“How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery” (1911)

This ghost story by E.F. Benson is somewhat unusual in that it ends on a happy note—uplifting even. At first, I admit I was a little disappointed somehow—E.F. is one of my favorites of his time—and I was certainly surprised. Benson is very good at ghost effects, and in a way this story is a clinic. It starts on a whimsical note with a mansion overrun by mostly friendly ghosts, all past relations of the Peveril family: the Blue Lady (Aunt Barbara), Master Anthony, Great-Great-Grandmamma Bridget. Their stories are briefly given, along with a profile of the family, which is a happy one, comfortable with their ghosts, and prone to playing pranks on guests. “But there is one ghost,” Benson writes, “at which the family never laughs.” And so to the horrendous 17th-century story of a fight for an inheritance, when brother killed brother and then burned a pair of 5-year-old twins alive in a fireplace in the long gallery of the mansion. Shortly after, a servant saw their ghosts and died 24 hours later in a horrible way. It’s like the video in the movie The Ring. If you see these ghosts of the twins, you die, often horribly. Sometimes it takes a while. Examples follow. Benson is just one of the best I’ve seen at this. One cruel relation, Mrs. Canning, a free-thinker, nonbeliever, and friend of Voltaire (excellent detail), makes a point of going to the long gallery at night until she sees them. As it happens, it’s safe while the sun is up. Then “she thought it good, poor wretch, to mock at them, telling them it was time to get back in the fire.” Her death is suitably awful. Benson is also really good at setting a pace—it’s not a fast one, generally, but it’s steady. He spends about two-thirds of this story setting up the scene promised in the title, which naturally takes place in December during the Christmas season. If it all errs too much on the side of cute—I don’t think so myself—it’s properly a gem with unstinted ghoulish details by the time we get to the story of the twins. Then it becomes a story about a guest who accidentally oversleeps her afternoon nap in the long gallery. Ruh-roh, as they say. But it all comes to a lovely ending. Kudos to everyone involved except the bad folks here, who get their just deserts.

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"Mrs. Amworth" (1922)

This E.F. Benson story is fairly conventional vampire stuff, but it does feature Benson's sly way of telling a story and has some nice effects too. He eases into it the way he often does, starting with a description of an ancient isolated village in England and proceeding at his own pace. The narrator is an affable lifelong resident. His neighbor, educated at Cambridge, is a native who has returned. He's something of a crank, with a keen interest in the occult—the rational man of science who wants to believe, retired into his studies. Into this tiny society along comes Mrs. Amworth, "widow of an Indian civil servant." Now in her 40s, she has deep roots in the village herself, with graves of ancestors in the churchyard. "Big and energetic, her vigorous and genial personality speedily woke" the village. Everybody likes her. The narrator enjoys dropping by her place in the evening to play piquet, a card game. She also plays the piano and grows a lovely garden. Everyone adores her except the academic from Cambridge, though he is at least "vastly interested" in her. I like the way Benson sprinkles his clues cunningly and relentlessly but I admit I'm confused again by vampire rules. In a way, Mrs. Amworth is sunshine itself—she certainly has no problems with daylight. On the other hand, more conventionally, she is visibly refreshed and more youthful after drinking up, and she can also sink into the earth back into a grave. These aren't necessarily the good effects here but they're not bad. To set the mood there's a lot of lore to sort out but it's interesting mostly. It seems there had been vampire activity reported back at the Amworths' post in India, as, indeed, there had been in the distant past of the English village. Hmm, makes a person think. Benson is actually quite artful at this. He knows when he is showing you his cards, though he always seems to be holding back another. And he delivers some nice surprises. But I'm still working on the basics around here, as I understand that vampires and zombies are both undead creatures but on different paths? (Let's leave witches out of it for now. I haven't seen enough of those stories yet.) Perhaps film director F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is the last point where the species resemblance between vampires and zombies remains. Interestingly, Nosferatu (released the same year "Mrs. Amworth" was published) was based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Universal Pictures adaptation of 1931 with Bela Lugosi has presently, of course, become the more famous enduring vision of the undead blood-sucker—suave, debonair, European, pointing down the road to Count Chocula. With that in mind, perhaps what we have is a spectrum of perception, with "undead" at one end and at the other "immortal," which seems to better fit the tenor of these charming and dashing but ultimately deadly creatures (leaving fairies out of it too for now). The ability to charm may be Mrs. Amworth's strongest trait, but she has some other interesting tricks up her sleeve as well.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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"The Room in the Tower" (1912)

E.F. Benson is not to be confused with A.C. Benson or R.H. Benson, his brothers who also wrote horror fiction, though not as prolifically or as well. E.F. Benson is one of the best horror story writers of his time. This story is based on dreams, the kind you have in your sleep, which is a perilous device if you don't know what you're doing. Fortunately, he does know what he's doing. It's not a long story but proceeds leisurely, with an unnamed first-person narrator establishing common traits of dreaming and pooh-poohing any reading too much into them. Then he relates the details of a recurring dream he's had for 15 years. In it he is attending tea with strangers at a house where he will be staying, always the same house. No one speaks. The hostess, a Mrs. Stone, says to him, "Jack will show you to your room: I have given you the room in the tower." The tower is a separate building from the house, three stories high and an older structure. Mrs. Stone's words fill the narrator with dread and anxiety. Her son Jack (a boy the narrator knew slightly in school and never saw since) leads him to the room. At this point the narrator wakes up, "in a spasm of terror." Benson goes on with more details about the dream and its small variations, using repetition to establish a tempo and emphasize certain points. Benson is good at making it feel like a dream, with the strange ways a dream moves, and he's also good at making this one unnerving. The scene at the house, the strange silence, the words Mrs. Stone always uses, which never change, the unaccounted dread. Then he is invited by a friend, John, to visit him at a rental his family has taken for the summer and it's the house with the tower from his dreams. Benson slips back into reality without missing a beat. It's the same house but the scene is different from the dream. The people are talkative and friendly. There is no dread, at least not until John's mother stands and says, "Jack will show you to your room: I have given you the room in the tower," and the rendezvous that has been arriving for the narrator for 15 years is upon him. Again, Benson is so good at what he's doing. The finish may be overdone, notably the last paragraph, which felt like a compulsive flourish to a somewhat pat conclusion. Benson is known for some extremities, notably a fascination with giant worms, though this story is not about giant worms. Still, "The Room in the Tower" is often effective, breeding a constant delicate sense of unease out of an easygoing anecdotal tone. The hook is in the intimate way the narrator speaks of dreaming, a common experience to all, and the story is artful, subtle, and scary, without pounding hard on anything (at least, not until the end).

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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