Monday, October 31, 2016

Remember the well between the four yew trees

Once upon our great-grandfather's time - or great-great-grandfathers's - a schoolboy named McLeod had a lot of trouble with an in class assignment. He sat and he sat and he just couldn't get the grammar right, until he was the last one left in the classroom. Until suddenly the words came to him, but words he hardly knew and had never seen before: "memento putei inter quatuor taxos." Remember the well between the four yew trees.

McLeod hardly knew what he had written, but his teacher did, and when he read it his face turned pale with fear...

So commences, more or less, M. R. James's A School Story - a great ghost story by one of the greatest ghost story writers. You can read it - and others - here. If you want to enjoy it fully, however, you probably shouldn't look at this picture:






A creepy drawing for halloween, done with a brush pen, various technical pens and markers, and coloured in photoshop.

1 comment:

  1. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
    ― Hilary M

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