“Pastor of village in Skåne. Usual black coat and soft black hat.” That’s passenger 24 on a Swedish canal boat in the summer of 1863. Passenger 25 is a commercial traveller going to Trollhättan. Passenger 26 is a “man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned”, and Mr Wraxall has crossed that one out and written “Perhaps identical with No. 13. Have not yet seen his face.” No. 13 is a Roman priest in a cassock, and after the last story I did look twice at that number. James gives us “not less than six” of these attempts and the sum never changes: twenty-eight people in the count, twenty-six at meals. The man in the cloak is “perhaps absent”, and the short figure in the hood is “certainly absent”.

“Count Magnus” is the sixth story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and I find those lists more frightening than anything that actually touches anyone in the book so far. Look at how they’re kept. A cloak gets crossed out and reconsidered, and a man who can’t see a face still enters the hat. Wraxall had spent the summer gathering material for a travel book, the kind James sums up as hotel details plus “reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers, and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.” Everything in the story began as copy for that volume, and by the canal boat the habit is all that’s left of it.

James spends a good part of the opening on how little of Wraxall there is. He’s “very much alone in the world”, “a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses”, and his belongings probably went in the Pantechnicon fire. He published a book about a holiday in Brittany, which the narrator, who has also been through the Calendar of Wraxall’s Oxford college, can’t find after “a diligent search”. Mr Abney chose his children as people who could vanish “without occasioning a sensible gap in society”. Wraxall has private means and letters of introduction, and as far as the story tells us nobody comes looking for him either.

The manor-house he’s heading for “is to be called Råbäck”, the narrator says, “though that is not its name”, which is thin cover. The De la Gardies are real, and Rosemary Pardoe has James at Varnhem in 1901 and, going by Michael Cox’s annotations, writing to his parents that August from a real Råbäck on Kinnekulle. Their famous Count, Magnus Gabriel (1622-86), “could scarcely have been a more different character”, and she makes a tentative case for his father Jacob as the model.

James’s Count built the house soon after 1600 and had late tenants flogged and branded, and the innkeeper says he “had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone back with him.” Among the family’s account-books Wraxall finds the Count’s own note: anyone who wants “a long life”, “a faithful messenger” and to “see the blood of his enemies” must first go to Chorazin and salute the prince, with one word scratched out that he reads as “of the air”. Across nearly three centuries, this only makes the man “a more picturesque figure”. He tries Chorazin on the deacon, who says old priests hold that Antichrist is to be born there, “and there are tales—”, and then, “Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten”, and goes home. The tradition is real. Pardoe and Jane Nicholls trace it to the Revelations of the Pseudo-Methodius, probably written in Syria around 690: “He will be born in Chorazaim, nourished in Bethsaida, and reign in Capharnaum.”

The name has had a stranger afterlife. Jack Parsons, the American scientist and follower of Crowley, left an account of a Black Pilgrimage of his own (“things were done to me of which I may not write”). Pardoe and Nicholls think he “somehow got the idea via ‘Count Magnus’”, while admitting “There is no actual evidence that he ever read the story”. Manon Hedenborg White, going by the parallels between the two accounts, calls it “more-or-less certain”, and I’m with her. That would mean a practising occultist took his pilgrimage from a Cambridge don who’d told him next to nothing about it.

The landlord finally gives up one story, and I’d never worked out its date before. Herr Nielsen puts it “ninety-two years ago”, so 1771, when two men say “The Count is dead; we do not care for him” and go poaching in his wood. Someone who built a house soon after 1600 had been in the ground a long time by 1771. People don’t bother saying that about a man that long dead unless it’s still in question, and nobody keeps the wood, “because no one wished to live there”. One of the men is found pushing with his hands at something “which was not there”, and he’s still doing it when he dies before the winter. The other is Anders Bjornsen, whose face “was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones. You understand that?”

The next morning Wraxall is looking at a band of engraving round the Count’s coffin. A man runs through trees with his hair flying, chased by a short hooded form with one visible limb, which he compares to “the tentacle of a devil-fish”. He’s less than a day from hearing about that face, and he files the thing as “allegorical”, a “fiend pursuing a hunted soul”, then looks round for the huntsman, expecting “a demon blowing his horn”. He finds a cloaked man on a hillock, leaning on a stick and watching “with an interest which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude”. Somebody worked at getting that interest right, for the man’s own coffin. The hooded thing is the faithful messenger, and the blood is what the man on the hillock has come to see. The long life is presumably why the lid has three padlocks on it.

He’d already asked once. The evening he read the note he stopped at the churchyard gate and told the mausoleum “I should dearly like to see you”, and something clanged, which he put down to “the woman who, I suppose, was cleaning up the church”. Now one of the padlocks is lying on the pavement. That night he comes to himself at the gate again, with no memory of the walk, chanting “Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?” and “something more which I have failed to recollect”, and inside he finds two loose. “I must have been wrong,” he writes, “in saying that one of the padlocks of my Count’s sarcophagus was unfastened”. He tries to close them, can’t, and lays them “carefully on the window-ledge”. On his last evening he goes back to say goodbye, “I should like to see you, or, rather—”, and the third hits his foot. The story never says his asking does it, but he asks three times and three locks come off.

The counting stops in England. Near Belchamp St Paul, on a moonlit August night, Wraxall’s closed fly reaches a cross-road and two figures are standing at the corner in dark cloaks, the taller in a hat and the shorter in a hood. They’ve got off the boat. He takes a furnished lodging and works through who might help: doctors would call him mad, policemen would laugh, and “The parson is away.” Then the narrator’s sentence starts out in his own voice, “People still remembered last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strange gentleman came one evening in August years back”, and by the end it belongs to them: “and there was an inquest; and the jury that viewed the body fainted, seven of ‘em did, and none of ‘em wouldn’t speak to what they see”.

The first line of the story promised that how the narrator got the papers would be “the last point which the reader will learn”, and it is. He inherited the house, which “had stood empty since 1863”, had it pulled down, and they turned up “in a forgotten cupboard under the window in the best bedroom”. He wasn’t looking for them. Since then he’s checked the Brasenose Calendar, gone through the bibliographies after a book on Brittany, collected what they still say in the village and read every last note in order, and he’s the one who told us on the first page that Wraxall’s besetting fault was “over-inquisitiveness”.

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