MASQUES OF SATAN Read online

  MASQUES of SATAN

  Twelve Tales and a Novella

  Reggie Oliver

  MASQUES OF SATAN

  ISBN: 9781553101468 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553101475 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2011

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 2007

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume any responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © Reggie Oliver 2007, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introductory

  The Man in the Grey Bedroom

  Grab a Granny Night

  The Children of Monte Rosa

  Mr Poo-Poo

  The Silver Cord

  The Road from Damascus

  Mmm-Delicious

  Puss-Cat

  The Old Silence

  Music by Moonlight

  Blind Man’s Box

  Shades of the Prison House, a Novella

  The End of History

  Sources

  FOR MY NIECE

  CAROLINE OLIVER

  Read by a taper when the needling star

  Burns red with menace in heaven’s midnight cope.

  Walter de la Mare

  MASQUES OF SATAN

  Introductory

  THE GHOST STORY is a very ancient and a very strange artefact. It purports to tell of disturbances in what we understand to be the natural order of things. This account of them is intended to induce fear, or to trouble the reader in some way. An explanation is offered for the alarming phenomena, but it is rarely a complete one, and the reader is meant to be left with an abiding sense of disquiet which is somehow, paradoxically, satisfying to the psyche.

  Not long ago I was at a dinner party at which our host told a ‘true’ ghost story. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he was in his rooms one night with a friend when suddenly the curtains on his windows billowed out, as if from a blast of wind. He went to the windows to find that they were shut. They heard knocking at the door, but, on going to answer it my host found no one outside the door. Later that night he was in bed when he heard a crash coming from the sitting room of his set. He did not dare venture out of his bedroom, but the following morning he discovered that the mirror which hung above the mantelpiece had been smashed onto the ornaments upon it and then carefully replaced. These phenomena never occurred again and the only explanation was found in a college legend that an undergraduate had once committed suicide by somehow attaching one end of a rope to the fireplace of my host’s rooms, putting the other round his neck and launching himself down the steep flight of stairs from his set of rooms to the quad below.

  Even if written up with skill, that would make a pretty poor fictional ghost story. The events are incoherent and not particularly chilling; the ‘explanation’ is vague, banal and unconvincing. All the same, I enjoyed listening to it because my host is an intelligent, unfanciful man and a completely credible witness. The story, for all its obvious shortcomings as a work of art, did offer two ingredients essential to any ghost story: alarm and mystery. It compensated for its artistic inadequacies by being true.

  What the fictional ghost story has to add, to compensate in its turn for not being true, is a visionary element. Its events must somehow amount to an insight, however brief and baffling, into the metaphysical world. It must in some way transcend the normally impenetrable wall of death. Ever since human beings had speech and began to tell stories they have wanted some transcendental aspect to be part of the weave. What is interesting is that story tellers have rarely made that transcendence reassuring. Part of the perverse-seeming, but obviously normal, pleasure we derive from the ghost story is that far from comforting us, it shakes us up.

  In about 2000 BC the first work of literature known to us and still extant was punched onto clay tablets. This was The Epic of Gilgamesh which was written in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq. It tells of ghosts, and takes as its main theme one which is at the back of most if not all ghost stories. It was summed up by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who called Gilgamesh ‘das Epos der Todesfurcht’, an epic about the fear of death.

  In one version of the epic the hero Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu describes a dream in which he is dragged down to the land of the dead:

  He bound my arms like the wings of a bird,

  to lead me captive to the house of darkness, seat of Irkalla:

  to the house which none who enters ever leaves,

  on the path that allows no journey back,

  to the house whose residents are deprived of light,

  where soil is their sustenance and clay their food,

  where they are clad like birds in coats of feathers,

  and see no light; but dwell in darkness.

  On door and bolt the dust lay thick,

  on the House of Dust was poured a deathly quiet.

  In the House of Dust that I entered . . .

  That seems to me an admirable passage which I or any modern practitioner of horror would be proud to have written. It has a disturbing visionary strangeness — why are the dead ‘clad like birds in coats of feathers’, for instance? — and yet an authenticity. It seems to tell of something that has been genuinely felt and experienced by the anonymous 4000-year-old author.

  There are several versions of the Gilgamesh epic. In the one quoted Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh goes on a vain search for immortality as a result. In another version Enkidu goes, in spite of Gilgamesh’s warning, to the world of the dead and is trapped there. Gilgamesh tries to rescue him and obtains only a brief interview with Enkidu’s ghost. The news from the other side is not good.

  Move on a millennium and we come to the earliest Greek Literature, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which are the mainsprings of so much classical and modern European literature. Ghosts play an important and dynamic role in both stories. In The Iliad the ghost of Patroclus appears to Achilles after he has killed Hector and urges him to give him a decent burial. This initiates the final movement of The Iliad, when Achilles goes to beg the body of Patroclus off Priam in Troy. The ghost is described as a spirit and an image (eidolon) but — oddly — ‘without wits’, even though Patroclus has just delivered a coherent speech to Achilles prophesying his friend’s death before the walls of Troy. Why? I can only explain it by suggesting that this Homeric idea of a talking, but essentially witless, ghost is a precursor of the idea held by some psychic researchers today that ghosts are psychic shells; in other words that human beings leave behind not only a physical corpse in the form of a dead body but a psychic one, too, and this can cause nuisance in the form of poltergeists and the like, or leave a sort of imprint on the place where it suffered a traumatic event. Visions of the afterlife are explored in The Odyssey, in the famous sequence known as the Nekuia when Odysseus visits the Underworld and holds conversations with the dead. This is a fascinating episode for a number of reasons, but one incident is especially worth me
ntioning because it disposes of the notion that human beings invented the afterlife as wish fulfilment, as a kind of consolation prize for the misery of this life. Nothing could be further from the truth. All early accounts of the afterlife — we’ve seen what The Epic of Gilgamesh has to say — are frankly pretty discouraging. There are no happy ghosts.

  So in The Odyssey one of the ghosts that Odysseus interviews is that of Achilles, and he utters these famous lines: ‘I would rather be a serf, working on the land, even for a poor man, than a Prince among the dead.’ (I paraphrase slightly.) In other words, I would rather be the lowest of the low among the living than dead. The speaker is the hero Achilles who dwells in the best part of the land of the dead, the Elysian Fields. For Homer there is no ‘pie in the sky’: that is a comparatively late addition in religious thinking.

  Ghosts appear throughout early literature, for example Greek tragedy, often as motive forces for revenge — the whole Oresteia of Aeschylus is driven by the angry ghosts of vengeance — and this is a line of ghost story which leads on directly to perhaps its ultimate expression, Hamlet. The scholar and critic C. S. Lewis called Hamlet a ‘ghost story’ not in a trivial sense, but because again, as with the Oresteia which indirectly influenced Shakespeare via translations of Seneca, the ghost is the driving force in the story. Another thing is worth noting about Hamlet. The opening scene with the guards on the battlements before dawn is not simply a grippingly effective opening to the play, it has an essential purpose, which is to establish that the ghost is not a figment of Hamlet’s tortured psyche, but a real entity, seen by others independently long before Hamlet does.

  To return to classical times, ghost stories as we understand them put in an appearance as inset tales in the earliest Greek and Roman novels. There is a werewolf story in the Satyricon of Petronius, the fragmentary Latin novel of the first century AD which contains the famous Trimalchio episode. About half a century later Pliny, in his letters, writes up one of the first ‘true’ ghost tales on record, about a haunted house in Athens. What is interesting about it is that the ingredients are so familiar. It contains all the commonplaces, indeed clichés, of the ghost story: groans, clanking chains and the unquiet spirit of a murdered man who ceases to haunt when his bones are properly buried.

  The modern ghost story, as opposed to the Gothic extravaganza, began with Sheridan Le Fanu, who added the vital ingredient of psychology to the familiar elements. In his stories the feelings and failings of the haunted were as important as the haunting itself. We today continue essentially in this tradition. Where I think we sometimes fail is in taking less seriously the metaphysical realities behind the phenomena. To put it bluntly, there are those who do not think it is necessary for ghost and horror writers to believe in a spiritual realm. I do.

  The stories that follow may contain humour and artifice, but they are essentially serious. They are not divertissements: in fact, I have become convinced that to write ghost stories of lasting merit it is necessary to believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. I am fully aware that this sounds a harsh, even barbarous statement, but I do not want to qualify it, only to explain. I do not mean by it that one needs to subscribe to a particular religious creed. On the contrary I believe that rigid, dogmatic beliefs are usually inimical to good writing, especially when the holder of those beliefs cannot resist a sermon. (Dante, Milton and Bunyan may perhaps provide partial exceptions to this rule.) On the other hand a sensitivity to the spiritual is essential, as is a belief in its eternal significance. No one could describe Henry James as a dogmatist, and yet what gives The Turn of the Screw its thrilling, horrid urgency is the fact that Quint and Miss Jessell are damned, and that Miles and Flora are in danger of damnation. Whether or not this is partly or wholly an imagining of the governess narrator is irrelevant.

  The protagonists of the supernatural tale at its best need to be playing for the highest stakes conceivable. That is what interests me, which is why, to be honest, I don’t really see myself as ‘a writer of ghost stories’ or a ‘horror writer.’ I write what I write because it is the best way of saying what I want to say about what matters to me most. My ideas derive from some tiny fragment of experience or research. When these fragments connect with some problem or passion that has been exercising me, a story is born. If it connects with some problem or passion that has been exercising the reader, it is a success.

  That is what matters; because, ultimately, though I write out of myself I do not write for myself. I write to enjoy your company vicariously and to widen your eyes just a little.

  Reggie Oliver

  June 2007

  The Man in the Grey Bedroom

  DURING HER FIRST TEN MINUTES at the Police Station Maggie Protheroe was incapable of saying anything. She was taking in great sobbing gasps of air, as if she were having an asthma attack. A Constable asked if medical assistance was required. The station sergeant gently told Maggie to breathe evenly and deeply, until eventually she was able to articulate a question about her children. They were fine, she was told, they were safe. A female police officer was looking after them and they were happily playing with their Gameboys. Maggie nodded, half-smiled, and began to breathe less convulsively. As she was given a cup of tea she was told to begin at the beginning and to take her time. Maggie appeared, at first, to be baffled by these instructions. Her normal world had been so comprehensively shattered that even simple metaphysical concepts like beginnings and ends, not to mention the taking of time — but where from? — were alien to her. The Sergeant who was conducting the interview had to prompt her. Were she and her family on holiday? Yes, that was right, Maggie said, they were on holiday. She hesitated again. It had just occurred to her, for the first time in her life, that the whole idea of going on holiday was really rather absurd; but then she told herself, as she often did, to ‘pull herself together’, reasserted her sense of normality, and began, if not at the beginning, at least somewhere near it.

  * * * * *

  She, her husband Jack, an auctioneer by profession, and their two sons, Andrew and Peter, aged seven and nine respectively, had been on holiday in Southwold. That particular day had begun overcast and was therefore not a beach day, so they had decided to go inland on an expedition. Jack had set his sights on Blakiston Hall. He was keen on such visits for a number of reasons. He worked for one of the major auction houses in the West Country, and possessed a wide knowledge of art and antiques which he was anxious both to augment and to demonstrate. He had plans to educate his sons into a similar enthusiasm: perhaps they would be not simply auctioneers like him, but antiques experts who would appear on television programs. He had never put this into so many words, but Maggie knew the way his mind worked and tolerated it. Peter and Andrew had yet to show an inclination of any kind other than towards fighting each other; and so the family set out.

  Blakiston Hall is just on the Suffolk side of the Norfolk and Suffolk border. It is a vast red brick Jacobean palace of a place, built by the Cheke family in the time of their glory when the young Sir Sydney Cheke had caught the roving eye of James I. Possessing both a good legal brain and a pretty face — not quite so unusual a combination as one might imagine — Sir Sydney rose to become Lord Chief Justice, and was created Earl of Blakiston by James’s son Charles. Thereafter the fortunes of the Cheke family varied considerably, but it managed to keep hold of the Hall until the nineteen-sixties, when the owners were gently coaxed by Mr. James Lees-Milne into handing it over to the National Trust. The Earldom of Blakiston had expired with the death of the last male heir in 1907, and the Hall’s inheritors had been a collateral branch of the family, the Ormerod-Chekes. In 1968 the last Ormerod-Cheke, exiled from the Hall, died in sordid and penniless obscurity.

  What the public saw, however, was ancestral glory, carefully conserved and subtly enhanced. If the place had a fault it was that everything had been so tastefully restored that it was a just little lacking in character. Nearly all traces of the later Chekes had been eradicated, the most rece
nt evidence being T. C. Dugdale R.A’s portrait of the late Sir Everard Ormerod-Cheke, who had been British Consul in Caracas during the Second World War. He was the last of the family to have made any mark whatsoever on the world.

  Maggie had her reasons for not looking forward to the Blakiston expedition. She knew how aggressively Jack liked to show off his expertise, and this was just the place in which to do it. He had long since ceased to impress her, and had therefore switched his attention to his sons, Peter and Andrew.

  However, as they turned into the long drive which approached the house through a deer park, her spirits lifted. There was still a cold breeze, but the sun was beginning to show itself from behind high white clouds. More importantly for her, Peter and Andrew, who had been determinedly bored throughout the journey to Blakiston, had shown genuine interest in the deer which wandered in dappled drifts under the trees, apparently oblivious of the squat metal cages that roared so purposefully past them.

  Before they turned off into the car park, there was a fine view of the Hall’s impressive Dutch gabled front of red brick, flanked by lead-roofed towers at either end, with large stone-faced mullion windows all along the façade. In the occasional flash of sun from behind the high clouds, the ancient bricks were alchemised into the colour of flame, the glass window lights into shining gold. The central entrance tower in Cotswold limestone displayed all the orders of architecture one above the other, and upon free-standing plain Tuscan columns on either side of the great doors stood the Cheke armorial supporters, a gryphon and a raven. The family motto of the Cheke family in pierced stone formed the parapet above the porch. It read: