Haunts (2024)

Cover image: Graham Fletcher / Cover Design: Daniela Gast /
Illustrations: Rowan Sylva

(July 1) Haunts. ISBN: 978-1-991083-17-3. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2024. 202 pp.

1. On the Road to Nowhere
   Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (18/2-1/12/15)

Stories:


2. In the Le Fanu Museum (12-13/7-27/8/19)
3. The Station (15/11/19-27/1/20)
4. The Cat’s Veto (13/12/19-27/1/20)
5. Skeleton tracks (18-19/11/21)
6. Ghosting (18-24/3/22; 22/4/22)
7. The Interrupted Journey (9/12/20-16/7/21)
8. Wellington (7/6/22-21/9/23)
9. Mythago Wood (19/5/22-16/8/23)
10. The Missing Pages (26/7-15/8/23)

Cartographies of the Afterlife: (16/1/22-20/9/23)


11. Preface: The Treasure House (21-24/6/22)
12. The Haunted Bookshop (30/1-8/2/22-19/9/23)
13. Suicide Note (16-29/1; 13-15/4/22-20/9/23)

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Lasavia Publishing


Mister, we’re all you’ve got.

– – Stephen King, Mr Mercedes (2014) [1]

•

Stories

The editor says he won’t consider any of the following:

Stories about gangsters, politics, regional problems. Stories with historical settings. Military stories, World War Two. Stories with a college background. Sex stories. Stories with smart-alec dialogue. Stories in which characters drink. Stories with a newspaper background. Dialect stories. Stories about writers or editors or advertising men. Radio stories. Stories about religion. Stories concerning insanity. Crime stories. Mistaken identity stories. Stories of the First World War. Stories about adolescent characters.

Apart from that, you’re as free as the birds in the tree tops and can write about anything you like.

– P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea (1953) [2]

•




Cartographies of the Afterlife


A forethought of death that we may find ourselves at death
Not helplessly strange to the new conditions.

– W. H. Auden [3]

•

Blurb:

As Jack Ross stated in his latest collection Ghost Stories, 'We’re most haunted by that which we’ve worked hardest to deny and eradicate from our lives.'

– Brooke Georgia, Aubade (2022)

What do we actually mean by the word haunt? In this new set of stories inspired by the term, Jack Ross invokes a series of his favourite haunts via voices from the past, beginning with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and concluding with Emanuel Swedenborg.
In between he visits with Irish ghost-story maestro Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, along with others ranging from James Joyce to H. P. Lovecraft – not to mention Scheherazade herself, creator / narrator of The 1001 Nights.
Most importantly of all, perhaps, he tries to settle accounts with his own father, the architect of a vast entangled empire of native bush and weeds at the back of their suburban quarter-acre section in Mairangi Bay.
The book ends with the novella Cartographies of the Afterlife, an exploration of the penumbra between life and death, based on accounts from recent visitors.
In the immortal words of Bette Davis: 'Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.'


Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His previous collection, Ghost Stories (Lasavia, 2019), has been prescribed for writing courses at three local universities. He’s also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including (most recently) Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems (2023).
He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

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Notes:

[1] Stephen King, Mr Mercedes: A Novel. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014), 382.

[2] P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters. With an Introduction and Additional Notes by W. Townend, and the Text of P. G. Wodehouse’s Five Berlin Broadcasts. 1953 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 166..

[3] W. H. Auden, ‘1929’. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957 (London: Faber, 1966), 38.

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Graham Fletcher, "Untitled," from the King of the Wood series (2002)
[photograph by Sait Akkirman]

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The Missing Pages

H. P. Lovecraft et al.: The Horror in the Museum (1970)

The other day I bought a second-hand copy of H. P. Lovecraft's The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1970). It wasn't a first edition, mind you, but rather a 1976 reprint of the limited-edition Arkham House original. Nevertheless, it went very nicely with my three-volume set of their edition of Lovecraft's Collected Stories:

1. The Dunwich Horror and Others (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1963)
2. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964)
3. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965)

What, then, was my surprise, on starting to leaf through it, to discover that it had some missing pages! The section in question spanned pages 21-26. It included the ending of Sonia Greene's ‘The Invisible Monster’, and the whole of her story ‘Four O’Clock’.

At first I thought it might be a complete signature which had fallen out by accident, but that didn't seem, on closer examination, to be the case. So far as I could see, the pages had either been cut or carefully torn from their place. There are no other gaps in the rest of the book, as I carefully ascertained by leafing all the way through it.

Never mind, I thought. I can make up the deficiency by reading both stories in my copy of S. T. Joshi's variorum edition of H. P. Lovecraft's Revisions and Collaborations.

Interestingly enough, while Joshi's edition does include the first story, ‘The Invisible Monster’ – also known as ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’ – in the body of the text, he relegated ‘Four O'Clock’ to an appendix:

S. T. Joshi having determined that this tale is not properly a part of the Lovecraft corpus; the story is entirely Sonia's, Lovecraft having simply made a few suggestions as to its prose style. [1]

But is that the whole truth of the matter? Sonia Greene was, after all, considerably more to Lovecraft than any of his other clients and collaborators. The two were married in 1924, and lived together for a few months in Sonia's apartment in Brooklyn before she moved to Cleveland to follow up a job opportunity.

It seems impossible to imagine the multi-phobic, antisemitic nationalist Lovecraft maintaining a married life with anyone, least of all a Jewish emigrée from the old Russian Empire, but they do appear to have been quite happy together – for a short time, at least.

The two discussed divorce in 1929, after Lovecraft had moved back from New York to his beloved Providence, Rhode Island, but the paperwork was never completed, so they were – technically at least – still married when he died in 1937. Sonia composed a short memoir, The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, in the mid-1940s, but it wasn't published in full until 1985, long after her death in 1972.

Lovecraft's friend and editor, August Derleth claimed, in a 1947 letter to his young protégé Ray Bradbury, that she ‘wanted to incorporate a lot of his prejudices as if they were major parts of his life, seen through her Yiddish eyes'. [2]

Derleth accordingly did his best to block publication of the full memoir, though he did include parts of her Providence Journal article ‘Howard Phillips Lovecraft As His Wife Remembers Him’ in his 1949 Lovecraft miscellany Something About Cats and Other Pieces, along with her two stories ‘The Invisible Monster’ and ‘Four O'Clock’.

Lovecraft himself commented of these stories in a 1922 letter to his friend Alfred Galpin:

Mme. G. has taken to this sort of composition — has written one & planned two more — & I’m damned if they don’t look like good stuff! The first one, “Four O’Clock”, has some images noxiously Poe-esque — I shall polish it up for use ... [3]

Sonia herself wrote to her friend Winfield Townley Scott in 1948:

I have sent to Arkham House snap photo of HPL’s aunts, some post cards, a story revised by HP and a fictitious story I wrote about HP a few months after I met him, but at his request I did not publish it in the Rainbow because, as he told it, it was obviously a description of himself. [4]

In his excellent article on the subject, published on the website Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein: The Undiscovered Mythos, Bobby Derie comments:

If the “story revised by HP” is “The Horror at Martin’s Beach”/”The Invisible Monster,” then by process of elimination the “fictitious story I wrote about HP” must be “Four O’Clock.” Which perhaps places this story ... closer to affectionate parody than an effort at a weird tale, a literary tweaking of Lovecraft’s nose.

Is that the reason for the missing pages in my copy? Has some Lovecraftian obsessive attempted to remove this stain on the Master's escutcheon by cutting out this 'alien' story from the (then) authorised version of his literary corpus?

S. T. Joshi, too, seems strangely coy about his decision to exclude it from his revised text of Lovecraft's collected revisions. This is what he has to say on the subject in his own recent edition of H. P. Lovecraft's Revisions and Collaborations:

In a letter to Winfield Townley Scott (11 December 1948; ms JHL), Sonia H. Davis wrote that this story was written only at HPL’s suggestion. On that basis, I excluded it from the revised Horror in the Museum (1989); but in fact, much of the prose appears to be similar to HPL’s own prose, with some characteristic linguistic and even punctuational usages; so HPL probably did touch up the story somewhat. HPL never mentions the story in any extant correspondence, it was apparently not published in his lifetime. The only basis for the text is its first appearance in 1949. [5]

It's hard to believe that the quasi-omniscient Joshi is unaware of the mention of 'Four O'Clock' in Lovecraft's 1922 letter (quoted above). Nor is it immediately obvious how his admission that 'HPL probably did touch up the story somewhat' equates with this continued refusal to acknowledge it as canonical.

Joshi, too, may find Sonia's insistence on Lovecraft's undeniable racism problematic, given the amount of his life he himself has devoted to a man who would undoubtedly have despised him had the two ever met. Derleth's reaction to her memoir was both franker and coarser:

in it she has HPL posing as a Jew-baiter (she is Jewish), she says she completely supported HPL for the years 1924 to 1932, and so on, all bare-faced lies. [6]

His implication that these are typically Jewish lies is not far from the surface in this and other passages quoted in Bobby Derie's magisterial survey of the evidence.

What, then, of the story itself? You can find the complete text of it at Wikisource. [7]

This is how it begins:

Four O'Clock
[1922]

by Sonia H. Greene

About two in the morning I knew it was coming. The great black silences of night's depth told me, and a monstrous cricket, chirping with a persistence too hideous to be unmeaning, made it certain. It is to be at four o'clock — at four in the dusk before dawn, just as he said it would be. I had not fully believed it previously, because the prophecies of vindictive madmen are seldom to be taken with seriousness. Besides, I was not justly to be blamed for what had befallen him at four o'clock on that other morning; that terrible morning whose memory will never leave me. And when, at length, he had died and was buried in the ancient cemetery just across the road from my east windows, I was certain that his curse could not harm me. Had I not seen his lifeless clay securely pinned down by huge shovelfuls of mould? Might I not feel assured that his crumbling bones would be powerless to bring me the doom at a day and an hour so precisely stated? Such, indeed, had been my thoughts until this shocking night itself; this night of incredible chaos, of shattered certainties, and of nameless portents ...

•

Last night, at six o'clock, the phone rang.

– Some time (not now, obviously) but some time when you have a moment, could you possibly come across and have a look at my TV? It doesn't seem to be working.
– I'll come across now.
– Oh, okay.
– See you in a second.

My mother's TV is often on the blink. She doesn't know how to fix it, as she can't form new memories anymore, and every attempt we make to explain to her just which remote control to use to turn on the channel she wants founders on this unfortunate fact.

Last time, after a week of struggle with the TV which involved two separate repairmen (one quite useless, the other both heroic and kindly) we succeeded in getting her Sky dish up and running again. This involved replacing the Skybox as well as parts of the satellite dish on her roof, which is why I call the second of these technicians ‘heroic’. He climbed up there despite the high winds and the imminent threat of a hailstorm, and kept a smile on his face throughout. I've seldom admired a man more.

Unfortunately, to get to Sky, my mother has to choose ‘AV’ on her TV remote, and then turn on the Skybox. This is too much for her. She can turn on the television itself, or she can turn on Sky if the screen is already set to Sky, but she can't combine the two operations.

I've tried writing out the various steps involved in capital letters on a little sign propped up by the television, but she never remembers to look at it when difficulties arise.

And yet the television is her lifeline. She can still tune in her radio, and she even uses her computer to play online games and check her email, but the television is the friend that keeps her in touch with the world each evening.

Knowing how much she needs it, then, I came up with the best compromise I could. I tuned the TV to Sky, then hid the other TV remote. This meant that she couldn't fully turn off the screen, but she could turn Sky on and off.

Unfortunately it also meant that the screen has the logo ‘NO SIGNAL RECEIVED’ moving up and down on it. This irritates her inordinately. Turning it off with the TV remote has the effect of turning off Sky, however, which leaves her without any channels to watch.

The free-to-air aerial on top of her apartment block is intended for all the tenants, but since none of the others seem to watch non-streaming TV, when it blew down in one of the recent gales, no-one seemed to know whose responsibility it was to fix it, or even who’d put it up in the first place. All in all, we thought it better to rely solely on Sky.

Usually, when I get that six o'clock phone call, I can manage it pretty easily. I dread it, of course. We can go for weeks with the system working fine, but every now and then she succeeds in turning the whole thing off. All I have to do is go over, locate the TV remote, turn the picture back on, and shift the reception code to AV.

This time, however, the whole screen was off. There was no little red pilot light to be seen, and the TV remote was powerless to turn anything on or off.

Had she unplugged it somehow? She did say that she'd got up in the middle of the night because it irritated her – perhaps casting a ghostly light on the room, or moving in the corner of her eye – and managed to turn it off. She couldn't tell me how, though. Direct questions of any kind tend to throw her, and I don't know enough about TVs to be au fait with all the various methods of turning them on and off.

Everything seemed to be plugged in as usual. I tried unplugging it all and then plugging it in again. No soap. Everything remained dark.

– How on earth did you do it?
– I don't know, she wailed.
– Well, I don't know either. We'll have to get another repairman. It's beyond me, I'm afraid.

I saw in my mind's eye the grim prospect of booking in another tradesperson – ‘they'll be calling sometime between 12 and 5 pm’ – then sitting there waiting for them, as she's only too prone to turn them away if they come while she's on her own. Nor can she explain to them why they've been called.

I could see she was upset by it all. So was I. But what could I do? There was nothing I could think of to try which I hadn't already tried. I had to leave. But I knew I was leaving her in the dark, with no friendly newsmen or sports commentators for company. She breaks my heart.

Next day my wife went over and located the – virtually invisible – black plastic indentation on the back of the TV which you have to press to turn the set on and off. God knows how my mother located it in the middle of the night, but she managed somehow. Her television is up and running again … for the moment.

Every evening, though, around six o'clock, I begin to feel nervous and look in the direction of the phone. Will it be tonight? Or tomorrow? Sometimes she can ring us five times in a row about the same matter, get the same reply, ring off, then be reminded of it again, and ring us again. But we are her sole lifeline, and each call is, for her, the first time she's mentioned it.

---

Notes:

[1] Wikipedia: ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horror_in_the_Museum_and_Other_Revisions].

[2] Bobby Derie, ‘The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis’ Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein: The Undiscovered Mythos (17/6/20). [https://deepcuts.blog/2020/06/17/the-private-life-of-h-p-lovecraft-1985-by-sonia-h-davis/].

[3] Bobby Derie, ‘Four O’Clock’ (1949) by Sonia H. Greene.’ Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein: The Undiscovered Mythos (24/8/19). Available at: [https://deepcuts.blog/2019/08/24/four-oclock-1949-by-sonia-h-greene/].

[4] Derie, ‘The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft’ (17/6/20).

[5] H. P. Lovecraft, Collected Fiction, Volume 4 (Revisions and Collaborations): A Variorum Edition. Ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2017), 613.

[6] Derie, ‘The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft’ (17/6/20).

[7] Sonia H. Greene, ‘Four O'Clock’ (1922). Wikisource. [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Four_O%27Clock].

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Jack Ross: Haunts (2024)


[26/7-15/8/23]

[2294 words]

[Published in Haunts (2024)]

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H. P. Lovecraft: Collected Fiction, Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations (2017)

Four O'Clock
[1922]

by Sonia H. Greene

About two in the morning I knew it was coming. The great black silences of night's depth told me, and a monstrous cricket, chirping with a persistence too hideous to be unmeaning, made it certain. It is to be at four o'clock — at four in the dusk before dawn, just as he said it would be. I had not fully believed it previously, because the prophecies of vindictive madmen are seldom to be taken with seriousness. Besides, I was not justly to be blamed for what had befallen him at four o'clock on that other morning; that terrible morning whose memory will never leave me. And when, at length, he had died and was buried in the ancient cemetery just across the road from my east windows, I was certain that his curse could not harm me. Had I not seen his lifeless clay securely pinned down by huge shovelfuls of mould? Might I not feel assured that his crumbling bones would be powerless to bring me the doom at a day and an hour so precisely stated? Such, indeed, had been my thoughts until this shocking night itself; this night of incredible chaos, of shattered certainties, and of nameless portents.

I had retired early, hoping fatuously to snatch a few hours of sleep despite the prophecy which haunted me. Now that the time was so close at hand, I found it harder and harder to dismiss the vague fears which had always lain beneath my conscious thoughts. As the cooling sheets soothed my fevered body, I could find nothing to soothe my still more fevered mind; but lay tossing and uneasily awake, trying first one position and then another in a desperate effort to banish with slumber that one damnably insistent notion — that it is to occur at four o'clock.

Was this frightful unrest due to my surroundings; to the fateful locality in which I was sojourning after so many years? Why, I now asked myself bitterly, had I permitted circumstance to place me on this night of all nights, in that well-remembered house and that well-remembered room whose east windows overlook the lonely road and the ancient country cemetery beyond? In my mind’s eye every detail of that unpretentious necropolis rose before me - its white fence, its ghost-like granite shafts, and the hovering auras of those on whom the worms fed. Finally the force of the conception led my vision to depths more remote and more forbidden, and I saw under the neglected grass the silent shapes of the things from which the auras came - the calm sleepers, the rotting things, the things which had twisted frantically in their coffins before sleep came, and the peaceful bones in every stage of disintegration from the complete and coherent skeleton to the huddled handful of dust. Most of all I envied the dust. Then new terror came as my fancy encountered his grave. Into that sepulcher I dared not let my thought stray, and I should have screamed had not something forestalled the malign power that pulled my mental sight. That something was a sudden gust of wind, sprung from nowhere amidst the calm night, which unfastened the shutter of the nearest window, throwing it back with a shivery slam and uncovering to my actual waking glance the antique cemetery itself, brooding spectrally beneath an early morning moon.

I speak of this gust as something merciful, yet know now that it was only transiently and mockingly so. For no sooner had my eyes compassed the moonlight scene than I became aware of a fresh omen, this time too unmistakable to be classed as an empty phantasm, which arose from among the gleaming tombs across the road. Having glanced with instinctive apprehension toward the spot where he lay mouldering — a spot cut off from my gaze by the window-frame — I perceived with trepidation the approach of an indescribable something which flowed menacingly from that very direction ; a vague, vaporous, formless mass of greyish- white substance or spirit, dull and tenuous as yet, but every moment increasing in awesome and cataclysmic potentiality. Try as I might to dismiss it as a natural meteorological phenomenon, its fearsomely portentous and deliberate character grew upon me amidst new thrills of horror and apprehension; so that I was scarcely unprepared for the definitely purposeful and malevolent culmination which soon occurred. That culmination, bringing with it a hideous symbolic foreshadowing of the end, was equally simple and threatening. The vapor each moment thickened and piled up, assuming at last a half tangible aspect; while the surface toward me gradually became circular in outline, and markedly concave; as it slowly ceased its advance and stood spectrally at the end of the road. And as it stood there, faintly quivering in the damp night air under that unwholesome moon, I saw that its aspect was that of the pallid and gigantic dial of a distorted clock.

Hideous events now followed in demoniac succession. There took shape in the lower right-hand part of the vaporous dial a black and formidable creature, shapeless and only half seen, yet having four prominent claws which reached out greedily at me - claws redolent of noxious fatality in their very contour and location; since they formed too plainly the dreaded outlines, and filled too unmistakably the exact position, of the numeral IV on the quivering dial of doom. Presently the monstrosity stepped or wriggled out of the concave surface of the dial, and began to approach me by some unexplained kind of locomotion. The four talons, long, thin, and straight, were now seen to be tipped by disgusting, thread-like tentacles, each with a vile intelligence of its own, which groped about incessantly, slowly at first, but gradually increasing in velocity until I was nearly driven mad by the sheer dizziness of their motion. And as a crowning horror I began to hear all the subtle and cryptical noises that pierced the intensified night silence; a thousand-fold magnified, and in one voice reminding me of the abhorred hour of four. In vain I tried to pull up the coverlet to shut them out; in vain I tried to drown them with my screams. I was mute and paralyzed, yet agonizingly aware of every unnatural sight and sound in that devastating, moon-cursed stillness. Once I managed to get my head beneath the covers — once when the cricket's shrieking of that hideous phrase, four-o’clock, seemed about to shatter my brain — but that only aggravated the terror, making the roars of that detestable creature strike me like the blows of a titanic sledgehammer.

And now, as I withdrew my tortured head from its fruitless protection, I found augmented diabolism to harass my eyes. Upon the newly painted wall of my apartment, as if called forth by the tentacled monster from the tomb, there danced mockingly before me a myriad company of beings, black, grey, and white, such as only the fancy of the god-stricken might visualize. Some were of infinitesimal smallness; others covered vast areas. In minor details each had a grotesque and horrible individuality, in general outlines they all conformed to the same nightmare pattern despite their vastly varied size. Again I tried to shut out the abnormalities of the night, but vainly as before. The dancing things on the wall waxed and waned in magnitude, approaching and receding as they trod their morbid and menacing measure. And the aspect of each was that of some demon clock-face with one sinister hour always figured thereon - the dreaded, the doom-delivering hour of four.

Baffled in every attempt to shake off the circling and relentless delirium, I glanced once more toward the unshuttered window and beheld again the monster which had come from the grave. Horrible it had been before; indescribable it had now become. The creature, formerly of indeterminate substance, was now formed of red and malignant fire; and waved repulsively its four tentacled claws - unspeakable tongues of living flame. It stared and stared at me out of the blackness; sneeringly, mockingly; now advancing, now retiring. Then, in the tenebrous silence, those four writhing talons of fire beckoned invitingly to their demoniacally dancing counterparts on the walls, and seemed to beat time rhythmically to the shocking saraband till the world was one ghoulishly gyrating vortex of leaping, prancing, gliding, leering, taunting, threatening four o’clocks.

Somewhere, beginning afar off and advancing slowly over the sphinx like sea and the febrile marshes, I heard the early morning wind come soughing; faintly at first, then louder and louder until its unceasing burden flowed as a deluge of whirring, buzzing cacophony bringing always the hideous threat, ‘four o’clock, four o’clock, FOUR O’CLOCK.’ monotonously it grew from a whimper to a deafening roar, as of a giant cataract, but finally reached a climax and began to subside. As it receded into the distance it left upon my sensitive ears such a vibration as is left by the passing of a swift and ponderous railway train; this, and a stark dread whose intensity gave it something of the tranquility of resignation.

The end is near. All sound and vision have become one vast chaotic maelstrom of lethal, clamorous menace, wherein are fused all the ghastly and unhallowed four o’clocks which have existed since immemorial time began, and all which will exist in eternities to come. The flaming monster is advancing closely now, its charnel tentacles brushing my face and its talons curving hungrily as they grope toward my throat. At last I can see its face through the churning and phosphorescent vapors of the graveyard air, and with devastating pangs I realize that it is in essence an awful, colossal, gargoyle-like caricature of his face — the face of him from whose uneasy grave it has issued. Now I know that my doom is indeed sealed; that the wild threats of the madman were in truth the demon maledictions of a potent fiend, and that my innocence will prove no protection against the malign volition which craves a causeless vengeance. He is determined to pay me with interest for what he suffered at that spectral hour; determined to drag me out of the world into realms which only the mad and the devil-ridden know.

And as amidst the seething of hell’s flames and the tumult of the damned those fiery claws point murderously at my throat, I hear upon the mantel the faint whirring sound of a timepiece; the whirring which tells me that it is about to strike the hour whose name now flows incessantly from the death-like and cavernous throat of the rattling, jeering, croaking grave-monster before me — the accursed, the infernal hour of four o’clock.

- Wikisource

•

Cartographies of the Afterlife

John D. Watson: Scheherazade (1862)


Preface:
The Treasure House

Fancy may be supplied; but Truth once lost in the annals of mankind leaves a chasm never to be filled.

– Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature (1791) [1]

The Treasure House (1926) [2]
Ref 4-4084, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Library

Perhaps the important thing to remember about the stories of Scheherazade - otherwise known as The Tales of the 1001 Nights - is that they haven't come down to us as they were told, but rather as they were written down long after the fact.

After King Shahryar deigned to pardon her, mainly because of the ‘three boy children, one walking, one crawling and one sucking’ she'd borne him during her long ordeal of storytelling, the Queen was forced to revisit the entire set of tales she'd told him during this three-year stint, in order to re-dictate them to the palace scribes:

In due time King Shahryar summoned chroniclers and copyists and bade them write all that had betided him with his wife, first and last; so they wrote this and named it ‘The Stories of the Thousand Nights and A Night.’ The book came to thirty volumes and these the King laid up in his treasury. [3]

How precisely she managed this feat is not discussed. Perhaps she brought in an annotated selection from the ‘thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers’ she had collected while preparing her astonishing act of deliverance. As she described it to her father, the King's Wazir:

... either I shall live or I shall be a ransom for the virgin daughters of Moslems and the cause of their deliverance from his hands and thine. [4]

There's no real way of knowing, then, just how closely these thirty volumes of stories actually resemble the ones whispered by the Queen to her husband (and sister) as they lay together in the dark. Certainly Scheherazade can't have had her reference library to hand at that point, so her incomparable memory was really all that stood between her and immediate death.

•

When I first laid eyes on the handwritten book of minutes kept by the Titirangi Branch of the (so-called) ‘Society of Spiritual Cartographers,’ I have to say that I was not unduly impressed. Precisely who found it – and when – has been difficult to ascertain. All I know is the story I was first told: that it was discovered in a box full of oddments discarded from the old Treasure House which forms part of the modern Lopdell Complex.

The Treasure House itself was built in 1926 as a home for the extensive collection of Kauri gum and other native artefacts owned by Frank Oscar Peat. When the Titirangi Hotel opened a few years later, in 1930, the Treasure House was listed as one of the ‘surrounding attractions in the area’. [5]

The Kauri gum collection was dispersed later in the 1930s, but the Treasure House continued to be used as a museum, storage space for the Art Gallery, and even a community centre – until, that is, the reconstruction of the entire area was undertaken in the early 2000s.

How and when the Society of Spiritual Cartographers began to use it as a venue for their meetings, I cannot say. My own involvement began when I was asked to advise on the value of this single odd volume of shorthand notes which had somehow escaped the fate of its (presumably) many companions.

Fortunately I took shorthand typing at school, and so was able to fathom the nature of its contents without too much difficulty. Not for me the fate of that nineteenth century scholar who transcribed the entire contents of Samuel Pepys's famous diary without ever realising that the key to the shorthand he used to record his thoughts was resting a few volumes over in Pepys’s own painstakingly catalogued library at Cambridge!

•

Talking against death. How else can one characterise the storyteller's task? It's seldom quite so direct an equation as in Scheherazade's case, but perhaps the nature of her plight has struck such a chord down the centuries simply because it is only our stories – or, rather, the record of our stories – which is likely to survive us.

How does Baudelaire put it?

Les minutes, mortel folâtre, sont des gangues
Qu’il ne faut pas lâcher sans en extraire l’or ! [6]

[‘Minute by minute we creep towards death
The treasure of each is more precious than breath’]

Can the same be claimed for this fragmentary record of the meetings of a club for amateur storytellers? Why was it thought necessary to take it all down, in the first place? Surely the members must have read out their pieces rather than improvising them on the spot? Could not those prompt-sheets been pasted in here instead?

Certainly there are documents and snapshots included on some of the pages. In the absence of the earlier volumes, where presumably all such matters were dealt with and the by-laws and conventions of the society spelt out in detail, one can only make conjectures from the evidence before us.

Perhaps it was their rule that – as in Scheherazade's case – the stories each of them shared had to be spoken rather than read? Perhaps the Society's officers needed their own dedicated copy of the proceedings of each meeting to deal with follow-up queries? It seems unlikely that these scribbled pages were actually meant for circulation, but certainly some of the transcripts are far fuller than others. Perhaps some members were more conscious than others of their debt to posterity?

In any case, whatever the reasons for its existence, we are left with a series of fragmentary tales: some complete, some anything but. There are many reasons to associate this society (at however many degrees of separation) with the Spiritualist movement itself. One is its name; another is because the common subject of most of these stories is death – or, if not death proper, a variety of conjectures about the Afterlife.

Nor is it clear if the majority of them were meant as fictions or transcripts of experience. The fact that they all share first-person narration, and are presented as actual events, cannot really be regarded as evidence one way or the other.

One interesting point, revealed to me by an informant who used to work at the Lopdell House Art Gallery (now Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery), is that the Treasure House itself – while a heritage building, and therefore immune from tampering or demolition – is sited on top of an underground stream. The water flows just a few feet down under the floor.

This makes it unsuitable for anything but occasional use, as the atmosphere inside is too damp for occupation or permanent storage. This may explain why the ledger itself was thrown out in one of the periodic Spring cleans necessary to maintain the building's health.

It may, however, also explain why it was used as a venue for these meetings in the first place. It's well known that running water is regarded as a convenient conduit for spiritual activity. Haunted houses tend to be located in close proximity to aquifers, and the junction of underground streams is generally one of the first things looked for by psychic investigators.

In any case, be that as it may, the Treasure House remains an immensely atmospheric relic from the mysterious past of West Auckland – a time when artists, bohemians, and counter-culture enthusiasts gravitated to its bush-clad valleys because they were: (1) off the beaten track, and (2) comparatively cheap.

•

My job as the editor of these materials has proved less straightforward than initially expected. To start with, I was faced with the dilemma of just how to present them. My first thought was a facsimile edition with transcripts printed beside each page of the original: a solution rejected (finally) mainly for reasons of cost.

As an alternative to that, I decided to make a painstaking record of the notes of each meeting more or less as they stood: including false starts, marginal comments, and other paratextual details. The unreadable nature of the result did not, however, seem to justify such an expense of time and effort.

In the end, I decided that the only practical way to proceed was to extract only those two narratives which could be regarded as reasonably complete for separate presentation. While unrepresentative of the character of the papers themselves, this approach does have the merit of being more convenient for readers.

Given the incomplete nature of some of the sections, I have nevertheless had to record, at times, certain details of their original appearance at the end. I've tried to confine my remarks to factual information, however, rather than providing any more editorial commentary than is absolutely necessary for comprehension.

Without more knowledge of each of the members of this society, identified, as they were, simply by initials, it's hard to guess the larger aims of their meetings. Was there an element of channelling here? Were some of the transcripts made directly from voices emanating from the Other Side?

It's hard to be sure. It may have been a more conventional writer's group than that, though the decision to take down the proceedings verbatim would seem unusual for such an informal, everyday gathering.

Another theory which has been gathering traction recently is that this volume was intended as the minutes of a Dream Laboratory, a record of the dreams (lucid or otherwise) of each of the participants.

I'm left in the unsatisfactory position of having to admit that your guess is as good as mine. If we had some of the other books of minutes which must once have existed no doubt we would know more. Were there other branches of the Society of Spiritual Cartographers? Was it an international or a purely home-grown organisation? As yet I've had no luck in resolving any of these queries.

I do feel, though, that some parts of the stories collected here are sufficiently intriguing to justify putting them on record – if only in the hopes that this may inspire someone to come forward with some other surviving relics of this strange, apparently secret society, based in the dank wooded hills of darkest West Auckland.

- Michael Shield, Matariki weekend, 24-26th June 2022

---

Notes:

[1] Isaac D’Israeli, ‘Some Notices of Lost Works’. Curiosities of Literature. 1791-3. Rev. ed. 1823 (London: George Routledge & Co., n.d.), 22.

[2] Ref 4-4084, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Library. [Available at Lisa Truttman, ‘The Titirangi Treasure House’. Timespanner: A Journey through Avondale, Auckland and New Zealand History (July 28, 2013): https://timespanner.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-titirangi-treasure-house.html].

[3] Richard F. Burton, trans., The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. 10 vols (London: The Kamashastra Society, 1886): 10: 61. [http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_10/vol10.htm].

[4] Burton, Arabian Nights: 1: 15.

[5] Truttman, ‘The Titirangi Treasure House’ (2013).

[6] Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘L'horloge.’ Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). [https://www.poetica.fr/poeme-684/charles-baudelaire-horloge/].

---

Jack Ross: Haunts (2024)


[21-24/6/22]

[1694 words]

[Published in Haunts (2024)]

•

Wellington

Petone Settlers Museum (Wellington, NZ)

We were in Wellington for the weekend to launch my wife’s brilliant new exhibition ‘History Repeats’ at the Petone Settlers' Museum.

This involved getting up at 3 am on Saturday morning to take an Air New Zealand flight down to the capital, then attending a late morning event, then driving back into the CBD to check into our hotel and do a bit of bookshopping (for me) and gallery-hopping (for her).

Would to God we'd had the sense to book a late afternoon flight back home instead of staying on overnight! And would to God, too, that I'd resisted the temptation to ‘make the most’ of our trip away by making the flight home a late afternoon one.

Saturday was an unexpectedly bright sunny day. On Sunday, however, the threatened bad weather began to close in. It was raining when we woke up, and so it continued, with occasional gaps in the cloudbursts.

Eventually we thought we’d call it a day and head into the airport to wait there instead of trooping grimly around the city. We'd had a big breakfast at the hotel with my brother-in-law and his partner, so there didn't seem much need to follow it up with anything similarly substantial for lunch.

My sister-in-law suggested that we try to change our flight to an earlier one. ‘You never know,’ she said, ‘They may be quite pleased to have some seats to sell on the later one.’

I felt a bit sceptical about this, but decided to give it a try.

Rightly, as it turned out. We arrived at the airport in time for the 1.30 pm flight to Auckland, but soon discovered that it would cost us $360 – more than the price of our entire journey to date – to swap our seats to the earlier one. Why? Because they were ‘non-baggage’ seats, and that was the full price of an upgrade. In essence, then, Air NZ seemed keener to fly with empty seats than to sell them at anything resembling a reasonable price.

We decided to give it a miss. In retrospect, this was a bad mistake, but then how were we to know? If it had been only a couple of hundred, I might well have gone for it – but the quote was so grotesque it really defied belief!

And so the afternoon wore on. From time to time announcements came over the airport loudspeaker – why are those things calibrated to be almost inaudible? and why do they invariably choose mumbling imbeciles to read out the messages? – about closing the runway because of thunderstorms, but flights still seemed to be taking off on a regular basis, albeit with a few delays.

Eventually we went through customs into the departure lounge, and now Air NZ began to show its true colours. Boarding took place with reasonable speed, but then there was the usual delay as they looked for one errant passenger (‘Is [name] on board? If so, could you make yourself known to cabin staff?’). I was unusually anxious to get going because of the obviously deteriorating weather, so every new pause in the process put me even more on edge.

So long did all this take that we lost our place in the queue to take off, and the captain said we'd have to wait for another plane to land before we taxied out onto the runway, ‘because we can't move out against this wind.’ That last detail sounded unusually ominous, even by the standards of this day of mischances.

The next thing that happened was considerably more bizarre, though. We'd actually inched out onto the tarmac with the speed of a dying snail when the cabin steward announced that two connecting flights from Auckland to New Plymouth had both been cancelled thanks to the weather, so everyone booked on them would have to disembark – along with all their luggage.

This, he confidently claimed, would take ‘fifteen to twenty minutes’ to effect. Yeah, right.

Back we trundled to the airbridge, and a quarter or so of the passengers duly deplaned. By now the wind was howling outside and the rain beating down. Every minute of delay made the weather worse. It had been obvious to me for some time that this plane was going nowhere, but the airline was not going to admit it for quite some time yet.

Off we went again, creaking and groaning out into the fairway. ‘You're not going to believe this, folks. I don't remember encountering this in 37 years of flying. One of the cockpit lights doesn't seem to be responding. We'll have to go back to pick up a technician. Apologies for the delay.’

So back to the airbridge we went. For a second time the cabin doors were unlocked, and eventually the technician joined us. Further delays followed. They did amuse us by lowering the screens to display their Air NZ quiz, however. They even issued us with cups of water and packets of chips: a bounteous display of generosity prophetic of things to come.

After twenty minutes or so, it became clear that this wounded bird was going nowhere. As we all disembarked, the captain repeated his comments about how he'd never encountered so many problems all in one go. ‘And actually, even if there weren't issues with the equipment, I doubt that I'd feel able to take off with the weather as it is at present.’

He seemed to feel that this might be reassuring to us. Basically, his remarks made clear that it was his own chagrin at such a succession of mischances which was paramount – the difficulties of a hundred or so passengers, many with urgent connecting flights awaiting them in Auckland, came a distant second.

‘Go to the “mumble-mumble” desk in the airport,’ they told us as we disembarked. ‘Our staff will assist you.’ Like hell they will. When I close my eyes, I can still see that long snaking line of passengers sprawling right around the check-in lounge. In front of them was a single desk with one employee talking to each passenger in turn at excruciating length.

Contradictory announcements kept on booming out from the speakers. First the passengers with connecting international flights were told to go down to the baggage claim area and collect all their luggage before heading up to the lounge to queue up at the transfer desk – the same one, with the same languid staff, who'd dealt with our request to transfer flights with such insouciance earlier that day. They looked a bit more agitated now, three of four of them falling over each other to process passengers on the sole connecting flight to Auckland left that evening!

Then the connecting passengers were told to leave their luggage on the carousels, from which it would be automatically shifted to their new flight. Now, though, they should come up and have their passports and travel documents ready for inspection. By this stage, however, text messages were beginning to come up from the baggage claim area which revealed that no luggage had yet emerged from the hold, and that everyone was still futilely waiting there.

As for the rest of us, as we stood in our long snaking crocodile of a line in front of that single, surly woman in uniform, at this point an announcement came that those of us with the Air NZ app would be directly booked onto a new flight – a few lucky ones (selected how, I wonder?) onto that evening's flight, but most of us onto one at 6 am the next morning.

The lucky ones with the app (alas, not us) began to flake off from the line and disappear in quest of accommodation. The rest of us stood there as one old lady at the head of the line spent ten minutes or so scrolling through her phone for (imaginary?) booking texts and arguing vociferously with the woman at the desk.

By now we'd struck up an acquaintance with a nice woman and her daughter standing in line behind us. The daughter was starting a new job on Sunday, and was understandably anxious to get back to Auckland that night. I, too, was feeling less than philosophical about this delay. We'd arranged for my mother to feed our cat while we were away, but weren't sure whether we could really trust her to remember to do it.

Also, I'd left my car in a pre-booked section of one of the airport parking buildings. I'd left a margin of several hours to allow for the usual delays, but hadn't thought to allow for a whole extra day of parking – the flight from Wellington to Auckland usually takes three quarters of an hour. It seemed a bit much to turn that time into a couple of extra days, but that's the kind of gumption that distinguishes our national carrier …

What happens when you go over time in one of those reserved spots? That was my question, but there was, of course, no answer available. We rang the ‘dedicated phoneline,’ but there was – again predictably – no reply, even though we were still well within their stated operating hours.

Once before this had happened to me, in Germany, when I missed a connecting flight because of ice on the wings of the plane transporting me there from Scotland. But that was with Lufthansa. They comped me a hotel room, and bumped me up to first class on my new flight the next day. They weren't particularly gracious about it, but it didn't seem to be anything they hadn't handled before.

Air NZ, by contrast, reacted to this interruption to their schedule with maximum disorder and confusion. The mere fact of having one person dealing with a hundred-odd passengers showed their lack of preparation. And, when we finally got to the head of the line, it was plain that rebooking onto next morning's flight was the maximum they would do for us.

They had zero interest in discussing what we could do to find overnight accommodation – not even a list of nearby hotels. Nor were they prepared to offer an opinion on whether or not my car was likely to be towed or clamped at the other end. We were just tiresome losers, to be dismissed as quickly as possible. Our travel insurance entitled us to only $250 in total, she barked at us as we turned away. Without that, even finding a corner of the airport to doss in would have been next to impossible.

Left entirely to our own devices, we went up the escalator to the airport hotel. Every spare room there had been snapped up while we stood in line, of course, but as we turned away disconsolately, we ran into our two friends from the queue. They too had been denied a room, as had another woman they were with, who was in the process of ringing to find rooms in nearby hotel.

‘Oh, do you need a room, too?’ our kind friend asked. ‘Yes,’ we chorused. ‘Add them to the list,’ she said to the other woman, who had managed to connect to some kind of hotel desk-wallah. And so it went. We were duly booked into the hotel, by these new chance acquaintances, who showed us so much more concern and compassion than any of the Air NZ staff.

Not only that, but it turned out that there was a hotel shuttle we could take from downstairs. By now we'd been joined by an Irish couple, in New Zealand on their honeymoon, who – it turned out – had not only been booked into the same hotel from the Air NZ desk we'd just been standing at ourselves, but had been offered the price of a meal at the same time!

Talk about a double standard! The face of that woman when I asked her what we were to do, caught overnight in a strange city through no fault of our own, would have curdled milk. Clearly orders had been issued to placate foreign visitors, though, so our new companions had had quite a different experience.

Never mind that the meal was dreadful, and the hotel we ended up at more like an old people's home than the luxury resort one might have expected from the prices they charged, it's the principle of the thing.

To put it simply, when put to the test, Air NZ choked. They showed no powers of organisation, no ability to improvise, and no kindness. They couldn't have been less efficient if they'd tried. Lufthansa, though admittedly equally brusque and unsmiling, beat them in every way.

My hopes of getting away next morning with this team of cowboys at the helm were, I admit, fairly muted. I had, in fact, hatched a scheme of renting a car after the inevitable cancellation of our new flight, and driving us all the way home myself!

My faith in Air NZ had pretty much reached rock-bottom by this stage. The crowning touch, I thought, was the completely blank sign above the desk we'd been directed to by the crew after the cancellation of our flight the night before.

So anxious were they for us to receive prompt service from their ground forces that they gave us no directions where to find this desk, and even made sure it wasn't marked or signposted in any way. All in all, I doubted their competence to transport anyone from point A to point B.

Our morning flight did leave, though, and only a little bit late. Which was just as well, as yet another thunderstorm was breaking out around us as we taxied out onto the runway. If we'd had Captain Klutz from the night before at the helm of this new aircraft, I'm sure he would have contrived to give up on this take-off, too. But our new pilot proved to be of sterner stuff, and gunned us up through the dark clouds and buffeting cross-winds.

Nor was our landing at the other end any easier. The long descent into Auckland was marked with flashes of lightning and driving rain. Having heard from another set of chance-met friends in the departure lounge at Auckland on Saturday morning of their own experience of flying all the way to Wellington only to be diverted back to Auckland to spend the night huddled in a corner of the airport, I was dreading being diverted to Kirikiriroa – or Kamchatka, for that matter. Our intrepid pilot did manage to land, though, and so we disembarked to a new sea of troubles.

•

Just what do I mean you to conclude from all this? That I'm a natural hysteric, inclined to panic at the smallest problem? Well, yes, I can see that would be a natural reaction to this comedy of errors. I hadn't flown since the beginning of the pandemic, and I found the whole experience unexpectedly stressful.

Certainly my wife must have found me quite a pain at certain moments during our trip, which was, after all, meant solely as a celebration of her own achievement at curating an entire exhibition at long distance, with only a couple of visits possible throughout the whole planning period!

Nor does Air NZ control the weather. The mass of thunderstorms which blanketed the country that weekend was (we're told) very unusual, and bound to be disruptive to travel – especially in a city such as Wellington, with its high hills and notoriously windy climate.

Nor should anyone second-guess their decision to ground a flight over a flashing light in the cockpit. It was, probably, nothing serious. But it's infinitely better to find that out on the ground than to learn the contrary in the air over Mt Taranaki!

That's pretty much where the excuses end, though. As we commiserated with our newfound friends in the departure lounge at 5.30 am next morning, our mutual conclusion was that nothing in the airline’s response to these events had been sensible or consistent.

I recall, as we pulled away in the hotel courtesy coach that rainy evening, catching a glimpse of a young Canadian who'd been trying desperately to get onto the next flight to Auckland to catch his connection to Vancouver, and had been waving people in front of him in the queue as he attempted to find out what could be done about his luggage. He was standing all alone in the pick-up zone. He, at least, had not achieved lift-off, despite all the faffing about of the Air NZ staff. His strained white face said it all.


One last thing. As I lay in my bed in the cramped, dusty little room they’d stuffed us into at the Lyall Bay hotel, I’m certain I heard someone calling my name outside the door.

The lights were all on in the corridor, as is usual in such places, but when I poked my head out there was nothing to see.

If that hotel reminded me of anything, it was the old psychiatric hospital at Kingseat in Auckland (now home to the haunted house experience Spookers [1]).

It wasn’t the zombies and chainsaw-wielding psychopaths who frightened me most, it was the long strange drive to get there – further and further away from the highway, from any other signs of habitation, in the oncoming twilight, which is the only time the show can open.

Above all, it was the rows of empty, abandoned buildings we had to nose through to reach that one glimmer of light in the darkness.

---

Notes:

[1] For further details on Spookers, you can visit https://spookers.co.nz/.

---

Jack Ross: Haunts (2024)


[7/6/22-21/9/23]

[2916 words]

[Published in Haunts (2024)]

•

Mythago Wood

Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood (1984)

When I first read Robert Holdstock’s classic fantasy novel Mythago Wood, [1] I felt a deep sense of familiarity – a set of young children living on the edge of a mysterious forest, whose secrets their father long since devoted himself to elucidating.

You see, I too grew up on the borders of Mythago Wood. Ryhope was, admittedly, rather larger than our particular forest realm, but then the point of the story is really the immense expansion it undergoes the further you penetrate into it.

For us, it all started at the creek. Clay-bottomed, mostly innocuous, at times it could grow into a raging torrent of brown water, pulling down banks and – on one celebrated occasion – flooding the entire neighbouring shopping centre.

It is, after all, a tidal stream, swelling with salt water twice a day and eventually, I suppose, destined to swallow up the entire suburb around us.

When we were kids, though, we dammed it with sticks and branches, and splashed around in the water with no real fear. There was, in fact, no way across except by way of a tiny ford by our back gate.

Everything this side of the gate was ordered, controlled: my mother's various vegetable gardens, the trimmed hedges, the roses by the front fence. Over the creek, though, strangeness ruled.

I remember, one day when we were engaged in constructing a dam, a group of other children – four of them, just as there were four of us – emerging from the bush they'd apparently been exploring. We stared at them in the wary way of kids meeting strangers.

I expected one of my older brothers to warn them off as trespassers – it was, after all, part of our land – but they didn't do so. When we came back later they were gone. We never saw them again, in fact.

Gradually the wood got fenced in as the neighbourhood changed. First a supermarket was built next door. This involved piping the creek underneath their parking area – in itself a mammoth task.

I'll always remember the day when a boy sunbathing on one of the concrete pipes – soon to disappear for good underground – took off his shirt, then carelessly left it behind. We expected him to come back for it, but he never did. There it stayed, in fact, for weeks, till the pipe was hoisted to be lowered into the ugly brown trench they'd dug. Perhaps it's still there, down there in the dark.

The supermarket then built a large wooden fence between us and them. It was, unfortunately, constructed more like a ladder than an actual barrier, so it could easily be climbed by the neighbourhood kids, some of whom tried tight-rope walking along the top, teetering above the ten-foot drop to the waiting asphalt below. None of them actually fell off, but my father took the precaution of nailing barbed wire strips along it to prevent further acts of derring-do.

Not only that, but he planted a set of Albertine rose bushes along it as well. The strong green vines gradually twined themselves through the rungs of the fence till it resembled Sleeping Beauty's castle – certainly making it impossible to climb.

That was, I suppose, the first great cut into the heart of our wood.

Then the old lady, Mrs Springall – who lived in a gloomy house in one of the properties across from us, and who had a strong aversion to the felling of timber or building of barriers – died, leaving her house to a nephew.

He took the precaution of installing a burglar alarm, which had the agreeable habit of going off in the wee hours of the night, or the middle of a lazy Sunday afternoon, and squalling vociferously for hours on end.

After my father had made innumerable complaints to the elusive householder, the wires to that alarm were cut unaccountably one dark night, and after that we heard no more from that direction.

Instead, the nephew rented it out to some indigent hippies who promptly started to cultivate dope. Knowing that they were likely to be targeted by any police raids, they took the precaution of placing their potted marijuana plants over the property line, on my father's and our immediate neighbour's land.

Another argument ensued, and no more was heard from the hippies in the old shed. 'Pathetic specimens,' I remember my father saying of them – my mother had been afraid that they might overpower him when he went over there to confront them, and insisted that he be accompanied by the burly builder who lived next door.

The next thing after that was the building of a set of retirement units on Mrs. Springall's old land. There were still local ordinances forbidding the felling of mature trees then, so it had to be sandwiched between some particular fine specimens of native bush. Now, of course, the whole site would be razed and the concrete be poured on the original clay of the valley. It means that we can still see many trees in that direction, though.

So what are we left with? The creek on one side, the supermarket fence on the other, the fence of the retirement complex on our upper boundary ... but nothing's been built on the other side. There's nothing there but a large fallen tree to mark the boundary between us and our next-door neighbour.

I guess that it may be this open border which enables the land to cling to its strangeness, its stubbornly impenetrable nature.

My father was a man with a pronounced taste for wilderness – for unbounded spaces. He liked allowing trees and plants to grow wild. He loved, too, the native birds which continue to flock to our bushy space despite the fact that most of our taller trees are now gone.

Generations of jobbing gardeners haven't helped by using the far corner of the section as a dumping ground for all their prunings: particularly those from the still viciously abundant roses, complete with their flesh-rending thorns.

My father, too, loved to leave little piles of wood from the various trees he had felled scattered randomly about on the ground, like mantraps. They're completely hidden by the thick green undergrowth, so you'd never know they were there until you tripped over them.

Then there are the strangely woven nests one can find behind some of the fallen trunks: possums? feral cats? tramps? Literally anything could be living over there. We'd never know.

Seen from the air, the whole thing looks quite innocuous: a dark green square behind the roofs and the light green lawns, but I defy anyone to walk from one side of our property to the other without feeling watched, and impeded, and finally stopped altogether.

As with the explorers in Robert Holdstock's story, the only way in is along the stream. As a kid I waded more than once through the dark pipes that lead away from us, under the supermarket, under a busy intersection, then on to the not-so-far-away beach.

Upstream is harder. I did try it once, with a few friends from school. It was easy to start with, wading through the shallow water past our section and then the neighbour's – another old lady's, Mrs Cottam. After that came the bridge that leads to the tennis courts. All that we negotiated with minimal difficulty. But then we entered stranger regions.

I still have a vision of inching along the bottom of a concrete culvert, and looking up to see the curious face of one of the upstream neighbours looking down on us. It made it all seem so ridiculous somehow: our journey to those headwaters so obviously located in someone else's backyard.

In reality, of course, the streambed leads to another set of pipes under the sports fields, and from there (I suppose) back up into the ring of hills that surround us on all three sides.

We retreated, and I never tried that again. In retrospect, I can see that we left it too late. If we'd set out a few years before, there might have been further discoveries to be made. As it is, the ubiquitous concrete had already gummed up the land.

We're left, though, with an anomalous space. I don't know quite what to call it: the other side of the creek was the phrase we used as kids: an alien and yet somehow fascinatingly paradoxical space, a little like the Zone left behind by the alien visitors in Tarkovsky's Stalker.

We feared it always, yet crossed and recrossed it often. It opened out, then, on all sides, so one had to guess where (and when) to turn back – there were no obvious boundaries.

And, like the man in Robert Holdstock's story, it's my long-dead father I have to thank for it all.

---

Notes:

[1] Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood. 1984. Grafton Books (London: Collins, 1990).

---

Jack Ross: Haunts (2024)


[19/5/22-16/8/23]

[1466 words]

[Published in Haunts (2024)]

•

Ghosting

Dictionary.com: Word of the Day (Oct 31, 2018)

I remember once, whilst in midst of editing a series of poetry anthologies for a university press, taking a walk on North Head with a much respected local poet (and senior academic).

She listened to my tale of woe about the increasing amounts of acrimony and discord involved in the project, then outlined her theory of the lustrum.

A lustrum was the period of five years preceding a census in Ancient Rome. She claimed that that should be about the effective length of a creative project. Sometimes they have to be renewed for another five years, but even then it’s best to concentrate on the limits in everything.

I’ve thought of that conversation often in the last couple of years. What I really like is to sit as I’m doing now, tapping away on a keyboard, and trying to get closer to that elusive meaning hovering behind each screen of words. What I have spent my time doing is largely other: communicating with students via the screen, rather than face-to-face, grading work by people I’ve never met in the flesh and am never likely to meet.

I’ll never regret spending so much time in Academia, but a whole slew of lustra have come and gone since I started there (especially if you count a decade of undergraduate and graduate study), and I find now that I want to change gear, lose that slightly absurd air of authority you’re forced to assume while teaching, in favour of sitting here alone with nothing solid to guide me.

It feels terrifying. That’s why I know it’s probably right.

– So what do you think? How bad is it?
– It’s not so bad. A bit pompous in places, I guess. You might want to look at all those ‘Whilsts’ and ‘Whilomes’ …
– I don’t say ‘whilome’! Actually, I don’t even know what it means.
– Neither do I, but you get the general idea. It’s kind of like cuddly old Uncle Albert, the great physicist, sitting down with the kiddies to explain his brand new theory of relativity in terms we can all understand.
– Gotcha. In my defence, though, I do have to stress that it wasn’t my idea in the first place. I didn’t want to write a piece about my reasons for quitting the university. They were the ones who insisted on it.
– That doesn’t mean you had to do it, though.

He had me there. There was no real professional advantage to it. How could there be, in fact, given it was about my reasons for retiring from the Academic rat-race in the first place?

All I can say is that it takes a while to adjust to the new order, to get over that constant need to be publishing and performing before that grim and faceless (and I suppose largely imaginary) tribunal which sits in the shadows, determining your future advancement within the institution.

My next door neighbour, Carl, had served out his full term in the Air Force, then gone into civilian life as a hospital administrator. He was one of the few people left in my life whom I could confide in about such matters, as he, too, understood the horror of the bureaucratic labyrinth.

What’s more, his secret passion was reading nineteenth-century novels, and I was probably the only person living nearby who could match him Brontë for Brontë.

But perhaps I’d better go back to the beginning, so you can better understand just what it was I was consulting him about. Starting in media res and then backtracking is a literary device as old as Homer, but it does have its drawbacks in a case such as this.

So, anyway, to make a long story short, an old associate-slash-acquaintance of mine had decided to start up a new journal (really a blog, but such things always sound better if you label them as ‘online periodicals’), and he’d asked me to contribute a piece on my reasons for shifting from my cushy Academic job to join the precariat.

What I’d just finished reading out to Carl was the result.

A trifle stilted, yes, and with a certain amount of personal tub-thumping built into it, but – I thought, at least – an attempt to write about the subject without either offending my ex-colleagues or papering over the deficiencies in my own less-than-glittering academic career.

I deliberated for a long time over the inclusion of a phrase, early on in the piece, about feeling at times like ‘a bit of a loser.’ I tried ‘a bit of an also-ran’ as an alternative, but I kept coming back to the crisp ring of that word ‘loser.’ I also tried ‘impostor’, but that led me down the rabbit-hole of ‘impostor’s syndrome.’

It definitely goes against the grain to call yourself a loser. If people weren’t thinking that already (and let’s face it, most people think solely about themselves), they certainly will be once they’ve read it in cold print.

It was risky, sure, but then the whole piece was risky, in that it exposed some private thoughts about the whole enterprise of ‘retirement’ with less caginess than I’d hitherto employed.

But anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound. It seemed foolish to live in fear of imaginary judgements from imaginary people, so I decided to let it stand. I could always cut it out later if it seemed too distracting.

So I sent it off to my friend-slash-acquaintance. He acknowledged it by return email, saying that it would take him a week or so to get to it, and he would be in touch about it after that.

And that was that.

Until I realised, a couple of weeks later, that I hadn’t heard from him, and decided to send a quick follow-up email to ask if he’d got round to reading it yet.

Nothing. Silence on top of silence, in fact.

It seemed too needy to write again, and yet I felt a bit horrified at the thought of having put so much work and time into such a throwaway piece. Was it really as bad as all that? Perhaps so. Perhaps he was looking for something more scholarly, less popular in focus.

The fact of his site being little more than a glorified private blog had perhaps misled me into thinking that the elaborate mandarin discourse beloved of my former colleagues would not, this time, be required. I itched to rewrite it, to replace that ‘loser’ label with something more along the lines of ‘repulsively brainy egghead.’

Perhaps I should have studied the site more closely. I had skimmed through a few of the pieces on it, which had had rather an academic tinge to them, but it hadn’t occurred to me that such generalised subject matter might require treatment along similar lines.

But the subject matter was his idea – that was the problem! It was he who had given me the topic for the piece. It would certainly not have been my choice, but – used as I am to external direction – I’d simply sat down to write according to the brief, without considering it further.

How long should one wait after sending out a piece before you can ask about it?

A month to six weeks was the formula I’d always worked by – but that was back in the days of print journals and self-addressed envelopes. Surely, in the electronic age, a couple of weeks would suffice?

Which is when I found out about ghosting.

Ghosting, as no doubt the rest of you already know, began as a term for the phenomenon of suddenly cutting off all contact with someone you’ve gone out with a couple of times, or have been corresponding with on a reasonably regular basis.

All of a sudden, without warning or explanation, your calls go unanswered, your texts are left hanging, and – in extreme cases – your access to all social media accounts is cut off.

There’s a certain cruel practicality to it, admittedly. It removes the need for self-justification, those painful last meetings, generally conducted in restaurants or other public places to inhibit embarrassing rage or violence on the part of the dumpee. Nor does it require any further subsequent monitoring or action by the dumper.

I first discovered the term while reading an article about job applications. Not that I’m particularly concerned with those at present, but I have spent a good deal of my life preparing and agonising over CVs and cover letters of various stripes, so it is a subject that interests me.

Apparently it’s now become normal for candidates to advance quite some way along the selection process – to be interviewed by their prospective teams and employers, given details of remuneration and even, in some cases, relocation – only to be dumped abruptly, at the last minute, without further contact, let alone explanation.

The devastating effect of this can only be imagined. All of us are used to sending out polite letters of inquiry which receive no reply, but to be nursed so far along the road only to be erased from consideration at the very last minute surely verges on deliberate abuse?

Apparently not. A number of employers have justified this procedure for its economy and practicality. All along they’d had someone else in mind, but while they were waiting for that person to make up their mind, it was only reasonable for them to prepare a proxy or two. ‘Here’s one I made earlier,’ as the TV chefs used to say.

Employment applications, job interviews, relationships, even legal contracts – ghosting is now a feature of all of them.

As well, it would appear, as the world of editing.

It’s true that in the past I’d sent out whole books to publishers and never heard anything back from them – I guess because it was too much trouble to reply.

Not unsolicited manuscripts, I hasten to add. I quite understand that simply adding to some major publisher’s slush pile is insufficient reason for blaming them for their failure to respond.

These were occasions where I’d sent advance letters of inquiry, to people I knew, asking them if they’d be interested in seeing some work along these lines. It was only when assured that they would be that I’d committed my work to their keeping.

And then nothing.

Critiquing a whole book to its fond parent’s face is, admittedly, quite a big ask. That rejection letter is bound to be subjected to literary criticism on a scale never contemplated by its author. Every word will be subjected to careful scrutiny – and niggling deconstruction – for weeks, possibly years to come.

So, yes, much though I resented it at the time (and continue to resent it, if the truth be told), I do understand their silence.

A trivial little piece for a blog, though? For a poxy little blog that nobody reads, run by a nobody, for no-one?

Why had I been stupid enough to send it in the first place? That was probably the most vital question, but what worried me was the extent to which it had taken hold of my mind.

I literally couldn’t sleep at night for composing long sarcastic letters in my head to my putative editor. Some of them were actually pretty good, but I understood that getting up to transcribe them would be one step further into madness than I cared to take.

Worst of all were the short, cutting letters. I spent so much time polishing and crafting the mots justes, just the right statesmanlike words to pass on the burn to my adversary, that my eyes began to take on the hooded scowl of the chronic insomniac.

So what to do? Should I actually send one of them? Should I simply try to move on? The online authorities appeared to be divided on this question.

Certain common themes did, however, stand out:

• Don’t try to justify or second-guess your feelings: accept them for what they are
  (in my case, bordering on psychotic)
• Don’t rant about it on social media, or start to troll your ex-friend
  (good advice – received just in time, luckily)
• If they do reestablish contact, don’t ask them what happened – just listen to what they have to say
  (easier said than done, I suspect – not applicable in this case, anyway)
• Do talk about it to people you trust

That last – probably the most useful piece of advice of all, was luckily the easiest to implement.

Hence my invitation to Carl to drop over for a beer and a chat, and hence my hijacking of said conversation to read out the whole of my piece to my longsuffering neighbour. Fortunately he’d run into his fair share of eccentrics both in the Air Force and the Health Services, so was well equipped to talk lunatics such as myself off the ledge.

– So what should I do? What’s your advice?
– Why do you care about it so much? Does it really matter if it appears in print or not?
– No, of course not. It’s just the contempt it shows, the fact that he’s calculated that he can get away with not answering me ever, and he just expects me to take it.
– You know the best revenge is living well.
– Yes, yes, I know all that. Psychobabble is not a foreign language to me, I assure you. But it’s no good saying ‘don’t let it bug you’ to someone who’s asking you how to stop something bugging them.
– Fair point. What do the psychobabble sites advise, then? I take it you’ve consulted some of them?

I outlined the four points listed above.

– Is there anything else they tell you to do?
– Well, it sounds a bit ridiculous. One of the more chatty ones did have a bit of extra advice.
– Which was?

I didn’t mention these ones in my list, as I must admit I was rather embarrassed by how immediately attractive I found them. The site in question had outlined two possible scenarios:

• Write a letter and don’t send it
• Talk to a cushion on a chair

– Talk to a cushion!
– Yeah, I knew you’d find that amusing.
– No, no, I see the point. The cushion is intended to stand in for your friend, I take it?
– Not friend: acquaintance. Ex-acquaintance now. Not even a colleague, really.
– Whatever. So they say you should either write out everything you’ve got to say to them, or (maybe for the less literate among us) harangue a proxy version of them?
– You got it.
– And did you?
– Did I what?
– Did you write a letter to your friend?
– Of course I did! I’ve written tons of them! That’s the whole problem, really: stopping myself writing letters to him.
– But did you keep any of them? Can I hear one?
– No. I knew you’d ask that. I destroyed all of them after writing them. [Lie]
– Did you try the cushion scenario, then? How did it go?
– No, I thought I’d try the ‘phone a friend’ option first. I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have done it the other way round, now, though.
– No need to get shitty. I am trying to help. I just need to know the parameters of the problem.

That, too, was a lie, as you’ve no doubt guessed. I had tried the cushion experiment. It was a pillow rather than a cushion, actually, as I found that its floppy, rectangular form made it easier to anthropomorphise as a sentient being.

I’d started off more or less as I kicked off this story, above. With a brief account of how things had looked from my side of the ledger.

The trouble was that the pillow kept on interrupting. Time and again I was forced to lift a hand and shout out ‘let me finish!’ as it started to justify itself. Man, it was the most talkative, self-justifying pillow I ever met.

Which got me talking faster and faster to get it all in. I got jumbled up with the time sequence, events from the far past coexisting with the matter at hand. Luckily my phone camera cut off after a while, or I would have been left with a lo-res cinematic record of the whole thing.

I did get a good deal of my final peroration on film, though. It ran as follows:

I realise you may not have meant to do what you’ve ended up doing, but you’ve treated me with complete contempt, as a nonentity unworthy of your or anyone else’s time. I spend my life trying to be considerate, to put people at their ease, to avoid making them feel worse about themselves. You, though – you waltz through life as if there’s no-one else in the universe. You’re ready enough to use people when it suits you, but you have no real belief in their independent existence. For you, the universe is a huge echoing void with only your own quacking voice grinding relentlessly on at its centre. You are the supreme monad – the primordial atom at the heart of your own big bang story. And yet you’re so pathetic! Such a nothing! You would never dare to refer to yourself as a loser, even though that’s what everyone else thinks of you. You see yourself as a victim, but actually you’re a bully; as an intellectual, when really you’re a pompous dolt; as a spiritual beacon, when in truth you’re a solipsistic baboon …

And so on. You can see, perhaps, why I wasn’t anxious to share the results of this experiment with Carl.

And yet it did get me somewhere. It showed me just how very near the edge of the abyss I was. Nor did it help that in the digital age it’s so terribly easy to find out where somebody lives. I’d already started to fantasise about staking out his house. Waiting outside till the opportunity came to – what? Torch his letterbox? Egg his windows? Let down his tyres?

– Have you thought of seeing a counsellor?
– What?
– Well, I don’t know what more I can advise than I’ve said already, and most of that has just been asking you questions about what you’ve already tried. Nor do I have much to suggest beyond what the sites themselves have to offer in the way of decompression techniques.
– Have you ever felt this way yourself about another human being? Someone who pushed in line in front of you, then laughed in your face about it? That kind of thing?
– Well, of course. Of course I have.
– What did you do about it?
– Moved on, I guess. Certainly there’ve been some ugly moments at work: screaming matches and standing-straight-at-attention in front of the C.O.’s desk as he tears strips off you.
– So you must have some way of discharging emotions, of shifting gears in your head.
– I suppose so, yes.
– How did you do it? It can’t have been easy.
– Well, it’s hard to say. It’s so long ago. It seems like another life, really.
– Another life?
– Yes. The army, then the health service, then the accident, and now …
– The accident? You never told me about that.
– Didn’t I? I’m sure I must have! I mean, we’ve had conversations like this before – haven’t we? It certainly all sounds pretty familiar.
– Tell me about the accident.
– There’s not much to tell, really. I was driving home from work; or was it driving to work? I don’t know. Anyway, I was driving, it was foggy, I didn’t see the stop sign, even though I must have known it was there, it was a route I’d driven a thousand times, and the next thing I felt was this great blow in the back of my car seat. It was if I’d been punched by a giant. I could see the car crumpling around me, and a lot of screeching metal and brakes, or perhaps that was just me screaming …
– But you must have been okay. I mean, you look okay now.
– I guess I must have. I don’t remember. I have a sort of voice in my head telling me about pulling over to the curve, swapping insurance information, giving an account of the accident to the cops, but it doesn’t seem real, exactly. It’s not concrete and exact, like the rest of the event. It’s as if I just made it up as the kind of thing that must have happened.
– Why must it have happened that way? I mean, you could have been knocked unconscious, woken up in hospital …
– Yeah, but I think if that had happened I wouldn’t have remembered the accident itself. Isn’t that usually the way? Don’t you lose at least a few hours of your memory if you’ve been knocked out?
– I don’t know.
– I do remember getting out of the car. I must have managed to steer it to the side of the street somehow. I remember getting out of the car and suddenly slumping over. The people in the other car … I remember them, too. I was a bit afraid they were going to be super-aggressive, maybe give me a punching, but all they seemed concerned about was whether I was okay. They were very young, but just full of concern.
– And were you okay?
– I don’t know. I must have been. There isn’t anything after that.
– How do you mean?
– Doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd, that we should be here, living side by side in this suburb, retired from our jobs, but not really doing anything much, not going out, not getting involved in anything much.
– Except sending off articles to blogsites, that is?
– Except sending off articles. But even that. I mean, aren’t you the one who was so keen on setting up his own website, offering alternative views uncensored by the Academy? Was it the fact that this other guy was stealing your thunder that really busted your balls?
– I don’t know. Now that you come to mention it, I guess I do have a bit of a background in online self-publishing.
– And did you ever ghost anyone who sent you an article you didn’t want to publish, but didn’t really want to discuss with them either?
– I suppose I might have. I’m not perfect. And doesn’t Freud say we most vehemently denounce the deficiencies we suspect are most prominent in ourselves?
– I don’t know about that, but it does seem like it might be a case of the biter bit.
– I was so angry! Positively homicidal. I’d literally started fantasising about killing him and leaving his body with some kind of message written on it: his severed hand shoved down his own throat, or his head left on top of a typewriter.
– You fantasised about it, but you’d never do it, would you?
– I’m not sure … I mean, now that I come to think of it, there is a bit of a darkness. I don’t know how to describe it: a memory shut-down.
– You didn’t do it.
– How do you know? I might have done. I simply don’t remember. How crazy is that?
– I know because I know who did.
– Who did what?
– Who did it. Who killed you, and cut off your hand, and left it lying on top of your keyboard, while the rest of you went into the acid bath.
– What!
– It’s all coming back. About the accident. The one I didn’t survive, and waking up here, next door to you, and getting into these conversations about things that didn’t happen, or sort of did, but not the way we remember. I died. You were killed. You were killed by that guy whose article you spiked without telling him. They put him in the nuthouse. It was a bit of a news story for a while, because the way he did it was so gruesome and picturesque.
– You mean, I’m dead? I don’t feel dead.
– How does it feel to be dead?
– I don’t know. Not like this. Not like … ordinary.
– How is it likely to feel? What else can we feel? Maybe we’re working something out. Maybe this is some kind of purgatory. Then again, maybe it’s just the last flickers of a dying intellect, rummaging through the shelves of its memories.
– Or maybe it’s hell. Maybe I goaded that guy with my silence till he literally made me the ghost I was pretending to be. Maybe it’s poetic justice.
– Maybe it is. But what about me? What did I do?
– I don’t know, Carl. What do you think you might have done?
– I don’t know. I suppose I wasn’t always the nicest guy. I didn’t really listen to other people. Basically I was always just waiting to start talking myself.
– You’re not like that now.
– Are you trying to tell me it’s working? That we’re working on our problems together, and one of these days we might get to go into the light instead of being stuck down here.
– Wherever this is.
– Anyway, I hope you’re feeling better about your problem. A trouble shared is a trouble halved, as they say.
– Much better. Thanks for listening, Carl. Your place tomorrow?
– Sure thing.

As he walked off I could see a faint fog gathering around him. There’ve never been many (any?) cars on our street, but off in the distance I could hear the rush-hour traffic starting to build. It sounded urgent, angry ... something which could come down on you any moment if you just let your attention slip for some reason.

Come to think of it, hadn’t I been married once? And hadn’t she died in a car-crash? I remembered a funeral – closed-casket – and a church full of mourners. When was that? And who was it who’d hit her? Some kind of an ex-military man, full of glib excuses to cover the fact that he’d had rather more than a skinful before heading home.

---

Jack Ross: Haunts (2024)


[18-24/3/22; 22/4/22]

[4316 words]

[Published in Haunts (2024)]

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