Dark Entries (20 page)

There was one place where the briars and ragged bushes were particularly dense and abundant, constituting a small prickly copse. Round the outskirts of this copse, the child led the way until Clarinda saw that embedded in its perimeter was a rickety shed. Possibly constructed for some agricultural purpose but long abandoned by its maker, it drooped and sagged into the ground. From it came a penetrating and repugnant odour, like all the bad smells of nature and the stockyard merged together.

‘That’s it,’ said the little girl pointing. They were still some yards off, but the feral odour from the shed was already making Clarinda feel sick.

‘I don’t think I want to go in
there.’

‘But you
must.
Rufo’s in there. All the others changed long ago.’

Apart from other considerations, the shed seemed too small to house many; and Clarinda could now see that the approach to it was thick with mud, which added its smell to the rest. She was sure that the floor of the shed was muddy almost to the knees.

The child’s face was puckered with puzzlement.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Clarinda, ‘but you know I don’t want to change at all.’

Clearly she was behaving in
quite the wrong way. But the child took a grip on the situation and said, ‘Wait here. I’ll go and ask.’

‘All right,’ said Clarinda. ‘But I’ll wait over there, if
you don’t mind.’ The child seemed not to notice the awful smell, but Clarinda was not going to be the first to mention it.

‘
There
,’ said the child, pointing to an exact spot. Clarinda took up her stance upon it. ‘Mind you don’t move.’

‘Not if you hurry.’ The smell was still very detectable.

‘Quite still,’ insisted the child.

‘Quite still,’ said Clarinda.

Swiftly the child ran three times round Clarinda in a large circle. The light was so clear that Clarinda could see the drops of water flying up from her feet.

‘
Hurry
,’
urged Clarinda; and, the third circle complete, the child darted away round the edge of the copse in the direction from which they had come.

Left alone in the still moonlight, Clarinda wondered whether this were not her great chance to return home to safety and certainty. Then she saw a figure emerging from the dilapidated hut.

The figure walked upright, but otherwise appeared to be a large furry animal, such as a bear or ape. From its distinctive staggering uncertainty of gait, Clarinda would have recognised Rufo, even without the statements of the little girl. Moreover, he was still leaning upon his long crook, which stuck in the mud and had to be dragged out at every step. He too was going back round the edge of the copse, the same way as the child. Although he showed no sign of intending to molest Clarinda, she found him a horrifying sight, and decided upon retreat. Then she became really frightened; because she found she could not move.

The hairy slouching figure drew slowly nearer, and with him came an intensification of the dreadful smell, sweet and putrid and commingled. The animal skin was thick and wrinkled about his neck and almost covered his face, but Clarinda saw his huge nose and expressionless eyes. Then he was past, and the child had reappeared.

‘I ran all the way.’ Indeed it seemed as if she had been gone only an instant. ‘You’re not to bother about changing because it’s too late anyway.’ Clearly she was repeating words
spoken by an adult. ‘You’re to come at once, although of course you’ll have to be hidden. But it’s all right,’ she added reassuringly. ‘There’ve been people before who’ve had to be hidden.’ She spoke as if the period covered by her words were at least a generation. ‘But you’d better be quick.’

Clarinda found that she could move once more. Rufo, moreover, had disappeared from sight.

‘Where do I hide?’

‘I’ll show you. I’ve often done it.’ Again she was showing off slightly. ‘Bind your hair.’

‘What?’

‘Bind your hair. Do be quick.’ The little girl was peremptory but not unsympathetic. She was like a mother addressing an unusually slow child she was none the less rather fond of. ‘Haven’t you got that thing you had before?’

‘It was raining then.’ But Clarinda in fact had replaced the black scarf in her mackintosh pocket after drying it before the Carstairs’ kitchen fire. Now, without knowing why, she drew it out.

‘Go
on
.’
Clarinda’s sluggishness was making the child frantic.

But Clarinda refused to be rattled. With careful grace she went through the moonlit ritual of twisting the scarf round her head and enveloping her abundant soft hair.

The child led her back halfway round the copse to where there was a tiny path between the bushes. This path also was exceedingly muddy; ploughed up, as Clarinda could plainly see, by innumerable hoofmarks.

‘I’d better go first,’ said the little girl; adding with her customary good manners, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather spiky.’

It was indeed. The little girl, being little, appeared to advance unscathed; but Clarinda, being tall, found that her clothes were torn to pieces, and her face and hands lacerated. The radiance of the moon had sufficed outside, but in here failed to give
warning of the thick tangled briars and rank whipcord suckers. Everywhere was a vapour of ancient cobwebs, clinging and greasy, amid which strange night insects flapped and flopped.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said the little girl. ‘You’d better be rather quiet.’

It was impossible to be quiet, and Clarinda was almost in tears with the discomfort.

‘
Quieter
,’ said the little girl; and Clarinda did not dare to answer back.

The slender muddy trail, matted with half-unearthed roots, wriggled on for another minute or two; and then the little girl whispered, ‘Under here.’

She was making a gap in the foliage of a tall round bush. Clarinda pushed in. ‘Ssh,’ said the little girl.

Inside it was like a small native hut. The foliage hung all round, but there was room to stand up and dry ground beneath the feet.

‘Stand on this,’ whispered the little girl, pointing to a round, sawn section of tree, about two feet high and four in diameter. ‘I call it
my fairy dinner table.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m all right, thank you. I’m always here.’

Clarinda climbed on to the section of tree, and made a cautious aperture in the boscage before her.

The sight beyond was one which she would not easily forget.

Clearly, to begin with, this was the maze, although Clarinda had never seen or heard of such a maze before. It filled a clearing in the copse about twenty or thirty yards wide and consisted in a labyrinth of little ridges, all about nine inches high. The general pattern of the labyrinth was circular, with involved inner convolutions everywhere, and at some points flourishes curving beyond the main outer boundary, as if they had once erupted like boils or volcanic blow-holes. In the valleys between the ridges, grass grew, but the ridges themselves were trodden bare. At the centre of the maze was a hewn block of stone, which put Clarinda in mind of the Stone of Scone.

Little of this, however, had much immediate significance for Clarinda; because all over the maze, under the moon, writhed and slithered and sprawled the smooth white bodies of men and women. There were scores of them; all apparently well-shaped
and comely; all (perhaps for that reason) weirdly impersonal; all recumbent and reptilian, as in a picture Clarinda remembered having seen; all completely and impossibly silent beneath the silent night. Clarinda saw that all round the maze were heaps of furry skins
.
She then noticed that the heads of all the women were bound in black fillets.

At the points where the coils of the maze surged out beyond the main perimeter were other, different figures. Still wrapped in furs, which distorted and made horrible the outlines of their bodies, they clung together as if locked in death. Down to the maze the ground fell away a few feet from Clarinda’s hiding place. Immediately below her was one of these groups, silent as all the rest. By one of the shapeless figures she noticed a long thick staff. Then the figure soundlessly shifted, and the white moonlight fell upon the face of the equally shapeless figure in
its arms. The eyes
were blank and
staring, the nostrils stretched like a running deer, and the red lips not so much parted as drawn back to the gums: but Clarinda recognised the face of Mrs Pagani.

Suddenly there was a rustling in the hiding-place. Though soft, it was the first sound of any kind since Clarinda had looked out on the maze.

‘Go away, you silly little boy,’ muttered the little girl.

Clarinda looked over her shoulder.

Inside the bower, the moonlight, filtered through the veil of foliage, was dim and deceitful; but she could see the big eyes and bird-of-prey mien of the other child. He was still wearing his bright blue hooded garment; but now the idea occurred to Clarinda that he might not be a child at all, but a well-proportioned dwarf. She looked at the black ground before stepping down from the tree trunk; and instantly he leapt at her. She felt a sharp, indefinite pain in her ankle and saw one of the creature’s hands yellow and clawlike where a moonbeam through the hole above fell on the pale wood of the cut tree. Then in the murk the little girl did something which Clarinda could not see at all, and the hand jerked into passivity. The little girl was crying.

Clarinda touched her torn ankle, and stretched her hand into the beam of light. There was duly a mess of blood.

The little girl clutched at Clarinda’s wrist. ‘Don’t let them see,’ she whispered beseechingly through her tears. ‘Oh please don’t let them see.’ Then she added with passionate fury, ‘He always spoils
everything.
I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.’

Clarinda’s ankle hurt badly, and there was palpable danger of blood poisoning, but otherwise the injury was not severe.

‘Shall I be all right if I go?’

‘Yes. But I think you’d better run.’

‘That may not be so easy.’

The little girl seemed desolated with grief.

‘Never mind,’ said Clarinda. ‘And thank you.’

The little girl stopped sobbing for a moment. ‘You
will
come back?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Clarinda.

The sobbing recommenced. It was very quiet and despairing.

‘Well,’ said Clarinda, ‘I’ll see.’

‘Punctually? That makes all the difference, you know.’

‘Of course,’ said Clarinda.

The child smiled at her in the faint moonlight. She was being brave. She was remembering her manners.

‘Shall I come with you?’

‘No need,’ said Clarinda rather hastily.

‘I mean to the end of the little path.’

‘Still no need,’ said Clarinda. ‘Thank you again though. Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye,’ said the little girl. ‘Don’t forget. Punctual.’

Clarinda crept along the involved muddy path: then she sped across the soft wet sward, which she spotted with her blood; through the gate where she had seen Rufo, and down the hill where she had seen the pigs; past the ill-spelled notice; and home. As she fumbled with the patent catch, the church clock which kept ward over Mrs Pagani’s abode struck three. The mist was rising again everywhere; but, in what remained of the moonlight, Clarinda, before entering the house, unwound the black scarf from her head and shook her soft abundant locks.

The question of Mrs Pagani’s unusual dwelling-place arose, of course, the next morning, as they hurriedly ate the generously over-large breakfast which Mrs Carstairs, convinced that London meant starvation, pressed upon them.

‘Please not,’ said Clarinda, her mouth full of golden syrup. She was wearing ankle socks to conceal her careful bandage. ‘I just don’t want to go.’

The family looked at her; but only Dudley spoke. ‘Whatever you wish, darling.’

There was a pause; after which Mr Carstairs remarked that he supposed the good lady would still be in bed anyway.

But here, most unusually, Mr Carstairs was wrong. As Dudley and Clarinda drove away, they saw the back of Mrs Pagani walking towards the church and not a couple of hundred yards from their own gate. She wore high, stout boots, caked with country mud, and an enveloping fur coat against the sharpness of the morning. Her step was springy, and her thick black hair flew in the wind like a dusky gonfalon.

As they overtook her, Dudley slowed. ‘Good morning,’ he shouted. ‘Back to the grindstone.’

Mrs Pagani smiled affectionately.

‘Don’t be late,’ she cried, and kissed her hand to them.

‘What a self-important, self-regarding so-and-so Aickman was! Can he really have been as unlikeable as he seems?’ Thus Roger Johnson in
Ghosts and Scholars
, issue 25 of that most M. R. Jamesian of journals. He’d been inflamed by a passage Don Herron quoted from a letter from Robert Aickman to Donald Sidney-Fryer: ‘I . . . cannot pretend that I do not know what you mean when you say that the range of both Henry James and M. R. James is smaller than mine.’ Aickman went on to paraphrase the comments he made about M. R. James in his introduction to
The Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
: ‘One becomes aware as one reads of the really great man . . . all too consciously descending a little, to divert, but also still further to edify, the company.’ Nevertheless Robert reprinted ‘A School Story’, explaining that he found it ‘free from this defect. The Provost knew about schoolboys.’

Two points are worth making before I go on: first, that Aickman may only have been more honest than many of us would be if invited to agree that our work was superior to work we didn’t particularly admire; second, that we often most dislike in others what we resist admitting about ourselves. Aickman told Sidney-Fryer that he found ‘an excessive distancing’ in James: ‘The reader is not meant to feel too involved. This, needless to say, is an intensely English attitude!’ May we assume that Robert was less than happy with the blurbs that compared him to James and praised the ‘feline detachment’ of
Dark Entries
?

I leave that question unanswered and return to Roger Johnson’s. Hugh Lamb responded, ‘Definitely not,’ and suggested that I might have something to add. Let me gather my reminiscences of Robert into as chronological an order as I can.

I first met him when I was nineteen. Kirby McCauley, as part of the second European trip we took together, had arranged a post-luncheon appointment for us at Robert’s rooms in Gower Street. Exactly as Michael Pearson puts it in the publisher’s note that introduces Robert’s book
The River Runs Uphill
, ‘I was acutely conscious of being in the presence of A Great Man.’ I was at the peak of my painful shyness with strangers, and may have uttered no more words than were involved in ascertaining whether I might smoke, then a habit of mine. (I was given an ashtray without comment.) At any rate, Kirby did much of the talking, and Robert most of the answering. At this distance I recall very little other than his dainty allusion to the fate of King Zog of Albania.

Ten years passed, and brought the first World Fantasy Convention, where I was among the judges for the World Fantasy Award. I note with sadness that all the nominees for the Life Achievement Award that year – Aickman, Long, Wandrei, Wellman, and the winner, Bloch – are now dead, and recall that the prize for short fiction went to Aickman’s ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’. I accepted on his behalf, and ferried it back to England to present to him.

He was now living in the Barbican, an apartment complex whose functional exterior concealed, in Robert’s case, a home from an altogether more genteel age. He chortled politely at Gahan Wilson’s bust of Lovecraft, and served me glasses of cream sherry. (Subsequently he had the bust separated from its stand, and after his death only the base bearing the award plaque was found to have survived. He was, to put it mildly, no admirer of Lovecraft, or indeed of any fiction he regarded as horror.) I must have conquered some of my shyness by then, but I believe Robert helped. Hugh Lamb once rightly said (I may be paraphrasing) that having a conversation with Robert always reminded you how much you yourself knew. Whatever art of conversation has been lost, Robert was one of its masters.

Next year – 1976 – he was guest of honour at the British Fantasy Convention in Birmingham. As the only person there who’d met him, I was made responsible for him. Perhaps by then we knew each other well enough for me to have been able to perceive him as a pale, chubby fellow with the worst teeth I’ve ever seen in a living mouth. I showed him to his room and returned at the appointed time. He emerged in a suit, not togs generally favoured at conventions even in those bygone days, and declared, ‘I am at your disposal.’ I introduced him to a number of suitably respectful people, some of whom accompanied my wife Jenny and us to dinner at an Indian restaurant. When the horror writer David A. Riley (‘The Satyr’s Head’, ‘The Lurkers in the Abyss’) revealed that he’d stood as a candidate for the National Front, Robert quizzed him about Oswald Mosley. Later, a number of us escorted Robert to someone’s room-party. I was the first to call it a night, but gather that Robert and Jenny and the anthologist Richard Davis shared a mug for drinking white wine, glasses being scarce. I’m told Robert declared that all men were looking for their Jenny and that I’d found mine.

Next morning he appeared at breakfast in a shirt and sweater. Ken Bulmer approached to tease him about having lightened up, and received a lethal glare. Perhaps Robert was getting himself into an appropriately grave mood to deliver his guest of honour’s speech that afternoon. Alas, there is no transcript, but my memory suggests that his talk drew on the philosophy of his Fontana introductions and on the essay he wrote for Gahan Wilson’s
First World Fantasy Awards
anthology. Afterwards he admitted disappointment with the audience reaction. ‘They don’t want standards,’ he told me. Presumably his sitting through every item on the programme – something Fantasycon attendees had already ceased to do – confirmed this verdict. To my surprise, of the films shown he preferred
Night of the Living Dead
to
The Leopard Man
, whose reticence and delicacy I would have expected to appeal to him.

By now Robert and I were exchanging letters frequently. ‘What a fascinating correspondence we are having!’ he wrote. Sadly, I no longer have his letters, which failed to survive moving house, and so I can’t recall if it was just before or just after the convention that I wrote to invite him to stay for a weekend, in our Liverpool house (which is very like George’s house in my
The Doll Who Ate His Mother
, including the rabbit).

Either his train was early or I was late. I found him standing outside the barrier and proffered my hand, which he took with, I thought, a brevity close to reluctance. When I proposed a bus ride home he acceded without demur. Of the ride I remember only asking him (for the purposes of the novel of
Dracula’s Daughter
I was about to write’) where one might have found fog by the Thames in the era of the tale – Whitechapel? He betrayed no disdain at my lack of research. ‘Stepney,’ he said at once, and so it was.

We’d invited friends to dine with him: Stan and Marge Nuttall, John Owen. For some reason Robert took a dislike to Marge, even though Jenny formed the view that in general he preferred the company of women. When Marge suggested that the texture of Jenny’s chicken tikka might not be authentic he sprang to its defence. Whether this disagreement was the source of the dislike I have no idea, but during a lull in the conversation he asked Marge if she was wearing a wig (which she wasn’t, in case the reader wonders). After dinner the conversation focused on artistic matters. Asked his opinion of Iris Murdoch, Robert said only that while it might be too much to expect contemporary fiction to have uplift, at least it shouldn’t take away from life. Rebecca West, he declared, had written the nearest things to masterpieces of literature our century was likely to produce.
Rosemary’s Baby
(the novel) he thought ‘a good shocker’.

As to films, he enthused about Leni Riefenstahl,
The Blue Light
in particular.
Ugetsu Monogatari
and (later, after I’d commended it to him)
Picnic at Hanging Rock
drew his praise; he agreed that the latter was reminiscent of his own tales, especially (he said) in the scene where the teacher appears in her underwear. A mention of
Don’t Look Now
provoked his ire – ‘offensive to Du Maurier, to the ghostly and to Venice in particular’. He was contemptuous of Donald Sutherland’s accent, which he found calculatedly international, and outraged by Sutherland’s sex scene with Julie Christie. When John Owen suggested it might have been put in for commercial reasons, Robert responded with a look that rendered words superfluous. Indeed, dislike often roused his passion; other detestations he expressed while I knew him included the magazine
Private Eye
and the Anthony Shaffer play
Sleuth
.

(Let me return parenthetically to Leni Riefenstahl. In his autobiography
The Attempted Rescue
Robert devotes a chapter (‘A Distant Star’) to her and cites
The Blue Light
(1932) as his favourite film: ‘When it was new I saw it again and again.’ It may well have influenced his strange tales, in particular ‘The Visiting Star’, but his account of the film is stranger still: he has the character of Vigo learning of the blue light when he watches all the men of the village attempt to scale the mountain with ladders, and Vigo later climbs the mountain in their company but reaches the summit alone. In Aickman’s version it’s Vigo who finds the cave despoiled because ‘the villagers have called in experts’, and the film ends with him roaming the mountains and vainly calling Junta’s name. I don’t think any amount of re-editing could change Riefenstahl’s film so radically, and must conclude that this vision was to some extent Aickman’s own – a vision it conjured up for him, and no less valid for it.)

Sunday gave me time to play him Korngold’s early opera
Die tote Stadt
. ‘Mr Aickman, you simply must hear it,’ a lady had told him, and he was grateful for the chance. At intervals he took out a notebook and made a memorandum, either quoting the libretto or recording an error in translation. Also found worthy of a note was my admission that submitting my ‘In the Bag’ to the
Times
ghost story competition (judged by Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith and Christopher Lee) had brought me no success. Jenny had the impression that there was something he hadn’t forgiven Amis for, perhaps not just for being (as Robert put it) a wine snob. I reflect that they were both in love with Elizabeth Jane Howard. All the same, he vigorously defended the finale of
The Green Man
from her objection that an exorcist had to believe in exorcism for one to work.

Monday found us picnicking in Lancashire, having been driven there by the Nuttalls. Later we visited Chingle Hall near Goosnargh but saw none of the reputed ghosts. Robert felt he and I should sign the visitors’ book, and perhaps our autographs still haunt it. On the same trip we failed to find an abandoned waterways terminal Robert had been given to believe was somewhere in the area.

Alas, that was our last meeting. We continued to correspond regularly until he wrote to apologise that he would no longer be able to keep it up, having been told ‘not really to my surprise, that I have cancer. At present I am oppressed by the mere vulgar symptoms.’ What can one say on such occasions? We assured him he would be welcome to stay whenever he liked, but it’s hardly surprising that he neglected to take up the offer. A year or so later he died, leaving me and Jenny with memories we wouldn’t be without. Jenny feels he should have given us a sign from the other side by now, since he was such a believer in the supernatural. I’m just as much of a sceptic, and yet I sometimes have a sense of being observed by him, especially if I swear immoderately to myself when there’s nobody else to be seen.

So was he as terrible a chap as Roger Johnson thinks? About as much as I am, I’d suggest. I’m the better for having had him as a friend and as an example. Once he commented to Kirby McCauley that there were no longer any vivid men. That was certainly untrue in at least one instance while he was with us.

RAMSEY CAMPBELL
is hailed by the
Oxford Companion to English Literature
as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’. His novels include
The Doll Who Ate His Mother
,
The Face That Must Die
,
The Nameless
,
Midnight Sun
,
The Long Lost
,
The House on Nazareth Hill
,
Ghosts Know
and
The Kind Folk
.