Short Fiction M. R. James (good book recommendations TXT) 📖

dreadful look on his face that I really thought he must be ill or even dead. I rushed at him and shook him, and told him to wake up; and wake up he did, with a scream. I assure you the poor boy seemed almost beside himself with fright. He hurried me away to the house, and was in a terrible state all that night, hardly sleeping. Someone had to sit up with him, as far as I remember. He was better very soon, but for days I couldn’t get him to say why he had been in such a condition. It came out at last that he had really been asleep and had had a very odd disjointed sort of dream. He never saw much of what was around him, but he felt the scenes most vividly. First he made out that he was standing in a large room with a number of people in it, and that someone was opposite to him who was ‘very powerful,’ and he was being asked questions which he felt to be very important, and, whenever he answered them, someone⁠—either the person opposite to him, or someone else in the room⁠—seemed to be, as he said, making something up against him. All the voices sounded to him very distant, but he remembered bits of the things that were said: ‘Where were you on the 19th of October?’ and ‘Is this your handwriting?’ and so on. I can see now, of course, that he was dreaming of some trial: but we were never allowed to see the papers, and it was odd that a boy of eight should have such a vivid idea of what went on in a court. All the time he felt, he said, the most intense anxiety and oppression and hopelessness (though I don’t suppose he used such words as that to me). Then, after that, there was an interval in which he remembered being dreadfully restless and miserable, and then there came another sort of picture, when he was aware that he had come out of doors on a dark raw morning with a little snow about. It was in a street, or at any rate among houses, and he felt that there were numbers and numbers of people there too, and that he was taken up some creaking wooden steps and stood on a sort of platform, but the only thing he could actually see was a small fire burning somewhere near him. Someone who had been holding his arm left hold of it and went towards this fire, and then he said the fright he was in was worse than at any other part of his dream, and if I had not wakened him up he didn’t know what would have become of him. A curious dream for a child to have, wasn’t it? Well, so much for that. It must have been later in the year that Frank and I were here, and I was sitting in the arbour just about sunset. I noticed the sun was going down, and told Frank to run in and see if tea was ready while I finished a chapter in the book I was reading. Frank was away longer than I expected, and the light was going so fast that I had to bend over my book to make it out. All at once I became conscious that someone was whispering to me inside the arbour. The only words I could distinguish, or thought I could, were something like ‘Pull, pull. I’ll push, you pull.’

“I started up in something of a fright. The voice⁠—it was little more than a whisper⁠—sounded so hoarse and angry, and yet as if it came from a long, long way off⁠—just as it had done in Frank’s dream. But, though I was startled, I had enough courage to look round and try to make out where the sound came from. And⁠—this sounds very foolish, I know, but still it is the fact⁠—I made sure that it was strongest when I put my ear to an old post which was part of the end of the seat. I was so certain of this that I remember making some marks on the post⁠—as deep as I could with the scissors out of my workbasket. I don’t know why. I wonder, by the way, whether that isn’t the very post itself.⁠ ⁠… Well, yes, it might be: there are marks and scratches on it⁠—but one can’t be sure. Anyhow, it was just like that post you have there. My father got to know that both of us had had a fright in the arbour, and he went down there himself one evening after dinner, and the arbour was pulled down at very short notice. I recollect hearing my father talking about it to an old man who used to do odd jobs in the place, and the old man saying, ‘Don’t you fear for that, sir: he’s fast enough in there without no one don’t take and let him out.’ But when I asked who it was, I could get no satisfactory answer. Possibly my father or mother might have told me more about it when I grew up, but, as you know, they both died when we were still quite children. I must say it has always seemed very odd to me, and I’ve often asked the older people in the village whether they knew of anything strange: but either they knew nothing or they wouldn’t tell me. Dear, dear, how I have been boring you with my childish remembrances! but indeed that arbour did absorb our thoughts quite remarkably for a time. You can fancy, can’t you, the kind of stories that we made up for ourselves. Well, dear Mrs. Anstruther, I must be leaving you now. We shall meet in town this winter, I hope, shan’t we?” etc., etc.

The seats and the post were cleared away and uprooted respectively by that evening. Late summer weather