E. Nesbit - haunted clothes
I recently reread the E. Nesbit book "The Enchanted Castle", which features a very horrible sequence in which a set of dummies made out of clothes are brought to life accidentally with a magic ring. (They were made to bulk out an audience for a childens' play)
here's how they are described before they are alive:
Mademoiselle looked at the figure seated nearest to her, stooped to
look more closely, half laughed, quite screamed, and sat down
suddenly.
"Oh!" she cried, "they are not alive!"
Eliza, with a much louder scream, had found out the same thing
and announced it differently. "They ain't got no insides," said she.
The seven members of the audience seated among the wilderness
of chairs had, indeed, no insides to speak of. Their bodies were
bolsters and rolled-up blankets, their spines were broom-handles,
and their arm and leg bones were hockey sticks and umbrellas.
Their shoulders were the wooden crosspieces that Mademoiselle
used for keeping her jackets in shape; their hands were gloves
stuffed out with handkerchiefs; and their faces were the paper
masks painted in the afternoon by the untutored brush of Gerald,
tied on to the round heads made of the ends of stuffed
bolster-cases. The faces were really rather dreadful. Gerald had
done his best, but even after his best had been done you would
hardly have known they were faces, some of them, if they hadn't
been in the positions which faces usually occupy, between the
collar and the hat. Their eyebrows were furious with lamp-black
frowns their eyes the size, and almost the shape, of five-shilling
pieces, and on their lips and cheeks had been spent much crimson
lake and nearly the whole of a half-pan of vermilion.
and once they are alive:
Mademoiselle began it: she applauded the garden scene with
hurried little clappings of her quick French hands. Eliza's fat red
palms followed heavily, and then someone else was clapping, six
or seven people, and their clapping made a dull padded sound.
Nine faces instead of two were turned towards the stage, and seven
out of the nine were painted, pointed paper faces. And every hand
and every face was alive.
it goes on...
He caught the ring from the unresisting Mabel, cried, "I wish the
Uglies weren't alive," and tore through the door. He saw, in fancy,
Mabel's wish undone, and the empty hall strewed with limp
bolsters, hats, umbrellas, coats and gloves, prone abject properties
from which the brief life had gone out for ever. But the hall was
crowded with live things, strange things all horribly short as broom
sticks and umbrellas are short. A limp hand gesticulated. A pointed
white face with red cheeks looked up at him, and wide red lips
said something, he could not tell what. The voice reminded him of
the old beggar down by the bridge who had no roof to his mouth.
These creatures had no roofs to their mouths, of course they had no
"Aa 00 re o me me oo a oo ho el?" said the voice again. And it had
said it four times before Gerald could collect himself sufficiently
to understand that this horror alive, and most likely quite
uncontrollable was saying, with a dreadful calm, polite
persistence: "Can you recommend me to a good hotel?"
"Can you recommend me to a good hotel?" The speaker had no
inside to his head. Gerald had the best of reasons for knowing it.
The speaker's coat had no shoulders inside it only the cross-bar
that a jacket is slung on by careful ladies. The hand raised in
interrogation was not a hand at all; it was a glove lumpily stuffed
with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the arm attached to it was only
Kathleen's school umbrella. Yet the whole thing was alive, and
was asking a definite, and for anybody else, anybody who really
was a body, a reasonable question.
The children decide to bring them to a tunnel that they can lock them in to until the spell wears off, so they tell the "Ugly Wuglies" they are bringing them to a Good Hotel
The respectable Ugly-Wugly leading with the lamp, the others
following trustfully, one and all disappeared into that narrow
doorway; and Gerald and Mabel standing without, hardly daring to
breathe lest a breath should retard the procession, almost sobbed
with relief. Prematurely, as it turned out. For suddenly there was a
rush and a scuffle inside the passage, and as they strove to close
the door the Ugly-Wuglies fiercely pressed to open it again.
Whether they saw something in the dark passage that alarmed
them, whether they took it into their empty heads that this could
not be the back way to any really respectable hotel, or whether a
convincing sudden instinct warned them that they were being
tricked, Mabel and Gerald never knew. But they knew that the
Ugly- Wuglies were no longer friendly and commonplace, that a
fierce change had come over them. Cries of "No, No!" "We won't
go on!" "Make him lead!" broke the dreamy stillness of the perfect
night. There were screams from ladies voices, the hoarse,
determined shouts of strong Ugly- Wuglies roused to resistance,
and, worse than all, the steady pushing open of that narrow stone
door that had almost closed upon the ghastly crew. Through the
chink of it they could be seen, a writhing black crowd against the
light of the bicycle lamp; a padded hand reached round the door;
stick-boned arms stretched out angrily towards the world that that
door, if it closed, would shut them off from for ever. And the tone
of their consonantless speech was no longer conciliatory and
ordinary; it was threatening, full of the menace of unbearable
horrors.
The padded hand fell on Gerald's arm, and instantly all the terrors
that he had, so far, only known in imagination became real to him,
and he saw, in the sort of flash that shows drowning people their
past lives, what it was that he had asked of Mabel, and that she had
given.
"Push, push for your life!" he cried, and setting his heel against the
pedestal of Flora, pushed manfully.
"I can't any more oh, I can't!" moaned Mabel, and tried to use her
heel likewise but her legs were too short.
"They mustn't get out, they mustn't!" Gerald panted.
"You'll know it when we do," came from inside the door in tones
which fury and mouth-rooflessness would have made
unintelligible to any ears but those sharpened by the wild fear of
that unspeakable moment.
When I read it first as a small child, I was very frightened, but I forgot all about it until I reread it recently. It was weird, I started getting this feeling of sick apprehension as I got closer to this sequence, but it wasn't until I actually read it that I remembered reading it before...
