Homefront Horrors

by Nevins, Jess;

  1. The Russian is untranslatable. The phrase means, “Give my life wings.”

  LAURA

  Saki

  (1870–1916)

  H.H. Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym “Saki,” had a traumatic early life, losing his mother when he was only two years old and being sent from Burma to England, where strict aunts and a grandmother raised him in a puritanical fashion (his father was in the Anglo-Indian civil service). This early experience marked Munro, and gave him a loathing for petty authority which shows up in many of his stories.

  Munro worked in Burma as a policeman, but ill health forced him to return to London, where he worked as a journalist for a number of newspapers while beginning to write the contes cruel he became best known for. His career took him abroad as a foreign correspondent in Russia, the Balkans, and Paris. When World War One began he enlisted in the British Army, and was killed in combat in France in 1916.

  Saki is perhaps best known for his contes cruel, those stories of the maliciousness of fate which hover on the border between fantasy and horror. Classics like “Sredni Vashtar” (1911), “The Open Window” (1911), and “The Music on the Hill” (1911) are witty, sharp, and compact, delivering the maximum effect with a minimum of words. “Laura,” which first appeared in Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), is one of Saki’s most famous stories; less cruel than mischievous, it still has Saki’s sardonic viciousness, which never grows old.

  “YOU ARE NOT really dying, are you?” asked Amanda.

  “I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,” said Laura.

  “But to-day is Saturday; this is serious!” gasped Amanda.

  “I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” said Laura.

  “Death is always serious,” said Amanda.

  “I never said I was going to die. I am presumably going to leave off being Laura, but I shall go on being something. An animal of some kind, I suppose. You see, when one hasn’t been very good in the life one has just lived, one reincarnates in some lower organism. And I haven’t been very good, when one comes to think of it. I’ve been petty and mean and vindictive and all that sort of thing when circumstances have seemed to warrant it.”

  “Circumstances never warrant that sort of thing,” said Amanda hastily.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” observed Laura, “Egbert is a circumstance that would warrant any amount of that sort of thing. You’re married to him—that’s different; you’ve sworn to love, honour, and endure him: I haven’t.”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with Egbert,” protested Amanda.

  “Oh, I daresay the wrongness has been on my part,” admitted Laura dispassionately; “he has merely been the extenuating circumstance. He made a thin, peevish kind of fuss, for instance, when I took the collie puppies from the farm out for a run the other day.”

  “They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex and drove two sitting hens off their nests, besides running all over the flower beds. You know how devoted he is to his poultry and garden.”

  “Anyhow, he needn’t have gone on about it for the entire evening and then have said, ‘Let’s say no more about it’ just when I was beginning to enjoy the discussion. That’s where one of my petty vindictive revenges came in,” added Laura with an unrepentant chuckle; “I turned the entire family of speckled Sussex into his seedling shed the day after the puppy episode.”

  “How could you?” exclaimed Amanda.

  “It came quite easy,” said Laura; “two of the hens pretended to be laying at the time, but I was firm.”

  “And we thought it was an accident!”

  “You see,” resumed Laura, “I really have some grounds for supposing that my next incarnation will be in a lower organism. I shall be an animal of some kind. On the other hand, I haven’t been a bad sort in my way, so I think I may count on being a nice animal, something elegant and lively, with a love of fun. An otter, perhaps.”

  “I can’t imagine you as an otter,” said Amanda.

  “Well, I don’t suppose you can imagine me as an angel, if it comes to that,” said Laura.

  Amanda was silent. She couldn’t.

  “Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable,” continued Laura; “salmon to eat all the year round, and the satisfaction of being able to fetch the trout in their own homes without having to wait for hours till they condescend to rise to the fly you’ve been dangling before them; and an elegant svelte figure—”

  “Think of the otter hounds,” interposed Amanda; “how dreadful to be hunted and harried and finally worried to death!”

  “Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive—a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should think.”

  “I wish you would be serious,” sighed Amanda; “you really ought to be if you’re only going to live till Tuesday.”

  As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.

  “So dreadfully upsetting,” Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir Lulworth Quayne. “I’ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best.”

  “Laura always was inconsiderate,” said Sir Lulworth; “she was born during Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies.”

  “She had the maddest kind of ideas,” said Amanda; “do you know if there was any insanity in her family?”

  “Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in West Kensington, but I believe he’s sane on all other subjects.”

  “She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter,” said Amanda.

  “One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in the West,” said Sir Lulworth, “that one can hardly set them down as being mad. And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that I should not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doing in an after state.”

  “You think she really might have passed into some animal form?” asked Amanda. She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily from the standpoint of those around them.

  Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air of bereavement that Laura’s demise would have been insufficient, in itself, to account for.

  “Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed,” he exclaimed; “the very four that were to go to the show on Friday. One of them was dragged away and eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I’ve been to such trouble and expense over. My best flower bed and my best fowls singled out for destruction; it almost seems as if the brute that did the deed had special knowledge how to be as devastating as possible in a short space of time.”

  “Was it a fox, do you think?” asked Amanda.

  “Sounds more like a polecat,” said Sir Lulworth.

  “No,” said Egbert, “there were marks of webbed feet all over the place, and we followed the tracks down to the stream at the bottom of the garden; evidently an otter.”

  Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir Lulworth.

  Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintend the strengthening of the poultry yard defences.

  “I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,” said Amanda in a scandalised voice.

  “It’s her own funeral, you know,” said Sir Lulworth; “it’s a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortal remains.”

  Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to further lengths next day; during the absence of the family at the funeral ceremony the remaining survivors of the speckled Sussex were massacred. The marauder’s line of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flower beds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower garden had also suffered.

&
nbsp; “I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the earliest possible moment,” said Egbert savagely.

  “On no account! You can’t dream of such a thing!” exclaimed Amanda. “I mean, it wouldn’t do, so soon after a funeral in the house.”

  “It’s a case of necessity,” said Egbert; “once an otter takes to that sort of thing it won’t stop.”

  “Perhaps it will go elsewhere now there are no more fowls left,” suggested Amanda.

  “One would think you wanted to shield the beast,” said Egbert.

  “There’s been so little water in the stream lately,” objected Amanda; “it seems hardly sporting to hunt an animal when it has so little chance of taking refuge anywhere.”

  “Good gracious!” fumed Egbert, “I’m not thinking about sport. I want to have the animal killed as soon as possible.”

  Even Amanda’s opposition weakened when, during church time on the following Sunday, the otter made its way into the house, raided half a salmon from the larder and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persian rug in Egbert’s studio.

  “We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feet before long,” said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particular otter she felt that the possibility was not a remote one.

  On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt Amanda spent a solitary hour walking by the banks of the stream, making what she imagined to be hound noises. It was charitably supposed by those who overheard her performance, that she was practising for farmyard imitations at the forth-coming village entertainment.

  It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who brought her news of the day’s sport.

  “Pity you weren’t out; we had quite a good day. We found it at once, in the pool just below your garden.”

  “Did you—kill?” asked Amanda.

  “Rather. A fine she-otter. Your husband got rather badly bitten in trying to ‘tail it.’ Poor beast, I felt quite sorry for it, it had such a human look in its eyes when it was killed. You’ll call me silly, but do you know who the look reminded me of? My dear woman, what is the matter?”

  When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from her attack of nervous prostration Egbert took her to the Nile Valley to recuperate. Change of scene speedily brought about the desired recovery of health and mental balance. The escapades of an adventurous otter in search of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda’s normally placid temperament reasserted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from her husband’s dressing-room, in her husband’s voice, but hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening in a Cairo hotel.

  “What is the matter? What has happened?” she asked in amused curiosity.

  “The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath! Wait till I catch you, you little—”

  “What little beast?” asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh; Egbert’s language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outraged feelings.

  “A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy,” spluttered Egbert.

  And now Amanda is seriously ill.

  THE PLACE OF PAIN

  M. P. Shiel

  (1865–1947)

  Matthew Phipps Shiell—he went by “Shiel” as a pen-name—was born on the island of Montserrat and was of Irish-Caribbean descent. He moved to England when he was twenty and began a lifetime of writing, in a wide range of commercial genres. His Decadent supernatural fiction, including his “Prince Zaleski” detective stories and his Poe-esque “Vaila” (1896), is still fondly remembered by connoisseurs, while his science fiction, including his post-apocalyptic The Purple Cloud (1901), is among the most striking and memorable science fiction of the time. A lack of commercial success and consequent money troubles forced Shiel to take on more commercial work, and he unsuccessfully churned out romances and plays and radical political and religious work during the last thirty years of his life.

  Shiel’s reputation is now mixed. There is the lingering scandal from the revelation of his imprisonment in 1914 for “indecently assaulting and carnally knowing” his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, an imprisonment which at the time he told everyone was for fraud. There are also the overtly racist politics of some of his future war novels, such as The Yellow Danger (1898) and The Dragon (1913). Viewed on balance, Shiel’s personal reputation is dire, but his reputation as a writer remains mostly positive.

  “The Place of Pain,” written before his term in jail, is one of Shiel’s more significant short stories. It combines science fiction and horror in a way not usually seen in the British science fiction of the era, as well as avoids the stylistic excesses of his more Decadent work, delivering instead a stripped-down piece that nicely hints at more than it reveals.

  THOUGH MY THEME is about the place of evil, and about how the Rev. Thomas Podd saw it, it is rather a case of evil in heaven; for I think British Columbia very like heaven, or like what I shall like my heaven to be, if ever I arrive so high—one mass of mountains, with mirrors of water mixed up with them, torrents and forests, and roaring Rhones.

  It was at Small Forks that it happened, where I went to pass a fortnight—and stayed five years; and how the place changed and developed in that short time is really incredible, for at first Small Forks was the distributing center of only three mining-camps, and I am sure that not one quarter of the district’s two million tons of ore of today was then thought of.

  At the so-called Scatchereen lode, three miles from the lake, there was no copper smelter, but not one silver-led mine within fifty miles, and no brewery, no machine-shop, no brick plant. Nor had Harper Falls as yet been thought of as a source of power.

  It was Harper Falls that proved to be the undoing of Pastor Thomas Podd, as you are to hear; and I alone have known that it was so, and why it was so.

  I think I saw Podd in my very first week at Small Forks—one evening on the Embankment.

  (You may know that Small Forks runs along the shore of an arm of Lake Sakoonay, embowered in bush at the foot of its mountain—really very like a nook in Paradise, to my mind).

  Podd that evening was walking with another parson on the Embankment, and the effect of him upon me was the raising of a smile, my eye at that time being unaccustomed to the sight of black men in parsons collars and frocks. But Podd was rather brown than black—a meager little man of fifty, with prominent cheek bones, hollow cheeks, a scraggy rag of beard, a cocky carriage, and a forehead really intellectual, though his eyes did strike me as rather wild and scatterbrained.

  He was a man of established standing in all Small Forks, where a colony of some forty colored persons worked at the lumber-mills. To these Podd preached in a corrugated chapel at the top of Peel Street.

  He held prayer-meetings on Monday nights, and one Monday night, when I had been in Small Forks a month or so, I stopped into his conventicler, on coming home from a tramp, and heard the praying—or, rather, the demanding for those darkies banged the pew-backs and shook them irritably.

  When it was over and I was going out, I felt a tap on my back, and it was the reverend gentleman, who had raced after the stranger. Out he pops his pompous paw, and then, with a smile, asked if I was “thinking of joining us.” I was not doing that, but I said that I had been “interested,” and left him.

  Soon after this he called to see me, and twice in three months he had tea with me—in the hope of a convert, perhaps. He did not succeed in this, but he did succeed in interesting me.

  The man had several sciences at his finger-ends; I discovered that he had a genuine passion for Nature; and I gathered—from himself, or from others, I can’t now remember—that it was his habit ever and anon to cut himself off from humankind, so as to lose himself for a few days in that maze of mountains in which the Sakoonay district towers toward the moon.

  No pressure of business, no consideration or care, could keep Podd tame and quiet in Small Forks when this call of the wild enticed
him off. It seems to have been long a known thing about the town, this trick of his character, and to have been condoned and pardoned as part of the man. He had been born within forty miles of Small Forks, and seemed to me to know Columbia as a farmer knows his two-acre meadow.

  Well, some two weeks after that second visit of his to me the news suddenly reached me that something had gone wrong in the Rev. Thomas Podd’s head—could not help reaching me, for the thing was the gossip and laugh of the district far outside Small Forks.

  It appears that late on the Saturday evening the reverend gentleman had come home from one of his vast tramps and truant interviews with Nature; then, on the Sunday morning, he had entered the meetinghouse scandalously late, and had reeled with the feet of some moonstruck creature into the pulpit—without his coat! without his collar! his braces hanging down!—and then, leaning his two elbows on the pulpit Bible, he had looked steadily, mockingly, at his flock of black sheep, and had proceeded to jeer and sneer at them.

  He had called them frankly a pack of apes, a band of black and babbling babies, said that he could pity them from his heart, they were so benighted, so lost in darkness; that what they knew in their wooly nuts was just nothing; that no one knew, save him, Podd; that he alone of men knew what he knew, and had seen what he had seen. . . .

  Well, he had been so much respected for his intellectual parts, his eloquence, his apparent sincerity as a Christian man, that his congregation seem to have taken this gracelessness with a great deal of toleration, hoping perhaps that it might be only an aberration which would pass; but when the revered gentleman immediately afterwards took himself off anew into his mountains, to disappear for weeks—no one knew where—this was too much. So when he came back at last, it was to see another dark parson filling his place.

  From that moment his social degeneration was rapid. He abandoned himself to poverty and tatters. His wife and two daughters shook the dust of him from off their shoes, and left Small Forks—to find a livelihood for themselves somewhere, I suppose. But Podd remained, or, at any rate, was often to be met in Small Forks, when he condescended to descend from his lofty walks.