Rampton - Chapter 3

John Mitchell sat at the old mahogany desk in his cottage outside Cauld Village, he was working on his latest tale, one very much in the vein of M.R. James, one of his childhood literary influences along with Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker, who he knew had been inspired by Slains Castle, in Cruden Bay, an area he was familiar with from his childhood, his childhood, before he had discovered his psychic gift, when he still got bullied. Monty James was his favourite author and his latest selection of Jamesian tales entitled ‘The Country Chapel Ghost’ had been issued to rave reviews online and his sales on Amazon Kindle and books has rocketted sky high on its first day of issue. His following was a cult one, passed by word of mouth, by blogs, e-mails, on Twitter, by Zoom book clubs, and meetings in coffee shops and bars, his books were not displayed along side the bestsellers in city centre bookstores. People occasionally turned up one  of his books in charity shops, or second hand book fairs.  He had never given interviews as he shunned publicity. ‘Augustus. J. Mitchell’ psychic and author of the strange and weird’ was how he was billed on the website. He had carefully modelled his image of the character of ‘Karswell’ from the ‘70s James adaptation of ‘Casting the Runes’, and he resembled the actor Iain Cuthbertson slightly, tall and  tending towards fat, with his hair receding at the crown and grown long at the back, in what folk back in the ‘80s termed a ‘mullet’. He also  dressed in a similar manner as the film character had., his habitual attire being a long black coat, and a wide brimmed hat, which gave him a sinister, or perhaps clerical image. As someone who had first-hand experience of psychic phenomena with the old lady Catriona, the so -called witch’ all those years ago, he felt he was qualified more than most to write in the supernatural genre.

 He had the side-line in the website ‘Rumours of Rampton’ which dealt with the fabled and mysterious church architect whose story was very much like something from the pages of old Monty James, and his former adversary, Clarke, had really fallen for the story of ‘Kirks O’ The North’, and the fact that there were only four copies in the world. Part of the story was true, there really had been an architect called Augustus Rampton, but as for the ‘Kirks O’ The North’, it was really just a rumour, , an urban myth,  basically a lie, perpetrated by Mitchell, which had fooled a few of his website acolytes and Facebook group members.. This was nothing new, hadn’t H.P.Lovecraft’s ‘Necronomicon’ been a myth as well, he thought so. It  was not the first time he had perpretrated a myth around a fictional author, years before , he had caused a stir among the supernatural tale fanatics when his fictional author 'Adam Maxwell - Farquhar'  raised a lot of interest in the Aberdeen area,  with folk offering ridiculous sums for copies of his books, which of course did not exist outside the world of Mitchell's imagination, Of course, it would no doubt lure Clarke, the collector of ecclesiastic ephemera, 'The Prof' as he was known back in the days of so-called Scouting,  Clarke would soon be here, in Cauld Village, if Mitchell’s plan to lure him here had worked. Then he would make his next move, as on his chessboard. Time would tell as always.