rbadac (March 13, 2000)['The Rose Garden' - M.R. James]Winter is almost over. Time to start thinking about making improvements to the landscape around the old mansion. How about that dank little clearing just off the shrubbery path ? True, it doesn't get much sun, but if we chop out some of those box-bushes and get rid of all that rotten wood left over from the old summer-house, those old seats and that oak post sticking out of the ground, well...
Mrs Anstruther's reasoning, anyway. Mr Anstruther only wants to go play a little golf, so he'll just have Collins take care of it, and that quite directly if you please, as Mrs A. doesn't hold much for having her wishes disregarded for a moment.
The post will take some doing, though; it's set in the ground firm it is, and will want a fair amount of digging. Will after tea-time be all right ? Don't bother Mrs A., she's talking to Miss Wilkins, you know, Miss Wilkins who used to live here ? She remembers when there was still a summer-house there, and a bit more besides.
If you don't have some equivalent of THE COMPLETE GHOST STORIES OF M.R. JAMES, a writer who has more editions than the Mummy, there is something seriously wrong with you. Now beat it, I've got work to do. There's a huge boulder covered with runes in my wheat field I have to dislodge. It's obstructing Mrs r.'s view of the acacia grove. Then I'll have to go into town and hire new servants. All of the old ones have run away.
rbadaaaaaAAAAAUUUGGGGHHHHHHHHH
oOo
rbadac (April 12, 2000)
['The Residence at Whitminster' - M.R. James]Are you possessed of Insect Fear? I am. Remember *Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom*? That scene where Kate Capshaw has to reach into that niche full of bugs to pull the lever to stop the room from squashing Harrison Ford and the little kid? If that'd been me, the movie would have ended right there. Sorry, Indy. I ain't got my shoulder-length gardening gloves with me, you just gonna have to die.
Being a prebend at the collegiate church at Whitminster entitles one to the titular place to live, and has for these many years, though since Dr Ashton's time back in 1730 they've had a little pest problem. Seems Dr Ashton was given into his care the only son of an Irish peer, a lad named Saul, to look after while his father was away on business in Spain.
Dr Ashton already has a boy himself, Frank, the orphan son of his wife's sister; he and Saul get along like a house on fire, or so it seems. They're playing games together before you know it, but what odd games they are-- acting out old tragedies in the garden that seem to upset little Frank unduly. And Mrs Ashton's black cockerel is missing.
When Frank takes mortally ill, he does not want to see Saul, but only wants to have the others tell Saul that he's 'afraid he will be very cold' when he is gone. The room in which the two boys stayed has a piece of furniture in it, a gaunt old press of dark wood, which is locked. Rustling sounds are associated with the room, and a plague of 'sawflies', reddish things like a daddy-long-legs, but smaller, and properly called the ichneumon fly (*Ophion obscurum*).
Saul had a little crystal tablet in which certain things could be seen by the receptive eye. And certain things are visible accompanying him when he goes out at night, as Mrs Maple relates:
'...in the town not a family but knew how he stopped out at night; and them that was with him, why, such as would strip the skin from the child in its grave; and a withered heart makes an ugly, thin ghost...'
In all the usual places and, in my mind at least, illustrated by Edward Gorey.
http://www.ou.edu/research/electron/oms/uglybug/bug98/index98.shtml
rbadac
oOo
Jim Rockhill (April 12, 2000)
Although many seem to disparage most of James' later stories, this has long been one of my favorites. I like the way these later tales resonate at an almost unconscious level, implying much more than they state.oOo
salamon (April 14, 2000)
Man! God sure created some downright ugly buggers!oOo
["An Evening's Entertainment" - M.R. James]August 1st is M.R. James' birthday, though we hardly need an excuse around here to bring him up. After all this time we're still wondering exactly what is meant by the phrase "rawhead and bloody bones," though we've had the benefit of an additional three generations or so since James asked the question in "An Evening's Entertainment," wherein he also gives us a possible scenario of such a tale's dissemination.
Tales told in dialogue, like this one, are tricky at best, but James was also famous for mimicry among his friends, and often amused them with his renditions of rural characters. This shows in his other stories as well, one or another horrible event often being commented on by the gardener or the charwoman or some other local or hired hand, in tones meant both to amuse and to provide adumbrations of dread in commonplace observation.
In "An Evening's Entertainment" Grandmother tells the Squire's children, Charles and Fanny, a story to explain why they shouldn't go blackberrying in a particular lane near their house. The children are all ears of course, and Grandmother gives them a whopper that could have come right out of E.F. Benson. But blackberries come from the store now, and who tells stories round the hearth these days? We've got television, more's the pity. The exchange described in James' tale would hardly fare in a modern setting. Or would it? Let's take a look in one such modern home, and pretend that Grandmother, Charles, and Fanny are still about in some form, though their precise parameters may be a bit different...
CHARLES: Grandma, Daddy didn't pay the cable bill again, and now it's cut off. I'm gonna miss my Pokemon special.
GRANDMA: Sssshhhh, dear, don't wake your daddy. Look, he's so exhausted from his second job at the convenience store he forgot to take off his bulletproof vest.
FANNY: I wanna watch Disney! Where's the VCR?
GRANDMA: Oh Fanny, Daddy had to pawn it. You know how he gets when he's been drinking spot remover.
CHARLES: This sucks. What are we supposed to do?
FANNY: I hate Daddy!
GRANDMA: Please don't make so much noise, children. How about if I tell you a scary story?
FANNY: It couldn't be any scarier than living here.
CHARLES: Give me a break, Grandma. I've seen stuff that would make you keel over with a coronary. I go to public school.
GRANDMA: Don't be so sure, Mr Smarty Pants. I could tell you the story about Mike McGregor who used to live here before we did. He used to lure little children just like you two into the house, then cut them almost in half to get at their guts, and when he got finished with them he would throw their little bodies over the telephone wires where they would hang like pairs of old shoes until they rotted or the birds made nests of them.
CHARLES: Grandma, you are so full of crap.
DADDY (mumbling): Wha... no, please don't shoot, all I've got is what's in the cash drawer... huh? Oh, hi, kids.
FANNY: Daddy, you're a doo doo head.
GRANDMA: Never mind them, John, just go back to sleep. Now where was I? Oh yes. Now here's a story you'll like. It's about a Mr Davis who used to stay in the cottage that stood at the end of the lane that runs by the Collinses. He was a strange one, he was. Never went out much, and never associated with anyone else in the neighborhood. But he had to eat of course, so he was seen going to the market on occasion. One day he came back from the market with a young man he had met, whom no one around here had ever seen before. Well, the next thing you know, that young man had moved in with Mr Davis, and from then on those two could be seen together constantly, taking walks and such in the evenings in the woods back of here, and out on the downs, and up on the hillside there where the old figure is cut in the turf.
CHARLES: Were they gay?
GRANDMA: Um, I don't know. Maybe. Now it seems my father (your great- grandfather) had cause to speak to this Mr Davis once, and he asked him why he and his young friend liked to go up on the downs so much at night. That young man piped up and allowed that he and Mr Davis were bloody great pagans who were for ripping open the barrows and releasing a horde of evil barbarian spirits upon the world, and some more in that vein, until Mr Davis fetched him upside the head with a big rock and knocked him cold as a flounder. "Don't pay him no mind, sir," he says to my father, "He's just young and incredibly stupid," he says, and I don't know as my old Dad didn't half agree with him on the subject, for he says he thought no more about it at the time. So that's where matters stood, until one morning a woodsman gone to work early thought he saw something like a white shape in the trees beyond where he was. After some consideration he finally went there and found Mr Davis' young man hanging by his neck from the biggest oak in the clearing. He was dressed in a kind of white gown like a surplice, and lying near him was an axe, all sticky and covered with blood and gore and shreds of raw meat, and dangling purple strands of organs, and bits of yellow- looking stuff that might have been fatty tissue, and little pieces of bone sticking up out of it all.
FANNY: Eeeeeuuuuwwwwww.
CHARLES: Cool!
GRANDMA: Yes, it was. Anyway, they fetched some more men to help cut him down, and put his body across a horse to bring it back (the horse didn't like that at all), and they went looking for Mr Davis, for who else was likely to know what it was all about? They found him, all right; when they got to his cottage the horse reared up and kicked the man leading him into the middle of next week, dumped the young man's body onto the ground, and ran like the gelders were after it. There was nothing to do but bring the young man's body into the cottage then, and that's what they did, but when they got inside there was already a body on the table before them. It was Mr Davis', and he was in a fair old mess. He looked as if Red Indians had been trying to make a dugout canoe out of him. Why, Mr White, who was what you might call the hard sort, went out in the garden and tossed his breakfast in the geraniums.After everyone had calmed down a bit, they made up a couple of black boxes in a hurry to put those two in, and they carried them outside of town to the crossroads and pitched 'em in a pit they had dug for that purpose. Some of the men tried to spit in the grave before they covered it up, but their spit wouldn't come all the way out of their mouths, and finally they were led away, all chagrined, and looking like they had the distemper. Later on, my father was passing the lane where he saw a few people standing around looking very distressed. When he asked them what the matter was, they pointed at spots on the road where the blood had sloshed out of Mr Davis and fallen to the ground, and now was covered by nasty black flies. He sent for the sexton with a shovel and a hand-barrow full of dirt to cover them up, but when the sexton threw the first shovelful on, the flies rose up in a solid black cloud and hovered there in the air, and the same at the other places he did. The sexton turned to my father and said, "It's Beelze--" and the flies all surrounded him like he was a marzipan dropped in the dust, til he looked less like a man and more like a dark shrubbery clipped in the shape of one, and they picked him up and carried him off, screaming, much to my father's relief, who never did take to him anyway.
Well, that was the last straw. Father threw his cigar in the thatch roof of the cottage and it went up straightaway in a huge blaze, and everybody made toast. After that, no one ever went round there again, except to steal bricks from the chimney and sell them to the tourists. Once your grandfather and me wandered up there accidentally when we was courting, and I got bit by some awful insect and my arm swelled up the size of my leg and turned all black, and your grandfather tried to get me to join the circus.
FANNY: Did you?
GRANDMA: Don't be impertinent. Your grandfather tried to get me to do a lot of things. Now run off to bed, the both of you.
rbadac
oOo
Randy Money (August 1, 2000)
Eh. It's okay, but I think I've heard it before. Didn't Le Fanu do it better?Randy
oOo
Jim Rockhill (August 1, 2000)
Very amusing if not quite as chilling as the interminable "Bush and Gory Bones" thread that has invaded this site.Jim
oOo
Christopher Roden (August 1, 2000)
M. R. James's birthday is a very suitable time to announce that The Ash- Tree Press M. R. James will be published early next year. It will be the first time that all of MRJ's supernatural writings (stories, fragments, prefaces, translations, etc.) have been available in one edition. Paul Lowe has been commissioned to provide illustrations for each of the stories. Brief details are currently available on the Ash- Tree web site at www.ash-tree.bc.ca/ashtreecurrent.html and more details will be provided as production progresses.CR
ooOoo