Winterwood and Other Hauntings

by Keith Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Welcome to a haunted world; the world of Keith Roberts' powerful and unique imagination. These stories show Roberts' fascination for the curious and unclassifiable; and as ever, his mastery of character and detail. 'Susan' introduces the reader to a schoolgirl with awesome psychic powers; but the sensitive treatment turns a shock situation into a brilliant fable, while 'The Scarlet Lady', predating Stephen King's Christine, has the genuine stench of petrol, oil and demons. 'The Eastern Windows' chillingly continues the theme; by contrast, 'Winderwood' introduces us to a fearsome locale that Roberts insists is real. 'Mrs. Cibber' transports the reader, with complete conviction, to the smog-ridden London of the fifties and unfolds the strange tale of a young graphic designer haunted by a woman from the eighteenth century. 'The Snake Princess', equally atmospheric, tells the story of a boy's doomed, bizarre love, while 'Everything in the Garden' presents the tour de force of a haunting within a haunting.

Release date: September 18, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

We had exchanged letters, and spoken on the phone, and–because I have that daftest of all phobias, fear of writers whose work impresses me–these brief exchanges had been nerve-racking. It was essential that we met face to face; there was Fantasy to talk about; there were Primitive Heroines to discuss; there was Henley bitter to be tasted at source, (for Keith Roberts lived a sniff away from the Henley brewery, and I have a passion for Real Ale). But because of the phobia, and having, as yet, no inkling of the enormously easy and welcoming man behind the eloquent voice on the phone, the drive to Henley was accompanied by a hundred images of greeting, a thousand impressions of a man who had, for years, kept himself very much to himself. Keith had never been to an SF convention, although he was a man much talked about, not just because of his reputation as a writer but because he had worked in an editorial and artistic capacity on Science Fantasy in the late 60’s and 70’s, when I was beginning my own career in writing.

So I was a tad apprehensive. And I took it as ominous that my car, a great, battered brown Renault 16, a tank of a thing, a powerhouse–usually–was reluctant to start that cold Spring morning in 1984.

Start it did, however, and at length I arrived in Henley, about to meet Keith Roberts for the first time, unaware as yet that the encounter would come damned close to being the last time I met anybody.

We had arranged to meet in the Horse and Groom, a small, smokey pub, full of tiny rooms and curved counters. Keith was sitting at the corner of a bar, a tall, bespectacled man, ciggy in one hand, half consumed pint quietly fermenting by the other, watching me curiously as I approached, perhaps seeking some intangible sign of that commonality of feeling he and I share for the Old Gods and the Long Past. I felt instant recognition and was instantly at ease.

It was a wonderful first encounter. We got the mutual compliments out of the way, discussed Primitive Heroines, Wildwoods, Publishers, Beer and the simple pleasures of living by and from the Imagination. Keith took me on a tour of Henley-on-Thames, and then we drove the Tank out to a hamlet and a pub called The Maltster’s Arms, a stone-flagged hostelry where the sausage I had for lunch would have fed the household cavalry. Next to the Maltsters was a small church, St Nicholas, in which was one of the rarest of treasures: an unadulterated Elizabethan tomb, undamaged by the Cromwellian atrocities of the early 17th Century, the kneeling figures of a Lord of the Manor, his wife and children still perfectly intact, and beautifully coloured. It’s the sort of treasure that is wonderful to discover, and I discovered that Keith is a treasurehouse of information about such wonders.

The day was getting on. There was more to see. We returned to the car and–as if it had been biding its time as a protest at its lack of servicing–the damn thing wouldn’t start. Nothing else to do, announces I. We’ll have to push.

I suppose we will, Keith says resignedly, his voice dropping as we contemplate the monstrous brown machine.

Handbrake off, a slippery, slightly icy road, and the two of us bent to the task, heads down and heaving from behind, trying to get sufficient momentum for a bump start.

For some reason I hadn’t noticed the hill; and it must have slipped Keith’s mind to tell me. Suddenly I realised we were getting up speed. That’s great, cries I. Keep it up, we’re getting there. A little more. A little more.

The next moment we’re staggering and stumbling forward, pushing thin air, watching as the car accelerates away down the hill, towards the Reading-Henley road.

Jesus! we cry, and off I go, the worse for half a gallon of Brakspeare’s Finest and a yard and a half of Cumberland sausage. I got the door of the car open, perched a toe on the narrow running board, was half aware of Keith padding down the hill after me, flung myself into the driver’s seat, half saw the lorry coming down the main road, thought ‘One chance for a bump start’, engaged gear, engaged engine, failed utterly to engage brain, roared out of the side road across the path of the lorry, noticed two fingers being stabbed furiously heavenwards from lorry cab, turned full circle in main road without pause (in case of stalling) and returned for Keith, the pair of us breathless, triumphant, one of us lucky to be alive.

Somehow, later, it all seemed incredibly funny.

In Henley it seemed natural to find a garage and clean the car up. This is when I began to discover just how many people Keith knew. He seemed to be a small institution, a part of the Henley scenery. We found his pal George, who ran a garage. George came out, peered into various distributor caps, plugs and points, scraped some muck away, told wonderfully funny jokes, caught up on Keith’s news, vice versa, and did the trick.

It was a memorable encounter, and I mention it because, whilst not in any way helping me understand Keith’s work–such a thing is unnecessary–it gave me an insight into the writer himself, someone who always has his senses alerted, who is hungry for detail, who observes down to the finest degree: the sound of accent, the fussiness of character, the awkwardness of human contact, the smell and colour of the land. His work is replete with such feeling, and the stories in this collection of hauntings illustrate the point perfectly.

He is also a wonderful conversationalist, and this too is manifest strongly in his stories. I always feel that Keith is describing a world, or a classroom, or a walk through London that is an ingrained piece of his own experience, that somehow he is telling us an anecdote from his own life, matter-of-fact, and highly detailed narrative, around a strange or horrifying event. (See ‘Mrs Cibber’ and ‘Scarlet Lady’, for example). He is a writer who lives his worlds and characters, and whose worlds and characters live vividly because of it.

I mention this first meeting in Henley, too, because in one way it seems a metaphor for my relationship with Keith’s writing itself: a sudden discovery of work that pleased me, an accelerating interest, culminating in the explosive discovery of two novels: The Chalk Giants (linked stories), and The Boat of Fate, juggernauts of writing both (without any concomitant rudeness from the driver) and two pieces of fiction whose absence–as I write–from the popular bookshelves is a disgraceful reflection on a publishing industry too ready to promote trivia, too willing to forget novels that are perhaps perceived (and wrongly so if they are) as not conforming to contemporary commercial tastes. They are marvellous books, full of the Ancient, the Unremembered, and the Power of Land; and The Boat of Fate, in particular, is detailed and textured, its treatment of Roman Britain quite breathtaking, strongly visual, almost cinematic.

Images from many of Keith’s stories haunt me: of two parallel worlds grinding together as they pass, in one of the early Anita stories; of a Roman war galley being drum-beaten into Dover haven, its oars striking the sea almost frantically as it glides past a small, passenger boat from which our hero watches; a ridgeway of tall white towers, signal arms creaking and clacking as they send their semaphore message across England, from coast to coast; a but on the high downs in which a terrified girl watches the green-masked, tattooed figure of The Corn God, in fact the tribe’s shaman, approach her with primordial ritual in mind; a frantic skirmish between dark riders and downland folk on the great outline of the Cerne Abbas Giant; the vertiginous feeling of being swept aloft in a small gondola, slung below rising, wind-cracked sheets of kite-canvas.

The chalk and the Downlands are as much a part of Keith Roberts as he of them; scratch the writer and see virgin chalk, soon to be greened in shades of memory and story.

So here is a collection of hauntings, a Dance Macabre through that greening, windswept writer’s mind. There are no variations on a theme here, though; each haunting is particular to the character, growing as much out of personality as it is imposed from the supernatural exterior.

In ‘Snake Princess’, for example, the boy–Douglas–is haunted by his own imagination; he wanders a fairground which “seemed to stand at the juncture of two worlds”, and is itself an apt and elegant metaphor for the boy growing up, a realm of childish fantasy on the borders of the harder, harsher reality of adulthood. First love and first loss are explored here, and how skilfully Roberts shows us the way life’s experience batters at the fragility of young imagination. In ‘Winterwood’, again imagination is at work, but this time processed through guilt and phobia, as a man becomes obsessed with the hideous face of an inventor, carved in wood in a rambling, tumble-down old house; a man? Or a demon? This is a fate-filled story, playing tragically with the uncertainties of perception and the reality of true evil.

By contrast of mood, ‘The Eastern Windows’ is a hellish portrait of that sort of cocktail party which sends shivers of horror, up the spines of the more unsociable among us; endlessly cycling through the moves and trivia and chitchat and pomposity of such gatherings, gradually a darker notion begins to insinuate itself into the narrative line. We are in no doubt about the strangeness of ‘Susan’. Who are you Susan, asks her teacher, and the answer is left to our imagination, though the story concisely explores the disturbing effect of disturbing behaviour, the haunting power of the unfamiliar in the familiar as people respond to a quiet alienness.

I like stories about trees, I always have, and ‘Everything in the Garden’ was a particular pleasure to read; it’s a skilful story, an expert piece of misdirection, playing with the reader’s perceptions and assumptions. A car is the central haunting factor in ‘The Scarlet Lady’, a dark and very savage story. ‘Mrs Cibber’ haunts our narrator from a portrait, for he falls in love with her, and becomes pre-occupied by thoughts of her life, two hundred years before. It’s a pre-occupation that has unforeseen consequences, a story in which London past and present itself is a character, haunting the storyteller from its streets and alleys and buildings, from its past, from its present.

And it is this presence and acknowledgement of the past which is, for a passionate folklorist like myself, the magical quality in Keith’s writing; he is a folklorist in every sense, adapting themes and stories to his own subjective, everyday world, allowing the power of the past to inform his modern tales, ever aware of, and always passionately involved with, the land and those ghosts and echoes in the land that continue to flow across the green that covers the chalk, where Giants shape memory.

Robert Holdstock,

London,

October 1988.

Summer and winter the chemmy lab had a smell all its own, a sharp half-sweet nuance like the scent of dust magnified many times. It came from the storage shelves to the left of the door where bottles of chemicals stood in rows on shelves of dark orange wood. Here were sulphates and thiosulphates, oxides and hydroxides, phosphorus coiled like Devil’s spaghetti in its thick oil, shining miniature slagheaps of iodine. There were other things too, a microscope on loan from Biology next door, a balance, its brasswork shining butter-yellow from its protective case; and a crystal of CuSO4, meridian bright in its tall vat. The jar in which the crystal hung stood on top of the highest shelf and seemed in itself to be a focus of light; reflections burned deep inside it like elongated turquoise suns.

Susan moved her unusual eyes from the shelves of chemicals, back to Mrs. Williams. The science mistress droned on softly, voice pitched just loud enough to carry to the farthest corners of the lab. From time to time chalk rasped on the board, the lines of symbols grew, white dust fell silently to thicken the drifts along the bottom of the varnished frame. This was the last period of the day and the lights were burning, pooling the floor with yellow, defining the edges of the benches with long waxy reflections, striking spindle-shaped gleams from the rims of beakers and flasks. Through the windows the sky was deepening toward four o’clock blue. Little noises came from the thirty girls; the rasp of a stool leg, the scuff of a foot, an occasional cough. The class was very slightly restless. Autumn term would finish in just under a fortnight; eight whole schooldays and a bit before breaking up and all the concert-making, report-sealing, desk-tidying excitement still to come. Christmas was already in the air.

The benches ran round three sides of the lab. To the right were more shelves with masses of glassware, test-tubes, gas jars, troughs, great seldom-used retorts. In the corner behind was the fume cupboard, bulky and forbidding with its tall newel posts, in the middle of the room the dais and the long blackboards. Susan sat halfway down the centre bench, elbows resting on the dark wood, knees together, steepled fingers just touching her top lip. She let her eyes wander again from the face of the mistress to the batswing burner on the bench in front of her. The little flame danced in a deepening web of shadow, its base invisible, its yellow horns quivering and ducking, never quite repeating the same shape twice. Its other less-used name was butterfly burner; like the Olympic torch it was a symbol, lit at the beginning of a lesson, never extinguished until the end. The flame hovered at the tip of the slim pipe like the bleeder of a tiny furnace where ideas, perhaps, were burned.

Mrs. Williams raised her chin slightly, questioning. ‘And the composition of hydrochloric acid, someone? Quickly now.’ Her glance travelled across the rows of faces, came to rest. ‘Yes, Susan?’ she said.

The girl lowered her hands to her lap gently and straightened her back. If a voice can be said to have colour, Susan’s voice was amber like her hair. ‘Thank you, Susan,’ said Mrs. Williams. ‘Yes.’ She paused, right elbow cupped in left hand, finger touching her throat. She was still for a moment, looking at nothing. Then the duster fizzed softly on the blackboard, the chalk scraped again. The lesson continued.

Ten to four, and the class starting to make their notes. Susan wrote methodically, glancing up from time to time to verify a formula that was already in her mind. As she finished the last line the bell shrilled in the corridor.

Nibs continued to scratch for another half minute; Mrs. Williams ran a very firm class. Then the mistress nodded briefly; exercise books scurried into satchels, buckles snapped shut, fountain pens were closed and rammed back into blazer pockets. There was the sort of straining silence that only comes between last bell and dismissal. Mrs. Williams eagled at the girls, compressed her lips. Then she turned and scanned the board with a vaguely resentful air, as if the end of classes had taken her completely by surprise. The corners of Susan’s mouth turned upward the smallest fraction. This was all part of the ritual.

‘Very well,’ said Mrs. Williams. ‘Stand.’

A thunder of obedience.

‘Stools.’

The stools were thrust hastily beneath the benches.

‘Dismiss,’ said Mrs. Williams. ‘Quietly now.’

The class scuttered down the corridor. Susan watched them go. Through the open door came the hurrying, locker-slamming sound of the big school finishing for the day. The batswing flame vanished with a pop.

Mrs. Williams looked up sharply. ‘Well, Susan? Haven’t we got a home?’

Susan swung her crammed satchel onto her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Williams. I was dreaming.’

Mrs. Williams smiled. The smile looked a little strained. ‘Time enough for that after next June.’

‘Yes, Mrs. Williams. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, Susan.’

The mistress stood in the doorway, books under her arm, hand on the lightswitches. She watched Susan walk away. She stayed still after the tall girl had turned the corner and was out of sight. Then a scuffle of second formers shot from somewhere, swirled momentarily round her skirt. Mrs. Williams jerked to automatic attention. ‘You. You, there. Yes, all of you. Come here…’ She turned off the switches, left the classroom to the twilight.

Susan washed her hands and face in the end sink of the first floor cloakroom, pulled a fresh loop of towel out of the dispenser. She dried herself slowly, burying her face in the towel to catch the clean, linen-smell of it that went so naturally with the scents of carbolic soap and steam. Cat-cleanliness was part of her particular mystery. She had been the same as a first former, though first formers are notoriously a fusty, inky-pawed crew. On one occasion the school captain of the time, catching a small girl at the unheard-of rite of washing during break, had taken her persistence for insolence and the whole idea for cheek and attempted to expel her. But a child who buzzes her displeasure like something electric, until your hand tingles and you have to let go, is something too far outside normal experience to cope with. And the child would keep staring with those lilac eyes, and the whole incident had unnerved the prefect so badly she never did get round to reporting it.

Susan crossed to the mirror, flicked her corn-coloured hair more or less into place, picked up her satchel again and headed for 5Q formroom, deserted now and dark. She turned on one light and packed her books for evening study, checking the subjects against the timetable pinned inside the desk lid. Then she walked back down the corridor toward the stairs. . .