"The Trapdoor" (1936)

There's not a lot I can tell you about C.D. Heriot, the author of this somewhat obscure story. Wikipedia is silent on him (at least I believe it's a him) and the invaluable Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is sketchy: he was British and published three stories, including this one, which I found in Mary Danby's Realms of Darkness collection. Two are from the '30s and one from the '50s. It probably makes more sense to align him with ghost story writers like E.F. Benson, F. Marion Crawford, or M.R. James (I understand the penchant for initials is artifact of the disreputability of horror or, in some cases, like E. Nesbit, because they wanted to conceal they were women). But in a way "The Trapdoor" can also be likened to Italian giallo horror movies like Lucia Fulci's The Beyond. An H.P. Lovecraft story, "The Dreams in the Witch-House," has specific similarities too and could well have had some influence, even on the movie. Things happen in The Beyond, as in "The Trapdoor," that make no sense. They just happen. You can't figure it out. They are not there to be understood. In turn, in brief flashes, they can point to dread of widening-gyre chaos loosed upon the world. In either case, the plot breakdowns may equally be matters of ineptitude. But still they have their ways to get to you. In this story, for me, it's a few paragraphs in the middle, fleetingly. The premise and setup are otherwise lame and the payoff lamer. John Staines is under doctor's orders to rest on weekends and finds a place to stay he likes in a village in the country, an "isolated beer house." Almost immediately he finds himself in tense relations with the sour landlady, Mrs. Palethorpe. To be fair, Staines has developed a fixation on a trapdoor in the hall outside his room, which leads to a loft. Anyone in Mrs. Palethorpe's position would likely be annoyed. Think about the greater likelihood that Staines is wrong and there is nothing sinister. Mrs. Palethorpe tells him the loft is empty and unused. But Staines notices the trapdoor has been sabotaged to be difficult to open. Or, alternatively, it has rusted shut because no one uses it. Staines has many questions. One night he is awakened by a knocking from above. It can only be coming from the loft. For a few minutes in the utter silence of the middle of the night in a strange place in the country he's not sure whether he's imagining it, and neither are we. For this brief and very nice passage we are right there with him in every strange room we've stayed in ourselves as he tries to decide what's real and what's not, and can't. Then the story moves into its more florid Fulci-like paces and things happen or don't happen that can't happen in the world we understand. Like Fulci, it gets progressively more silly. In the end Staines realizes he's getting the opposite of the rest that was prescribed and he quits the premises forthwith. An explanatory letter of sorts from Mrs. Palethorpe follows some weeks later, sounding nothing like the character we met earlier. Now she is "Alice." But it's too late and altogether the wrong impulse for explanations. Still, it was good while it lasted.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)

Story not available online, but this piece by Tom Mullen, circa 2003, talks about it with a story by M.R. James and is worth a look.