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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, Fall 1945
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lous forms. The giant hairy spiders, the size of a man's head, that infest "The Ash Tree", under the direction of the witch whose skeleton is found buried at its base, are perhaps only adaptations of natural horrors, and the three wooden carvings in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" (a cat, a robed and horned devil, and a death-skeleton in a mantle) whose life-size counterparts haunt the guilty archdeacon's house follow traditional forms; but the tentacled familiars of "Count Magnus" and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" are certainly somewhat off the beaten track--especially the toad-like guardian in the latter story, which the treasure-hunting antiquary mistakes for a damp mouldy leather bag until he pulls it forward onto his chest and it puts its arms around his neck. The revelatory shock of that climax is almost equal to the one in "'Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" when the blind creature from the extra bed steps into the moonlight and shows its "intensely horrible face of crumpled linen". That invisible and explicable entity, summoned by the Templars' whistle, which molds itself in bed-clothing and has no other form, is probably the creepiest and certainly the most original of all of James's demonological creations. Mention should doubtless be made of some of the lesser supernatural beings and events which he makes use of at times. In "Mr. Humphries and His Inheritance" the characters sometimes get lost in the garden maze (where the ancestor's ashes are entombed) oftener than is natural, and the hero reads in an old book a parable about a man in a maze who was pursued by stealthy panting shapes, but later is unable to find the book; this is the same situation as one of the plots in "Stories I Have Tried to write" about a man in a railway carriage who reads a passage that later proves true but never was in the book. One of the "Two Doctors"--the one who has evidently sold his soul to the Devil and mentions meeting spirits in the lane and attending the Witches' Sabbath--does something to a set of bedclothes (evidently rifled from a mausoleum) so that the pillow suffocates his rival one night. In "Number 13" that particular non-existent room in a Danish hotel is created nightly out of portions of the two adjoining rooms by the warlock, whose indecipherable manuscript is buried in the floor. None of the rest of this ghostly company posess that much power over inanimate matter (though they pass through it easily enough), but they frequently have a certain power over people's minds. In "Count Magnus" for example, Mr. Wraxall, fascinated by the legends of the demoniacal count, finds himself walking toward the sarcophagous repeating, "Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?" Every time he (voluntarily?) expresses a romantic desire to see the long-dead sorceror, one of the padlocks on the tomb falls open, this evidently being one of the conditions of the count's release. In "A School Story" the ghost conveys his warnings to his murderer, the teacher, by somehow inducing a boy to write them in Latin during the class exercises in that language; the boy knows nothing of what they mean, but the teacher most assuredly does. The dreams of two characters in "The Rose Garden", about the trial of a man who was executed for treason in the seventeenth century, are obviously inspired by the cruel judgewho is buried in the garden, though why the dreams should transpire from the point of view of the prisoner (only one among many whom the judge convicted) instead of the judge is never explained. In "The Story of a Disapperance and an Appearance" the narrator has a premonitory dream about a Punch and Judy show come to life and acted with gruesome seriousness by a fiendishly murderous punch who is finally pursued and overtaken by the replica of a victim whom in real life the operators of just such a show have murdered, and whose ghost finally kills them. Other dreams are: the one by the victim in "Two Doctors" who repeatedly dreams of digging up a man-sized chrysalis in the garden that turns out to be his own dead body; the -- 10 --
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lous forms. The giant hairy spiders, the size of a man's head, that infest "The Ash Tree", under the direction of the witch whose skeleton is found buried at its base, are perhaps only adaptations of natural horrors, and the three wooden carvings in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" (a cat, a robed and horned devil, and a death-skeleton in a mantle) whose life-size counterparts haunt the guilty archdeacon's house follow traditional forms; but the tentacled familiars of "Count Magnus" and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" are certainly somewhat off the beaten track--especially the toad-like guardian in the latter story, which the treasure-hunting antiquary mistakes for a damp mouldy leather bag until he pulls it forward onto his chest and it puts its arms around his neck. The revelatory shock of that climax is almost equal to the one in "'Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" when the blind creature from the extra bed steps into the moonlight and shows its "intensely horrible face of crumpled linen". That invisible and explicable entity, summoned by the Templars' whistle, which molds itself in bed-clothing and has no other form, is probably the creepiest and certainly the most original of all of James's demonological creations. Mention should doubtless be made of some of the lesser supernatural beings and events which he makes use of at times. In "Mr. Humphries and His Inheritance" the characters sometimes get lost in the garden maze (where the ancestor's ashes are entombed) oftener than is natural, and the hero reads in an old book a parable about a man in a maze who was pursued by stealthy panting shapes, but later is unable to find the book; this is the same situation as one of the plots in "Stories I Have Tried to write" about a man in a railway carriage who reads a passage that later proves true but never was in the book. One of the "Two Doctors"--the one who has evidently sold his soul to the Devil and mentions meeting spirits in the lane and attending the Witches' Sabbath--does something to a set of bedclothes (evidently rifled from a mausoleum) so that the pillow suffocates his rival one night. In "Number 13" that particular non-existent room in a Danish hotel is created nightly out of portions of the two adjoining rooms by the warlock, whose indecipherable manuscript is buried in the floor. None of the rest of this ghostly company posess that much power over inanimate matter (though they pass through it easily enough), but they frequently have a certain power over people's minds. In "Count Magnus" for example, Mr. Wraxall, fascinated by the legends of the demoniacal count, finds himself walking toward the sarcophagous repeating, "Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?" Every time he (voluntarily?) expresses a romantic desire to see the long-dead sorceror, one of the padlocks on the tomb falls open, this evidently being one of the conditions of the count's release. In "A School Story" the ghost conveys his warnings to his murderer, the teacher, by somehow inducing a boy to write them in Latin during the class exercises in that language; the boy knows nothing of what they mean, but the teacher most assuredly does. The dreams of two characters in "The Rose Garden", about the trial of a man who was executed for treason in the seventeenth century, are obviously inspired by the cruel judgewho is buried in the garden, though why the dreams should transpire from the point of view of the prisoner (only one among many whom the judge convicted) instead of the judge is never explained. In "The Story of a Disapperance and an Appearance" the narrator has a premonitory dream about a Punch and Judy show come to life and acted with gruesome seriousness by a fiendishly murderous punch who is finally pursued and overtaken by the replica of a victim whom in real life the operators of just such a show have murdered, and whose ghost finally kills them. Other dreams are: the one by the victim in "Two Doctors" who repeatedly dreams of digging up a man-sized chrysalis in the garden that turns out to be his own dead body; the -- 10 --
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