"…Then I heard him call softly, “All right, sir,” and went on pulling
out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the
edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck .
‘… I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several — I don’t know how many — legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. I screamed out, Brown says, like a beast…’”
‘… I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several — I don’t know how many — legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. I screamed out, Brown says, like a beast…’”
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, M.R. James, 1904.
I've been wanting to draw the 'Jamesian wallop' moment of The Treasure of Abbot Thomas for a long time, but I couldn't work out how to compose it. It's set down a well and I didn't know where to 'stand' in order to illustrate something that was happening to two protagonists facing each other, in the dark, inside a tube.
I'm quite pleased with what I eventually worked out; not least that you can see Somerton's face, and you can't quite see what it is that is embracing him.
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