✥ For the fourth year in a row, THE LAMP is sponsoring a Christmas ghost story competition in the spirit of Dickens and M. R. James. When we say “in the spirit of,” we do not have in mind wan pseudo-Edwardian pastiches of James and others; we mean stories that “succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours,” stories with contemporary or near-contemporary settings that achieve effects similar to those sought by the genre’s masters.

The winner of this year’s competition will receive one thousand dollars, and his or her story will appear in the Christmas number of the magazine. At least two runners-up will receive three hundred dollars each and have their stories published online during Christmastide.

The rules are as follows:

The contest is open to all writers aged eighteen and older. With the exception of THE LAMP’s editor, any judges involved will not be aware of the identities of the authors before assessing their work; they will examine entries “blind,” without regard for previous publications, background, etc.

The prize is for stories no longer than ten thousand words. There is no minimum length.

Stories, while obviously intended to be frightening, must not contain obscene or indecent material.

Stories must involve the supernatural, however sensitively portrayed or faintly suggested.

Stories must be written in English.

Stories must be original, which is to say, they must not have been published previously, either in print or in any public online forum.

“Simultaneous submissions” are not permitted.

Only one story per entrant is allowed.

Entries may be submitted by email to boo@thelampmagazine.com (.doc, .docx, or .rtf only: .pdf attachments will not be read). Biographical information limited to a single sentence should be contained in a separate document.

Entries should be formatted in Times New Roman with single line spacing. Do not include tab stops, indents, headers, footers, page numbers, or illustrations original or otherwise. A title will suffice. Epigraphs are also permitted.

Submissions must be sent by midnight Eastern Time on October 31, 2024, in order to be eligible.

Both the winner and at least two runners-up will be notified at a date to be announced later. No other editorial correspondence related to the contest will take place. The decision of the judges is final.

✥ In the last town in which I lived, I stumbled into a thrice-weekly game of noon basketball, populated by a hodgepodge of college students, faculty members, and townies who would descend on the college gym during their lunch breaks. Such a mixture meant that players’ ages ranged from eighteen to sixty. Rather than adopt the usual pickup method and try to blend ages, though, our game instead opted for a strict young versus old divide.

You might think that such a division would lead to lopsided results, with the younger players running the old folks out of the gym. But seasoned players of pickup basketball will know better: there’s a curious magic, even a Bismarckian special providence, in the “old man” method. As much as basketball rewards feats of stunning physical prowess, it also makes space for delay, trickery, and a working of the angles, features readily exploited by the wily senex on the court.

The current consensus best basketball player in the world, Nikola Jokić, plays like a suburban dad from Davenport. Not that he’s not athletic—he’s nearly seven feet tall, and his doughy appearance, like a slightly underbaked gibanica, belies a surprising stamina and toughness—but his dominance relies not on soaring through the air, or on beating opponents to the basket with his quickness, but on his preternatural ability to process the game.

His touch allows him to hit “driveway” shots with frequency—those one-footed launched prayers that dads so often hit over the outstretched hands of their frustrated sons. But his primary weapon is his brain. Several times a game, he will find a teammate with a pass so ridiculous, so unexpected, that it takes your breath away, because he’s clearly thought five steps ahead of everyone else on the court. It’s not uncommon for him to catch the ball and pass it again all in one motion. This ability to read and react, to understand the geometry of the court at all times, is the apotheosis of dad ball.

Jokić has singular processing ability, of course; pickup dads like me can recognize and admire, but never achieve, his greatness. Other facets of old man basketball filter down pretty well from the professional level to the blacktop, however. Take Chris Paul, consummate old man baller, who played like a fifty-year-old even when he entered the league.

Like Jokić, Paul manipulates the game at a high level, but he also has a skill more easily imitated by casual players: he’s irritating as heck. He gets under other players’ skin, from his pesky, physical defense (there’s nothing young pickup players hate more than guys who actually play defense) to his constant chirping at opponents and referees. Plenty of players complain to referees, of course, but Paul actually gets results, thanks to his pedantry with regard to the N.B.A. rulebook: he once got an opposing player called for a technical foul for having his shirt untucked.

Though norms vary from court to court, most pickup games run on a laissez-faire foul philosophy: offensive players determine whether they’ve been fouled, but the code dictates that you refrain from calling out the defense unless you’re close to bleeding. Secondary concerns like traveling and double-dribbling fall by the wayside—except if you’re playing with a cranky older player, who’s liable to watch eagle-eyed for any slip-ups as you handle the ball. I once played with a fifty-year-old who delighted in watching young guys blow by him to the rim, only to waive the layup off, pointing fervently to the place where they had taken an extra step.

Conversely, the sly veteran won’t hesitate to push at the edges of legality when defending, pulling shirts and slapping backs to gain that smallest of edges against younger bodies who might otherwise leave him in the dust. No self-respecting young man will call such ticky-tacky fouls, so the old artificer remains free to press his advantage: rim protection by a thousand paper cuts.

I have yet to find a geriatric game in my new environs, so these days I play almost exclusively against college students. They treat me with unfailing kindness, calling me “sir” and complimenting my hustle and defense, even though I must seem as old to them as Tennyson’s Ulysses. Still I press on, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will: to school some whippersnappers in the labyrinthine arts of old man ball.

—Asher Gelzer-Govatos

✥ A specimen from the British Critic magazine of October 1836:

We must still more briefly mention those enormous ancient terrestrial saurians, the megalosaurus and iguanodon; the former genus, established by the discoveries of Dr. Buckland himself at Stonesfield in the colite, has been since also found by Mr. Mantell in the freshwater deposits of the Weald of Kent and Sussex, which intervene between the oolite and subcretaceous sand. The megalosaurus, as its name imports, must have been an enormous reptile, measuring from 40 to 50 feet in length, and partaking of the structure of the crocodile and monitor. It was carnivorous, and is especially admired as a most efficient member of his animal police by Dr. Buckland, because its teeth were calculated to put its victims very speedily out of their pain.

The iguanodon is a discovery of Mr. Mantell, in the Wealden formation, before noticed. It is even larger than the megalosaurus, and must have had more than a giant’s strength, but was not, like all the former saurians, “tyrannous enough to use it as a giant.” If any of our readers should have been sentimental enough to feel shocked at the sanguinary character of our very efficient police, as hitherto described, they will be relieved to find that our new monster is, in truth, “a very delicate monster,” an innocent herbivorous reptile. Its teeth, almost identical with those of the recent iguana, (whence its name), completely prove this—an identity very remarkable, when we consider the diminutive size of the modern animal, scarcely exceeding five feet, as contrasted with the fossil analogue, at least twelve times that size. How might a saurian “laudator temporis acti” mourn over the degeneracy of iguanas, as iguanas are now! The fossil, like the recent iguana, appears to have combined with these teeth, a nasal horn, and the concurrence of these remarkable peculiarities, in both types, affords a good example of Cuvier’s laws of co-existence.

The Hylæosaurus, (or, Lizard of the Forest or Weald,) a creature about twenty-five feet long, was found in the same locality. The most remarkable peculiarity consists in a series of long flat pointed bones, which seems to have formed a dermal fringe, like the horny spines on the back of the modern iguana.

✥ When I was five, I memorized the presidents front-to-back for twenty bucks. I can still regurgitate the list before grinding to a halt at the presidents elected since: “Obama—Trump—Biden.” I found it harder to remember as I grew up, even as remembering important parts of the “Great Books” felt extremely urgent. Maria Montessori’s Absorbent Mind documents this difference well: the child’s mind is a sponge, but the adult’s has long since been saturated. Annie Dillard gave me almost existential angst about this difficulty with remembering: “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” Not a great R.O.I. for a liberal arts education.

So I wrote. I kept a list of books I’d read, a “commonplace” journal, rules for writing, blurbs of books that metastasized into full-length reviews, poetry memorized and to memorize, and more I’m embarrassed to share. I eventually learned (read: recollected) the law of diminishing returns and scaled back, picking just a few things to write down to remember. Yet writing to remember at all is dangerous, as we’ve known since Plato’s Phaedrus. Writing may fill my safe with more than ashes, but that which is written will never get into my bones as that list of presidents did. I only remember phone numbers from before I had a contact list.

I’ve thus also tried to remember by purposely not writing “important” things down and instead fixing them in my memory. Yet my memory refuses to function as one from a pre-literate Homeric age. It’s ruthless and utilitarian; it cannot be tricked about what’s important. It keeps what I need ready-to-hand and stuffs the rest away in dusty drawers whose contents I know not.

Strangely, though, my subconscious seems to know those contents well. Two weeks ago, I found myself struggling to remember some pointless fact—the name of a French heiress. I gave up after twenty minutes, but it later popped into my awareness: “Bettencourt.” My mind had been sifting through its own drawers without my knowledge, perhaps just waiting to see whether I would google the damn thing.

There’s an important difference between this kind of forgotten item—something you can remember, given time or a prompt (e.g., bilingual people can “pick up” a “forgotten” language very quickly)—and those parts of the mind that never reveal themselves. Montessori’s book suggests this second category. In the womb, the child forms her physical organs. But her “spiritual embryo” begins at birth when she forms psychic organs like perception, language, and conscious memory by interacting with the environment.

I doubt my two-year-old daughter will remember much from forming these psychic organs. She won’t remember my chasing her and playing “chag” or “hi-seek.” But I hope these unremembered joys will form her nonetheless into someone who loves her dad, fun, and mischief. Saint Ignatius suggests they might: “Give me the child for his first seven years, and I will give you the man.” It’s bewildering that we could forget such essential foundations of who we become—who remembers much from early childhood? But it’s compelling, too.

When I think about great books I read in college—The Intellectual Life, After Virtue, and Beyond Good and Evil—so little remains. I remember not structure, propositions, or theses, but pathetic snippets like “spend two hours a day in the intellectual life,” “emotivism,” and “aphorisms.” You may think I didn’t read them closely. I thought so too until I checked the marginalia. What did I take away from my purported deep engagement with these texts through long hours of study, discussion, and lectures? No matter how hard I search—and even after giving my subconscious time to look—I find little more than these snippets. More would return if I reread these books or deciphered my marginalia. But life is short, and there’s more to learn.

I think I carry with me another kind of knowledge—something like the sum total of all habits of mind and character that lead me to encounter the world in particular ways. Such intangibles are often denigrated as “soft skills.” These things cannot be googled or stowed for later reference. They are themselves the scaffolding of the mind, invisible underneath other drawers and papers but supporting them all. They are the most important parts of what I’ve learned: the unseen, the forgotten. Or so I tell myself as I forget almost all that I learn—except the last names of the first forty-three presidents.

—Gill West

✥ The relics of the saints have a kind of long-sightedness: they have a way of hanging on in times of difficulty and a way of resurfacing when they are required again. There are, unfortunately, horror stories of the mistreatment or disposal of relics in the last century, but here is one of triumph, the kind of humble, unassuming victory of the saints, worked out in centuries of grace-filled struggle.

The Long Parliament of 1640–1660 afforded the clandestine Catholic clergy of England an unexpected breath of fresh air, more than it had known in recent memory. The previous century saw Edmund Campion brought to the scaffold and the fortunes of noble Catholic families drained from heavy fines. Even a generation earlier, hysteria from the Gunpowder Plot forced the knot tighter on England’s Catholics. Hurried trials made honest Protestant juries blush. Every family was required by law to attend and commune at the Protestant service. England had no bishops. Priests made do, saying Mass and hearing confessions. Simply being a priest was an act of high treason, and harboring or aiding clergy was also a criminal offense.

Now the political tensions provoked by the reign of Charles I saw a nation in civil war, and the public opinion of Catholics waned. Charles married a Catholic and was rumored to be sympathetic to the Roman Church. Parliament pressed harder for mandatory oaths that would exclude Catholics from political offices, impose restrictions on travel, and keep Catholics from owning a horse valued above £5—all while Charles secretly sought French aid against his own opposing ministers. The yet-nascent Established Church had spent much time fighting against an increasing Puritan minority with even more force.

Men entering at Douay (the English seminary established in France to educate priests to send back to England) knew that they were being prepared for a lonely and very often fraught ministry whose only real reprieve would be martyrdom. One such man was John Southworth, a Lancashireman who had been instructed in the Faith at home in secret. Southworth, being from the north, a kind of heartland of recusancy, would have felt very keenly the greater restrictions on Catholics, and valued the faith of the Apostles more than anything. He resolved to enter Douay and left home for France at age twenty-one. After at least one return to England because of poor health, he was ordained a priest six years later and sent back to England. Southworth operated in London for a time and later in his native Lancashire. There is record of his being arrested and imprisoned, narrowly escaping a death sentence at the insistence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who arranged for him and others to be deported to France.

Southworth made little of this upset and returned to his work in England. He was arrested another four times. On three occasions his release was negotiated by the Secretary of State, Francis Windebank, at the Queen’s direction. At his fourth arrest, he managed his own escape. His mission was to attend to souls, and this he did wherever he found himself. When there was an outbreak of plague in London, he visited those who had lapsed from the Faith out of fear of the new regime or out of convenience. He was by all accounts a likable and agreeable man. It was during this time that he earned the sobriquet “Parish Priest of Westminster.”

By the end of 1640, King Charles had lost the governance of the country in all but name. Sympathy with the rising Puritan faction had grown immensely. The king’s regicide and the seizure of power by Oliver Cromwell in 1649 put Catholics definitively on the losing side of the Civil War. Parliament directed the expulsion of all recusant families, but these directives could hardly occupy the attention of anyone with executive authority. The country was everywhere divided. England did not yet have a standing army, Parliament found it difficult to enforce its laws, and the legitimacy of the Established Church was questioned because of popish trappings and monarchical support while Cromwell’s officers lived in domineering, if irreproachable, austerity. Nevertheless, house priests enjoyed relative freedom to continue their work for souls, if they kept out of sight. Southworth continued his work but was caught while lodging in Westminster. He was found with “all the requisites for the celebration of Mass” and was taken prisoner. The arresting officer was one of Cromwell’s more zealous followers, which led to harsh treatment and an unusually swift indictment.

Despite these unfavorable conditions, Southworth’s good nature won the pity of his judges. He openly confessed that he was a priest, but the judge cut him off, and his testimony was delayed. The judges wanted Southworth to plead not guilty, since there was no proof of his crime. He had been found near the Mass kit but had not been caught administering the Sacraments. This suggestion, it seems, was even made in court while the magistrate implored him to deny his charges. Southworth was unmoved, and the magistrate was “so drowned in tears” that he could barely pass the sentence.

John Southworth was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn, beheaded, and quartered on June 28, 1654. The other men executed with him were charged with forging currency. Southworth was the last to face the executioner, and, after a brief address to the crowd there gathered, he prayed in silence and went to his reward. The English College at Douay sang the Te Deum and held a Mass of thanksgiving when they received the news. An onlooking royalist found his vocation and entered the Society of Jesus in Rome the same year.

The sentence prescribed placing the four quarters of the body at the four corners of London, but the Spanish Ambassador, Alonso de Cárdenas, bribed the jailer with forty shillings and took the body to be embalmed. (A bone was removed from the spine to be kept as a relic by the English clergy.) The body was kept by the ambassador until the body could be safely returned to France in 1655. Bishop Richard Challoner records in 1741 that the body was interred at Douay in the church near Saint Augustine’s altar. The faithful gathered there to pray and venerate the body of the martyr, and the miraculous healing of a boy was recorded. A fever deemed incurable subsided after the family laid his head upon the cushion that supported Southworth’s head.

A few decades later, the 1790s brought destruction and irreligion in France. The English clergy who had found refuge and acceptance at Douay were now viewed with double suspicion. King Louis XVI was killed on January 21, 1793, and war was declared on England. The Catholics of France had sided with the king, and the non-juror clergy were seen as enemies of the State. Fearing imprisonment, the residents of the College buried church plate and relics, carefully hidden and noted. Fr. Thomas Stout, one of the priests involved in the burial, made a rough diagram, noting that Southworth was buried exactly six feet deep. Soon after, their suspicions were confirmed, and the clergy were taken prisoners by the National Guard. They were held in captivity in France until their return was negotiated to Dover in 1795. The fathers of Douay earnestly desired to return to their home of more than two hundred years, but the circumstances of neither country made this a ready possibility.

Meanwhile, England’s Catholic hierarchy was not restored until 1850. Immigration from Ireland and an increasingly Catholicizing wing of the Church of England gradually pushed the trappings of the Roman Church further into the public eye, though the movement in Oxford did little for the Catholic cause. Slowly the new hierarchy began to take stock of what could be done. Cardinal Manning acquired land for a cathedral in the City of Westminster, where the first Catholic cathedral since the English Reformation would be built. Not long after, permissions were acquired to make a search of the grounds at Douay and to try to recover what had been buried there. The buildings of the College at Douay had been made into barracks, and their layout significantly altered, so that when Msgr. George Mary Searle, the search party’s leader, arrived, the sketch the party had to follow made very little sense. Some of the church plate was found, but no Southworth. It was thought that after some seventy-five years, the coffin and its contents were likely to have disintegrated. The diocese of Westminster continued its recovery of hidden church furnishings that had survived the Reformation, but her martyred parish priest lay yet hidden in France.

In 1923, plans were made for the demolition of the barracks. In 1927, workmen were digging a cellar for a new building erected there and uncovered a lead coffin. The coffin was conveyed to a morgue for inspection, and thereafter to the Institut Médico-Légal in Lille for detailed research of the remains. The investigation found a body whose form had been mostly preserved, though some water had entered through a hole in the coffin, presumably made by Msgr. Searle’s spade. The earlier party had been so close to finding Southworth. The physical description of the man fit that of Southworth, and x-rays of the body confirmed Southworth’s identity by his sentence: beheading and quartering. After the body was recovered, the precise location could be again compared to Fr. Stout’s sketch made in the eighteenth century. The location of the body corresponded exactly to the sketch.

On May 1, 1930, Westminster’s parish priest was brought in triumphant procession to the Roman Catholic cathedral. His return brought with it the whole weight of the restoration of England’s hierarchy, and it was a turning point for the English faithful. The papal legate, wreathed in incense, led what one described as “one mile of watered silk”: religious from throughout the entire country turned up to greet their saint, flanked by a multitude of faithful carrying candles, banners, and singing hymns. Girls wearing their Easter best strew flowers in front of the ornate feretory, which bore Southworth’s restored relics; he was robed in his priestly vestments and Canterbury cap behind the crystal. He now keeps watch over the English Church from her capital. Every year when the chosen men of Westminster lie on the pavement of the cathedral to become Christ’s anointed, Saint John’s feretory is moved to the main aisle to lie next to them as they hear his name sung in the Litany.

—Sean Pilcher