The Locked Room

The Locked Room and Other Horror Stories
M.R. James
Louise Greenwood and Carolyn Jones drew the pictures Level 4 Retold by Piers Sandford Series Editors: Andy Hopkins and Jocelyn Potter

Pearson Education Limited Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, Essex CM20 2JE, England and Associated Companies throughout the world. ISBN 0 582 41807 0 ‘The Ash-Tree’, ‘A School Story’, The Diary of Mr Poynter’ (“TheCurtains’), ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’ (The Flies’), ‘Rats’ (‘The Locked Room’), ‘The Mezzotint’ (‘The Painting of—ngley Hall’), ‘Lost Hearts’, ‘Martin’s Close’ (‘Martin’s Lake’). and The Tractate Middoth’ (‘The Two Cousins’). first published by Edward Arnold 1931 The adaptation first published by Penguin Books 1993 Published by Addison Wesley Longman Limited and Penguin Books Ltd. 1998 Newedition first published 1999

Second impression 2000 Text copyright © Louise Greenwood and Carolyn Jones 1993 Illustrations copyright © Piers Sandford 1993 All right reserved

The moral right of the adapters and of the illustrator has been asserted

Typeset by Digital Type, London Set in 11/14pt Bembo Printed in Spain by Mateu Cromo, S.A. Pinto {Madrid)

All rights reserved; no part of thispublication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publishers.

Published by Pearson Education Limited in association with Penguin Books Ltd, both companies being subsidiaries of Pearson Plc

For a complete list of the titles available inthe Penguin Readers series please write to your local Pearson Education office or to: Marketing Department, Penguin Longman Publishing, 5 Bentinck Street, London W1M 5RN.

Contents
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Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 The Ash-Tree A School Story The Curtains The Flies The Locked Room The Painting of —ngley Hall Lost HeartsMartin’s Lake

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Chapter 9 The Two Cousins Activities

Introduction
He jumped and screamed and, as he did, the face of the thing came up towards him: no eyes, no nose, no mouth. He screamed again and rushed to the door. He felt the thing touch his back and start to tear at his shirt... Things ... things in the night, things in the house, screaming, running, staring ...In these stories there are things that are worse than your worst dreams. Giant black spiders living in a tree. The terrible ghost that waits outside a window. Empty clothes that walk. The strange thin woman who moves through a man’s picture. The boy with the long, dirty fingernails - and a hole in his chest. The woman who screams from the bottom of a lake. And the dry dusty old man who reads - buthas no eyes! Here are nine stories like no others you have read. Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 in a village in Kent, in the south of England, where his father was a vicar. From an early age. he loved old books and studied history, the Bible, languages and the books of past centuries at Cambridge University. He studied, lived and worked at the University from 1882 to 1918. He began towrite ghost and horror stories after reading the stories of Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. From the early 1890s, he read one of his own stories to friends at Christmas every year. His great knowledge of history gave his stories an unusual amount of detail and his ghosts seem more real, and are more frightening, than those of almost any other writer. M. R. James died in 1936.

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Chapter 1 TheAsh-Tree
Visitors to Castringham Hall in Suffolk will find it almost unchanged from the days when our story took place. They can still see the beautiful old house with its gardens and lake. However, the one thing missing is the ash-tree, which used to stand, proud and tall, in front of the house, its branches almost touching the walls. This story begins in 1690 with a strange, lonely old woman,...