Miss Ludgate, seeming over age 80, “…presented a surface like a mountain range of unexpected peaks and valleys;”
Just like the upsweep and downsweep of a broom, the piques and veils of a foreboding Fetch in Autumn. As we all enter Autumn now, in our own real-time in this country of Burrage, especially we older ones fear such a Fetch. Playing Patience with Fiction as I do by sweeping stories of their meaning. Often scooping new meanings to make each story last at least another season of teasing time by allowing the reading of it again and again. Hearing in the words and their meaning, forced or natural, that rhythm ever nearer, hoping my time remaining preserves itself by emptying the trees of extra pages and then collecting them up again in revised cycles….”the strokes were as regular as those of the pendulum of some slow old clock.”
Tessa, 22, Miss Ludgate’s companion, lives in this large house with Miss Ludgate … “And here and there, in the most unexpected places, were garden gods, mostly broken and all in need of scouring. Tessa soon discovered these stone ghosts quite unexpectedly, and nearly always with a leap and tingle of surprise.”
“…her slim hands—they at least would have pleased an artist—hovering like white moths over the keyboard”, she being induced to play on the loud pedal to block out the sound of what you once did wrong in your past, something now coming to “fetch” you, nearer and nearer, but never quite reaching… till it does! An annual recurrence, at the time that your wrong was first done. A wrong, as perceived by yourself or by others.
“…to touch hands over the barrier between youth and age. Miss Ludgate inspired in Tessa a queer tenderness.”
“She reminded Tessa of some poor actress playing the part of Queen, wearing the tawdry crown jewels,…”
And by dint of ominous elbows, there seems to be triggered today the possible certainty of dying in the coming Autumn, as first mentioned, following these elbows, to Tessa by Miss Ludgate — thus to clinch something in this particular reading of it, something not noticed when I last read it; I had not fully learnt of such elbow triggers nor the need to watch for their increasing effect on what I read till now, viz. “…when she had taken out and arranged a pack of patience cards preparatory to beginning her evening game, she suddenly leaned her elbows on the table and rested her face between her hands.”
Beggars can’t be choosers, and I infer young Tessa knows that tramps’ sleeves are increasingly worn away at such crucial hinges of happenstance. You see, in childhood, she and her brothers and sisters “had worn each other’s clothes, tramped the carpets threadbare,…”
***
Other similar reviews of unconnected horror stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
PS: AMB aka Ex Private X
Already quoted above: “…in the most unexpected places, were garden gods, mostly broken and all in need of scouring. Tessa soon discovered these stone ghosts quite unexpectedly,…” (my italics)
Compare or Contrast…
From SWEE to SMEE…
SMEE
SMEE
Everyone know this version of the hide and seek game and the nature of the plot in this classic rambling house ghost story. So…”…no need to pull long faces about it.”
“The memory of having touched her bare arm made me wince and draw in my lips. I prayed that somebody else would come along soon.” To read it with me as every page of it today was made to SEEM somehow blank. I must have got confused by the two pairs of knees!
The Waxwork
THE WAXWORK
The famous chilling story by Burrage about a jobbing journalist staying the night in the waxwork museum of deadly murderers, like Crippen, and the Frenchman, Bourdette, the latter an expert in mesmerism, I seem to recall. The journo kept thinking one or other of us moved, as he foolhardily swivelled in the armchair they had provided him for his journalistic stunt. But I sense we all moved at once, so nobody noticed, all being too busy moving, even if slightly, to pick which one of us really moved. Or was it just me and my imagination, and the collection of throats we all wore beneath the chin. But which one was a real throat, and which of us the wielder of a real razor? We’ll have to read the newspaper tomorrow, I guess to find out, which one of us can read minds.
But it wasn’t this famous fiction by Ex Private X that I had read at all, but an induced flash of fact about un conte concis I was about to write instead!