"The Rope in the Rafters" (1935) by Oliver Onions

Readers unfamiliar with "The Rope in the Rafters" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

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….it was by the coldness and the overpowering smell that he followed. After a moment or two these became less strong, but in the corridor the scent was still breast-high. Along the passage he followed in the direction of the stairs that led to the mansard, up the stairs into the space beneath the roof. He followed in cold blood, not into bat-haunted shadows now, but in pallid dusty daylight that showed up every detail of every post and beam. He came to where the floorboards ended and the drop to the stage below could be seen. Then the odour left him as cleanly as if it had fallen in one dense body over the edge, and he stood looking stupidly at the rope that dangled from the beam overhead.

     Stupidly yet with eyes suddenly cleared, for he remembered now how that rope had been the first thing to greet him on his arrival at the house. With workmen about its presence had not struck him as sinister then, but now it beckoned to him like some dreadful lure. 'Your life?' the gently-swaying, sinuous thing seemed to whisper. 'It cannot be that you value life? When you remember yourself as you were twenty years ago? Have you forgotten? The Past was the Best, the Present is Worse, the Worst is to Come! Twenty years ago you lived every minute, because you know how few the minutes might be. If anything should happen at least a whole man would get it in head or stomach or groin. The feel of your body was like wine to you, you made friends of a sudden. Where are your friends now? Can you find one, where before every man had a wave of the hand for you, though you never saw him again? The best of them are dead. They would be glad to be dead if they could see today what they died for. It would at least be decent that all should be dead before men began to think of carnage again. But they are subtly at work, even those who saw it—security, rights, the glorious past, our immortal story, the heritage our fathers died for, our glory still to be. And what of the multitude who will believe anything if only the lie is big and noisy enough? Who cling to their leaders who prepared the evil, and saw the evil through, and made a worse evil to follow it, and are even now tired and helpless before an evil by the side of which the other would be good? Have you seen it once and want to see it again? Do you want to live, James? In this world as it is? The Past was the Best, the Present is Worse, the Worst is to Come. Look at me, James, and ask yourself if you want to live'. All this, and a thousand times more, the rope seemed to be saying to James Hopley as it hung there, gently swaying from the beam overhead.

     And suddenly James Hopley covered his face with his hands. Blasted and blackened as he was, he did want to live. And he was afraid of that waving, beckoning thing. He turned and ran. He ran from some inner vision of what would happen to him unless he packed his bags and left that château at once. He ran to the door of his own room and put his hand on the knob, but even then he drew it back again with a cry. The door had been opened at the same moment from inside.

     'Monsieur!' he heard Marsac's voice, hard and shaken.

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In "The Rope in the Rafters" (1935) by Oliver Onions protagonist James Hopley takes up residence in a friend's chateau in France where there are ongoing renovations. Hopely is isolated by choice from his friends and his country: he has not returned since the end of the war, where he lost an eye and most of his face in battle; he was also buried alive for seven days during trench fighting.

Hopley soon concludes his room in the chateau is haunted. Instead of being frightened, he is thrilled at the prospect. He has been, in a way, a ghost himself in his own life since his biblical seven days underground. 

As he tentatively explores the haunting's outlines, Hopley also interacts with a few of the locals. The caretakers, an old couple named Marsac, react to Hopley's appearance as though he has become an uncanny disruption in their own lives. A young contractor on a ladder almost falls to his death when he catches sight of Hopley. 

....must every place affect everybody in precisely the same way and degree? Was there nothing in what a man brought to it? It was no light experience that James Hopley was bringing to this château of his friend's. A smell at which anybody else would simply have opened a window was for him charged with dreadful memories. Coldness to him was not a mere momentary discomfort but the coldness of all mortality, disturbed breathing the suffering of a human frame that could bear no more. Was it then to be wondered at that after that first night he was ready to appropriate to himself anything unusual there might be about that château, its past, its present, or anything else it might have in store? He continued his walk under the alders of the swollen river, sometimes wondering whether the air was really as insalubrious as the curé has said, but always returning to his thought . . . that if a man brought more to a place than he found there he already knew a good deal more about it than anybody else could tell him.

The local curé initially offers to take Hopley in as a guest, but grows more aloof the longer Hopley stays in the chateau, and the more he presses for historical information about the site.

      But he did not find the curé communicative. No place like that was without its hundred legends, some with a basis of truth, others the merest gossip, he said. Three houses had stood on those foundations before the present one. One story was that the wounded were brought to this château after the battle of Arcques. There were rumours concerning it during the Terror. Later, if vulgar report was to be believed, it had a history of smuggling. Its skeletons were best left in its cupboards. And that was about as much as the curé would commit himself to. Again he recommended his own vicarage. He accepted a glass of wine, but declined to stop and share James's midday meal, and James accompanied him as far as the rusty gates.

     He found it interesting that the battle of Arcques had been fought in the neighbourhood. He did not know what weather that battle had taken place in, but a battle can be an earthy affair, with much trampled grass, and they who take part in it are exceedingly likely to sweat. But James could not believe that a battle fought nearly three hundred years ago had very much to do with himself. Had nothing happened in this country of France since then? The Terror was not exactly yesterday either. As for smuggling . . . well, these people ought to know best, but he gave a shrug. The incident had made far too deep an impression on him to be dismissed like that.

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"The Rope in the Rafters" is written in third-person, but Onions provides narrative counterpoint with excerpts from Hopley's stream of consciousness diary entries. Here the sour stink and shape of a body on the other bed in his room is intermixed with his memories of the trench cave-in. This alternating point of view slowly thickens the emotional pitch of the story. The effect is terrifying, which with Onions is often only another word for sublime.

Oliver Ones was one of the finest twentieth century writers of supernatural stories.  His fictional marshalling of what James Machin in Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (2018) termed his "weirder valences" is still not fully appreciated, or explored.

"The Rope in the Rafters" is a fine late novella, perfectly observed and delineated. For readers new to Oliver Onions, it is an excellent place to start.

Jay

11 June 2022