Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic Tales Vol 5

By Algernon Blackwood

Selected from the entire body of Algernon Blackwood's work, this collection of short stories contains his finest writing. Published in a total of five volumes, Volume 5 contains seven of the best, including ‘The Dance of Death’, ‘A Psychical Invasion’, and ‘The Nemesis of Fire’. In ‘The Dance of Death’ we have a fleeting glimpse into another world, tantalisingly only half explained. Each disturbing tale is stamped with the unmistakable hallmark of Blackwood’s style including the two major John Silence stories. Mysticism and cosmic experiences feature, as well as the more traditional elements of the horror story. Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic Tales reveals why Blackwood is celebrated as the twentieth century's foremost British writer of supernatural fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Stratus
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780755156122

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English journalist, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Shooter’s Hill, he developed an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism at a young age. After a youth spent travelling and taking odd jobs—Canadian dairy farmer, bartender, model, violin teacher—Blackwood returned to England and embarked on a career as a professional writer. Known for his connection to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Blackwood gained a reputation as a master of occult storytelling, publishing such popular horror stories as “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” He also wrote several novels, including Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909) and The Centaur (1911). Throughout his life, Blackwood was a passionate outdoorsman, spending much of his time skiing and mountain climbing. Recognized as a pioneering writer of ghost stories, Blackwood influenced such figures as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, and Henry Miller.

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Copyright & Information

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic Tales

Volume 5

© Algernon Blackwood; House of Stratus 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Algernon Blackwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2017 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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About the Author

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) was born into a well-to-do Kentish family. His parents, converts to a Calvinistic sect, led an austere life, ill-suited to their dreamy and sensitive son. During adolescence, he became fascinated by hypnotism and the supernatural and, on leaving university, studied Hindu philosophy and occultism. Later, he was to draw on these beliefs and experiences in his writing.

Sent away to Canada at the age of twenty, his attempts at making a living were wholly unsuccessful and shortly after his return to England, he began to write. The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, published in 1906, was followed by a series of psychic detective stories, featuring John Silence, 'physician extraordinary'. His reputation as one of the greatest exponents of supernatural fiction began to grow.

Chiefly known for his ghost stories, Blackwood wrote in many different forms within the genre. His most personal works, however, are his 'mystical' novels, for example The Centaur, where he explores man's empathy with the forces of the universe.

Blackwood also wrote children's fiction. A Prisoner in Fairyland was adapted into the play (later the musical), Starlight Express.

Later in life, Blackwood turned to writing radio plays, and in 1947 he began a new career on BBC TV telling ghost stories. He received a knighthood in 1949.

The Works of Algernon Blackwood

Published by House of Stratus

Novels:

The Bright Messenger

The Centaur

The Education of Uncle Paul

The Extra day

The Human Chord

Julius LeVallon: An Episode

The Promise of Air

Children's Fiction:

A Prisoner in Fairyland

Collections:

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 1

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 2

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 3

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 4

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 5

Note: No Stories are repeated in these volumes

Introduction

(To the previous Volume of The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood)

The body, they assure us, changes its atoms every seven years or so, being therefore totally different at twenty-eight from what it was at twenty-one, but science does not commit itself with regard to mental changes, such changes being doubtless incommensurable. At any rate, Mr Martin Secker's request for an introduction to this collection faces me with a question: Am I the man who wrote these tales some thirty years ago, or am I someone else? This considerable period of time is involved, but as I cannot step back to the platform from which I viewed the world in 1906, the question finds no answer. Neither Dunne's Serial Universe, nor Ouspensky's other-dimensional time, nor even a book like Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen, can help, while the recent exposé of the Versailles Adventure suggests brutally that thirty or one hundred years are precisely what they say they are, no more, no less. Moreover, a polite request from an intelligent publisher being in the nature of force majeure, if not an Act of God, this Introduction, whoever writes it, must be written.

It is, none the less, a dour job, for I have not read these stories since I first wrote them; physically, mentally, spiritually I must have changed more times than I care to remember; they introduce me to someone I now know but slightly, so that it is almost like reading the work of another man. Any desire to cut, to alter, entirely to re-compose is, of course, inadmissible; tinkering is worse than useless, it is dangerous; the tales stand, therefore, as they were first set down. Far from apologising for them, however, I must admit that most of them thrilled me. I wish I had known the fellow who saw things in this way and thus expressed himself is the kind of comment my twentieth-century mind suggests, since behind the actual tale I discern hints of an adventurous philosophy. I wonder whether his queer, observant, questioning mind travelled further! But what I myself honestly think of the stories today not even Torquemada could extract from me.

It is, of course, extremely interesting to look back across the years questioningly, wonderingly, objectively, without detachment, though seeing objectively does not necessarily imply seeing truthfully. It ought to imply seeing with self eliminated, yet self obstinately intrudes, whether it be the self of today or the self of 1906. I recall, anyhow, that these tales poured from me spontaneously, as though a tap were turned on, and I have often since leaned to the suggestion that many of them derived from buried, unresolved shocks – shocks to the emotions; and by unresolved, I mean, of course, unexpressed. These shocks had come to an exceptionally ignorant youth of twenty who had drifted into the life of a newspaper reporter in New York after a disastrous cattle farm and a hotel in Canada, and the drifting had included the stress of extreme poverty and starvation. Having told some of this in Adventures Before Thirty, I must not repeat, but it holds this psychological interest for me today: that the New York experiences in a world of crime and vice had bruised and bludgeoned a sensitive nature that swallowed the horrors without being able to digest them, and that the seeds thus sown, dormant and unresolved in the subconscious, possibly emerged later – and, since the subconscious always dramatises, emerged in story form.

Others are, of course, ghost stories, so called, for the classification of ghost stories has stuck to me closer than a brother, and even when the BBC ask for a story it must be, preferably, of the creepy kind. Yet this alleged interest in ghosts I should more accurately define as an interest in the Extension of Human Faculty. To be known as the ghost man is almost a derogatory classification, and here at last I may perhaps refute it. My interest in psychic matters has always been the interest in questions of extended or expanded consciousness. If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than what sees it? Do we possess faculties which, under exceptional stimulus, register beyond the normal gamut of seeing, hearing, feeling? That such faculties may exist in the human being and occasionally manifest is where my interest has always lain. Such exceptional stimulus may be pathogenic (as duplicated in the Salpetrière and other mental hospitals), or due to some dynamic flash of terror or beauty which strikes a Man in the Street, but that they occur is beyond the denials today of the petty sceptic. If this is more certain to me now than it was when I wrote these tales a generation ago means merely that I have since studied more of the increasingly voluminous evidence. Thus in most of these stories there is usually an average man who, either through a flash of terror or of beauty, becomes stimulated into extra-sensory experience. A wide gap may lie between a common-place mind that became clairvoyant and clairaudient from a flash of terror in The Empty House, to the Man in the Street in The Centaur whose sense of beauty blazed into a realisation of the planetary bodies as superhuman entities, but the principle is the same: both experienced an expansion of normal consciousness. And this, I submit, travels a little further than the manufacture of the homespun ghost-story.

These early stories, though I did not know it at the time, seem to me now to have been practice-flights for more adventurous explorations, or, as Eveleigh Nash, my first publisher, phrased it, trying your hand on a larger canvas. That idea of a larger canvas scarified me at the age of thirty-six, but seeing my first book in print, I remember, scarified me even more. It is an experience that must surely intensify any hint of inferiority complex that lies hidden. I well recall my intense relief that The Empty House, my first book, enjoyed, if that be the word, a gentle, negligible press until the Spectator of that day, half to my distress, half to my delight, chose it as a verse for a special sermon, and, later, a scholarly article in the Morning Post, analysing the ghost-story as a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form, based its remarks on this particular book and became traceable to Hilaire Belloc, to whose subsequent encouragement I owe much.

What I may call left-handed compliments, at any rate, flew wildly across a barrage of faithful criticism, and I remember that, while accepting the blame as deserved, I cuddled the compliments, deciding therefore to try again – so that The Listener in due course appeared. And, such are the tricks of memory, I can still see the grave expression on the faces of Eveleigh Nash and his gifted reader, Maude ffoulkes, while we discussed together whether a large Ear might be printed on the cover (picture-jackets had not yet come in), and whether the title story was not perhaps of too pathogenic a character to be included, my own vote being in the decided negative despite the personal origin of that horrible tale.

It is, at any rate, true that to this persuasive suggestion of trying a larger canvas I owed a later Centaur, Julius Le Vallon, The Human Chord, The Education of Uncle Paul, and many others. Thus, I both blame and bless Eveleigh Nash for a stimulating hint which, if its results have afflicted others, provided relief to an author who found himself more overcharged with material than probably his talent was competent to express adequately.

The origin of some of these stories may be of interest to a reader here or there: this not only sounds egotistical, but is: it interests me, as I look back to revive old memories…of a journey down the Danube in a Canadian canoe, and how my friend and I camped on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg (Bratislava) and the willows seemed to suffocate us in spite of the gale blowing, and how a year or two later, making the same trip in a barge, we found a dead body caught by a root, its decayed mass dangling against the sandy shore of the very same island my story describes. A coincidence, of course! Of that unfurnished haunted house in a Brighton Square where I sat up to see a ghost with a woman beside me whose rather wrinkled face suddenly blanched smooth as the face of a child, frightening me far more than the ghost I never actually saw; of the Moravian School in the Black Forest (Königsfeld), where as a boy I spent two haunted years and revisited later to find a compensating Devil Worship in full swing and called Secret Worship; of the island in the Baltic where the Were-wold Legend materialised as The Camp of the Dog, yet whereof our happy party of six campers remained ignorant until they read my tale; above all, of that old French town of Ancient Sorceries, where the slinking inhabitants behaved as cats behave, sidling along the pavements with slanting gestures, twitching their sleeky ears and snakey tails, their sharp eyes glinting, all alert and concentrated upon some hidden, secret life of their own while they feigned attention to tourists like ourselves – ourselves just back from climbing in the Dolomites and finding the train so boring on its way from Basle to Boulogne that we hopped out at Laon and spent two days in this witch-ridden atmosphere. The Auberge de la Hure was the name of the Inn, and it was not Angoulème, as some fancied, nor Coutances as John Gibbons thought (I Wanted to Travel), nor elsewhere as variously attributed, but Laon, a lovely old haunted town where the Cathedral towers stand up against the sunset like cats' ears, the paws running down the dusky streets, the feline body crouched just below the hill. Yet who should guess that so much magic lay within a kilometre of its dull, desolate railway station, or that from my little bedroom window I should presently stand enthralled as I looked across the moonlit tiles and towers, jotting down on the backs of envelopes an experience that kept sleep away till dawn? Then the awful Wendigo comes shouldering up over a hill of memory, a name I remembered vividly in Hiawatha (Wendigos and giants runs the line), yet hardly thought of again till a friend, just back from Labrador, told me honest tales about mysterious evacuations of a whole family from a lonely valley because the Wendigo had come blundering in and scared them stiff; of the Haunted island, an island I lived on for an autumn month alone in the Muskoka Lakes north of Toronto, where Red Indians flit to and from when the summer visitors have left; and of a dreadful house I once lived in (New York City) where unaccountable noises, voices, slitherings at night and so forth seemed a commonplace setting for the Eavesdropping re-enactment of a gruesome murder of twenty years before…

Memories, indeed, of where each story was written are clearer to me today than the conduct and details of the plots themselves, but clearer still is the vivid recollection that in each case an emotion of a very possessive kind produced each tale. To write a ghost story I must first feel ghostly, a condition not to be artificially induced; and there was a touch of goose-flesh down my back as I watched my Wendigo in a mountain inn above Champery and heard the November night-winds crashing among the pine-forests beyond the window; shivers down the spine, too, as the horror of that Willows island crept over the imagination. I think, indeed, the majority of these tales were accompanied at birth by what may be called a delicious shudder. The true other-worldly story should issue from that core of superstition which lies in every mother's son of us, and we are still close enough to primitive days with their terror of the dark for Reason to abdicate without too violent resistance.

There has, however, been one striking change in knowledge since the generation when these tales were written – matter has been wiped out of existence. Atoms are no longer minute billiard-balls but charges of negative electricity, and these charges, according to Eddington, Jeans and Whitehead, are themselves but symbols. What these symbols stand for ultimately Science admittedly does not know. Physics remains silent. Jeans speaks of a world of shadows. Phenomena, Professor Joad reminds us, may be merely symbols of a Reality which underlies them. The Reality, for all we know to the contrary, may be of an entirely different order from the events which symbolise it. It may be even mental or spiritual. The Universe, thus, seems to be an appearance merely, our old friend Maya, or Illusion, of the Hindus. Possibly, therefore, Reason might today encounter less need for abdicating than thirty years ago, and the rapprochement between Modern Physics and so-called psychical and mystical phenomena must seem suggestive to any reflecting mind. All alike conduct their researches in a world of shadows among mere symbols of a Reality that may conceivably be mental or spiritual, but is at any rate unknown, if not unknowable.

Let me leave the stories to speak for themselves. They are printed here in the chronological sequence in which they were written between 1906 and 1950.

AB

Savile Club

1938

The Dance of Death

Browne went to the dance feeling genuinely depressed, for the doctor had just warned him that his heart was weak and that he must be exceedingly careful in the matter of exertion.

‘Dancing?’ he asked, with that assumed lightness some natures affect in the face of a severe shock – the plucky instinct to conceal pain.

‘Well – in moderation, perhaps,’ hummed the doctor. ‘Not wildly!’ he added, with a smile that betrayed something more than mere professional sympathy.

At any other time Browne would probably have laughed, but the doctor’s serious manner put a touch of ice on the springs of laughter. At the age of twenty-six one hardly realises death; life is still endless; and it is only old people who have ‘hearts’ and such-like afflictions. So it was that the professional dictum came as a real shock; and with it too, as a sudden revelation, came that little widening of sympathy for others that is part of every deep experience as the years roll up and pass.

At first he thought of sending an excuse. He went about carefully, making the buses stop dead before he got out, and going very slowly up steps. Then gradually he grew more accustomed to the burden of his dread secret: the commonplace events of the day; the hated drudgery of the office, where he was an underpaid clerk; the contact with other men who bore similar afflictions with assumed indifference; the fault-finding of the manager, making him fearful of his position – all this helped to reduce the sense of first alarm, and, instead of sending an excuse, he went to the dance, as we have seen, feeling deeply depressed, and moving all the time as if he carried in his side a brittle glass globe that the least jarring might break into a thousand pieces.

The spontaneous jollity natural to a boy and girl dance served, however, to emphasise vividly the contrast of his own mood, and to make him very conscious again of his little hidden source of pain. But, though he would gladly have availed himself of a sympathetic ear among the many there whom he knew intimately, he nevertheless exercised the restraint natural to his character, and avoided any reference to the matter that bulked so largely in his consciousness. Once or twice he was tempted, but a prevision of the probable conversation that would ensue stopped him always in time: ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Mr Browne, and you mustn’t dance too hard, you know,’ and then his careless laugh as he remarked that it didn’t matter a bit, and his little joke as he whirled his partner off for another spin.

He knew, of course, that there was nothing very sensational about being told that one’s heart was weak. Even the doctor had smiled a little; and he now recalled more than one acquaintance who had the same trouble and made light of it. Yet it sounded in Browne’s life a note of profound and sinister gloom. It snatched beyond his reach at one fell swoop all that he most loved and enjoyed, destroying a thousand dreams, and painting the future a dull drab colour without hope. He was an idealist at heart, hating the sordid routine of the life he led as a business underling. His dreams were of the open air, of mountains, forests, and great plains, of the sea, and of the lonely places of the world. Wind and rain spoke intimately to his soul, and the storms of heaven, as he heard them raging at night round his high room in Bloomsbury, stirred savage yearnings that haunted him for days afterwards with the voices of the desert. Sometimes during the lunch hour, when he escaped temporarily from the artificial light and close air of his high office stool, to see the white clouds sailing by overhead, and to hear the wind singing in the wires, it set such a fever in his blood that for the remainder of the afternoon he found it impossible to concentrate on his work, and thus exasperated the loud-voiced manager almost to madness.

Having no expectations, and absolutely no practical business ability, he was fortunate, however, in having a ‘place’ at all, and the hard fact that promotion was unlikely made him all the more careful to keep his dreams in their place, to do his work as well as possible, and to save what little he could.

His holidays were the only points of light in an otherwise dreary existence. And one day, when he should have saved enough, he looked forward vaguely to a life close to Nature, perhaps a shepherd on a hundred hills, a dweller in the woods, within sound of his beloved trees and waters, where the smell of the earth and camp-fire would be ever in his nostrils, and the running stream always ready to bear his boat swiftly away into happiness.

And now the knowledge that he had a weak heart came to spoil everything. It shook his dream to the very foundations. It depressed him utterly. Any moment the blow might fall. It might catch him in the water, swimming, or half-way up the mountain, or midway in one of his lonely tramps, just when his enjoyment depended most upon his being reckless and forgetful of bodily limitations – that freedom of the spirit in the wilderness he so loved. He might even be forced to spend his holiday, to say nothing of the dream of the far future, in some farmhouse ‘quietly,’ instead of gloriously in the untrodden wilds. The thought made him angry with pain. All day he was haunted and dismayed, and all day he heard the wind whispering among branches and the water lapping somewhere against sandy banks in the sun.

The dance was a small subscription affair, hastily arranged and happily informal. It took place in a large hall that was used in the daytime as a gymnasium, but the floor was good and the music more than good. Foils and helmets hung round the walls, and high up under the brown rafters were ropes, rings, and trapezes coiled away out of reach, their unsightliness further concealed by an array of brightly coloured flags. Only the light was not of the best, for the hall was very long, and the gallery at the far end loomed in a sort of twilight that was further deepened by the shadows of the flags overhead. But its benches afforded excellent sitting-out places, where strong light was not always an essential to happiness,