Day 2: The Wailing Well

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Here’s how I got to M.R. James.

terminal insomnia

reddit’s /nosleep/ thread, where users post nightmare fodder and readers engage in a sort of “yes, and” improv exchange in the comments, offering advice on how to, say, block otherworldly text messages, or how to trip up that weird phantom pretending to be your brother.

The best post by a mile?

I’m a Search and Rescue Officer for the U.S. Forest Service, I have some stories to tell

It’s got everything: faceless forest men, ethereal kidnappers, lost time, teleportation, looped recordings of babies crying playing from the depths of national parks. But my favorite of his claims is how common it is to find staircases to nowhere deep in the woods. Staircases ripped from homes of all different styles. So common, in fact, that his fellow officers hardly comment on it (this may also be a conspiracy).

It borders on Dada, and I f$%!ing love it.

This reminded one commenter of…

“They’ve got him! In the trees!”: M.R. James and Sylvan Dread. A quasi-scholarly, loving tribute to horror writer M.R. James, by one Steve Duffy for something called the Everlasting Club mailing, July 1999 issue. (And I say with complete authenticity, Mr. Duffy: Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.)

Duffy had me at “They live – where? In the well? Maybe, but certainly within that ‘clump of bent and gnarled Scotch firs’ inside the red ring on the Scouts’ map.’”

and so…

The Wailing Well.

Fun fact: James was a respected medievalist whose ghost stories often featured academics pushing the envelope too far, but for a few years he would show up to one Boy Scout troop’s yearly summer camping trip and read the kids a ghost story he’d written for the occasion. For The Wailing Well  he did a little reconnaissance beforehand, checking out the campsite and then working the landscape into his story. He noticed, for example, that the poor boys would be spending the night near a clump of bent and gnarled Scotch firs.

And then…

Unlike every other supernatural short James published, Wailing Well never got the BBC treatment via A Ghost Story for Christmas. So a small film company in Bristol (which may really just be one man with a basement and enviable project management skills) took it on. And as someone who nearly had a breakdown the one time she participated in the 48 Hour Film Festival, I respect and support the effort. I have a lot of good to say about the way this one was filmed, the shadows and, yes, the touch of sylvan dread they managed to shoehorn in, possibly in post.

But this humble labor of love also tosses out everything I liked about James’ tale. Gone is the lazy, pre-War middle-class patois of the Scouts (replaced by some EastEnders extras, if I had to guess). The shepherd these ruffians encounter is bristly and defensive, and hardly a shepherd at all, really; James gives us a good-natured chap with a dog, and he supplies an enigmatic, overly long cautionary tale where the dog gives alarm and then gets the hell out (“gone he had, and when I came up with him in the end, he was in that state he didn’t know me, and was fit to fly at my throat. But I kep’ talkin’ to him, and after a bit he remembered my voice and came creepin’ up like a child askin’ pardon. I never want to see him like that again, nor yet no other dog”). 

And in James’ tale, there’s a responsible, even valiant adult — Mr. Hope Jones — who simply gets there too late. That’s horrifying — there’s competence and bravery, and it doesn’t matter! The woods still got Judkins! And then Jones tries to get the woods, but he can’t — the laws of fire don’t work there!

On video, we have bullying and a really boring backstory. We have two Dickensian villains who dislike overbearing EastEnders extras, and they happen to have access to a well.

And there’s only two of them!

But James keeps it all so vague (easier to do in text than on film). All we know about the four things in the woods is “they was all bad’uns when they was alive” — we don’t even know what period that was. Were they Victorian-era hustlers, victims of an unbudging class system? Were they Restoration-era opportunists, shaking down plague victims? Were they pirates?

Did they even die together? Is this group the result of some weird, supernatural predatory scheme?

And I can’t be the first to notice it, but the male/female ratio, coupled with the undead’s unexpected spryness, at the very least suggests a wonderfully twisted sexual dynamic.

All of which is to say: go read M.R. James, for free.

originally published Oct 3 2015

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