MASQUES OF SATAN (2 page)

Ghosts appear throughout early literature, for example Greek tragedy, often as motive forces for revenge — the whole
Oresteia
of Aeschylus is driven by the angry ghosts of vengeance — and this is a line of ghost story which leads on directly to perhaps its ultimate expression,
Hamlet
. The scholar and critic C. S. Lewis called
Hamlet
a ‘ghost story’ not in a trivial sense, but because again, as with the
Oresteia
which indirectly influenced Shakespeare via translations of Seneca, the ghost is the driving force in the story. Another thing is worth noting about
Hamlet
. The opening scene with the guards on the battlements before dawn is not simply a grippingly effective opening to the play, it has an essential purpose, which is to establish that the ghost is not a figment of Hamlet’s tortured psyche, but a real entity, seen by others independently long before Hamlet does.

To return to classical times, ghost stories as we understand them put in an appearance as inset tales in the earliest Greek and Roman novels. There is a werewolf story in the
Satyricon
of Petronius, the fragmentary Latin novel of the first century AD which contains the famous Trimalchio episode. About half a century later Pliny, in his letters, writes up one of the first ‘true’ ghost tales on record, about a haunted house in Athens. What is interesting about it is that the ingredients are so familiar. It contains all the commonplaces, indeed clichés, of the ghost story: groans, clanking chains and the unquiet spirit of a murdered man who ceases to haunt when his bones are properly buried.

The modern ghost story, as opposed to the Gothic extravaganza, began with Sheridan Le Fanu, who added the vital ingredient of psychology to the familiar elements. In his stories the feelings and failings of the haunted were as important as the haunting itself. We today continue essentially in this tradition. Where I think we sometimes fail is in taking less seriously the metaphysical realities behind the phenomena. To put it bluntly, there are those who do not think it is necessary for ghost and horror writers to believe in a spiritual realm. I do.

The stories that follow may contain humour and artifice, but they are essentially serious. They are not
divertissements
: in fact, I have become convinced that to write ghost stories of lasting merit it is necessary to believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. I am fully aware that this sounds a harsh, even barbarous statement, but I do not want to qualify it, only to explain. I do not mean by it that one needs to subscribe to a particular religious creed. On the contrary I believe that rigid, dogmatic beliefs are usually inimical to good writing, especially when the holder of those beliefs cannot resist a sermon. (Dante, Milton and Bunyan may perhaps provide partial exceptions to this rule.) On the other hand a sensitivity to the spiritual is essential, as is a belief in its eternal significance. No one could describe Henry James as a dogmatist, and yet what gives
The Turn of the Screw
its thrilling, horrid urgency is the fact that Quint and Miss Jessell are damned, and that Miles and Flora are in danger of damnation. Whether or not this is partly or wholly an imagining of the governess narrator is irrelevant.

The protagonists of the supernatural tale at its best need to be playing for the highest stakes conceivable. That is what interests me, which is why, to be honest, I don’t really see myself as ‘a writer of ghost stories’ or a ‘horror writer.’ I write what I write because it is the best way of saying what I want to say about what matters to me most. My ideas derive from some tiny fragment of experience or research. When these fragments connect with some problem or passion that has been exercising me, a story is born. If it connects with some problem or passion that has been exercising the reader, it is a success.

That is what matters; because, ultimately, though I write out of myself I do not write
for
myself. I write to enjoy your company vicariously and to widen your eyes just a little.

Reggie Oliver

June 2007

The Man in the Grey Bedroom

DURING HER FIRST TEN MINUTES at the Police Station Maggie Protheroe was incapable of saying anything. She was taking in great sobbing gasps of air, as if she were having an asthma attack. A Constable asked if medical assistance was required. The station sergeant gently told Maggie to breathe evenly and deeply, until eventually she was able to articulate a question about her children. They were fine, she was told, they were safe. A female police officer was looking after them and they were happily playing with their Gameboys. Maggie nodded, half-smiled, and began to breathe less convulsively. As she was given a cup of tea she was told to begin at the beginning and to take her time. Maggie appeared, at first, to be baffled by these instructions. Her normal world had been so comprehensively shattered that even simple metaphysical concepts like beginnings and ends, not to mention the taking of time — but where from? — were alien to her. The Sergeant who was conducting the interview had to prompt her. Were she and her family on holiday? Yes, that was right, Maggie said, they were on holiday. She hesitated again. It had just occurred to her, for the first time in her life, that the whole idea of going on holiday was really rather absurd; but then she told herself, as she often did, to ‘pull herself together’, reasserted her sense of normality, and began, if not at the beginning, at least somewhere near it.

* * * * *

She, her husband Jack, an auctioneer by profession, and their two sons, Andrew and Peter, aged seven and nine respectively, had been on holiday in Southwold. That particular day had begun overcast and was therefore not a beach day, so they had decided to go inland on an expedition. Jack had set his sights on Blakiston Hall. He was keen on such visits for a number of reasons. He worked for one of the major auction houses in the West Country, and possessed a  wide knowledge of art and antiques which he was anxious both to augment and to demonstrate. He had plans to educate his sons into a similar enthusiasm: perhaps they would be not simply auctioneers like him, but antiques experts who would appear on television programs. He had never put this into so many words, but Maggie knew the way his mind worked and tolerated it. Peter and Andrew had yet to show an inclination of any kind other than towards fighting each other; and so the family set out.

Blakiston Hall is just on the Suffolk side of the Norfolk and Suffolk border. It is a vast red brick Jacobean palace of a place, built by the Cheke family in the time of their glory when the young Sir Sydney Cheke had caught the roving eye of James I. Possessing both a good legal brain and a pretty face — not quite so unusual a combination as one might imagine — Sir Sydney rose to become Lord Chief Justice, and was created Earl of Blakiston by James’s son Charles. Thereafter the fortunes of the Cheke family varied considerably, but it managed to keep hold of the Hall until the nineteen-sixties, when the owners were gently coaxed by Mr. James Lees-Milne into handing it over to the National Trust. The Earldom of Blakiston had expired with the death of the last male heir in 1907, and the Hall’s inheritors had been a collateral branch of the family, the Ormerod-Chekes. In 1968 the last Ormerod-Cheke, exiled from the Hall, died in sordid and penniless obscurity.

What the public saw, however, was ancestral glory, carefully conserved and subtly enhanced. If the place had a fault it was that everything had been so tastefully restored that it was a just little lacking in character. Nearly all traces of the later Chekes had been eradicated, the most recent evidence being T. C. Dugdale R.A’s portrait of the late Sir Everard Ormerod-Cheke, who had been British Consul in Caracas during the Second World War. He was the last of the family to have made any mark whatsoever on the world.

Maggie had her reasons for not looking forward to the Blakiston expedition. She knew how aggressively Jack liked to show off his expertise, and this was just the place in which to do it. He had long since ceased to impress her, and had therefore switched his attention to his sons, Peter and Andrew.

However, as they turned into the long drive which approached the house through a deer park, her spirits lifted. There was still a cold breeze, but the sun was beginning to show itself from behind high white clouds. More importantly for her, Peter and Andrew, who had been determinedly bored throughout the journey to Blakiston, had shown genuine interest in the deer which wandered in dappled drifts under the trees, apparently oblivious of the squat metal cages that roared so purposefully past them.

Before they turned off into the car park, there was a fine view of the Hall’s impressive Dutch gabled front of red brick, flanked by lead-roofed towers at either end, with large stone-faced mullion windows all along the façade. In the occasional flash of sun from behind the high clouds, the ancient bricks were alchemised into the colour of flame, the glass window lights into shining gold. The central entrance tower in Cotswold limestone displayed all the orders of architecture one above the other, and upon free-standing plain Tuscan columns on either side of the great doors stood the Cheke armorial supporters, a gryphon and a raven. The family motto of the Cheke family in pierced stone formed the parapet above the porch. It read:

ODERINT DUM METUANT

Jack, who had been giving his unappreciative children a short lecture on the orders of  architecture as they stood before the entrance was interrupted by his eldest, Peter, who wanted to know what the ‘stone words’ meant. Jack’s knowledge of Latin was not extensive, so he suggested that they move indoors.

Jack flourished his National Trust family membership card in the faces of the staff at the ticket desk  and they began the tour. They had arrived early, almost on the dot of its opening time, thanks to Jack’s careful planning, so they had the place more or less to themselves. This put Jack into a good, but rather proprietorial, mood. In the main hall hung tall, dull portraits of the first Chekes. There was a long oak table and a great fireplace with an elaborate carved overmantel executed in the seventeenth century.  A large central panel on which were displayed the Cheke coat of arms surmounted by an earl’s coronet was surrounded by some smaller panels on which various scenes were carved in relief. These depicted events in the life of the early Chekes and their connection with the law. A magistrate on the bench passed sentence on a cowering criminal; there was a scene of a multiple hanging; and another in which a man was being torn apart, each of his four limbs having been tied to the bridle of a stout pony. A fourth panel depicted the victim tied into a chair while two men busied themselves at a burning brazier, heating irons. Peter and Andrew showed some interest in these tableaux.

The guide book in which Jack had invested offered further information. It read: ‘The arms carved over the fireplace were those given to the Cheke family when the first Earl’s grandfather Sir Deverell Cheke was knighted by Bloody Mary in 1555.  He was Escheator for Norfolk, a lawyer like his son and grandson, and a great hunter of heretics in Mary’s Catholic cause. The family motto chosen by him, ODERINT DUM METUANT, may reflect his policy at the time. It translates as: ‘let them hate me so long as they fear me.’ It would appear that Sir Deverell’s Catholic fervour did not survive the accession the young Queen Elizabeth, with whom he and his sons also found favour.’

There had been no one in the main hall to guide them, so Jack and his family took the initiative and mounted the great oak staircase to the rooms on the first floor. The staircase was remarkable for the Jacobean figures carved on the newel posts, mostly armed men, possibly representing the Nine Worthies, strangely attenuated, but one was carved in the shape of a ‘Green Man’ covered in leaves, shaggy and unnaturally brutal-looking. Another of the figures, Jack noted, must have been replaced in the eighteenth century because the carving was altogether different and more refined. It represented a man, thin to the point of emaciation, in waistcoat and knee breeches, playing the violin. The head, which was bent over the instrument in a pose of furious concentration, was hollow-eyed and cadaverous, almost like a traditional Death figure. Despite the sophistication of its workmanship — perhaps because of it — this was the least pleasing of all the newel figures. At the top of the stairs they embarked upon the main range of rooms on display, and it was here that Maggie began to be seriously embarrassed by her husband.

As is the custom in National Trust houses, each room contained an elderly volunteer of irreproachable respectability whose purpose was to answer questions and ensure that as little damage as possible was done to the objects on display. The problem, as Maggie soon discovered, was that the expertise of these obliging servants of the Trust was no match for their gentility.

The first room they entered was the Green Drawing Room, which was occupied by a woman with iron grey hair and a look of obliging condescension. She ought to have been able to cope with Jack, who took an immediate interest in a glass cabinet containing china.