Tales from the Dead of Night: Twelve Classic Ghost Stories (2013) edited by Cecily Gayford

Varieties of spectral Yule fiction

Readers unfamiliar with Tales from the Dead of Night: Twelve Classic Ghost Stories may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection.

Tales from the Dead of Night (2012), edited by Cecily Gayford, is not presented as an anthology of Christmas stories. But three pieces qualify. The book is an excellent general introduction to the supernatural horror field, and contains several outright masterpieces.

"The Shadow" by E. Nesbit begins with a thesis:

This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened.

Nesbit then proceeds to contradict the statement with the tale-within-tale framework narrative she spins. Not that this explains-away the poignant and humble power of "The Shadow." After finishing, we remain entangled.

W. F. Harvey's "The Clock" may be new to his readers, unless they have already pushed into his collected stories. 

It begins as an errand-for-a-friend story, easily braiding a strange location and unknown interior. The narrator observes, as the trapdoor of horror prepares to open:

....The clock had no business to be ticking. The house had been shut up for twelve days. No one had come in to air it or to light fires. I remembered how Mrs Caleb had told my aunt that if she left the keys with a neighbour, she was never sure who might get hold of them. And yet the clock was going....

There is nothing unknown about the exteriors and interiors of "Pirates" by E. F. Benson. Our protagonist returns to a childhood home. Subsequent to his family leaving it behind, no owner or renter has stayed long, and it is now empty of living occupants.

[....]  The house was a sad affair, he thought: it gave him a stab of loneliness to see how decayed was the theatre of their joyful years, and no evidence of newer life, of the children of strangers and even of their children’s children growing up here could have overscored the old sense of it so effectually. He went out of young Peter’s room and paused on the landing: the stairs led down in two short flights to the storey below, and now for the moment he was young Peter again, reaching down with his hand along the banisters and preparing to take the first flight in one leap. But then old Peter saw it was an impossible feat for his less supple joints.

Sublime effects do not always have their source in horror. But the vertiginous terror of time's passing, whether geological eons or a human lifespan, suffices if the craft suffices.

"The Crown Derby Plate" by Marjorie Bowen is about the perils of vacation side-trips and completist collectors misunderstanding the obvious because unconsciously they know it is a check to desire fulfilled. 

  She remembered that thirty years ago – yes, it must be thirty years ago, when, as a young woman, she had put all her capital into the antiques business and had been staying with her cousins (her aunt had then been alive) – she had driven across the marsh to Hartleys, where there was an auction sale; all the details of this she had completely forgotten, but she could recall quite clearly purchasing a set of gorgeous china which was still one of her proud delights, a perfect set of Crown Derby save that one plate was missing.  

  ‘How odd,’ she remarked, ‘that this Miss Lefain should collect china too, for it was at Hartleys that I purchased my dear old Derby service – I’ve never been able to match that plate.’

  ‘A plate was missing? I seem to remember,’ said Clara. ‘Didn’t they say that it must be in the house somewhere and that it should be looked for?’

Bowen is crafty with all elements: with landscape and interiors, with dialogue as action, and with the smell of wrongness evoked even in unrecognized moments of danger. 

Smells of fear are absent from "The Tarn" by Hugh Walpole. But soul-stunting professional jealousy -- something Maugham learned Walpole about -- at each moment threatens to drown his protagonists, Foster and Fenwick. 

  Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host’s knee. ‘Look here! I’m mentioning it for the last time – positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you assured me last night, but I just want –’

  Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man’s hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster’s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets, said, ‘Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?’

  The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.

  ‘I am so glad! That’s splendid! Splendid! I hope you won’t think me ridiculous, but I’ve always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to know you better. I’ve admired your talent so greatly. That novel of yours – the – the – the one about the aloe –’ 

  ‘ The Bitter Aloe ?’

Bitter indeed, and "The Tarn" is a paean to bitterness. Murder will not end it. After murder, in fact, jealousy's bitterness may engulf the killer of the slain, too.

"The Haunting of Shawley Rectory" by Ruth Rendell is a slick story about haunted houses. 

  ‘ Seen? ’ I said. ‘She actually claims to have seen something?’ 

  ‘She said her mother did. She said her mother saw something in the drawing room the first evening they were there. They’d already heard the carriage wheels and the doors closing and the footsteps and all that. The second evening no one dared go in the drawing room. They heard all the sounds again and Mrs Grainger – that’s the mother – heard voices in the drawing room, and it was then that they decided they couldn’t stand it, that they’d have to get out.’ 

Rendell’s thesis is that a haunted house cannot create a tragedy for just any resident. They can only doom a certain type of person, or array of persons; or a certain type of family romance. 

Words like "haunted" and "ghost" are not used in "The Cotillon" by L. P. Hartley. A story about the perils of trifling-with-others, it is a masterpiece. 

  ‘I was always an empty-headed fellow,’ he went on, tapping the waxed covering with his gloved forefinger, so that it gave out a wooden hollow sound —‘there’s nothing much behind this. No brains to speak of, I mean. Less than I used to have, in fact.’

  Marion stared at him in horror.

  ‘Would you like to see? Would you like to look right into my mind?’

  ‘No! No!’ she cried wildly.

  ‘But I think you ought to,’ he said....

It is a superb exercise in accumulating dread, in onrushing horror. 

Reading "The Haunted Dolls’ House” by M. R. James again in this anthology, I wondered: how many purchases has Mr. Dillet made at Mr. Chittenden's shop? Mrs. Chittenden seems happy only about the transaction that opens the story.

  ‘It’s gone,’ [Mr. Chittenden] said. 

  ‘Thank God for that!’ said Mrs Chittenden, putting down the teapot. ‘Mr Dillet, was it?’ 

  ‘Yes, it was.’ 

  ‘Well, I’d sooner it was him than another.’ 

  ‘Oh, I don’t know; he ain’t a bad feller, my dear.’ 

  ‘Maybe not, but in my opinion he’d be none the worse for a bit of a shake-up.’

  ‘Well, if that’s your opinion, it’s my opinion he’s put himself into the way of getting one. Anyhow, we shan’t have no more of it, and that’s something to be thankful for.’

This also begs the question: what did owning the item in question, and having it on the premises, mean for the Chittendens? 

At the two-thirds point in the story, Dillet and the Chittendens find they are recuperating from their respective doll house ordeals at the same "quiet place on the east coast."

Masterfully, James does not dramatize an argument between seller and purchaser. Mr. Chittenden, armored with the-gift-of-the-gab, covers both sides himself:

‘Well, I don’t wonder at you being a bit upset, Mr Dillet. What? Yes, well, I might say ’orrible upset, to be sure, seeing what me and my poor wife went through ourselves. But I put it to you, Mr Dillet, one of two things: was I going to scrap a lovely piece like that on the one ’and, or was I going to tell customers, “I’m selling you a regular picture-palace dramar in reel life of the olden time, billed to perform regular at one o’clock a.m.”? Why, what would you ’ave said yourself? And next thing you know, two Justices of the Peace in the back parlour and pore Mr and Mrs Chittenden off in a spring cart to the county asylum and everyone in the street saying, “Ah, I thought it ’ud come to that. Look at the way the man drank!” – and me next door, or next door but one, to a total abstainer, as you know. Well, there was my position. What? Me ’ave it back in the shop? Well, what do you think? No, but I’ll tell you what I will do. You shall have your money back, bar the ten pound I paid for it, and you make what you can.’

"Pomegranate Seed" by Edith Wharton, uses spectral first-class mail to unzipper a marriage.

Wharton dramatizes numerous scenes of thickening inevitability. The richest interactions come as Charlotte and her mother-in-law unite.

  ‘But the few strokes that I can make out are so pale. No one could possibly read that letter.’ 

  Charlotte laughed again. ‘I suppose everything’s pale about a ghost,’ she said stridently. 

  ‘Oh, my child – my child – don’t say it!’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I say it, when even the bare walls cry it out? What difference does it make if her letters are illegible to you and me? If even you can see her face on that blank wall, why shouldn’t he read her writing on this blank paper? Don’t you see that she’s everywhere in this house, and the closer to him because to everyone else she’s become invisible?’

"The Phantom ’Rickshaw" by Rudyard Kipling returns us to the theme of trifling- with-affections. This is mixed with specialist nomenclature and the off-hand vernacular of a social class unknown to us now. This creates a powerful atmosphere of ostranenie.

Heatherlegh is the nicest doctor that ever was, and his invariable prescription to all his patients is, ‘Lie low, go slow and keep cool.’ He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay, who died under his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively, and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death. ‘Pansay went off the handle,’ says Heatherlegh, ‘after the stimulus of long leave at home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs Keith-Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P&O flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight and killed him, poor devil. Write him off to the system – one man to do the work of two and a half men.’

Closer to home than Kipling's India, "The Toll-House" by W. W. Jacobs relates the adventure of four jocular chums on a walking holiday. They decide to spend the night at a local haunted house.  ‘It always is somebody else that sees [ghosts]," one complains, by way of explanation. But the “frontier guards” of the Toll House are ready for the larkers.

"The Black Veil" by A. F. Kidd is my least favorite type of horror fiction: an occult detective story pastiche. 

"The Hedgehog" by Saki is about a prank that dupes a visitor from the SPR. But, as with the best supernatural fiction, it's the way the story is told that makes the difference. And Saki is the master of "the way the story is told."

The beginning, for instance:

      It was one of the accepted conditions of the rectory garden party that four ladies, who usually knew very little about tennis and a great deal about the players, should sit at that particular spot and watch the game. It had also come to be almost a tradition that two ladies should be amiable and that the other two should be Mrs Dole and Mrs Hatch-Mallard....

"The Bell" by Ryan Price is a contemporary story of social and spectral misunderstandings at pub closing time. The comedy and misperception is cheerfully handled.

Jay

14 December 2023