The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

INTRODUCTION

There are perhaps two good reasons for selecting a ghost story to read; though several bad ones, of which the worst is the quest for a sadistic thrill, something that is better sought in a daily newspaper.

The first good reason is the need we all must feel for some degree of reconciliation with death. The second is vaguer but more continuously present in the consciousness of most of us: the need to escape, at least occasionally, from a mechanistic world, ever more definable, ever more predictable, and, therefore, ever more unsatisfying and frustrating. As an antidote to daily living in a compulsorily egalitarian society, a good ghost story, against all appearances, can bring real joy. The reader may actually depart from it singing.

In the Introduction to the first “Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories,” I remarked that the successful ghost story is akin to poetry and seems to emerge from the same strata of the unconscious. I reminded the reader of these things in the Introduction to the second collection, and now venture to do so once more, because this affinity and this origin are at the heart of ghost story writing, reading, choice, and criticism. The successful ghost story does not close a door and leave inside it still another definition, a still further solution. On the contrary, it must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and, at the end, leave it open, or, possibly, ajar. A door ajar is often, of course, more teasing to the imagination (“worse,” as children put it) than a door wide open. We think we want certainty and security, but the steadily increasing popularity of ghost stories is only one of many contemporary indications that, in our “hearts,” or our unconscious minds (ten times wider than our conscious, say the experts), we want no such stuff. Our unconscious knows full well that if this hard, tangible world of ubiquitous decay were all there is, we should every one of us draw back at the threshold of it, and our odd race cease to exist. As so much more of us is unconscious than conscious, this means that we know it; and so continue to live.

For our allotted time, of course. The ghost story helps, in some small degree, to reconcile us with death, not only by suggesting that all of us, or many, or some, survive it, but also by justifying the death institution itself, illuminating it as an instrument of justice.

Thus the acceptable aspiration; but the ghost story, including the ghost story from which these lines were taken, provides visual and audible evidence of its truth. It may be a creepy business when, in the small hours, Uncle Joe makes his return and gazes, proud or distraught, upon us as we huddle between the sheets; but at least it suggests, first, that we too may not be obliterated when we die, and, second, that the chances and evils of the world are knitted up into justice at the end. . . . Justice is what most people seem to crave for (perhaps modified by mercy, but only slightly), and it is not for the present writer to inquire further into this aspect of the matter, for space would hardly permit.

Uncle Joe’s return sounds like a rather commonplace affair, as these things go, though not necessarily the less reassuring for that, in the ways just indicated; but the unconscious, from which ghost stories rise, and, conceivably, ghosts too, is boundless, or at least mercifully unbounded by the present state of knowledge. The ghost story, therefore, can include ingredients from the totality of experience, as can poetry; mainly, once more, experience which is neither fully conscious nor a field for deliberate and prudent selection. Only poetry and the ghost story draw on a world so wide.

Wide is the world of ghosts in the more superficial sense also; wide as the surface of the globe. In the present collection, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch leads in a polar ghost, chillier than the night outside; Lady Eleanor Smith materialises a whole tropical island, with a picturesquely clad population, as suddenly as a competent medium will materialise the white third finger of a lady who died young, with her very betrothal ring on it. Lady Eleanor’s island is also the true fabric of wish-fulfilment in the western world, set down by the author with a strange, calm stare; and riddled with inconsistency as all wish-fulfilment must be. And this may be the moment to remind the reader of Quiller-Couch’s novel, Dead Man’s Rock: few novels contain such scenes of spiritual terror, and few show such confidence in the winding of fantastic incident. Only certain elements in the book would qualify as supernatural by the standard of a literal-minded editor, but the entire work glitters with unnatural phosphorescence, which, like phosphorous, enters the reader’s blood. It contains the best face-at-the-window scene ever written. Quiller-Couch was a master of these effects. What more fearful place could there be for an unearthly intruder than the snowy waste of The Seventh Man?

Though it must be terrible to be so impossibly unable as in the Antarctic to call to strangers for help, it can be hardly better to be pursued by a ghost through a multitude of Malays, Chinese, and Dyaks, all either indifferent or, quite probably, on the ghost’s side, as in The End of the Flight by Somerset Maugham, a distinguished writer and generous benefactor of other writers, who has himself been so infamously pursued and vulturised since his death by high-minded birds of prey.

There has been, in fact, no people and no culture without ghosts, except, perhaps, the Communist (so far), and no land without poltergeist disturbances from earliest times. But England is generally regarded as the metropolis of the supernatural, as of lyric poetry. In England you cannot gather together more than twenty random people without it transpiring that at least one of them has had a paranormal experience, and very likely seen an apparition. What is more, there will regularly be among the twenty a further person who has been through something considerably more upsetting than the tale told by the first speaker in the group; so upsetting that the person does not care to talk about it, except sometimes to a single individual of proven sympathy.

Those who have embarked upon serious psychic research will agree that what they find, though occasionally inexplicable and fascinating, tends to differ substantially from the poetical ghost stories of fiction. Many of the British stories in this book, however, derive palpably from quite common experience. The strangeness of Mr. MacDiarmid’s rustic intruder is of the Dr. Fell order (“the reason why, I cannot tell”); perceptible only to that instant, almost clairvoyant, apprehension which, for those gifted with it, says so vastly more than careful feature-by-feature analysis can say to the rest of us. How many people have a recurring dream, which while it recurs, also shifts significantly, as does that of A. J. Alan; though few of us, even when asleep, have minds so elegant and orderly as to bring it to such a devastating upshot, while ourselves escaping injury! The Man Who Came Back is the work of a beautiful and sensitive stylist: Mr. Gerhardi’s Of Mortal Love is the finest hard-to-come-by book in English literature. Equally, The Case of Mr. Lucraft is the epitome of mid-nineteenth century London, and of its denizens’ wild hopes and hidden fears. In it you can listen to the Strand, when it still was the Strand; smell the sausages and gas; be overcome by the mystery. If Besant and Rice ever wrote anything better in any field, I have never found it. As for Negotium Perambulans, by a writer for whom, as a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, ghosts were in the family, what community in Cornwall lacks for at least one such tale as this, complete with horrid witness in blood or runes, for those who dare to look? Still, Cornwall is hardly England, as British Railways are currently confirming.

There remain two stories which are on a larger scale. Of my own, it would be indecorous to speak: I shall say only that it is closely based on fact, as must, I imagine, be plain, whatever else may be surmised. Of The Beckoning Fair One, it must be said that it is one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field; constellated here with Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo in the first collection, and Robert Hichens’s How Lave Came to Professor Guildea in the second. An almost perfect story, its perfection is the more impressive by reason of the unusual but indispensable length to which it is sustained. The masterly characterisation, not by any means only of the bewitched hero (for who can forget the odious Barrett, and “I was arsking a blessing on our food”?); the slenderness of the ghostly mechanism, equalled only by its deadliness; the so skilfully kept balance, however fierce the odds, between Miss Bengough and her lethal rival; the author’s disconcerting blend of worldly knowledge with unworldly lyricism: these are among the elements in a story which brings great power to the ninetiesish theme of the quest for perfection and the ruin to which the quest so regularly leads. To break through the common round is so often to find oneself surrounded.

The shortest ghost story in the world is said to run thus. There were two strangers alone in a railway compartment. “Do you believe in ghosts?” inquired the first, making conversation. “Yes,” replied the second; and vanished. And so the present reader: seated after midnight, alone in the isolated manor or headland villa, while the last cinders drop, he or she hears the doorbell. After a longish period of no sound but heartbeat, the chain is attached, the door slightly opened. No one stands outside, or certainly no human being; nothing is visible but the dead tree, nothing audible but the rising wind, nothing tangible but the cold trickling in through the vertical crack. The reader returns slowly to the embers; unreassured, and leaving the chain in position. So it is with most phantoms: nothing about them is so confirmatory as nothing.

Robert Aickman