THE WRONG TURNING E-Book

Stephen Johnson

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A curated selection of chilling ghost stories from world literature,_x000D_ introduced and edited by broadcaster Stephen Johnson. What these _x000D_tales of the supernatural have in common is the theme of taking a_x000D_ 'wrong turning' in which the protagonists are made to face their _x000D_darkest fears. In the spirit of a fireside storyteller, each tale has an _x000D_afterword by Stephen Johnson, to suggest what the story might _x000D_really be telling us. With contributions from Tove Jansson, Henry James, Penelope Lively, Emily Bronte and more.

Leseprobe

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Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be lingered over and cherished.

Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.

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THE WRONG TURNING

Encounters with Ghosts

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Introduced and Edited by

Stephen Johnson

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One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –

One need not be a House –

The Brain has Corridors – surpassing

Material Place –

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting

External Ghost

Than its interior Confronting –

That Cooler Host […]

The Body – borrows a Revolver –

He bolts the Door –

O’erlooking a superior spectre –

Or More –

– Emily Dickinson, ‘670’, c.1863

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– Contents –

– Title Page –– Epigraph –– Introduction by Stephen Johnson –– EMILY BRONTË –from Wuthering Heights– ALEXANDER PUSHKIN –from The Queen of Spades– M. R. JAMES –from Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad– HENRY JAMES –from The Turn of the Screw– CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN –The Yellow Wallpaper– PENELOPE LIVELY –Black Dog– LANG YING –Men Take Refuge from Ghosts in a Bath House– AMBROSE BIERCE –An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge– W. W. JACOBS –The Monkey’s Paw– TOVE JANSSON –from Moominpappa at Sea– EMILY BRONTË –from Wuthering Heights– FLANN O’BRIEN –Cruiskeen Lawn column, Irish Times, 4 December 1944– Acknowledgements –– Permissions –– Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –– About the Author –– Copyright –vii

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1Stephen Johnson

– Introduction –

‘A menacing enchantment’ – that memorable phrase occurs in The Sculptor’s Daughter, the childhood memoir of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins. It captures the sense of both magic and encroaching darkness that was so much part of the infant (and adult) Jansson’s imaginative world. And yet there was one thing that made little Tove feel safe amid the blackness of the long Finnish winter nights: stories, particularly the stories told to her by her mother, the illustrator Signe Hammarsten-Jansson – later the model for Jansson’s wise, practical, endlessly loving Moominmamma:

The log-fire is alight and we draw up the big chair. We turn out the lights in the studio and sit in front of the fire and she says: once there was a little girl who was terribly pretty and her mummy liked her so awfully much … A soft gentle voice in the warm darkness and one gazes into the fire and nothing is dangerous. Everything else is outside and can’t get in. Not now or at any time.

But not everyone is blessed with a mummy like Signe-Hammarsten-Jansson. For those who aren’t, 2there may be another possibility: that the story itself can perform a similar function, giving form to the threatening shadows, and in the process taming them, containing them. When the story is well told, maybe the very pleasure we take in the telling can help us deal with those fears – make them less menacing and more enchanting.

My first memory of being gripped, scared, but also enthralled, by a ghost story goes back to when I was about five. I was with my mother in the kitchen, and David Davis, head of BBC’s Children’s Hour, was beginning a story on the radio. I’d heard that beautifully modulated, deliciously reassuring voice before, reading Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows, and I made myself comfortable in preparation for a similar ‘Listen with Mother’ session. What I got, however, was M. R. James’s terrifying The Haunted Doll’s House, in which two children are somehow made away with by the hideous, frog-faced apparition of the rich grandfather their coldly avaricious parents have obviously murdered. I remember spending a fearful, truly haunted night – and yet I was also hooked. Was this pure emotional masochism on my part, or was there a sense that I needed to face something down? To peer into the darkness that so frightened me? Could it even be that I’d begun to realise what Thomas Hardy had grasped: that, ‘If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst’?

After decades of grappling with the dread and 3weird exhilaration that goes with the bipolar condition I have suffered with since my teens, I’d like to think that I was close to the right track. Human beings have always loved frightening and being frightened by each other – within reason, of course, and as long as one retains that sense of being in a fundamentally ‘safe space’. An adrenaline rush, followed by a pleasurable dopamine release when one draws oneself up, looks around, and remembers that it’s all make-believe – maybe for many that’s all it ever needs to be. But for others, and especially for some of the troubled men and women who wove these stories together in the first place, I suspect that it was more than that. Looking back on the ghost stories that riveted me as a teenager and as a young adult, I’m struck by how many of them contain descriptions of states of mind strongly reminiscent of my own more unpleasant episodes. Picture M. R. James’s unfortunate scholar Dunning, in Casting the Runes, on his way back from the solidly rational British Museum to his reassuringly dull suburban dwelling place, unaware that a curse has been placed upon him:

More than once on his way home that day Mr. Dunning confessed to himself that he did not look forward with his usual cheerfulness to a solitary evening. It seemed to him that something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped between him and his fellow-men – had taken him in charge, as it were. 4

Excursions into dangerous mental territory often start with something like that. As James says in one of the stories included here, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, experto crede – ‘believe one who has experience of this.’ That flash of personal detail, rare in James’s stories, has led some to infer that the author himself had encountered appalling supernatural events like those he describes so vividly. But James always denied it, and I believe him. The experience I think he alludes to is the mental state itself: terror, painfully heightened awareness (hypervigilance, as the specialists put it) and dreadful imaginings – half-waking nightmares beyond the conscious control of the sufferer. I have experienced the same kind of thing myself at times when I’ve sensed, however falteringly, however unwillingly, that I too was contending with something that occupied the haunted corridors of my own brain: something too dreadful to be faced directly. It’s striking how many of the finest, subtlest ghost stories leave open the question of whether the ‘ghost’ is best understood as an objective or a subjective horror – Emily Dickinson’s ‘superior spectre’. Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw springs to mind, followed speedily and stealthily by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s taut little masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper. Penelope’s Lively’s Black Dog poses the same question, but the other way round: initially it seems likely that the disturbance is ‘all in the mind’; but could it actually be objectively real – or is there another, still more 5challenging way of looking at it? The best ghost stories often leave the reader with questions like that, questions which, however plausibly they may be answered, only lead to more questions: in Dickinson’s words, ‘a superior spectre – Or More – ’?

Therein lies the big difference between the ghost story and the other great English-language mystery genre, the detective story. Many detective stories start by creating a sense of the uncanny, so much so that we may at first believe there really is an element of the supernatural – think of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, or any number of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. Then the detective gets to work; reason is applied and finally light is shone into those dark corners. Bewildering, frightening events are explained and set in order – think how many of these expertly engineered tales end with the triumphant sleuth laying it all out in clear narrative form to an enthralled audience. The rational mind – what Poirot famously called his ‘little grey cells’ – has triumphed.

Great ghost stories rarely start by springing the traumatic event upon us; more usually they build up to it steadily, carefully, though we may sense early on that something is seriously amiss, even – perhaps especially – when the scene set before us at the outset appears comfortable, predictable, everyday. It can be solid, orderly and well-lit as Mr. Dunning’s British Museum, or cosy as the family fireside setting where W. W. Jacobs’s 6‘The Monkey’s Paw’ begins its steady crescendo of horror. We are lulled into a false sense of security, and so are less able to dismiss or diminish the terrible thing when it finally reveals itself.

For Robert Aickman, the still undervalued creator of what he preferred to call ‘strange stories’, there was a lot more to all this than the enjoyment of a little adrenalin-boosting fun. Aickman set out his theory in a letter he wrote on his acceptance of the World Fantasy Award in 1976:

I believe that at the time of the Industrial and French Revolutions … mankind took a wrong turning. The beliefs that one day, by application of reason and the scientific method, everything will be known, and every problem and unhappiness solved, seem to me to have led to a situation where, first, we are in imminent danger of destroying the whole world.

Whatever one thinks of Aickman’s comments as a philosophical or historical summary – an explanation of where humankind as a whole went astray – the notion of some kind of ‘wrong turning’ does seem to lie behind a lot of the most enduring literary ghost stories. No matter whether it involves a literal wrong turning or something more mysterious and elusive, in each case a character makes a mistake and places trust in the wrong kind of mental compass: nemesis is waiting in the wings to punish hubris. Something within us, the ‘superior spectre’, needs to be encountered and 7reckoned with, and when we meet it, Poirot’s little grey cells aren’t adequate to deal with it on their own. Whether what we confront in the haunted chamber is the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’, the Jungian ‘shadow’ self, the embodiment of some buried childhood trauma or simply a personification of the terrible fact of death (for M. R. James, the ‘King of Terrors’), to come to terms with what the ghost represents we must expand our mental horizons. If we are to achieve fully integrated minds, we can’t go on being left-brain supremacists, insisting on the primacy of analytic language, scientific logic and objective truth: we must accept that the right hemisphere of the brain, with its resources of fantasy, poetic symbolism and subjective insight, has something vitally important to tell us too. That has certainly been my experience. Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century of serious therapeutic work, I’m struck by how often, in trying to explain my own terrifying mental states to psychiatrists or psychotherapists, I’ve resorted to images or turns of phrase in some of my own favourite ghost stories. Shakespeare famously spoke of how, ‘as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown’, the poet ‘turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’ The poet, mark you, not the clinician or the neuroscientist: and when, with his or her help, our shadows acquire that shape and that name they somehow become less frightening, more manageable, or at least liveable with. 8

But not necessarily more rational. A good ghost story remains, in the end, an exercise in what Keats called ‘Negative capability’: the state of mind in which we are not only able but willing to remain ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. When it comes to confronting one’s own internal horrors that, I believe, is essential. At the end of one of Robert Aickman’s finest stories, Into the Wood, the central character, Margaret, experiences a classic face-off with her husband, Henry, who – like quite a few of the male characters in these stories – thinks that his wife just needs to ‘be reasonable’ and everything will return to sane, safe normality:

The argument took every bit as long as she expected, but Margaret was developing new resources now, even though she had little idea what they were.

‘I’ll let you know immediately I get out of the wood,’ she promised. ‘It’s one of those things you have to live through until you emerge the other side.’

The line between menace and enchantment may be perilously thin, but, on the evidence of these stories, treading it can be as perversely delightful for the writer as for the reader: so often there’s a glint of wicked playfulness amid the darkness. The moral and psychological horrors conveyed in The Turn of the Screw are real enough, but there’s also something teasing at 9work here, evident in the way James layers ambiguity on ambiguity, creating an Escher-like nest of tables for the would-be interpreter. Something similar flickers in the irony and deft understatement of M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, even after the shocking climax – ‘as you may imagine, the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear than they used to be.’ ‘I could a tale unfold’, says the Ghost in Hamlet, ‘whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combined locks to part, / And each particular hair to stand on end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.’ There’s something about that outrageously florid language that suggests that this ‘poor ghost’ is having a thoroughly good time scaring the morbidly imaginative Prince out of his wits.

As for Flann O’Brien, or, rather, Myles na gCopaleen – best to let him speak for himself, which he does with characteristic brilliance, in the space of a newspaper column, at the end of this collection. I’ll just say it turns out that there’s more than one way of dealing with superior spectres. 10

† Granted, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is not, in any normal sense, a ‘ghost story’; but ghosts do play a significant role in the novel, however brief and shadowy their presences may be. An encounter with a ghost – or at least the possibility of one – is what sets the novel’s central narrative in motion, and its ambiguous, hauntingly beautiful coda hinges on the question of whether intense passion and pain cease when the sufferers’ earthly lives are over.

A little scene-setting is necessary before our first extract. The prosperous, ever-so-slightly foppish Lockwood has just taken up the tenancy of Thrushcross Grange, a country house in a sheltered valley amongst the wild and desolate Yorkshire Pennines. His curiosity about his new landlord, the sullen, enigmatic Heathcliff, has driven him to seek the latter out, on a snowy winter’s day, at his remote farmhouse, Wuthering Heights; and this, it soon becomes clear, is his first significant ‘wrong turning’. There Lockwood receives a welcome worthy of the classic TV black comedy, The League of Gentlemen. He is harangued by the crabbed-souled, fanatically religious servant Joseph, treated with oddly defensive resentment by the as yet unnamed young woman of the house, and with undisguised hostility by the shabby Hareton. As for Heathcliff, the only thing that forces a smile from him is Lockwood’s ineffectual protesting when he’s set upon by two enormous guard dogs. With the moors now impassable, and Lockwood bruised and faint from his ordeal, Heathcliff grudgingly orders the servant Zillah to give his guest brandy and find him somewhere to sleep. But for the unfortunate Lockwood, there is worse to come.

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Emily Brontë

– from Wuthering Heights (1847) –

While leading the way upstairs, she recommended that I should hide the candle, and not make a noise; for her master had an odd notion about the chamber she would put me in, and never let anybody lodge there willingly.

I asked the reason.

She did not know, she answered: she had only lived there a year or two; and they had so many queer goings on, she could not begin to be curious.

Too stupefied to be curious myself, I fastened my door and glanced round for the bed. The whole furniture consisted of a chair, a clothes-press, and a large oak case, with squares cut out near the top resembling coach windows.

Having approached this structure, I looked inside, and perceived it to be a singular sort of old-fashioned couch, very conveniently designed to obviate the necessity for every member of the family having a room to himself. In fact, it formed a little closet, and the ledge of a window, which it enclosed, served as a table.

I slid back the panelled sides, got in with my light, pulled them together again, and felt secure against the vigilance of Heathcliff, and every one else. 12

The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up in one corner; and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint. This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small – Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton.

In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw – Heathcliff – Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres – the air swarmed with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I discovered my candlewick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calfskin.

I snuffed it off, and, very ill at ease under the influence of cold and lingering nausea, sat up and spread open the injured tome on my knee. It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a flyleaf bore the inscription – ‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book,’ and a date some quarter of a century back.

I shut it, and took up another and another, till I had examined all. Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose: scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary – at least the appearance of one – covering 13every morsel of blank that the printer had left.

Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand. At the top of an extra page (quite a treasure, probably, when first lighted on) I was greatly amused to behold an excellent caricature of my friend Joseph – rudely, yet powerfully sketched.

An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began forthwith to decipher her faded hieroglyphics.