The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“Don’t think that all this is irrelevant. You’ll see soon how the manuscript fits into the story. But first I must tell you more about Merton.

“Four months ago his fiancée was killed – in a motoring accident. Naturally any man would be deeply upset in such circumstances, but you’ve no conception of the effect it had on Merton. All his past depression returned a hundred-fold accentuated. He’d sit in his room for hours on end with his head buried in his hands. He seemed to have lost all interest in life. I got seriously concerned about him, and tried to persuade him to see a doctor. I offered him a month’s holiday by the sea, but he refused to take it. If he hadn’t been such an old and tried member of the firm, I should really have had to consider getting rid of him.

“From a conversation I had with him at this time I learned that some quack medium had got hold of him and that he was attending séances. He asked me my view on spiritualism on one occasion, and from his remarks I gathered that he wasn’t himself deriving much solace from it. The medium had, of course, promised that he should be put in touch with his dead fiancée, but the contact had still to be established. It was really pitiful to see a grown man taking such stuff seriously.

“Merton’s state of mind was particularly unfortunate at this time, as I had bought a private library in Shropshire early in the summer. The catalogue I sent you last night represents only about half of it – I had hoped to have offered the whole collection for sale by now. I don’t suppose Merton catalogued more than a third of the items. I did the rest; the boy down in the shop isn’t up to such work yet. I expect you noticed a small section of occult books, of which number seventy-nine was one. Those were the only books in which Merton showed any interest – he spent hours on them, far more time than their value justified, but I didn’t mind. I was so glad to see him at work again, and hoped it would be a prelude to returning to his normal output.

“One night about a week ago Merton came up to my room at closing time, and made me an offer of ten pounds for the manuscript. I was surprised at this – he wasn’t a collector, and I knew that he couldn’t afford it. I refused – rather brusquely, I’m afraid. When he had gone I had a good look at it. It was full of the usual cabbalistic mumbo-jumbo, the pentacle, the secrets of Solomon, and the like, but the section on necromancy, which comprised the bulk of the book, was much fuller than I’ve seen in other manuscripts of this class, and included a lot of the dog-Latin incantations and conjurations to be employed by the practitioner of the black art to invoke the spirits of the dead. I put it away in the safe and thought no more about it.

“The day before yesterday Merton asked me for the key of the safe at lunch-time. This was such a common occurrence that I gave it to him quite automatically, without asking him what he wanted. There are always a few good things in there awaiting cataloguing, and I assumed that he was going to make a start on one of them.