Genres: Horror
Cast of Wonders 172: A School Story
Show Notes
Do you love flash fiction? The Escape Artists podcasts are hosting their fourth annual flash fiction contest, starting with Pseudopod this year. The submission window runs from August 15th through September 15th. All the details can be found on their forum.
A SCHOOL STORY
by M.R. James
Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. “At our school,” said A., “we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase. What was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?”
“You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own. There’s a subject for you, by the way–‘The Folklore of Private Schools.'”
“Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.”
“Nowadays the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.”
