The ISFDB tells us the stories in Uncanny Stories Megapack all date from 1916-1917. They were previously collected - mostly - in two anthologies: More Uncanny Stories (1918) and Ghost Stories and Other Queer Tales (1931).
Queer the tales certainly once would have been termed, but uncanny serves just as well. Some are in minor, others in major key. Protagonsts are killed, others lost, some simply trip themselves up in the queer coils of what Hardy called The Immanent Will. The uncanny is sometimes simply a strange and deflected means by which the universe bears a load of nemesis to mortal ego.
[An essay on uncanny fiction in general can be read here.]
❖
The Goth by Roy Vickers (1916)
Vickers, per Google, went on to a long career as a mystery novelist. His style is slick and economical, his plotting illuminated by taut description and sharp dialogue. Like the prose of Jerome, Jacobs, and Burrage among countless others, Vickers was a pro, and his stories are better for it.
"The Goth" of the title is a young man named Cargill, who cocks a snook at a local Welsh legend.
....The legend and the mountains are the two attractions of Tryn yr Wylfa—the official guidebook devotes an equal amount of space to each. It will tell you that the bay, across which the quarry's tramp steamers now sail, was once dry land on which stood a village. Deep in the water the remains of this village can still be seen in clear weather. But whosoever dares to look upon them will be drowned within the year. A local publication gives full details of those who have looked—and perished....
Cargill decides this is a perfect show-off chance:
....as he walked back to the hotel it was just Betty Lardner who made him think again of the legend. He was in love, and, being very young, wanted to do something insanely heroic. To defy the Fates by looking on the sunken village was an obvious outlet for heroism.
Betty thinks otherwise when she learns what Cargill has done.
"How could you?" was all she said.
"I—I didn't know you knew," he stammered weakly.
"Of course everybody knows! It was all over the village before you returned.
"Can't you see what that legend meant to us?" she went on. "It was a thing of beauty. And now you have spoilt it. It's like burning down the trees of the Fairy Glen. You—you Goth!"
"But suppose I am drowned before the year is out—like Roberts?" he suggested jocularly.
"Then I will forgive you," she said.
And to Cargill it sounded exactly as if she meant what she said.
Vickers then gives us twelve months of droll fun as Cargill becomes increasingly obsessed with not getting himself into potential drowning situations. But eventually Cargill's obsession loses its humor.
....In his search for a cab it became necessary for him to cross the canal. On the bridge he paused and, gripping the parapet, made a surprise attack upon his enemy.
Some children, playing on the tow path, helped him considerably. Their delightful sanity in the presence of the water was worth more to him than the brandy. He was positively winning the battle, when one of the children fell into the water.
For an instant he hesitated. Then, as on the night of the Tube episode, panic seized him. The next instant the man who was probably the best amateur swimmer in England, was running with all his might away from the canal.
When he reached his chambers he waited, with the assistance of the brandy, until his man brought him the last edition of the evening paper. A tiny paragraph on the back sheet told him of the tragedy....
The ending is beautifully done for fans like myself of morally uplifting self-sacrifice. And Vickers does the end tale in a dozen pages!
***
The Eighth Lamp by Roy Vickers (1916)
This is a much more sober story than "The Goth." It gives us in kitchen-sink detail the sufferings of a London Underground signalman who faces supernatural comeuppance after the killing of a train engineer, his rival for the affections of Jinny.
....with remorse came, with renewed strength, the terror which he had partly beaten back. The terror began to grip him even before the stationmaster had left. In the signal-box he had formed the plan of telling the stationmaster that he could not turn out the lights that night—that he must hurry to the bedside of a dying child—any lie would do provided it saved him for that night. Tomorrow night he would be married to Jinny. He would have made what reparation lay in his power and would feel the safer.
"Good-night, George."
"G'night, Mr. Jenkins."
The stationmaster hung the keys on the nail outside his den and walked off. Raoul would have called after him, but checked himself. The stationmaster would not believe that lie about the dying child. His face would betray his terror—his terror of the tunnel. The stationmaster would ask him why he was afraid of the tunnel, and—God knew where those questions would lead!
"Funny it's wors'n ever tonight!" he said, as he finished the lights on the up-platform—for he was not analytical and did not wholly understand why the secret tower of strength had crumbled. He only knew that he did not want to marry Jinny on the following day. He only saw his sin in gaining possession of her—in the way that he had gained possession of her—in its naked hideousness.
The odd fatalism of his class prevented him from shirking the lights on the down-platform. What has to be will be. The same fatalism drove him ultimately to dousing the eighth lamp and turning, like a doomed rat, to face the already rumbling horror of the tunnel.
More slowly than before, as if it knew that he must wait for it, the train came on. Then in his ears sounded the familiar grinding of the brakes. The train had stopped in the station. The faint luminosity in the driver's window grinned its welcome. Then it beckoned.
"I'm comin', Pete."
From the corner by the staircase, where he had been crouching, he moved across the platform and boarded the train....
***
The Last Ascent by E. R. Punshon
Punshon was an even more popular mystery novelist than Vckers. Under a variety of pen names, he was a stalwart of UK Golden Age detective fiction.
"The Last Ascent" deals with the midair disappearance of pilot Radcliffe Thorpe. (It makes for piquant comparison with Conan Doyle's "The Horror from the Heights.") The narrator discovers a photo Thorpe took while up on an earlier flight:
.....Slowly, very slowly, I began to see that that misty appearance had a shape, a form. Even as I looked I saw the features of a human countenance—and yet not human either, so spectral was it, so unreal and strange. I felt the blood run cold in my veins and the hair bristle on the scalp of my head, for I recognized beyond all doubt that this face on the photograph was the same as that Radcliffe had sketched. The resemblance was absolute, no one who had seen the one could mistake the other.
***
The Haunted Chessmen by E. R. Punshon
"The Haunted Chessmen" is a full-dress antiquarian ghost story about the fates of owners of a set of pieces carved from human bone.
...."I don't know if it's true," Kerr added, "very likely it isn't. It may be just a yarn. But the tale is that an Indian Rajah some time in the Middle Ages captured a hated enemy, killed him, and had these made from his bones."
"Ugh!" I said. "What an idea! What on earth made you get them?"
"I hardly know," he answered. "Mrs. Lathbury wanted to get rid of them—naturally. They hadn't very pleasant associations for her. She asked me what they ought to fetch. I said I would take them if she liked. I thought it was a way to help her, and then it's lovely carving."
"Rather too lovely for me," I said, and I could have sworn that the black queen turned her head and shot at me a glance of malignant and deadly hatred....
***
The Unknown Quantity by E. R. Punshon
A slick, sharp, and eerie story about a mathematician who murders a wealthy relative and thinks he gets away with it.
....when an old man remains obstinately healthy, when his doctor can say with confidence that he is good for another twenty years at least, and when he stands between you and a large fortune which you need, and of which you can make much better use in the cause of science and the pursuit of knowledge, what alternative is there? It becomes necessary to take steps. Therefore, the Professor had taken steps....
The professor's plans for his inherited wealth are not exactly sun, fun, and debauchery:
....He would be able to publish at once his great work on "The Secondary Variation of the Differential Calculus," that hitherto had languished in manuscript. It would make a sensation, he thought; there was more than one generally accepted theory he had challenged or contradicted in it. And he would put in hand at once his great, his long projected work, "A History of the Higher Mathematics."
But murder will out. On the first of each month someone notices a bloody spot on his right hand.
….the skin seemed whole everywhere. He looked at his handkerchief. There was still visible on it the stain where he had wiped his hand, and this stain seemed certainly blood.
"Odd!" he muttered as he put the handkerchief back in his pocket. "Very odd!"
The spot grows in size with each monthly appearance. He sends a sample to a chemist for analysis.
...."Mammalian blood," pronounced the chemist, "probably human—rather a curious thing about it, too."
"What's that?" asked the Professor.
"Why," his friend answered, "I was able to identify the distinctive bacillus—" He named the rare bacillus of an unusual and obscure disease. And this disease was that from which the Professor's cousin had died....
❖
Jay
12 June 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment