Aickman's Heirs

by Simon Strantzas

  Mystery...Desire...Madness... Death...

  Six Strange Stories of the Supernatural by a Modern Master of the Macabre

  “Mr Archibald can certainly make your skin crawl. His ghosts and half-seen monsters are as evocative as any by M.R. James.” Dublin Herald

  “A modern-day Poe, bringing fear and mystery into our modern world. No ghost-story aficionado should miss this treat.” Sheffield Telegraph

  “Better than H.P. Lovecraft.” Evening Standard

  I was fourteen years old. I’d loved everything spooky and strange since I’d discovered the works of Edgar Allan Poe at the age of seven. I’d read all of M.R. James, most of Lovecraft, and every genre anthology I could find, but I’d never heard of J.W. Archibald.

  Of course I bought it, and read it from cover to cover that night, to be rewarded by an uneasy sleep punctuated by nightmares. Those six strange stories—which I only half-understood on first reading—made my skin crawl with a delicious, unreasoning terror.

  I loved it.

  The only problem was that there was no more, only those six stories by the writer who had shot to the top of my list of favourites. No one I knew had ever heard of him. As this was in the days before the internet, my means of searching were limited, but I tried my best, even putting through a request by the inter-library loan service, without success. I never stopped looking, but I never even came across another copy of the book I had found. It was as if I’d made it up...or it had been made up, created in an edition of one, especially for me. I knew that was silly. Until the Stones Weep was a British paperback, published by Fontana in London in 1966; it was by a great stroke of luck that I had come across one of the few copies that had found their way to America, but there must be others; somebody else must know about J.W. Archibald.

  And of course there was somebody else, living about two hundred miles away, but it took me another seven years to find him.

  Everybody called him Tommy, a boyish name that went with the twinkle in his eye, his unruly hair, his whole attitude that life was a game. He was a collector who made his living dealing in second-hand books. His store was on South Lamar, in Austin; it hasn’t been there for a long time now, but old residents may recall it. I only discovered it in my last year at the University, when I finally moved off campus to share an apartment and a car with my best friend, Maudie. Even though I went in there nearly every week—browsing more than buying—I was too shy to strike up a conversation with the good-looking man behind the counter.

  One day Maudie said, “We’re going to Tommy’s party tonight.”

  “Who?”

  “Bookstore guy.”

  “What? Really? Wait, how do you know him?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Same way you do. I scored a copy of The Doors of Perception from him yesterday, and he invited me. ”

  I felt a clench of jealousy. “Does he even know your name?”

  She punched my arm. “He wasn’t hitting on me! He said, Be sure to bring your little sister.” She laughed. “I don’t know if I should be offended that he thinks I look older than you!”

  Tommy lived in a small wooden house on a big lot on Enfield Road. His front room contained free-standing bookcases and wall-mounted shelves; elegant glass-fronted bookshelves side by side with the casual brick-and-board arrangements Maudie and I used. As soon as I saw all those books, I relaxed, and forgot everything else in my eagerness to browse.

  And there it was. The book I thought was my own private discovery, in a stranger’s collection. I stopped breathing for a second, and put my finger on the familiar wrinkled black spine, to be sure I wasn’t dreaming, then pulled it out and stared at the familiar, ridiculous, hideous old witch.

  “Don’t let the cover put you off; the stories are much better than—“

  “They’re great,” I said fiercely, looking up with a frown into the face—smiling, interested, and very close—of the book’s owner. I rearranged my own expression and said, “He’s my favourite writer, Archibald, but I’ve never met anyone else who’s even heard of him.”

  “Read anything else by him?”

  When I only gaped, he led me into another room, where the walls were entirely covered in books. There was also a cluttered desk and a couple of chairs, one a leather recliner with a floor lamp beside it.

  “It’s a signed first,” he said, holding up a small, hardcover book in a plain red and white dust-wrapper. “So I won’t let you take it away—in case you’re tempted not to return it. But you can read it here—any time you like,” he added quickly as I sat down in his reading chair. “I didn’t mean right this minute; you’re more than welcome to come back.”

  “I’d like to look at it now—just to read a little bit,” I said. “Please?”

  His gaze softened; he gave me a sympathetic smile, and handed me the first copy I had ever seen of The Secret Game by J. W. Archibald and Sarah Anne Lyons.

  “But it’s—“

  “A collaboration between two authors. Her second and his first published book, and the closest thing he’s written to a novel. You know who she is?”

  “The Hound of God, The Servitors, of course.” Lyons was a respected English novelist, and wife of another, even better-known, novelist. I’d read one of her novels but had found it too dense with religious and literary allusions for my taste. “But she’s—“

  “Married to Albert Baker, yes, now, he’s her second husband, but after the break-up of her first marriage, she was Archibald’s, uh, girlfriend.”

  It was all too much. “No! But he must be so old—much older than her, and—well, I thought he was dead! The way he writes...” Archibald’s stories, while avoiding contemporary references that would absolutely date them, had always struck me as belonging to the world of the 1920s, if not earlier.

  “I can see why you’d think that. His style is very old-fashioned.”

  “But how old is he?”

  “He’s cagey about his age. He must be a good ten years older than Lyons—maybe twenty. She’s, what, mid-forties now? So he could be in his sixties.” He told me—enjoying my astonishment and awe—that he had briefly corresponded with Archibald. He was about to get out the letters when he finally realized that my interest, then, was all for the book in my hands, and left me to read it in peace.

  I spent the next two or three hours in a kind of fevered dream, so rapt in story that it seemed to be happening to me. I could hardly have said what the book was “about”—I experienced it as a series of dreams and nightmares that flowed imperceptibly together. Incidents took place in London and Venice, in a Welsh village and on the Norfolk Broads, and, because I had never been out of Texas, as I read, the bleak stretches of Norfolk became the Texas coastal plains, the Welsh village was in the hill country, black cabs and red double-decker buses appeared on the streets of Austin, and the canals of Venice ran through Galveston.

  The Secret Game was a novel in the manner of Arthur Machen’s The Three Imposters; that is, a series of strange stories, loosely linked by several continuing characters. There were contemporary references that made it clearly a post-World War II production; mentions of bomb-damage and rationing and to movies and songs of the late ‘40s. It was copyright 1950. In both style and substance it was easy to recognize as the work of J. W. Archibald. I was not familiar enough with Lyons’s writing to guess how much she had adapted her style to his, but I wondered how they had worked together. The tone and style was so thoroughly consistent, it seemed the work of one writer.

  When I finished that enchanted first reading and stumbled back into the front room, I found a much diminished party, and no Maudie.

  “Your friend wanted to leave. I promised her faithfully that I’d see you safely home—when you’re ready. I thought you might want to talk some more about Archibald.”

  From the way he slightly slurred his words, I knew Tommy was in no condition to drive me across town, but I didn’t care. I did want to talk about the book. We could talk all night, I decided, and drink
coffee, and in the morning, he could take me home.

  I was about half right. We did talk all night—not just about The Secret Game and Until the Stones Weep, but about all our favourite books, and our shared desire to write, and our oddly similar childhoods—and drank lots of coffee, which he liked just the way I did, with plenty of Half-and-Half and lots of sugar—until, by the time we were left alone in his house, we were both buzzing with caffeine and the thrill of finding a soul-mate. He was sober enough to drive me home by dawn, but instead we went to bed, to continue our conversation on another plane. And it turned out that our bodies connected as passionately as our minds. At one point while we were making love I fell into a sort of waking dream in which he was showing me one book after another, and they were all things I had been looking for, without knowing they existed, and he was giving them to me, to read and keep.

  “Do you like this? How about this? No, wait, this is even better. This? Or this?”

  I couldn’t choose; I wanted them all, all at once. “Yes,” I said, holding him tightly. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  After that, he never did drive me home—except to get my car and load it up with my things to take back to his house. Our house.

  We had a blissful life together, for awhile. Neither of us was terribly ambitious—although we had our dreams, and wrote stories that we hoped to sell, really all we cared about, besides each other, was getting by, doing the things we enjoyed, reading and collecting and talking about the books we loved.

  My sister thought it was the least romantic affair she’d ever heard of. She couldn’t believe I’d rather be given an aged, yellowing paperback novel with a picture of a skeleton on the cover instead of a dozen red roses or a bottle of expensive perfume on Valentine’s Day. But I’ve never liked cut flowers, and I’d rather choose my own fragrances. That wasn’t just any crummy old paperback; it was an anthology that included a very rare, never-reprinted short story called “The Chill Touch of Your Hand” by J. W. Archibald. She thought I was crazy for thinking that driving to Oklahoma City to spend the weekend looking through the books in every Salvation Army and junk store was more fun than the “pampering spa weekend” she craved.

  I’m not sure when or why it changed. I suppose it was a gradual thing, a distance that grew between us, a flame that burned out. At least on his side—I remember how shocked I was when, a month before what would have been our fourth anniversary of living together, he said, in that unmistakably heavy, resolute voice of doom those words all lovers dread: “We need to talk.”

  One week later, in a state of shock, I was living in my own one-bedroom apartment.

  “Was there someone else?” Maudie and my sister both thought he must have been sneaking around with someone else behind my back. I did not think so. True, there was a new woman in his life before the month was out, but he’d always been fast like that.

  Although of course I was miserable at first, the end of a relationship is not the end of everything. Other men found me attractive, and I had the freedom to pick and choose. And there were other things in my life. I had started selling my short stories—around the same time that I’d noticed Tommy’s attitude towards me begin to change. Maybe the two things were not unconnected. My literary success did not amount to much—half a dozen short stories sold to magazines that paid less than five cents a word—but it was more than he had managed to do, and maybe he minded it more than he would say.

  When I was twenty-eight, I came into an inheritance. I decided to use it to travel abroad. Friends of my family owned a flat in London I could use as a base for a month or two. London was at the top of my list—J.W. Archibald lived there. His reputation and career had received a boost with the coming of the horror boom, and he’d finally been published in America—thirteen of his old stories, and one completely new collection. An issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with one of my stories also contained a brand new tale by Archibald, so I felt confident enough to call the magazine’s editor to ask if he could give me Mr. Archibald’s address.

  His voice changed when he heard what I wanted, becoming lower and softer. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, but... This isn’t for public consumption but ... he’s not very well. In fact... I don’t think he’s long for this world. He’s moved into a friend’s flat—he couldn’t really manage on his own any longer.”

  My heart sank lower and lower. “I see.”

  “But let me give you the address. You may as well write to him—I know he’d love to hear from you. I’m sure that if he’s able, he’ll write back.”

  J.W. Archibald was dead before my letter could reach him. Two weeks later, I received a note on black-edged paper, signed with a name I could not decipher.

  I was sad, of course, but the idea that I might meet him had never been real. And what could one brief meeting have added to my understanding or my pleasure in his writing? It was his words that mattered, the magic he’d created on the page. The great sadness was that there would never be any more, that he’d never write another story, not that I’d never been able to shake his hand and tell him how much his stories had meant to me.

  Before leaving on my travels, I reread The Secret Game and all of the short stories. They were just as good as I remembered, haunting, disturbing, and puzzling. Multiple readings did not dilute their strangeness; rather, it seemed the more closely you inspected them, the odder they became. Even now that I was older and more widely read, able to pick up on his references (he was big on opera, architecture, and obscure nineteenth-century artists), some things remained opaque.

  I arrived in London at the beginning of November. It was cold and grey and looked exactly as I thought it should. This was before London became a multicultural, international city with futuristic, gleaming sky-scrapers, and enormous shopping malls, in constant flux. In those days, not so long ago, it seemed charmingly old-fashioned, a little grubby and run-down, but quaint; a city distinct from all others, like nothing I’d encountered except in fiction.

  Although I was alone, I was too entranced by the novelty of it all to feel lonely. Living in a flat meant I could lead a normal life, shop and cook for myself and keep whatever schedule suited me. I walked all through the short daylight hours, sightseeing and storing up impressions, wrote in my journal and read in the evenings.

  I’d brought only a couple of books with me, just enough to tide me over, for I anticipated the bookshops of London, where I was, as expected, overwhelmed by a variety of treasures.

  On my first visit to Foyles, the new novel by Sarah Anne Lyons was prominently displayed, and that same day I read an interview with her in the Evening Standard, from which I learned that she was no longer married to Albert Baker. They had been separated for nearly two years, but the divorce was only now about to be finalized, having been waiting on the division of their property. Bert hated change, she said; he couldn’t bear the disruption of moving, yet without selling their big house he’d been unable to give her half its value.

  “It was much too big for him, of course, and he hasn’t the least idea what has to be done to keep up a house, but he had become so stuck in his ways he was quite irrational... it was part of the reason I left him. I shan’t be getting married again. When I was young, I seemed to feel I needed a man, to be complete, but now...now I find I enjoy living my own life. Rather like Lydie, in my new novel.”

  The interview was a two-page spread, including a large picture of a very beautiful mature woman. On an impulse, I wrote a letter, care of her publisher, asking to meet her. I said I was a writer myself, and mentioned my sadness at the recent death of J.W. Archibald. I gave her my address, told her I did not have a phone, but would be in London for at least a month and available whenever it was most convenient for her.

  The very next day, in the bargain bin outside a bookshop in Cecil Court, I saw a familiar wrinkled black spine with white lettering. The cover (that leering witch) was even more battered than on my own copy, but the pages inside were clean, and I could not res
ist buying it.

  Standing with it in my hand, I had a sudden idea. Why not use Archibald as my tour guide? The places where the stories were set could provide my itinerary. After seeking out the London streets and buildings he mentioned, I’d go to the Norfolk coast, the Yorkshire moors, Wales....

  I’d already purchased that indispensible guide, the London A-Z, and over lunch (in the Wendy’s on Cambridge Circus—seeing it, I suddenly yearned for an American hamburger) I put the map-book and a pencil on one side and began to leaf through my new copy of Until the Stones Weep in search of place names. There were none in the first story, ‘The Trembling Leaf,’ which was set mostly indoors. ‘The New Neighbours’ likewise did not identify even the city in which its “mid-nineteenth century housing estate for merchants and professional men” was located.

  In the third story, at last, I saw some familiar names—perhaps a bit too familiar. I’d already been along Oxford Street, and Bond Street, and was even now in Cambridge Circus, but the next reference perked me up a little: Notting Hill, where a strange event occurred inside a house on a nameless ‘side street.’

  There was a tube station called Notting Hill Gate; getting there would give me more practice navigating the underground, and when I got there, I did what I was already accustomed to doing in any new area: walked around and looked at things.

  I found a second-hand bookshop within five or ten minutes of walking away from the tube station, down what surely was a side street—it didn’t seem to have a name.

  A bell over the door jangled as I entered; the man behind the counter looked up, but left me to browse while he continued talking to someone on the telephone.