Robert Aickman - Fontana Ghost #3

[weirdmonger]

Two classic stories just newly discovered for me —

nullimmortalis June 6, 2021 at 8:42 am
THE SEVENTH MAN by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

“The cards were so thumbed and tattered that by the backs of them each player guessed pretty shrewdly what the other held. Yet they went on playing night after night;…”

“Whist!” And beware, this is a very chilling tale (literally and scarily), till — SPOILER — the sun comes out at the end, but comes out for whom? Paradise Lost – and Regained?
It’s always night because the stopped clock — in inexact tune with the clock in the AJA story above — ever thus says it is night in or out of this dream of madness dreamt or actually lived by a group of meticulously named men, shipwrecked upon a desolate Arctic shore, if there is such a shore to be had, and their sleeping in cupboard-bunks possibly with quills in their couches to keep them awake, within a possibly ready-made or self-made one-roomed hut with trap-doors in the roof to let out the smoke of the warming fire. The number of the men was once seven, I guess, but one has been buried outside under the snow. But their names and personal derivations confuse me and, no doubt, confuse them, too, and it is never certain who knocks on the door, who goes out a trap door to investigate, and who comes back frozen almost stiff. The counting — like the clock’s or that of the scheming playing-cards — is interminable and even lasts beyond the ending of this excellent ghostly work. Still lasts now as I write this — beyond any lost conceit of Paradise, I guess. [Not forgetting the “interloper” in this work’s inner ballet scenario reminiscent of Elena’s model in Aickman’s ‘The Model’ that I am now equally slowly and attritionally reviewing here!]

nullimmortalis June 6, 2021 at 2:14 pm
NO SHIPS PASS by Lady Eleanor Smith

“What should have been paradise was only a pretty hell.”

I won’t detain you long with this review of a truly classic story, once read never can it be UNread. Never to escape its own version of Null Immortalis. As if I invented this two-word expression for an anthology book that I edited some while ago, invented it, by premonition or instinct, to encapsulate this very story, just read by me for the first time! Furthermore, I don’t know how I possibly predicted the paradise lost/regained element based on someone in the previous story above reading Paradise Lost by Milton, when I wrote the previous review above of a single hut and surrounding hummocks, and now here huts in the plural and hammocks inside — here on a perfect archetypal desert island, a Mirage Island, where death does not exist. And with no escape from it. The believable POV of Patterson shipwrecked here, as the others had been years ago, even centuries ago, and the characters of Captain Micah Thunder and Doña Inés, the elegant and evocative descriptions of these people and of the island itself and of its flickers of parakeets as well as flickers of sorrow beyond the looks of happiness — none of this will you ever forget. Even its arguably empty ending as a story has already fitted into its own scheme of endless ‘nullimmortalis’. Yet I am somehow blown away by the work’s magic and style, while ever fated to be blown back to its doldrums or fated never to leave them in the first place, even temporarily.

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Full context of above here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/the-3rd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/

[weirdmonger]

THE VISITING STAR by Robert Aickman

“She nodded. ‘Will you take me down a mine?’”

Incredibly, I cannot remember reading this story before, although I surely must have done! It is, equally surely, his masterpiece. The Reggie Oliver-like theatrical story, here, of course, pre-apotheosised by Aickman, taking place in a town of coal mining, where, despite this, the young narrator is studying outdated lead and plumbago mining and I learned more about this activity than I would ever have wished! As well as theatrical — and here there is a wonderful character of a local theatre to die for and its manager and its faulty scenery ‘grid’ and its old timer of an actor called Ludlow also to die for — there is the Aickman classic ambiance of a lodging-house where dinner one night is luncheon meat and chips … and two people sitting in a bar munch interminably on mounds of margarine and bread, without talking to each other, as if in the midst of an argument. Above all, the trans- (Cf trains) triangulation of the actress Arabella Rokeby and the evasive Mr Superbus with his inscrutable luggage and the wan and frail Myrrha is a characterisation that outdoes all else in literature, I suspect. The implications of the story’s denouement in the light of this very triangulation are insidious and manifold and lasting. They will, in fact, enduringly last for any stretches of Null Immortalis that happen to ensue after reading this cracker of an Aickman, I promise you. And the intermissionary visit by the narrator with Arabella (carrying a single flashlight between them) into a lead/plumbago mine is absolutely ace. I can’t help noticing, too, that Aickman seems to have included, for its first publication, this story in this his own edited Fontana Ghosts anthology and he even labels it with a special ‘© 1966 Robert Aickman’ on the story’s title page as if to mark it proudly as ‘mine’!

“Then that will look after you. Where’s the mine? Conduct me.”

[weirdmonger]

‘Narrator’ in inverted commas, as if Colvin is ‘me’!