replying. Finally he said:

“Will you come upstairs to my room?”

I accompanied him through the shop and past the little cataloguer’s room behind it, and we mounted the stairs together. I’d always liked the firm of Egerton. The bulk of their business was in legal books, but their catalogues usually had something in them of interest to me, and over a period of fifteen years I’d bought a number of books from them. Egerton himself had become quite a personal friend. We often met in the reading-room of the British Museum. We entered his room on the first floor lined with reference books, and he waved me into a chair.

“The manuscript you want to see has been destroyed,” he said.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I replied. “What an unfortunate accident!”

“It wasn’t an accident,” he said abruptly; “it was burned by – myself.”

I looked at him. He was obviously upset and reluctant to discuss the matter, but why on earth a businessman like Egerton should have destroyed a book worth fifteen pounds was beyond my comprehension.

He realised that some explanation was due, but seemed to be undecided whether to give it to me. Finally he said:

“I’ll tell you about it, if you like. In fact, it’s rather more in your line than mine.”

He paused, and I waited hopefully.

“You knew Merton?” he resumed.

“Your cataloguer?” I said. “Why, of course I know him – you’ve had him with you for years.”

Merton was one of those enigmatic figures that one occasionally meets in the rare-book business – a man of considerable ability and apparently not the slightest ambition.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you his history,” said Egerton. “He came down from Oxford in 1913, and got caught up in the war before he’d settled down to anything. He was badly shell-shocked in France, and when he got his discharge in 1918 he was a nervous wreck. He came to me temporarily while he was looking round for something to do, and stayed for twenty years. Of course he was eccentric, but extremely able. In fact, he was so eccentric that I tried never to let him deal with customers, but if he kept in his room behind the shop he did really excellent work. I think I can justifiably claim a very high standard for our catalogues, and this was due to Merton. Of course he was undeniably odd – he was normally moody, but sometimes he’d get fits of depression for weeks on end, during which he literally would hardly speak a word to a soul. He wasn’t a very cheerful member of the firm, but his excellence at his job compensated for his other failings.

“About a year ago he came to me one morning and announced that he was engaged to be married. I was astounded, but also delighted for his sake. I felt that if anything could help him to overcome his moodiness and eccentricity, married life would do it for him. I congratulated him warmly and agreed to raise his salary. His fiancée came to the shop several times and he introduced her to me. She struck me as being just the sort of wife he needed – about twenty-five and obviously extremely capable and sensible. He was devoted to her and became a new man. I’ve never seen such a transformation as his. You would never have recognized him as the shy, tongue-tied recluse that he was before.”

I shifted uneasily in my chair, wondering what all this had to do with the book I wanted. Egerton must have sensed my unspoken impatience, for he continued: