This Graveyard is for Ania, a Blythe Spirit amongst our Blithe Cats, with All my Love and Always Yours,
David+++
There Is A Graveyard That Dwells In Man
Edited by David Tibet
ISBN: 9781907222610
First Published by Strange Attractor Press 2020
Texts Copyright © 2020 The Authors & Their Estates
Introduction Copyright © 2020 David Tibet
Artwork by David Tibet & Ania Goszczyńska
Layout by Maia Gaffney-Hyde
Transcription by Bea Turner. Proofing by Richard Bancroft. Strange Attractor and David Tibet send them Love and Thanks for all their invaluable help.
David Tibet has asserted his moral right to be identified as the editor of this collection in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
Strange Attractor Press BM SAP,
London, WC1N 3XX, UK
www.strangeattractor.co.uk
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And London, England.
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Table of Contents
A Rainbow Rag To An Astral Bull
A Black Solitude
The Death Mask
Lost Keep
The Slype House
The Small People
The Shrine of Death
The Inmost Light
Paymon's Trio
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Liszt's Concerto Pathétique
The Room in the Tower
The Beckoning Fair One
The Sweeper
Slep Hath His Hous
The Other Wing
Brickett Bottom
Podolo
Afterward
The Watcher
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Bird in the Garden
Seaton's Aunt
Present at the End
Biographical Notes
Grateful Moons
23. He that is not with me, is against me: and hee that gathereth not with me, scattereth. 24. When the vncleane spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through drie places, seeking rest: and finding none, he sayth, I will returne vnto my house whence I came out. 25. And when hee commeth, hee findeth it swept and garnished. 26. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seuen other spirits more wicked then himselfe, and they enter in, and dwell there, and the last state of that man is worse then the first.
St. Luke XI: 23—26
43. When the vncleane spirit is gone out of a man, hee walketh thorow dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. 44. Then he saith, I will returne into my house from whence I came out; And when he is come, he findeth it emptie, swept, and garnished. 45. Then goeth he, and taketh with himselfe seuen other spirits more wicked then himselfe, and they enter in and dwell there: And the last state of that man is worse then the first. Euen so shal it be also vnto this wicked generation.
St. Matthew XII: 43—45
A Rainbow Rag To An Astral Bull
David Tibet
šiptu alsīkunūši ilū mušīti
ittīkunu alsi mušītu kallatu kuttumtu
alsi barārītu qablītu u namārītu
INCANTATION: I summon you, Gods of the Night
With you I summon Night, the covered bride
I summon Twilight, Midnight, and Dawn
Maqlû (“Burning”), Tablet 1, lines 1-3
In my introduction to The Moons At Your Door, the first volume in this series of anthologies of the short stories—all, it has to be said, either supernatural or weird in their nature—that have most inspired and influenced me in all my work, I wrote at some length about what brought me to those Moons that I saw at play around me.
Whether those Moons arose, or descended, for me, they waited patiently outside my door. On opening that door, I ran inside, sofast and inwards, to escape their greetings. But inside, inwards, I saw that there was a Graveyard there, the source of those Moons—and this Graveyard is the source of that pull to the dark and that call to the twilight that dwells within us all.
In this brief essay, I would like to consider the Graveyard that dwells in me—and in us all—and to which we will all journey at the Anointed God's appointed hour, hand in grave, grave in hand, a doomed Puss-In-Boots.
For when I look back at all my obsessions, all my enthusiasms, I feel them as strongly and as vividly now as when I first encountered them, and I run—so fast—after them still. They are so real to me, as real as rainbows, and quite as ungraspable.
I just need to hear the name “Stenbock” and I see myself in the company of Count Eric. When I look at the inscribed copies I own of his works, I see him clearly as he writes his Greek and as he thinks on other loves, his head dropping like a flower as his own chosen flowers overwhelm his blood. His writing is real, the images are real, and my dreams are the real.
Just so, in all of those artists whose works so move me, whose rainbow is so deep inside me, I see their escape from, and their return to, that twilit grave from which they ran, as if by running so fast they could shield their eyes to not notice how quickly their steps returned them to that same.
This obsession that I have, and which so many of us share, is a fire from a falling star—even if I do not quite remember when the spark first lit me, or when I first saw that bright dead star fall. And these sparks, these fires, sometimes come to us because they have already chosen us, knowing our face for far longer than we have known their name.
Under the firelight of this star, as an example of the Graveyard that dwells in us all, I would like to detail my obsession with Borley Rectory, known as “the most haunted house in England”, after the psychic investigator Harry Price's book of the same name, published by Longmans, Green and Co. in London in 1940.
I don't remember exactly when I first read about Borley, but it would certainly have been in Malaysia sometime between 1970 and 1973, in some lurid book promising, and delivering, lurid contents. As soon as I read the name, the name read me and the name goaded me into a long, long journey to find anything and everything about it and under it and over it and in it—its very essence, if you will. The most haunted house haunted me. And since it was burnt down in 1939, and then demolished in 1944, its intangibility made it all the more tangible to me. We can now read, in The Borley Rectory Companion (The History Press, London 2009), that indispensable book Paul Adams co-authored with Eddie Brazil and the late Peter Underwood, that:
“Items known to have come from inside the Rectory are incredibly rare. Steuart Kiernander rescued a tangle of bell-wires and one of the Bull wine bottles from the Rectory ruins following a visit in the 1940s; he gave them as a souvenir to Peter Underwood, who was also presented with a miniature blue-and-white plate by Ethel Bull and a wooden inkwell by Alfred Bull, made by his brother the Revd Harry; both these latter items were later stolen from the collection and their whereabouts today are unknown.”
Even though I was not aware of the utter scarcity of items physically connected to Borley Rectory when I first read about it fifty, or so, years ago, I now feel that Borley already knew my name, and that she had numbered me amongst her elect. Anyway, I started collecting anything I could find about Borley Rectory,
starting with paperbacks in any edition at all, and moving on to first editions in hardback, and then first editions in dust-jackets, and then again those same books written, and inscribed, by Harry Price, the author who first brought the case to the public, and so sensationally did so. But no matter how scarce the book, no matter how fulsomely inscribed by, and to, those who had been part of the story, I had to acquire an actual physical link to the Rectory and to the story that had so taken me—something which I could truly call as real as rainbows—that connection which takes me back to that Graveyard which dwells in the heart of every story. The photographs I saw in books of the “tangled bell-wires”, or of a wine-bottle, or a bell, were filled with such ephemeral beauty, which filled me with such sweet melancholy—and such beauty and such melancholy I wished to hold and to know.
Whether I inadvertently summoned the ilū mušīti—those gods of the night upon which the first three lines of Tablet I of Maqlû, written in the Neo-Assyrian form of Akkadian, so sparingly yet eloquently call—or whether Borley herself, who had no doubt long known those gods’ true night names, asked them to find me, I found that to those who wait, all things come, for better or worse.
And so Borley came to me, like a dream, in a rush and a skip, with her bag of twilight tricks. And this is how it happened: I had noticed an item offered online for auction that was described as a silver-bottomed hip-flask, with missing cap, and the words “REV H BULL BORLEY RECTORY” engraved on the silver, along with a Cross. This was indeed a Rainbow Rag to me in my vocation as Astral Bull. I asked the seller, a young man named Sam, about the provenance of the hip-flask. In fact it turned out to be a container for Holy Water… and following on from this, I was to see more of Borley than I had ever dreamt.
In my first conversation with Sam, which swept between Nick Drake, Marc Bolan, and Keith Emerson, we discovered that we got on very well and soon became good friends.
And such was the beginning of my acquisition of the largest collection in existence of Borley Rectory memorabilia—which also included items from the equally-haunted Borley Church (or equally-unhaunted, if you wish to split ghosts)—and had previously belonged to Sam's wealthy, eccentric, and recently departed, great-uncle, an enthusiastic collector of esoteric curiosities, and who had been especially interested in Borley Rectory, time-travel, and early DNA research.
So now, when I look at the walls of my study, on which hang the paintings of Borley Rectory and of Borley Church painted by the Reverend Harry Bull, or at the furniture on which he has carved his name and the legend “BORLEY RECTORY REV H BULL” and a Cross, or the cheap metal tin on which he has engraved the motto “MEMENTO MORI” with a Death's Head and a Crow and Cross, or the holograph notes he has left regarding two experiences he had of the ghostly sad nun who haunted the Rectory, or listen to the plaintive melody that comes from the music box that he owned—I am there in the Rectory with him, and the Rainbow is real, and the Rectory is the real. I open a box Harry owned, and wonder what made him place in it a small number of animal bones in a small oval tin. I have several of his pocket-watches, on all of which all the hands have stopped as surely as time itself stopped in Borley. On the back of each one is again engraved his, and the Rectory's, name next to the usual simple Cross. I don't know whose dark black hair is curled in the velvet-covered locket which bears the inscription “Harry 2nd Feb 1900”— Harry's? His father's? His wife's? His lover's—is she the unidentified woman who sits smiling in a photograph that I found in the little hidden drawer in one of the several wooden boxes I acquired?
Each such object I hold in my hand, or each such story I read in a book, or that I hear from the long-dead voice of some long-dead face, who hid behind her and his own many masks, is a Graveyard.
Amongst the graves and the tombs and the chipped angels and the shining words that shine from under the worn Biblical verses and the sugar-sweet hopes and prayers beautiful and hopes sentimental, each of these stories come—voices in sounds or in words or in stone, spinning in the airs, as dark as moths and as bright as butterflies, spinning on to where they return, and where we shall meet them again too—that Graveyard of many colours and of many births in which there is no end, and which is itself only a mask, and behind which the Aleph waits.
David Tibet, Hastings, All Hallows’ Eve, 2019!
A Black Solitude
HR Wakefield
I have no explanation of this story, in fact, one of my reasons for telling it lies in the hope that some reader of it may provide one. I rather dislike being left in such an elucidatory void. I got permission to tell it from Lady Foreland; she is sure the Chief would not have minded. I shall probably tell it very badly, for I am an organizer of writers by profession, not a writer myself. The “Chief”, was Lord Foreland, the first and greatest of the newspaper peers; none of his many successors can hold a candle—or should it be a telephone?— to him. I was his personal, private secretary for six years. I got the job directly after the Kaiser War when I was twenty-two. I was a callow, carefree, confident youth in those days, still housing a number of small pieces of shrapnel, but otherwise healthy enough, and very proud of serving such a celebrity.
The events in this narrative occurred at Caston Place, the Chief's most renowned country house. This was a famous specimen of early Tudor manor house, in Surrey, charming rather than beautiful, perhaps; though never have I seen such exquisitely mellow brick. The grounds were unarguably lovely. The great lawn—finest turf in the world—lined by Lebanon cedars, the flower, rock, water and kitchen gardens, all showpieces and deservedly so, the best private golf-course in the Islands, snipe in the water, meadows down by the strolling, serpentine Wear. Well, if I were a millionaire, that's the sort of cottage I would choose. The interior, too, after the Chief's purse had mated with “Ladyship's” taste, had been most delicately modernized without a trace of “vulgarized.” I was there about thirty week-ends in the year and I grew to love it. It was a great old gentleman, an eternally young old gentleman and it died, like so many other gentlemen of my times, in the wars. And also, like many such gentlemen, it had a secret which died with it. My little bedroom was almost at the end of the east wing. It had once been, I fancy, the dressing-room of the big bedroom next door to it. To my surprise I found that this big bedroom was never used, even when the most lavish house-parties came for the weekend. It was not kept locked, but no one ever slept there.
One day I went in and inspected it. By any standards I had known up till then it was a vast room, and somehow vaguely unprepossessing. It had very dark oak panelling and a great oak bed. Two full length portraits flanked the fireplace.
The owners of Caston had fallen on sufficiently mediocre days not to be able to afford to live in it, though the rent the Chief paid for it must have gone far to reconcile them to such exile. Portraits of their forebears—the majority third-rate daubs to be accurate— liberally littered the walls. The Chief told me there'd always been a “sticky” streak in the family (though the latest generation were tame enough) with a notorious name for cruelty, improvidence and various and versatile depravities. These portraits certainly, for the most part, bore this indictment out. They were a baleful-looking crew, men, women and children, and their decorative value exceptionally meager. But the two in the room, as I will call it from henceforth, struck, it seemed to me, a new and noxious low. They were man and wife, I suppose, and fitting mates. They were both in the middle forties, I should say, period, early Stuart, judging from their garb. The husband had a very nasty pair of close-set beady eyes and his lower lip—a family stigmata this—was fleshy, puffy and pouting, the lip of an insatiable and unscrupulous egoist and sensualist. He carried his head bunched forward and his chin down, as though staring hard at the artist and giving him the toughest piece of his mind. The lady was a blonde, and sufficient in herself to give blondes a bad name. She had the lightest blue eyes I ever saw in a face, almost toneless. They were big, too far apart and as hard staring as her spouse's. Her mouth was just one long, har
d, thin line of scarlet. Her expression was ruthless and contemptuous, as though telling the painter he was an incompetent—which was true—and informing him it would be a case of “off with his head” if he didn't hurry up. I remember thinking that if he'd ever seen the colour of his fee, he was lucky. When I looked at them I found them staring back at me and I felt I would not let them stare me down. I thought how lowering it might be to find those four evil eyes on one when one woke up in the morning, and that it might not be too jocund to turn the light out knowing they were there. (In some frail moods it is difficult to differentiate entirely man and his effigy. And that goes, if you know what I mean, for dead men—and women—too.) These twain looked, if I may so put it, as though at any moment they might step down from their frames and beat me up.
Well, here was a small mystery and I made up my mind to solve it. It wasn't as if Caston was over-supplied with bedrooms. Those old houses are smaller than they look, in this sense, that many of their rooms are, to our ideas, ludicrously large, and there are too few of them. I knew Ladyship could have put the room to very good purpose if she'd so chosen. Why didn't she so choose? It was puzzling. I was new to the job, and it was not part of it to ask possibly awkward domestic questions. So I waited my chance and presently it came.
One day, when I was on my own down at Caston making arrangements for a big staff party the chief was throwing, I took a stroll round the grounds with Chumley, the butler and a great character. The very first time I stayed at Caston, the Chief sent for Chumley and in his presence said to me, “This is my butler, the best butler in England, and a very great rogue. Owing to his defalcations and the house property he has purchased therefrom, he is also a very rich man. No doubt eventually he will go to America, the devil, the spiritual home of the best British butlers. Never, my boy, let me catch you giving him a tip.”
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