Readers may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) excelled her peers in creating outré landscapes and moments of uncanny frisson. The bog-mired climax of Clouds of Witness and the opening thirty pages of The Nine Tailors might be pigeon-holed today as "cozy," but the marketer's coup is a discouragement for readers hunting weird moments pushing into popular fiction.
For me, there is no better example than this scene from "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention." Lord Peter's mount, Polly Flinders, comes up lame on a lonely stretch of road at night:
As he passed the fork, he hesitated for a moment. Should he take the path over the common or stick to the road? On consideration, he decided to give the common a miss — not because of its sinister reputation, but because of ruts and rabbit-holes. He shook the reins, bestowed a word of encouragement on his mount, and continued by the road, having the common on his right hand, and, on the left, fields bounded by high hedges, which gave some shelter from the driving rain.
He had topped the rise, and passed the spot where the bridle-path again joined the high-road, when a slight start and stumble drew his attention unpleasantly to Polly Flinders.
'Hold up, mare,' he said disapprovingly.
Polly shook her head, moved forward, tried to pick up her easy pace again. 'Hullo!' said Wimsey, alarmed. He pulled her to a standstill.
'Lame in the near fore,' he said, dismounting. 'If you've been and gone and strained anything, my girl, four miles from home, father will be pleased.' It occurred to him for the first time how curiously lonely the road was. He had not seen a single car. They might have been in the wilds of Africa.
He ran an exploratory hand down the near foreleg. The mare stood quietly enough, without shrinking or wincing. Wimsey was puzzled.
'If these had been the good old days,' he said, 'I'd have thought she'd picked up a stone. But what —'
He lifted the mare's foot, and explored it carefully with fingers and pocket-torch. His diagnosis had been right, after all. A steel nut, evidently dropped from a passing car, had wedged itself firmly between the shoe and the frog. He grunted and felt for his knife. Happily, it was one of that excellent old-fashioned kind which includes, besides blades and corkscrews, an ingenious apparatus for removing foreign bodies from horses' feet.
The mare nuzzled him gently as he stooped over his task. It was a little awkward getting to work; he had to wedge the torch under his arm, so as to leave one hand free for the tool and the other to hold the hoof. He was swearing gently at these difficulties when, happening to glance down the road ahead, he fancied he caught the gleam of something moving. It was not easy to see, for at this point the tall trees stood up on both sides of the road, which dipped abruptly from the edge of the common. It was not a car, the light was too faint. A waggon, probably, with a dim lantern. Yet it seemed to move fast. He puzzled for a moment, then bent to work again.
The nut resisted his efforts, and the mare, touched in a tender spot, pulled away, trying to get her foot down. He soothed her with his voice and patted her neck. The torch slipped from his arm. He cursed it impatiently, set down the hoof, and picked up the torch from the edge of the grass, into which it had rolled. As he straightened himself again, he looked along the road and saw.
Up from under the dripping dark of the trees it came, shining with a thin, moony radiance. There was no clatter of hoofs, no rumble of wheels, no ringing of bit or bridle. He saw the white, sleek, shining shoulders with the collar that lay on each, like a faint fiery ring, enclosing nothing. He saw the gleaming reins, their cut ends slipping back and forward unsupported through the ring of the hames. The feet, that never touched the earth ran swiftly — four times four noiseless hoofs, bearing the pale bodies by like smoke. The driver leaned forward, brandishing his whip. He was faceless and headless, but his whole attitude bespoke desperate haste. The coach was barely visible through the driving rain, but Wimsey saw the dimly spinning wheels and a faint whiteness, still and stiff, at the window. It went past at a gallop — headless driver and headless horses and silent coach. Its passing left a stir, a sound that was less a sound than a vibration — and the wind roared suddenly after it, with a great sheet of water blown up out of the south.
'Good God!' said Wimsey. And then: 'How many whiskies did we have?'
He turned and looked back along the road, straining his eyes. Then suddenly he remembered the mare, and, without troubling further about the torch, picked up her foot and went to work by touch. The nut gave no more trouble, but dropped out into his hand almost immediately. Polly Flinders sighed gratefully and blew into his ear.
Wimsey led her forward a few steps. She put her feet down firmly and strongly. The nut, removed without delay, had left no tenderness. Wimsey mounted, let her go — then pulled her head round suddenly.
'I'm going to see,' he said resolutely. 'Come up, mare! We won't let any headless horses get the better of us. Perfectly indecent, goin' about without heads. Get on, old lady. Over the common with you. We'll catch 'em at the cross-roads.'
Without the slightest consideration for his host or his host's property, he put the mare to the bridle-path again, and urged her into a gallop….
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The three stories below display Sayers' abiding interest in the weird motif.
Scrawns (1932)
"Scrawns" is a beautifully executed story of rural menace.
Arriving in a dark and stormy dusk, Susan Tabbit has been hired to serve as House-parlormaid for the Wispells at Scrawns, Roman Way, Dedcaster. She meets the husband and wife already in service:
.....her first overwhelming impression was of enormous height and size. The flat, white, wide face, the billowing breasts, the enormous girth of white-aproned haunch seemed to fill the room and swim above her. Then she forgot everything else in the shock of realizing that the huge woman was cross-eyed.
It was no mere cast; not even an ordinary squint. The left eye was swivelled so horribly far inward that half the iris was invisible, giving to that side of the face a look of blind and cunning malignity. The other eye was bright and dark and small, and fixed itself acutely on Susan's face.
Mrs. Jarrock is unsettling: "Susan could not rid herself of the notion that the left eye was still squinting at her from its ambush behind the cook's flat nose."
Mr. Jarrock is another matter: something out of and old dark house movie not starring The Ritz Brothers:
"Oh, there you are, Jarrock. Come and take your tea."
The man moved then, skirting the wall with a curious, crablike movement, and so coming by reluctant degrees to the opposite side of the fire, where he stood, his head averted, shooting a glance at Susan from the corner of his eye.
"This here's Susan," said Mrs. Jarrock. "It's to be hoped she'll settle down and be comfortable with us. I'll be glad to have her to help with the work, as you know, with one thing and another."
"We'll do our betht to make things eathy for her," said the man. He lisped oddly and, though he held out his hand, he still kept his head half averted, like a cat that refuses to take notice. He retreated into an armchair, drawn rather far back from the hearth, and sat gazing into the fire. The dog which had barked when Susan knocked had followed him into the room, and now came over and sniffed at the girl's legs, uttering a menacing growl.
"Be quiet, Crippen," said the man. "Friends."
The dog, a large brindled bull-terrier, was apparently not reassured. He continued to growl, till Jarrock, hauling him back by the collar, gave him a smart cuff on the head and ordered him under the table, where he went, sullenly. In bending to beat the dog, Jarrock for the first time turned his full face upon Susan, and she saw, with horror, that the left side of it, from the cheekbone downwards, could scarcely be called a face, for it was seamed and puckered by a horrible scar, which had dragged the mouth upwards into the appearance of a ghastly grin, while the lefthand side of the jaw seemed shapeless and boneless, a mere bag of wrinkled flesh.
Susan must have nerves of steel, and the macabre man and woman of the house have still not been introduced!
I can imagine the mirth Sayers must have felt as she added each ingredient to the story's opening, then crowned her work by naming the dog "Crippen."
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The Cyprian Cat (1933)
What queer wives our friends select!
Merridew and I were always the best of friends; school and college and all that sort of thing. We didn't see very much of each other after the war, because we were living at opposite ends of the country; but we met in Town from time to time and wrote occasionally and each of us knew that the other was there in the background, so to speak. Two years ago, he wrote and told me he was getting married. He was just turned forty and the girl was fifteen years younger, and he was tremendously in love. It gave me a bit of a jolt — you know how it is when your friends marry. You feel they will never be quite the same again; and I'd got used to the idea that Merridew and I were cut out to be old bachelors. But of course I congratulated him and sent him a wedding present, and I did sincerely hope he'd be happy. He was obviously over head and ears; almost dangerously so, I thought, considering all things. Though except for the difference of age it seemed suitable enough. He told me he had met her at — of all places — a rectory garden-party down in Norfolk, and that she had actually never been out of her native village. I mean, literally — not so much as a trip to the nearest town. I'm not trying to convey that she wasn't pukka, or anything like that. Her father was some queer sort of recluse — a medievalist, or something — desperately poor. He died shortly after their marriage.
Mr and Mrs. Merridew are staying in an old inn in Little Hexham, Somerset, when our narrator goes to stay with them.
Merridew and I had a drink and went for a stroll round the village. It's a tiny hamlet quite at the other end of nowhere; lights out at ten, little thatched houses with pinched-up attic windows like furry ears — the place purred in its sleep....
[....] later in the night I woke up. I was too hot, so took off some of the blankets and then strolled across to the window to get a breath of air. The garden was bathed in moonshine and on the lawn I could see something twisting and turning oddly. I stared a bit before I made it out to be two cats. They didn't worry me at that distance, and I watched them for a bit before I turned in again. They were rolling over one another and jumping away again and chasing their own shadows on the grass, intent on their own mysterious business — taking themselves seriously, the way cats always do. It looked like a kind of ritual dance. Then something seemed to startle them, and they scampered away.
I went back to bed, but I couldn't get to sleep again. My nerves seemed to be all on edge. I lay watching the window and listening to a kind of soft rustling noise that seemed to be going on in the big wistaria that ran along my side of the house. And then something landed with a soft thud on the sill — a great Cyprian cat. What did you say? What did you say? Well, one of those striped gray and black cats. Tabby, that's right. In my part of the country they call them Cyprus cats, or Cyprian cats. I'd never seen such a monster. It stood with its head cocked sideways, staring into the room and rubbing its ears very softly against the upright bar of the casement.
Readers of the story "The Late Mrs. Fowke" in In Ghostly Company by Amyas Northcote, as well as Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries," will soundly conclude that Merridew has selected the wrong spouse.
It is left to Sayers' narrator to find out how correct his suspicions turn out to be.
* * *
Nebuchadnezzar (1939)
You choose a name — and unless your audience is very patient, it had better be a short one — of some well-known character. Say, Job. Then you act in dumb show a character beginning with J, then one beginning with O, then one beginning with B. Then you act Job, and the spectators guess that Job is what you mean, and applaud kindly. That is all. Lighthearted people, with imagination, can get a lot of fun out of it.
Surrounded by a group of imaginative, lighthearted people come together for a birthday party,
Cyril Markham felt slightly out of it, though they were all exceedingly nice to him and tried to cheer him up. It was nearly six months since Jane had died, and though they all sympathized terribly with him for her loss (they had all loved Jane), he felt that he and they were, and ever would be, strangers and aliens to one another. Dear Jane. They had found it hard to forgive him for marrying her and taking her away to Cornwall. It was terrible that she should have died — only two years later — of gastroenteritis.
But as the arcana of Nebuchadnezzar proceeds, with Markham as the only spectator, an understory of suspicion is detected in game tableau and wordplay.
[....] The lights were on again now. Queer, how white and unnatural all their faces looked. Like masks.
[....] But it was really horrible, the way these people pretended not to know that it was J, A, N, Jane. They did know, really, all the time and were wondering how long he would stick it. Let them wonder! All the same, he must think out what to do when it came to the complete word. J, A, N. Of course, if the last letter wasn't E . . . but it was bound to be E. Well, it would be a relief in a way, because then he would know that they knew.
[....] He had never known such silence. He could not even hear the wolfpack breathing. He was alone in the room with the girl who lay on the bed. And now she was moving. The sheet slipped from her shoulders to her breast, from her breast to her waist. She was rising to her knees, lifting herself up to face him over the footboard of the bed — gold hair, sweat-streaked forehead, eyes dark with fear and pain, black hollow of the mouth, and the glittering line of white teeth in the fallen jaw.
JANE!
The level of nerve-shredding hysteria Sayers creates by the end of "Nebuchadnezzar" is inspiring. Her control over material, of comings and goings, entrances and exits of characters, rivals Bowen's "The Cat Jumps."
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Jay
26 November 2022
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