I am a big fan of Steve Duffy's MRJ inspired collection The Night Comes On, as well as his more recent work, so any collection with a story by him always makes me sit up and take notice.
I'm also a big fan of "The Night Comes On"; it's absolutely brilliant; I felt the same when I noticed a story by him was included.
I am reading this excellent 1998 collection ‘The Night Comes On’ by Steve Duffy….
THE NIGHT COMES ON
“…mummies, mummies by the bushel, and not just any ordinary mummies, either.”
This is a companion piece — or cause to its effect — of God of Storage Options, the previous work by this author I happened to read only a few days ago! Spooky! Explanation of how our own memories of past selves are swaddled for re-emergence, if not darkly ancient Egyptian entities also stored or preserved! Translated from one special pagan occasion to another.
This story’s climax follows an attritional preamble, too, worthy of the constructively long-winded narrative techniques of Aickman’s Residents Committee? — a preamble about a newspaper man optimising the slack window of opportunity for news during a hot summer in 1931, and various other characters and names and ancient artefact smuggling conspiracies that deliciously defeated me. Including a villain called the Fiery Lucifer. Also something about getting stuck in a predictably dodgy lift at the storage depot.
***
Out of the Water, Out of the Earth
“Take the example of my contemporary, Professor Westhall, who some years ago had cause to travel to Rome, there to carry out sundry researches in the Vatican Library concerning the dealings between King Henry VIII and Pope Clement.”
I just read, an hour ago, by chance, a Fragment of Thucydides by Reggie Oliver and this elegantly written Duffy now seems to remind me that both these authors are as wonderful as each other, although I think Duffy came first, if not in life but certainly in publishing dates of their otherwise equally competing haunted and haunting stories. They write with fragments from the same soul, I guess. This particular Duffy, written when he must have been quite young, is of a Professor who leaves Rome to convalesce, after food poisoning, on a scenic, beautifully conjured Italian island, in a Villa, wrapped round with Romishness as well as legends of a hermit and a water well, involving Temptations of St Anthony, Bosch visions et al. It is something to soak one’s susceptible reading-soul within. A treasure.
***
The Close at Chadminster
“‘Time seems to pass at a slower, less frantic rate in such places, don’t you find?’”
A discussion at Christmas by house guests, about the best Cathedral architecture (my own favourite cathedral is Ely), leads to a story from a Professor whom they had almost forgotten was there, a story of his time at the eponymous Minster, beautifully described with churchy details, and of his own foolhardy and often literal unearthing of a story of conspiracy, murdered Jews and a single boy’s death, while helping with the construction of a memorial to the recent war dead to replace the existing triptych et al to the single dead one in that legend. The frisson I received — with the shifting figures and the conundrum of footsteps in the snow, or not, as well as dozy or arthritic clerics, and the storyteller’s own instinctive catalytic power for wrongs to be righted — was a frisson just as strong, or even stronger, than any frisson gifted to me by the best of M.R. James. Seriously.
“‘It were black, and crooked, and it moved too fast,’…”
***
The Last of the Scarisfields
“Those volumes indispensable to the telling of my story I will of course introduce at the appropriate juncture: as for the rest, suffice it to say…”
…that the reader feels as if guided by an affable soul, perhaps with a tongue in their cheek about the acceptably dark ‘cosy’ nature of the tale being told, a beautifully, if archetypally written story of a Lakeland house, with an eyesore of a folly next to an evil oak tree, and two academic men who rivalled each other to sort out its massive library, but end up together chewing the fat over the dire deeds in the past of someone who was responsible for another young boy, like the one in the previous story, being killed after keeping a darksome diary, then bearing in mind that a scion or two in that house’s past were evidentially interested in books on the black arts. Even an echo of mysterious sayings about owls that this officiating affable soul haunts us with…
“…and owls shall answer one another there; and the hairy ones shall dance there,…”
***
The Hunter and His Quarry
“…it is no place, but a place of the head, of the mind, a place that is dreamed of to scare those foolish souls who in darkness look for dark things.”
Hunter of darkness or dark hunter, I wonder whether the one I earlier assumed has an affable soul guiding these stories, is not quite so cosy as I imagine, with degrees of deviousness or mischief, if harmlessly so? The blatantly admitted disguising of names of people and places, and making us believe the coincidence that the central event in this story happened to take place on a date crucial to the legend depicted, that is, the last day of April. Yet I can forgive anything, because this otherwise affable mover and shifter of what we read has an exquisite style of narration, bookishness and churchly equivalent manners, especially when here evocatively conjuring places such as this desolate, sparsely populated land on the Baltic shore, its churches and one particular island which, against strong advice, our would-be protagonist ‘Crusoe’ visits to check out an intriguing plaque he saw in a church. A Crusoe tempting a later close-hugging, hunting fate chasing across lands alongside the train he travels home in. A concept that will now haunt as well as hunt me, I guess. And that is true even though I have denied so far any factoring of that concept into vague memories from this story of babies and small children being sacrificed…
***
THE OSSUARY
“Can Mr Metfield be blamed for imagining the missing skeleton restored to its corner as before, inert, unmoving—and then all of a sudden twitching? Stiffening? Flexing its bony fingers on the shaft of its scythe?”
So asks our ever affable soul.
I’ve never read of so many bones in a crypt, evocatively sorted into parts, and others as whole skeletons, on this crucial Good Friday whose Danse Macabre pageant opportunely makes these bones and their later chilling comings and goings inside and outside the crypt, dry inside, damp out, chilling everywhere — as located in and around the genius loci of this provincial church in France, and its Anglican visitor Mr M who is bombarded with Catholic propaganda by his guides as well as by his own witnessings and researches….
The affable soul officiating this story actually turns up at the end in person! He is getting closer to me, I sense…
***
RUNNING DOGS
“my flesh crawls now as it crawled then”
A story of my train line from Liverpool Street, here with a story told to another passenger about a Norfolk halt, if not Holt, a tale of Aickman-like proportions and, can there be a greater compliment for me to give than to say that many aspects of it mean that a lost Aickman-type story has shape-shifted into this quite original new one. Not a pastiche but a re-toothing. It needs to haunt many more readers with its lingering absurdism, a dream that still feels oh so real!
***
ONE OVER
“How the Darkness makes children of us all!”
“…it’s reckoned round these parts that there ain’t no good comes of a low tide in Rushwold; no good at all, sir, no good at all.”
A honest-to-goodness tale told by one man to another over cosy comestibles and intoxicating drinks one New Year’s Eve atop a Cambridge bookshop of yore, about a dishonest-to-badness haunting of a would-be Suffolk Dunwich where tides at their bottom-ebb produce the direst ‘one over’ possible, the one leftover as a buried body not reburied in a land’s church but left to its own deep encroaching tides till such tides are intermittently but a ‘muddy estuary’. A pestilence or plague to those it gets near, young as well as old, this lug-worm.
Making the explicit tides of sleep less deep.
As from one man to another, like I said. No margins for cosy embroidery, this is just what happens, no more, no less, with words telling the barest truth of horror as stitched by instinctive expression by those who know — such as the affable soul who contextualises and narrates with words from outset, this being a freehold narration that is subsequently told by its leaseholder in deploying a truthful tenant’s diary about staying within the ironic hospitality of another ‘One Over’ of yore whereunder all us others usually have our varying intoxicants to mix.
***
Figures on a Hillside
“…a swarm of cabbalists, table-tappers, and fake mediums to […] this irregular animal chorus was augmented still further by the frenzied and (to the Cantabrigian, collegiate ears of Mr Fielding) peculiarly irritating bleating of sheep; with an all-embracing curse on the entire animal kingdom,…”
The Cerne Abbas giant and its ilk become the essence of the HARDON COLLIDER of CERN Zoo, a dowsing with steel rods of another chalk man in Dorset by two gentlemen, and releasing its dark companion, then shuttling between mayhem and worse! Loved it.
***
EX LIBRIS
The first half of this whole printed story is the most delightful work, a sheer ‘strange story’ classic in itself, discrete and uncluttered by the second half’s more strident, but still beautifully written, horrors when the scene in the first half is returned to by the protagonist. It is as if the second half seeks to redact the first half.
I shall only carry memory of the first half, the ‘uncontested’ country roads of Suffolk, the car-driving protagonist getting lost without signposts, finding a library with exquisite books in an unexpected country house, including the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, the inscrutable bargain made with its supercilious owner, and later discoveries, back in his hotel, as to that book, and its contents. A tantalising overhanging conclusion to the discrete first half that is also seasoned by a passing reference to a bookseller on East Hill, Colchester that I know very well.
I redact the rest.
***
The Story of a Malediction
“London was a great growling furnace that day;”
As it is no doubt today in the current heatwave.
Our affable soul of a host does not like London, even in those days when Clapham Common housed a golf course. But it takes us into the realms of this oasis in the hope of spiritual balm, I guess. So, the implications of such civilising being disrupted by pre-Brexit heathen nations and their legends and artefacts found on the golf course, and stalking crossword puzzle clues, and entities disguised as squirrel-like creatures on London transport intent on retribution upon academics and golf club officials alike make for a creepy experience. A potentially revelatory conundrum or puzzle for our times, too?
***
The Vicar of Wryde St Luke
“—but the several small yet significant discrepancies from the norm combined to give the whole a curious and quite indescribable aspect, which Burnage sought in vain to define to his own satisfaction, and which, as a consequence, I naturally despair of communicating to you, my patient audience.”
We are the affable soul’s patient audience and we learn from him or her or it today about two gentlemen of yore, with cosy habits, one who studies church architecture, the other church books or books about churches or, as here, a book or grimoire IN a particular church, a now effectively and deliberately unconsecrated church that has been bypassed for many years because of the flagitious one who had reigned there as vicar and we learn what dire things that are now brought into being, brought into and beyond our patient eyes, too, in full fledged horror. Can a reader be cut to ribbons, too? Attacked by rats or whatever?
Attempts to outdo MR James again? The so-called affable soul who here mock-suggests that he has airbrushed some of his suggestions for dubious reasons ….but has also released what lurks in the church, be it book or beast? Or both.
Released to our patient eyes, and what can be read by them between the lines…
“…thanks for the good fortune of the book having been sheltered from the worst of the general decay inside the church. The more he pondered the matter, the more miraculous the book’s escape seemed to him; and suddenly, he was seized with an illogical, unreasoning, yet none the less compelling desire…”
***
The Return Journey
“; and a very good thing, too.”
The rest of the story was recited to me retroactively by hired mutes. Based on someone else’s crabby handwriting.
While the above topping and tailing of it were already imparted by the person crucial to its related funeral, someone, that is, who had pre-booked the eponymously open-ended journey back in the hearse. In whatever opposite direction of time the medicine worked, I guess.
Not finished this book yet…
