"The Red Lodge" (1928) by H. Russell Wakefield

Slime and the spectral

"They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city."

Psalm 59:6 KJV

Readers unfamiliar with "The Red Lodge" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

Two nights ago I made the mistake of listening to Tony Walker's superb reading of "The Red Lodge" (1928) by H. Russell Wakefield. 

I say "mistake" because I started listening to it at 11pm. Horripilation commenced at 11:11pm, when Wakefield's narrator, alone in a room at night and reading Sidgwick's The Use of Words in Reasoning, suddenly heard a cough directly behind him. Wakefield's management of the moment is admirable. The lengthy quote from Sidgwick, inhumanly soporific, nicely suggests the after-dinner half-doze anyone might experience:

         Mary, pleading a headache, went to bed soon after dinner, and I went to the study to read.

       Directly I had shut the door I had again that very unpleasant sensation of being watched. It made the reading of Sidgwick's The Use of Words in Reasoning — an old favourite of mine, which requires concentration — a difficult business. Time after time I found myself peeping into dark corners and shifting my position. And there were little sharp sounds; just the oak-panelling cracking, I supposed. After a time I became more absorbed in the book, and less fidgety, and then I heard a very soft cough just behind me. I felt little icy rays pour down and through me, but I would not look round, and I would go on reading. I had just reached the following passage: 'However many things may be said about Socrates, or about any fact observed, there remains still more that might be said if the need arose; the need is the determining factor. Hence the distinction between complete and incomplete description, though perfectly sharp and clear in the abstract, can only have a meaning — can only be applied to actual cases — if it be taken as equivalent to sufficient description, the sufficiency being relative to some purpose. Evidently the description of Socrates as a man, scanty though it is, may be fully sufficient for the purpose of the modest enquiry whether he is mortal or not' — when my eye was caught by a green patch which suddenly appeared on the floor beside me, and then another and another, following a straight line towards the door. I picked up the nearest one, and it was a bit of soaking slime. I called on all my will-power, for I feared something worse to come, and it should not materialize — and then no more patches appeared. I got up and walked deliberately, slowly, to the door, turned on the light in the middle of the room, and then came back and turned out the reading lamp and went to my dressing-room. 

The courage to go back and switch off the reading lamp before calmly leaving the room is a powerful depiction of grace under unimaginable pressure.

*   *   *

In his introduction to The Eighth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1972), editor Robert Aickman writes:

[....] The Red Lodge details another peril of property ownership: the property this time being of the kind usually found not too far from a good golf club. It was H. R. Wakefield’s intention to make the hair stand on end: an exercise necessary on occasion in such places. Wakefield was what one may term a prolific writer of ghost stories.They are few.¹

How does Wakefield accomplish this? I think his strategy is two-fold. First, immediate sighting or hearing of the uncanny is juxtaposed with household routine, but is touched-upon only lightly. 

Second, Wakefield compresses revelations about several different types of manifestation, deftly building them into an oppressive mass of varied but insidious instances.

Wakefield begins this section with Tom, the father, questioning Tim's nurse:

         'Did you see anything that could have frightened him?'

       'No, sir, nothing.'

       I went back to them. It was no good questioning Tim, and there was nothing coherent to be learnt from his hysterical sobbing. He grew calmer presently, and was taken up to bed. Suddenly he turned to Mary, and looked at her with eyes of terror.

        'The green monkey won't get me, will it, Mummy?'

         'No, no, it's all right now,' said Mary, and soon after he went to sleep, and then she and I went down to the drawing-room. She was on the border of hysteria herself.

         'Oh, Tom, what is the matter with this awful house? I'm terrified. Ever since I've been here I've been terrified. Do you see things?'

         'Yes,' I replied.

         'Oh, I wish I'd known. I didn't want to worry you if you hadn't. Let me tell you what it's been like. On the day we arrived I saw a man pass ahead of me into my bedroom. Of course, I only thought I had. And then I've heard beastly whisperings, and every time I pass that turn in the corridor I know there's someone just round the corner. And then the day before you arrived I woke suddenly, and something seemed to force me to go to the window, and I crawled there on hands and knees and peeped through the blind. It was just light enough to see. And suddenly I saw someone running down the lawn, his or her hands outstretched, and there was something ghastly just beside him, and they disappeared behind the trees at the end. I'm terrified every minute.'

*   *   *

Slime is the place where earth life began.² 

[....] Despite the fact that humans gradually ascended from these clustered ponds of ooze, slime, as both a general name for a life-generative and semi-solid substance in the physical sense and the disgust of life, the ostensible grossness of organic being in a metaphysical sense, slime remains something to be left behind and forgotten. This is despite the fact that humans are well aware of the fact that our individual biological geneses consist of the unceremonious mixture of slimy biological components (of sperm and egg); sexual procreation being an obvious example of the disgusting yet generative articulation of slime-as-life and life-as-slime. (Woodard 6)

Slime has been a substance in horror since horror began. From the Alien franchise to pornographic videos, slime converts to the enemy within: it collects, alters, and hollows out the human mind and body.³

The slime at the Red Lodge is part of a larger ensemble of effects: tactile, visual, auditory; they quickly beat down the narrator's family. Tom and Mary each tried to ignore it for the sake of the other. In fact, I suspect they and Tim would have died in the river but for the galvanizing intervention of Sir William.

*   *   *

✂Green slime

✂Green monkey

✂The cough

✂The man in the bedroom corridor

✂Figures running for the river at night

✂Made to crawl from bed to window at night

[....]  an hour before dawn they made their greatest effort. I knew that they were willing me to creep on my hands and knees to the window and peep through the blind, and that if I did so we were doomed. As I set my teeth and tightened my grip till I felt racked with agony, the sweat poured from me. I felt them come crowding round the bed and thrusting their faces into mine, and a voice in my head kept saying insistently, 'You must crawl to the window and look through the blind.' In my mind's eye I could see myself crawling stealthily across the floor and pulling the blind aside, but who would be staring back at me?

*   *   *

In the last six months I have reread all the Ash-Tree Press collections of Wakefield stories except They Return At Evening (1928). Thank you, Tony Walker, for reminding me of the power of "The Red Lodge." 

1928 was a fruitful year for short horror stories, but none had the power of Wakefield's perfectly crafted nightmare.

Jay

31 December 2023

1. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KuXj-AHSX4QHC6dB0mF4EqrlaA0QaI7d/view?usp=drives

2. Woodard, Ben. Slime Dynamics. John Hunt Publishing, 2012.i

3. And yet, if young Tim were alive today, and a few years older, he might go online to find a recipe to make his own slime.