“Dickon the Devil” (1872)

I liked this story by Sheridan Le Fanu pretty well—it’s quick and to the point and comes with surprises. ISFDB has it as part of a Martin Hesselius series by Le Fanu featuring a psychic investigator. The series includes some of Le Fanu’s best stories, such as “The Familiar” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle.” But the first-person narrator in “Dickon the Devil” is more by way of an estate lawyer and we don’t hear much from Hesselius. Apparently this is a case from his files? Two elderly sisters have hired the estate lawyer to assess and possibly sell (“make partition of”) a property that includes a house. Well, it’s a mansion, more like, which has been uninhabited for 20 years. Of course it’s haunted. What did you think? Our narrator knows it was the source of rumors in the past, but he doesn’t know or can’t remember the details, and none of the locals are talking. At one point, early in the story, the village idiot goes racing by—it’s Dickon the Devil, whose story is told along with the former owner’s and the two old ladies too. It’s a ghost story but this is a ghost with strange powers—visible from afar, recognizable as the former owner, and somehow able to blight and kill cattle. It turns out to be a dispute about the will. Apparently the two old ladies are more rapacious than we suspect at first. Or perhaps not, because the narrator doesn’t seem to see anything off in them. But the eternal fury of the ghost of the former owner must be coming from somewhere. He was well enough liked when he was alive, and good for the community too, basically. The narrator encounters the ghost in his overnight stay, on which basically the whole (incomplete) story turns. Le Fanu skillfully foreshadows and holds off on telling the backstory, making it more effective when he does. There are gaps but I like how they are just sort of left to sit there. Who, if anyone, is at fault in the dispute about the will? The former owner intended to rewrite it before he died—but why? Did the sisters know he intended to change it? Did they have something to do with his death? We never learn, and it seems to work that way, as Le Fanu distracts us with the terrible story of Dickon, who was not always as he is in the present of this story and now has been for 20 years. He was good with the cattle the sisters invested in and put there. But the former owner, as ghost, objected to this plan with the cattle for some reason. When blighting the cattle grows tiresome, he drives the hired man insane. Dickon’s insanity is better than anything like it by H.P. Lovecraft, for example, although credible insanity may be a low bar there.

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