‘Never should ha’ reopened that.’
‘Pretty line though.’
‘In summer.’
‘Autumn too I reckon, what with the trees.’
‘Wouldn’t catch me there out of season – nor anyone with sense.’
‘When they do their winter maintenance, then? Best part of preserved steam, that is – no public to bother with.’
‘They squeeze it in, I suppose. Chap who works there told me that about mid to late October someone says ‘reckon that’s it till Spring, now’ and they all just down tools and go – as a body, like, as if no-one wants to be the one left behind on his own.’
‘I heard that.’
‘Like I said, never should ha’ reopened it.’

It’s surprising how you can tune into a conversation where no names are mentioned, yet know exactly what (or where) is being talked about. It made me draw my coat closer about me and sit nearer the fire with my pint. The potter’s valley was the name I gave it, though it isn’t called that on the map. When I heard them talk I made a vain effort to think of pleasant days on the canal – summer days – but November was always the month I came back to; out of season, as the man said.

I had a friend – a potter, hence my name for it – who lived in that valley all year round, though he took precautions: the entrance to his house was guarded by a little stream. He had a drawbridge that he lowered when a visitor rang the bell that hung on a post. He treated it as a joke, of course, a bit of fine English eccentricity to please American visitors, but I don’t think it was, really. It was from him that I learned about the railway, with its strictly-observed season.

‘So, why do they leave?’ I asked.
‘I doubt if they could tell you,’ was his reply. ‘It’s just a feeling they have, that they should be gone, that they ought not to stay around.’
‘But you stay around.’
He shrugged.
‘I’m careful. And maybe my trade gives me a better understanding of these things – working with the elements, you know – earth, fire, water – air, too’ (he touched the leather-lunged bellows he used to blow up his fire) ‘ – you can always come to an accommodation.’
He spoke in a lighthearted way, as if he did not expect to be taken seriously.
‘You don’t mind living here, then – out of season, I mean?’
‘No – not at all. Indeed, that’s when I do some of my best work. There’s a kind of magic to it,’ he added, with an impish grin.
‘You don’t feel isolated?’
He smiled at that and took me outside. I have already mentioned his little ceremony with the drawbridge; now he took me round the side of the house, where a waterfall plunging down a cliff powered an ancient slow-turning waterwheel with a shaft that ran through the gable of the house.
‘I still use that to drive some of my equipment,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderfully reliable and of course it costs nothing.’

The stream that flowed past his front door came from the pool at the foot of the waterfall, but as he now showed me, there was a second branch that ran round the rear of the house.

‘The stream effectively flows across the canal,’ he told me. ‘You can see how the water runs over that concrete lip on the other side. Of course, this house was here long before the canal – it’s over four hundred years old – and in those days, the two streams joined again on this side of it’ (we had walked round to the canal side by this time) ‘ – so yes, I am isolated, if you take the word in its literal sense: my house stands on an island. Its name on old maps is Ait House. An ait or eyot is a little island.’

‘I can see why you like it here.’
‘It wouldn’t suit everyone,’ he replied, ‘but it has a lot to recommend it. Of course, you have to make sacrifices.’

It was the sort of thing that anyone might say, but it lodged in my mind, though at the time I made a joke of it. ‘Ah yes – the definition of an idyll: where someone else lives. No-one ever allows the perfection of their own place. If you mean that it gets lonely at Christmas time, I‘d be happy to come down and help you be convivial.’
His response to this startled me.
‘Don’t you dare!’ he said, with real force, then tried to back-pedal as soon as he realised what he had said. ‘What I mean is, you’d risk your neck coming here – the canal would be frozen and the road’s a death-trap even when it’s not blocked with snow – and besides, you’d find me dull company. I don’t really do Christmas.’
‘All right, then, if you don’t want me to come,’ I said.
I didn’t add that he had offered rather more excuses than seemed at all necessary; instead, I asked, ‘Do you get a lot of snow in winter, here?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, glad to move away from the subject. ‘The weather here can be peculiar – quite unlike the surrounding district, even just a few miles away.’ he fell into a muse. ‘It’s the influence of the valley, I suppose,’ he added, after a time, more to himself than me.
‘You mean it has a sort of micro-climate?’ I queried.
His mind must have been running on other things: he stared at me blankly for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, that’s it – that’s just what I meant’ – though his tone suggested it was not what he meant at all.

I never did go there for Christmas, but a strong curiosity to visit that valley out of season ran like a deep current under the normal surface of my life; it often came to me in the sort of outlandish places my work took me to. I’m a man who’s knocked about the world a bit and done some things I shouldn’t, generally for money. When you’re in dark and dangerous places it’s important to have an escape, a sort of star to steer by, some sort of vision to pull you through, something to keep going for. For some men it’s a woman or a family but I never spent long enough in the places where such attachments are formed when I was young and as you get older the time for making them is past. Besides, I don’t know that I’d make a very good long-term companion for anyone, so instead I have my boat.

She’s not your usual canal boat, Amethyst – she’s steam-powered, for a start, and though handy enough for one man to manage through a lock, something about her lines suggests a life spent on less sheltered waters – those sturdy navigation lights are not what you expect on an inland waterway, and the big bow searchlight (on a mounting that might double as a gun emplacement) hints at clandestine visits to quiet coves, landing unusual cargoes or picking up irregular passengers; but that was in the past, and now, like me, she’s retired from active service.

It’s a ritual for me, going on the canal: it has to be done properly. It starts with getting away: there’s an art to that – it can’t be done abruptly. You need to put conscious distance between yourself and the world. A car is best avoided: too swift, too easy to pack too much, ‘just in case.’ Getting down from a train at a wayside halt is better, especially if you have a bicycle. Then you have had to pack your bags with care, to take only what you need, because you cannot carry much. And because the wayside halt is deserted and the train pulls away to leave you in the rural silence that is made up of a thousand tiny sounds you can fancy yourself already stepped back to an earlier age, the age when your big old-fashioned bicycle was new. And a car could not easily penetrate the narrow overhung lane that you turn down and a driver would scarcely notice the gate in the hedgerow so dilapidated and askew it surely cannot function and besides who would want to enter that narrow strip of field grown up with rusty bracken and bounded with a sombre fringe of trees?

And yet the gate does open and the foot finds a path the eye cannot see along which a bicycle can be wheeled up to that gap in the trees that might be an entrance to the wood…
The boathouse is almost drowned in a sea of ivy and creepers. You’d think it ruinous, but it’s sound enough. In summer it almost seems underwater in the subaqueous green light that filters through the trees but in the time I had given up trying to put from my mind it was November and the light had already begun to fail, so that I found my way by touch as much as sight. Inside, it is dry and weather tight. It takes time to get light because the lamps are acetylene; they started life on some grand motor-car of an earlier age. No electric here: that’s another important part of the ritual, the slipping back in time.

Canal life is strange, slow-paced: you can spend all day covering a distance you might drive in minutes in a car; a brisk walker on the towpath can overtake you. Negotiating a lock can take as long as sailing a mile, so that is the general rule of thumb for reckoning a journey – actual miles plus lock-miles. With your copy of Nicholson’s Canal Guide and a shrewd estimate of your average speed (between 3 and 4 miles per hour) you can reckon fairly accurately at the start of a day’s sailing where you will be at the end.

That matters more in November when the days are short: you need to think where you might find a mooring for the night from around four o’clock in the afternoon or even sooner, because the light fails rapidly and mooring in the dark can be a pain – more so, in fact, than sailing in the dark, if you have a big searchlight, as I did. So when my slowness in raising steam in the morning persuaded me that I was unlikely to make my intended destination in daylight that day, I checked and found that there was a full moon later. That meant that if I sailed on for a bit in the dark, I could moor by moonlight – people these days forget how bright the moon can be: you can see very well by its unaided light, once your eyes have grown accustomed to the dark.

Once realised, the idea took my fancy – the potter’s valley was a good day’s sailing at the height of summer, so I had originally planned to go half-way this time and complete the journey on the morrow; but now with the prospect of a full moon I saw that I could do the whole thing in a single trip, and the appeal of sailing by moonlight, when all the world was asleep, strengthened the notion of slipping back into the past.

Canals are resolutely unmodern: their architecture is ancient, even where it has been restored – a replacement lock-gate that is ten years old looks and works like its predecessor of two centuries before. They were built in the age of pick and shovel, when a galloping horse was the greatest speed a man might attain, and they wind through the countryside along contour lines to avoid unnecessary changes of height; even more than railways, they go around the back of things and their likeness to rivers harmonises them with nature more than any other form of transport.

In summer this music of the past makes a pleasing counterpoint with the modernity that encapsulates and overlies it: the fibreglass pleasurecraft, the other boaters with their range of competences, from the awkward hire-boat daytrippers steering with nervous smiles to the old hands who seem like fitments on their boats; the noisy beergardens and the honk of car-horns at every hump-backed bridge. It runs like a deep strain of otherness under the surface of everyday sights and sounds – like something, as Eliot puts it, ‘heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.’

But now, in November, the canal had a different aspect: the leafy canopies of summer were gone and the trees stood bare and elegant, side-lit by the low sun; you could see deeper into the woods on either side. The ground was carpeted with bronze and gold. Fewer people were about, on the roads above or down below on the canal: such boats as as I saw were moored up for winter, either happed in tarpaulin, locked and shuttered, or with cosy curtains drawn and a curl of smoke going up from the stove chimney and piles of firewood stacked along the roof. The world above seemed to have gone to sleep, and down on the canal the sense of being submerged in the past was strong. Even at noon the sun struck at a low angle, creating a glare from the water and the metal surfaces of the boat that made me shield my eyes; a figure that looked in upon me as I entered a deep lock had no face, only a dark outline tinged with golden fire, and was gone by the time I scrambled up the ladder to close the gate and work the paddles.

The arm that led to the potter’s valley started in scenes of urban dereliction, old abandoned warehouses and the occasional flat-backed tower-like kiln preserved as industrial heritage among modern housing developments; it was not till the passage of a couple of swing-bridges and some fixed ones with very little headroom (for which I took the precaution of lowering the funnel) that its true character became evident. Then it swung in leisurely curves among fields till the fact of being in a valley gradually forced itself on your consciousness: you noticed that the broad flat floor was flanked – distantly, as yet – by low hills; in the middle of it, marked by a sinuous line of trees, a river was evident; beyond that, higher up, you could pick out the line of the preserved steam railway.

As the sun dropped lower, the character of the valley began to alter: the hills now were more numerous, shaped like long barrows, suggesting ancient glaciation; they seemed to crowd in, forcing the canal, the river and the railway ever closer as the valley sides grew steeper and the shadow deepened. At the same time, the sense of abandonment grew: here and there, rows of lime-kilns reared up, like the ramparts of long-forgotten fortresses; and one particular lock, dank and gloomy with a dark tunnel-like approach under a railway bridge, had landing steps green with moss, the lowest of them awash as if the lock itself was slowly sinking. I had already been up to the lock to empty it and open the gate: the railway passed close beside it, coming over the bridge that darkened the approach then running on the other side of the by-wash amid birch trees, its sleepers buried in a carpet of brown leaves. This image of human industry overwhelmed by nature made the place seem all the more desolate.

As I drove deeper into the valley the cliffs rose up on either side and soon the declining sun caught only the topmost ridge of the eastern heights; all below was cast in deep shadow. I lit the powerful searchlight and sent its beam ahead. A light mist was rising from the river that now ran close by on the left hand side; owls hooted in the woods. The valley floor grew narrower and after a time it became clear that canal, river and railway could not continue to run together but must converge. It was the canal that gave way: a narrow lock marked the point where it ended, dropping down to become a river navigation with the railway running close alongside. Beneath the foot-bridge at the lower lock-gate a gauge was painted on the wall, red above and green below; when the water has risen into the red sector, you are advised not to proceed, as dangerous conditions may exist.

It was wholly dark within the lock and when the searchlight picked out the gauge the water was risen to the top of the green, perhaps a little way into the red, but I did not hesitate: after all, I had ample reserves of power, and there was no evidence of recent heavy rain that might cause a flood. The river had a smooth, deceptive look: as soon as I entered it, I was aware of being borne along, as the current – absent from the level canal – took hold. The greater depth meant the boat went with more speed, though still leisurely enough. The search light swept the wooded banks as we swung along, at one point picking out another wall of lime-kilns agains the steep declivity on the right hand side, then some way further on, an unusual structure in a wood: a rectangular stone pillar about the size of a telephone box, with a pyramidal top and a metal door on one side – it reminded me oddly of a sanctuary of some sort, and I wondered what lay beyond the door – a set of stairs, perhaps, leading to an underground shelter.

The river was broader than the canal and had quite a different feel to it, wild and unregulated. It wound in lazy curves, the railway hemmed in beside it, running among the trees on the left; I thought what a fine thing it would be to see a steam train running so close by. I recalled that there was a station up ahead, where the canal once more departed from the river, which ran on over a weir under the arches of a bridge. The canal resumed as a branch off to the left, under a railway bridge, and between it and the river stood the station, which was built in part above the canal, one of its platforms and a waiting room being cantilevered out over the water.

By the time I reached it, the moon was up, and the station and its buildings stood out eerily bone-white, a man-made island between the still canal and the river plunging noisily over the weir. It had about it a strange air of expectancy, like an empty stage waiting for something to be enacted. Overhead, it was a fine night of stars; the sides of the valley mounted up like dark shoulders on each side and the moon shone down above the treetops – the whole had a sort of hypnotic charm about it, and I eased Amethyst in under the overhanging platform, tied her to the steel supports and clambered up to the station. Once I was there, standing among the deserted buildings, the sense of something impending was stronger than ever: in my oddly detached mood, I mused that the painted sign saying ‘waiting room’ was curiously apt – not only the little wooden building that hung over the canal but the entire station was just that.

Though I was awake and fully conscious, my state of mind was like something out of a dream – I looked at the ordinary things about me with a sense of their deep inner significance; I could not say if I actually heard it, or only imagined it vividly, but I had the impression of a sonorous chime, as if something was being announced. At the same time, I seemed to be at once where I stood (I could see the strong shadow I cast in the moonlight angling across the platform) and somehow outside myself, and the detached part of my mind recalled that this was the literal meaning of the Greek term ‘ecstasy’. Thus, I seemed to see myself as a figure standing on that moonlit stage yet at the same time I was that figure, aware of all that was going on around me.

The air above my heard seemed pregnant with sound – I can think of no other way to put it – as if, at any moment, it might break out in a chorus of some sort, whether the twittering of birds or human voices I did not know; while up ahead, beyond the station, I saw two separate points of light appear, a good distance apart. As I watched, each seemed to multiply, becoming a column of bobbing lights, and my mind formed the thought that these were two lines of torchbearers advancing towards me, one following the railway, the other the towpath which passed my friend the potter’s house – and I found myself wondering (again, with complete detachment) whether he had the drawbridge up, and if he was at his window, watching the column of torchbearers go by.

The thought that there might be witnesses to this spectacle caused me to look up to the far side of the valley, where the dark outline of a house thrust up above the trees at the very top of the cliff. A single lit window stood out brightly and I fancied there was a figure behind it, looking out, though at such a distance it was impossible to tell. I wondered if the watcher could see me far below, a dark figure on the bone-white platform. For a moment I experienced a curious transposition, and it was as if I was in the house myself, looking down on the valley from a safe height, able to gaze into it without being in it. Then from my own viewpoint on the platform I saw the window alter shape, one half becoming dark, and I knew a shutter had been closed across it; a moment later, the other side was closed too, and the window went as dark as the rest of the house.

For a second it was as if I still lingered up there and felt, like the owner of the house, that I had looked long enough. Strangely, it was that one small detail – the shuttering of the window – that brought me back to the present and a sense of my own immediate danger: from what or whom I could not tell, but I felt a powerful urge to get away. The spell was broken: I scrambled down to the boat, unmoored her, and went astern. Why I did that I cannot say: it was not a conscious decision. I had some notion (bound up, perhaps, with the idea of crossing running water) that to be safe again I would need to go back up the river navigation to the canal lock.

I soon found it was not going to be easy. In the time that I had been ashore, the river had risen considerably: I had to put on full power to keep myself off the weir, which swept under the old bridge, its arches barred with huge beams suspended on chains – I could see that these floated much higher than had been the case when I came down. It was difficult to steer going astern and made harder by the fact that I had to go across the current first then turn into it. I was aware over my shoulder that the intensity of light in the vicinity of the station had increased, but I did not look back: if I lost concentration for a moment, the boat would be swept to the weir and pinned there by the force of the water.

Inch by inch I fought her round for what seemed an age and at last her stern pointed up stream and the waters flowed past her flanks rather than driving against her side. My situation was eased, but only slightly – even with the engine on full power, progress was difficult – we clawed our way forward against the inexplicable flood. It was like fighting a living thing. At the back of my mind was the fear that I might not have sufficient fuel to maintain such a course for long, yet if I eased back I would not make any headway at all – but if I lost power before I reached the safety of the lock, I would be at the mercy of the flood. In the end, the sheer force of the current decided it for me – nothing less than full power would serve, and if it failed, it failed…

All the while I fought I was aware that there was a light at my back – I could see it reflected on the water – and, above the rush of the weir, a sound like many voices singing; the more I struggled to get away from them, the more a giant hand seemed to force me back. Time slowed, and how long we hung there, battling against the current, I could not say – it seemed like hours; when at length I risked a glance at the pressure gauge, I saw to my horror that it had begun to fall. Behind me, I heard the voices rise in climax, culminating in what seemed a single cry or shout, and in that instant the whole valley was lit as if by a lightning flash, though no thunder followed – instead the voices fell in a long, mournful wail, and as they did, the force of the water against the boat eased and we began to move steadily up the river navigation.

When I risked a backward glance, the station was in darkness. In the woods, the owls resumed. I made the lock and went up it, tied up at the lock moorings, and dog-tired, fell asleep. Next morning seemed such an ordinary day that I had few qualms about descending the lock again. The river gauge was well in the green. The station, as I passed, seemed no more than an abandoned country station, quaintly situated. At my friend the potter’s house, the drawbridge was down and the door was open; the house, as I expected, was empty.

I have not been back since. But now I am older – in the November of my life, indeed – I wonder if perhaps I was mistaken. That last cry I heard – was it terror? It might have been ecstasy. ‘You have to make sacrifices,’ my friend had said. And as the year wears on, I ponder a final out-of-season trip on the canal.

[This story was originally published in 2014 by the Sarob Press, in The Book of Shadows 2, their second anthology of MR James sequels by various hands. This version has been slightly modified to make it easier to read aloud. There is a link to a spoken version, and some notes at the end reflecting on the ‘morality’ of the story. My thanks to Katie Pamment for the slightly sinister picture of me at the Edinburgh Bavarian Christmas Market in 2012 that provides the heading]

[Here is a link to a spoken version of the story]

Had I been another sort of man, I would have laughed in his face; it might have been better if I had, for both of us.

Professor Bentley was a rackety sort: he occupied the chair in Paranormal Studies which no one with any reputation would touch with a bargepole. The chair had been funded with a bequest from a notably eccentric alumnus, quite possibly as a joke, but the Vice-Chancellor was unwilling to turn it down, though many of us protested that he should. It had done the University’s standing as an academic institution no good at all – “laughing-stock” was a term frequently employed – but as the Vice-Chancellor was keen to remind us, it brought “much-needed income” and “a significant boost to student numbers” .

Bentley’s students, I have to say, were among the silliest young people I have ever encountered. An unusually high percentage of them were nubile young women whose chief attributes were giggling, squealing, and showing their magnificent teeth – which was not unconnected with the fact that Bentley ran a TV show as part of his course. This went out on one of the higher-numbered channels and consisted of visits to supposedly haunted sites by a crew consisting of Bentley, a number of squealing students, and a monosyllabic cameraman given to outbursts of foul language at moments of excitement. It was mostly filmed using night-vision equipment so that everything was tinged with ghastly green. It purported to be ‘a serious attempt to document any sites in England associated with paranormal activity.’

Of course everyone in the College watched it, though few would admit to it. Nonetheless, I was surprised when Bentley turned up in the School of Mediaeval Studies, asking for me by name. I would not call him an attractive man: he walked with a stoop and had lank dark hair that fell over his face so that he was always having to brush it away. His students credited him with “an intense stare” which I suspected was augmented by coloured contact lenses. He had a nervous manner and an odd way of speaking, very precise and clipped.

“I’m just working out next year’s schedule,” he told me, “and I wondered if you could point me in the direction of any likely mediaeval sites.”
“Do you want ones that come with any particular history?”
“Preferably not – even if there is, I’d rather not know it. We want to go in clean, without any preconceptions. More scientific that way.”
That was the point where I should have laughed, I think. It would have saved us both a deal of trouble.

My difficulty was that I didn’t know what to make of Bentley. He seemed so devoid of any sense of irony that I thought it must be a pose – that while we took him for a fool, he was really making fools of us. That was the certainly view of my colleague Cusiter, a profound cynic: “you may well mock Mr Bentley,” he told a young man who was doing just that, “but if you ask me, he does very nicely out of it.”

The notion that Bentley was a consummate charlatan, a species of satirical performance artist sending up the pomposity of academia, was certainly more entertaining than the possibility that he might actually be as he seemed. He claimed never to have read any book of fiction – “and certainly not ghost stories” – and to have been raised by parents whose scientific materialism denied the young Bentley not only the consolations of religion, but anything at all that in their opinion smacked of “fantasy” – which is to say, about ninety percent of the standard adolescent diet. In consequence he was – or claimed to be – wholly without imagination.

“Might I ask why you are particularly interested in old sites?” I enquired.
He looked at me with some surprise.
“Why, because they are the most likely to be haunted.”

I should add, at this point, that Bentley’s approach – on the evidence of his TV programmes – was conventional to the point of stereotype. Ghosts were sought in graveyards, old houses and picturesque ruins, or else in natural sites that had some ancient pedigree – the Druids, the Romans, or Bronze-age settlements. A key concomitant of ghosts, evidently, was their antiquity (It was, as the cynical Cusiter observed, “Just the sort of thing the Americans lap up”).

“I suppose,” I said, “that you expect these places to be haunted by ancient ghosts?”
“I try to keep myself free from expectations,” said Bentley, primly. “But it would be logical to expect ancient ghosts in ancient places.”
“So where do the modern ghosts go?”

I will admit I said this out of mischief, purely for the sake of observing Bentley’s reaction. He cocked his head to one side, then to the other, as if to convey that he was considering the matter from every angle. An odd look of rapture crept over his face that put me in mind of Keats: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken”.

“Modern ghosts?” he breathed. “Do you know, I really hadn’t thought about that – where do they go, I wonder?”

And I wondered, not for the first time, how I could possibly take this man at face value – he must be having me on; the alternative was too depressing to contemplate. So I did what one does in these circumstances: I joined in the game. With an equally straight face I said:

“M.R. James had some ideas on that, I think.”
“M.R. James?”
“A fellow mediaevalist. He wrote ghost stories as an entertainment, but I think he must have known about it from personal experience. Listen to this…”

I made a long arm and reached down my edition of James’s Collected Ghost Stories, and read out a passage from “After Dark in the Playing Fields”:

“I find I do not like a crowd after dark – for example at the Fourth of June fireworks. You see – no, you do not, but I see – such curious faces: and the people to whom they belong flit about so oddly, often at your elbow when you least expect it, and looking close into your face, as if they were searching for someone – who may be thankful, I think, if they do not find him. ‘Where do they come from?’ Why, some, I think, out of the water, and some out of the ground. They look like that.”

I fixed him with a gaze that I hoped matched his own in intensity.

“That has the authentic ring, don’t you think? That change of person… ‘You see – no, you do not, but I see’ – it has the effect of a mask slipping momentarily, does it not? And the tone of it is quite different from the rest of the piece, which is a jokey sort of thing, not even a proper story. It’s very much ‘tacked on’, as if James felt compelled to say it, regardless of how it fitted – he even makes a point of separating it in the text. It is like some truth blurted out unintentionally.”

Bentley gave a low whistle: I could see he was impressed, or pretending to be. Just for the fun of it, I pushed things a little further.

“James’s thesis is more credible than the conventional one, I think – after all, why would the dead haunt deserted places, ruins and the like? Would they not be much more likely to seek the company of the living? Especially random crowds of strangers where they might pass unnoticed?”

Bentley nodded his head excitedly. I felt the urge to keep going.

“And here’s another thought – have you ever considered the custom of issuing formal invitations to parties? Where does that come from, I wonder?”
“What do you mean?”
“Only that immemorial tradition of the threshold as a barrier which spirits cannot cross – they have to have been invited in. And a party is just the sort of miscellaneous gathering the dead might be drawn to – lots of ‘life energy’ as you might say – intimacy among strangers. You go to parties to meet people, don’t you? Perhaps in former times they were more alive to the possibility that the wrong sort might get in – hence the practice of issuing formal invitations.”
“I’d never thought of that – it’s entirely possible!”

I’ve often found that flights of fancy flourish where there is a receptive audience.

“Then there’s that passage in the Gospel,” I found myself saying, “ – I don’t suppose you’re familiar with it, with your upbringing?”

He shrugged; I searched behind me for a New Testament.

“Here it is: ‘And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he said unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ The savage hostility of that! It’s really chilling, when you consider that only a few minutes before he was issuing a generous invitation to all comers. Clearly there were some guests that were not welcome under any circumstances.”

I don’t know what I hoped for: in a curious way, it was a kind of flirting – you know, when you’re both talking about one thing and meaning another. If Bentley had been a woman, I’d have looked for something in the eyes, some signal in his look that contradicted what his lips were saying, reinforced, perhaps, by a twitch at the corners of the mouth – a mutual recognition that we were playing a game. At the very least there would have been some ambiguity in his response that hinted at more than was actually being said – but there was nothing. He stayed resolutely in character, the unimaginative man surprised by a new idea.

“You really have given me a lot to think about! Thank you!”
“Well, let me know how you get on,” I said. “Perhaps we should start going to the same parties?”

But even that parting shot elicited nothing more than a smile and an enthusiastic nod.

*****

By an odd coincidence, the next time I saw Bentley, it was at a party. He was unusually animated, as if drink had loosened his tongue. He was deep in conversation with some three or four others I didn’t recognise: I don’t think they were students – certainly they were not the usual sort that Bentley was seen with. They seemed to take a great interest in what he was saying, stooping down and looking up into his face. The posture was oddly familiar, but it took me some time to recollect where I had seen it before: a teacher, a woman, talking to a pupil who was intent on avoiding eye-contact – whenever he fixed his eyes on the floor, she would hunker down and look up into his face, forcing him to meet her gaze. There was an element of coercion in it.

I did not see Bentley leave. Neither, it appears, did anyone else. The police questioned everyone who had been at the party; everyone they could find, that is. Bentley they found in a drainage ditch, face down in a foot of water. No one could account for his being there: it was some way out of town and entailed a journey of at least three miles to reach it, across rough terrain. I told the police about the people I had seen with him at the party, but I could not pick them out from any of the pictures they took of those attending. The verdict when it finally came was misadventure: there were no signs of violence and the alcohol levels in the body, though high, were not excessive. Aside from the central mystery of how he got from the party to the distant field unobserved by anyone, and why on earth he was there at all, there was no reason to think it other than an unfortunate accident.

I saw no cause to mention to anyone the conversation I had had with Bentley, and once I had overcome the initial shock of his death I persuaded myself that there was no reason for me to make any connection between the two – in any case, what connection could there be?

I did not think I had let the incident affect me unduly till one day, shortly before Christmas, a colleague asked if I would be attending a seasonal gathering that evening. “It’s just that I haven’t seen you at anything this term – have you become a hermit?” I mumbled something about being absorbed in research, but once I was alone I reflected that – without any conscious decision – I had indeed avoided all but the smallest, most intimate gatherings since Bentley’s disappearance; certainly I had gone to nothing where I could not be sure beforehand whom I might meet. That evening’s gathering, which followed on from a carol service, was of quite the opposite kind: anyone could go and many would, since the standard of hospitality was excellent. I saw that there was no avoiding it: to do so would be to open the door to the irrational.

The carol service, in the college chapel, affected me unexpectedly. I am used to the warm fuzzy feel-good sentiment that goes with candlelight and gothic vaulting and soaring boy sopranos in white surplices transforming banal lyrics into heart-stirring sound, but this was quite different: for the first time in my adult life, I desperately wanted it to be true that the people that walked in darkness had seen a great light. Looking at a wavering candle, I recalled St John: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it – but even as I thought it, the flame guttered and went out.

When the service drew to a close I felt a great reluctance to leave; but the throng pressed about me and I was carried out into the dark. A voice spoke at my elbow and, looking sharply round, I was relieved to see the colleague who had spoken to me that afternoon.

“You decided to come after all! I’m so glad. Remarkable crowd in tonight – the season draws them, I suppose. And the promise of free drink, of course.”

I heard myself laugh and make some fatuous rejoinder. After all, why should I not enjoy myself? ’tis the season to be jolly: nothing banishes morbid fancies like a glass or two of good wine in convivial company. I brushed away all thoughts of Bentley and the yearning I had felt in chapel and set my face firmly to make the most of the evening. What nonsense it all was, I told myself, catching sight of one of the Fellows, a prominent secularist, in jovial conversation with the chaplain, a glass of wine in one hand, the other gesturing extravagantly with a mince pie: there was a man whose example I would do well to follow.

“There’s a man who knows how to enjoy himself,” someone said, right at my ear, but I could not see who had spoken – the way he seemed to voice my thought gave me a momentary qualm.

I reached for a second glass of wine but the tray was whisked away; as I turned in annoyance a man beside me said, “Here, let me offer you this,” and held out a large glass of dark wine. I took it and drank gratefully, aware at once that it was something out of the common run. “Remarkably good, isn’t it?” said the man. He turned to someone at his side and said, “I was just introducing our friend here to this remarkable vintage”. The man nodded and held up his own glass in toast. “To the pleasures to come!” he said.
“That’s a fine toast,” said a third voice, at my shoulder. “I’ll drink to that!”

The volume of sound in the room had increased, so that I was aware of the conversation going on around me, but could not make out the detail of it: when I felt that words were addressed to me, I made what I thought was a suitable reply, though I could scarcely hear myself speak. In any case, it hardly seemed to matter – my new companions, who evidently knew one another, were engaged in that sort of swift flowing exchange where the topic is batted back and forth, skilfully caught and passed on to the amusement of all; only I felt a little left out, being unable to follow exactly what was being said, yet glad to be included in the general bonhomie. It was like being swept along on a powerful tide.

I came to myself on the brink of a dark drop. Half a step further and I would have fallen into a deep canal lock. It was sheer-sided and ill lit. I doubt if I should have managed to get out of it. There was no one with me, and the only sound was the fall of water leaking from the lock-gates. It was an utterly deserted spot. How I came to be there, I have no idea.

I would like to interpret the fact that I was left on the brink of the water and not in it as a warning, rather than a foretaste of what is to come. I remain watchful and avoid gatherings of any sort; I am careful whom I invite to cross my threshold – but I fear it is only a matter of time.

FIN

Here is a link to a spoken version of the story

A Note

[What prompted me to print this story was coming on this note, while searching for something else – I think I must have written it soon after I finished the tale:]

Reflection on ‘The Partygoers’ – it had not struck me how important to the story is the fact that the narrator thinks he is just making something up when he pulls together the idea of invitations, the wedding garment, and so on – he gives his imagination free rein, and does so also with a mischievous and mocking purpose – his impulse to laugh in the man’s face reveals an unpleasant streak, and what he actually does is also unpleasant, though with some excuse – he thinks Bentley must be ‘taking the piss’, so resolves to do the same – but Bentley is actually an innocent, not so much a dimwit as a man blinkered by an undeveloped imagination; and the narrator exposes him to danger…. there are actually two kinds of ‘inviting in’: the narrator, in giving free rein to his imagination, and for no good purpose, allows in those things that can be pictured as prowling around outside, seeking entry – and that is repeated in the party, where we have an enactment of what the narrator has imagined: the ones against whom the door should have been barred have been allowed in, and wreak havoc.

There is sin – transgression – on the part of the narrator, and as a result, the innocent suffer, and we must suppose that he will too… what is his transgression? It is twofold, I think: there is a want of charity in his treatment of Bentley, to whom he attributes the same base motive he finds in himself – he mocks where he should help, or at least be kind. Yes, I suppose that is it, really – at the heart of the tale is his unkindness: by attributing a doubtful motive to Bentley, he gives himself licence to treat him unkindly – so we have to wonder how far he is genuine in suspecting Bentley, and how far he is simply looking for an excuse to be mean to him. I was going to say that his free imagining is the second fold, but I see now that that is the equivalent of the door opening downstairs in Casting the Runes – the process has already begun.

This foreshadowing of the event strikes me as important – sin, perhaps, is an inviting-in of what we should keep out; and the ideas that come to the narrator’s mind (he feels inspired, remember – as if it is coming from elsewhere) when he starts being unkind to Bentley are the means by which entry is gained…

Now, I did not think of any of this in writing the story, and indeed the ideas and connections (between the James paragraph, the notion of invitations, and the wedding garment) came to me unbidden, much as they did to the narrator (I can only plead that my motive was not unkindness) and if you had asked me at the time I might have thought it something of a weakness – these were things I wanted to get in to the story, but had not supplied a satisfactory mechanism to explain them (one could imagine a more studied version, in which these are actually furnished, like the James quotation, from books – i.e. not the NT (as happens in the story) but rather someone who connects the wedding garment with the idea of invitations, and has put all that in a book) – but such an explanation would weaken the story, and to some extent diminish the narrator’s culpability – it is he who makes the connections, and effectively conjures up the partygoers – and in fact I now realise that the ones James encounters on the playing fields are looking for just such as the narrator – they are seeking ‘a way in’, looking for someone susceptible, someone who will let them in…

 

(This year’s entry for the Fearie Tales competition at Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Winter Words festival, but no hat-trick for me, alas, as it didn’t make the cut – a shame, as I think I like it as well as any of my successful entries. But judge for yourself:)

‘Well, I’ll be damned! Is this place inhabited at all? and is there any chance of a drink?’

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘Why’d’you keep it so infernally dark? I can barely see a thing!’

‘You’ll find your eyes adjust, sir, as you become accustomed to your change of circumstances.’

‘Change of circumstances? O, I suppose you mean after the daylight outside – not that it’s exactly bright out there! I swear I never saw such weather. ‘Dreek’ – isn’t that what you call it in these parts?’

‘Aye, dreich sir – you could say that.’

‘And hadn’t you thought of getting a decent footpath made?’

‘Across the moor, d’ye mean sir? Did you find it hard going, then?’

‘If you call slogging several miles through the plant equivalent of razor wire ‘hard going’ well yes, I’ll say it was.’

‘Och, the whins do you mean, sir? They can be a bit jaggy. But no if you’re properly equipped, mind.’

‘Well if I’d been able to find a stout pair of walking boots and some thick woolly socks be assured I’d have sat right down and put them on, but there’s rather a shortage of retail outlets hereabouts – in case you hadn’t noticed – and they’re not the sort of article you’ll find just lying by the wayside, are they?’

‘It seems not, sir. Tsk! No proper boots or socks! that would have made for harsh going right enough.’

‘I’ll say it did! I’m damned if those devil-plants haven’t pricked me to the bare bone, a hundred times over!’

‘Just as you say, sir. Now, what can I do for you?’

‘Well I take it – and I have to say I’m just guessing here, on account of the complete lack of any signage – but am I right in supposing that this is an inn of some sort?’

‘Just so, sir. The Ferryman’s, some folk call it, or else The Crossing – on account of the old ferry.’

‘And you, I take it, are the proprietor?’

‘Mr Carron, at your service.’

‘Well then, Mr Carron, I’d like a room, if you please, and before that, a decent dinner – I’m famished! – and before that – well, something to drink wouldn’t go amiss.’

‘hem.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I do not wish to be rude, sir – but are you sure you have the means to pay?’

‘Now look here! I’ll have you know that I – that I, um, appear to have come away without my wallet… now isn’t that the damnedest thing? I’ll swear that I – maybe in another pocket? must have slipped out on that hellish moor – wait a bit, here’s something! O, that won’t get me far! It would appear, Mr Carron, that all I have is this coin – though where I picked that up I have no idea. It looks like an old penny, but it’s so worn it’s hard to tell.’
‘I should hang onto that, if I were you, sir. You may have need of it, later.’
‘Ha ha, very droll, I’m sure. Now look here, Mr – er – Carron: as I’m sure you can tell, I am a man in very good standing with the bank – in fact (and you’ll just have to take my word for this, of course) I used to be a banker. So you can be assured, my credit’s good – you needn’t worry about that. Payment is guaranteed – it may just take a little time.’

‘Indeed, as you say, sir – I don’t doubt that you will pay, one way or another.’

‘Well, I’m glad that’s sorted! How about that drink – should have a whisky, I suppose – wine of the country, eh?’

‘There you are, sir. Might I ask how you come to be here? Given that you’re so ill-prepared for the journey?’

‘Ah, yes – the ‘no luggage’, you mean? and the – um- the unsuitable, so to speak, footwear? Well, that’s a bit of an odd story – if you have time?’

‘O, I have all the time in the world, sir.’

‘Mm – good! Tell you the truth, I’d like to try and piece it together myself – make a comprehensive narrative of it, if you will. There’s something there I can’t quite put my finger on. I know when it started – it was when I began taking walks – for my health, you know – they say it’s as good as going to the gym.’

‘Are you sure about that, sir?’

‘Well, it’s what they say, anyway – brisk thirty minute walk -’

‘O, I wasn’t querying the efficacy of a good walk, sir – I know that well enough. I meant, ‘are you sure that’s where it started?’ – your story, I mean.’

‘What the devil -!? Of course I’m sure! It’s my story. isn’t it? It starts where I say it does – I’m damned if I start it anywhere else, for you or anyone!’

‘Just as you say, sir. It was just that it seemed to me you were starting quite close to the end.’

‘Look, do you want to hear this story or not?’

‘By all means, sir.’

‘Well – as I said – it started when I began to take a daily walk. To understand what I’m talking about, I need to tell you that where I live now – I’ve only recently moved there, never mind why – anyway, it’s very much in town, and to be quite honest, the prospect of tramping the streets did not fill me with the greatest enthusiasm. Too much a reminder of my old work, I suppose – all that property. That’s what I specialised in, you know – I’m retired now – repossessing property, foreclosures – all these feckless people who couldn’t keep up their mortgage payments for some reason but still seemed to think they could go on living in the same house. Ridiculous! ‘Take a look at the small print there, matey – does that say ‘your house may be in danger if you fail to keep up your repayments’ or does it say ‘if you break your promise and stop repaying all that money we loaned you we’ll just let you and your family go on living here out of the goodness of our hearts’? That’s not how the world works!’

‘A poor way to make a living, if you ask me, turning folk out of their homes.’

‘Well, I didn’t ask you, and it wasn’t poor by any means, I can tell you! It set me up very nicely, thank you! retired at fifty-five with a handsome bonus and a tidy pension – not to be sniffed at! And anyway, isn’t that rather a sentimental way to describe it? I prefer to think I restored to the bank the security that was its proper due when people broke the terms on which they had originally borrowed money. I didn’t turn them out – it was their own folly did that. I just brought home to them the consequences of their actions. And in any case, that has nothing to do with the story.’

‘Does it not, now?’

‘No, it doesn’t. As I was telling you, I didn’t much relish walking through town, though I was determined to do my thirty minutes, so the first few times I just went at it hard and fast, kept my head down, maintained a brisk pace. Then one day, just along the road from where I stay, I noticed a sort of lane between two houses – I suppose I’d always taken it for the entrance to one or the other of them, but in fact it was neither – it was a narrow, twisting lane that ran between two hedges at first, then two high walls, and eventually came to a set of winding steps leading downwards.

‘When I came to the foot, I was surprised to find myself in a wood, with the sound of running water near by. There was a path of sorts – not very clearly marked out – that I followed to an ornamental bridge. The stream ran underneath, clear brown water, and up ahead the path twisted away among the trees. I went on till I came to a fork in the way. I chose the right hand-path – it led uphill, you see, so I thought that was better for my health.

‘Some way up the hill I came to another fork: the left hand path plunged down into the dell – back to the stream, I judged – but I wanted to keep going upwards. But just as I reached the top…’

‘As you reached the top?’

‘…There was a man – at least, I think it was a man – standing with his back to me. He wore dark clothing from head to foot with one of those – what do you call them? – hooded jackets, with the hood up – so I could not be entirely sure – that it was a man, I mean. The path was narrow and he was straddling it, so I would have been unable to get past unless he moved… and, well, it occurred to me that I’d probably come as far as I needed and that if I retraced my steps it would mean I’d get home having done the half-hour I set out to do, so I turned back.

‘All the same, it irked me, that man standing where he was. I felt sure there must be another way out of the dell so that I could make a circular walk without doubling back, and I resolved to come back the next day. You will think me foolish, I know, but for some reason that encounter on the path unnerved me, so this time I took a different route – that is, I started out the same way uphill, then took the left hand branch down towards the stream.

‘It’s silly, I know – what reason had I to suppose I’d meet him there again? In any case, the downward path was no good – it fetched up beside the stream just where it formed a deep pool at the foot of a vertical cascade and there was no bridge, so short of wading across – and it looked too deep for that – or clambering up the waterfall, I’d have to go back. Then I spotted a very narrow path that went up the bank to my right – hardly more than a line in the grass, really, and very steep and overgrown, but it headed the way I wanted to go, so I clambered up. It was steep! By the end, I had to use the young saplings as poles to keep myself upright, and my feet kept slipping on the wet slope, but I reckoned I could see the lip of the main path not far above my head.

‘I had to scramble pretty well through a bush to get to it, but I made it – and guess what?’

‘Tell me.’

‘There it was again – the same dark figure, with its back to me, barring the way ahead.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I know it sounds stupid, but you weren’t there in that overgrown dell with the light starting to fail and that figure on the path, standing dead still with its back turned – it felt, well, ominous is the only word that springs to mind. Not for love nor money would I have tried to pass him: I just couldn’t bring myself to do it; instead, I did what I had the day before, and went back the way I’d come.’

‘When was that?’

‘Two, maybe three days ago? That’s the part I’d like to get clear – I seem to be missing a piece somewhere. I do remember not feeling so well when I got back home and drinking rather a lot of whisky. The next day I felt pretty cheap so I decided not to go out at all. The thing was, that second encounter had jarred me quite badly, and I began to dread the possibility of any further meeting – for some reason I felt that a third encounter would be significant in some way – rather as it is in the stories one reads as a child: don’t things always happen in threes in them?

‘So the next day – or was it the next again? I steeled myself to go out but I’d already made up my mind that I’d stay well clear of that damned dell so when I came up to the entrance to the narrow lane I just walked smartly past. Today I was going to stick to the pavements and the quiet suburban streets.

‘And they were quiet! I don’t think I saw a soul all the time I was out – and the fact it was a pleasant day made that all the stranger: not a mother out with a push-chair, or a woman hanging out washing, or a pensioner taking a turn up to the shops to fetch his newspaper – it began to feel like one of those scenes in a film, where the stranger comes into what looks like a prosperous ordinary town and gradually realises the whole place is deserted. That idea took such a grip on me that by the time I had turned for home, I was scrutinising every house and garden that I passed, just in the hope of seeing some sign of life – but there wasn’t so much as a cat or dog; and by that time I’d have been grateful to see – or even hear – a single bird; but there didn’t seem to be any of them, either.

‘Then I turned into my street and I did see someone.

‘A dark figure was standing with its back to me, just outside my house. He was so positioned that I could not reach my gate without passing him.

‘I suppose I panicked. I mean, talking about it now, what could be easier than going up to my own front gate and in through my own front door? So what if some fellow – who might not even have been the same person, for heaven’s sake! – happened to be standing in the street? What was that to me?

‘But all I know is that I turned tail and ran. The one idea I had in my head was to get as far away from that place as possible, so I went to the station and bought myself a ticket to Inverness – not that I intended to go there; it was just the farthest away place I could think of that I could reach that day. I had some foolish notion of covering my tracks, so I meant to get off at one of the little stations in between. And then what? I’d have a little holiday, I told myself, let my frayed nerves settle, get things in perspective.

Once I was on the train, the idea began to grow on me – it was still a beautiful day, and we were passing through some spectacular countryside. Why had I never thought of this before, I asked myself – if exercise was what I was after, I could go walking in the hills, with an apple and some sandwiches in my rucksack, drink out of mountain streams and not come home till evening, stay at some small hotel or guest house where I could have a hot bath and come down to a pleasant, well-cooked meal…’

‘You make it sound heavenly, sir. So that is what brought you here, then?’

‘Well… not entirely. You see, even before I got off the train, I had already earmarked the place I wanted to stay – we were up near the top of the pass now, and I could see it a good way off from the curve of the line, against a backdrop of tawny folded hills and hazy purple peaks, with here and there a glint of water from some stream or lochan – one of those four-square Highland hotels in whitewashed stone with the westering sun glinting on its windows. That’s the place for me, I thought – paradise! I could see myself walking up to it in the evening sunshine, and the friendly landlady in her apron waiting on the step to greet me and welcome me in…

‘But when I stepped down onto the platform, I saw that there was someone ahead of me. At the far end – the way I must go, if I wanted to reach the white hotel – a figure was standing, with its back to me. It was clad from head to foot in dark clothing and wore a hood.

I stood there a long time waiting for it to move, but it just stayed there, stock still, barring my way. After a bit I slipped off at the other end of the platform, crossed the line, and soon found myself on that infernal moor, with my clothes cut to ribbons – and here I am, with nothing but a single penny in my pocket.’

‘And you best hang onto that, sir – you’ll be needing it soon. For the ferryman.’

FIN

Commentary: Doubtless many will recognise the references to the traditional Lyke-wake Dirge at the outset – the whinny muir, the opportunity to puy on ‘hosen and shoon’ and what it depends on, and the sharpness of the whins in consequence; these combine with the opening words ‘well, I’ll be damned’ to suggest that this is no ordinary journey and no common hostelry. It is a device I have used before, at the start of my third book, City of Desolation, and in both cases it was partly suggested by an excellent George Mackay Brown short story (whose title eludes me) that uses the same idea, though his character is rather more deserving than mine and makes a happier passage. There is (or used to be) an inn near Pitlochry Festival Theatre called The Ferryman’s so I thought that a suitable reference for a Fearie Tale to be read there, but again there is a deeper significance, echoed in the landlord’s name, Carron, which recalls Charon, the infernal ferryman whose task is to take the souls of the damned across the river Acheron or Styx (depending which version you prefer). Traditionally, Charon required a small fee – an Obol, in Greek, I believe, which was a little coin with an owl on it; this is usually translated as a penny. It is notable that the main character never dares to challenge the dark figure who repeatedly bars his way: so no-one compels him to take the path he does; it is his own fear and guilt that drives him, and ultimately his lack of courage that damns hims. He first meets the stranger having taken the right-hand path, which is traditionally more auspicious; it also leads upwards. A second time, it is the narrow path he takes, only to be baulked once more – and traditionally and scripturally, the path to heaven is a narrow one, as expressed in Thomas the Rhymer:

‘O see ye not yon narrow road,

So thick beset wi’ thorns an briers?

That is the Path of Righteousness

Though after it but few enquires.’

The final time that he is baulked it is at the station, having just had an uplifting vision of walking among the hills – ‘you make it sound heavenly, sir’ – but though he can see the hotel in the distance and feels sure he will be welcomed there, his own fear turns him back.  We must assume that at some point in the story the main character has passed from life to death, though there is no precise indication when; but the eerie quietness of the suburban streets (something I have always found disquieting) sounds an ominous note, and perhaps his inability to reenter his own home signals the final transition – that is what prompts the journey that ends at the inn.