“The Swords” (1969)

I’ve been revisiting and looking further into horror stories for a few years now. Partly it has been to get perspective on what I was reading of horror that affected me so much when I was a kid, how those stories shaped me. Now I have a better understanding of the sectors of horror I did and didn’t know then and how they fit in the larger history. I have many gaps I still have some interest in filling, particularly in the ‘70s and beyond, when I mostly stopped reading it. Robert Aickman is one such gap. Basically, I had never heard of the guy and his self-designated “strange” stories before, missed him completely in his time. Now I think he’s one of the best horror story writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s (he died in 1981 at the age of 66), if not the one best, and he wrote some good ones in the ‘50s as well. He worked a day job as a conservationist, cofounding the Inland Waterways Association in the UK, which works to preserve England’s canal system. Not all his stories are as stellar as this one and others, but they nearly always at least contain great fragments. And a surprisingly high number of them are pure little masterpieces, such as “The Swords.” Everything about this story—its plot, its characters, its symbols, its setting, the very title—suggest it is about sexual awakening and initiation. It blatantly trucks in horror cliches, notably the carnival setting, yet makes them work and even vitalizes them. A lonely traveling salesman (yes!) finds himself in an unpleasant hotel in a strange English city. He goes out walking to tire himself and help sleep. He finds a tiny, shabby street carnival, set up between two apparently abandoned factories in a vacant lot strewn with rubble. It has one ride, a merry-go-round operated by a disquieting woman, and not even a dozen stalls altogether. It is indeed a sinister carnival. And where does our traveling salesman go? To the sideshow, of course, which is marked “The Swords.” Here he finds seven other men sitting on rickety chairs, all singles, no one together. On the stage is a young woman who is thin and doesn’t appear to be that healthy, sprawled in a chair, wearing green makeup and a costume. The MC is wearing navy blue and our man begins referring to him as “the seaman” (yes). And then, the show. It all gets to be so ham-handedly phallic it’s practically comical. Aickman’s accomplishment is that what he describes in the show is impossible. In fact, the narrator doesn’t believe it and takes it as some sort of stage magic trick. We probably would too if we were seeing it for ourselves. And that’s what it might be, somehow. But somehow it feels fantastically, irrationally real—among other things, Aickman is uncanny at evoking dream senses. The narrator is fascinated and repulsed and flees before he is forced to take part as a volunteer. But there is still one more encounter for him with the woman wearing green makeup. You come away feeling almost infected or consumed by the events, which Aickman was capable of doing often in his stories.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine
Read story online.