Strange Stories Read online

  Strange Stories

  Robert Aickman

  (version 3.0)

  Contents

  Ron Breznay’s Masters of Horror: Robert Aickman

  The Stains (1980)

  Marriage (1977)

  The Inner Room (1966)

  Ringing the Changes (1955)

  The School Friend (1964)

  Hand in Glove (1979)

  Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale (1980)

  Ron Breznay’s Masters of Horror: Robert Aickman

  Robert Aickman was an English writer best known for his “strange stories,” as he termed them, which were subtle and poetic and concentrated more on the emotions of horror rather than material terror. He also wrote longer fiction as well as non-fiction and was an editor and conservationist.

  Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in London on June 27, 1914. His father, William, was “the oddest man I have ever known.” William had married at age 53 to a woman 30 years his junior and, being deeply set in his bachelor ways and accustomed to living alone, could not adapt to married life. This resulted in a family environment that was chaotic and emotionally empty, with the parents constantly bickering. Aickman’s rancorous home life is mirrored in his stories “The Clock Watcher,” “Ringing the Changes,” “The Stains,” “The Fetch,” and others. When Aickman was a teen-ager, his mother deserted the family. His father also eventually left, living Aickman living at home alone.

  Aickman was originally schooled in architecture, which was his father’s profession. However, his interests were more in the arts. Apparently, writing was in his blood as his maternal grandfather, Richard Marsh, was a prolific Victorian novelist, who wrote The Beetle (1897), an occult novel that was almost as popular as Dracula in its time. Aickman’s mother encouraged him to write. He stated, “My mother aimed from the start to make me an author.” He started reading the classics early and began writing while in school.

  His first publication was the collection We Are For The Dark: Six Ghost Stories (1951), which contains three of his stories and three he wrote in collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard.

  Critics have compared his work to that of Walter de la Mere and M.R. James. Peter Straub writes in his introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea: “What attracted Aickman to ghosts was not the notion of dripping revenants but the feeling – composed in part of mystery, fear, stifled eroticism, hopelessness, nostalgia and the almost violent freedom granted by a suspension of rational rules – which they evoked in him.”

  The protagonist in “The Visiting Star” (1966) is an author who spends a winter in a desolate English town while researching a book on the mining industry. A famous actress shows up to star in a play at a local theater. The actress has a split personality – literally – with a mysterious character accompanying her embodying that personality.

  “The Inner Room” (1966) tells of Lene, who visits an old shop and buys an odd doll house, the windows of which are shut fast, except for one from which a doll is partially protruding. When Lene gets the doll house home, she finds all the windows are tightly closed, and the doll is nowhere to be seen. She cannot remove the roof or any of the walls, and the only access she has to the inside of the doll house is the front door. Her exploration of the interior reveals many strange and unsettling sights. During a thunderstorm, she has a dream of the doll house and awakens to hear unfamiliar footsteps and then to see life-size dolls skulking about in the darkness. Nevertheless, she keeps the doll house, which affects her strangely for the rest of her life.

  In “The Hospice” (1975), a traveling businessman loses his way in a maze of rural roads and ends up at a mysterious inn, where he has a series of strange encounters. The protagonist in “Into the Wood” (1968) has a similar strange stay at a hotel in the Swiss Alps, but unlike the businessman, is changed by the experience.

  “The Next Glade” (1983) is about a strange hidden glade in a small wooded area in which a woman, Noelle, loses a friend, John, while strolling with him. Months later, while walking there with her husband, Melvin, she finds John standing next to a small house and digging a garden trench. Melvin is mortally wounded by a knife he is using to clear the path. At the funeral, John appears and takes Noelle for a walk in the woods. When they reach the glade, the small house and trench are gone, replaced by a huge pit in which hundreds or thousands of men are working–or is it just a vision? John again disappears. This story reflects Aickman’s preference of nature over industrial progress.

  Aickman’s short stories – he published a total of 48 – have been gathered into eight original collections and four reprint collections. Besides We Are For The Dark, the other original collections are: Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories (1964); Powers of Darkness: Macabre Stories (1966); Sub Rosa: Strange Tales (1968); Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories (1975); Tales of Love and Death (1977); Intrusions: Strange Tales (1980); and Night Voices: Strange Stories (1985). The reprint collections are Painted Devils: Strange Stories, which contains revised stories (1979); The Wine-Dark Sea (1988); The Unsettled Dust (1990); and The Collected Strange Stories, two volumes containing all of his published stories (1999).

  “The Fully-Conducted Tour”, a previously unpublished story, appeared in the Autumn 2005 issue (Issue 5) of Wormwood.

  Besides short stories, Aickman wrote three novels: The Late Breakfasters (1964), about lesbian love, ghosts, and the reviled inhabitants of a mysterious mansion; The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (1987), a fairy tale set in pre-revolutionary Russia; and Go Back at Once (unpublished).

  On the non-fiction side, Aickman wrote The Story of Our Inland Waterways (1955) and two autobiographies, The Attempted Rescue (1966 and reprinted by Tartarus Press in 2001), which relates his early years, and The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (1986), about his involvement with the Inland Waterways Association. He was also a theater critic for The Nineteenth Century and After, but his reviews have not yet been collected in book form.

  Aickman edited eight volumes of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, from 1964 through 1972. He included a story of his in six of these anthologies, and he wrote introductions for all but one.

  Some of his writing remains unpublished. Among these works are three plays, Allowance for Error, Duty, and The Golden Round; Panacea, a philosophical work, which runs to over a thousand pages in manuscript; and Go Back at Once. The manuscripts of these works are among the papers preserved in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

  A few of Aickman’s works were adapted for other media. In 1968, “Ringing the Changes” appeared as “The Bells of Hell” on the BBC2 television program Late Night Horror. The same story was adapted for the CBC Radio drama series Nightfall on Halloween in 1980 and for BBC Radio Four on Halloween in 2000. “The Swords” was filmed in 1997 for the television horror series The Hunger. “The Same Dog” premiered as a musical play in 2000. “The Cicerones” was made into a short film in 2002 (which can be viewed at: The Cicerones).

  As a conservationist, Aickman was best known as one of the co-founders of the Inland Waterways Association, whose aim was to restore and preserve England’s canal system. Another co-founder, L.T.C. Rolt, was also a writer of weird fiction.

  Aickman won the 1975 World Fantasy Award in short fiction for his vampire story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” and the 1981 British Fantasy Award for his story “The Stains.” The Collected Strange Stories won the 2000 British Fantasy Award for best collection.

  Aickman developed cancer and refused conventional medical treatment. He died on February 26, 1981.

  Ron Breznay

  The Stains

  After Elizabeth ultimately died, it was inevitable that many people should come forward with counsel, and doubt
less equally inevitable that the counsel be so totally diverse.

  There were two broad and opposed schools.

  The first considered that Stephen should ‘treasure the memory’ (though it was not always put like that) for an indefinite period, which, it was implied, might conveniently last him out to the end of his own life. These people attached great importance to Stephen ‘not rushing anything*. The second school urged that Stephen marry again as soon as he possibly could. They said that, above all, he must not just fall into apathy and let his life slide. They said he was a man made for marriage and all it meant.

  Of course, both parties were absolutely right in every way. Stephen could see that perfectly well.

  It made little difference. Planning, he considered, would be absurd in any case. Until further notice, the matter would have to be left to fate. The trouble was, of course, that fate’s possible options were narrowing and dissolving almost weekly, as they had already been doing throughout Elizabeth’s lengthy illness. For example (the obvious and most pressing example): how many women would want to marry Stephen now? A number, perhaps; but not a number that he would want to marry. Not after Elizabeth. That in particular.

  They told him he should take a holiday, and he took one. They told him he should see his doctor, and he saw him. The man who had looked after Elizabeth had wanted to emigrate, had generously held back while Elizabeth had remained alive, and had then shot off at once. The new man was half-Sudanese, and Stephen found him difficult to communicate with, at least upon a first encounter, at least on immediate topics.

  In the end, Stephen applied for and obtained a spell of compassionate leave, and went, as he usually did, to stay with his elder brother, Harewood, in the north. Harewood was in orders: the Reverend Harewood Hooper BD, MA. Their father and grandfather had been in orders too, and had been incumbents of that same small church in that same small parish for thirty-nine years and forty-two years respectively. So far, Harewood had served for only twenty-three years. The patron of the living, a private individual, conscientious and very long lived, was relieved to be able to rely upon a succession of such dedicated men. Unfortunately, Harewood’s own son, his one child, had dropped out, and was now believed to have disappeared into Nepal. Harewood himself cared more for rock growths than for controversies about South Africa or for other such fashionable church preoccupations. He had published two important books on lichens. People often came to see him on the subject. He was modestly famous.

  He fostered lichens on the flagstones leading up to the rectory front door; on the splendidly living stone walls, here grey stone, there yellow; even in the seldom used larders and pantries; assuredly on the roof, which, happily, was of stone slabs also.

  As always when he visited his brother, Stephen found that he was spending much of his time out of doors; mainly, being the man he was, in long, solitary walks across the heathered uplands. This had nothing to do with Harewood’s speciality. Harewood suffered badly from bronchitis and catarrh, and nowadays went out as little as possible. The domestic lichens, once introduced, required little attention - only observation.

  Rather it was on account of Harewood’s wife, Harriet, that Stephen roamed; a lady in whose company Stephen had never been at ease. She had always seemed to him a restless woman; jumpy and puzzling; the very reverse of all that had seemed best about Elizabeth. A doubtful asset, Stephen would have thought, in a diminishing rural parish; but Stephen himself, in a quiet and unobtruding way, had long been something of a sceptic. Be that as it might, he always found that Harriet seemed to be baiting and fussing him, not least when her husband was present; even, unforgivably, when Elizabeth, down in London, had been battling through her last dreadful years. On every visit, therefore, Stephen wandered about for long hours in the open, even when ice was in the air and snow on the tenuous tracks.

  But Stephen did not see it as a particular hardship. Elizabeth, who might have done - though, for his sake, she could have been depended upon to conceal the fact - had seldom come on these visits at any time. She had never been a country girl, though fond of the sea. Stephen positively liked wandering unaccompanied on the moors, though he had little detailed knowledge of their flora and fauna, or even of their archaeology, largely industrial and fragmentary. By now he was familiar with most of the moorland routes from the rectory and the village; and, as commonly happens, there was one that he preferred to all the others, and nowadays found himself taking almost without having to make a decision. Sometimes even, asleep in his London flat that until just now had been their London flat, he found himself actually dreaming of that particular soaring trail, though he would have found it difficult to define what properties of beauty or poetry or convenience it had of which the other tracks had less. According to the map, it led to a spot named Burton’s Clough.

  There was a vague valley or extended hollow more or less in the place which the map indicated, but to Stephen it seemed every time too indefinite to be marked out for record. Every time he wondered whether this was indeed the place; whether there was not some more decisive declivity that he had never discovered. Or possibly the name derived from some event in local history. It was the upwards walk to the place that appealed to Stephen, and, to an only slightly lesser extent, the first part of the slow descent homewards, supposing that the rectory could in any sense be called home: never the easily attainable but inconclusive supposed goal, the Clough. Of course there was always R. L. Stevenson’s travelling hopefully to be inwardly quoted; and on most occasions hitherto Stephen had inwardly quoted it.

  Never had there been any human being at, near, or visible from the terrain around Burton’s Clough, let alone in the presumptive clough itself. There was no apparent reason why there should be. Stephen seldom met anyone at all on the moors. Only organizations go any distance afoot nowadays, and this was not an approved didactic district. All the work of agriculture is for a period being done by machines. Most of the cottages are peopled by transients. Everyone is supposed to have a car.

  But that morning, Stephen’s first in the field since his bereavement six weeks before, there was someone, and down at the bottom of the shallow clough itself. The person was dressed so as to be almost lost in the hues of autumn, plainly neither tripper nor trifler. The person was engaged in some task.

  Stephen was in no state for company, but that very condition, and a certain particular reluctance that morning to return to the rectory before he had to, led him to advance further, not descending into the clough but skirting along the ridge to the west of it, where, indeed, his track continued.

  If he had been in the Alps, his shadow might have fallen in the early autumn sun across the figure below, but in the circumstances that idea would have been fanciful, because, at the moment, the sun was no more than a misty bag of gleams in a confused sky. None the less, as Stephen’s figure passed, comparatively high above, the figure below glanced up at him.

  Stephen could see that it was the figure of a girl. She was wearing a fawn shirt and pale green trousers, but the nature of her activity remained uncertain.

  Stephen glanced away, then glanced back.

  She seemed still to be looking up at him, and suddenly he waved to her, though it was not altogether the kind of thing he normally did. She waved back at him. Stephen even fancied she smiled at him. It seemed quite likely. She resumed her task.

  He waited for an instant, but she looked up no more. He continued on his way more slowly, and feeling more alive, even if only for moments. For those moments, it had been as if he still belonged to the human race, to the mass of mankind.

  Only once or twice previously had he continued beyond the top of Burton’s Clough, and never for any great distance. On the map (it had been his father’s map), the track wavered on across a vast area of nothing very much, merely contour lines and occasional habitations with odd, possibly evocative, names: habitations which, as Stephen knew from experience, regularly proved, when approached, to be littered ruins or not to be detectable at al
l. He would not necessarily have been averse from the twelve or fourteen miles solitary walk involved, at least while Elizabeth had been secure and alive, and at home in London; but conditions at the rectory had never permitted so long an absence. Harriet often made clear that she expected her guests to be present punctually at all meals and punctually at such other particular turning points of a particular day as the day itself might define.

  On the present occasion, and at the slow pace into which he had subsided, Stephen knew that he should turn back within the next ten to fifteen minutes; but he half-understood that what he was really doing was calculating the best time for a second possible communication with the girl he had seen in the clough. If he reappeared too soon, he might be thought, at such a spot, to be pestering, even menacing; if too late, the girl might be gone. In any case, there was an obvious limit to the time he could give to such approach as might be possible.

  As the whole matter crystallized within him, he turned on the instant. There was a stone beside the track at the point where he did it; perhaps aforetime a milepost, at the least a waymark. Its location seemed to justify his action. He noticed that it too was patched with lichen. When staying with Harewood, he always noticed; and more and more at other times too.

  One might almost have thought that the girl had been waiting for him. She was standing at much the same spot, and looking upwards abstractedly. Stephen saw that beside her on the ground was a grey receptacle. He had not noticed it before, because its vague colour sank into the landscape, as did the girl herself, costumed as she was. The receptacle seemed to be half-filled with grey contents of some kind.

  As soon as he came into her line of sight, and sometime before he stood immediately above her, the girl spoke.

  ‘Are you lost? Are you looking for someone? ’

  She must have had a remarkably clear voice, because her words came floating up to Stephen like bubbles in water.