Guy Fawke's Night

[dem bones]

Recycled from a variety of threads spread across the board ......

Shamus Frazer - The Fifth Mask: (London Mystery Magazine #33 1957; Tandem Book of Horror Stories, 1965). Even after all these years, November 5th is still a time of dread for Fred Tucker due to a dark and horrific episode in his childhood when he and friend Robin Truby encountered a weird woman in the fog on Failing town fields and requested "a penny for the guy". Having first got them to lift their horror masks she then removes her own. And the one beneath that. And the one beneath that and ....

A "little Lord Fauntleroy" joins them and persuades the crone to remove her fifth and final mask and with it the pennies from her eyes. What he sees - Fred and Robin having fled before she's finished - is so ghastly, it ........

Ramsey Campbell - The Burning: (Ghosts & Scholars #3, 1981: The Best of Ghosts & Scholars, 1986)

Alan Hunter's illustration for The Burning in The Best of Ghosts & Scholars, Haunted Library, 1986)

Merseyside during the Thatcher years. A time of swingeing cuts, mass unemployment, growing social unrest. Blake has recently become another redundancy statistic and it feels like he's been pronounced obsolete. On November 5th and, with nothing better to do he attends a public firework display in the park.

Perhaps Blake was just depressed yet it seemed to him that while Hallowe'en was supposed to be the feat of the macabre, tonight was altogether grimmer. How else could one describe a night when an executioner's victim was resurrected to be burned a thousandfold?

Earlier in the evening a group of youths pelted the fire brigade with bottles but now a second, far deadlier mob emerge from the trees. Blake is singled out, set upon, gagged with a cloth soaked in petrol and manhandled onto a bonfire ...

For me, one of the author's nastiest, full-on horror stories. It's inclusion in Inconsequential Tales suggests the author doesn't consider The Burning among his successes. It worked for me.

Richard Davis - Guy Fawke's Night: (4th Pan Book Of Horror Stories, 1963). Davis's breakthrough story, likely his best and certainly the most famous. Have tried not to go too spoiler heavy, but you know how these things go.

Mr. Thomas, Squire of Tedham village, is an ill-tempered brute with a cruel streak and a zero tolerance approach to poachers. He once set a ring of fire around a copse to smoke out three poultry thieves, one of whom soon died from the burns he sustained. The old bastard wishes his shy, bookish son David would be less of a namby pamby and more like himself. For his part, David - a future Harley Street specialist - despises his father as a bully, and the hatred intensifies when his beloved dog Rusty meets his death in a man-trap. And then, during the village bonfire celebrations on Guy Fawke's night, 1919, Squire Thomas vanishes, presumed run off with one of his floozies. His wife suffers a mental collapse from which she never recovers.

It takes David's one childhood friend, Jerry Williams, all of four decades to piece together what really happened that night, by which time he wishes he hadn't.

C. A. Cooper - Bonfire: (5th Pan Book Of Horror Stories, 1964). Kent: A deranged headmaster, murderously jealous of a younger teacher, decides to be rid of him. Guy Fawkes night provides a perfect opportunity. Reminiscent of Richard Davis' classic in #4, but still terrifying on it's own very nasty terms.

John Metcalfe – The Funeral March Of A Marionette: (Fifty Masterpieces Of Mystery, 1937). On a snowy, bitterly cold November 4th, budding entrepreneur Alf and little George drag a trolley along the Millbank, collecting a small fortune in coppers from admires of their uncannily lifelike Guy. Unfortunately, old Gus the tramp isn’t equip to handle the sub-zero temperatures ….

Norman Howard

August Derleth - Hallowe’en For Mr. Faulkner: (Lonesome Places, 1962). October 31st, 1953, and Guy Faulkner, a New Yorker in London to complete his genealogical studies, is lost in the fog. A stranger approaches, asks for a light and, when Mr. Faulkner complies, he is shocked to catch a glimpse of the man's face in the flame as it looks just like his own! The stranger leads him to a house in Old Paradise where a group of gentlemen in strange attire welcome him as though he were a close associate! Funny thing is, he's sure he knows them from somewhere ....

St John Bird - Firework Night: (26th Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1985). Don't have a copy of #26, but from friend Erebus's comments, this one most certainly qualifies.

George Augustus Sala - The Vault Of Death; (reprinted in Peter Haining The Penny Dreadful, 1976).

"To the rack with him!" yelled the indignant noble in a voice of fury.
Quick as the words were uttered Guy Fawkes was seized.
He made a desperate resistance but all was in vain.
His foes were too many for him. He was forcibly dragged to the rack and bound firmly hand and foot upon it.
"Proceed with the torture!" cried the noble, passionately.
The grim executioners immediately thrust their iron-tipped levers into the rollers of the rack and gave them a turn.
Another moment and Guy Fawkes's limbs would have been torn from their sockets.
At this critical juncture, however, a wild scream rang out loudly in the vaulted cell, and the frenzied face of a girl appeared, though unseen, at the grated window.

And so on. Guy is eventually freed by Evelyn the dancing girl and her rude companions and ferried off down the Thames, presumably to be reunited with true love Violet at a later date.

any more?

[ripper]

There's Gunpowder Plot in Vengeful Ghosts by Clive Ward and first published in Ghosts and Scholars 18.

[dem bones]

Thanks, Rip. As luck would have it, Ghosts & Scholars 18 is the last one I bought, so have set it aside for a rematch.

This fellow has also become synonymous with Guy Fawkes in recent years - and may become even more so after tonight's protests in Parliament Square.

Dez Skinn (ed.) - Warrior: #11 (Quality Communications Ltd., July 1983)

Editorial

Alan Moore & Alan Davis - Marvelman
Steve Parkhouse & John Ridgeway - The Spiral Path
Steve Moore & John Stokes - The Legend Of Prester John
Alan Moore & David Lloyd - V For Vendetta
Pedro Harvey & Steve Dillon - Laser Eraser And Pressbutton

Dispatches (Readers Letters)

[cauldronbrewer]

Speaking of Ramsey Campbell and Guy Fawkes Night, there's also "The Guy" in Demons by Daylight.

[dem bones]

Inflation ...

Emma Beal, future spouse of Ken Livingstone (BlowJo's predecessor as 'mare of London), tests the gullibility generosity of City traders, ES magazine, 3 Nov 1995. She raised £20.

[dem bones]

Thanks to Tommy (@atters1000), Maria J Pérez Cuervo and Charlie Black for these Guy Fawkes' suggestions.

John Gordon - The Burning Baby
Stephen Volk - Newspaper Heart (Mark Morris [ed.] The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, 2014)
Marjorie Dark - "Remember, remember, the 4th of Nov" (Jean Russell [ed.] The Methuen Book of Sinister Stories, 1982)

[mattofthespurs]

Nov 5, 2015 8:46:47 GMT dem bones said:

Inflation ...

Emma Beal, future spouse of Ken Livingstone (BlowJo's predecessor as 'mare of London), tests the gullibility generosity of City traders, ES magazine, 3 Nov 1995. She raised £20.

I would have given her £20 on my own.

And you talk about sleazy...

[humgoo]

There's a short and very grim one by Nugent Barker (whose novella Curious Adventure Of Mr Bond is much appreciated by Vaulters on the Worst Pub Landloards thread):

Mrs Sayce's Guy (first published in 1929, reprinted in New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors (1934) and collected in Written With My Left Hand (1951, Percival Marshall & Co, reprinted twice by Tartarus)). "Into the tiny, grotesque body, Mrs Sayces had pushed, and prodded, and stuffed, and bundled, all the deformity of the world. Beneath a boy's cloth cap, and from the voluminous folds of a muffler, the magenta face shone forth with a fierce, disturbing beauty. [...] She carried down her precious burden, and sat it in an old perambulator that was covered with the thick dust of a year. One must go very carefully now. The thought occurred to her that this was the most important moment of her life. [...] Lifting her head, she listened to the voices of the far-distant children, chanting the Guy Fawkes song:

Please to remember

The Fifth of November ...

[...] Mrs Sayce wheeled her perambulator to the door; and through the dark November streets she pushed her Little Guy."

[Swampirella]

Poor Guy - Janet Craig James (London Mystery Selection #78 Sept. 1968)

Fern and Oswin Aspinal, British ex-pats, live in "Grove Cottage" in a secluded New York suburb. "She and Oswin had done a remarkable job of bringing England with them". Heavy mahogany furniture, Royal Albert tea service, eccles cakes and Chelsea buns, china dogs, "Oswin in his shabby-genteel tweeds, military moustache bristling over acrid-smelling pipe, she in her mauve flowered crepe and arch support shoes sent direct from London."

Its a real shame when a biker gang drives through their garden, causing up roar and crushing Oswin's rose bushes. Oswin's no slouch when it comes to dealing with them, "just has he had with the Wogs - as he called them, in Africa." (author's license, I assume) Using his spade and his boots on several of them, he finds one of them is a woman! Shock! He brings her into the house and Fern makes her tea. "Boo-Boo" soon recovers but the gang stays on, listening to Oswin rattling on about England, browsing through their News of the World and seemingly interested in the Moors Murder case.

The following week they return, unannounced, propping up their bikes against the toolshed wall. While Fern fed them tea and buns, Oswin filled their silence with stories of British history and derring-do. "Do you think they're really interested?" she asks. Oswin thinks so; "They pretend to be unimpressed, but underneath, they crave our kind of life, our traditions, our culture. It's our duty to give it to them". While they're "giving it to them", "Creeper" asks to hear again about Guy Fawkes celebrations. As it happens to be next week, the jolly gang offers to bring everything needed for a party. Food, fireworks, and they'll even make a dummy. All they ask is an old suit, which is Fern's chance to "get rid of that mustard-coloured Harris tweed" she hates so much. 

They duly arrive and after passing around the scotch, urge Mr. Aspinal to get the bonfire going. They've brought potatoes to roast and toffee "isn't that the junk you said they have in England?"

Fern is suddenly feeling very sleepy, but notices they've forgotten the guy. It turns out he's in the shed; she's asked to help carry him. "It was funny to see Oswin's old tweed suit stuffed with something, and an old hat rammed over the dummy's head. She started to laugh and couldn't stop. Now they were all laughing. No wonder. The cardboard mask they'd put on the effigy was so silly." They toss the effigy on the pyre and Boo-Boo gives it a vicious kick. "Poor Guy!" she screeches. They adjust their goggles and gauntlets and speed off into the night. Fern wonders where Oswin has got to, he'll want to thank them for the party. No, he won't.

[dem bones]

Paul Finch - The Hell Wain: (Ill Met By Darkness, 2020). Hackenworth folk have their own November 5th tradition. Never fear, it too involves burning alive.

Simon MacCulloch - Dummy: (100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, 1994).