In Ghostly Company (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Amyas Northcote

  IN GHOSTLY

  COMPANY

  Amyas Northcote

  with an introduction by

  David Stuart Davies

  In Ghostly Company first published by

  Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010

  Published as an ePublication 2011

  ISBN 978 1 84870 402 2

  Wordsworth Editions Limited

  8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

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  For my husband

  ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

  with love from your wife, the publisher

  Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

  not just for me but for our children,

  Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

  INTRODUCTION

  The writing of ghost stories has attracted more talented amateurs than any other form of literature. By the term ‘amateur’, I mean those individuals whose main occupation in life is not writing, but those who take up their pen or sit at their typewriters in their idle hours between the demands of their normal profession. The list of candidates in the ghost story genre includes M. R. James, Sir Andrew Caldecott and A. C. and R. H. Benson. Another name to add to the list, one which is forgotten today by all but the most knowledgeable aficionado of supernatural fiction, is Amyas Northcote.

  Northcote remains a shadowy figure, and not a great deal is known about him or what prompted him to create this delicious collection of ghost stories. He was born on 25 October 1864 into a privileged background. He was the seventh child of a successful politician, Sir Stafford Northcote who was lord of the manor at Pynes, situated a few miles from Exeter. During his childhood years, all the great Tory politicians, including Disraeli, Lord Salisbury and Randolph Churchill, were guests at the house. Sir Stafford was a great devotee of the theatre and literature. He had an especial fascination for ghost stories and the tales of the Arabian Nights and needed little encouragement to spin yarns of magic, wizardry and the fantastic to his children. No doubt this influenced the young Amyas Northcote in his reading tastes and sowed seeds of inspiration which were not to flower until many years later.

  Amyas attended Eton and was there at the same time as that doyen of ghost story writers M. R. James. It is not known if the two young men knew each other at this time, but the ancient and academic atmosphere that they breathed in together finds its way into both of their writings. Amyas followed the typical route from Eton to one of the Oxbridge Universities: Oxford in his case. In his story ‘Mr Mortimer’s Diary’ Northcote makes the following observation which could easily apply to himself.

  Mr Roger Mortimer was a gentleman born of well-to-do parents . . . and was educated according to the usual practice of well-to-do folk; Eton and Oxford claimed him . . .

  Shortly after his father died in 1887, Amyas emigrated to America where he set up in business in Chicago and, in 1890, married Helen Mary Dudley, from Kentucky.

  During this period he developed his talent for writing. These were journalistic pieces full of political comment and wry observations rather than fiction, but they revealed that he had the ability to present his ideas and opinions in a cool and deceptively unemotional fashion, which later became a stylistic feature of his ghost stories. His time in America was a happy one and he held great affection for the country and its people. In one of his newspaper articles he affirmed:

  The United States is my abiding place; my warmest friends are Americans . . . No foreigner who has not himself experienced it can be made to understand the kindness and hospitality with which Americans of all classes treat the stranger within their gates.

  Northcote returned to England at the turn of the century, owning properties in London and the Chilterns. Little is known about his activities at this time except that he took on the role of Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire. Then, it would seem, out of the blue he brought out a collection of ghost stories in 1921. In Ghostly Company was published by John Lane, Bodley Head in November that year, just in time for Christmas, the season when it seems ghost stories come into their own.

  The book received mixed reviews. The Times Literary Supplement referred to the author’s ‘unemotional style’ but added ‘in several of the stories, there is a subtle didactic touch which is not overdone.’

  Indeed, the key words here are ‘subtle’ and ‘unemotional’. If the reader is in search of stomach-churning, heart-stopping violent horror, he will not find it in the stories of Amyas Northcote. His style is most akin to that of M. R. James in the sense that it is measured and insidiously suggestive, producing unnerving chills rather than shocks and gasps. After reading Northcote’s tales one is unsettled and disturbed. This is partly due to the fact that the hauntings or strange occurrences in his stories take place in natural or mundane surroundings – surroundings which would be familiar to most readers but ones never before thought of as unusual or threatening.

  Consider for example the story ‘In the Woods’, which takes the form of a dream-like anecdote. It has no resolution and like many of Northcote’s stories no explanation either. He does not follow the path of many ghost story writers by explaining why or how the haunting has taken place. To do that, he seems to suggest, removes much of the mystery and the fear. The real point of fear is that there is no rational explanation.

  In essence, there is no plot to ‘In the Woods’. The central character, a girl whose name we are never told, communes with nature and at first finds peace and tranquillity. ‘The woods enthralled her’ is a phrase used several times in the text and subtly the meaning of the word ‘enthralled’ changes from the implication of enchantment to enslavement. Northcote delicately and yet tangibly transforms this pastoral idyll into something dark and sinister. The woods become a character, and a threatening one at that: ‘The firs stood dark and motionless, with a faint aspect of menace in their clustering ranks . . . ’

  Nature is a living thing with hidden undercurrents of danger.

  Sadly In Ghostly Company proved to be Amyas Northcote’s only collection of ghost stories – his only published volume of any kind in fact. It has been suggested that it was his family name and his connections that persuaded the original publisher to accept the book. Certainly a slim volume of ghost stories by an unknown author was not going to make them a huge profit, but we shall never know the truth regarding this theory.

  Amyas Northcote died very suddenly just eighteen months after the collection was published and no further stories were found amongst his papers. It is perhaps because of this brief flare on the literary scene, this limited contribution to the genre, that the book as a whole was neglected for so long. The publishers, not able to build up a readership for the author because of his untimely death, paid little attention to the volume and never republished. It was only because certain stories, ‘
Brickett Bottom’ in particular, found their way into various anthologies, that Northcote’s name was remembered at all.

  ‘Brickett Bottom’ was championed by the great supernatural scholar Montague Summers who featured it in his classic The Supernatural Omnibus in 1931. It is typical of Northcote’s approach to the ghost story. It features, as several of his other tales do, a disappearance. It is a simple tale set in the seemingly harmless lush English countryside but before the reader is fully aware of it, the author has begun to build the tension and suspense. One of the major commentators on the British ghost story, Jack Adrian, thought that ‘Brickett Bottom’ ‘ . . . is far, far better than simply a good tale well told . . . it plumbs the most profound depths of horror and despair’. Adrian maintains that ‘there are a good many giants of the genre from that golden late-Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian period, who never wrote anything half as excellent.’

  Another story that features a disappearance is ‘The Picture’. This tale is particularly Jamesian in style with all its historical detail and takes Northcote away from his typical mis en scène of the English countryside to Hungary. Here we are given a wicked Count and an old castle as elements in this tale of cruel love.

  Like ‘Brickett Bottom’, another tale favoured by admirers of Northcote’s work, appearing in several anthologies over the years, is ‘The Late Mrs Fowkes’. This story is perhaps the least typical of Northcote’s output as it is concerned with witchcraft. It features a ceremony of Devil-worship very reminiscent of a scene in Dennis Wheatley’s classic The Devil Rides Out which was first published in 1934. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, maybe probability, that Wheatley, who was an aficionado of supernatural fiction, was familiar with this story and, shall we say, influenced by it and the Devil-worshipping scene in particular.

  Northcote had the ability to take a moment, an incident, and invest it with a strangeness that at once seems inevitable and yet suddenly surprisingly frightening in its potential. For example ‘The Downs’ presents what appears to be a most mundane scenario: a man walks over the Downs as darkness falls to return to his lodgings. There is a long and seemingly inconsequential preamble before the narrator actually sets off on his journey, which lulls us into thinking that this is a very tame story. However, there are clues dropped casually into the text to alert the reader to the unpleasantness to come, like the observation that, ‘I was perfectly confident in my ability to find my way back over the Downs to Branksome at night as the path was very familiar to us, and I expected to be aided by the light of the moon which would rise about ten o’clock.’ This innocent, naïve belief is juxtaposed shortly afterwards by confession that, ‘Up to this night, I had never in the least suspected that I was possessed of any special psychic intelligence.’ These two statements inform the astute and imaginative reader that we are about to witness some very strange occurrences. Without preparing us for precisely what the narrator will encounter on his late-night journey, Northcote has clearly implied that something disturbing will happen. As it does. Out of a simple situation comes mystery and frightening consequences.

  Northcote applies a similar approach in ‘The Steps’ which begins with the assertion that, ‘The following story purports to be the actual experience of one of our leading medical men.’ So much is packed into that statement: the word ‘purports’ suggests that that there are elements of this tale which we may have difficulty believing; the word ‘actual’ increases that sense that what we are about to read will be difficult to believe; but then he adds that the person at the centre of the story ‘is a leading medical man’, a character with a respectable practical scientific background who is most unlikely to have an impressionable imagination. Northcote strengthens the idea that what he is telling us is really the truth by presenting the incidents as creepy rather than sensational so that we can hear and believe in those haunted footsteps.

  In some stories, such as ‘Mr Mortimer’s Diary’ and ‘Mr Kershaw and Mr Wilcox’ – both, incidentally involving a feud between two men, one of whom believes he has been wronged – Northcote plays with the reader, presenting events that could simply be the result of a disturbed mind. It is possible that it is the power of guilt and the force of imagination that causes the strange outcome rather than a supernatural experience.

  Northcote’s technique of relaxing the reader early in the story before reaching the nerve-tingling moments, as mentioned in the comments referring to ‘The Downs’, is carried out in many of the stories using different methods. However, none is more cunning than his ploy in ‘The Young Lady in Black’. In this tale, the author states at the outset that while it is not ‘a tale of horror and woe, like the typical ghost story, still it is interesting as opening up for consideration the question of whether, after the death of a body, the spirit is able to carry on and bring to a more or less satisfactory conclusion some task commenced in the flesh.’ The prose may be cool and unemotional but nevertheless it acts as a hook to draw the reader in. The premise expressed in this apparently simple statement is in fact very frightening and tinged with horror.

  The idea of the dead influencing the living is also found in ‘The Late Earl of D.’ in which Northcote takes the clever notion of the image of an evil deed surviving in an ethereal form long after its execution. The narrator sees a reflection in a darkened window which reveals a terrible truth.

  So, in this fascinating volume we have a very varied confectionery of excellent ghost stories, which at first mislead with their ‘unemotional style’ but which eventually leave the reader with uneasy feelings and a surprising tingle of fear. This rare collection has long been out of print and is a very welcome addition to this series of all that is best and wonderful in the mystery and supernatural genre.

  Enjoy!

  DAVID STUART DAVIES

  IN GHOSTLY COMPANY

  Brickett Bottom

  The Reverend Arthur Maydew was the hard-working incumbent of a large parish in one of our manufacturing towns. He was also a student and a man of no strong physique, so that when an opportunity was presented to him to take an annual holiday by exchanging parsonages with an elderly clergyman, Mr Roberts, the puarson of the Parish of Overbury, and an acquaintance of his own, he was glad to avail himself of it.

  Overbury is a small and very remote village in one of our most lovely and rural counties, and Mr Roberts had long held the living of it.

  Without further delay we can transport Mr Maydew and his family, which consisted only of two daughters, to their temporary home. The two young ladies, Alice and Maggie, the heroines of this narrative, were at that time aged twenty-six and twenty-four years respectively. Both of them were attractive girls, fond of such society as they could find in their own parish and, the former especially, always pleased to extend the circle of their acquaintance. Although the elder in years, Alice in many ways yielded place to her sister, who was the more energetic and practical and upon whose shoulders the bulk of the family cares and responsibilities rested. Alice was inclined to be absent-minded and emotional and to devote more of her thoughts and time to speculations of an abstract nature than her sister.

  Both of the girls, however, rejoiced at the prospect of a period of quiet and rest in a pleasant country neighbourhood, and both were gratified at knowing that their father would find in Mr Roberts’s library much that would entertain his mind, and in Mr Roberts’s garden an opportunity to indulge freely in his favourite game of croquet. They would have no doubt preferred some cheerful neighbours, but Mr Roberts was positive in his assurances that there was no one in the neighbourhood whose acquaintance would be of interest to them.

  The first few weeks of their new life passed pleasantly for the Maydew family. Mr Maydew quickly gained renewed vigour in his quiet and congenial surroundings, and in the delightful air, while his daughters spent much of their time in long walks about the country and in exploring its beauties.

  One evening late in August the two girls were returning from a long walk along one of their fav
ourite paths, which led along the side of the Downs. On their right, as they walked, the ground fell away sharply to a narrow glen, named Brickett Bottom, about three-quarters of a mile in length, along the bottom of which ran a little-used country road leading to a farm, known as Blaise’s Farm, and then onward and upward to lose itself as a sheep track on the higher Downs. On their side of the slope some scattered trees and bushes grew, but beyond the lane and running up over the farther slope of the glen was a thick wood, which extended away to Carew Court, the seat of a neighbouring magnate, Lord Carew. On their left the open Down rose above them and beyond its crest lay Overbury.

  The girls were walking hastily, as they were later than they had intended to be and were anxious to reach home. At a certain point at which they had now arrived the path forked, the right hand branch leading down into Brickett Bottom and the left hand turning up over the Down to Overbury.

  Just as they were about to turn into the left hand path Alice suddenly stopped and pointing downwards exclaimed: ‘How very curious, Maggie! Look, there is a house down there in the Bottom, which we have, or at least I have, never noticed before, often as we have walked up the Bottom.’

  Maggie followed with her eyes her sister’s pointing finger. ‘I don’t see any house,’ she said.

  ‘Why, Maggie,’ said her sister, ‘can’t you see it! A quaint-looking, old-fashioned red brick house, there just where the road bends to the right. It seems to be standing in a nice, well-kept garden too.’

  Maggie looked again, but the light was beginning to fade in the glen and she was short-sighted to boot.

  ‘I certainly don’t see anything,’ she said. ‘but then I am so blind and the light is getting bad; yes, perhaps I do see a house,’ she added, straining her eyes.

  ‘Well, it is there,’ replied her sister, ‘and tomorrow we will come and explore it.’