A rustle in the dark

... as you may well imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

--M. R. James, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"

Thus ends one of M. R. James's most famous horror stories, a story about something that comes when one whistles, something that embodies itself in crumpled bed linen. Linen that moves about the room at night.

I re-read James's masterpiece after reading an article about the author's life and work in last week's New Yorker. James was the quiet, studious provost at King's College, Cambridge. He spent his life locating and poring over old manuscripts. But he's best known for writing several volumes of chilling short stories.

James was an interesting character, and his stories may or may not be self-revelatory psychologically. But the stories are the sort that make the hair rise on the back of your neck, despite a total absence of blood, gore, and decapitations. Merely a sheet on a bed that moves about -- once the candle is snuffed out.

The New Yorker article, and my subsequent glancing back through a volume of James's stories, instantly took me back to a summer day when I was 14. It was a hot day, and I had walked over to the house of a vacationing aunt and uncle, where I performed my daily job of moving the sprinklers from place to place about the yard. I had brought a recently-purchased book with me -- Tales of Terror, edited by Boris Karloff. I set up the sprinklers in their initial positions, got them running, and went inside the cool house to relax and amuse myself for a half hour until I'd have to move them again.

The story I began reading was -- as I now discover -- a classic: "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood. A camping story, about a couple of men who are canoeing down the Danube near the Austrian/Hungarian frontier. They pull up to a small sandy island to spend the night, an island forested with willow trees. During a night somewhat reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project, they sense that the willows are malevolent or are at least the expressions of something that's malevolent. At the climax of the story, the body of a peasant floats past their campsite with bizarre funnel shaped gouges in his face, the mark of whatever forces surround them in the willows.

Blackwood's story ends. But before I finished reading, I became conscious that I was sitting and reading all alone in a cool, dark, quiet house -- a small, simple rambler with which I was totally familiar -- and that my heart was pounding. The house was dead silent, except for the slow "tick tock" of a pendulum clock on the mantle. Not only the house was silent, but the entire world, indoors and outdoors, seemed hushed.

I quickly exited the cool house and sat on the back porch in the hot sun. I continued reading. I still had a couple of hours of sprinkling to oversee. But I read outdoors, free of whatever menace my aunt's normally friendly home, now at my back, seemed to offer.

A truly well written ghost story, or "tale of terror," doesn't jump at you or spatter you with gore. It merely suggests that all is not as you think it is, that worlds exist far beyond our powers of perception, and that those worlds may well be hostile and menacing. A world, as "The Willows" suggests, which is

a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly, [a world where] great things go on unceasingly...vast purposes...that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul, ... an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.

For some reason, I felt safe sitting outside, where the sun beat down on me, the breeze blew in the trees, and the sprinklers spurted rhythmically. I hadn't yet read anything by M. R. James. His stories would have warned me that the greatest horrors can present themselves in the most pleasant, mundane and unassuming of locations.

The ability to be scared out of your wits by a good yarn is part of the charm of being 14. It's surprising (and a bit alarming) how a good enough story can make your hair stand on end, even as an adult.

I can't find my old childhood copy of Tales of Terror. I've just now ordered a used copy through Amazon. Parts of us never grow up.