The Three Black Cats
One of our ancestors was the possessor of a small estate in the Wychwood forest, then very much larger than now, occupying a wide extent of country north-west of Oxford. It was many years ago – I can hardly tell how many – but he must have lived in the beginning of the last century. His name was Halliday.
Now in those days there was great alarm in the country about witchcraft, and no wonder, for every strange thing that occurred was ascribed to the malevolence of witches, everyone seemed to believe in their power, from the Justice of the Peace to the village school dame, and most people were sorry that the laws which consigned such monsters to the stake, had been swept from the Statute Book by wiser heads than their own.
(The penal statute of James I was not blotted from the Statute Book till 1736; the tale must, therefore, bear a subsequent date. It is significant that so exemplary a judge as Sir Matthew Hale believed in witchcraft, and considered the statute which he administered to be just, and founded upon scripture; on the strength of the texts, Exodus xxxii.18, and Duet.xviii.10.)
Hard by the home farm lived on of the most dreaded of these hags, and strange were the stories they told of her. She had been seen to ride broomsticks through the air, and to assume the form of animals; to mutter spells, to melt waxen images of unhappy victims at the fire (who faded away as their effigies faded and died of atrophy!).
Once, passing a wagon, she had, in mere mischief, caused the cart rope to turn in the air like a huge snake, which so frightened the driver, that he dropped the reins, and the horses ran away, equally frightened, and smashed the wagon.
She lived in a dismal dell of a wood, where nothing but stinging nettles and foul weeds grew; the toad and the newt were her companions, the very birds avoided the place. Her dwelling was a crazy hut, somewhat devoid of comfort, but not of food and fuel, which were abundantly supplied for the asking owing to the fear with which she was regarded. Her door opened by a string passing through a hole above the latch, which it drew up. Once, a frolicsome lad poked the string in through the hole, and when she came home she could not get in. She cursed the daring rascal, and the unhappy boy pined away, like her other victims, and died.
Now our ancestor had always been careful to avoid her enmity, and had to pay her the accustomed tribute in butter, eggs, milk or the like, until one day his unlucky fortune brought upon him her hatred.
He was out coursing, when his dogs roused up a large white hare; he followed up the chase, and the dogs seemed to have their prey on their very jaws, when it rushed into the bushes which surrounded the hag’s dwelling, and there disappeared, as if it had got through some crevice into the hut. Halliday opened the door; there was no hare, bit an old woman sat panting over the fire, struggling vainly to recover her breath. It was plain whom he and his dogs had been hunting.
But from that time she hated him and his with bitter hatred, and soon the effects of that hatred became manifest. The cattle pined away and died, the crops withered – everything went wrong. In vain they tried to propitiate her; she had been hunted, and would not be propitiated. Yet she did her diabolical work so cunningly, that no one caught her on the premises, or it would have gone bad with her in spite of her dread master.
Now our ancestor had two little children, a boy and a girl, lovely as ever gladdened a parent’s heart. Well, one day, when everyone was out, the old hag came upon the scene, and found the children in the courtyard of the house, whereupon she looked them through and through, and muttered her deadly spells.
“Whose pretty children are you, my little dears?” she said, with a mocking laugh. “Ah! You are master Halliday’s children I see. Ah! Ah! Pretty dears.”
But from this time, like the cattle, the poor little dears pined away, and no doctor could do them any good. Too well did the father and mother suspect the cause, but they knew not what to do, when one night they were awoke by the screams of the children, and rushed up to the nursery, where they found them sitting up in the bed, almost wild with fright.
So soon as they could speak, they insisted that three black cats were in the room, and had been sitting on the bed trying to suck their breath.
There were, it need hardly be said, no living beings in the room; but the parents sat with their little ones until they had composed them into a broken slumber; their hearts were very heavy, for it was plain that their darlings had received a very severe shock. Next night the nurse was told to sit up with them, and they hoped all would be well: but in the dead of night the same screams were heard, and the girl was found vainly endeavouring to soothe the children; she had been overpowered with an extraordinary disposition to sleep, and during that sleep, the cats had reappeared, but only the children had seen them.
And so, every night, the same dreadful phenomenon recurred. The parents watched by themselves; the changed the room; but it was all of no avail; the watchers were always overpowered by a strange and unnatural drowsiness, sleep ensued, and the mystery was re-enacted, until they were awoke by the screams and cries of the children, for there was something in the visitation very appalling to their little minds, especially when the phantom cats tried, as they said, “to suck their breath.”
In this extremity the parents had recourse to a man of high reputation for wisdom and for ‘white magic’, who lived in the Chiltern hills; ‘the cunning man’ people called him, and he was not himself beyond the suspicion of too great an intimacy with unseen powers, but he never used his art for evil.
Therefore the parents journeyed to the hill country, and sought his aid. They told him their sad story, and he confirmed their worst anticipations.
“It is but too true,” he said; “they do see these cats. Your children are hopelessly bewitched.”
“But can you not save them?” cried the poor mother, wringing her hands.
“Alas!” he replied, “it is too late; you should have sought me before. Your cattle I can save, at least, for the future, but it is too late for the poor little ones!”
In vain they offered him all the wealth they possessed, in vain they implored him to let the cattle tale their chance, and to confine his exertions to the children. It was useless, quite useless, he said.
“But,” he continued, “if I cannot save your children, I can give you revenge. You may destroy the witch if you have the courage to avenge your little ones.”
They grasped at the offer, so riven were their hearts by the cruel injury they had received.
“Try us!” they cried. “How can we remove this curse from our home and neighbourhood?”
“Go home then,” he replied, “you will find a cow just dead of the pestilence; cut the body open, take out the liver, the heart, and the lungs, then make a great fire in the chamber where the little ones sleep, shut yourselves up with them, and at sunset, having previously stopped up every crevice in door or window, throw the liver, the heart and the lungs into the fire. Then watch in silence until midnight, but say not a word, or you will break the spell; at twelve o’clock the wall appear to gape, and the three cats will appear, the one after the other, and the third will be the witch. Shoot her, and you will have avenged your poor children.”
Sadly, but with brows bent in stern resolution, they returned home to their forest dwelling, and found, as the cunning man had predicted, a cow just dead from the plague. This gave them faith in the knowledge of the seer, and they gave the order to the servants to cut out the liver, the heart and the lungs.
At sunset, which was not until curfew, for it was summer, they put the children to bed, soothing them with the promise that they would sit with them all night; they closed every crevice in the room, and as the sun went down, like a huge red ball over the western woods, they threw the liver, heart and lungs on the fire, and the scent thereof was not odoriferous. But they had to bear it, and there they say, as the darkness of the brief summer night gathered.
A storm came up, and the clouds blotted out the stars; a hoarse wind howled and moaned about the house; the dogs seemed disturbed, and barked and howled incessantly; there they sat, quiet and gloomy, but sternly resolute; not a word could they interchange for fear they should break the spell; but they read their Bibles, and especially those solemn and mysterious chapters of the Revelation which close the sacred Book, and tell of the victory of the victory of the Church of God over the powers of darkness. Yet they shuddered from time to time; for a vague sense of fear crept over them, and chilled the very blood, making each individual hair of the to assert itself obtrusively, and stick up ‘like quills upon the fretful porcupine’.
The two children lay placidly asleep in bed as the hours rolled on, ten, eleven, and at last the old-fashioned clock told that the midnight hour was near.
How terribly resonant its loud ticking seemed, distinct as the blows of a hammer, telling how the moments perished, and were reckoned – each lessening the interval as it sank into the grave of the past. At last the clock gave that curious click which old-fashioned clocks send forth about five minutes before the hour – the hour of twelve.
Five minutes of intense suspense. The wife was pale as death; and instinctively placed her hand upon her heart to still the tremendous beating which half threatened the rupture of the fleshy prison; the husband sat with his hand on the trigger of his old flint gun, now at full cock, and his eyes intently fixed upon the wall at the head of the bed.
One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Slowly the measured tones fell on the still air of the night, and at the sixth –
The wall seemed to open; a chasm yawned as if from the outer darkness; and a huge gaunt black cat appeared, and emerged upon the bed, where it lay, intently watching the children, the eyes gleaming with lurid fire; then a second appeared, and did likewise; then a third, most hideous of all, the witch herself in feline disguise.
The man forgot his horror in his fell wrath.
“Thou cursed witch!” he said, and fired.
But, alas! that one word, so excusable, broke the spell, and the guilty sorceress escaped her merited doom; he fired in vain.
The children woke up screaming; the cats disappeared; the lights went out; the room filled with smoke; the husband threw open the windows, and looked out into the black night; a howling wind arose, and on its wings came the burden of a well-known voice, laughing in hideous cachinnations, and uttering the word fire! fire! fire!
The poor children fell back upon the pillow, and sobbed themselves to sleep; and from that day they slowly withered away. They were reduced to atrophy, and appeared as living skeletons ere they died and were at peace.
But then the power of the enemy was exhausted: the sick cattle died no more; those which were sick recovered; other children were in due course born, lovely as those they had lost; and the remainder of their lives was peaceful, so far as peace can be found here.
Against the witch in the changed state of the law no remedy could be found, although many like her had perished in a blazing tar barrel, upon less evidence than accorded in her case; but she had her reward.
A terrible storm of thunder and lightning burst over the forest; a traveller, a stranger to those parts, was passing through the woods and sought for shelter, when he saw the witch’s hut : he opened it, and shrank back from the hideous interior. Through a foetid cloud of sulphurous smoke he saw a skull in one corner, crossbones in another; toads, efts, newts, adders, and the like, obscene reptiles affixed by nails to the walls; but no living tenant.
Nor was the witch ever seen again, and no one in Wychwood forest ever doubted that her master raised that storm when he carried her away.
M.R. James & Plagiarism - The Case Of The Three Black Cats
This hitherto neglected 1888 tale of witchcraft by the Rev. A.D. Crake was first discovered by The Haunted River in 2002. A very strong case can be made for arguing that M.R. James copied many key images and ideas from this one specific story for his own tale The Ash-tree.
N.B. Readers should be aware that preparatory to the publication of Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary in 1904 that James was being urgently pressed by the publisher Edward Arnold for more tales to fill his debut volume, and that The Ash-tree was originally titled The Spiders before James switched titles after ‘bolting-on’ the device of an ash tree to his tale (James adored cats but had a personal horror of spiders).