Count Magnus

Count Magnus de la Gardie belongs to the dusty aristocracy of a small Swedish town, remembered chiefly through a black-letter biography and the locked mausoleum where his remains rest under a lid no one dares lift. The book's early pages hint at a life of sinister wanderings — a 'Liber nigræ peregrinationis' kept in his own hand — and at a countryside belief, older than memory, that something about him was never quite right. His tomb and his reputation form the quiet dare that draws the traveller onward, making him the still centre around which the story's dread slowly coils.