The Judge's House

Happy people will agree that life above all other things is sacrosanct; unhappy people will care about little details or none at all. The qualms of conscience from which the vast majority of us suffer should therefore reflect our concerns, and the unhappy cannot be expected to worry themselves about the big picture. That is to say, if what plagues you is your coworker's hairstyle, salary, or ability, we cannot hope that you will have empathy for those who cannot afford meat much less envy. Some particularly woeful shades will even look down upon those who have nothing and claim that they are lazy and complacent (and I think I need not share my opinions on that approach to humanity). Yet it is true that we all quietly mete out imaginary sentences to those who have offended or betrayed our ideals or pride – which brings us to this terrible tale.

The premise is plausible enough: Malcom Malcomson, an advanced student of that coldest of sciences, mathematics, frets over his upcoming exams for which he needs absolute serenity. As such, the young man betakes himself by train to "the first name on the local time-table which he did not know." I say plausible enough because an utterly unfamiliar location would be as time-costly as one's own neighborhood, if in a very different way. In any case, Malcomson is convinced, perhaps foolishly, that all English villages have enough in common to allow for easy adaptation. When he arrives in Benchurch, he puts up at the town's only inn all the while looking for "quarters more isolated than even so quiet an inn as 'The Good Traveller' afforded." As it were, there was "only one place which took his fancy," a house that has been empty for so long that it has made itself a victim of "absurd prejudice." What type of "absurd prejudice," you may ask? One can well imagine what the villagers have in mind; but the only details provided to Malcomson relate to a nameless Judge who was particularly cruel and bloodthirsty to anyone unfortunate enough to cross his docket. He is warned that staying in such a residence might be detrimental to his spiritual well-being, an admonition he summarily dismisses. A man reading for his mathematics exams "has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious 'somethings.'" A bold statement made, of course, well before he has encountered any of the somethings in question.

I am naturally loath to reveal too much of a bad thing, but I will add a few more pieces to our puzzle. The general temperament of the house is transformed by a loving charwoman whom Malcomson hires, and he falls into the very student routine of work, dinner, more work, and tea (some prefer coffee, but that would be a tad continental). Slowly Malcomson realizes that he is not alone. His company is a pack of hateful plague-carrying rodents who at first do not scare as much as annoy him. Yet a strange occurrence attends his unwillingness to rid himself of these beasts and instead examine his shadowy surroundings:

The carving of the oak on the panels of the wainscot was fine, and on and round the doors and windows it was beautiful and of rare merit. There were some old pictures on the walls, but they were coated so thick with dust and dirt that he could not distinguish any detail of them, though he held his lamp as high as he could over his head. Here and there as he went round he saw some crack or hole blocked for a moment by the face of a rat with its bright eyes glittering in the light, but in an instant it was gone, and a squeak and a scamper followed. The thing that most struck him, however, was the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof, which hung down in a corner of the room on the right-hand side of the fireplace. He pulled up close to the hearth a great high-backed carved oak chair, and sat down to his last cup of tea. When this was done he made up the fire, and went back to his work, sitting at the corner of the table, having the fire to his left. For a little while the rats disturbed him somewhat with their perpetual scampering, but he got accustomed to the noise as one does to the ticking of the clock or to the roar of moving water, and he became so immersed in his work that everything in the world, except the problem which he was trying to solve, passed away from him.

He suddenly looked up, his problem was still unsolved, and there was in the air that sense of the hour before the dawn, which is so dread to doubtful life. The noise of the rats had ceased. Indeed it seemed to him that it must have ceased but lately and that it was the sudden cessation which had disturbed him. The fire had fallen low, but still it threw out a deep red glow. As he looked he started in spite of his sang-froid. There, on the great high-backed carved oak chair by the right side of the fire-place sat an enormous rat, steadily glaring at him with baleful eyes. He made a motion to it as though to hunt it away, but it did not stir. Then he made the motion of throwing something. Still it did not stir, but showed its great white teeth angrily, and its cruel eyes shone in the lamplight with an added vindictiveness.

Those familiar with how such narratives function will come to conclusions which they will wonder why Malcomson himself did not entertain. And yet he goes on in his studies, flinging books at the rats that seem to come from the very darkness that wreathes the top of his study like, well, a giant noose.

Our tale is collected in this slender tome, long since relegated to the dusty shelves of more eccentric booksellers because its first story is improved upon in the opening chapter in this most famous of horror novels. Stoker's style is better when he observes from a neutral perspective, as his first-person narratives tend to be overwrought with the emotion a conventional Victorian mind would never openly admit it enjoyed (although it would have likely comprised a secret pleasure). When separated by third-person distance, he paints in much more terrifying colors because so much of horror stems from not knowing your adversary. And even that ignorance doesn't stop some very bright people.

Crooken Sands

I am quite happy to report that according to the intergalactic weapon known as Google, the eponymous town of this story does not seem to exist. Why should I be so pleased? Because there is something wholesome about wholly devised fiction unfettered by the necessity of deferring to historical fact or, much more egregiously, of drawing its power from it. Admittedly, this sounds like a distinct paradox since what feeds fiction – real faces, real tones, real words, real emotions – is undoubtedly derived from the banalities of the everyday. The difference is that first-rate fiction tilts objects, obscures gestures, and drowns out voices to achieve the maximum aesthetic effect.  Some mechanized minds might interrupt at this point and spout off a long German word which they claim, with some pomposity, has 'no equivalent in English'; others, even less original, will drone on about a mysterious 'circle of thinkers' collectively summoned as the Russian structuralists, a name which always reminds me for some reason of a mechanical brassière. The truth is that these 'circles' invariably involve no thought whatsoever, being simply staffed by backslapping mediocrities huddled together like prepackaged ballot boxes, so their reinventions of many a wheel should not distract the discerning reader from his enjoyments. And in a lovely little work like Crooken Sands, we do not wish to be distracted at all.

Our protagonist is a certain Arthur Fernlee Markam, whom I ought to describe in extenso as his image will prove to be a monument amidst the plot's wafting winds. Markam is an English merchant ("essentially a cockney") whose abiding dream is "to provide an entire rig-out as a Highland chieftain." Markam is also a dutiful husband and father of three, if by dutiful one understands that while he needs his space and quiet every evening after a long and profitable business day, he buys his family all the best clothes and appurtenances so that they may join him in the glorification of their social status ("The prosperity of the business allowed them all sorts of personal luxuries, amongst which was a wide latitude in the way of dress"). Readers of these pages will know what I think of such persons, and they will also know what fate tends to befall them. In any case, Markam, as stereotypical a Philistine as one could possibly find in the annals of literature, decides that his crowning achievement as a man of culture is to don the tartan of a clan to which he has never belonged and parade around a Scots fishing village in full regalia. Some faint apprehension, however, prevents him from simply borrowing the Royal Stuart pattern – probably the only one Markam could ever distinguish from a pincushion. Instead, and just as appropriately, he orders for a "pretty stiff" check a custom design:

Mr. Markam foresaw difficulties if he should by chance find himself in the locality of the clan whose colours he had usurped. The MacCallum at last undertook to have, at Markam's expense, a special pattern woven which would not be exactly the same as any existing tartan, though partaking of the characteristics of many. It was based on the Royal Stuart, but contained suggestions as to simplicity of pattern from the Macalister and Ogilvie clans, and as to neutrality of colour from the clans of Buchanan, Macbeth, Chief of Macintosh and Macleod. When the specimen had been shown to Markam he had feared somewhat lest it should strike the eye of his domestic circle as gaudy; but as Roderick MacDhu fell into perfect ecstasies over its beauty he did not make any objection to the completion of the piece. He thought, and wisely, that if a genuine Scotchman like MacDhu liked it, it must be right—especially as the junior partner was a man very much of his own build and appearance.

"The MacCallum," by the way, is neither a pub nor an inn, but the "junior partner very much of" Markam's "build and appearance"; almost as importantly, the sartorial deputy also speaks "with a remarkable cockney accent." Markam makes his purchase but does not "take his family into his confidence regarding his new costume" as he could not be certain that he would remain "free from ridicule." Once at the sands, Markum does indeed insist on wearing his outfit and his children laugh their necks red about it. A tableware accident invites more mockery from his wife, and it is at this point that Markum, by all indications pig-headed in that manner particular to smug, clueless boors, decides that on all outings henceforth he and his martial dress shall not be parted.

That our description has barely passed the first page of the text of Crooken Sands is cogent testimony to Stoker's foresight. The story ambles at an easy pace – almost as a metronome of Markum's aimless strolls near and around the village cliffs – and concludes at precisely the same speed, although by then our (and our English merchant's) pulses are beating noticeably faster. Without slipping into sly hints at the story's arc, one would do well to brush up on one's Scots, both the tongue and the nomenclature, before tackling this tale. And while I generally abhor dialect as a stooge-like conceit of the uninspired author, a cat's paw to generate some ancient truism from infallible rustics, it earns its place here. In fact, the very likelihood that Markum does not quite fully comprehend the local speech seems to heighten the danger in which he soon finds himself. What sort of danger? Well, one of the sorts you associate with 'sands,' although perhaps not the first that comes to mind. Thus during the plight – it does become a plight for more than one reason – of our Mr. Markum, we may find ourselves recurring to Kipling: "He may be festooned with the whole haberdashery of success and go to his grave a castaway." If that be his besetting sin, then surely we can forgive him.   

Asylum

The history of mental illness is curiously coterminous with the history of psychology, a fact which proponents of such therapy claim is a testament to its importance. Without belaboring the matter, I will say that retroactive imputations of mental illness to famous figures in history is not so much outlandish as proof that this type of approach engenders silly speculation befitting computerized minds. There are some prominent movements afoot that revile psychiatry, and the more one knows of the subject the more one is inclined to heed such warnings. Ultimately, we will have to understand that a small segment of our population – much smaller than pharmaceutical companies and their agents would care to admit – is truly ill and in need of medication and perhaps occasional inspection. The rest of us can jolly well fix our own problems, which brings us to this delightfully gloomy novel.

Our narrator is Peter Cleave, a senior psychiatrist at an asylum redolent of Victorian Gothic and situated in the British countryside. The year is 1959, a watershed for English mental institutions by virtue, we are told, of the passing of the Mental Health Act. The intergalactic weapon known as Google informs me that this piece of legislation trumped the "1890 Lunacy Act" (surely a glorious feat) and more or less provided a legal framework to detain mental patients in appropriate institutions against their will. This stipulation will become important on more than on one occasion in Asylum, but let us briefly step through the brambles of the plot. A new deputy superintendent, Max Raphael, his voluptuous wife Stella, and their plump, generally ignored ten-year-old son, Charlie, have been getting accustomed to life in this dreary if lush pocket of existence. Cleave is skeptical about this arrangement from the very beginning:   

Stella .... was the daughter of a diplomat who had been disgraced in a scandal years before. Both her parents were dead now. She was barely out of her teens when she married Max. He was a reserved, rather melancholy man, a competent administrator but weak; and he lacked imagination. It was obvious to me the first time I met them that he wasn't the type to satisfy a woman like Stella. They were living in London when he applied for the position of deputy superintendent. He came down for an interview, impressed the board and, more important, impressed the superintendent, Jack Straffen. Against my advice Jack offered him the job and a few weeks later the Raphaels arrived at the hospital. 

With this unsubtle introduction, it is clear that we will soon encounter someone who is Stella's match, and probably also Max's opposite. This task falls to Edgar Stark, a large, muscular psychopath who fancies himself to be a bit of a sculptor (what he did to his wife, a disgusting crime that landed him in lockdown, will tell you all you need to know about his artistic capacity). In any case, Stark is certainly attractive in a brawny, Lord Byron sort of way, and Stella has been "more or less celibate" for the last several years. How does a "cultured, beautiful woman," who also appears to be a fine cook and homemaker, end up so neglected that she confesses her feelings at a dinner party? It is one of the odd conceits of the novel that Max's lack of imagination is blamed; in fact, this lynchpin is so dubious as to cast enormous shadows on all that is to come. To wit, if you have a wealth of ambition and a dearth of sensuality, why would you ever marry a beautiful woman whose curves gain her the nickname from one of the characters of "Rubens"? Not only is her ability to play hostess untested and unlikely, but a buxom bombshell will raise more than eyebrows regarding Max's maturity. And when Stella willingly allows Edgar's advances to conquer her whole, the novel skids down some rather implausible slopes.

Yet this is again to the credit of McGrath, who excels when he writes about his native England, but is far less successful with his American-based works (despite that he has long been a New World resident). Stella and Edgar fornicate, spend hours thinking themselves unwatched amid the sprawling hospital gardens – or, I should say, Stella alone believes this nonsense – and enjoy probing each other's physical and emotional limits. Then one fine day, Edgar has the impudence to seduce her on her own bed then make off with some of Max's clothes. Escape from an asylum, observes the usually purblind Max, requires two things: clothes and money. How nice of Stella then, when Edgar asked a week or so before, to have "given him everything she had in her purse." Edgar, to no one's surprise except Stella's, absconds to London where the second act begins, with Stella joining her lover and the latter's henchman Nick in an urban warehouse loft she will come to fear. Here we get scenes as plebeian as the raw and unfinished surroundings, and it is also here that Stella tries to refashion Edgar – who has hitherto come off as merely an unctuous, self-serving beast, at least to us – into the lover she really craves, not unlike Edgar's desire to sculpt her head:

She knew the thread was unbroken; even in his worst fits of aggressive jealousy she felt him straining for her, she felt the passion, only it was confused and misdirected, it was as though it had been shunted off down some passage from which it emerged monstrous and unrecognizable. This was his illness. And she said that it was during the two days she spent with Nick that she attempted what she called her heart's prompting: she tried for the first time, not intellectually but emotionally, to separate the man from his illness, and yes, she could do it. Oh, it was easy, she was more than equal to the task: she imagined him clutching his head as the storm raged in his poor benighted mind, but the storm wasn't him! The storm would pass, he would recover, he would be himself again. But for his sake she must avoid him while he was mad; later she would go back to him.

As Cleave duly notes, Stella has learned little from living among psychiatrists. Her few weeks in London are Bohemian in that very banal manner so commonly incident to lesser novels – which seems precisely like what has entrapped Stella. Edgar's "benighted mind" eventually gets the better of him, as it always has, and Stella makes her fallen way back to the familial country home alongside the titular institution.

Although I have not seen all of the doggedly faithful screen adaptation, I will permit myself use of its less complimentary reviews. While the film has been loathed in particular for Stella's abrupt stupidity, the novel's original improbabilities are greatly magnified by the casting choices, especially with this late actress as Stella. Richardson is sadly ten years too old and, unfortunately, not enough of a bimbo to make this work – and herein lies our greatest trouble. Our narrative, while gripping, will evolve in guarded steps; indeed, McGrath has never written more beautifully or more accurately. The premise of its stemming from the pen of an elderly psychiatrist bestows the semblance of an ornate clinical report. What happens to Stella and Charlie and Max in the third act, which begins in some downtrodden Welsh village called Cledwyn Heath, indicates that Edgar is not the only ailing soul among the dramatis personae. Max, as usual, does not quite catch on:

The house seemed too large for them, and they drifted about it like strangers in an empty hotel. Max was unable properly to begin his punitive campaign, perhaps, she thought, because the magnitude of her guilt awed him. That she should still eat, and drink, and move from room to room, burdened as she was with sin, this struck him dumb with amazement and even a sort of admiration. He could not quite believe that she wasn't crawling about on her hands and knees, begging his forgiveness.

Stella does nothing of the kind, and Max keeps her around with the old excuse that a child needs a mother. Now, a child certainly does need a mother, but not one like Stella. Not one who has succumbed to "those large emotions that by their very nature tend to blaze freely and then die, having destroyed everything that fed them." Well, almost everything.

The Tractate Middoth

Once upon a time, an educated Western man could be counted on to know Latin and quite possibly some Greek ("as much Greek as he could get his hands on" to paraphrase this author). Hebrew, generally reserved for those in theology, was no less valuable in its contributions to our understanding of the world and its reasons. And while the educated Westerner might have told you marvelous things about the etymology of terms in his Old Testament, he would have been blissfully ignorant of the first monotheism's parallel development, its mystics and conundrums now overshadowed by the horizon of the Cross. These times have changed, of course, and now a uniform ignorance of all ancient languages sadly does not seem to trouble most people. So the antiquarians among us rejoice when people occasionally bother to acknowledge the importance of the oldest alphabets, if not exactly conduct a second-hand survey in translation of their riches. What good does a knowledge of these texts entail? Apart from the philosophies of the Greeks, which are as eternal as the earth itself, what wisdom from these occult ages could possibly inform our modern sensibilities? You may be amazed at the answer, which in no small way should influence your appreciation of this famous story.

Our initial character will make only a brief appearance, then resurface at a crucial juncture much later on. That personage is one John Eldred, "an elderly man with a thin face and grey Piccadilly weepers" (a term regrettably faded from use) who one autumn afternoon finds his way into a "certain famous library." His aim is the acquisition of an old Hebrew tome; his manners are cordial and almost unctuous; and his disposition in general seems to be that of precisely the person who would want to peruse an early eighteenth-century Talmudic work in the original language. He is helped in his endeavor by young Mr. Garrett, a employee of the library who deems the initial task ("Talmud: Tractate Middoth, with the commentary of Nachmanides, Amsterdam, 1707, 11.3.34")  a simple job to round off his day and proceeds to the Hebrew section only to find that the book has just been loaned to a "shortish old gentleman, perhaps a clergyman, in a cloak." And while he is mildly surprised by the speed at which old Eldred accepts this twist of fate and scurries off towards the exit, he is rather shocked to find upon reexamination that the tome in question is in fact quite securely seated in its shelf. 

What happens next is a sequence I have to spoil, as good Mr. Garrett ends up quite unconscious in that selfsame section. He relates his excursion to a colleague who helped find and revive him:

'I went into that Hebrew class to get a book for a man that was inquiring for it down below. Now that same book I'd made a mistake about the day before. I'd been for it, for the same man, and made sure that I saw an old parson in a cloak taking it out. I told my man it was out: off he went, to call again next day. I went back to see if I could get it out of the parson: no parson there, and the book on the shelf. Well, yesterday, as I say, I went again. This time, if you please – ten o'clock in the morning, remember, and as much light as ever you get in those classes – and there was my parson again, back to me, looking at the books on the shelf I wanted. His hat was on the table, and he had a bald head. I waited a second or two looking at him rather particularly. I tell you, he had a very nasty bald head. It looked to me dry, and it looked dusty, and the streaks of hair across it were much less like hair than cobwebs. Well, I made a bit of a noise on purpose, coughed and moved my feet. He turned round and let me see his face – which I hadn't seen before. I tell you again, I'm not mistaken. Though, for one reason or another I didn't take in the lower part of his face, I did see the upper part; and it was perfectly dry, and the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bone, there were cobwebs – thick. Now that closed me up, as they say, and I can't tell you anything more.'   

Ah, but we can. Garrett takes a well-deserved vacation to the seaside only to faint again in his train compartment upon the sight of "a figure so like one bound with recent unpleasant associations." He is nursed by "the only passenger in the carriage," a certain Mrs. Simpson, and her unmarried daughter. Unlike other good Samaritans these two ladies suppose that Garrett might repay their kindness by solving a long-standing family mystery, one involving an old book and two contradictory testaments authored by an evil uncle whose requested method of burial is the stuff of travel guides. To make Mrs. Simpson's long and wicked story short, this uncle Dr. Rant, somehow also a priest ("I can't imagine how he got to be one"), became by unknown means a wealthy man – ours is not to reason why. On his dying day Rant, a vile old snake if there ever was one, announced to his two remaining relatives that the dueling wills were concealed in different pockets of his vast library, not excluding some works he had already given away to public institutions and suchlike. Thus the only impediment to her inheritance, claims Mrs. Simpson, is her cousin John Eldred – and I think the ends of our circle are close enough for us to stop here.  

The only criticism one could ever level at this author – whose style is as impeccable as that of any other twentieth-century writer – is his occasional overreliance on provincial dialects, which for his musical ear seemed to have held a curious fascination. More often than not, the truth about the local circumstances is revealed by the rustic resident and some of the concomitant terror is lost in the decryption of the oddities (on rare occasions, as it were, the weirdness of the language actually heightens our fears). We are mercifully spared too many of these humble clarifications and glide smoothly at James's natural heights. Garrett comes off as a bit callow at times, but that fact aids him in his quest as no one rightly expects a young librarian to match wits with a decrepit and diabolical scholar, dead or alive. And if you think Garrett may be a coincidental passenger on that shorebound train, you may also think our ending is a tad too cheerful. And you also may not be quite as attentive as those old Westerners.

Ancient Sorceries

I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description.  By way of relief I kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers.  I almost wished I were with them again.  But my dreams took me elsewhere.  I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses.

                                                                                                               Arthur Vezin

Surely you have heard in various and sundry situations that old adage, "less is more."  I encountered it many times as a child and adolescent, in the oddest of contexts: clothing, furniture, calories, exercise, sleep, color on a canvas, words to say to that one girl to whom you barely can say anything.  Once upon a time, this adage fell on the hardly deaf ears of perhaps the greatest musical genius the world has ever known, and he spurned it with the foreknowledge of his glory.  And in literature, it is strange how close two stories by the same author can be in motifs and how distant in effect, with the more effective story almost invariably being the one that reveals less.  A pithy introduction to one of the masterpieces of horror fiction.

At the onset of our tale we are reminded of one the world's many inequities: namely, that while it can understand the wild narratives of "the adventurous type" of person, because "such people carry about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives," little is to be thought of "dull, ordinary folk."  Nothing, we are informed, is to happen to these plain souls.  That is to say, nothing out of the way in what we may presume are boilerplate bourgeois scripts, the same roles and routines that drove so many European intellectuals to laud the grimy charm of the proletariat.  To what category then belongs our protagonist Arthur Vezin?  His initial account to Dr. John Silence disperses more than a few hints:

He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer.  He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English.  He disliked them, not because they were his fellow countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.  These English clashed around him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn't want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth.

This most remarkable passage contains all the seeds of explanation for the events to come (in particular the three Latinate words beginning with "ob," which etymologically all involve some kind of force outwards), with Vezin's surname and curious bout of anti-patriotic fervor suggesting that we are not dealing with someone of Anglo-Saxon stock.  The imperfection of Vezin's French is underscored throughout the text – an integral feature, one supposes, of his 'ordinariness' – a ploy that allows the reader to comprehend his befuddlement at the series of events in the little town into which he wanders one evening.

Vezin's final view of the town will summarize symbolically his thoughts and fears, but his inchoate impression is positive.  Indeed, what struck him then was "the delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train."  So delightful, as it were, that he "felt soothed and stroked like a cat."  Dr. Silence proceeds on the basis of a contextual clue to ask more questions about why Vezin uses this peculiar analogy, and we do not need to belabor the matter.  Suffice it to say that Vezin enters the town and finds a hotel, but despite the alleged peace of mind achieved, never quite feels at ease.  After a string of encounters with the local townsfolk, Vezin decides that something untoward may be afoot:

'For the whole town, I suddenly realized, was something other than I so far saw it.  The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared.  Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes.  Their busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes.  They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets; yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places.  In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown.  It was all a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly for purposes of their own.  But the main current of their energies ran elsewhere.  I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the whole body organizes itself to eject or absorb it.  The town was doing this very thing to me.'

Such an observation would seem to be a product of the solipsistic nonsense common to "adventurous types"; but we also know that many ostensibly 'plain and ordinary' people suffer from delusions of grandeur (one of the most frequent manifestations is a professed link to a well-known catastrophe).  Yet here this is not the case.  For all his weird musings, Vezin truly senses that something personal is at stake ("something exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance") that does not make him a more important being on this earth, but simply one who may belong to a different order of things.  That the town's cathedral "was ever empty, the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted," suggests what form of religious experience the locals may prefer.  It is the appearance of the hotel owner's beautiful daughter, however, that finally embodies our traveler's fears in a guise he can hardly misinterpret – and we should say no more.

Ancient Sorceries is understood by some as the inspiration for this famous film, and it gives nothing away to reveal that a quite similar theme is broached in another of Blackwood's tales, which shall remain nameless on these pages.  The difference between our story and the less successful effort is very much a study in omission: while occasionally, ahem, flashing its claws, Ancient Sorceries only implies that certain things may have occurred, and the forms perceived by the protagonist may necessarily be of his own composition.  The later story degenerates into one of the most flawed spectacles of otherwise first-rate fiction, irrevocably compromising the fine, if overly topical setting established in its opening pages.  Vezin's fate seems to be his doing alone, and not the work of continental strife or some other such nonsense, rendering the dénouement to our tale all the more plausible.  Plausible, that is, for a journey endangered by sleep.  And by cats.