The Five Jars by M. R. James

Author:M. R. James [James, M. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 0405081413
Publisher: Edward Arnold
Published: 1922-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

VI

THE CAT, WAG, SLIM AND OTHERS

I got out my precious casket. I sat by the window and watched. The moon shone out, the lid of the box loosened in due course, and I touched my forehead with the ointment. But neither at once nor for some little time after did I notice any fresh power coming to me.

With the moon, up came also the little town, and no sooner were the doors of the houses level with the grass than the boys were out of them and running in some numbers towards my window; in fact, some slipped out of their own windows, not waiting for the doors to be available. Wag was the first. Slim, more sedate, came among the crowd that followed. These were still the only two who felt no hesitation about talking to me. The others were all fully occupied in exploring the room.

“To-morrow,” I said (after some sort of how-do-you-do's had been exchanged), “you'll be flying all over the place, I suppose.”

“Yes,” said Wag, shortly. “But I want to know—I say, Slim, what was it we wanted first?”

“Wasn't there a message from your father?” said Slim.

“Oh, yes, of course. ‘If they're about the house,’ he said, ‘give them horseshoes; if there's a bat-ball, squirt at it’: he thinks there's a squirt in the tool-house—Oh, there's the cat; I must——” After delivering all this in one sentence, he rushed to the edge of the table and took a kind of header into the midst of the unfortunate animal, who, however, only moaned or crowed without waking, and turned partly over on her back.

Slim remained sitting on a book and gazing soberly at me.

“Well,” I said, “it's very kind of Wag's father to send me a message, but I must say I can't make much of it.”

Slim nodded. “So he said, and he said you'd see when the time came; of course I don't know, myself; I've never seen a bat-ball. Wag says he has, but you never know with Wag.”

“Well, I must do the best I can, I suppose; but look here, Slim, I wish you could tell me one or two things. What are you? What do they call you?”

“They call me Slim: and the whole of us they call the Right People,” said Slim; “but it's no good asking us much, because we don't know, and besides, it isn't good for us.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, you see, our job is to keep the little things right, and if we do more than that, or if we try to find out much more, then we burst.”

“And is that the end of you?”

“Oh, no!” he said cheerfully, “but that's one of the things it's no good asking.”

“And if you don't do your job, what then?”

“Oh, then they get smaller and have no sense.” (He said they, not we, I noticed.)

“I see. Well now, you go to school, don't you?” He nodded. “What for? Isn't that likely to be bad for you?” (I hardly liked to say “make you burst.

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