"Count Magnus" (1904)

I admit M.R. James has been something of an acquired taste—he has felt consistently oversold—but stories like this are bringing me around. He has a strange dry way of telling them, ruminative and circling main points, though the details and violence as reported can be ferocious. They are often in the vein if not indeed classics of one of horror's favorite devices, first-person tales by librarians, scientists, and other researchers whose work introduces them to curious mysteries that deepen into the uncanny. "Count Magnus" is built out of documents found hidden in a house that has been purchased and demolished for new construction. I should say spoiler alert because this latter point is reserved as a reveal for the end. But it's only an empty formality, as it adds little to the foregoing. James sets up basically a historian's approach to assembling knowledge, summarizing and editing original documents (judiciously, we trust). This cerebral and sober distance can work to make fantastic events more believable but also less immediate; paradoxically, the impact is more strained but also more insidiously unnerving. You feel the spook later and it doesn't necessarily go away quickly. So there is our narrator, puzzling over details from the found documents, and there is Mr. Wraxall, a freelance writer who sold light travel pieces and created the documents—notes, mostly, for his pieces. The story involves Wraxall's experience in a region of Sweden where he died and specifically one estate, where his body was found. The local inquest rules it death by "visitation of God." "Count Magnus" is ambiguous enough in its details that it may be considered a ghost story (as Wikipedia and the Penguin collection above has it) but others take it as a vampire story—most horror writers of the day had at least one or two of them, the way all garage bands in the '60s covered "Gloria." The story has some great effects with various hideous deaths. Count Magnus is shown to be a cruel lord of the manor in the feudal times when he was alive, severely punishing the peasants on his estate for the smallest infractions. As Wraxall investigates, we see evidence that something is affecting him. He begins to have blackouts and periods of missing time and confusion. At one point he reports: "[I] found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I believe, singing or chanting some such words as, 'Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?' and then, something more which I have failed to recollect." This clouding minds business to me puts it squarely in the vampire realm, though we are spared any overt blood-sucking, purple lips, etc. You have to wonder what an inquest jury is getting at with the "visitation of God" ruling. Our narrator does not know because he only has the documents to go on, and Mr. Wraxall has long since been dead and unable to tell the rest of the story himself.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.