“…but always returning to his thought . . . that if a man brought more to a place than he found there he already knew a good deal more about it than anybody else could tell him.”
“The thing had already begun to write itself terribly on his face.”
“…talked with his fountain pen.” “
“He writes in cold ink:”
The above quotes, and their pervasive ‘thought’, as taken from this self-evidently important literary story, sum up its gestalt as a literal real-time review here called a “stop-watch record”, a handwritten transference blended into an overall story that should be published again and again in and out of ghost story collections.
About James Hopley, who suffered facial disfigurement in World War I, (“…his grafts and his paraffin-wax and his seared cheek, with the glass eye glittering as hard as a doll’s in the middle of it all.) and any plastic surgery fails to conceal the horror of how his face looks, as he at least partially becomes, by piecemeal writing, the ghost of a legendary suicide, a ghost that haunts him when he arrives at a French chateau to convalesce.
He may have been welcomed with a ‘half-drawn cork’ in a wine bottle, but sight of him incrementally shocks the locals who later turn to pitchfork him as the monster, while he suffers the experience from one of those famous ‘two beds in one room’ stories, where you are sleeping alone and then someone or something chillingly seems to be in the other bed!….
***
“why should the Ghostage stop there?”
Indeed! Earlier Hopley’s face is touched in the dark by the eponymous rope, later seen as a ‘beckoning’ rope, and trap-door levels between this rope and a well beneath. There are ‘window-piercings’ where workmen glimpse his face (the chateau is being renovated) — and there are strong reminders of ROOUM and his labouring and materials-handling skills, as well as their difficulties (“…making it fast to the beam’s no good. Wants a dead prise-up with a lever, shall be crushing the poor devil to pulp if I begin to haul.”) as well as the rope as pulley, and Rooum’s solids into solids, as new parts of the building explicitly try to blend with the old parts.
And so to that transference of Hopley — blending solid into solid, filter into filter, ghost into ghost….
“So take such a man as I am, neither one thing nor the other. I am, as you might say, either death warmed up or life cooled down. In that case there is only a margin of difference between him, scarcely dead, and me, scarcely alive. He is as much a man as I, I as much a ghost as he.”
***
And Hopley’s writing in his black-backed exercise book is how that blending works, as words become truths within the lies of fiction.
And he becomes a ‘bad’ mutilation from the war while those in the area contain ‘decent’ mutilations, as we witness, along with him, a memorable scene in the open air, prose-couched in many evocative ways…
“…a fête, but there it was, in full progress. Half a dozen canvas booths had been set up, with tiny flags and gay banners of bunting. […] There with their half-legs and sticks and empty sleeves and war-medals they moved about,… […] But these were decent mutilations, mutilations that made a man hold his head up and brought him honour among his friends and the awed regard of their children.”
And later, in resonance perhaps with the ‘fifteen chapters’ in THE BECKONING FAIR ONE, Hopley’s stop-watch real-time review is set to have filled his exercise book, but by whose hand is now wielding the fountain-pen upon the final fifteen pages and its cold ink? —
“There were fifteen of them, and his normal handwriting was on the small side. Fifteen should be enough, and as he looked on the blank pages he wondered what would be found on them at that time tomorrow.”
What indeed? A haunting story that seems to have written itself by dint of a pervasive thought.
***
And Onions seems to have a message for us today! —
“And what of the multitude who will believe anything if only the lie is big and noisy enough? Who cling to their leaders who prepared the evil, and saw the evil through, and made a worse evil to follow it, and are even now tired and helpless before an evil by the side of which the other would be good?”
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My similar Horror reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
My recent detailed reviews of Oliver Onions, ROOUM: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/18/rooum-by-oliver-onions/ and THE BECKONING FAIR ONE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/the-3rd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/ and GAMBIER: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/11/gambier-by-oliver-onions/ and TRAGIC CASEMENTS: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/17/tragic-casements-by-oliver-onions/