So I've been thinking about stories. Short stories I remember. And most of the short stories I remember are ghost stories. I've never been afraid of the hook-for-a-hand, call-coming-from-inside-the-house stories. I was more afraid (scared stupid, from what I recall) of things like the Wendigo--stories with an indefinable but omnipresent menace. Stories that would've been made by Stanley Kubrick instead of Dario Argento, if I'm going to get insufferable about it. But the one I always recall, (obviously) to this day, is the story about the King o' the Cats.

Does anybody else remember this story? I've heard it told in a million different ways (just like all good essential stories) but the one I think about the most involves the narrator (there's always a narrator) relating the tale of a traveler (always a traveler) who is going through a dark, scary night and arrives at an inn (sometimes it's a church or a lonely cottage) and tells the innkeeper (parson, or decrepit old man) he's seen a bunch of cats bearing a gilded coffin, and one of them tells him to tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum is dead. Whereupon the cat who has been dozing in the corner suddenly perks up and says "Tim Toldrum dead? Then I'm the King o' the Cats!" and rushes up the chimney (always the chimney) and disappears.

So a little research shows me this is an English children's story. But it still creeps me out to think about it. To look at it now it's surreal and kind of funny, which is maybe why it was so scary to me as a child. The surreal is always kind of scary, but I think especially to children whose reality must be kind of surreal at a certain age. And when things are kind of funny in a situation set up as frightening, they're always more frightening because of that perversion of playing the opposite.

I think at this point in my life I have a archaeological fear, a relict from deep inside my brain that hasn't adapted in raw form but continues to periodically filter through the layers of development and intellectual maturation to tint contemporary experience.

Basically, if someone could retell this story for grownups, it would scare the ever-loving shit out of me.

Hooray!