Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (62 page)

Then came a new feature. From both sides there darted into the heart of the ball two squadrons of figures flying at great speed (though without wings) and perfectly horizontal, with arms joined and straight out in front of them, and almost at the same instant seven or eight more plunged into the ball from above, as if taking headers. The boys were out.

I stopped squirting, for I did not know whether the water would fell them as it felled the bats; but a shrill cry rose from below:

“Go on, M! Go on, M!”

So I aimed again, and it was time, for a knot of bats just then detached itself from the main body and flew full-face toward me. My shot caught the middle one on the snout, and as I swung the squirt to left and right, it disabled four or five others, and discouraged the rest.

Meanwhile the ball was cloven again and again by the arms of the flying squadrons, which shot through it from side to side and from top to bottom (though never, as appeared later, quite through the middle), and though it
kept closing up again, it was plainly growing smaller as more and more of the bats outside, which were exposed to the squirt, dropped away.

I suddenly felt something alight on my shoulder, and a voice said in my ear, “Wag says if you
could
throw a shoe into the middle now, he believes it would finish them. Can you?” It was, I think, Dart who had been sent with the message.

“Horseshoes, I suppose he means,” I said. “I’ll try.”

“Wait till we’re out of the way,” said Dart, and was off.

In a moment more I heard—not what I was rather expecting, a horn of Elf-land, but two strokes on the bell. I saw the figures of the boys shoot up and away to left and right, leaving the bat-ball clear, and the bats shrieked aloud, I dare say in triumph at the enemy’s retreat.

There were two horseshoes left. I had no idea how they would fly, and I had not much confidence in my power of aiming; but it must be tried, and I threw them edgeways, like quoits. The first skimmed the top of the ball, the second went straight through the middle.

Something which the bats in the very center were holding—something soft—was pierced by it, and burst. I think it must have been a globe of jelly-like stuff in a thin skin. The contents spurted out on to some of the bats, and seemed to scald the fur off them in an instant and singe up all the membranes of their wings. They fell down at once, with broken screams. The rest darted off in every direction, and the ball was gone.

“Now don’t be long,” said a voice from the window-sill.

I thought I knew what was meant, and looked to the leaden casket.

As if to make up for lost time, the moonbeam had already made an opening all around the part on which it shone, and I had but to turn the other side toward it—not even very slowly—to get the whole lid free.

After cleansing my hands in the water, I made trial of the Fifth Jar, and, as I replaced it, a chorus of applause and cheering came up from below.

The Jars were mine.

There was no scrambling up to the window-sill this time. My visitors shot in like so many arrows, and “brought up” on their hands on the tablecloth,
or lit on their feet on the top rail of a chair-back or on my shoulder, as the fancy took them.

It would be tedious to go through all the congratulations and thanks which I offered, and indeed received, for it was important to them that the Jars should not get into wrong hands.

“Father says,” said Wag, who was sitting on a book, as usual—“Oh, what fun it is to be able to fly again!” And he darted straight and level and butted head first into the back of—Sprat, was it?—who was standing near the edge of the table. Sprat was merely propelled into the air a foot or two off, and remained standing, but, of course, turned around and told Wag what he thought of him.

Wag returned contentedly to his book. “Father says,” he resumed, “he hopes you’ll come see us now. He says you did all right, and he’s very glad the stuff got spilled, because they’ll take moons and moons to get as much of it together again. He says they meant to squirt some of it on you when they got near enough, and while you were trying to get it off they’d have got hold of—” He pointed to the box of jars; there was a shyness about mentioning it.

“Your father’s very kind,” I said, “and I hope you’ll thank him from me; but I don’t quite see how I’m to get into your house.”

“Fancy you not knowing that!” said Wag. “I’ll tell him you’ll come.” And he was out of the window. As usual, I had recourse to Slim.

“Why, you did put some on your chest, didn’t you?” was Slim’s question.

“Yes, but nothing came of it.”

“Well, I believe you can go pretty well anywhere with that, if you think you can.”

“Can I fly, then?”

“No, I should say not. I mean, if you couldn’t fly before, you can’t now.”

“How do you fly? I don’t see any wings.”

“No, we never have wings, and I’m rather glad we don’t; the things that have them are always going wrong somehow. We just work it in the proper way with our backs, and there you are; like this.” He made a slight movement of his shoulders, and was standing in the air an inch off the table. “You never tried that, I suppose?” he went on.

“No,” I said, “only in dreams,” which evidently meant nothing to him.

“Well now,” I said, “do you tell me that if I went to Wag’s house now, I could get inside it? Look at the size I am!”

“It doesn’t look as if you could,” he agreed, “but my father said just the same as Wag’s father about it.”

Here Wag shot on to my shoulder. “Are you coming?”

“Yes, if I knew how.”

“Well, Come try, anyhow.”

“Very well, as you please; anything to oblige.”

I picked up a hat and went downstairs. All the rest followed, if you can call it following, when there was at least as much flying up steps and in and out of banisters as going down. When we were out on the path, Wag said with more seriousness than usual:

“Now you do mean to come into our house, don’t you?”

“Certainly I do, if you wish me to.”

“Then that’s all right. This way. There’s Father.”

We were on the grass now, and very long it was, and nice and wet I thought I should be with all the dew. As I looked up to see the elder Wag I very nearly fell over a large log which it was very careless of anyone to have left about.

But here was Mr. Wag within a yard of me, and to my extreme surprise he was quite a sizeable man of middle height, with a sensible, good-humored face, in which I could see a strong likeness to his son.

We both bowed, and then shook hands, and Mr. Wag was very complimentary and pleasant about the occurrences of the evening.

“We’ve pretty well got the mess cleared up, you see. Yes, don’t be alarmed,” he went on, and took hold of my elbow, for he had, no doubt, seen a bewildered look in my eyes.

The fact was, as I suppose you have made out, not that he had grown to my size, but that I had come down to his. “Things right themselves; you’ll have no difficulty about getting back when the time comes. But come in, won’t you?”

You will expect me to describe the house and the furniture. I shall not, further than to say that it seemed to me to be of a piece with the fashion in which the boys were dressed; that is, it was like my idea of a good citizen’s house in Queen Elizabeth’s time; and I shall not describe Mrs. Wag’s costume. She did not wear a ruff, anyhow.

Wag, who had been darting about in the air while we walked to his home, followed us in on foot. He now reached up to my shoulder. Slim, who came in too, was shorter.

“Haven’t you got any sisters?” I took occasion to say to Wag.

“Of course,” said he. “Don’t you see ’em? Oh! I forgot. Come out, you sillies!”

Upon which there came forward three nice little girls, each of whom was putting away something into a kind of locket which she wore around her neck.

No, it is no use asking me what
their
dresses were like; none at all. All I know is that they curtsied to me very nicely, and that when we all sat down the youngest came and put herself on my knee as if it was a matter of course.

“Why didn’t I see you before?” I asked her.

“I suppose because the flowers were in our hair.”

“Show him what you mean, my dear,” said her father. “He doesn’t know our ways yet.”

Accordingly she opened her locket and took out of it a small blue flower, looking as if it was made of enamel, and stuck it in her hair over her forehead. As she did so she vanished, but I could still feel the weight of her on my knee. When she took it out again (as no doubt she did) she became visible, put it back in the locket, and smiled agreeably at me.

Naturally, I had a good many questions to ask about this, but you will hardly expect me to put them all down. Becoming invisible in this way was a privilege which the girls always had till they were grown up, and I suppose I may say “came out.”

Of course, if they presumed on it, the lockets were taken away for the time being—just in the same way as the boys were sometimes stopped from flying, as we have seen. But their own families could always see them, or at any rate the flowers in their hair, and they could always see each other.

But dear me! How much am I to tell of the conversation of that evening? One part at least: I remembered to ask about the pictures of the things that had happened in former times in places where I chanced to be. Was I obliged to see them, whether they were pleasant or horrible?

“Oh no,” they said. If you shut your eyes from below—that meant pushing
up the lower eyelids—you would be rid of them; and you would only begin seeing them, either if you wanted to, or else if you left your mind quite blank, and were thinking of nothing in particular. Then they would begin to come, and there was no knowing how old they might be; that depended on how angry or excited or happy or sad the people had been to whom they happened.

And that reminds me of another thing. Wag had gotten rather fidgety while we were talking, and was flying up to the ceiling and down again, and walking on his hands, and so forth, when his mother said:

“Dear, do be quiet. Why don’t you take a glass and amuse yourself with it? Here’s the key of the cupboard.”

She threw it to him and he caught it and ran to a tall bureau opposite and unlocked it. After humming and flitting about in front of it for a little time, he pulled a thing like a slate off a shelf where there were a large number of them.

“What have you got?” said his mother.

“The one I didn’t get to the end of yesterday, about the dragon.”

“Oh, that’s a very good one,” said she. “I used to be very fond of that.”

“I liked it awfully as far as I got,” he said, and was betaking himself to a settle on the other side of the room when I asked if I might see it, and he brought it to me.

It was just like a small looking-glass in a frame, and the frame had one or two buttons or little knobs on it. Wag put it into my hand and then got behind me and put his chin on my shoulder.

“That’s where I’d got to,” he said. “He’s just going out through the forest.”

I thought at the first glance that I was looking at a very good copy of a picture. It was a knight on horseback, in plate-armor, and the armor looked as if it had really seen service. The horse was a massive white beast, rather of the cart-horse type, but not so “hairy in the hoof.” The background was a wood, chiefly of oak-trees; but the undergrowth was wonderfully painted. I felt that if I looked into it I should see every blade of grass and every bramble-leaf.

“Ready?” said Wag, and reached over and moved one of the knobs. The knight shook his rein, and the horse began to move at a foot-pace.

“Well, but he can’t
hear
anything, Wag,” said his father.

“I thought you wanted to be quiet,” said Wag, “but we’ll have it aloud if you like.”

He slid aside another knob, and I began to hear the tread of the horse and the creaking of the saddle and the chink of the armor, as well as a rising breeze which now came sighing through the wood. Like a cinema, you will say, of course. Well, it was; but there was color and sound, and you could hold it in your hand, and it wasn’t a photograph, but the live thing which you could stop at pleasure, and look into every detail of it.

Well, I went on reading, as you may say, this glass. In a theater, you know, if you saw a knight riding through a forest, the effect would be managed by making the scenery slide backward past him; and in a cinema it could all be shortened up by increasing the pace or leaving out part of the film. Here it was not like that; we seemed to be keeping pace and going along with the knight.

Presently he began to sing. He had a loud voice and uttered his words crisply, so that I had no difficulty in making out the song. It was about a lady who was very proud and haughty to him and would have nothing to say to his suit, and it declared that the only thing left for him was to lay himself down under a tree. But he seemed quite cheerful about it, and indeed neither his complexion nor the glance of his eye gave any sign that he was suffering the pangs of hopeless love.

Suddenly his horse stopped short and snorted uneasily. The knight left off singing in the middle of a verse, looked earnestly into the wood at the back of the picture, and then out toward us, and then behind him. He patted his horse’s neck, and then, humming to himself, put on his gauntlets, which were hanging at his saddle bow, managed somehow to latch or bolt the fastenings of them, slipped down his visor, and took the hilt of his sword in one hand and the sheath in the other and loosened the blade in the sheath.

He had hardly done this when the horse shied violently and reared. And out of the thicket on the near side of the road (I suppose) something shot up in front of him on the saddle. We all drew in our breath.

“Don’t be frightened, dear,” said Mrs. Wag to the youngest girl, who had given a sort of jump. “He’s quite safe this time.”

I must say it did not look like it. The beast that had leapt on to the saddle was tearing with its claws, drawing back its head and thrusting it forward again
with horrid force against the visor, and was at such close quarters that the knight could not possibly either draw or use his sword.