“About thirty yards from her house there was an elbow in the drove.”
It is important to closely read and remember the paragraph here about ‘droves’ in the wilds of Norfolk, the nature of these dubious routes with high sides near unto the Fens, where the truly evil-seeming unforgettable vision in words of a depleting number of beasts, depleting but aggrandising unto one, and appearing to me as a foul sort of potential Annunciation heading, in hindsight, towards the woman in her lonely cottage at the end of a drove, a vision as strikingly triggered by “Suddenly I heard a loud snort, as of a beast, apparently at my elbow.” — as stated by a vicar to us in his last document, before his expounding on this vision. There is much Zenoistic ‘wading’ through droves in this work, too. The ‘story’ as left by the vicar for reading after his death, concerned his visit on New Year’s Eve to a woman he ever feared, for some unknown reason, visiting. A visit today where he finds her fearfully reading the Book of Tobit about Sarah loved by the demon Asmodeus, the latter, I believe, having slaughtered all seven of her husbands before the marriages were consummated. And I think it was timely, for intense contrast and comparison, that I somehow read this Malden work by chance an hour or so after reading and reviewing (HERE) ‘Madonna of the Magnificat’ by Mary Butts!
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Other disconnected horror stories reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
There will hopefully be further reviews of R.H. Malden in the comment stream below…
THE SUNDIAL by R.H. Malden
“The form of the story suggests that he intended to publish it; probably in some magazine. As far as I know it has not been published before.”
A slow, wading emergence as spooky tale till I do read or re-read it today. Like the running after a deformed intruder in circles around the garden path, and its secretive orchard doors, during a time’s era, after working for the Viceroy in India, now moving into a large country house with a butler etc., something that I could afford as tenant because of an unexpected legacy, a place, a racially incontinent past, where I live and go hunting with dogs and shooting pheasants, and that effectively slow running in a circle after an evil-looking intruder, simply because he is deformed, and the intruder terrifyingly becomes as if he is now slowly running after me! A slow, wading, Zeno-like emergence of meaning: just like the stake-like shadow of time upon a circular dial, reaching towards a state of becoming no shadow at all, quashed by a subsuming night like death, and that tree root uprooted from the earth that is the stake itself that marked the spot where the intruder (that was me) was buried, but yearned to wake again and get revenge on me for deforming him with my own fallible death!
A now printed story, though, that gives a dated masquerade of historical facts of crime and punishment at the end to tell quite a different story or to reconcile it within a civilised state of time’s imperial past, i.e. “the form of the story” I once read many years ago and just now re-read by a different brain to what mine once was. A sort of preferable version of King Solomon’s wisdom. And the demons that reside within us.
With due disregard to those with incontinence who still have it within their bones to be intolerant of those who seem different. And who read things differently. Locking myself inside by having bolted it on the outside.
“If you’ll pull, I’ll push.”