King Erik Glipping was murdered near Viborg in 1286, and the narrator of “Number 13” can tell you that fifty-six blows of square-headed iron maces “were traced on Erik’s skull when his tomb was opened in the seventeenth century. But I am not writing a guide-book.” He carries straight on to the hotels: “Preisler’s and the Phœnix are all that can be desired.” His cousin Mr Anderson went to the Golden Lion instead, and “has not been there since”. Helen Grant, writing up her own visit in a Ghosts & Scholars newsletter, says James stayed in the town in 1900, at Preisler’s. So he gave the hotel he’d actually slept in a clean notice and made up another one for the horror.

This is the fifth story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Anderson, “a methodical, accurate-minded man”, has come to copy papers on the last days of Danish Catholicism, and he turns down Number 17 because its windows “commanded only the blank wall of the next house”. He takes Number 12, with three windows on the street. The guest list on the blackboard has no Number 13, but that night he comes back from fetching a book to the wrong door, and it’s numbered 13. It “entirely refused to open, and he caught the sound of a hasty movement towards it from within.” In bed he works out that the board must be wrong, and he’s sorry he didn’t take the room himself.

James sets out the next part as evidence and leaves the adding up. On the second night the portmanteau, left on a trestle “at the farthest end of the room from his bed”, has gone. Anderson smokes at the window (“the right-hand window it was”), facing the kind of dead wall he turned down Number 17 to avoid, and on it he can see his own shadow and, to the right of it, the occupant of Number 13, “like himself, leaning on his elbows on the window-sill”. He leaves his cigarette-end on the sill and goes to bed. In the morning the portmanteau is back on its trestle and the cigarette-end is on the sill of the middle window. So at night Number 12 is two windows long, the far end of the room has gone, luggage and all, into a room that isn’t there in daylight, and the sill that shadow leaned on is his own right-hand window by day. He’d been sorry not to take Number 13, and he’s been paying for part of it all along.

The landlord, Herr Kristensen, is no help, and I could read a whole book of him. Asked why Danish hotels skip the number, he’s off into his old schoolmaster and “one snowy day”, then his father’s hotel in Aarhuus. Only at the third go does it come out that the trouble is the commercial travellers, with their stories of “men that have slept in a Number 13 and never been the same again, or lost their best customers”. So the gap on the board is hotel management, and the thing has marked its door with the one number the hotel left free.

By day Anderson is in the Rigsarkiv with letters about Bishop Jörgen Friis, who was real: the last Catholic to hold the see, according to Grant. The Bishop owned a house in the town and let it to one Mag Nicolas Francken, who the reforming party say “practised secret and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy”. The Bishop tells them to bring it before the proper court, meaning his own. Two days after their last reply he writes that Francken “hath been suddenly removed from among us”, so that “the question for this time falls”, and he moves on to the Scarlet Woman, “be it known to you,” etc. That “etc.” is the last anyone hears of it. Francken is James’s invention; when Grant asked at the local archive the name “met with an absolute blank”. The reformers had the real Friis imprisoned in his own dungeon at Hald, which the narrator calls “one of the prettiest things in Denmark”, and on the afternoon Anderson reads that letter he pays it “a short visit” and goes for his tea.

The archivist, Herr Scavenius, mentions that he’s never been able to place the Bishop’s house. Of the 1560 terrier of the Bishop’s property, “just the piece which had the list of the town property is missing. Never mind.” That makes two lists with a hole in them, the blackboard and the terrier. Nothing in the story says the Golden Lion was the Bishop’s house, and James lets you suspect it anyway. Grant went looking in November 2005, walked the streets where most of what survived the fire of 1726 is clustered, and found “no single building which has all these characteristics”. The Golden Lion, she concludes, “is everywhere and nowhere in old Viborg.”

On the third night he looks out at the wall again and sees a thin form crossing the next window, “his arms waved, and a gaunt leg was kicked up with surprising agility”. He assumes it’s the staid lawyer in Number 14, Herr Jensen, and starts composing comic verse: “I dance all night upon the floor. / And even if my neighbours swore, / I’d go on dancing all the more, / For I’m acquainted with the law”. Nobody ever says who’s really dancing, but the rhyme fits Francken better than it fits Jensen: his neighbours did swear and his whole case turned on a point of law, and Anderson has spent two days reading about it. Mark Sinker at Freaky Trigger compares the thing to someone dancing along to “LOUD TECHNO till dawn, selfishly encroaching on the personal space of others”. After Abney’s children and Mrs Mothersole, it reads less like revenge than like somebody who won’t be told.

Then it sings, with the landlord sitting right there, in “a high, thin voice” that’s “dry, as if from long disuse”. Kristensen’s contribution is “I have heard it once before, but I made sure it was a cat.” The lawyer comes in to complain and finds nobody to blame, and he and Anderson go out into the passage with a stick and an umbrella and finally compare notes. “My room has three windows in the daytime,” says Anderson. “By George, so has mine!” says Jensen, turning to look at him, which puts his back to the door. It opens, and an arm comes out and claws at his shoulder, “clad in ragged, yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long grey hair upon it.” The servants won’t touch the door until Anderson tells them “It isn’t a German in there, and if it was, we are five to one.” One swings a crowbar at the door and it’s a plaster wall, with a gash in it. A cock crows, and the landlord asks “with hesitation” whether they’d like “another room for tonight—a double-bedded one?”

S. T. Joshi, quoted on Wikipedia, says “the ‘ghost’ is not that of a person, but of a room”. The plaster wall is on his side, but a room doesn’t need linen, and it doesn’t laugh to itself behind a shut door.

Next morning they take up the floor of Number 12. “You will naturally suppose” that they found a skeleton, perhaps Francken’s. “That was not so.” They find a copper box holding “a neatly-folded vellum document”, and the narrator breaks off to talk about the fly-leaves of an astrological book of his own, where after ten years he can’t “determine which way up this writing ought to be read, much less in what language it is.” James, who catalogued many of the manuscripts in Cambridge’s college libraries, gave him that line. After two days Jensen, “the bolder spirit of the two”, “hazarded the conjecture that the language was either Latin or Old Danish.”

The narrator gets all of it a few months later, near Upsala, after a visit to the library where he’d laughed over the contract by which Daniel Salthenius “sold himself to Satan”. Salthenius was real, and the letter is still in the university library there. He was sixteen, and he offered body and soul for a purse that never ran dry. Anderson “was not really amused.” “Young idiot!” he says, “how did he know what company he was courting?” The reformers’ charge against Francken was the same one, and that’s as near as Anderson gets to the subject. He tells the story, and he “refused to draw any inferences from it, and to assent to any that I drew for him.” The narrator clearly drew some, and he doesn’t pass them on.

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