The Ash-Tree by M.R. James, 1904
The magic trick:
A puzzling situation that only gets stranger and stranger
It’s time for another run of scary stories on SSMT as we approach Halloween. We’ll start this year’s with a back-to-back dose of M.R. James.
“The Ash-Tree” takes us back in time a few hundred years to the witch trials of Eastern England. Needless to say, spooky and strange things are afoot at a particular house where a particular ash-tree sits right next to one of the main bedrooms.
This story reminds me quite a bit of a Sherlock Holmes template. The puzzle is laid out for the reader during the first half of the text. But whereas Sherlock – and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – then work back to dazzle the reader by finding a practical solution to such oddities, James instead only ratchets up the weird.
Which of course is what we’re here for with an M.R. James ghost story. We didn’t sign up for practical solutions. We want weird. This story certainly delivers. The puzzle established early in the story only leads to stranger and stranger, more puzzling solutions.
And that’s quite a trick on James’s part.
The selection:
Next day Sir Matthew Fell was not downstairs at six in the morning, as was his custom, nor at seven, nor yet at eight. Hereupon the servants went and knocked at his chamber door. I need not prolong the description of their anxious listenings and renewed batterings on the panels. The door was opened at last from the outside, and they found their master dead and black. So much you have guessed. That there were any marks of violence did not at the moment appear; but the window was open.
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