“You can keep the house, Jed. I don’t want it. I’ll leave now.”
You’re lying. They’ll come for me. Just like before. You’ll call them.
“I won’t, Jed. I promise. The house is yours. I’m leaving now.”
You’re not leaving. You’ll never leave!
He swung the axe. It slashed the air above my head. I backed away, slipped, and fell to one knee.
The axe came down and—
Jed lurched backward, as if pulled from behind. He screamed out with shock and fury as he tumbled against the television set.
My mother’s face swam up on the screen. She was pressing the point of the kitchen knife to Jed’s back. His features convulsed as a thick smear spread across the back of his shirt. A gray ectoplasmic fluid oozed down his sides, and Jed seemed to shrivel in size.
He was being drawn into the screen, kicking and screaming. His shoulders had already disappeared and his torso was quickly fading from sight. He made one last strenuous effort to resist the backward tug. Then he whirled away from me, breaking into atoms of light and dark as the last vestiges of form dissolved into the picture tube.
His body flashed up on the screen, lying motionless beside my mother.
With a tremendous effort, I pulled myself together and dashed downstairs to the kitchen.
It was empty. Except—
On the floor lay a seven-inch kitchen knife.
OLD HOBBY HORSE by A.F. Kidd
Rosemary Pardoe’s excellent series of chapbooks devoted to M.R. James has become an annual publication, and each of the three issues of Ghosts & Scholars has included a story written and illustrated by A.F. Kidd. Kidd was born April 21, 1953 in Nottingham; she was educated in Shropshire, read law at King’s College, London, and has now settled in the South of England, working as an advertising copywriter. Kidd’s interests in writing, drawing, and cinema pushed a law career aside. She writes that she has also been a newspaper film critic and cartoonist, has written slushy verse for greeting cards, and is currently collaborating on a science fiction novel.
“Old Hobby Horse” is A.F. Kidd’s third published story. It is based on an idea by M.R. James, outlined in his essay, “Stories I Have Tried to Write.” In this essay, James described a number of “stories which have crossed my mind from time to time and never materialized properly. Never properly: for some of them I have actually written down, and they repose in a drawer somewhere ... Let me recall them for the benefit (so to style it) of somebody else.” “Old Hobby Horse” is based on only a single incident described by James, the plot and writing being entirely Kidd’s. I think the Old Master would have been pleased with her extrapolation.
Those who have travelled or resided in the county of Kent will no doubt have encountered a large number of inns each claiming the distinction of being the oldest in the country (although I am of the, possibly biased, opinion that the claims of certain pubs in Nottinghamshire for this honour are more likely to be true).
The Kentish claimants are alike almost to the point of stereotype, though I am by no means denying their attraction: low-beamed affairs, bedecked with hops, and equipped to a greater or lesser degree with the requisite stone flags, open hearths, etcetera, necessary to their status; and with the more recent innovations of refrigerators displaying assortments of cold comestibles. The more enterprising, indeed, indulge in such commercial trivia as paper napkins, beer-mats, and even garments printed with the hostelry’s name.
I had been conducted to one of these picturesque, if selfconsciously so, establishments, by an acquaintance with whom I was staying. Having expressed due appreciation of the exceedingly smoky fire, open on four sides and subject to a particularly vindictive down-draught which made my eyes smart; and of the antiquely smooth oaken seats, prolonged sitting on one of which was proving singularly distressing; I was quite prepared to entertain its claim. Indeed, the original furnishings seemed to have been retained, as my discomfort could testify.
After a while, my friend remarked, “I didn’t only bring you here for the beer.”
“The beer,” I replied, with sincerity, “is superb. Want a refill?”
The formalities observed, I asked him, not without resignation, “So what was this ulterior motive of yours?”
“Atmosphere,” he said, “I’ve got a story for you.” And he proceeded to relate the following narrative.
“They do a lot of Morris dancing down here,” he began. I interrupted to beseech him not to fill his tale with things of which I was already aware. In the summer, as I had observed not infrequently, most of the local pubs were besieged by throngs of thirsty young men in white trousers and eccentric headgear, whose steps, by the end of the day, had become less precise than they might be. My friend continued.
At one time, he said, he was quite interested in folklore (which I imagine would come easily to an historian, at least in cases where the two can be separated), but not to the extent of, as he put it, fooling around in cricket gear and waving a napkin in the air. Nonetheless, he would sometimes go out of his way to watch the dancing: the first performance he had seen since childhood, in fact, took place outside the pub we were sitting in. Not, he admitted, that he remembered much about it other than the fact that one of the dances had involved the banging together of sticks and the kicking over of a pint of beer which had inadvertently been left too close to the field of action.
Gradually, for some reason, he became almost obsessed by the subject, and spent a considerable amount of time travelling around the county in pursuit of groups of dancers. They were willing enough to accept the beer he bought them, and to talk—but their talk was of almost any topic other than folklore. With regret, my friend concluded that a group of modern-day Morris dancers was no different from a group of cricket enthusiasts or football fans—young people whose shared interest was simply an excuse for getting together and drinking unencumbered by wives. Genuine historical interest, he saw, could be furthered only by serious study.
However, such research was hampered by the discovery that the local libraries seemed singularly ill-stocked in this respect, and even such museums as he found proved mere haphazard collections of trivia. He was eventually persuaded that study would be facilitated only by recourse to various private collections of which he had become aware.
Discovering the whereabouts of these turned out to be a far more onerous task than he had imagined, although once found, his not inconsiderable reputation as an historian gained him admittance quite readily.
If he had thought that the worst of his troubles were over, he was due for a bitter disappointment. After weeks of travelling around some of the larger and more gloomy country houses, and becoming more and more depressed, he was quite ready to abandon the whole enterprise.
It was in this mood of frustration that he received a letter from a gentleman by the name of Somerville, inviting him to come and view his collection of ‘objets d’art’, as his correspondent somewhat pretentiously described them. My friend was more than half inclined to ignore the invitation, suspecting charlatanism and worse, and being, in any case, more than ready to give up on his study of traditional dances in Kent. His publisher was clamouring for the MS of his current book, and consequently my friend was suffering from that peculiar breed of guilt known well by those who miss deadlines.
However, as the reader will no doubt have guessed (for otherwise there would be no story) he did, at length, decide to accept the invitation, and wrote accordingly to Mr Somerville.
The minor roads in Kent are ill-equipped with signposts and a great majority are in a lamentable state of repair. These obstructions, coupled with the fact that it was raining quite heavily, conspired together to make my friend three-quarters of an hour late for his appointment. Suffering in almost equal proportions from a violent headache and an attack of extremely bad temper, the spectacle of Mr Somerville’s house, and, shortly afterwards, Mr Somerville himself, hardly constituted an emollient.
My friend thought to h
imself that rarely had he seen a building so remarkable in its hideousness. It was constructed somewhat on the lines of St Pancras Station (but lacking that edifice’s engaging Gothic charm) out of a bright red brick of a peculiarly smooth and unpleasing texture. Mr Somerville’s appearance proved to be entirely in keeping with his house: indeed, his florid features appeared, at first glance, to be constructed of the same garish material, and the tasteless ostentation of his tie and jacket (what my friend referred to, somewhat unkindly, as a ‘Max Miller suit’) produced an effect not unlike that of the house.
“Mr Somerville?” enquired my friend, with sinking heart.
“Yes, yes, me dear chap, come on in.”
Somerville led him to the library, which was furnished in the deplorable taste my friend expected, and gave him a glass of soda water with an infinitesimal amount of whisky in it. This he contrived (for he has a detestation of soda water, although he felt somewhat in need of alcoholic refreshment) to tip into a vulgar-looking receptacle holding a withered rubber-plant, and enquired where Mr Somerville kept his collection.
Accompanied by a highly coloured and no doubt largely mendacious account by his host of the acquisition of various items, my friend managed to examine the objects. As he had feared, they were bunched together with no indication of either intellect or taste: blatant fakes jostled equally with artifacts notable only for their crudity and with a few genuine rarities, all of which Somerville seemed to treat with equal reverence. While his host endeavoured to interest him in a decaying fowl in a glass case, which had been none too expertly made to incorporate an extra pair of legs, my friend was admiring a small blue glass bowl. It was, he thought, Venetian, and of some little value; its lines were very pleasing. Somerville referred to it as an ashtray, and drew his attention to a ship’s figurehead which leered from a corner.
By this time, my friend’s headache was demanding most of his attention, and it was quite by accident that he became aware of an intriguing, if incomplete, set of ceramic figures. Although their colours were garish, their execution lacking in subtlety, and their glaze uneven, they caught his eye for two reasons. One, the remarkable power which they seemed to have; and two, their relevance to his quest. They dated, he judged, from the late eighteenth century, and comprised, inter alia, a remarkably hideous representation of Jack-in-the-Green and a beribboned and malevolent-looking Hobby Horse, which reminded him uncomfortably of Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’.
Somerville, noticing his interest, pointed out a print hanging nearby entitled “Southfield Morris”, depicting dancers outside an inn (the same one, in fact, that my friend had led me to in order to relate this story). It had, my friend says, a menacing aspect, which he was totally unable to explain or interpret.
There was one further item of interest, which his host allowed him to borrow: a pamphlet which he subsequently photo-copied before returning it (by registered post: he could not face another interview with its boorish owner). This copy he now handed to me.
It was entitled, “A True Account of Traditional Dances in the County of Kent”, and the passage headed “Southfield Morris” had been marked in red ink. The page was all but disintegrating along the lines where it had been folded. I forget the idiosyncrasies of spelling and phraseology, but the gist was along these lines:
‘The dance is symbolic of the death of Winter and the coming of Spring. This is signified by the enacted decapitation of the figure portraying Winter, from whose corpse arises the leafy representation of Spring in the persona of Jack-in-the-Green. It is believed in these parts that at one time Spring would literally fail to come were the ritual not enacted. The figure of Winter is robed in white to signify snow and is “slain” by a masked dancer armed with a sword.’
I read this, and handed it back, remarking, “Unusual, but there are familiar elements. Why did you stop your research?”
“Something happened. Something very odd.”
“Well go on, astonish me.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that ... I’m just afraid of the sequel.”
At this point, my friend, whose sense of the dramatic is not underdeveloped, broke off to adjourn once more to the bar. On his return he sat silently for a time, whether in reluctance or indecision I had no way of telling. Eventually he resumed.
For some days after his visit to Mr Somerville, he told me, he was aware of a certain uneasiness of spirit, as if a weight of responsibility or guilt had been imposed upon him. He found himself frequently looking over his shoulder or being alarmed by slight movements out of the corner of his eye; movements which his rational mind knew were no more than the shifting of a curtain in the draught.
He had never been a particularly impressionable person: imaginative, yes, but not undisciplinedly so—therefore this inexplicable nervousness was difficult to attribute to mere imagination. One evening, about a week after his visit to Somerville—the date was late in April—he was sitting in his study putting the finishing touches to the MS which had been so sadly neglected of late, when the sense of being watched suddenly intensified. It increased to such an extent, in fact, that he actually felt the hairs on the back of his neck literally begin to prickle.
At the same time, he became aware that a tune was running round in his head, one which he recognized as having been in the back of his mind for some time. It was a Morris tune, and by this time his senses were so abnormally heightened that he felt he was actually hearing it, as distinct from being merely an echo in his brain. Why he should think so he could not say, but he was convinced that what he was hearing was the “Southfield Morris”.
He abandoned his work for a minute or so, until he was startled into turning by what sounded like the stealthy opening of the window. In the slight gap between the curtains he perceived a face. It was a blank, dead face, with the pale waxy complexion of a corpse; but the eyes which stared from it were so unpleasantly out of place in their living, malevolent awareness that they made the apparition somehow far more terrible. There was a kind of awful gloating expression in them—even, maybe, hunger.
There is such horror in the totally impossible that you might suppose him to have been rooted to the spot; but this was not the case. In a panic, he leapt to his feet and tore the curtains apart with an almost convulsive gesture. Something fell on his foot, something with an unpleasant soft texture: he jumped away from it.
Behind the curtains was the closed window: the latch was securely fastened.
He looked down, then, to see what had fallen, and found nothing more than a perfectly ordinary mask made of pasteboard. Nevertheless, and perhaps understandably, he could not bring himself to pick it up for some considerable time. When he did so he found it such a totally innocuous object that he began to laugh—but not, indeed, without a certain amount of hysterical relief.
The only thing which bothered him, apart from wondering how the mask came to be there, was this: whose were the eyes which had peered through the blank slits in the mask?
“And the sequel?” I enquired.
“I want you to meet someone first,” said my friend, indicating, with what I felt was an unnecessarily histrionic gesture (since he nearly knocked my beer over in the process) a wizened individual seated in a corner. I regarded him with some distaste: he was one of those persons referred to by condescending tourists as a ‘character’, and whose evil odour, I presume, is supposed merely to add to the period charm of their eccentricity. His attention appeared to be equally divided between his beer and a noisome pipe down which, judging from the sound-effects, he seemed to be spitting. A villainous-looking dog was lying by his feet, its nose jammed against the most unwholesome pair of boots I had seen for a long time, which either says a great deal for its tolerance or very little for its olfactory sensibility.
I followed my friend resignedly over to this unpleasing specimen, who was introduced as Simms. He eyed me craftily and I took the hint and bought some more beer. When I returned, Simms was knocking tarry black dottle out of his pipe, which he then proce
eded to refill with what looked like well-rotted manure. This process took up several minutes.
“Mr Durham,” my friend said, indicating me, “would like to hear about the Southfield.”
Simms hawked and spat for a while. After this he took the pipe out of his mouth and considered it, possibly for inspiration. At length, he said, “My grandad, ’e were Southfield dancer.”
The pipe-sucking which followed this statement went on for so long that I began to wonder whether this was the sum total of the information in Simms’s possession.
“Did away with Southfield in my grandad’s day,” he observed eventually. “I were born in 1890.”
I found this hard to credit: decrepit as he appeared, he looked hardly more than sixty-five.
“Fertility dance, it were. Makin’ crops grow ’n wimmen conceive. May day dance. Know about May day, do yer?” I nodded. “Tell yer why they done away with it. My owd grandad, ’e were the Jack, an’ Winter, ’e were called Joe ’awkins; an’ owd ’obby ’orse an’ th’un with the mask, ’is name were Bill Thomson.”
My friend muttered, “The same dancer for the Horse and the killer of the winter—odd, that.”
Simms cast a jaundiced eye at him, and addressed himself once more to his unspeakable pipe, waiting until he had coaxed some noxious fumes from it before starting to speak again.
“Nar this Bill Thomson ’e caught Joe ’awkins tumblin’ ’is wife, so ’e thrashes ’im good an’ proper. Nar you’d a thought ’e would of scared Joe ’awkins off, wooden yer?”
“Yes, get on with it,” said my friend, earning another malicious glance.
“Not ’im, ’e comes braggin’ all round the place as ’ow this owd fertility dance ’as put new life into ’im, know what I mean?” Simms accompanied this tasteless information with a toothless snigger and an evil leer in my direction. As I was at that moment looking past him to some girls at the bar, this served to embarrass me somewhat, and I took a mouthful of beer to hide my confusion.
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