Count Magnus E-Book

M.R. James

• Herausgeber: SAMPI Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 26

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Traveller Mr. Wraxall researches a Swedish manor's archives and becomes fascinated by its ferocious ancestor, Count Magnus de la Gardie. In the church mausoleum, Wraxall discovers the Count's "Black Pilgrimage" to Chorazin and inadvertently unseals the Count's copper sarcophagus. Soon, two shapes—one tall in a broad hat, one short and hooded with an inhuman limb—shadow him across Europe. Fleeing to England proves futile: the pursuers arrive, and Wraxall meets a nameless, harrowing end.

Leseprobe

Count Magnus

M. R. James

SYNOPSIS

Traveller Mr. Wraxall researches a Swedish manor’s archives and becomes fascinated by its ferocious ancestor, Count Magnus de la Gardie. In the church mausoleum, Wraxall discovers the Count’s “Black Pilgrimage” to Chorazin and inadvertently unseals the Count’s copper sarcophagus. Soon, two shapes—one tall in a broad hat, one short and hooded with an inhuman limb—shadow him across Europe. Fleeing to England proves futile: the pursuers arrive, and Wraxall meets a nameless, harrowing end.

Keywords

Mausoleum, Pursuit, Black Pilgrimage

NOTICE

This text is a work in the public domain and reflects the norms, values and perspectives of its time. Some readers may find parts of this content offensive or disturbing, given the evolution in social norms and in our collective understanding of issues of equality, human rights and mutual respect. We ask readers to approach this material with an understanding of the historical era in which it was written, recognizing that it may contain language, ideas or descriptions that are incompatible with today's ethical and moral standards.

Names from foreign languages will be preserved in their original form, with no translation.

COUNT MAGNUS

By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a statement of the form in which I possess them.

They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book of travels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties and fifties. Horace Marryat’s Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the Danish Isles is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These books usually treated of some unknown district on the Continent. They were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of hotel accommodation, and of means of communication, such as we now expect to find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely in reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers, and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.

Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers as they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personal experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve, almost, of its termination.

The writer was Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to depend entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is probable that he entertained the idea of settling down at some future time which never came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon fire in the early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would have thrown light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to property of his that was warehoused at that establishment.