Night Music (51 page)

All of which brings us back to M. R. James, the greatest writer of short supernatural fiction that the genre has yet produced. James (1862–1936) was the provost of King's College, Cambridge, and later of Eton College.
¹⁹
He wrote just over thirty ghost stories, many of them intended to be read aloud to friends and colleagues at Christmastime. James was a medieval scholar, and the central characters in his tales are often academics, antiquarians, or gentleman intellectuals of a particularly fusty and reserved kind. (James's first anthology, published in 1904, was entitled
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
.)

A typical James tale will find some such fellow poking around in an old church or library—examining an obscure carving (“The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”), perusing an ancient volume (“Canon Alberic's Scrap-book”), or investigating rumors of hidden wealth (“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”)—and suddenly being confronted with a hideous entity linked to the object in question. What is most wonderful about James is the physicality of the roused spirits. When we think of ghosts it is often in an incorporeal way: ethereal wisps that float through walls or, in the case of poltergeists, entities with no form at all whose presence can only be discerned through their impact on terrestrial objects. James has no truck with that kind of nonsense: his horrors can be seen and touched.

More worrying, they can see and touch in turn. The unfortunate narrator of “Abbot Thomas” recounts how he is “conscious of a most horrible smell of mold, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and of several—I don't know how many—legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body.” Of John Eldred's demise in “The Tractate Middoth,” we are told that “a little dark form appeared to rise out of the shadow behind the tree-trunk and from it two arms enclosing a mass of blackness came before Eldred's face and covered his head and neck.”

James seems to have had a particular horror of hair. (He was a notorious arachnophobe.) The demon that guards Canon Alberic's scrapbook is “a mass of coarse, matted black hair,” and Barchester Cathedral hides a being with “rather rough and coarse fur.” Most unpleasantly of all, Mr. Dunning in “Casting the Runes” thrusts his hand beneath his pillow and feels “a mouth, with teeth, and hair about it.” This image would have provided a therapist with regular income for many years had James chosen to present himself for treatment, but it doesn't take a committed Freudian to spot all manner of psychosexual confusion underpinning James's work. He was, in all probability, a closeted gay man at a time when society's tolerance for such forms of attraction was limited in the extreme. The main outlets for his repressed sexuality came in the form of extended bouts of wrestling with possibly like-minded gents on college floors, and in the squelching, tactile, hirsute horrors that found their way into his stories.

Then again, the nature of James's sexuality matters less than the power of the tales that he left behind. The world has seen plenty of repressed homosexuals, but few of them have bequeathed a body of work quite like James's. Perhaps more interesting is that his stories stand as dire prognostications of the danger of intellectual curiosity, a peculiar position for an academic to take.
²⁰
Indeed, one of his tales is called “A Warning to the Curious.” In James's world, it's entirely inadvisable to go poking one's nose into dark corners for fear that something may well poke one back.

But why isn't James on my childhood bookshelf? He is, in a sense: “Casting the Runes” and “Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad” are both contained in anthologies that I bought as a child, but my primary introduction to James came through the medium of television.

From 1971 to 1978, the BBC broadcast a series of television adaptations of supernatural short stories under the banner of
A Ghost Story for Christmas
. I was an altar boy in my local church, which meant that I served at Midnight Mass each Christmas Eve. (This being Ireland in the late seventies and early eighties, Midnight Mass was usually held at nine
P.M.
in order to avoid an influx of drunks when the pubs closed at eleven
P.M.
) I was too young to catch the original transmissions of these dramatizations, but I was old enough to be able to watch the repeats. By the time I returned home from the service, my parents were either already in bed or happy to leave me to my own devices as long as I promised not to go into the living room to peek at my Christmas presents. I would sit in the kitchen with a cup of tea and some chocolate, turn on our portable television, and take in “The Ash Tree,” “Lost Hearts,” or whatever other adaptation the BBC happened to put my way.
²¹
Sometimes, if I was particularly fortunate, they'd also throw in a Laurel and Hardy short, which made it marginally easier for me to go up the dark stairs to bed afterward.

In 2012, the aforementioned Professor Darryl Jones edited a definitive collection of James's work for Oxford University Press. To celebrate its publication, we showed Jonathan Miller's 1968 adaptation of “Oh Whistle . . .” (which lost the original “Oh” to become simply “Whistle . . .” for reasons that I've never understood) to audiences in Dublin and Belfast. What was surprising was just how effective it remained, anchored by a terrific performance by Michael Hordern as Professor Parkin, who stumbles across an old bone whistle inscribed with the words “Quis este iste qui venit” (Who is this who is coming?), a question to which, unfortunately, he is destined to learn the answer. Yes, the apparition, when it finally manifests itself, takes the form of a bedsheet on a wire, but it's Hordern's reaction to it that haunts the viewer, the sense that his world has been changed for ever, and he will never again rest peacefully in it.

•  •  •

So there we have it: a little piece of my reading and viewing history, and a pointer, perhaps, to the reasons why I write what I do.

And what of that old lady, and her tale of the house in which an entity apparently lingered, waiting to prey on children? Well, I couldn't help her much. I did refer her to a Hodder author who specializes in books on angels, but the whole problem was outside my remit, and I don't think anything came of the referral.

Subsequently I returned to the same city to talk about a collection of essays on crime fiction that I'd co-edited, and the elderly lady was present again. This time I had traveled alone, so there was no rep with me. As before, she waited until everyone else had left before approaching, then produced a map showing an area of the town. On it was drawn the letter
X
, and beside the
X
were the words “I live here.”

Naturally I assumed that the
X
in question marked her own house, and she was the one living there, but I was wrong.

“That's where it lives,” she said.

She was smiling. She had me, and she knew it.

“I have a car,” I said.

“You should go and see it.”

And I did.

It was a foul afternoon, damp and cold. As it turned out, the house in question stood on a street not far from the library. It wasn't hard to find as it was the only house still standing. The rest of the street had been given over to industrial buildings, interspersed with patches of waste ground to break the monotony. The house looked like it had once been part of a terrace of similar redbrick dwellings, but they were all gone now, and only this one remained, as though it had been dropped from space. It had two windows on the upper story, a window and a door on the lower. Most of the panes were broken. The doors and windows were covered by wire grilles—too late to save the glass, but a deterrent to anyone who might have fancied a spot of breaking and entering—and behind the grilles were sheets of plywood, so it was impossible to see inside.

Was it unsettling? Slightly, even if only in its incongruity. This was no longer a residential street. Had anyone still been living in the house, the view from the windows would have been one of unsurpassed ugliness, a testament to what sometimes still passes for urban planning in Britain's more benighted cities. The house just looked lost, and slightly baleful. It didn't even have a garden any longer. No wall or fence separated it from the pavement. It was simply
there
.

But all stories like this should have an odd thing about them, shouldn't they, one little detail that leaves the reader with a shiver. Here is the odd detail: the plywood at one corner of the lower level was broken, or had rotted away, although a piece of dusty glass covered the gap. Written in the dust of the glass, as though by a finger, were three words:

I LIVE HERE

And they were written on the
inside
of the glass.

Even though no exclamation mark stood at the end of the declaration, I heard its emphasis in my head as I read the words. It was simultaneously a statement of fact, and a kind of threat, and a howl of anger and despair at the decay that surrounded it and at what it had itself become.

Did I see a ghost?

No.

Did I sense a presence?

No.

Does something squat in that old house, rippling with hatred, waiting to take its rage out on the children who play on the waste ground, roaming just beyond its reach? I don't know, but the woman who sent me there believed that the house was not unoccupied, and she appeared sincere, sensible, and self-aware.

Eventually someone will knock the house down, and that will probably be for the best. If an entity does haunt it, then it is tied to either a person or a place. I could see no people, and the only place was the house itself—its wood and bricks and broken glass, its floorboards and tiles and walls. Take them away, and there is nowhere for anything to hide.

I may be wrong, of course. I make no great claims of insight on the subject. I don't think that I even want to know for sure. I still retain that image of Michael Hordern as Professor Parkin, sitting in his nightgown on his uneasy bed, his certainties about this world shaken, and his secret fears about the next confirmed. Better to remain uncertain, perhaps.

Better to heed the warnings to the curious.

1
. Mind you, I've become better at writing on the road, if only out of necessity. When I started out as a writer, I was probably a little precious about the whole business, and felt that I couldn't work unless I was at my own desk, and even then I rarely produced more than a thousand words a day, after which I'd require a bit of a lie-down until one of the servants woke me with a restorative brandy and a freshly ironed copy of the evening paper. Now I can write just about anywhere—the middle seat of airplanes, noisy coffee shops, even under the gaze of a TV camera, as I did when a documentary crew was filming in my home. The only thing guaranteed to distract me is a conversation on a cell phone, which is why, in
Bad Men
, my fifth novel, a man is brutally beaten and then shot to death for having the temerity to use a cell phone when a pair of killers are trying to read their newspaper. I wrote that section on the same day that someone had disturbed my reading and writing in a coffee shop by engaging in a very loud conversation with someone in Yemen. I'm nothing if not passive-aggressive.

2
. I should say that my bedroom remains very much as it did when I left Rialto some decades ago. I like to think that my mother has preserved it as a shrine to my genius, just in case any scholars of my work decide they need to immerse themselves in the details of my early life, although I rather suspect she'd be quite happy if I'd just clear all the rubbish out so she can put it to better use.

3
. Originally the stories were to be broadcast late at night, but someone at the BBC had the bright idea of putting them on in the early afternoon slot, just as parents were bringing their children home from school. There were, I believe, complaints.

4
. People of my acquaintance occasionally express surprise that I still take the bus, assuming that, at a certain point, I must surely have felt obliged to abandon such nonsense and hire a chauffeur. In fact, a former neighbor of mine was quite shocked to hear that I caught the bus into the city, and seemed to regard taking public transport as being on a par with pimping one's offspring, or trapping pigeons for food. I was once catching the bus into Dublin's city center shortly after Christmas, and took the only available seat beside an older lady who, I couldn't help but notice, kept casting sideways glances at me. Eventually she tapped me on the arm and said, “The old books not doing so well, are they?” I think I was rendered speechless for a moment, before I managed to puff out that I was on the bus not because I had fallen on hard times, but because I quite liked taking public transport, to which her immortal reply was, “Ah, you do, yeah,” spoken in a tone of what I can only describe as aggressive disbelief.

5
. I'm tempted to argue that winning the Best Actor Oscar for playing Dr. Hannibal Lecter was the worst thing that could have happened to Hopkins in terms of his craft, since—with a couple of honorable exceptions, namely
The Remains of the Day
and
Shadowlands
—it appeared to lead him to assume that there really was no such thing as overacting, and that caricature and character amounted to more or less the same thing in Hollywood.

The Silence of the Lambs
is one of the few films at which I've shed a tear, although I should point out that it was less a question of content than circumstance. I'd just returned from the United States to see my father, who was dying of cancer in the hospital, and I felt the urge to hide away somewhere dark afterward. My then-girlfriend suggested we go to see a movie, and
The Silence of the Lambs
was the only film that happened to be starting at the right time. So we went to the Screen cinema, where I burst into tears about halfway through the movie, thereby becoming, I believe, the only person to have wept at
The Silence of the Lambs
. Anyway, we'll come back to Lecter anon.