Caveat: Don’t Forget it’s only fiction.
Stories, all short-shorts so far, that can be read separately as well as connected.
Written recently on different dates in this order, breaking a near-complete writer’s block of twenty years…
THE REAL MUCKY
The first time I encountered the Gruesome Guestroom was during my geeky, nerdy project in collecting Mansions Without Roofs. Not that I ever was exactly a nerd, nor a geek, not even an anorak. I think many – especially my parents – considered me an eccentric collector of things, something that kept me off the streets, out of mischief, along the straight and narrow, and, oh, by the way, you may already have noticed that I collect hackneyed words, outworn sayings, trite expressions and other clichés. Not that you could call ‘Mansions Without Roofs’ a common expression; indeed, it sounds well used, a title of a book, or poem, or whatever, but as far as I have checked, it is uniquely used here. It also sounds like an expression that has been passed from generation to generation as a meaningful symbol of a state of existence that never really has existed at all. The term ‘Gruesome Guestroom’ is equally rare, even though a ghost story would die for it as a title. As I thought when I first encountered one such room in a Mansion that had lost its roof. Can a room without a ceiling, and open to the sky be haunted? With difficulty, I would say. There is a sense of claustrophobia in seeing ghosts, I suggest. Closed in spaces. From where you can’t escape. Where the ghost – despite its tenuous existence – is trapped, too, making it pent up and thus more frightening. This Mansion was in deepest Essex and it once had stayover guests interested in hauntings and connected occult matters, a building that had now seen better days. Full of guest rooms, all of which rooms on the top floor were open to the sky. I thought this was a fine example of a mansion without a roof to tick off on my bucket list as having been visited by me. Or as the saying goes, it was the real McCoy. Few people know that the real McCoy expression was actually coined in Glasgow as the real Mackay, but the Americans changed it to the real McCoy. Of course, I was trespassing when I visited it, as it was a dangerous building the ownership of which had been debated in courts longer than the Jarndyce & Jarndyce case. But as with The Haunted and the Haunters by Bulwer-Lytton, I loved such ghostly literature. Nothing could stand in my way. It was fenced off with the appropriate warning signs, specially the one announcing ‘Danger of Death’. I imagined falling through the lower stories once I reached the top guest rooms. But I managed to negotiate all the obstacles in my way, and to cut a long story short, ha, there I go again… I reached what I eventually called the top story, and then the Gruesome Guestroom, exactly as Midnight might have struck. Even without my torch, I could have told the time by my luminous wristwatch, as there were no working clocks. Just an eerie silence. As dead as the grave. As silent as the tomb. As unspoken as verse from the hearse. And hovering at eye-level I made out the real McCoy, something or other that gave the guest room its full name. The story halted me in my tracks. Shaken to my roots. Left me mindless, if not bodiless to boot. No skin left in the game, just the spooky bleakness that a poor bloke like me could no longer have brain to house. Death for death, breath for breath, the headless mansion gulped and shuddered. With no roof to keep it in, thus scared out of its own very skin. And mine.
The ghost hunter first visited this ancient set of mansions in the early part of the 1950s. Usually, one envisages a haunted mansion to be a solitary large building of some stateliness in the countryside, surrounded by woods and hills. Here, though, in the quieter quarters of a city centre were a row of such mansions with a mere narrow alley way between each one at ground level. So, not a terrace as such, but they were evidently conjoined at the upper floors. But like many terraces of smaller working-class houses, two-up-two-downs or back-to-backs as they were once called in the early twentieth century, they had attics that ran the length of their extent without interruption by any physical partition.
So, here, the ghost hunter, once clambering up to these attics, found a huge length of raftered space with uncertain flooring stretching from mansion to mansion, dark and and full of cobwebs. He held his torch steady to see what was what.
Downstairs, the living quarters were still in good shape, and in a few of the mansions their ancient families still held sway, some squatting in chairs staring through the grimy windows they could not be bothered to clean. They had allowed the ghost hunter into their domains with grudging nods. They has seen many such visits before from earlier ghost hunters to whom they charged a small fee. But this ghost hunter was different. It was me.
And I took one of the surly denizens with me upon this first torchlit visit to the now notorious corridor of attics, spanning several histories below us, each mansion having its own dynastic family. They used this area directly under the conjoined roofs as storage space. Many dark shapes of student trunks and suitcases and dolls houses and broken rocking-horses and stopped clocks provided sinister silhouettes as far as the eye could see. Many narrow gaps in the conjoined roofs supplemented my torch but I could see that, despite such gaps, there was not one sign of seepage from weather, because the gaps of light were opportunely angled to resist any fluid’s passage.
That night, having returned home, I dreamt of those attics. They no longer had roofs at all, but the heavens still failed to penetrate its inclement weather within. It was as if there was an invisible skin of light stretched between the rafters that protected the storage space. A mere dream but a clue to the ghost I sought, I thought, when I awoke.
I soon forgot the dream, and left for my second visit to the mansions. I sought out the same denizen who had accompanied me into the top storeys the day before. He had changed somewhat from how I remembered him, and this time he insisted on bringing his wife with us as we made a second exploration. He told me she had once seen the ghost up there, and, despite her own natural fears of the unknown, she trusted in the ghost being a good ghost, as most ghosts seemed to me always to be, should I ever find one. She would point the ghost out to me. She knew how to sense it, to recognise it. I suddenly remembered again my dream and told them both about it. The man shrugged, but his wife smiled. As if she knew something we both didn’t.
There was a child involved in their marriage who had to be cared for by another denizen of the mansion, and once that was arranged, the three of us set off, clambering through the lower partitioned attics towards the upper corridor of attics. Strangely, I had not noticed the lower attics yesterday, but I was never an infallible witness, and I shrugged my shoulders at this hole in my memory.
I invite you, nevertheless, to follow my hunting as far as I was able to reach that day. We managed to walk, in a stooped way, the whole length of the mansions. Listening to what was going on below in each of them, the sound of dynastic families passing through levels of time towards this era of chaos that seemed gradually to be affecting the whole world. The odd Singer sewing machine being treadled. Children’s voices. And a gramophone needle’s scratching. Prior to music sounding out.
Some of the gaps in the roof were now more like holes. And the bric à brac stored up there seemed to have skeletal outlines rather than yesterday’s unbroken shapes back to back. One rocking horse was now a cage. One of us opened it. But it still rocked with the rhythm of a clock, as the heavens above shone through the holes with what I imagined the Holy Ghost to be. The rest was forgotten. But it was not a dream this time.
***
‘ A GHOST STORY BY D.F. LEWIS’
The figure entered the hallway with a pure white head – the term ‘head’ including the whole face where the hair, mouth, nose and ears should have been, but on one side was a single large vertically eye-shaped hole to let any light through. The outline of the face itself was moon-wide upon a black neck that led to a body dressed in what appeared to be an armless black gown in the otherwise dim space in which I stood watching it.
It was a household that eked out its electricity supply with proud stubbornness, so everywhere in it was mainly dark, with the denizens currently sitting in the only fully lighted room in the whole mansion. They indeed called it their sitting-room.
I had not expected such an apparition, but being what I like to call a ghost hunter, indeed the ghost hunter, I should not have been surprised, let alone as shocked as I was. But bearing in mind that this was my very first ghost apparition to witness, any emotion could have been excused, ranging from a love of awesome things to a mild fear, then to this utter terror. From frisson to a prison of self. Shutting every sense down so as to block out what I had seen. Not even shouting out to those in the sitting-room.
Whether the ghost had vanished after my initial sight of it, I was never to discover. All I can remember is that there was one slit in my soul that let it in like light. The next time you read some narrator’s words claiming to be the ghost hunter in a series of forthcoming short ghost stories like this one, it will not be me.
***
THE GRUESOME GUESTROOM
The ghost hunter’s next assignment of a haunted mystery was one he thought he had once cracked earlier, as he already had a title for it. Déjà vu was not a luxury he would countenance, so he remained determined to follow it through, whatever corners he had to turn more than once.
He knew the room in question was on the top floor of a mansion near Chelmsford, and he ordered a taxi to reach it, bearing in mind the rail strikes prevalent at the time. He hated unexpected points or signal failures, in any event. As the car wound up the long drive, he remembered he was only half invited, as it were. So he had his own story to tell once he knocked on the front door, depending on who opened it. The elderly couple who lived there with many servants did not see eye to eye, and only one of the couple had arranged this assignment for the ghost hunter.
Neither of them, as it happened, opened the door to him. It was, of course, one of the servants, so the ghost hunter was a little at a loss for words.
So, it was me who climbed the interminably winding stairs behind the footman. He knew exactly why I was there. He was obviously in cahoots with the one who had assigned me to this task, because surely, otherwise, he would have taken me in completely the wrong direction. We reached what he called the guestroom in question, and it turned out to be beyond the top storey, as it happened, being more an attic than a pukka floor.
He nodded me to open the door to this guestroom myself, with no sense of suspense. And the climax was already there before me. Nothing signalled in advance.
Attics were known to have rafters. But this one had what I can only call a flat ceiling, pure white from corner to corner, with fine cornices. Or were they covings? This was the disguised ghost of the mansion, I knew. Stretched in smooth pity or pain. As if it should not be there at all. But simply needed to be there as spectral witness.
The footman withdrew, leaving me with my own quandary. Beneath this ‘ceiling’, were the prone figures of an elderly couple, hands positioned in prayer, as if carved in stone for an old country church. I managed to leave quietly, retracing the route of what I now knew for certain to once have been déjà vu.
Not a gruesome guestroom after all, as there was no blood, simply peace and quiet. I took one rubbing from the brass plinth at the foot of their ‘bed’ as a keepsake. Not even a guestroom full stop. I simply guessed they were not guests of the elderly couple in the mansion. But the elderly couple themselves.
And, back home, he knew he was the ghost hunter, after all, now pleased with yet another tale to re-tell.
***
MANSIONS WITHOUT ROOMS
I had a dream once. Well, several dreams, in fact. All ghost hunters do. So, I suppose being the ghost hunter means I have more dreams than most. Within the special dream to which I am drawing attention here, I dissociated myself from the self dreaming it and became the man in it, not, as such, a ghost hunter at all, but an interested party in the side issues of such matters. He was asked to visit a few mansions in the Norfolk area of England, and coming from Clacton, he needed to travel from train via Colchester. The mansions themselves probably never existed outside of this special dream of mine.
The Clacton man was an insurance official, a claims adjuster and a property valuer combined, and of course ghosts were capable of causing insurable damage to properties as well as affecting the value of such properties. The value of a property, in this context, went up or down according to the imaginative or sensitive temperament of any purchaser of it, of course. A yearning to see ghosts as some form of mortality blocker. Or a terror at the thought of such things.
To cut a long dream short, I still feel a frisson of disquiet at what transpired in this dream to the man in it, a man who was only similar to me by living in Clacton, as I do, and, indeed, I, too, once worked in insurance many years ago as a company pensions negotiator. Actuaries in those days feared mortality blockers! Still do, I guess. And, oh yes, I wrote the old story ‘Digory Smalls’ where a man takes a stunted dwarf into a series of interlocking attics in a mansion above the various floors containing rooms.
The mansions in the dream were set side by side in an area of Norfolk that was little known. Not a terrace of mansions as such, but certainly a row. With an allotment between each one. Tended by inhabitants of those mansions, vegetables for their own consumption. The area had seen better days. But the crux of the matter, as the insurance official discovered, was that all the mansions contained no rooms at all! They were constituted of a whole complex of interlocking attics, interlocking even with other mansions in the very top levels by dint of some upper crooked architecture that counteracted the gaps between these mansions lower down.
The last thing I remember when cutting a longer dream short, was being carried by this man through these dusty raftered attics, full of childhood’s bric à brac, towards some force of nature that counteracted nature itself. Azathoth was a name somehow imprinted on my mind, as I struggled with the hatches between each attic, using loft ladders galore in what I can only call tessellated lattices, just with the use of my stunted limbs like small flippers. The man in this special dream eventually abandoned me up there, you see, and a version of me is still there seeking immortality, but being blocked at every turn. I need to dream the dream again to attempt rescue of myself. Or from myself? The trains are now on strike, though.
***
THE THIRD BED
As ghost hunter, I had encountered many situations where the sleeping occupant of one bed next to an empty one, sensed a haunting that emanated from such a situation. So when I was requested to investigate a case where — for some reason I failed to grasp — there were three separate beds in a room, I could not resist answering such a call to duty. Yes, it was a large room! It was in an old boarding house in a seaside town not far from Clacton. In fact, this nearby town was where I was born 75 years before, but that is beside the point.
When I was first told of the circumstances, intrigue overwhelmed me, with my being a great fan of Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘shadowy third’ syndrome, where a couple felt an extra presence stalking them. Or even perhaps overseeing them benignly. Quite often, a third that was in love with one or the other of the people with whom it was obsessed. Normally, a ghost but sometimes a real person. Rarely, if ever, was this ‘third’ a hybrid of ghost and real person, needless to say.
To reach this place, luckily I did not a need a train. A bus would suffice, and if I were younger a long walk would have achieved my goal. So the bus it was. The last bus of the day. I had been unavoidably delayed, you see. I planned to book a taxi back home, after completing the assignment. But it never came to such a necessity. You can guess why.
***
ALONE WITH THE HORRORS
Whereas in these stories of self and non-self I am labelled the ghost hunter, such a label also entails dreamcatcher or hawler of literature, sufferer of pareidolia and apophenia, finder of found art on sea, beaches, woods and skies, and above all, when alone, someone who feels he is haunted and hunted by those he in turn haunts and hunts. The ghost haunter, too, then, you might already have guessed.
This particular tranche of plot tells of when I investigated ‘The Third Bed’ mystery in the very seaside town where I was born. Allowed actually to sleep in such a bed as part of some experiment in self-haunting. Staring up at the bedroom ceiling which was as evidently as white during darkness as it was during daylight. A house big enough to be called a mansion with the name Olive Villa. Otherwise, boarded up, despite the pure whiteness of its ceilings, even whiter and brighter upstairs than downstairs. I tried to drift my mind into sleep with memories of dreamcatching certain literature, such as that written by Satyamurthy, Zelenyj, Hirshberg, Heuler, Leyshon, Wyckoff, Miskowksi, dePackh, Pflug, Bartlett, Holmes, Crisp, Watt, Travis, Mathew, Royle, Lynch, Linwood Grant, Scofidio, Rix & Ruppert along with other Axes of Chaos and Order
But the heavy breathing of the elderly couple sleeping in the other two beds kept me awake, with my ever listening for such breathing to cease. It was so very dark, despite the widening brightness above me.
Meanwhile, in hope or dread, he keeps one vertical eye open.
***
GHOST HUNTING FOR THE GHOST HUNTER
As soon as we knew that not just any ghost hunter but the ghost hunter had gone missing when on their latest assignment, we pulled out all the stops to find them.
Who are we, you ask? Well, the best way to describe us would be a loose organisation of other ghost hunters, most of us real people with interests in such matters, mostly level-headed citizens with a leaning towards the paranormal because we yearned admittedly for such a mortality blocker, being romantic souls with open eye-shaped apertures ready to welcome in the light of such spirituality beyond our normal lives. There were a few mad ones, too, perhaps, and even a number of shadowy thirds masquerading as real people, a tiny few among the latter being at least partially ghosts themselves.
Whoever we were in the view of third parties, we were quite different from each other in many ways, all genders and orientations and creeds, and we had one goal, to find the ghost hunter who represented us all. We hunted this ghost hunter in all the places we knew they frequented, mansions without roofs, mansions without rooms, searching even the most far-fetched attics beyond sane ceilings or storey dividers. We searched the pareidolia of skies, seas and woods, the gestalt apophenia of poetry, fiction and literature, the scurrilous avenues of AI art and for the first time we indulged in the experience of hunting real paintings for ghostly shifting of overnight changes in them. And, of course, and now with a look of importance in our faces, we hunted within the music we knew they loved: viz. Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Schoenberg, Glass, Nurse with Wound and the late work of the late Scott Walker.
And we eventually found what we knew somehow was the Real Mucky, a blind idiot god with flutes and drums, and frights so frightful, we screamed. Whether it was the ghost hunter transmigrated into the light they thought they had seen we shall never know. Most of us who were able to do so went back to our normal lives without beliefs in anything beyond such lives. Once bitten, twice shy, most of them. One of us, though, still wanders the now renewed wastes of your minds, still hunting for ghosts beyond the mirrored ceiling of gestalt, knowing someone simply has to fulfil this duty for a reason that has yet to be defined better than it was earlier defined above in this very tract that you now read, someone or something beyond pronoun’s reach that sits within you as you read it.
***
THE POINTING GHOST
I now reach a watershed or non-sequitur, as I suddenly recall, from my childhood, a ghost that relentlessly pointed at me with its finger, for as long as I managed to stay awake when sitting on my nursery rocking-horse. But when I did sleep, I dreamt of the ghost still pointing at me. Except in the latter case, I was the ghost and the ghost was me sitting on my rocking horse. In those days, I did not know I was to become a ghost hunter, and I often wonder what that dream must have presaged — but, calling a spade a spade as the cliché goes, let’s call this dream what it really was, a sheer utter nightmare of terror involving confusion about what pointed at whom or who pointed at what upon the now stiff and stifled rocking of the rocking horse. Did this nightmare actually trigger my destiny in becoming a ghost hunter, often providing a similar confusion as to whether I was to become a ghost haunter, instead? A finger continuously pointing at myself in some form of bony rigour that was far more mortifying than just a calm drifting away into a brain-softening old age, the endgame of which I once called, with relish, an ‘eventernal slumber’ (please Google this term) or was it the state of what has since become known in my head as ‘null immortalis’? Meantime, when you arrive at a watershed in a series of telling events, it is all too easy to make the break clearer by employing a new paragraph or even a small line of asterisks to show that you are turning a page, or leap-frogging a cliffhanger. These stories, it increasingly becomes clear, are separate floors in the mansion of life, till you reach the topmost attic of all, from which vantage point of near roofless exposure, you can gather, simply by looking down, that the whole crumbling exterior of the mansion badly needs repair. And yet the dark shapes that climb the outer walls, despite such crumbling, fail to carry trowels for the necessary ‘repointing’ (a term you hope is understood even by any non-building workers). In fact, they seem to be wielding implements far more disturbing. You desperately yearn to be rocked asleep into an unimpeachably full ‘null immortalis’ before they can reach you or, failing that, you must simply yearn to be given, by an overarching power, the surprise gift of a real unicorn horn as the only known antidote to their approach. You see, death and its denizens are reputedly their own non-sequitur. Time will tell, as the cliché says.
***
MANSIONS OF THE MOON
Only the title is borrowed from Jeff VanderMeer in ‘Nemonymous One’ whose story’s authorship therein was late-labelled in Nemonymous Two)
More as a dream catcher than as a ghost hunter, although ghosts were surely involved, I took a rocking-horse ride to the dark side of the moon whereon a multitude of shapes and figures pointed at me with steady fingers from the rooftops of renovated mansions. All this, beyond the mutually disguised chaos and order of the Real Mucky that now prevailed in Earth’s ruined streets and the fury of wild-fiery terrains.
Here, on Moon’s obverse, therefore, resided hope of rescue for those who might follow me, despite the paranoia-inducing pointing of the mansions’ denizens already here. The people remaining below on Earth would use, no doubt, their own chosen means of an erstwhile childhood’s transport as and when needed to dream themselves here for real. And then for them to ignore the pointing from those on the mended rooftops already here, and to build their own mansions of fulfilled expectation.
Did I wake reluctantly from this dream’s later eclipse? It is for me to know, and for you to find out.
I was simply reminded of a different childhood and a different grown-up version of me who could not believe in ghosts even when haunted by them. They teemed around me at every corner of my life, I have since discovered. They were there when I was at work and when I was at play, even during a period of parenthood amid the new toys thus involved, and even under the effects of later illness and sore urination, before visiting the elderly couple carved upon a tomb, all in pure white stone, a whiteness to match the ceiling above them.
I took such memories to the mansions on the moon whereby to fill the cracks in their walls. Yet the whiteness of my cement made the cracks look worse against the original moon rock of the walls that my cement healed. I would need to paint all over them to make the disguise fully work. All completed under the tessellated lattice of ladders to heaven or hell as formed by pointed fingers each grown into a bony elbow.
Did I wake less reluctantly this time from a second dream’s eclipse? It is for me to know, and for you to find out. But you seem to have departed already towards the moon’s bright white horn of bone now straightening — even as I watch it as above, so below — into a vertical eye’s ellipse.
***
To be continued here:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-df-lewis-stories-2.html
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