CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-df-lewis-ghost-stories-part-one.html
***
MANSIONS OF THE ROOM
INTRODUCTION: ‘As above, so below’, is an easy meme, for example to reconcile my interests in the believable power of synchronicity rather than in the more superstitious cause-and-effect effect of cosmic bodies and patterns upon us all. You see, even astrology becomes believable in that very light, the perceived power of the moon being a fine way to contextualise this consideration. Indeed, by the way, the word ‘mansions’ is an official term in the art or science of astrology as derived from the ancient form of astrology. From the Internet: ‘Often called lunar mansion, a lunar station or lunar house is a segment of the ecliptic through which the Moon passes in its orbit around the Earth.’ You may be interested to know that I used to follow planetary transits upon my own Natal Chart as shown HERE. Meantime, ghost hunters and dream catchers are creatures of ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’, as I hope my recent stories show, building eventually towards a gestalt that will not counteract against the ability of these stories to be separately read in a gulp, each managing to stand thus alone. Each a stone alone in the universe but susceptible to the universe’s patterns.
***
I once had an assignment to hunt a ghost in a mansion near St Osyth and in what I guess to be the biggest children’s nursery room in the whole world! A nursery used for an only child, to boot! Incidentally, I am conscious I may have given you the impression that I am an exorcist, but no, I am a freelance ghost hunter, with my own yearning to witness a real ghost as a comfort blanket or mortality-blocker, someone who is in fact often employed by my customers to establish a ghost’s existence for their own similar satisfaction, but not for me to destroy or remove such a ghost. There is quite a difference.
The room in fact, I hasten to add, in hindsight, used to be a nursery but this was no longer the case, the child having long grown up and left home. However, it was preserved exactly as the erstwhile child had left it, scattered with toys, many of which were dolls houses as far as the eye could see. I counted at least a hundred of them. Or should I call them dolls mansions? They looked like mansions to me, most with liftable roofs or openable frontages, to reveal the rooms. Yet, unlike the actual real mansion housing this main once-nursery room which itself housed such ‘toy’ mansions, these so-called ‘toy’ mansions, I soon discovered, had been gutted of their rooms altogether as if to make the largest internal space possible in each one — as if to suit dolls that were gigantic when judged by the scale of the buildings themselves. So that they could stand with feet in the basements and heads against the insides of the roofs. All ceilings gutted, all partitions or rafters, too.
I suddenly stopped in my tracks of thought. Did I just say ‘basements’ somewhere in my report above? How possibly could a traditional ‘dolls house’, as these mansions effectively were, have basements? The concept was unthinkable for obvious reasons.
As the crucial planetary transit of the day clicked into place in my brain, that brain had a brainwave. I had found a real ghost at last. The once unthinkable concept was now well and truly trapped between four walls and a roof. No escape for it now.
But I knew I was on the ground floor of the mansion, and beneath my feet I heard the sudden noises of awakening by things that would give me nightmares for the rest of my time on Earth. So I fled into the moonlight outside the main mansion while I had a chance to do so, without waiting to seek payment from the customer for my ghost hunting services and without any desire for the mortality-blocker’s comfort blanket that I once hunted. But even so, I am nevertheless beset by the nightmares I feared would have come to me had I stayed in that room!
***
MISSPOKEN AND MEANT MENTIONS
There was a time when I wasn’t any old ghost hunter let alone the ghost hunter, and I was even investigated for malingering as non-existent. I did no work at all, you see, until I heard the call, my first assignment being to establish a ghost in the ready-made ruins of St Botolph’s Priory, Colchester. The council needed it to bolster the tourist trade, as nobody seemed to visit this otherwise attractive place except winos. So, disguising myself as one of those winos, I, too, sat in this shaded, hillocky precinct out of mind and time, near the streets of charity shops yet strangely also so far away from them. An ancient ruined place that needed to achieve the magnetic heft of the more renowned Norman Castle in that town, now city.
But no ghost submitted its presence to my hunting, so I resorted to dream catching it instead, hauling, in my mind, every piece of the crumbling structure into new configurations that would strip any ghost of its non-existence behind or within such items of now malleable rubble it may have hidden. The other winos stared at me, as I sat in a state of half sleep, half waking, indeed half human, half ghost, juggling with a new physics, a new path for reality, and despite having misspoken many times since that first assignment about never yet having established the existence of any ghost, let alone the ghost, I did that day come as close as close can be to doing so. I only mention such later failings on my part as ghost hunter so as to give the ghost more credence, distilled as it was from your disbelief now suspended.
You see, yes, you can surely see, the actual disturbing shape hanging between Priory Street and St Botolph’s Church, floating without support, a configured tranche of history in this oldest recorded town, now city, the oldest in the whole of Britain. A blasphemous blend of all the history lessons that we have endured throughout our serial schooldays, a deconsecration utilising a huge sucking maw to motion its intentions. It meanfully moved with its own robotic but spiritually tenuous limbs, as well as engulfing, with its autonomous mouthings, whoever of us glimpsed its form of lies, the winos as spear-carriers included,
So, if truth were told, the ghost hunter had already fled, without even a glimpse of this so-called ghost, like Darcy fleeing from Ms Bennett in an alternate version of Pride and Prejudice. Or like the allies fleeing the aliens in a new world war. With no mentions of mansions. Just ruins. A tourist trap to die for.
***
ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός
I’ve deliberately delayed telling you about one particular assignment for me to establish a ghost, because its circumstances seem to stretch credence beyond anywhere credence is supposed to go!
But when I say one particular assignment, there were two assignments in truth, but strangely, in hindsight, connected into one. By the way, I use the word ‘credence’ instead of ‘belief’ advisedly, because it gives the necessary church ambiance, and, after all, many M.R. James stories took place in churches, perhaps without even one mention of God, only mention of the carved pews and the people who worked there, whether Rector or Vector diverted. Or do I mean Verger? Even Sexton? Those aforementioned paths of reality with which I once juggled in the grounds of St Botolph’s Priory. And churches do make a welcome change from mansions, I guess.
Whatever the case, upon curating these many so-called ghost stories, I have tried delaying the telling of this one because of the personal connections? No, because it was damn frightening. It is nothing I can really convey through the words that I type here, but deep down the frights remain, and you will have to take that as read. You will never be able to feel these frights unless you had experienced them alongside me.
The first ‘assignment’ was the Wivenhoe church, in a township near Colchester with tea places, antiques and bookshops, the church itself with a construction on its tower that looked like a much smaller version of the old-fashioned bandstand from Colchester Castle Park. The other ‘assignment’ was St Andrew’s Church, Coulsdon in Surrey, near Croydon, a relatively nondescript church on a suburban hill that had no connection whatsoever with the Wivenhoe church. Coulsdon, incidentally, was, and probably still is, a place nobody would visit unless they had to!
At first I thought the cases were quite separate and thus I treated them as such. Before I go much further, you will be astonished to learn that I never actually set foot in either of these churches as part of my paid ghost hunting, although I do recall many many years before attending a choral concert in the Coulsdon church. Memories are ever uncertain at my age.
It was simply the ‘credence’ stretching between the two sites that eventually indicated what I was up against. I’ve told you before I am not an exorcist, but an establisher of ghosts so as the customer asking me to do this can exploit the hauntings for whatever purpose they have in mind. And somehow I established a flyover, half real highway, half Heavenly arch, stretching between the two churches, and spanning all the counties between. With outlandish vehicles, it seemed, negotiating its complex lanes and hard shoulders, whether driven by ghosts or not, with the thickest brown smog imaginable pouring from outsized exhausts.
Needless to say, I was never remunerated for my findings. They, whoever they were, blocked my findings from all records. This is the first time they have been made public. But I still have that particular over-weening ghost somewhere in all the contraptions of life that I use, even the one used to type this. Deus Ex Machina. Grating atonally like a wind band with rusted or corroded instruments.
***
PRECARIOUSLY PITCHED BETWEEN TRUTH AND UNTRUTH
There was a period in my life when I yearned to surrender all goals in my career of ghost hunting or, as I now prefer to call it, ‘ghost establishing’. Having failed to fully establish any ghost, it seemed pointless to continue, although my reputation remained good for almost establishing a real ghost on several occasions. Perhaps, as similar to Holmes, I should recruit an assistant to bear some of the burden, before handing in my spiritual dowser!
After several auditions, a better word obviously than ‘interviews’ in the circumstances, I decided to do without! But the process had enlivened my interest and confidence in the activity of ghosts and hauntings. One man called Smith, for example, provided evidence of fully established ghosts that he had encountered when working for other practitioners. I took these claims with my usual cliché of a pinch of salt. Funny that, though, thinking about it in hindsight, throwing a pinch of salt over one’s shoulder into the Devil’s eye was a superstition unworthy of a pukka ghost hunter, but actually to take matters with a pinch of salt was to preserve sceptical caution over a claim precariously pitched between truth and untruth, a claim often already swinging toward the latter. But that was not the last time I encountered Smith. It was when the balance was due to swing the other way, like a hopefully blunt pendulum over the Real Mucky’s pit I later found myself in.
As someone always ready to wield a hackneyed phrase, I now cut a long story into a short-short, by saying that the assignment that saved me from retirement as ghost hunter was a story title given to me, ‘Mansions Without Roofs’, picked randomly out of a tin of many prepared titles on slips of paper useable for the writer’s group to which I belonged in Clacton. And I quickly scribbled out what was due to be typed, as if it were one of our customary speed-writing exercises, but retitled it ‘The Real Mucky’ instead of the original given title from the random tin, having by then deleted the most horrific bits I had written that genuinely scared me, still do in fact. And also to safeguard the other members of the group.
One day I shall try to remember exactly what it was I wrote and later deleted, hopefully then to block it forever by catharsis. What I originally wrote, however, must have autonomously established a ghost for real, either by a code or occult means, which was my ultimate ambition of ghost-establishment that still dogs me, indeed established such a ghost with irresistible certainty and with no hope of exorcism. Not a daemon muse as such, but an incubus that was too soft and mucky to prevent itself melting all over me.
The only way to escape such a nightmare was to make a certain promise to the Real Mucky that has haunted me ever since, a sacred promise (now fulfilled) of replacing the given title of my assigned homework in the group I had attended for well over twenty five years. Meantime, Smith, as I remembered him, turned out frighteningly to be an alias, the alternate truth of a monster’s namesake, a key to the code I had somehow written. But that is now water under the bridge, hopefully.
I later wrote a different sanitised story for the group and gave it the title ‘Mansions Without Roofs’, my penance thus come full circle. Touch wood.
***
CRAQUELURE
The painting did not become clear till he had wiped over its surface with a specially prepared cloth, using a mild purpose-made chemical that wiped away dirt, dust and other foreign bodies without harming the paint itself. It also wiped away any illusions that what was in front of him would not be a major discovery for any art dealer to die for.
The art preserver’s partner whistled under his breath, the only way to describe the sound of awe at what he saw over the art preserver’s shoulder. The lady in the corner, the inherited owner of the painting, craned her neck to get a better view of it, the preserver’s own blinkered enthusiasm not allowing him to think about moving to allow her to see more. He had felt the contours of the paint and its enticing craquelure under the cloth that he had gently wiped across its mentally marked out areas requiring meticulous treatment one by one. It made his fingers tingle. Never had he felt a painting like it. Indeed, actually to feel a painting tactilely is a separate experience from simply seeing it, with both processes complementing each other in a synergy with indefinable power. Most people only receive the experience of simply seeing a painting, unless they or a friend had painted it and thus allowed to touch it. I was now touching it through the tenuous skin of empathy. But rarely could most people touch a now obviously radiating masterpiece like this one by an as yet unknown artist of the art-heavy past. These were never experiences obtainable with AI art in any case, one reason I can feel confident that such art will never prevail over real art, however fine the former’s images. But the lure remains.
Until the artist’s name is established, I have left many of the other names unspoken here, the art preserver himself, his partner, the lady who owned the painting, and her besuited son who now entered the room scowling that they had started the process without him. I have also delayed describing or naming the painting’s images revealed, all richly coloured, some apparently thickly applied with an ancient palette knife. Its overall impression empathically evolving under thinly cloth-insulated fingers was startling, suffice it to say at this stage.
You see, as I write this, the process is incomplete. The gestalt only to be guessed. It had soon became clear that it was a diptych with the other half hinged to the upper half but sitting below it, and much care would be needed in dislodging the embedded one, face down as it was to the back of the glassless frame. We intend to tackle this tomorrow. I say ‘we’ but it is mainly me who does the intricate work of ghost hunting, more difficult, I claim, than the meticulous acts of art preservation.
-
Many of my previous assignments of ghost ‘pareidolia’ were with various forms of music and literature and indeed previous examples of painting or other fine and found art, and there are more tales of those disciplines in my later ghost hunting accounts as sort of allusive fiction-truths, particularly the discipline (or indiscipline?) of some atonal music, and this, in fact, is something for you to look forward to when I get round to writing them up for you.
But now, the next day has indeed dawned, and I can reveal that the opening of the back of the frame was easier than anticipated as if some trap was making it easier for us to be trapped by it!
None of us — and you can only guess at the backstories and current interactions of us all in this story that would take a whole novel to tell! — yes, none of us could have predicted what eventually transpired, even though the lady’s supercilious son had insisted that I, as professional ghost hunter, had been present at the operation. The artist’s name never became clear, as I understand it, so I am forced to allow any other names to remain elusively undivulged, however otherwise alluring they may be. An act of sacred Nemonymity on my part.
Yet, I can now bruit it publicly about many of the repercussions of this second day of the art preservation, the first clue to which was that some of the images cleaned into view the previous day seemed to have slightly shifted overnight. And one figure had taken on a possible resemblance to a well known figure in our current government in a pose he would not have wanted witnessed, and with what Blakean company he kept.
The back of the frame indeed revealed the hinge to the second half of what I still deemed to be a diptych, and after some more systematic cleaning area by area by the preserver, thus making my own fingers tingle, we stood there with open mouths, reflecting similar mouths we now saw within the literally creaking craquelure, as if the paint was in pain. And we now realised there was another hinge to a ‘shadowy third’! A ghostly tripswitch toward something I had always yearned to experience. The others, meantime, went their own ways, beyond the frame of this brief story.
***
ATONALIA
I think it is the common factor in all ghost hunters — well, all those worth their salt — that they enjoy the niche sound art of atonal music, whether it be Arnold Schoenberg or the old collective of musicians called Nurse With Wound, and many others such as Barraqué, Berg, Boulez, Zann and the late sessions of the late Scott Walker. Why this should be the case, I have my theories, but the reason became slightly clearer with what I have referred to before as the Case of the Third Bed.
It was where ‘Oh Whistle’ became ‘Oh Scream One’s Heart Out’, beside the sea, near the second longest pleasure pier in England. It was when the ghost hunter as narrator of events effectively made the haunted extra bed full with my investigative bodily presence, instead of this bed’s apparent customary emptiness, while an old married couple breathed heavily and rhythmically in apparent near unbroken sleep in the other two beds nearby. Only for them to suddenly wake and find indeed with terror that their spare bed was full. The combined ‘musical’ sounds heavily leaking from my several bluetooths must have scared them with more than just the hologram of a ghost that was sculpted in the air from the unexpected shape in the bed, cross-tempered with the various zany angles and the odd acoustics of their empty attic with a broken ceiling and the raging seas outside, the flutes, violins and drums within each of the seas’ relentless rhythmic surges, just like another Old One’s breathing.
I somehow managed to make peace with the elderly couple, a little the worse for wear from their panic at the sight of an an unexpected guest, and adding their own precarious mortality to the gestalt of patterns, and I was more than just happy in my heart that potential real ghosts could be created from any chance configurations of reality, as if through a sort of cosmic pareidolia. A lesson for all good ghost hunters.
***
FOR THE FORMING AND ASSIMILATION OF SMILE
The next assignment is a second example in this series that derives from either déjà vu or blatant retelling, I am not sure which. In old age memory fades. This time the ghost as pareidolia involves my favourite stamping ground, so surprising it has not cropped up in this series of fiction-truths till now. It is opportune, however, as I have recently decided that the original Real Mucky was not real at all, not even an alter ego of Azathoth, merely a ghost with a fluid excess of ectoplasm, in just the same basic way as I currently have a medicinally induced excess of sporadic sweat upon my body. Just a ghost as real or unreal as those in my favourite ghost stories by M.R. James, Oliver Onions, E.F. Benson, H. Russell Wakefield, L.P. Hartley, Edith Wharton etc. etc., even in the more complex spectral constructions of Walter de La Mare, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti. Yet my recent brief accounts seem to contain real ghosts, if one scries the pareidolia and apophenia of their words with an open mind, not merely to discover signs of the obvious yearned-for ghost always only almost there as a mortality-blocker but a quite different hidden ghost that is truly there! And I smile at such a tantalising thought.
.
Holland Haven is upon the Essex Edge where sea defences have recently been transformed from the old fashioned wooden groynes, those wide-toothed combs for Giants, now reborn as fishtail promontories of imported geology surrounded by deepened levels of sand, so deep that each old concrete or wooden stairway down to the sea has been buried up to the neck within swathes of newly wide-spread beachhead.
The waves find it impossible to climb these man-made heaps of gritty yellow and brown, but how long will tidal surges be outdone by these dunes let alone by the rocky two-fingered fishtails intended somehow to trick such surges away from the shore?
That trick seems to be based upon a pattern of angles by hidden geometry whereby these sea defences sweep water into confusions of direction, causing tide to neutralise tide, one in ebb, the other in flow. The quenching of thirsty energy with each swell and counterswell of mutual gulping.
The apparent Holland Haven local thereabouts smiled at me when I told him about my theories upon the mysterious nature of the fishtails and heightened sand. He was a strange man who seemed to spend his time taking photographs of these new sea defences with his battered iPhone. He had a wealth of photographs, he told me, showing the building of them from scratch. Also photos of this area before the coming of the fishtail builders. He was not interested in science or engineering, however, he told me; he was more of an artist who, by some instinctive framing, preserved the shapes and sculptures of man-made structures interacting with natural ones. An open air Tate Gallery, he evidently hoped.
He suddenly pointed at what looked like a variegated flotsam of attic bric-a-brac bobbing gradually into view around the tip of the nearest rocky fishtail. I squinted my eyes to see at what he was now repeatedly clicking his iPhone. Floating there were what appeared to me to be framed paintings, all a bit worse for wear from being in the sea. They clunked and clicked together upon the tide, at first seeming to approach the beach where we stood, then growing more distant, each move forward immediately followed by a move back like a latter day Zeno or Sisyphus, the trend being to travel parallel with the Edge of Essex, not inward nor outward.
We walked to keep pace with them, getting nearer to an area of the coast where yellow mechanical diggers and lorries were still building the fishtails and other sea defences. We would soon be stopped in our tracks by barbed wire.
‘That’s the Mona Lisa,’ he suddenly said, as I watched one painting, looking remarkably like that actual iconic portrait with its famous smile from the Louvre, as it bobbed out of sight behind a few randomly piled rocks.
‘Surely a copy,’ I said confidently with a forced smile of embarrassment to cover my retreat of fear at this madman.
‘Nope,’ he said coolly, ‘that’s the original.’
He had taken a quick iPhone snap of my face. He then took another cursory snap, this time of the rocks around which the painting had vanished upon some tidal current nobody could have explained or predicted, least of all the engineers who had allowed this current to exist from the random positioning of several fishtails and heaped-up sand.
His photos, I infer, were not direct records of observed things but more like trying to cohere the Platonic Form of Smile. Not a Cheshire Cat’s smile nor even a ghost’s, but a smile created by waves and suchlike as found art, in the Zeno’s Paradox of our perceived time and space.
But this story about him was never to be the destination, just a way station. Images, painted or snapped alike, are human first or artificially created second; they ever ebb and flow in dilatory uncertainty. Words are waves and suchlike, too, equally confused and conflated with human and artificial, but words must never ebb and flow; they must a crucial stasis be. The most frightening thought-ghost of all.
Yet, these words I know to be mine and mine only are also uncertain. The solid dependable ghost or gestalt, you see, remains to be captured by the additional means of an as yet unknown ‘shadowy third’.
And so we hunt on. Around every groyne and wave-blocker. Along every shaft of light reaching the reached-out eye below the makeshift roofs and dark attics of our head.
***
CONTINUED HERE:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-df-lewis-ghost-stories-3.html
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