By No Mortal Hand by Daniel McGachey. This was a hard to find volume, that I willingly paid $100 for it on eBay since it's a very out-of-print title from the small press outfit Sarob Press, part of a very limited run of 275 copies. McGachey is an author of short stories I had enjoyed before, his short story collection
They That Dwell in Dark Places is a fave, and if I wanted to track down every anthology, small press chapbook and 'zine that the stories in this Sarob collection were published in (not counting the stories original to the collection) I'd be in for a more difficult time.
McGachey has been a frequent contributor to the small press magazine
Ghosts & Scholars and it's successor the G&S Newsletter, devoted to non-fiction articles and fictional stories in the vein of authors like British academic M. R. James and his contemporaries and so on. Indeed, the first three stories are sequels to Jamesian stories - the titular one detailing events a century after
The Ash-Tree, as a village's new vicar is told the story of Mistress Mothersole and how in 1770 the town's new physician and his manservant secretly got up to some sinister experimentation relating to the town legend, "Ex Libris: Lufford", a sequel to
Casting the Runes, where a used bookseller and a customer are unfortunate to come across some former property of the late Julian Karswell, a sinister occultist, and "If You Don’t Come to Me, I’ll Come to You", both a sequel to
A School Story and inspired by one of the fragments James mentioned in an article "Stories I have tried to write", a mysterious toad appears in the study of narrator James, spurring his imagination (or is it just his imagination) to account for what happens near a well featured in said story.
The remaining stories involve Dr. Lawrence, academic who has made a study of folklore and the occult (and featured in some of the stories from
They That Dwell...) and the volume is capped off with three stories "by" a fictional contemporary of authors like James, E.F. Benson and so on, Dr. H.S. Grace.
Quite special to me is the first Dr. Lawrence story "Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling". On learning the terrible news that his younger brother has been killed in battle during "The Great War", Reginald Hinchcliffe pays a visit to ____________ College to seek out the late Jonathan's tutor, Dr. Lawrence, of whom the young man spoke fondly. Reginald learned from Jonathan that the professor has a deep interest in matters folklore and occult - could he be the man to help him in his current plight? Lawrence agrees to accompany Reginald to a local pub, where a group of soldiers are belting out the macabre British airmen's jingle,
The Bells of Hell go Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling, which is disturbingly apt for Hinchcliffe's position.
Until recently, Reginald Hinchcliffe was employed by Rupert Fosdyke, notable business magnate, as procurer for and curator of his private museum. Reginald's work brought him into contact with Madame Lousalle, an impoverished refugee who fled to England with several valuable painting and objects d'art rather than have them fall into the hands of the Germans. Prominent amongst this treasure trove,
The Awakening Clock, the most fantastic time piece Hinchcliffe had ever gazed upon.
"More than a clock! Not merely a wonderfully intricate sculpture in brass, but a work of mechanical artistry. What it depicted was a town in miniature, with twin rows of buildings - here the church, with its spire and its churchyard; there the schoolhouse, with its rooftop bell; in one street the houses, in the other shops and workplaces, a stable and an inn; these dwellings and places of trade were presided over by what I can only describe as a citadel - an edifice of spires and turrets and lofty windows atop a high central hill. And the clock face itself was set into the tallest of these towers, a Cyclopean watcher at the heart of the township."
All it's missing is a wind-up key, and Fosdyke can afford to hire skilled horologist Eric Shorehouse to replicate the missing key. Shorehouse begins to have misgivings, believing the clock to be the work of a legendary German clockmaker...and reputed necromancer...a gutwrencher of a tale, Jamesian, touching on the horrors of the First World War and with elements of Gothic horror in the vein of authors like Mary Shelley and E.T.A. Hoffman.