New D.F. Lewis Ghost Stories (4)

CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-df-lewis-ghost-stories-3.html

***

THE GLASS ONION

 The ghost furthest from being a ghost, as it happened to be after hunting and then finding it, was unworthy of even the word ‘almost’ a ghost, and it featured during a lengthy sojourn with my young family on the Clockhouse Mount during the whole of Thatcher’s era into Major’s. My contemporaneous horror stories, if not ghost stories, featuring this place can be easily found by any enthusiast on one of my websites. 

It was so far from being a ghost, it ceased to be anything at all. Until hindsight kicked in, that is. The pub called The Jack and Jill — which I rediscovered, making a small diversion to see it when I was driven past  the area upon one of those life-guzzling motorways that connect places today —  is still there, even if almost a derelict shell of itself. And the man who once cut my hair was seen snipping away at an unseen customer. Now much older, he still traded behind the same window of the same depressing shopping façade. 

Memories welled up in me, like little rodent ghosts nibbling away at their past reality. Yet, I was mainly happy in this place, I remember, for many reasons I need not expand on here. There are some who shared my happiness there  who have the same memories, if filtered differently. Very important people in my life, such as those to whom I read nursery rhymes, as well as the walk-on parts of those with whom I worked in nearby deepest Surrey, and the workaday actors who shared the creaky stage with me in the Amateur Dramatics at Clockhouse’s Hillcrest Hall. And, of course, in the tradition of Reggie Oliver’s ghost stories, in that latter place, the ghost, about which I speak above, once resided. The ghost was, I think, most of all present when we performed a certain play — a farce called ‘The Glass Onion’, by a forgotten playwright — but was otherwise indescribable, even worth not mentioning at all. The ghost and the play.

Although this ghost was as attenuated as far as attenuation can reach without being nothing at all, it still haunts me with even more than  the horror I Ieft behind in the guise of the ludicrous horror stories written back there and that nobody ever reads, including me. Almost-nothing-at-all is quite unnoticeable, you see, when it secretes itself  in a pocket, stowing-away as it were, when I moved house by means of those damnable motorways to the distant Essex seaside, as it must have done in hindsight. It whispers silently, you see, as I ever write Beyond Credence. 

***

HALF HOAX, HALF HEX

I learnt some lessons today from a book review just this minute finished, which review, you may ask, well, it’s for me to know, and for you to find out. These stories, meantime, are half truth, half fiction, often with an established backstory, to give some substance to the scares, and to bolster the hidden codes (hidden is a better word, than occult), codes that my attempted wordplay deploys disingenuously but with some skills hopefully  of reality-erection and ghost-establishment in an otherwise scatterbrained hunting for such things. They scare me, you see, so I expect they will scare you, too. 

My established backstory today, is that of Hastings, Sussex, where I spent a few summer holidays in the 1960s with my grandmother who lived there on West Hill at that time. A wonderful place of vast views of the New Town and mazy Old Town bookshops and East Hill’s rough country where Pitch and Putt prevailed, as well as the sight of the Dolphin building whose Witch Doctor disco I attended, too, and, if memory serves, you could discern distant Beachy Head where people died. But my story takes place in next door St. Leonard’s where the old buildings half-soar, mentally half-squat, with digs galore within them, and there is the seasoned age and imposing awe of inland town and seaside resort merged, and where ghosts are sure to abound, as a certain unexpected ghost did that day when I, a ghost hunter rookie in the 1960s, visited there for no reason at all. Just to get out of my Nanna’s hair I guess, as she thought me too much of a homebird and spoilt by her daughter who happened to be my mother back in Colchester

It was not an obvious ghost, it was more a Close Encounter of the one and a half kind with a huge hovering UFO that nobody saw but me, judging by the expressionless faces of the bent and the upstanding streetwalkers alike and  holidaymakers who had lost their bearings. It reared above a terraced shop’s upper frontage, a UFO as mass of uncertain resemblance to anything that can be described, with more ancient flashing colours upon its silver bulk  than the Witch Doctor itself (in those days Psychedelia was as basic as lights going on and off to the sound of Little Stevie Wonder as he was then known) but this was a future Virtual Reality show to kill something at root in your soul. And things trooped from a vertical eye-shape in the UFO’s flank  (now a UFO landed as a ULO) onto the roof, indeed one of those many roofs invisible to ground-level eyes, even if you actually thought to raise the sight sufficiently to notice what the tops of buildings in otherwise run-of-the-mill towns sported as codes of found art or etched engravings too far-fetched to read. These things  must have found it difficult to walk on such roofs even if the roof slopes were not steep enough to see, of if not roofs there at all, such things vanishing into the terraced mansions below them. I use the word ‘walk’ advisedly, as these things I call ‘things’ did not appear to have legs. Nor did my belief in them have legs at all, however suspended my disbelief was eventually to become as I continued to watch them.

These ‘things’, however, before my belief in them finally vanished, did emerge from its sunk-roof syndrome with what seemed to be an old woman in a particular thing’s ‘arms’, but she did not seem distressed as far as I could tell. It was as if a moment of truth or proof had happened for once in this duplicitous world that was merely incubating itself in those just past the mid-century days of which I speak. I lowered my eyes for a moment, too, as if in respectful obeisance to something  I did not understand and when I lifted them again, all was as it had been before what later happened. 

A bent old woman undeniably standing next to me on the pavement smiled a near vertical smile at me and went her way, as did some others, even a holidaymaker who seemed to be in the know about some different code to mine, and, later that day, I returned  to my temporary West Hill home, with its widest view possible of countless New Town roofs as well as the cricket ground and the railway station, went home, indeed, to my then much younger Nanna. And I, for once, felt Rhagarol, and the world my oyster.

***

For eighty thousand years Pth’thya-l’yi had lived in Y’ha-nthlei

This may be another instance of a tale derived subconsciously from déjà vu or a blatant retelling. Whichever is the case, I hope I have sufficiently embroidered it to be more than just a Victorian sampler or a barely post-mid 20th century naïvety as it truly was, but a relevance for today.

Meantime, you may be interested in knowing there is an old South Wales town called Llanelli, a place where my father was born and grew up in the twenties and thirties, a place that for some reason was, in my own time,  spelt as ‘Llanelly.’

Llanelli’s correct pronunciation is not unlike H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. In fact, I am not the only one to have made the case for some intangible synchronous connection between the two. On a visit there, whilst taking my late father from Essex where he had settled upon a nostalgic trip back to his roots, I could easily imagine the surly inhabitants possessing brothership with Deep Ones – and the deserted part of Llanelli docks being their lurkhole….

Imagine my shudder of delight when I soon after noted some words on the last page of ‘Shadow Over Innsmouth’ that I have employed as the title above. And, when I later related this fact to my own story-appearance in the since acclaimed ‘Shadows Over The Innsmouth’ (note the pluralisation), a plush hardback edited by Stephen Jones, since reprinted in several countries, well, I then felt I had hunted down a real ghost at last, one formed from the word-pareidolia  of coded fiction. 

Life is full of such coincidences. And I think immanent synchronicity and dark serendipity affect lovers of the dark side  of fiction more than most readers. Just as an example, whilst on that short visit to Llanelli, Dad scoured the local telephone directory in what he thought was a hopeless task to track down one of his old friends with whom he had gone diving at Llanelli docks as a boy: someone he had not seen or heard of for over forty years–and lo, that very friend was living directly opposite the guest house where Dad and I were staying, miles from the friend’s previously known abode! This chap turned out to be a Chief Mason in Llanelli with more resemblance to one of Deep Ones than was polite to notice. All true!

The strange forces of serendipity and coincidence ever seem to be at work, especially when writing stories in the ghost story mode. Either that or there is some wondrous mantra or muse steering our minds towards those priceless moments of creativity and gestalt.

Well, in hindsight, the previous paragraphs, still mainly in their pre-déjà vu state, may not be true at all, merely arguably possible. Certainly, those original tellings thus sampled were far too flowery, too pretentious and whatever else you might want  to call them. As an excuse, they were of their own age, with instinctive backdrops stitched from de la Mare, even Bulwer Lytton’s brain as fabrics to wipe Lovecraft’s fevered brow or to decorate his neat necktie tightened into a bud beneath his chin… And I admit, belatedly, this is certainly not a story at all but an intermission in my hunting for what I have not yet found save in a passion of the moment when writing about it.

***

FRINTON’S FRONT

Quite close to where I live in Holland on Sea is posh Frinton on Sea, well, I have managed to walk there at a push, until recently. Past the Haven’s radar mast, striding, or perhaps shambling in more recent days, along the sea wall onward to Frinton golf course, and eventually the town’s enclave itself where in wartime days my Mum worked for the Naafi. And in later years, a place that did not allow pubs, fish-and-chips nor buses to enter its  precinct. I think it has relaxed a bit since, if a place can relax, rather than the people who live there. 

H. Russell Wakefield, one of the great ghost story writers of all times, mentioned Frinton at least twice in his fiction, and so it may already have a readiness to be a venue for strange thoughts and even stranger sightings. But when I once spotted the church, the smallest in Essex, I believe, I sensed that ghost hunting would not go amiss in and around it. But that was in the days when I had not fully seen my métier for what it was and Frinton’s front was impermeable to me. But the church being quite close to the main shopping area, Connaught Avenue, one would have thought anything supernaturally eerie would be unlikely to happen. Not ripe for my quirky amateurish ghost hunting, as it was then (and perhaps Frinton itself had not yet fully fulfilled such a magnetic role, too, in such a context), even though my quirkiness was a mask for something more deeply unsettling than I could then imagine. And indeed I often found Frinton unsettling, despite its happy wide beaches with old-fashioned wooden groynes that had been replaced with rocky fishtails where I lived myself, and Frinton’s plush beach huts worthy of bigger constructions, ladders and outcrops of wooden backramps et al. And a shop that seemed to be a girl’s wardrobe. And a little park on the sea front with a tree carved into a sharp beaky bird, with a castle gate hewn into its base. Not forgetting the imposingly well-named Grand Hotel of Frinton facing the round  clock-shelter on the sea front upper green that looked like a morphing from  a time-travelling Tardis vehicle. The whole place seemed made for me. Both chirpy and unsettling, as I think I may have implied during these ramblings on my part. I can supply photographs if required. No rooms with spare third beds in these large houses and mansions hereabouts, rooms large enough to be single-minded and en suite, only to be shared when required. Sometimes, I wondered about just one room filling some of the town’s mansions. Duties as missing attics and lofts left for the owner’s beach huts to fulfil, especially in the off-season. But now I seem to be rambling off piste.

I simply must focus on my tale, if only for my mother’s sake, who spent most of her earlier years in Essex living on a boathouse called the ‘Onward’ as moored amid the Walton-on-the-Naze backwaters, where Arthur Ransome set some of his Swallows and Amazons  adventures. As a child, I preferred Enid Blyton, though. And Biggles at a push. Which brings me back to that outing on foot I once took from Holland to Frinton along with an old walking friend, now sadly deceased, whose mind was as wandering as now my own mind possibly wanders even worse than his did then. 

We saw Frinton in the distance as we left Holland Haven, and our proposed destination suddenly appeared to be an enticingly magical place over the brow of its own golf course, in the golden shafts of something that was not sun-bred. The shafts came from a direction in the sky, in fact, different from where the sun was meant to be. Golden as in something to be wished for. But there were bigger fish to fend off. And the sea shimmered not with the rich blue I described earlier in these storified reports of mine, but a deep yellow that, despite such dark deepness, blinded our eyes. We managed to hasten onward, onward being a word I cannot escape using in this context, and I shrugged off something my friend seemed to accept as natural as I helped lead him to the promised land of a later pub lunch in Walton which we would reach if we could walk that far, indeed plugging on towards Walton’s vast tiers of beach huts near its long pier and near where I was conceived, Walton being where we always intended to be rather than in Frinton, a plan that all along entailed our desire to by-pass Frinton despite the length of the walk we would be forced to strain our ageing sinews to achieve, and much of what I have  written above was to give that very false impression of our intentions to a place called Frinton that lay in wait for us, but by now it had discovered this my deceitful narration and was pulling us onward towards that small church inside its gates, a church that I mentioned before. Or was it the beaky bird that called us or the clock shelter cowering before a huge hotel with not guestrooms inside but a vast inner space gutted bigger even than the Tardis itself?

I can’t ask my friend now. But I am pretty sure we only escaped by pretending that we never intended to leave Holland at all, and with some boyish laughter and relief we turned back at the point in our walk where we always turned back, just as Holland became Frinton at the front edge of the latter’s golf course where stick-like figures with sticks they swung seemed to wave at us. We ever joked that we were auditioning for a new series of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ and we sought the actual number 42 in various configurations, too, just as a game to by-pass time. He thought these were my jokes, but little did he know how serious I could be. And I turned round to glimpse the Frinton we had escaped (or did it, for reasons of its own, relax its hold on us?) and I  saw with some relief that the sky had returned to pale blue, and the sea an even richer blue than I had ever seen it before. This story is merely now my aide memoire never to forget such events in honour of my friend. Pity I did not write it earlier when maybe it would not have been so wandering in its focus. And who knows, if we had reached Frinton, I may have found the very ghost that has ever eluded my hunting for it. Or does it hunt me, instead? Who or what is the front line we both defend

***

THE THIN KING

I have achieved little success so far in this canon of ‘stories’ to hunt out the real ghost that all ghost hunters seek to find, with erected holo-words filled up by codes as to such a ghost’s undeniable existence, while also bolstered by the truths of an author’s personal past life intrinsic to such stories as well as attempts at deploying the interspersed power of fiction itself to further, even more, such bolstering of the truths by lateral thinking, but the goal remains elusive, permanently tantalised by the brinkmanship of attainment. So try other means, I say. Strip a story of its setting, its set of people, its backstory, its plot and place, even its set of words, even losing a rare odd letter or two along the way, that would have couched any non-events’ onward course towards an ending. But these words that I use to express my intentions are words themselves, you claim, that I am using for you to read about them! And I shrug my shoulders and so plan to resort to all those missing ingredients of a story yet again. 

But GHOST stories surely do not logically exist by definition of what I fear can never be hunted down.

So there you have it, and my goal is finally reached. A philosophical impossibility made possible by fiction’s fearless force. A conundrum beaten out to the extra rhythms of Azathoth’s celebratory flutes and violins. Here, then, as necessary non sequitur, is the next story in line set out, as tempered by a restraint not demonstrated above. Meantime, it seems I have hunted down the ghost I sought during a lifetime of seeking it, simply by twisting a thought one ratchet further than I had ever twisted it before. ‘Torque Stories’, the would-be overall title of this still evolving collection of short-short ghost stories, to supplement  a volume called ‘Gauche Stories’ that is currently planned to be published independently before the end of 2023, that in turn will supplement the already published volumes entitled ‘Dabbling With Diabelli’ and ‘A Man Too Mean to be Me’ that were published following ‘The Last Balcony’ and ‘Weirdmonger’ before them. I have several more stories to tell, I hope, as a mass debriefing for now such a lifelong hunting’s sudden success. Thinking about it, to debrief a series of short-shorts is to make them longer, I guess. Thinking about such things again and again, perhaps forever, before the story proper shows its face.

Once upon a time, there was a thin King who doubted his own thoughts, despite the apparent worship his subjects demonstrated for each of his proclamations. His fairy tale castle resided in a world that sparkled less than some fantasy of yore, yet never so grim as Grimm either! These subjects, however, pretended to obey his words while doing their own thing without him knowing. The complete opposite happens between ruler and ruled in our own real world, you may already have noticed! But this is not a fable with a moral, but a fiction for its own sake, so please do not expect an easy message massaging your prejudices as you squat with your constant rage inside now legendary roofless and roomless mansions.

This thin King was the sort who knew more about dealing with whoever read about him in a  story about him than he knew about his subjects themselves within the story, subjects who had objectively never been taught to read beyond words of one syllable. His future bride, to be wed to him when she eventually came of rage, was a case in point with regard to the one-syllable syndrome, so his preliminary love letters written to her in the guise of ghost hunting stories went mainly to waste. So, she thought him to be some waster who wrote nothing but nonsense extending its various lengths null immortalis. PS I love you. Fat or not.

***

A VENETIAN TALE

Getting back to basics, allow me to explain that, for the ten years between 1975 and 1985, I wrote very little creative fiction material, yet as a character I appeared in stories written by unnamed sources and placed in plot venues I had not yet visited in real life. Towards the end of the century into the noughties, however, I travelled throughout Europe with my wife on coach tours, and thus I eventually managed to fulfil the visit to a particular city that my character had already made in the following  story from years before…

Venice saw the arrival of the ghost hunter who had English and Welsh roots. His name was ever unclear except for the epithet I have already given him. He tried to remain incognito as he believed such a state of tenuous existence as a person enabled an easier approach to supernatural phenomena who would be less suspiciously frightened of him if without a name and a passport. How he had reached Venice, in such insubstantial circumstances, still remains a mystery.  He mainly sought, he told locals, a ghost that was substantial enough to dress in real clothes. But that, in hindsight, I realised was an ironical claim, to conceal his real purposes.

There was a ghost that fitted very few labels or pre-conditions, about which it had been bruited in British paranormal circles as being one that haunted the canals of Venice while seeking very old locals who might remember a literary man and an unconnected youth both of whom once stayed there during a cholera outbreak, the latter youth accompanying a well-to-do family. But, in the end, I guess, they were a different older man and younger man the ghost sought than those who seemed obvious from the original terms of its reputed quest. Men that somehow crossed continents without official papers, too.

Indeed, the ghost hunter stumbled upon a different ghost altogether from any yet discussed, on a night of masked celebration for the city, a ghost wearing a mask with one slit not seeming to cover a proper face at all. I shudder even now at the thought. A vertical eye staring into the night, if the mask’s single slit was deduced correctly.

Which brings me to the nub of the night around which this story circles in uncertain currents. The ghost hunter was accustomed for his research to what we call mansions in Britain, readily generous as they were with many almost-ghosts, as I call them, but the Venetian form of these mansions were called palazzos, their roofs mainly still intact but their foundations sunk deep in the surrounding canals with often rank and real mucky water. The ghost hunter wondered about the nature of the rooms inside the palazzos and how residents  managed irrigation or ablution and eventual drainage. Commodes, he thought, must have been the answer.

A rising damp, too, he feared, a feeling that made his own bones seem to seep. Attics would be the safest place to hunt, if he could gain permission to enter them. Without a name, though, real people had more suspicion of him than he had assumed any potential ghosts apparently to have. Gondoliers were fussy, too, not taking any passenger without any checking, yet the ghost hunter was later poled, on a gondola with a single lantern, nearer to a particular incontinent palazzo, but a palazzo chosen by whom? This gondolier, who had agreed to take him in the end, was masked with a mask barely sufficient to see through to know where he was going. The water splashed with deceptively subtle tones of flute and violin, despite or because their respective holes and strings were slack or clogged, in contrast to the ghost hunter’s guilty heart beating, as he stood up precariously in the gondola under a quickly expunged crevice of the lantern’s light, indeed drumming as loudly as when the heart itself — while I was peering at his swaying shape with my vultural eye — had been snatched, upon its first drumming, from below a nearby Palazzo’s sunken floor.

***

THE TINIEST MANSION OF ALL

Any house, however basic-gaslit-1950s-bijou-cosy-needing-repair as it was then, with a toilet outside and no bathroom, can seem to be a mansion when an inhabitant who lives there magnifies its essential wonders. Time indeed now takes me back to Old Heath Road days, post Walton on Naze, having now moved to a terraced house slope-straightened upon a hill and next door to another such house that had then been turned into a small sweet shop-cum-grocery, just opposite the end of Scarletts Road that led to Colchester’s Recreation Ground… well, the more I reminisce, the  more the story will be lost. But I am first forced to to tell you about these school days of mine that involved St George’s Junior an imaginary enemy-filled walk away in Canterbury Road and later the Grammar School a two-wheeler bike ride away, as pedalled via the Army Garrison precinct roads. At the back of our house was a long thin garden containing a bullace tree in the branches of which I often sat wearing a Davy Crockett hat, and then further back some rough ground which the council later built up by means of cranes and diggers into a higher mound for new housing, and even further off, before the new houses arrived, two poplar trees, as iconic memories of those days, one tree taller than the other. Outside trundled past the No. 6 bus into town plus the equivalent, in the 1950s, of the wi-fi hub I dreamt to be under the pavement just in front of our gate.  My parents often at the Hippodrome Bingo having given up the black and white films they used to watch in Walton’s place for moving pictures. And me, when a little older, here in Colchester, watching the Dambusters film at the Embassy Cinema with daylight showing through its roof in echo now of something else I can’t now quite nail down. And much more from those days slides away even before I know it is there to grab.

With these pictures of the Old Heath Road locale now set in words, I find — especially at my age of such slippage — that the story I intended to tell  has indeed been lost with no memory of it connected to one or more of  those careful images from my past, including a ghost to feature in it actually to turn it into a ghost story, indeed the ghost I have ever since written about hunting and never found. A ghost story — that has vanished even before any chance to read it, or to write it, or even, in hindsight, to think it at all — is strangely the most frightening ghost story of all

THE END OF THIS SERIES OF GHOST STORIES