Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights (2022) edited by by Tanya Kirk

Varieties of spectral Yuletide fiction

The remarkable thing about what happened to me and Ruth was simply that Nothing happened. If you have never come up against Nothing you have no idea how it can scare you out of your wits. When I was a child I used to be afraid of Something in the dark. I know now that the most fearful thing about the dark is that we may find Nothing in it.

Readers unfamiliar with Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection.

Authors and reviewers used to introduce ghost stories with the caveat that such fictions’ time was already finished. Edith Wharton and L. T. C. Rolt each wrote essays to this effect while simultaneously writing the best horror stories of their eras and. careers. In 1944, Edmund Wilson proposed that rural electrification was the final nail in the genre's coffin:

[....] It was only during the ages of candlelight that the race of ghosts really flourished, though they survived through the era of gas. A candle can always burn low and be blown out by a gust of air, and it is a certain amount of trouble to relight it, as is also the case with a gas-jet. But if you can reach out and press a button and flood every corner of the room, leaving the specter quite naked in his vapor, or if you can transfix him out of doors with a flashlight, his opportunities for haunting are limited. It is true that one of the most famous of ghost stories, Defoe's “Apparition of Mrs.Veal,” takes place in the afternoon; that it is a part of the effectiveness of “The Turn of the Screw” that its phantoms appear out-doors in broad daylight as well as indoors at night; and that that eeriest of all ghost stories supposed to be true, the anonymous book called “An Adventure,” purports to give the experiences of two English ladies visiting Versailles in the afternoon; but these are all in the nature of tours de force on the part of the apparitions or the authors. The common run of ghost needed darkness.¹

Hunters at the Hearth is a valuable historical anthology, and a refutation of Wilson all along the line. The stories, all of high quality, span 1864 to 1974, and the advent of indoor utilities affects them not at all.

Pre-1914

“The Phantom Coach” (1864) by the incomparable Amelia B. Edwards weaves its magic from the start:

….It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way.

The story's increasing complications are crisply dramatized.

“Jerry Bundler” (1897) by W. W. Jacobs, like the author's “The Well,” is a story about errors in judgment and their consequences. Men, full of themselves and their cleverness, witness the execution of a ghastly joke. 

….“Of course it’s an old idea that spirits like to get into the company of human beings. A man told me once that he travelled down the Great Western with a ghost and hadn’t the slightest suspicion of it until the inspector came for tickets. My friend said the way that ghost tried to keep up appearances by feeling for it in all its pockets and looking on the floor was quite touching. Ultimately it gave it up and with a faint groan vanished through the ventilator.”

“Bone to His Bone” (1912) by E. G. Swain begins with a sublime touch of horror:

            The moon, by this time, had passed out of the south, and the library seemed all the darker by contrast with the moonlit chamber he had left. He could see nothing but two blue-grey rectangles formed by the windows against the sky, the furniture of the room being altogether invisible. Groping along to where the table stood, Mr. Batchel felt over its surface for the matches which usually lay there; he found, however, that the table was cleared of everything. He raised his right hand, therefore, in order to feel his way to a shelf where the matches were sometimes mislaid, and at that moment, whilst his hand was in mid-air, the matchbox was gently put into it!

From there, the story becomes a spectral treasure hunt, with the ghost ‘throwing common speech into forms suggested by Holy Writ: “So dig,” it said, “that ye may obtain.”’ 

1924-1943

“Oberon Road” (1924)  by A. M. Burrage is a touching London fairy adventure. Forty-two year old Michael Cubitt thinks his life is satisfactory until a series of startling encounters begins:

[Michael Cubitt] vouchsafed an answer when the only other occupant of his compartment laid aside an evening paper and suddenly addressed him.

  “A lot of rain,” said the stranger casually.

  Cubitt regarded him with a long, comprehensive glance. A queer-looking fellow, this man who sat opposite him. He was tall and thin and wore his clothes as if they grew upon him, like the fur of an animal. His mouth was long and straight, almost ludicrously like a receptacle for letters, his forehead high and narrow, and his eyes small, dark, beady, and full of meaningless laughter. But it was his ears which interested Cubitt most. These were long and large and had no lobes to them, and at the tops they were distinctly pointed. He caught himself wondering if they were the ears of a criminal; at least they were the ears of no normal person.

  “Wretched weather,” Cubitt grunted.

  “Oh, I like it,” said the other, grinning, “it makes the toadstools grow.”

  Cubitt frowned slightly over what he considered to be a pleasantry which was either feeble or beyond his understanding.

  “And, of course,” he grunted, “they’ve taken Norman Avenue up, and the pavements will be all over wet clay which the navvies have trodden there, and I shan’t be able to move for people with shopping baskets and umbrellas. I don’t know what the L.C.C. is thinking of—taking up the roads at this time of the year.”

  The stranger had one eye closed as if in contemplation of something, but the other, turned upon Cubitt, grew suddenly very bright and friendly.

  “You live in Judge Park?” he asked.

  “Yes, Fenton Road,” said Cubitt, wondering at the same time what made him so communicative.

  “Ah, I know Judge Park. I’m going there myself tonight. I’ve got something to give to a good policeman who gave a poor man sixpence yesterday instead of running him in for being without a home.”

  “Oh!” said Cubitt shortly, not greatly interested.

  “So,” added the stranger, making his eyes snap merrily, “when you see him standing up in the rain, holding up some traffic with one hand, and beckoning other traffic forward with the other, you’ll know he won’t really be there at all. He’ll be back in a hayfield down Shropshire way.”

When Cubitt finally finds his way to Oberon Road, his experiences become a sentimental mirroring of motifs Machen employed in his late masterpiece, “N.” 

Another neighborhood redolent of almost-Machenean magic is found in “The Last Laugh” (1925)  by D. H. Lawrence. The pivotal character, a young deaf woman, experiences most of the startling transformations. 

           The slightly martial look which her long, dark-blue, military-seeming coat gave her was intensified, while the slightly anxious, bewildered look of her face had gone. She seemed to stretch herself, to stretch her limbs free. And the inert look had left her full, soft cheeks. Her cheeks were alive with the glimmer of pride and a new, dangerous surety.

  She looked quickly at the tall young policeman. He was cleanshaven, fresh-faced, smiling oddly under his helmet, waiting in subtle patience a few yards away. She saw that he was a decent young man, one of the waiting sort.

  The second of ancient fear was followed at once in her by a blithe, unaccustomed sense of power.

  “Well!” she said. “I should say it’s no use waiting.” She spoke decisively.

  “You don’t have to wait for him, do you?” asked the policeman.

  “Not at all. He’s much better where he is.” She laughed an odd, brief laugh. Then glancing over her shoulder, she set off down the hill, carrying her little case. Her feet felt light, her legs felt long and strong. She glanced over her shoulder again. The young policeman was following her, and she laughed to herself. Her limbs felt so lithe and so strong, if she wished she could easily run faster than he. If she wished, she could easily kill him, even with her hands.

  So it seemed to her. But why kill him? He was a decent young fellow. She had in front of her eyes the dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes. Her breast felt full of power, and her legs felt long and strong and wild. She was surprised herself at the sensation of triumph and of rosy anger. Her hands felt keen on her wrists. She who had always declared she had not a muscle in her body! Even now, it was not muscle, it was a sort of flame.

Her eventual healing echoes the healing of the young woman with tuberculosis in Machen’s The Great Return. 

“Dr. Browning's Bus” (1933)  by E. S. Knights is a richly detailed story about a doctor who retires from city to country, to a house called Eastman’s Farm. It has a dark history:

          As with many other such places, curious tales hung round Eastman’s Farm. Old village wives told of a brutal farmer who had lived there with only an ancient dame to “do for him.” One day after a fearful storm they were both found dead in front of the house with no suggestion of how they met their end, and ever since it was firmly believed that their unhappy spirits visited the farm during a storm.

“Whittington's Cat” (1933) by Lady Eleanor Smith is a warning to young men about the dangers of bachelorhood and independent scholarship, to say nothing of collecting prints. Our protagonist, Martin, got the idea for his research project, Pantomime throughout the Ages, several months before Christmas.

          Early that autumn, visiting a local curiosity shop, he had stumbled by chance upon a series of spangled prints representing characters from popular pantomimes; fascinated by the glitter and gaiety of these little pictures, he had bought the lot, and hung them in his bedroom; he was determined to reproduce them as illustrations to the book, and it is conceivable that his fondness for the collection may have influenced his choice of subject.

By story's end, Martin's doctor recites the lessons learned:

             The doctor lighted his pipe.

  “I think you’re very lucky to be alive.”

  “What else?”

  “I’ll tell you, Martin, since you want to know. What I’ve got to say is unethical and the world would probably laugh me out of the medical profession if it heard me talking to you, but I’ll chance that.” He took a pull at his pipe. “Look here, Martin, it’s not good for any young man to live so much alone as you’ve been doing. This lonely house, these books—it’s not a healthy existence. You’re inclined to be imaginative, you’re a bit neurotic into the bargain, and all that combined is tempting Providence.”

  “Well?”

  “Merely this: let us suppose for a moment that there do dwell, on the borders of this world and some other world, unclean spirits, evil elementals, forever in search, so to speak, of pliable human minds on which to impose their own will—suppose, I say, just suppose, such creatures exist, you yourself would undoubtedly have been an ideal victim for their experiments. Do you see?”

  There was a pause.

  “I see”, Martin said, slowly, “that at least you understand my story and don’t think me mad.”

  “I don’t think you mad… Go abroad for six months, and when you come back to Burford try to interest yourself in something less solitary than study. Buy a car, but learn to repair it yourself. Keep a horse, but groom it. And don’t go mooning about by yourself at pantomimes any more. Take some children with you next time.”

  “There won’t be any next time,” said Martin.

“The Earlier Service” (1935)  by Margaret Irwin recapitulates several motifs first explored in her story “The Book” (1930): an intelligence expressed with writing and a family in the crosshairs of corrupt and malevolent influences. In “The Earlier Service,” the writing is Medieval graffiti on a church wall; more words appear as more attention is paid. As teenage daughter Jane approaches confirmation, strange events begin to mirror experiences of another young woman circa 1474.

“Christmas Honeymoon” (1939)  by Howard Spring features a pair of winsome newlyweds off on a Cornish honeymoon two days after they meet, one day after their marriage. On Christmas Eve they get lost on a rocky coast, lose their way on a moor, and after dark come upon a village empty of all life.

            We had stared through the windows of every cottage in the village. We had looked at the shop and the inn. We had banged at three doors and entered two houses. But we had not admitted our extraordinary situation in words. Now I said to Ruth, “What do you make of it?”

  She said simply, “It’s worse than ghosts. Ghosts are something. This is nothing. Everything is absolutely normal. That’s what seems so horrible.”

  And, indeed, a village devastated by fire, flood, or earthquake would not have disturbed us as we were disturbed by that village which was devastated by nothing at all.

  Ruth shut the door of the hall. The crashing of the sea on granite, the tolling of the bell, now seemed far off. We stood and looked at one another uneasily in the dim light of the hurricane lamp. “I shall stay here,” said Ruth, “either till the morning or till something happens.”

  She moved down the hall to a door which opened into a room at the back. I followed her. She tapped on the door, but neither of us expected an answer, and there was none. We went in.

  Nothing that night surprised us like what we saw then. Holding the lantern high above my head, I swung its light round the room. It was a charming place, panelled in dark oak. A few fine pictures were on the walls. There were plenty of books, some pieces of good porcelain. The curtains of dark-green velvet fringed with gold were drawn across the window. A fire was burning on the hearth. That was what made us start back almost in dismay—the fire.

  If it had been a peat fire—one of those fires that, once lit, smoulder for days—we should not have been surprised. But it was not. Anyone who knew anything about fires could see that this fire had been lit within the last hour. Some of the coals were still black; none had been consumed. And the light from this fire fell upon the white smooth texture of an excellent linen cloth upon the table. On the table was supper, set for one. A chair was placed before the knife and fork and plates. There was a round of cold beef waiting to be cut, a loaf of bread, a jar of pickles, a fine cheese, a glass, and a jug containing beer.

  Ruth laughed shrilly. I could hear that her nerves were strained by this last straw. “At least we shan’t starve,” she cried. “I’m nearly dying of hunger. I suppose the worst that could happen would be the return of the bears, demanding ‘Who’s been eating my beef? Who’s been drinking my beer?’ Sit down. Carve!”

I could go on quoting and praising “Christmas Honeymoon.” It is a superbly written work of uncanny fiction. In small compass it makes-strange marriage, honeymoons, Cornwall, and the nothingness of human absence. It displays every facet of horror I love.

To offset the open-country emptiness of “Christmas Honeymoon,” “The Cheery Soul” (1942)  by Elizabeth Bowen drops us into a wartime interior: the Midlands, the home of the Rangerton-Karneys. Our protagonist, on Christmas break from war work, has been invited to stay. But, of a break there will be none: cross-talk, misunderstanding, and door slamming quickly commences. An old aunt, the house's only resident, offers the narrator no help or comfort.

In the kitchen, the narrator discovers the cook's last notes to the Rangerton-Karneys:

            I put my rations down on the table and was, dumbfounded, preparing to turn away, when a white paper on the white wood caught my eye. This paper, in an inexpert line of block-printing, bore the somewhat unnecessary statement: I am not here. To this was added, in brackets: “Look in the fish kettle.” Though this be no affair of mine, could I fail to follow it up? Was this some new demonstration of haybox cookery; was I to find our dinner snugly concealed? I identified the fish kettle, a large tin object (about the size, I should say, of an infant’s bath) that stood on a stool half way between the sink and range. It wore a tight-fitting lid, which came off with a sort of plop: the sound in itself had an ominous hollowness. Inside, I found, again, only a piece of paper. This said: “Mr. & the 2 Misses Rangerton-Karney can boil their heads. This holds 3.”

At this point, a policeman arrives with some shocking revelations.

Bowen fills “The Cheery Soul” with many droll strokes. The farce and contretemps, handled with deft brevity, make for an enjoyable respite.

….Whether I met with my adventure through any fault of my own I cannot tell. But of one thing I am sure. There are powers of darkness which walk abroad in waste places: and that man is happy who has never had to face them.

  If anyone who reads this should ever have a similar experience and should feel tempted to try to investigate it further, I commend to him the counsel of Jesus-ben-Sira.

  “My son, seek not things that are too hard for thee: and search not out things that are above thy strength.”

“Between Sunset and Moonrise” (1943) by R. H. Malden is a stunning short story. It begins with a familiar narrative frame: our narrator, acting as executor for a recently deceased friend, relates a strange story found among the friend's papers. It dates from his time as vicar in an isolated Fen country parish.

[....] There was nothing which could be made fit for publication, except one document which I should have preferred to suppress. But he had left particular instructions in his will that it was to be published when he had been dead for a year. Accordingly I subjoin it exactly as it left his hand. It was dated two years after he had left Yaxholme, and nearly five before his death.

One New Year’s Eve, the vicar decides to visit a Mrs. Vries. She lives at the end of an isolated fenland drove that can only be approached on foot.

            When I reached the cottage I was a little surprised at having to knock three times, and by hearing the sound of bolts cautiously drawn back. Presently the door opened and Mrs. Vries peered out. As soon as she saw who it was she made me very welcome as usual. But it was impossible not to feel that she had been more or less expecting some other visitor, whom she was not anxious to see. However, she volunteered no statement, and I thought it better to pretend to have noticed nothing unusual. On a table in the middle of the room lay a large book in which she had obviously been reading. I was surprised to see that it was a Bible, and that it lay open at the Book of Tobit. Seeing that I had noticed it Mrs. Vries told me—with a little hesitation, I thought—that she had been reading the story of Sarah and the fiend Asmodeus. Then—the ice once broken—she plied me almost fiercely with questions. “To what cause did I attribute Sarah’s obsession, in the first instance?” “Did the efficacy of Tobias’ remedy depend upon the fact that it had been prescribed by an angel?” and much more to the same effect. Naturally my answers were rather vague, and her good manners could not conceal her disappointment….

After departure, the vicar has a queer encounter on the drove, which is surrounded by walls of fog.

 [....] what I had seen was a creature of darkness and waste places…. When I reached home my housekeeper looked at me oddly. Of course my clothes were muddy and disarranged, but I suspect that there was something else unusual in my appearance. I merely said that I had had a fall coming up a drove in the dark, and was not feeling particularly well. I avoided the looking-glass when I went to my room to change.

Only on New Year's Day does the vicar learn of Mrs. Vries’ fate. The local doctor eventually shares his opinion:

[....] she must have had a shock of some kind. “In fact,” he said, “if anyone ever died of fright, she did. But goodness knows what can have frightened her in her own kitchen unless it was her own conscience. But that is more in your line than mine.”

“Between Sunset and Moonrise” is a bravura piece of writing. 

Post-1945

“The Mirror in Room 22” (1946)  by James Hadley Chase takes us back to the Second World War. RAF officers at a new UK billet spend a glum Christmas evening smoking and listening to a dog howling somewhere outdoors.

            “I suppose all lonely old country houses are creepy,” Meadowfield, the catering officer, remarked. 

            “If you’re afraid that a spook will jump out on you when you go to bed I don’t mind convoying you along the corridor for a slight consideration.” There was a general laugh, in which Hopkins joined, and then came a pause in the conversation. The wind rose to a sudden crescendo, sending a flurry of twigs and small stones against the windows, for a moment drowning the ghoulish howling of the dog.

“The Mirror in Room 22” is told in a few pages of clipped, professional jargon. We are far away from pre-1914 storytelling; this is the hard, sharp style perfected by H. Russell Wakefield, John Metcalfe, and Elizabeth Bowen. Yet the English Ghost story's traditional tropes persist: 

            “It seems that the last two occupants of Room Twenty-two were found lying before the mirror with a razor in their hands and their throats cut. Both of them had occupied the room on successive Christmas Eves and since then the room had been kept locked. It was only when my squadron moved in that the room was opened again.”

            He gave a chuckle. “I thought it was absolute rot and told the squire so. As the evening went on I forgot all about it. The next morning I was on early duty and got up about six o’clock. It was dark and the room was lit only by flickering candles. The dog was howling as it is howling now but even then I did not think of those odd deaths that had taken place in the room. I began to shave before the mirror, watching as one does the reflection of my face. Then quite suddenly I had an extraordinary illusion. It could have been nothing but that, of course, but I found I was no longer looking at myself in the mirror, but at someone completely different….

The narrator of “At the Chalet Lartrec” (1947)  by Winston Graham recounts a post-war experience of “Major Frederick Vane, aged thirty-three, a British officer attached to U.N.R.R.A….” He is given shelter at an Alpine inn closed for the season. The husband and wife proprietors are a forlorn pair, the wife weepy and the husband a man who nervously shrugs his shoulders “as if to rid them of some oppressive weight.”

“Account Rendered” (1951) by William Fryer Harvey is another in a series of stories by the author where a man tries to evade the Eternal Footman. In this case, it is about a man who approaches doctors with a strange request on the same day each year. “All he wanted was to be fully anaesthetised between 11:45 and 12:15.” 

That's 11:45 p.m. and 12:15 a.m.

Over several years a nurse and two doctors realize they have all met the man, and had the same odd experience at midnight during the procedure. 

“The Wild Wood” (1957) was written by U.S. author Mildred Clingerman.  She shared a similar deadpan observational perspective with a levy of talented post-1945 horror writers. These included Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Charles Beaumont, and Shirley Jackson. 

Written in an immaculate third person, "The Wild Wood" explores a yearly ritual humiliation faced by a wife and mother as she accompanies her husband and children to purchase a family Christmas tree from the disgusting and lascivious Mr. Cravolini and his mentally handicapped sister, Angela. 

             Every year after that Margaret promised herself that this year she’d stay at home on the tree-buying night. But something always forced her to go—some errand, a last bit of shopping, or Don’s stern injunctions not to be silly, that he could not handle Bonnie, Bruce, and the biggest tree in town. Once there, she never managed to escape Cravolini’s unctuous welcome. If she sat in the car, then he came out to speak to her. Much better go inside and stick close by Don and the children. But that never quite worked, either. Somehow the three of them eluded her; she might hear their delighted shouts two aisles over, but when she hastened in their direction, she found only Cravolini waiting. She never eluded him. Sometimes on New Year’s Day, when she heard so much about resolutions on radio and television, she thought that surely this year she’d tell Don at least some of the things Cravolini said to her—did to her—enough, anyway, to assure the Abbotts never going back there again. But she never did. It would be difficult to explain to Don why she’d waited so long to speak out about it. Why hadn’t she told him that first night?

             She could only shake her head in puzzlement and distaste for motivations that were tangled in a long, bad dream. And how could a woman of almost-forty explain and deeply explore a woman in her twenties? Even if they were the same woman, it was impossible.

Clingerman spins the secret malaise of Margaret's suburban life into a phantasmagoric inner monologue: the soul-measuring looks of her children, the fact that kids "see things that adults never notice," the sensation that all this had happened before, a dream that lived and walked beside her and had the power to call her back every year.

Presentiments of doom, of course, sometimes cannot rescue us from the onrushing pitfall. Particularly when it may be camouflaged by black magic.

"....but I sent them away and said that waits must wait till Christmas Eve.”

Each of L. P. Hartley's horror stories achieves a high level of sustained macabre art. In the last seven years, I have read with admiration his collections The Traveling Grave (1948) and Two For The River (1961).

“The Waits” (1961) depicts a crowded few Christmas Eve minutes as endured by the Marriner family: Henry, a successful "Capital Distribution" mandarin father, his wife, daughter Anne, and son Jeremy. The action takes place around the dining room table after a day's hard work of cooking and decorating by mother and daughter.

From outside, they hear carolers.

"[....] Who’ll go and give them something?”

  “I will,” Anne said, jumping up. “What shall I give them, Daddy?”

  “Oh, give them a bob,” said Mr. Marriner, producing the coin from his pocket. However complicated the sum required he always had it.

  Anne set off with the light step and glowing face of an eager benefactor; she came back after a minute or two at a much slower pace and looking puzzled and rather frightened. She didn’t sit down but stood over her place with her hands on the chair-back.

  “He said it wasn’t enough,” she said.

  “Wasn’t enough?” her father repeated. “Did he really say that?”

  Anne nodded.

  “Well, I like his cheek.” Even to his family Mr. Marriner’s moods were unforeseeable; by some chance the man’s impudence had touched a sympathetic chord in him. “Go back and say that if they sing another carol they shall have another bob.”

  But Anne didn’t move.

  “If you don’t mind, Daddy, I’d rather not.”

  They all three raised questioning faces to hers.

  “You’d rather not? Why?”

  “I didn’t like his manner.”

I used to confuse the end of "The Waits" with the end of "The Book" by Margaret Irwin. Both feature bourgeois families, and have sites of pivotal action in dining rooms. Additionally, the final moments of "The Waits," when Henry – pistol in hand – confronts the carolers, also recalls a final revelation in Hartley's masterpiece, "Cotillon" (1931).

[....]“Will you be quiet? They’re saying something. Now Daddy’s pointing the gun at him—he’s got him covered! His finger’s on the trigger, he’s going to shoot! No, he isn’t. The man’s come nearer—he’s come right up to Daddy! Now he’s showing him something, something on his forehead—oh, if I had a torch—and Daddy’s dropped it, he’s dropped the gun!”

It recalls, sublatedly, a thought M. R. James expresses near the conclusion of “Stories I Have Tried To Write,” regarding an idea for a story set at a holiday part, and the fate of one of the attendees:

[....] They will probably leave the party early, pleading indisposition; but very likely a previous engagement of long standing would be the more truthful excuse. [Emphasis in original.]

How many night watchman horror stories are there? “Deadman's Corner” (1963) by George Denby is my second; the first was L. P. Hartley’s “Night Fears” (1924), which I reviewed here as part of The Travelling Grave and Other Stories. Hartley, always unerring in finding a weird angle of approach, gave us a late night story about an unnerving visitor to a night watchman's shack and brazier:

‘When the eye doth not see,’ continued the stranger, ‘the heart doth not grieve; on the contrary, it makes merry.’ He laughed, as the night-watchman could see from the movement of his shoulders. ‘I’ve known cases very similar to yours. When the cat’s away, you know! It’s a pity you’re under contract to finish this job’ (the night-watchman had not mentioned a contract), ‘but as you are, take my advice and get a friend to keep an eye on your house. Of course, he won't be able to stay the night —of course not; but tell him to keep his eyes open.’

George Denby's “Deadman's Corner” presents a similar kind of meeting. His night watchman is on a dark and lonely rural road. Denby’s two characters are more loquacious than Hartley’s, but the menace is still there as they discuss the bloody history of the construction site. 

             “Cold, ah. Pretty cold it were… So they’re mendin’ old road at last.”

  “Ah.”

  “’Bout time too. Bad name this corner’s allus ’ad.”

  “Accidents?”

  “Ah, and more’n accidents.” With the palms of his hands he essayed to brush the snow off the front of his old worn overcoat.

  “W’y, wot more’n accidents?”

  “W’y, it’s ’ereabout, by the roadside like, many a year agone, as they took and ’anged Dancing Jack. Ah, and buried ’un too nigh about.”

  “Dancin’ Jack? Never ’eard tell on ’im. ’Oo was ’e?”

  “’Ighwayman, that’s wot ’e was. ’E robbed mail ’ereabouts, and they took ’im and ’anged, drawed and quartered ’im, ah, and buried ’un too nigh round about. And folk won’t come nigh this place ’o nights accordin’.”

  “Well, I ain’t seed ’im, mate, and I lay I never shall. I tell you wot. I bin a night watchman nigh on forty year and I can tell yer that I’ve watched in some mighty queer places. And I ain’t never seed no ghost yet.”

Long-time horror readers may guess the climax; the fun of “Deadman's Corner” is getting there. 

Prematurely figuring out the ending is also a possibility when reading the splendid “Don't Tell Cissie” (1974) by Celia Fremlin. Tone and characterization entice, and I look forward to reading more Fremlin in the future. She has an eye and ear for class, manners, and shortcomings similar to E. F. Benson and Elizabeth Bowen. 

“Don't Tell Cissie” portrays a rural cottage ghost-hunt by the new owner and her friend, the narrator.

            At one time, we used to be sorry for Cissie, the only one of our set who never married. But now, when the slow revolving of the decades has left me a widow and Rosemary stranded among the flotsam of a dead marriage—now, lately I have begun wondering whether Cissie hasn’t done just as well for herself as any of us, in the long run. Certainly, she has had plenty of fun on the fringes of other people’s lives, over the years. She wangles invitations to silver-wedding parties; worms her way into other people’s family holidays—and even if it ends up with the whole lot of them in quarantine at the airport because of Cissie coming out in spots—well, at least she’s usually had a good run for her money first.

  And, to be fair to her, it’s not just the pleasures and luxuries of our lives that she tries to share; it’s the problems and crises, too. I remember she managed to be present at the birth of my younger son, and if only she hadn’t dropped the boiling kettle on her foot just as I went into the second stage of labour, her presence would have been a real help. As it was, the doctor and midwife were both busy treating her for shock in the kitchen, and binding up her scalded leg, while upstairs my son arrived unattended, and mercifully without fuss. Perhaps even the unborn are sensitive to atmosphere? Perhaps he sensed, even then, that, with Cissie around, it’s just no use anyone else making a fuss about anything?

Celia Fremlin makes it clear to the reader she is having a good time. While the punchline may be guessable, “Don't Tell Cissie” is a delight.

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Should we spend our holiday evenings reading or reciting spectral horror stories? It is an excellent distraction as we try to avoid the living. 

And ghost story readers – after all – make the best hearth haunters anyway.

Jay

29 December 2023

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1. The New Yorker, May 27, 1944 P. 72. Also available in Classics and Commercials:

https://www.amazon.com/Classics-Commercials-Literary-Chronicle-Forties-ebook/dp/B07ZBWJRQV/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=