"The only joy in the world is to begin...." Cesare Pavese

"The only joy in the world is to begin...." Cesare Pavese

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Reading Ramsey Campbell: 1982

[....]literature itself could be defined as the discourse of the uncanny: literature is the kind of writing that most persistently and most provocatively engages with the uncanny aspects of experience, thought and feeling. In some ways this is in keeping with the sort of conception of literature theorized by the Russian formalists of the early twentieth century, especially Viktor Shklovsky. Literature, for the Russian formalists, has to do with defamiliarization (ostranenie): it makes the familiar strange, it challenges our beliefs and assumptions about the world and about the nature of 'reality'.


From: An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle (2016)




* * *


….the sound he could hear now of something—an enormous sack, he thought—being dragged intermittently over stone.


Snake & Ladders (1982)


"Snake & Ladders" is a minor, grimly satisfying revenge tale. Journalist Booth attends a nighttime faith-healing performed by Mrs. Cooper. Her coterie are skeptical that Booth will promote her in his article, however.


"You're going to say she's a miracle, aren't you? The last one who lied about her found out what else she can make happen."


Booth flees, and in panic backs over and kills Mrs. Cooper's daughter with his car. Chased headlong into a neighborhood of derelict dockside warehouses, he comes face to face with what else Mrs. Cooper can make happen.


* * *


....streets of small houses and shops that looked dusty as furniture shoved out of sight in an attic. They were deserted except for a man in an ankle-length overcoat, who limped by like a sack with a head.


The Depths (1982)


A number of Ramsey Campbell stories and novels could be titled "The Depths." The depths are, for Campbell, a continuing theme:  depths of psychopathology, of family romance, of blighted rural and urban landscapes, and of a certain inhabited lake.


I wrote about "The Depths" at length here in 2020.


* * *

It must be a draught that made it twitch feebly.


Calling Card (1982)


     After several sherries Dorothy remembered something she'd once heard. 'The lady who lived next door before me—didn't she have trouble with her son?'

     'He wasn't right in the head. He got so he'd go for anyone, even if he'd never met them before. She got so scared of him she locked him out one New Year's Eve. They say he threw himself in the river, though they never found the body.'

     Dorothy wished she hadn't asked. She thought of the body, rotting in the depths....


"Calling Card" is a short story of ferocious clarity. Campbell salts it with enough turns, back-steps, and toe-stubbings in the perceptions and misperceptions of poor Dorothy Harris to fill a novella. The density of thickening menace is superbly done. Each visit, day trip, or errand outside the house adds to the accumulating clues: Dorothy knows something is going to happen, which is the most unnerving feature of her ordeal.


Not only malicious: it's a fickle malice.


* * *


"Job xxxix. 30, Her young ones also suck up blood."

"The Ash-Tree" by M. R. James


The Invocation (1982)


Impatience with distracting upstairs neighbor Mrs. Dame leads film student Ted to cry out, "I wish something would shut you up for a while," in the solitude of his room.


     He couldn't write unless he carried everything to the library, and that was a mile away. Surely he could read. He gazed at Les Films "Z + ", translating mentally from the point at which he'd stopped reading. "Within the most severe restrictions of the budget, these gleams of imagination are like triumphant buds. One feels the delight of the naturalist who discovers a lone flower among apparently barren rocks." But the room was growing darker as the sky filled with cloud. As he peered more closely at the text, Mrs Dame's voice insinuated words into his translation. "Consider too the moment (one of the most beautiful in the entire British cinema) in Master Spy where June Thorburn discovers that her suspicions of Stephen Murray are, after all, unfounded. The direction and acting are simply the invisible frame of the script. Such simplicity and directness are a cream puff."

     "God!" He shoved his chair back violently; it clawed the floorboards. Her muttering seeped into the room, her words formed and dissolved. The heat made him feel limp and cumbersome, the heavy dimness strained his eyes. He went to the window to breathe, to find calm.

     As he reached the window her voice ceased. Perhaps her listener had interrupted. Silence touched him softly through the window, like a breeze. The thickening sky changed slowly, almost indiscernibly. The traffic had gone home to dinner. The trees along the carriageway held their poses, hardly trembling. The hole that had been advancing along the roadway was empty and silent now, surrounded by dormant warning lights. Ted leaned his elbows on the sill.

     But the silence wasn't soothing. It was unnatural, the product of too many coincidences; it couldn't last for long. His nerves were edgily alert for its breaking. Overhead a ragged black mass was descending, blotting out half the sky. It seemed to compress the silence. No doubt because he was unwillingly alert, Ted felt as though he was being watched too. Surely the silence, in its brittleness and tension, must be like the silence of a forest when a predator was near.

     He started. Mrs Dame's voice had recommenced, an insistent bumbling, It nagged violently at him. Even if he shut the window, trapping himself with the heat, there was nowhere in his flat he could escape her voice. He began to curse loudly: "Jesus God almighty…" He combined everything sexual, religious, or scatological he could think of, and found that he knew a good many words.

     When at last he was silent he heard Mrs Dame's voice, wandering unchecked. His chest felt tight, perhaps holding back a scream of rage. His surroundings seemed to have altered subtly, for the worse. Beyond the trees that divided the carriageway, the houses brooded, gloomily luminous, beneath the slumped dark sky. Dull red blobs hung around the hole in the road; the sullenly glowing foliage looked paralysed. The ominous mumbling of the city, faint yet huge, surrounded him. He felt more strongly as though he was being watched. He blamed everything he felt on her voice. "I wish something would shut you up for a while," he said as loudly as he could, and began to turn away.

     Something halted him. The silence was closer, more oppressive; it seemed actually to have muffled Mrs Dame's voice. Everything shone luridly. A dark hugeness stooped towards him. The mass of black cloud had altered; it was an enormous slowly smouldering head. Its eyes, sooty unequal blotches, shifted lethargically; jagged teeth lengthened and dissolved in the tattered smile. As the mass spread almost imperceptibly across the grey, its smile widening, it seemed to lean towards him. It pressed darkness into the room.

     He flinched back, and saw that the decanter was toppling from the sill. He must have knocked it over. It was odd he hadn't felt the impact. He caught the decanter and replaced it on the sill. No wonder he hadn't felt it, no wonder his imagination was getting in his way: Mrs Dame's muttering had won.

     When he switched on the light it looked dim, cloaked by smoke. Darkness still made its presence felt in the room; so did the sense of watching. He'd had enough. There was no point in trying to work. Another evening wasted. He clumped downstairs angrily, tensely determined to relax. Overhead the clouds were moving on, still keeping their rain to themselves.


As is happily never the case in our own lives, the universe shapes a deadly response. Mrs. Dame succumbs to... something. And Ted soon finds that something is just getting started.


* * *

The Voice of the Beach (1982)


"The Voice of the Beach" is part of that stream in horror where the protagonist, venturing into a border area in open country, begins to experience awe and alarm. Is trade/exchange really going on between realities in this "interzone"? Or is the zone only causing the senses of the experiencer to malfunction?


In "The Voice of the Beach" there are two experiencers, one more advanced than the other. The narrator plays catch-up, allowing the reader time for necessary orientation.


     Perhaps if I hadn't been ill I would have been able to divert Neal from his obsession, but I could hardly venture outside without growing dizzy; I could only wait in the bungalow for my state to improve. Neither Neal nor I had had sunstroke before, but he seemed to know how to treat it. "Keep drinking water. Cover yourself if you start shivering." He didn't mind my staying in—he seemed almost too eager to go out alone. Did that matter? Next day he was bound only for the library.

     My state was crippling my thoughts, yet even if I'd been healthy I couldn't have imagined how he would look when he returned: excited, conspiratorial, smug. "I've got a story for you," he said at once.

     Most such offers proved to be prolonged and dull. "Oh yes?" I said warily.

     He sat forward as though to infect me with suspense. "That village we went to—it isn't called Lewis. It's called Strand."

     Was he pausing to give me a chance to gasp or applaud? "Oh yes," I said without enthusiasm.

     "Lewis was another village, further up the coast. It's deserted too."

     That seemed to be his punch line. The antics of patterns within my eyelids had made me irritable. "It doesn't seem much of a story," I complained.

     "Well, that's only the beginning." When his pause had forced me to open my eyes, he said "I read a book about your local unexplained mysteries."

     "Why?"

     "Look, if you don't want to hear—"

     "Go on, go on, now you've started." Not to know might be even more nerve-racking.

     "There wasn't much about Lewis," he said eventually, perhaps to give himself more time to improvise.

     "Was there much at all?"

     "Yes, certainly. It may not sound like much. Nobody knows why Lewis was abandoned, but then nobody knows that about Strand either." My impatience must have showed, for he added hastily "What I mean is, the people who left Strand wouldn't say why."

     "Someone asked them?"

     "The woman who wrote the book. She managed to track some of them down. They'd moved as far inland as they could, that was one thing she noticed. And they always had some kind of nervous disorder. Talking about Strand always made them more nervous, as though they felt that talking might make something happen, or something might hear."

     "That's what the author said."

     "Right."

     "What was her name?"

     Could he hear my suspicion? "Jesus Christ," he snarled, "I don't know. What does it matter?"

     In fact it didn't, not to me. His story had made me feel worse. The noose had tightened round my skull, the twilit beach was swarming and vibrating. I closed my eyes. Shut up, I roared at him. Go away.

     "There was one thing," he persisted. "One man said that kids kept going on the beach at night. Their parents tried all ways to stop them. Some of them questioned their kids, but it was as though the kids couldn't stop themselves. Why was that, do you think?" When I refused to answer he said irrelevantly "All this was in the 1930s."

     I couldn't stand hearing children called kids. The recurring word had made me squirm: drips of slang, like water torture. And I'd never heard such a feeble punch line. His clumsiness as a storyteller enraged me; he couldn't even organise his material. I was sure he hadn't read any such book.

     After a while I peered out from beneath my eyelids, hoping he'd decide that I was asleep. He was poring over the notebook again, and looked rapt. I only wished that people and reviewers would read my books as carefully. He kept rubbing his forehead, as though to enliven his brain….


* * *

How could Mr. Waddicar be limping doggedly along the corridor when she could see him outside in the yard?


Eye Of Childhood (1982)


Do school kids still practice their forms of intention aimed at teachers who bully them? If wishes were horses, many of my old teachers would have been found covered in hoof prints.


In "Eye Of Childhood '' Karen is witness and unwilling participant in Mary's curse on their new martinet of a teacher, Mrs. Tweedle. The curse takes form as four misshapen creatures animated from classroom artwork whose quality Mrs. Tweedle has bemoaned, though Karen initially takes them for four year olds when she sees them from a distance.


Point of view is handled expertly, essential information and social context emerging naturally as Karen is pulled into Mary's project. 


And Mrs. Tweedle's replacement can only be an improvement for Mary.


* * *


The Ferries (1982)


"The Ferries'' is redolent of sailors and their lore, of spectral ships conducting souls beyond. Campbell's achievement is that the action takes place entirely on dry land; his book editor protagonist is the last word in landlubbers.


Berry's retired sailor uncle asks his help in getting away from the coast.


     Berry had meant to suggest the idea of a book of his uncle's yarns, for quite a few had haunted him: the pygmies who could carry ten times their own weight, the flocks of birds that buried in guano any ships that ventured into their territory, the light whose source was neither sun nor moon but that outlined an island on the horizon, which receded if ships made for it. Would it be a children's book, or a book that tried to trace the sources? Perhaps this wasn't the time to discuss it, for the smell that was drifting through the window was stagnant, very old.

     "There was one story I never told you."

     Berry's head jerked up; he had been nodding off. Even his uncle had never begun stories as abruptly—as reluctantly—as this.

     "Some of the men used to say it didn't matter if you saw it so long as you protected yourself." Was the old man talking to himself, to take his mind off the desiccated river, the stagnant smell? "One night we all saw it. One minute the sea was empty, the next that thing was there, close enough to swim to. Some of the men would almost have done that, to get it over with." He gulped a mouthful of rum and stared sharply out across the pale dry waves. "Only they could see the faces watching. None of us forgot that, ever. As soon as we got ashore all of us bought ourselves protection. Even I did," he said bitterly, "when I'd used to say civilised men kept pictures on walls."


That night the ship comes for the uncle. The remainder of "The Ferries" follows Berry back to work in London, pursued by the ship. Once seen, a man knows he will see it again.


In The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (2006), John Clute refers to this type of story with the term Appointment-in-Samarra:


     The appointment in Samarra is an appointment with the true nature of things, as they are finally unveiled....


     The appointment is honoured in horror when a protagonist attempts to run away from (or as in Robert Aickman's work refuses to face) that which is most terrifying to encounter....


Clute further explains:


Specific iterations of the story type include Algernon Blackwood's "By Water" (1914), in which a man destined to drown runs away to a desert, where he arrives at an extremely small pool and drowns....


(Another maritime horror story capable of an Appointment-in-Samarra reading: William Hope Hodgson's 1909 novel The Ghost Pirates.)


* * *

….It sounded dry as an insect, but much larger. Was it peering over the edge at him?


The Show Goes On (1982)


Again, and on a very high level of aesthetic clarity: Campbell's urban hellscape of wrecked and rotting streets, shops, and people. And the protagonist, Lee, a local man now alone in the world, running the carry-out his late parents probably held on to for too long. All he can do at night is try to protect it from local kids bent on stealing and vandalizing. He searches the theater next door for culprits.


     Once as a child, he had been meant to sneak into the Gents' and open the window so that his friends could get in without paying. He'd had to stand on the toilet seat in order to reach the window. Beyond a grille whose gaps were thin as matchsticks, he had just been able to make out a small dismal space enclosed by walls which looked coated with darkness or dirt. Even if he had been able to shift the grille he wouldn't have dared to do so, for something had been staring at him from a corner of the yard.

    Of course it couldn't really have been staring. Perhaps it had been a half-deflated football; it looked leathery. It must have been there for a long time, for the two socketlike dents near its top were full of cobwebs. He'd fled, not caring what his friends might do to him—but in fact they hadn't been able to find their way to the yard. For years he hadn't wanted to look out of that window, especially when he'd dreamed—or had seemed to remember—that something had moved, gleaming, behind the cobwebs. When he'd been old enough to look out of the window without climbing up, the object was still there, growing dustier. Now there had been a gap low down in it, widening as years passed. It had resembled a grin stuffed with dirt.

    Again he heard movement beyond the grille. He couldn't quite make out that corner of the yard, and retreated, trying to make no noise, before he could. Nearly at the corridor, he saw that a door lay open against the wall. He dragged the door shut as he emerged—to trap the thieves, that was all; if they were in the yard that might teach them a lesson. He would certainly have been uneasy if he had still been a child.


"The Show Goes On" is a somber editorializing title. The movie theater is closed and going to wrack and ruin; the neighborhood is going to wrack and ruin; Lee's shop and general prospects are going to wrack and ruin. Only the menace keeps going on, more than show.


* * *


The Puppets (1982)


"The Puppets" is one of the splendors of Dark Companions (1982). It is a bildungsroman about the brink of leaving one's childhood home and moving on to the adult world. It portrays the intoxication that flows from answered prayers, and how teenage hubris can often be negated not only by the contradictions of everyday life, but by a universal malignancy.


     That was the summer when I thought I could see everything. Because I knew I'd passed to go to University, my focus wasn't narrowed down to textbooks. More than that, I had what I thought I wanted—which shows that I wasn't seeing very clearly, after all.

     Yet I was seeing so much for the first time: how the shadow of the church spire made the village square into a sundial (ten o'clock at Millie's Woollens, eleven at the Acorn, just as the bar was opening); how the campers' tents beside Delamere Forest resembled orange wedges of processed cheese; the workmen's sentry box guarding the pit outside the post office, where they were supposed to be improving the telephone exchange, and the way passersby both frowned at the intrusion and muttered "About time." Even Mr Ince's Punch and Judy show seemed new to me, a childhood delight it would do me no harm to recapture....


Jim, son of the village dentist, begins dating Rebecca, whose parents own the local antique shop. Jim describes her by turns as porcelain, and as a Cinderella. Her parents, organizers of the village's summer pageant, don't like Jim.


      "Look," I said, "if they bother you so much, why don't you move away and get a job?" 

     "A job?" She made it sound insulting. "I don't want a job. I'm only helping in the shop to keep my parents happy." 

     She added more gently "When I'm married I'll want to devote my time to my music."


Rebecca's family and friends are a little insular for Jim's taste, which is richly imbued with teenage arrogance.


....For a while I hung about on the edge of conversations, listening as Rebecca's friends agreed what was good (hanging, the birch, repatriation) and bad (unions, comprehensive education, the state of the world outside the village). What upset me most was that her young friends, Alan and the rest, sounded exactly like their elders. I don't know who or what provoked me to say "Why don't you just build a wall around the village?"

     "It strikes me you don't care much for our village," Rebecca's father said. "You seem happiest when you're away from it. Like that fellow Ince."

     "Don't mention him," his wife said. "Letting us down like that over the pageant, not even bothering to stay."

     "He wants locking up," Alan said. "God only knows what he thinks he's doing—I don't think he knows himself. I had a look at his show today. No wonder people are keeping their children away. It isn't entertainment, it's monstrous."

     Before I could ask him what he was talking about, Rebecca said "He's so restless. All that travelling. Like a gypsy." She wrinkled her nose as though at a bad smell.

     "What's wrong with gypsies?" I managed not to blurt, restraining myself not only because I could imagine the sort of reply she would make but because I'd suddenly realised the trap that had been set for me....


At each station of the way as Jim and Rebecca pull apart, the plight of Mr. Ince is used as a counterpoint. Mr. Ince lives in a house surrounded by swaying trees, whose wood he carves to make puppets. His portable Punch and Judy show is a village fixture.


      Once I'd seen Mr Ince gazing wistfully at birds that splashed in the birdbath, then sailed away on the wind. Did he wish he could create movements as tiny and perfect as theirs? But tonight's rehearsal didn't look much like that and in an obscure way I was reminded of a dance of trees....


After Jim's  first fight with Rebecca:


     I was shocked by how much he had aged. Had this been a gradual process that I'd been too preoccupied to notice? He looked drained, exhausted, past caring about the large figure he had agreed to carve for the pageant.


Later in the summer:


....when we reached the square I had to say "You didn't tell me you were going on holiday."

     "No." Her voice sounded as though it was trying to hide in the blustery wind.

     "Why didn't you?"

     "Because of the way I felt." Her hand jerked in mine. "Don't make me worse."

     I hurried her past the antique shop, before I could grow too irritable to keep quiet, towards the green. The night we'd sat there, we had been closest. Perhaps the muted glow of the grass would calm us now.

     Was it the tension between us that made the place seem too vivid? Large bruises blackened the green where the rides of the fair had stood. Around them the sparse grass looked oily with traces of rain. The glimmering blades were lurid as green wires, and when I gazed at them they seemed to flicker like dying neon. There was no peace here, for in the clump of trees at the edge of the green, someone was croaking.

     Should I have guided Rebecca away, since she was growing more tense? Ultimately it would have made no difference between us. I crept towards the trees, but faltered before she did, my hand tightening inadvertently on hers. In the dark beneath the trees, Mr Ince was standing upright in a coffin.

     Of course it was the theatre. The back of the stage, which concealed him from the audience, was gone. His head appeared above the ledge, dwarfing the performers. Though the puppets were croaking at each other as they nodded back and forth, in the dimness his mouth seemed not to be moving. Only his eyes rolled in their sockets like marbles in a fairground mask, watching the puppets.

     Rebecca was trying to drag me away, but I wanted to hear what the voices were saying, all the more so since they sounded vicious almost to the point of incoherence. I could make out some of Judy's phrases now, though they seemed to ebb and flow like wind in trees: "…living like an animal…nobody to look after you…can't look after yourself…" The croaking rose almost to a shriek. "…might as well dig yourself a hole and live in it…that's where you're going anyway…deep in the dirt…"

     I might have heard more if Rebecca hadn't held me back. Was he repeating accusations that had been levelled at him? I couldn't see how, since he had always lived alone. Was part of him accusing himself? "Come on," I said irritably to Rebecca, "don't be stupid. Nothing's going to hurt you."

     "No, I won't." Her voice was so cold that it stopped me. "You watch by yourself if you want to. I don't enjoy watching people suffering."

     "What do you mean by that?"

     Her tone had already made it clear. "You told me how you enjoy listening to people in your father's surgery."


The blustery, stormy, emotional night before Jim leaves for college:


As I crossed the green, the wind made me feel I was sailing. Tomorrow I would be somewhere new. The clump of trees at the edge of the green lashed convulsively back and forth; I thought of a bird caught by the tail, unable to fly. Nothing stood among the trees.

     The hedges were rocking, trying to erase the path with splashes of thicker dimness. The leaves sounded like rain, and seemed to scintillate like a million fragments of breaking glass. Large bluish patches raced through the clouds. Beyond the fields I thought I heard Delamere Forest, a deafening choir made faint by distance.

     As I reached Mr Ince's cottage, the sky was clearing. Nevertheless I almost passed by, having observed casually that the trees were creaking, the grass of the unkempt garden was hissing. Had his tour exhausted him that he'd let the grass grow so long? Why, he had even left the theatre standing beside the garden path—wedged there, as far as I could see, by a couple of large stones.

     The theatre wasn't deserted. Though there was no sign of Mr Ince within the proscenium—I craned over the hedge, which pushed and clawed at me—Punch and Judy were onstage. Were they nailed to the ledge and moving in the wind? Certainly their nodding and gesturing looked lifeless, all the more so when I made out that the paint of their faces and fixed eyes was peeling, yet I had a hallucinatory impression that they were actually fighting the wind. Apart from the rattle of wooden limbs on the ledge, they made no sound.

     I was still peering, determined to make out exactly what I was seeing, when the wind dropped and the figures continued to move.

     Perhaps there was still an imperceptible breeze; it wouldn't take much to make the figures totter and nod. But how could a breeze make Punch's cap writhe while failing to stir the miniature curtains? A moment later the edge of the cap gaped, and a snail crawled out down the face, leaving its trail across one flaking eye. The snail dangled from the set lips like a lolling tongue, then fell.

     As I recoiled, a gust of wind rushed over the hedge and hurled the theatre down so violently that the frame collapsed, leaving a canvas shape flattened on the grass. Above the wind I heard something, two things, fleeing through the long grass and scrabbling past the door of the cottage, which I now saw was open.

     I should have fled, and then the village would have no hold on me, not even when I wake at four in the morning. But I was determined to find out what was happening—not least because Rebecca would never have let me.

     I opened the gate, which had to be lifted on its crumbling hinges, and ventured up the path. Cold wet grass spilled over my ankles. A tree root bulged the path, a swollen muscle beneath cracked stone skin. The trees seemed to have closed even more oppressively about the cottage; I was unable to distinguish them from its walls.

     I could see nothing through the small blackened windows. Though the entire cottage seemed to be creaking—no doubt that was the tossing of trees overhead—I made myself go to the door. It was stuck ajar, but when I pushed it, it swung wide.

     It opened directly into a room. On the bare stone floor, beside a low table, Mr Ince sat with his back to me, his legs splayed straight out before him, his hands gripping his thighs. He was facing a cold fireplace. Though the door had banged against the wall, he didn't stir.

     Perhaps it was concern for him that made me enter, but still I was nervous enough to tiptoe quickly, ready to flee. Before I reached him I glimpsed the conditions under which he had been living—for how long? Both his clothes and the table were spattered with mouldy food; the fireplace and the surrounding wall seemed to be trembling with soot; sagging wallpaper revealed cracks in the walls like the bulging crack in the path. Then I saw his face.

     Was he alive? Barely, perhaps, but I hoped not when I realised why his face was more visible than the rest of the room; it was patchily whitish, like an old tree. How could he bear that if he were conscious? Still, that wasn't why I was backing away, too panicky to realise that I was retreating from the door. Two small things had crawled rattling from his pockets and were tugging, like terrified children, at his hands.

     It was only wind that slammed the door, but I flinched back still farther. Perhaps the same wind moved Mr Ince; perhaps I didn't really see his whitish mouth grimace in a parody of senile impatience—but he fell forward on his hands, splintering the objects within them....


"The Puppets" eloquently epitomizes the learns-better theme as it pertains to horror fiction.


Jay

6 February 2022


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