“The Fetch” (1980)

This long story by Robert Aickman is reasonably conventional horror business, given that little Aickman did was ever conventional. It’s more like folk horror, as “fetch” is an obscure 17th-century term for “the apparition or double of a living person, formerly believed to be a warning of that person’s impending death.” It’s not hard to see how that sense of the word could come to be. The fetch in this story is less of a doppelganger and more of a wraith, an old woman who hides her face and trails dripping seawater wherever she goes (as she evidently comes from the sea, and to the sea must we all return). Aickman’s stories tend to be long and he takes his time getting to his points. It works because his language, however dreamlike, remains clear and straightforward, and the payoffs do come. In this first-person tale the narrator details his three strange sightings of this particular fetch, which do indeed augur deaths or, in one case, a disappearance. My favorite detail about this apparition is either the turning of the fetch’s face or the dripping seawater. She simply keeps her face out of sight, even if she’s turning to look at a far wall as she climbs a staircase. Aickman might be leaning into the smell of the seawater a little hard for him. It’s not as overbearing as the recurring “fishy” smell that we get, for example, from H.P. Lovecraft in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but it seemed unusually pushy for Aickman. He is generally more reserved and holding back as a rule, setting a leisurely pace that slowly becomes hypnotic. As an article of folk horror, “The Fetch” is specifically focused on sightings of the apparition. They are the high points even when they are approached somewhat sidewise. Sometimes I think everything Aickman does is sidewise. But it’s also, when you think about it, the way most people experience the supernatural, if they do. It always happens kind of in the corner of your eye, and rarely when you go looking for it. Whatever you believe it seems most of us experience the strange and inexplicable one way or another. Most of us have an anecdote. That confusion and uncertainty about how to take it is where Aickman’s stories live.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.

“The Same Dog” (1974)

Here’s another nervy good one from Robert Aickman, operating much like a fairy tale at altitude. He introduces us to Hilary—a boy, but his name often confuses others. He’s the third son in a broader extended family that has only boys. Already coming at us with the small, absurd, unsettling details. Hilary’s brothers are both older than him by double-digit years. Their mother is dead. Hilary has no memory of her. He is sent to the boarding school everyone in his family goes to, and there, as a young boy, he meets Mary, who becomes his closest friend. She is the first female in his life. It seems likely to be a lasting union, even so early. They take longs walks in the woods, share imaginary stories, and make detailed maps of imaginary places, such as Fairyland and the bordering Giantland. On one day’s walk, deep in the woods, they find a very high wall. A dog that can’t be seen makes strange noises: “... barking—if, indeed, one could call it a bark. It was more like a steady growling roar, with a clatter mixed up in it, almost certainly of gnashing teeth.” This is frightening, but they take turns being frightened and reassuring. They follow the wall to a gate, where they see the dog, a strange yellow beast, and also the house, which appears abandoned. After they return from the adventure, Hilary takes sick the next day and is bedridden for two months. When he recovers, he is told that Mary is dead. No further word is ever learned about Hilary’s sickness or how Mary died. No one seems willing to tell Hilary how she died. It’s a shocking development, for the reader too. The story then jumps ahead 20 years, to when Hilary as a young man has occasion to visit the school again, visiting a friend who lives in the region. The area has been developed considerably, with many new homes. It’s hard to tell whether they can even find the strange house. Hilary tells his friend the story meanwhile. Then they find it. It has been fixed up and is occupied now. The title has already given away what they find, but there is more—Aickman’s usual ration of unsettling more. It’s arguable Aickman was the best short story writer of horror or fantasy in the second half of the 20th century. More evidence here.

Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine
Listen to story online.

“The Wine-Dark Sea” (1966)

My introduction to Robert Aickman: I impulsively picked up the collection for which this is the title story because I kept noticing Aickman’s name coming up. The story is reasonably representative of him, certainly in its rather longer length of about 50 pages. It reminded me quite a bit of John Fowles’s novel The Magus, also set among the islands of Greece. The Magus was published in 1965, so conceivably it was of some direct influence here. Both seem to feel they can hear the footfalls of ancient Olympian gods beyond the mist of the modern-day Greek islands. “The Wine-Dark Sea” is the story of a man, Grigg, who steals a boat to visit a small island off the coast of a much larger island where he is vacationing. Grigg is drawn to the small island first by the strange and unexplained hostility of the people living on the larger island. No one will take him there and no one will really explain why. They won’t even rent him a boat if that’s where he’s going. So he steals one—later he’s told he would be “torn to pieces” if he tried to return it. On the island are three beautiful women—Lek, Tal, and Vin—who tell him they are sorceresses. They bear an equally hostile attitude toward “Greeks,” though they often seem to be talking more about the ancient variety. There’s a lot of interesting undercurrent to all this, mixing in elements of ancient mythology, not just sirens but gods and alchemies of earth, fire, air, and water. It resolves in apocalyptic fashion, with a stupefying revelation of what lies beneath the island, and with just enough explanation to make it almost perfectly, mysteriously resonant. Until then the horror, the weird, the strange, such as it is, is barely there, but something nags at you. The story casts a spell, reminding me in some ways of experiences on LambdaMOO, the one-time online collaborative creative space, gentle, daffy, but with hard edges glinting out of the murk that might slice you. “The Wine-Dark Sea,” intimations of Homer and all, is ultimately a kind of tragedy, but so removed we can’t entirely feel it. It works slowly, at the deeper levels I’ve come to know of Aickman. It’s a great way to start with him.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.

“The Unsettled Dust” (1968)

What’s most enjoyable for me about Robert Aickman at this point is that I’m still discovering how good he is, still finding these above-average “strange” stories, and they still surprise me a lot. His floor is higher than the ceilings of many who are better known. The first-person narrator in this one is a corporate officer of the Historic Structures Fund, an organization dedicated to preserving buildings of interest. He’s telling the story of a past experience by way of contributing to the work of a new group within the Fund, the Psychic and Occult Research Committee, whose mission is to investigate reports of hauntings. The haunted house in this story is one of the Fund’s properties, where the narrator stayed while he was working on another project in the region. The former owners of the house, and the last remaining heirs of the family who originally built it, still live there—two sisters, Agnes and Olive. They are required to put him up because the Fund now owns their home. They are reasonably cordial. “The Unsettled Dust” has lots of Aickman touches, perhaps most notably the dust. It covers everything and no one does anything about it—no one can do anything about it. Even the dining table where they eat is dusty. Rings created by glasses and plates are covered again by dust by meal’s end. No one really knows where it comes from, but they take it as a given, with their own theories—wind, unpaved roads, high country, etc. The narrator thinks there must be a cement factory nearby. The expectation for the sisters is that they will be old, crotchety types, and Agnes certainly is. But the narrator finds himself strangely attracted to Olive. He also sees a ghost, a man he finds in his bedroom one afternoon who says nothing to him and eventually leaves. The housekeeper (“the grey Elizabeth”) assures him he will only see it that once—everyone sees it only once—and that turns out to be true. I like the dust in this story, it’s a very strong and, yes, unsettling element. It makes the narrator’s hands visibly dirty just living there day to day, and the thought of eating at that dining table makes me a little sick. I also like the narrator’s attraction to Olive, who is eerie, ethereal and a little indeterminate even within the story, but also indeed somehow attractive. She plays the piano and bears an air of melancholy. The narrator’s infatuation is wrapped into his stiff manner, but it’s quite evident. Through him, Olive becomes attractive to the reader as well. Neil Gaiman: “Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully.”

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
Listen to story online.

“The Houses of the Russians” (1968)

I’m not sure yet what the consensus is on Robert Aickman, I’m just going with the ones that seem to really reach me. They all seem to reach me. This is another good one from probably his best period, the late ‘60s. I was slowed down a little by all the description of unusual landscapes, where land and water meet with many islands in remote Finland. This story might be ripe for graphic adaptation because I can see you could really lay it out in comic book panels with the right artist. It’s also a story with indeterminate borders in other ways: between the political entities of postwar Finland and the USSR, for example. Because of these geographical and political factors there is necessarily some sense of this story as travel writing. The island with the mysterious vacation homes, once we finally get there, is the kind of stuff that I think only Aickman can do. As usual, it is accompanied with an unsettling sense of the experience of dreaming. These houses are at once peculiar and bear a bland malevolence that comes through well, though it is hard to explain. Another border is one of time and history, with the Russian experiment with communism approximately at midcentury, and memories still alive of time before the Revolution. This theme may even have been Aickman’s most intentional in 1968. Or not—certainly the landscape also reflects the preoccupation of his day job and other life, as the protector of waterways. It’s a frame story, told by a mysterious old man. I like the way the houses veer from totally abandoned to alive with parties in progress. I love that our main guy, the storyteller, ends up at one. I like the imposing, massive figure in black he takes for a priest. The old man’s idea, at least at the time of his visit to this strange region, was that he was presumably Eastern Orthodox or something, which perhaps evokes Soviet persecution of organized religion. I looked at a cheesy paranormal reenactments show called True Horror the other day. It was a story about a woman in England in the 2000s who bought a house that used to be a “witches prison” and was now haunted. By coincidence, one of the ghosts as depicted looks like the black figure in this story. Funny coincidence, but also emphasizes how Aickman is able to slip his ghosts in so effectively. This one is working on a lot of levels and takes some time to sink in.

Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust
Story not available online.

“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.

"Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (1953)

In a way this story by Robert Aickman is dated now because it relies so much on telephone technology without features we take for granted today, such as caller ID, which alone may have destroyed hundreds of horror story premises not to mention criminal stalking activities. On the other hand Aickman's story is a nice reminder of how mysterious this connection to the outside world could feel, exploited so well in the 1948 picture Sorry, Wrong Number. And exploited so well here too. It's probably a ghost story but also reminds me in key ways of Hanns Heinz Evers's story "The Spider." Edmund St. Jude is housesitting for his girlfriend while she recuperates from TB. Already this is "strange," the term Aickman preferred for his stories. What is he doing with his place in the meanwhile? Her apartment has a telephone, which is common by 1953, but not so common that it wouldn't be unusual not to have one. Edmund here would prefer not to have one, but it's a lot of trouble to remove so he lives with it. Is it haunted or is it glitchy? First it rings a lot and won't stop until he answers it. Then the caller waits for him to say "Hello?" three times and hangs up. There's not much to be done about it. He has more strange adventures with the phone when he tries to call out. Eventually he wanders into strange conversations at the other end of the line with a woman he doesn't know. He is strangely drawn to her and soon they are declaring their love for one another. But she won't give him a number to call. He can only wait for her to call. She says he can't see her but she won't say why. It briefly enters into the early internet / late landline period when people spent hours on the phone with strangers in phone-based relationships. If this story is dated in one way, it's prescient in another. Meanwhile Edmund is so preoccupied he's letting his life go to hell. He makes a living as a translator but loses interest in his work and starts to get fired from jobs. Then he starts to get wrong-number calls for an extension 281 at a "Chromium Supergloss Corporation." He's also ignoring letters from his girlfriend now, letting them pile up. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (which words never occur in the story by the way) is a meditation on all the spaces a ghost might occupy in telephone technology. The woman on the phone is more or less a ghost in this story, but not exactly, much as the woman across the way in "The Spider" is a vampire, but not exactly. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" is sadder but it has a cold core—maybe that's the point of the title. Looking it up, it appears to have something to do with the opera La boheme. Strange stuff indeed from early in the career of one of the best story writers of his time.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.