Table Of ContentStrange Stories
Robert Aickman
(version 3.0)
Contents
Ron Breznay’s Masters of Horror: Robert Aickman
The Stains (1980)
Marriage (1977)
The Inner Room (1966)
Ringing the Changes (1955)
The School Friend (1964)
Hand in Glove (1979)
Mark Ingestre: The Customer's Tale (1980)
Ron Breznay’s Masters of Horror: Robert Aickman
Robert Aickman was an English writer best known for his “strange stories,” as
he termed them, which were subtle and poetic and concentrated more on the
emotions of horror rather than material terror. He also wrote longer fiction as
well as non-fiction and was an editor and conservationist.
Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in London on June 27, 1914. His father,
William, was “the oddest man I have ever known.” William had married at age
53 to a woman 30 years his junior and, being deeply set in his bachelor ways and
accustomed to living alone, could not adapt to married life. This resulted in a
family environment that was chaotic and emotionally empty, with the parents
constantly bickering. Aickman’s rancorous home life is mirrored in his stories
“The Clock Watcher,” “Ringing the Changes,” “The Stains,” “The Fetch,” and
others. When Aickman was a teen-ager, his mother deserted the family. His
father also eventually left, living Aickman living at home alone.
Aickman was originally schooled in architecture, which was his father’s
profession. However, his interests were more in the arts. Apparently, writing was
in his blood as his maternal grandfather, Richard Marsh, was a prolific Victorian
novelist, who wrote The Beetle (1897), an occult novel that was almost as
popular as Dracula in its time. Aickman’s mother encouraged him to write. He
stated, “My mother aimed from the start to make me an author.” He started
reading the classics early and began writing while in school.
His first publication was the collection We Are For The Dark: Six Ghost Stories
(1951), which contains three of his stories and three he wrote in collaboration
with Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Critics have compared his work to that of Walter de la Mere and M.R. James.
Peter Straub writes in his introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea: “What attracted
Aickman to ghosts was not the notion of dripping revenants but the feeling –
composed in part of mystery, fear, stifled eroticism, hopelessness, nostalgia and
the almost violent freedom granted by a suspension of rational rules – which
they evoked in him.”
The protagonist in “The Visiting Star” (1966) is an author who spends a winter
in a desolate English town while researching a book on the mining industry. A
famous actress shows up to star in a play at a local theater. The actress has a split
personality – literally – with a mysterious character accompanying her
embodying that personality.
“The Inner Room” (1966) tells of Lene, who visits an old shop and buys an odd
doll house, the windows of which are shut fast, except for one from which a doll
is partially protruding. When Lene gets the doll house home, she finds all the
windows are tightly closed, and the doll is nowhere to be seen. She cannot
remove the roof or any of the walls, and the only access she has to the inside of
the doll house is the front door. Her exploration of the interior reveals many
strange and unsettling sights. During a thunderstorm, she has a dream of the doll
house and awakens to hear unfamiliar footsteps and then to see life-size dolls
skulking about in the darkness. Nevertheless, she keeps the doll house, which
affects her strangely for the rest of her life.
In “The Hospice” (1975), a traveling businessman loses his way in a maze of
rural roads and ends up at a mysterious inn, where he has a series of strange
encounters. The protagonist in “Into the Wood” (1968) has a similar strange stay
at a hotel in the Swiss Alps, but unlike the businessman, is changed by the
experience.
“The Next Glade” (1983) is about a strange hidden glade in a small wooded area
in which a woman, Noelle, loses a friend, John, while strolling with him. Months
later, while walking there with her husband, Melvin, she finds John standing
next to a small house and digging a garden trench. Melvin is mortally wounded
by a knife he is using to clear the path. At the funeral, John appears and takes
Noelle for a walk in the woods. When they reach the glade, the small house and
trench are gone, replaced by a huge pit in which hundreds or thousands of men
are working–or is it just a vision? John again disappears. This story reflects
Aickman’s preference of nature over industrial progress.
Aickman’s short stories – he published a total of 48 – have been gathered into
eight original collections and four reprint collections. Besides We Are For The
Dark, the other original collections are: Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre
Ghost Stories (1964); Powers of Darkness: Macabre Stories (1966); Sub Rosa:
Strange Tales (1968); Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories (1975); Tales of
Love and Death (1977); Intrusions: Strange Tales (1980); and Night Voices:
Strange Stories (1985). The reprint collections are Painted Devils: Strange
Stories, which contains revised stories (1979); The Wine-Dark Sea (1988); The
Unsettled Dust (1990); and The Collected Strange Stories, two volumes
containing all of his published stories (1999).
“The Fully-Conducted Tour”, a previously unpublished story, appeared in the
Autumn 2005 issue (Issue 5) of Wormwood.
Besides short stories, Aickman wrote three novels: The Late Breakfasters
(1964), about lesbian love, ghosts, and the reviled inhabitants of a mysterious
mansion; The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (1987), a fairy tale set in pre-
revolutionary Russia; and Go Back at Once (unpublished).
On the non-fiction side, Aickman wrote The Story of Our Inland Waterways
(1955) and two autobiographies, The Attempted Rescue (1966 and reprinted by
Tartarus Press in 2001), which relates his early years, and The River Runs
Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (1986), about his involvement with the
Inland Waterways Association. He was also a theater critic for The Nineteenth
Century and After, but his reviews have not yet been collected in book form.
Aickman edited eight volumes of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, from
1964 through 1972. He included a story of his in six of these anthologies, and he
wrote introductions for all but one.
Some of his writing remains unpublished. Among these works are three plays,
Allowance for Error, Duty, and The Golden Round; Panacea, a philosophical
work, which runs to over a thousand pages in manuscript; and Go Back at Once.
The manuscripts of these works are among the papers preserved in the Robert
Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
A few of Aickman’s works were adapted for other media. In 1968, “Ringing the
Changes” appeared as “The Bells of Hell” on the BBC2 television program Late
Night Horror. The same story was adapted for the CBC Radio drama series
Nightfall on Halloween in 1980 and for BBC Radio Four on Halloween in 2000.
“The Swords” was filmed in 1997 for the television horror series The Hunger.
“The Same Dog” premiered as a musical play in 2000. “The Cicerones” was
made into a short film in 2002 (which can be viewed at: The Cicerones).
As a conservationist, Aickman was best known as one of the co-founders of the
Inland Waterways Association, whose aim was to restore and preserve
England’s canal system. Another co-founder, L.T.C. Rolt, was also a writer of
weird fiction.
Aickman won the 1975 World Fantasy Award in short fiction for his vampire
story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” and the 1981 British Fantasy Award
for his story “The Stains.” The Collected Strange Stories won the 2000 British
Fantasy Award for best collection.
Aickman developed cancer and refused conventional medical treatment. He died
on February 26, 1981.
Ron Breznay
The Stains
After Elizabeth ultimately died, it was inevitable that many people should come
forward with counsel, and doubtless equally inevitable that the counsel be so
totally diverse.
There were two broad and opposed schools.
The first considered that Stephen should ‘treasure the memory’ (though it was
not always put like that) for an indefinite period, which, it was implied, might
conveniently last him out to the end of his own life. These people attached great
importance to Stephen ‘not rushing anything*. The second school urged that
Stephen marry again as soon as he possibly could. They said that, above all, he
must not just fall into apathy and let his life slide. They said he was a man made
for marriage and all it meant.
Of course, both parties were absolutely right in every way. Stephen could see
that perfectly well.
It made little difference. Planning, he considered, would be absurd in any case.
Until further notice, the matter would have to be left to fate. The trouble was, of
course, that fate’s possible options were narrowing and dissolving almost
weekly, as they had already been doing throughout Elizabeth’s lengthy illness.
For example (the obvious and most pressing example): how many women would
want to marry Stephen now? A number, perhaps; but not a number that he would
want to marry. Not after Elizabeth. That in particular.
They told him he should take a holiday, and he took one. They told him he
should see his doctor, and he saw him. The man who had looked after Elizabeth
had wanted to emigrate, had generously held back while Elizabeth had remained
alive, and had then shot off at once. The new man was half-Sudanese, and
Stephen found him difficult to communicate with, at least upon a first encounter,
at least on immediate topics.
In the end, Stephen applied for and obtained a spell of compassionate leave, and
went, as he usually did, to stay with his elder brother, Harewood, in the north.
Harewood was in orders: the Reverend Harewood Hooper BD, MA. Their father
and grandfather had been in orders too, and had been incumbents of that same
small church in that same small parish for thirty-nine years and forty-two years
respectively. So far, Harewood had served for only twenty-three years. The
patron of the living, a private individual, conscientious and very long lived, was
relieved to be able to rely upon a succession of such dedicated men.
Unfortunately, Harewood’s own son, his one child, had dropped out, and was
now believed to have disappeared into Nepal. Harewood himself cared more for
rock growths than for controversies about South Africa or for other such
fashionable church preoccupations. He had published two important books on
lichens. People often came to see him on the subject. He was modestly famous.
He fostered lichens on the flagstones leading up to the rectory front door; on the
splendidly living stone walls, here grey stone, there yellow; even in the seldom
used larders and pantries; assuredly on the roof, which, happily, was of stone
slabs also.
As always when he visited his brother, Stephen found that he was spending
much of his time out of doors; mainly, being the man he was, in long, solitary
walks across the heathered uplands. This had nothing to do with Harewood’s
speciality. Harewood suffered badly from bronchitis and catarrh, and nowadays
went out as little as possible. The domestic lichens, once introduced, required
little attention - only observation.
Rather it was on account of Harewood’s wife, Harriet, that Stephen roamed; a
lady in whose company Stephen had never been at ease. She had always seemed
to him a restless woman; jumpy and puzzling; the very reverse of all that had
seemed best about Elizabeth. A doubtful asset, Stephen would have thought, in a
diminishing rural parish; but Stephen himself, in a quiet and unobtruding way,
had long been something of a sceptic. Be that as it might, he always found that
Harriet seemed to be baiting and fussing him, not least when her husband was
present; even, unforgivably, when Elizabeth, down in London, had been battling
through her last dreadful years. On every visit, therefore, Stephen wandered
about for long hours in the open, even when ice was in the air and snow on the
tenuous tracks.
But Stephen did not see it as a particular hardship. Elizabeth, who might have
done - though, for his sake, she could have been depended upon to conceal the
fact - had seldom come on these visits at any time. She had never been a country
girl, though fond of the sea. Stephen positively liked wandering unaccompanied
on the moors, though he had little detailed knowledge of their flora and fauna, or
even of their archaeology, largely industrial and fragmentary. By now he was
