The Magician by Somerset Maugham

When Alan Moore decided to source all the fictional representations of famous occultist Alesteir Crowley for his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, he soon found that he had his work cut out for him. It seems that the Wickedest Man in the World made quite an impression on any number of writers during his life, many of whom decided to pay him the questionable compliment of including a facsimile of him in their works.
Somerset Maugham famously disliked Crowley upon meeting him, thinking him an outrageous humbug, but clearly found the man interesting enough to base The Magician on him.

Arthur and Margaret are English lovers hanging out with the artsy crowd in Paris during the late belle epoque. Their friends are dandies, bohemians and Impressionists and their lives are the stuff of Renoir paintings. That is, until, one Oliver Haddo comes into their lives. Haddo is an obese and boastful man who is rude and crude, yet not without some wit and charm. Though nobody seems to actually like him, he fascinates all who know him with his tales of travels in the East, and his hunting prowess. His absurd boasts invariably turn out to be true, so people afford him a grudging respect. And his favourite subject of all, and one on which he can converse endlessly, is the occult.

At first Margaret can't stand the man. But after Haddo is humiliated and physically abused by Arthur in their studio home, Haddo begins to use his strange powers to affect a change in her attitude towards him. Her perfect (chaste- and this does become a plot point later on, as well as being an example of prudery) relationship with her fiance Arthur comes to an abrupt end as she embarks on an unthinkable affair with the repulsive Haddo. But what does the magician really want with the beautiful, virginal Margaret?

This is my first Maugham book, so I didn't really know what to expect. He almost disowns it in the introduction, claiming that he doesn't even remember writing it, and that he seems to have been trying out a flowery continental style that he later regretted. His prose is readable but a little stilted. He draws his characters somewhat naively, they're flat characters who are either good or bad. We are constantly told how lovely and beautiful and innocent Margaret is, and this is supposed to make her fall even more tragic. Instead, it's kinda of annoying- it's 'tell- don't- show' storytelling, and there's kind of a lot of it in this book.

It's pretty obvious that Maugham has little real interest in the occult. He sticks in just enough information about magical matters to make the plot work, and in the introduction he muses that he must have spent at least a few days researching it in the British Museum. A few pages of this slim volume are given over to the works of Paracelsus and his ilk. Compare the later work of Dennis Wheatley, another writer who claimed that he had no particular interest in the occult prior to using it as a plot device in his fiction. Someone's been telling porkies, because even the casual reader of The Devil Rides Out can tell that Wheatley must have become an enthusiast at some stage- why else would he have included such a tremendous amount of research?

In any case, the magic that Oliver Haddo concerns himself with is not Satanism nor Spiritualism, but alchemy. In particular, he's interested in creating a homunculus. Unfortunately, not much time is given over to the mechanics of how he intends to achieve this, nor to what end. His motives remain decidedly nebulous.

Instead, much of this slim novel is taken up with the foibles of Arthur and Margaret's friend Susie as they ponder how to combat Haddo, though 'combat' might be too strong a word. There's a lot of crying, a lot of broken hearts, and a lot of cups of tea in the studio, and a lot of inaction. The only character who seems likely to do something is Dr. Porhoet, a kind of Van Helsing character who has lived his life in Alexandria, and so is knowledgable about the occult. Unfortunately, even he's so cowardly that Arthur has to force him to use his knowledge to help out Margaret.

SPOILERS

By the time this group has stopped sniveling and decided to take action, it's too late and Margaret is already dead. They have a poke about Haddo's English mansion, and find a laboratory full of occult paraphernalia. Then, hidden in his attic, they find the most interesting thing in the whole book: Haddo's attempt to re-create that scene from Alien Resurrection, eighty-nine years before it will be released to an uncaring public:

'...but what immediately attracted their attention was a row of those large glass vessels... each was covered with a white cloth. For here too, was a strange mass of flesh, almost as large as a new-born child, but there was in it the beginnings of something ghastly human. It was shaped vaguely like an infant, but the legs were joined together so that it looked like a mummy rolled up in its coverings. There was something that resembled a human head, covered with long golden hair, but it was horrible; it was an uncouth mass, without eyes or nose or mouth. The colour was a sickly pink, and it was almost transparent...'

Arthur removes the coverings from the other jars, and they see

'...abominations so awful that Susie had to clench her fists not to scream. There was one monstrous thing in which the limbs approached nearly to the human. It was extraordinarily heaped up, with fat, tiny arms, little bloated legs, and an absurd squat body...in another the trunk was almost like like that of a human child, except that it was patched strangely with red and grey. But the terror of it was that at the neck it branched hideously, and there were two distinct heads, monstrously large, but duly provided with all their features...'

Well, I can tell you that I woke up a bit after reading that. Unfortunately, Maugham does nothing with this great set-piece. It explains nothing about Haddo's magic, or how he killed Margaret, or what he needed from her.

So is there anything else worth noting about The Magician? The orientalism factor is extremely high. Once again, any character who has been to 'the East' has experienced impossible things and knows that the supernatural is real. Dr. Porhoet speaks to Arthur about his childhood in the 'Arabian Nights' world of Alexandria. When Haddo seduces Margaret, he talks of

'...strange Eastern places where no infidel had been. He spoke of the dawn upon sleeping desolate cities, and the moonlit nights of the desert, of the sunsets with their splendour, and of the crowded streets at noon. He told her of the many-coloured webs and of silken carpets, the glittering steel of armour, and of barbaric, priceless gems. The splendour of the East blinded her eyes. He spoke of frankincense and myrrh, of heavy perfumes of the scent-merchants, and drowsy odours of the Syrian gardens. The fragrance of the East filled her nostrils... it seemed to her that a comparison was drawn for her attention between the narrow round which awaited her as Arthur's wife, and this fair, full existence.'

Yep, once agin those mysterious Easterners are decadent and wondrous, barbaric and yet knowledgable about ancient powers. If only there had been a bit more of this stuff in the book and less of Arthur and his chums faffing about like an far less effective parody of Dr Quincy Morris and co from Dracula, there might have been a happy ending. As it stands, The Magician seems to be a book that Maugham wrote about a subject that he wasn't particularly interested in, and he didn't even put much magic into it anyway.

Fighting Fantasy: Book Outline

I've written before about the Fighting Fantasy series. As limited and childish as the format seems to be, there's something about this stuff that remains fascinating to me. It's something that involves writing, games, world-creating and, usually, horrible creatures and monsters. The possibilities ought to be endless! But in practice, things usually tend to go down the same old route of sub-Tolkien stories involving medieval towns with inns, boring old orcs and dragons, and zero character development.

Lost Games: Body Harvest

I haven't cared too much about gaming since my beloved N64 died many years ago. Being an N64 fan back then was like choosing to support the underdog in a a cup final. It was like hiding members of the Rebel Alliance in your basement while living on a planet where everyone wore stormtrooper helmets. Allright, maybe that's stretching it somewhat. What I'm saying is that public opinion, by and large, held that Playstation was bigger, badder and cooler. These things matter when you're 13. The PS did have rubbish loading times, but that wasn't enough of a handicap, and we knew it. The N64 itself was undeniably childish, awkward to programme for, couldn't do FMV, and had graphics fuzzier than Obama's plan for Iraq.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

I first encountered Jack the Ripper one of those big ol' potboiler book of unexplained mysteries that every kid should have. It had an introduction by Colin Wilson and an article on Nostradamus that scared seven shades of hell out of me by claiming that the world was going to end-

In 1999 and seven months

From the sky shall come the great king of terror

Brr. Those words haunt me still. Thankfully, old Michel's prophecy was off (by at least two years anyway!) and I'm still around, sharing reminisces about childhood trauma. Anyway, the book also featured a terrific article on Jack the Ripper. Ok, the writing was poor, but all the elements were in there- spooky, fog-shrouded Victorian London (which I already knew about because of Dracula and H. G Wells), a mysterious killer who was left-handed and had expert SURGICAL KNOWLEDGE, and sent taunting letters and half-eaten kidneys to the police. What a character!

I think the fact that the Ripper was literate and consciously stoked his fame (vis-a-vis the letters, though I didn't find out till years later that he probably didn't write any of them) made him more interesting to me than boring, sordid, ordinary crime stories (still hate 'em, actually); it made him a character. More Springheel Jack than Jack Jones. And add to this that he was probably a doctor, and an upper-class one at that: I pictured Jack as a flamboyant, skilled and charming madman who wanted to give the world something that would shock and awe them- something the world would never, ever forget.

I still feel that some of this is valid. Look, if you've already decided to be crazy and commit some terrible and motiveless crime (and obviously the best option is not to do that at all), than at least you could do it in a way that's creative and memorable, instead of just seedy and depressing. It's a fact that people are obsessed with war and murder. A guy once cut up five prostitutes, and one hundred years later we're still talking about it. We're fascinated by it. We use it as a window into his time and place, we use it as a jumping-off point to learn about the society he came from. Look at Hitler, to invoke Godwin's law. However terrible he was (in fact, because of how terrible he was), he will always be a million times more fascinating than the good people who struggled against him. We may admire them, but we don't buy books about them and we don't make movies about them.

How many books or movies have you seen about Detective Abberline?

Have you even heard of him?

Ok, I'm going to step down from the soapbox now. The other feature of note about the Unexplained Mysteries book that needs mentioning is the imagery that it used- all taken

from Punch and the Illustrated Police News. The former was a Victorian magazine that is still famous for its satirical cartoons such as dropping the pilot and the Rhodes Colossus. The latter is probably best looked upon as an ancestor of Britain's loathsome tabloid culture. Both featured great line-drawing art that solidified Victorian London in my mind as a dark, sordid place full of horror and mystery.

Around every monochrome corner in this imaginary London, it seemed that serious-faced men in mutton chops found the shattered corpses of fallen women. Elsewhere, mesmerists, mediums and even a few hapless bobbies did their best to track down those responsible. See for yourself:

Little did I know it, but out there waiting for me was From Hell: not only is it probably the most detailed fictionalization of the Whitechapel murders in any medium, but it's also one of the most immersive trips into Victorian London it's possible to take nowadays. This is due in no small part to the art of Eddie Campbell, who clearly based his vision of this period on the kind of lurid art featured above. Alan Moore's extensive research and all-round geniusness don't hurt either. Calling From Hell a comic book is a bit like calling the Sistine Chapel a wallpaper replacement. It's a many-layered piece that manages to comment on much more than just the Ripper murders.

But first thing's first: a little bit of plot. The story kicks off when heir to the British throne Pronce Albert has an affair with a Catholic sweet-shop girl that results in a pregnancy. This alerts us that Moore is using as his base the outlandish theories of one Stephen Knight, writer of Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution. It's an ingeniously complex conspiracy theory that even Moore admits is nonsense. Long story short, in order to avert scandal Queen Victoria herself orders that a small group of prostitutes who have attempted to blackmail certain parties with this information. Unlike much Jack the Ripper fiction (including the movie version), From Hell is decidedly not a whodunnit, as we learn early on who the killer is: Sir William Whitey Gull, physician-in-ordinary to the Queen (it's not a secret, he's on the front of the book for feck's sake).

Soon, Detective Fred Abberline in brought in to deal with the case. He's not happy- after years working in Whitechapel, he thought he'd finally left it behind after being promoted. Now he's back amid the poverty and prostitutes of London's East End. But it seems as if many on in the police force don't particularly want him to track down the killer...

From Hell is a huge book, and using the Ripper murders as a focus, it manages to comment on a great many subjects. Moore gives us one a feeling of what it must have been like 'on the ground' in Victorian London, and many aspects of that society are addressed: the social system, racism, political activism, art and history. A multitude of historical cameos occur- including from Irishmen W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. And if you've ever heard the story about the cursed mummy case in the British Museum, well, there's a little something for you, too.

There's a lot of talk about the occult, too. The narrative kind of stops dead in chapter four as Sir William Gull gives his uncomprehending coachman an occult tour of London. It goes on a bit long, and contains perhaps just a bit too much information for the casual reader (restraint was never one of Moore's strengths), but to those who are interested, it's a masterful piece of work. Using entirely real places and working from photographs, Moore and Campbell provide a wealth of history, both real and imagined, about the various pagan activities that have existed around the British capitol. Even the more outlandish theories have some basis in history, as Moore proves in his wonderful appendix.

Moore seems to have it in for the Masons. Like in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they live up to their legendary status as secret string-pullers in From Hell. Here, Moore provides a fascinatingly thorough look at how such an organization might actually function. Again, he claims that most of the information has been claimed as fact at some time or another, though he was not afraid to bend the facts to fit his story. The Masons are portrayed as an important group to get involved with if one wishes to advance themselves in Victorian London.

All this fanciful stuff aside, From Hell remains an excellent way to begin learning the facts of the true case. The appendix makes clear what is fact and what is fiction, and Moore has attempted to cleave as close to fact as he can (within the boundaries of Knight's outrageous plot). Having faces and characters to attack to the various persons involved with the case is helpful too, and spurs one on to read about the truth (Charles Warren, for example, was a far more interesting character in real life than the book hints at).

There's a whole lot of other great stuff chucked in as well. As Gull descends deeper and deeper into madness during the book, he has hallucinations that link his murders to others committed at different times throughout history. At first it seems like just an oddity, but Moore is working towards some tremendous ideas about the nature of history, paranormal experiences, and murder. Stick with it. And the final appendix is a self-contained comic quite unlike anything you'll ever read. It's a brilliant take-down on the notion that we'll ever really know what happened in Whitechapel in 1888. All the major suspects and theories are looked at in some detail, but the take-home message is that the mentality of those fascinated by the murders is as interesting as the original happenings.

The Ripper murders will obviously continue to fuel books and movies. But I can't see any of them improving on what Moore and Campbell have done.

And to mix and mash influences, I'd like to note that the reason I can still name all five of the 'canonical' victims is not any book, but in fact this.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

Writers seem to love mash-ups set in the Victorian age above all others. Maybe it's because there was such a wealth of crazy characters about just then- both real and fictional. I mean, I can understand the temptation to pit Jack the Ripper, probably the world's most famous criminal villain who never got caught, against his fictional contemporary, Sherlock Homes. But some of the pairings out there are less obvious.
In the ranks of professional fan-fiction, Holmes alone has battled H. G. Well's Martians at least as many times as he has the Whitechapel fiend. Nicholas Meyer is no stranger to the concept- after writing the Seven-Per-Cent Solution in 1976, he wrote the batty movie Time After Time, in which (hold your breath) Jack the Ripper steals H. G. Wells' time machine, and travels to 1970's San Francisco. Well, dammit if there isn't something about this same bunch of characters that makes people want to use them, over and over again, in different combinations.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution has the potential to address some interesting aspects of the Holmes world that Doyle, writing when he did, could not. It takes as its theme a very serious issue which, to us, Doyle merely skips over- Holmes' cocaine habit. Watson, narrating a previously undiscovered memoir, decides that the time has come to correct some of the fictions his previous volumes created as a smokescreen, and reveal the awful truth: Holmes was a serious cocaine addict, at times being lost to dementia and unable to look after himself.

Watson, Mycroft and even Moriarty (!) conspire to bring Holmes, against his will, to Vienna, where he will meet the famous Dr Sigmund Freud, who alone has encountered success in curing cocaine addicts. Various hijinks ensue, resulting in a somewhat boring, tacked-on royal crisis that the group must solve.

There's lots to like about the book. 'Watson' recreates the world of Doyle's characters convincingly well- though he cannily admits in the opening that because he is writing in the evening of his life, we should not expect his style to be exactly as we remembered it. Most of your favourite Holmes characters show up at some point, and Watson really goes out of his way to tie lots of background information from the canon into the story.

However, the book does have an irritating Nannyish feel to it that Doyle never had. Having introducing the heavy topic of drug addiction, Nicholson doesn't seem to know what to do with it, and rarely goes into the horrors overly deeply. Maybe it's just me, but Holmes' withdrawal seems awfully quick, and within no time he's off again, following a new case. It seems to me to be kind of a cheat. I know Watson is a Victorian, but it still feels that this, his shocking 'tell-all', has had a strong dose of not-before-the-children. Holmes, fascinating because he has almost completely surrendered his humanity and emotions to pure deduction, begs lots of questions, but Meyer posits them only to ignore them, as if he doesn't trust the audience to handle a real look into the weaknesses of their hero as a human being instead of an ideal. Certainly, an opportunity to do something new with the character has been lost. Instead, Meyer churns out another serviceable piece of fan-fiction.

Freud too is disappointing. We learn pretty much nothing new about the guy that any average person could tell you- he's Austrian, bearded, and has some funny ideas about psychology. That's about as much depth as the plot goes into. What a waste of such a divisive figure; a man who's ideas shaped how we thought about the mind for a century, only to be debunked and scorned. Instead, Freud is treated as a magic 'get-well' figure who can cure Holmes without clogging up the narrative with little details like how.

Before long, the GreatDetective is back to battling Martians, Dracula Whitechapel murderers and whoever else contemporary writer decide to pair him with.

Yellow Peril- Rising Sun by Michael Crichton

Though the idea of the ‘Yellow Peril’ is basically a 19th century one, and I do love all things Victorian, I’m not going to get into that period of its development right now. To anyone who’s unfamiliar with the term, I’ll direct your attention to the incomparable Jess Nevins once again, as he seems to be the reigning authority on the subject, at least as far as pop-culture goes. Instead, I’m going to talk about a bizarre resurgence of this idea in media approximately one hundred years later. Specifically, I’m going to talk about the late, great Michael Crichton.

The Unappreciated: Music from 'The Elder' by Kiss

As a Kiss record I'd give it a zero. As a bad Genesis record, I'd give it a two.
Gene Simmons

Imagine it's the early 80's, and you've just joined KISS, the hardest rockin' band in the world (stop laughing), you're ready to bust heads and take names, and then you find out that Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons want to release ... a duff 70's-style concept album. Shudder.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

For all that I bang on about Arthur Conan Doyle, I've gotta 'fess up to the fact that I'm not overly enamoured by his most famous fictional son. Mostly, I guess, because I simply have no interest in crime fiction, of which Sherlock Holmes was probably the most perfect kind. The mystery of a whodunnit always seemed rather paltry to me after an early diet of Clarke, Asimov, and of course, a cornucopia of mind-expanding 19th-century horrors. So what if one mammal kills another- boring. And you expect me to care about who did it? Bring on the Martian tripods, the undead half-breeds and the space-travel, please. I do have a passing familliarity with the Holmesian cannon, more out of a feeling of duty to my favourite author than because I've really enjoyed it. Well, I did enjoy The Hound of the Baskervilles, but it felt to me as though Doyle was somehow repressing his own natural urge to bring a wacky supernatural element to the story, just because, in the world of Holmes (though not, apparently, in the real-life world of Doyle), there has to be a more prosaic explanation.

In any case, I've finally gotten around to a viewing of Hollywood's latest tinkering with a classic, and wouldn't you know, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting- perhaps because I'm not too tied to the original source material. Basically, Guy Ritchie's sort-of made another one of his cheeky-chappie Cockney gangster flicks, except it's happening in the 19th century. Well, there's more to it than that, but still. Robert Downey Jr. and J*** L** play Holmes and Watson respectively. Predictably for a Hollywood adaptation, the movie ups the action and dumbs down some of the original material. But is it any good?

Overall, it's a gorgeous-looking romp that's good fun. Honestly, whatever sins Ritchie has committed by making Holmes into a two-fisted, pit-fighting dandy are more than made up for by the sheer liveliness and speed of the story. The relationship between the two leads has been slightly altered- they are now fast-talking buddy-movie leads, but the dialogue is pithy and hilarious throughout, and there are just enough elements from the stories left in, or slightly misused, to make you believe, at least for 100 minutes, that this is a legitimate interpretation of Doyle's character. Holmes is a flamboyant, over-intelligent misfit who doesn't live in or interact very well with the rest of society. Watson is a lady-killer who loses his patience with Holmes's eccentricities at times. And the two of them do have a brotherly affinity for each other in a kind of hetero life-mate kind of way (if not outright bro-ners) that is threatened when Watson gets married. So maybe Ritchie is stretching this stuff, but it's all there in the books.

Another thing Ritchie has done is to remind me why I'm fascinated by Victorian London. He makes it seem so fun (which it obviously was, if you lived in the right part of town). He even drags in an occult conspiracy that rips elements wholesale out of From Hell, whether he knows it or not. It's quite possible that he just reckons you can't tell a gothic London tale without this stuff, but the parallels are striking-

-a Masonic-type society that controls the empire
- secrets of the ancients
-a plan involving the occult architecture of London, including a scene with a giant map

What do you think?

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

It's been a looong time since I've posted on Age of Empire, but I've got a very good excuse: I'm in the jungle. Yep, my lifelong love for tales of adventure in tropical climates and my education in zoology have finally conspired to land me a temporary position working in a small town in the steaming jungles of Central America. I think it's fair to say that my being here probably owes as much to Conan Doyle as it does to Wallace and Darwin- but there's at least one more figure there, lurking at the fringes of my subconscious, who should be named- Colonel Percy Fawcett.

Remember when you were a kid, and you borrowed the same book out of the library time and time again? Well, I recall the public library in Cork City serving me well in that regard, as back in the early 90's, I was consumed by a particular book about monsters. I used to borrow it every week for about a year. I've scoured the net for any info about this tome, but so far I've come to naught. I recall that the cover had a black border, with Monsters written on it in a bloody font, and a painted image of a sea serpent menacing a small boat. Man, there was so much good stuff in that book- my first introduction to the Loch Ness Monster, the Thugee cult, detailed analyses about more obscure monsters such as the Great Grey Man of Ben MacDhui, and of course, traumatising painted images of everything. But this book was also my earliest introduction to one Percy Fawcett.

In Monsters, or whatever it was called, I learned that Europeans sometimes headed into jungles wearing khaki and pith helmets to have Adventures. And Fawcett had the best adventures of them all, for he fought giant snakes while he was at it. The book recounted how an enormous diamond shaped head rose out of the river as Fawcett and his party were canoeing through the jungle. Fawcett emptied his machine gun clip and the enormous snake fell dead. The men guessed the snake to be at at sixty feet, though they had no measuring equipment, and this figure was never taken seriously by the scientific community at home. Somehow, the snake was still alive, and when it began writhing again, they had to scarper. Because they had no evidence, Fawcett became something of a laughing stock for this claim (one he never backed down on, either). This story lodged in my mind next to an early scene in The Lost World, where Professor Challenger loses all evidence of the lost plateau when his canoe tips over, and is unable to prove his findings when he returns to England. The frustration of it all! I'll never forget the black-and-white drawing in Monsters of Fawcett, a steriotypical Victorian explorer, emerging from the jungle and pumping lead into a terrifyingly thick, hooded (unlikely, for an anaconda) serpent towering over him. Man, I wish I could find that book again.

In any case, I was recently lucky enough to come into possession of a book-length rumination of Fawcett's life: The Lost City of Z. And if in my own head Fawcett has always hovered between fact and fiction, what with his Indiana Jones-like career, Professor Challenger-like personality, and larger-than-life tall tales, well in truth that is exactly where he belongs. Grann covers Fawcett's early years in stiff Victorian boarding schools, his military career and early archaeological discoveries in Ceylon, and his first descent into the jungles of South America. Originally feted as a British hero, 'the Livingstone of South America', Fawcett became more and more unstable as he became obsessed with exploring some of the most hostile terrain on earth, eventually being consumed by occult theories. By the time he disappeared forever into the Matto Grosso region of the Amazon while searching for the mythical city of Z in 1925, he had already endured ostracisation by the scientific community.

One point of interest I noted from an in-depth look at Fawcett's life was just how enmeshed he was with the kind of Imperialist adventure fiction that mirrored the realities of his life. Upon returning from his 1911 expedition, he gave a talk in London that was attended by Conan Doyle. When he spoke of the huge, flat-topped plateaus of the jungle, Doyle seized on the idea for his then-nascent dinosaur novel. The two became friends, and corresponded often by letters. The character of John Roxton from The Lost World owes at least as much to Fawcett as he does to Roger Casement. After the First World War, in which he served at the Somme, Fawcett seems to have had a similar breakdown to Doyle. Having seen the utmost of the horrors that man can do to man, both became disenchanted with material things, and turned to spiritualism and the occult for condolence, which probably deepened their friendship. This did not go down too well with the Royal Geographical Society, the austere scientific establishment that had funded Fawcett's expeditions in the past. It was this interest in the occult that eventually led to Fawcett's mania to discover Z.

Incredibly, Fawcett was also friendly with that other great Imperialist writer and inventor of the 'Lost Race' adventure (of which Fawcett was eventually to re-enact in real-life), H. R. Haggard. When Fawcett finally did disappear into the 'green hell' for good, he did so carrying a mysterious stone idol that Haggard has given him. Fawcett believed that it was evidence of a sophisticated civilization existing in the Matto Grosso.

Also interesting is the matter of Fawcett's brother, Edward Douglas Fawcett. An escapee from the stiff-collar world of Victorian high society, Edward became an early convert to Buddhism, and eventually occultism, long before his brother Percy showed much interest. He co-wrote books with the famous Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, and before his brother left England, he was penning Jules Verne-ian adventure fiction such as Swallowed By An Earthquake, which features living dinosaurs, and The Secret of the Desert, in which a world-famous British adventurer disappears in a remote Arabian desert and has to be rescued (good luck finding this book anywhere, but I love that cover). Eerily prescient. It never fails to amaze me just how small the Victorian world really was, and how many amazing people, each fascinating in their own right, knew or influenced one another.

Maybe the biggest character besides Fawcett in this story is the jungle itself, the 'green hell'. Having been to see a little of it myself, I can confirm Fawcett's experiences that it's one of the toughest places on Earth that man ekes out an existence. The climate, the insects and animals all conspire to make it a beautiful but difficult place to be to all but the most stubborn of men- and Fawcett was nothing if not stubborn.

Australian Ghost Stories

So it seems that Australians had something of an inferiority complex when it came to gothic fiction: in the introduction to Australian Ghost Stories, editor James Doig explains that Australia was often not considered ‘old’ enough by its inhabitants to possess the key ingredients for a spooky chill-fest. Largely ignoring the potential of a vast, unexplored frontier land full of deserted mining towns, deserts, jungles and aboriginal folklore (later utilized so effectively in Picnic at Hanging Rock) for weird fiction, Australian writers instead bemoaned the lack of such superficial characteristics as ancient castles or ghostly traditions.

This is not a trivial point- it shows that writers of the 19th and early 20th century (the providence of Wordsworth, who trade exclusively in out-of-copyright material) drew a distinction between European and aboriginal folklore- the former was considered a kind of ‘real’, mature culture, and useful for the plotting of effective stories, while the latter was not. ‘There never were any fauns in the eucalyptus forests, nor any naiads in the running creeks,’ says Rosa Campbell Praed at the beginning of her tale, The Bunyip, almost apologizing for her use of indigenous folklore. ‘No mythological hero left behind him stories of wonder and enchantment. No white man’s hand has carved records of a poetic past on the grey volcanic-looking boulders.’ Thus with a broad stroke, the entire potential of the brooding landscape and wonderful mythology of the Dreamtime is swept aside.

What a waste. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel- read this lengthy quote from one Marcus Clarke:

What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry- Weird Melancholy… The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade… In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, out from the bottomless depth of some lagoon the bunyip rises, and, in form like a monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out of the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.

Wow. What an evocative piece of writing. No master of fantastic fiction could create a more suitable setting for tales of the macabre and the extraordinary. Could anybody still be in doubt that Australia has the chops for gothic/weird fiction? Why has this location not been utilized as the American frontier has been? And yet, what’s disappointing about Australian Ghost Stories is how some of the best stories have very little to do with Australia at all.

Many colonial writers who wished to utilize the gothic style simply set their stories in England, for example the Irish/Australian Mary Fortune, who wrote The White Maniac: A Doctors’ Tale. It’s a typically gothic tale that takes place in England. A doctor becomes obsessed with a family who live in a house in which everything is painted white. They are, of course, keeping a terrible secret, and the twist at the end of the story is very of its time, but entertaining nonetheless. Apart from my disappointment with the lack of ‘Australia-ness’ in the story, it’s one of the best in the collection.

Other Australian writers wrote spooky stories in the manner of English gothic novels without utilizing any real Australian elements. The Mystery Of Major Molineaux by Marcus Clarke is a similar tale that takes place in Australia, not that you’d notice. It’s still a cracking tale with a kind of Le Fanu feel, and it’s one of the spookiest of the lot.

There are entries here that make good use of the Australian culture and countryside: The Haunted Pool, A Haunt of The Jinkarras, Spirit Led, The Bunyip and others do introduce us to ghosts and creatures that haunt the deserts and sweltering frontier towns, but as stories, their plots aren’t crafted quite as well as the gothic shorts mentioned above. Of these, A Strange Goldfield is probably my favourite- it’s an effective story about a bunch of men who discover a ghost town deep in the Australian desert that’s still haunted by its former residents. Another find is The Devil of the Marsh by H. B. Marriott Watson, in which a man keeps a tryst with a mysterious woman in a horrible swamp at night- a perfectly rendered gothic masterpiece. Below is an illustration for this story from the cover of another collection.



The editor clearly had to stretch his definition of an ‘Australian ghost story’ somewhat in order to fill the book- he includes a couple of south-seas tales, as well as a couple of pieces in which mysterious happenings turn out not to be supernatural (no spoilers on which ones they are!) And there is one story in the collection in which a really creepy, effective build-up leads to such an absolutely stupifyingly strange conclusion that it leaves me quite unsure how to rank it.

Overall, the volume is worth looking into. And Wordsworth editions are very attractively priced (usually 3-5 euros in the Republic), so you rarely go wrong with them. This one of varied enough in settings and action that it’s usually entertaining, even if there are few stone-cold classics. I still feel that the Australian location has been rarely used to its full potential (Picnic at Hanging Rock is an exception). I have a feeling that some Australia-related fiction may appear soon at Odds and Ends.

The Walsingham Ghosts: An Update

2020 UPDATE: This is an article from a very long time ago. For ten years, it floated about on the internet, containing a very serious error. Originally, I mistakenly attributed the popularisation of the Walsingham Ghost tale to the famous London journalist W.T. Stead, in his 1891 book Real Ghost Stories. I then proceeded to tell various stories about Stead, including his connection to the infamous British Museum 'cursed mummy-case' and his death on the Titanic.

Whether through sloppy research or a genuine mix-up, my younger self was seriously in error. Stead never wrote about this story at all. The first book to reprint this newspaper story was in fact True Ghost Stories, written in 1915 by Hereward Carrington. Getting the names of these two books mixed-up is understandable, and Stead is not an unlikely source for stories like this. He was a prominent spiritualist, and he did after all write collections of 'true' ghost stories. However, not going back to primary sources to check was poor journalism on my part.

Carrington was an interesting character himself - a British-born investigator of the strange who moved to America at the turn of the 20th century. He was an SPR member, maintained an odd balance between skepticism and belief in mediums, and was probably best-known for investigating and writing about the 'Amherst Mystery' poltergeist case - that of the infamous 'Esther Cox, You Are Mine To Kill' quote.

I’ve written before about the Usborne Supernatural Guides. When I read them now, I’m struck by the lack of verification for each story. Some of them are well-known cases of the paranormal, but many are not. So where did these stories come from? How did the writers decide which ones to include? With this in mind, I attempted to track down the origins of one of the most interesting tales in the Ghosts, Spectres & Haunted Houses book: The tale of the Walsingham Ghosts. Boy, did this one scare me as a kid, especially with those patented Nightmare Fuel Usborne oil painting illustrations. One particular image was so terrifying to me that I learned where it was in the book so that I could skip the page whenever I read it. I still loved the book even though I was scared of it, so this was quite necessary. The story starts when a farmer called Walsingham moves into a new house in Georgia in the Deep South. According to the illustrations, it was a damn-creepy Gothic mansion, to boot. He finds a bunch of bones in the house and throws them out. Locals warn that they may be human remains, but Walsingham’s a tough customer and he doesn’t care, not even when hideous moans and groans begin to ring out through the house. Soon, invisible forces begin to cause havok within the house. The artist chose to portray all of these as being the work of an evil-looking blue spectre. Here he breaks the neck of the family dog. The family has a teenage daughter. One night she’s doing her makeup when she feels an icy-cold hand on her shoulder, but can see no reflection of it in the mirror- it’s that horrible blue man again. An invisible bare-footed man follows Dad around in the garden one day. Now things get serious- another family has come over for a dinner party, but the ghosts ruin things once again. A horrible moan is heard from upstairs, then blood starts to drip from the ceiling onto the dinner table, forming a huge pool. The Walsinghams run upstairs, but there is nothing to be found. They rip up the carpet, but there is no explanation for the blood that continues to drip onto the table. Next day, a reputable chemist examines a sample of the blood and declares that it’s human blood. This entire scene should be stolen to add to the best horror movie script ever. The Walsinghams justifiably abandon the house, and according to locals, it sits empty for some time, as more moaning and screaming echoes from within. Then a guy called Horace Gunn agrees to spend a night in the house for a bet. He experiences a number of horrifying things, climaxing with this horrible image (the eyes, the eyes!)- Brr. I’m glad that’s over. Horace runs from the room, but that old blue man is still hanging around, and ‘icy’ hands grip his ankles, knocking him to the ground and then trying to choke him. By the time he escapes, he’s reportedly wound up in an asylum. Poor, brave Horace Gunn. Hope he won some money for that.

Carrington's book cites, as his source, an article in the San Francisco Examiner. Here's the beginning of it, dated to 29th Nov 1891, and locating the haunted house in the town of Oakville, near Savannah Georgia.

Another newspaper version of the story I turned up comes from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, dated Dec 5th 1891.

These seem to be the earliest available versions of the story.

The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

The plot here is basically the same as in the later movie version: two of Wheatley’s three modern day (by which I mean the 1930s) ‘musketeers’, the aristocratic Duc de Richleau and two-fisted American playboy Rex Van Ryn suspect that their close friend Simon Aron is in a spot of bother. Why? Well, neither of them have seen him for months because he’s been so busy with his new ‘friends’- a dodgy conglomerate of Johnny foreigners and deformed people. Clearly, something is not right. The friends bust Aron right in the middle of an ‘astronomy’ session at his new house, and the Duke forces him to admit that he’s been messing about with ‘black magic.’ Of course, the sacrificial black cockerel and white hen kind of gave the game away.

The rest of the novel details the three chums’ attempts to outwit the grand Epissimus, one Mr. Mocata, and his coven of acolytes. There are some memorable set-pieces, including a car chase through the English countryside, a black Sabbat on Walpurgis Nacht, and a tense night spent within the safety of a specially-prepared pentangle.

I’d sandwich Wheatley somewhere between Iain Flemming and P.G. Wodehouse. He was massively popular in his day for writing page-turning thrillers, but with a very early 20th century British twist. Even though his attitudes have not aged well, his writing certainly has: he uses a very clean, economical style that feels oddly modern, especially compared to other works from this time. In a way, he’s a bit like a 1930s Stephen King- known not only for his gripping books about the supernatural, but also for his smooth, no-nonsense prose style.

Wheatley has been frequently criticized for the racist, elitist elements in his books. In The Devil Rides Out, the Duke and his friends reflect Wheatley’s own sympathetic vision of the European aristocracy that he feels is about to pass into history. In an early chapter, the Duke’s living style is described-

'His forebears had ridden with thirty-two footmen before them, and it caused him considerable regret that modern conditions made it impossible for him to drive in his Hispano with more than one seated beside his chauffeur on the box. Fortunately his resources were considerable and his brain sufficiently astute to make good, in most years, the inroads which the tax collectors made upon them.'

Spoken like a true enemy of socialism (which Wheatley certainly was). We also learn that the Duke-

'-did not subscribe to the canon which has branded ostentation as vulgarity in the last few generations, and robbed nobility of any glamour which it may have possessed in more spacious days.'

All the characters in The Devil Rides Out live in a world that has since passed into memory- a world of footmen, butlers, country houses and private aeroplanes. Of course, for the reader today all this is part of the charm. Wheatley was also an expert on wines, and an inordinate amount of dialogue in the book is spent discussing when and what the characters shall have to drink. When the plot calls for them to fast for a time, one character bitterly laments that he has been denied that most basic and necessary of civilizing things- a fine rose with Morecambe bay prawns.

The racism in the novel is slightly trickier. Non-whites are treated as being inherently different rather than inferior- in fact, it’s mentioned that many Eastern races are formidable in matter of magic because they are more accepting of it.

'Very few white men can really get inside a Negro’s mind and know exactly what he is thinking- and even fewer blacks can appreciate a white’s mentality.'

This is a kind of Orientalism rather than outright racism (though many believe them to be the same). Knowledge of the power of magic is said to be an especially Eastern thing- the Duke learned all he knows of it during his time in the East, and the various magic practitioners have roots in the rituals of Africa, Madagascar and the Deep South. Mocata’s servant is a Malagassy, and he has the power to appear as a terrifying specter in an early chapter.

Over the course of the book, pretty much every supernatural or mystical idea you could think of is mentioned by the Duke, as he’s a shocking know-it-all, and he’s the mouthpiece for Wheatley’s impressive research into the occult. He is liable to bring up any aspect of the paranormal- witches, werewolves, Egyptian mythology- and give it a good airing. I’d imagine this book was the most elaborate and accurate rundown of the occult most people in England at the time were familiar with. Most of these ideas are introduced with astonishing clarity and consistency. Early on, the Duke convinces Rex of the reality of the supernatural using reasoning that is oddly persuasive even today.

The place of religion in The Devil Rides Out is rather unusual- for a novel about ‘satanism’, there’s surprisingly little mention of Christ or God. Wheatley’s characters are up against genuine Dark Forces, and while they do use crucifixes and prayers, the Duke explains that these are merely symbols that have been charged by centuries of powerful spiritual thoughts; had they been in the East, a Hindu swastika or horseshoe symbol would have been just as effective. ‘He who thinks right, lives right,’ he explains to them as they seek sanctuary in the positively charged (if pagan) shrine of Stonehenge, in the absence of any Christian churches. Makes a refreshing change from righteous religious dogma, doesn’t it?

But, as it turns out, thinking and living right are quite conditional. Early on, the Duke twigs that Simon’s new friends are clearly up to no good because they look unsavoury- an Oritental, an albino, etc. Their diabolical celebration of the Sabbat consists of everything any right-thinking 1930s Englishman would consider downright evil- eating and drinking to excess, dancing naked and engaging in a little free love. Wheatley makes much of their unattractiveness when naked- each is bloated or swarthy or just plain old. Compare this to the American Rex, whom the narrator is constantly telling us is tall, strong and totally in tune with Wheatley’s uptight mores.

Despite any such misgivings, it’s a cracking novel, and the abhorrent attitudes remain but a culturally interesting artifact of times gone by. The plot moves quickly, the set-pieces are excellent, and you’re never more than a page or two away from one of De Richleau’s lectures about the occult.

They Had the Appearance of a Man (1)

Christian County, Kentucky, August 1955, 5pm.

The day had gone well: in the morning Jeremiah’s relatives had met him at the train station, and after some shopping, they had escaped the sweltering afternoon heat by ducking in to see a picture at the Alhambra theatre. Maisie had bought the tickets. They were five that day: Jeremiah, his cousin Billy-Glen, his wife Isabel and their little boy Bucky, and old Maisie.

Jeremiah noticed that Maisie hadn’t thought much of the picture.

‘Flying saucers and creatures from outer space-Jesus certainly never mentioned anything about them,’ he had heard her say to Bucky afterwards. ‘Folk from California dream up such things, but they’re a long way from Kentucky. All that sea air must make them soft-headed.’ Bucky had seemed to enjoy the picture, nonetheless.

Now the fields and scattered woodlands of Christian County were spread out before them as they trundled towards home in Billy-Glen’s battered Ford pick-up. The light was fading and the trees on the horizon were just starting to glow with a gold sheen.

Jeremiah was from one of the larger cities in New Jersey; at thirty-two, he was a little younger than his cousin, and had been removed from their branch of the family for many years. His natural home was one where chasms and canyons only existed between skyscrapers, where birds struggled to sing above the sounds of traffic at dawn. The silence here impressed him. His heart lifted, even as the heat smothered him like a closed fist. He tried to alleviate the stuffiness of the truck by opening the window, but the scorching breath that passed for wind in late-summer Kentucky quickly caused him to close it again.

‘Damn, Maisie. This is the life,’ he said, shielding his eyes from the sun. ‘Folk in Christian County don’t know what they have goin’ for themselves. When you were queuing for tickets this afternoon, I stood around in front of the post office. Just waitin’. And good God, every one of the customers who came in during that time knew the stewardess by name. And she knew them too, like as not.’

Maisie smiled. ‘Ain’t nobody in Christian County who doesn’t know everybody else, Jeremiah. And everybody else’s business, too- ‘specially in the case of Irene from the post office.’ She laughed, and then her face tightened. ‘And I’ll thank you not to use the Lord’s name in vain, dear.’

Jeremiah’s spirits fell slightly; he was certainly on a different plane to his rustic relatives. He made a mental note to watch his words more carefully in future. Before he had time to ponder this matter any further, Billy-Glen halted the truck with a jolt.

‘Cattle-gate!’ he yelled. ‘Whose turn is it?’

Seeing an opportunity to prove that he was no soft city-boy, Jeremiah jumped out of the truck before any of the others had an occasion to volunteer. He approached the gate; it was no more than a bunch of logs tied together with barbed wire, but he could see no obvious way to untangle the mess. Fumbling with the latch, he yelled as a blunt blade of wire sank into his skin.

Isabel leapt from the cab and brushed Jeremiah aside. She lifted one of the smaller logs, tracing it around a vertical stump to release the gate.

‘Isabel! Who is that with you?’ An elderly farmer, his face browned and leathery, approached from the field beyond the gate.

‘Nice to see you, Thomas,’ said Isabel. ‘This here’s my relative, Jeremiah.’

The big farmer practically crushed every bone in Jeremiah’s hand with his shake, but his smile was warm and genuine. “Pleased to welcome you to Christian County, friend,’ he said. Then, addressing Maisie in the truck’s cabin, he hollered ‘Hey May! Any news?’

Maisie’s head appeared from the window. ‘Well, Tom, next week’s the county fair. Are your strawberries gonna beat mine this year?’

‘It’s never happened yet.’

‘Then there ain’t no news around here. I’ll see you and your clan this week at church?’

‘As always, Maisie.’

‘Then all’s right with the world. Come on you two, get in the truck. It’s another ways ‘till we get to the farm. So long, Tom.’

As he climbed back inside, it struck Jeremiah that Maisie probably did meet Tom’s clan every week at church. He had a vision of them: two children, clean and polite and wholesome. He’d be willing to bet that Maisie’s strawberries beat Tom’s every year at the county fair, too.

Maisie seemed to know what he was thinking. ‘This family’s been my responsibility for nearly forty years, Jeremiah,’ she said. ‘I see to it that the little ones- little Bucky here, that is- get to grow up in a world where people know what’s right and what’s wrong. I don’t see why we need any change, when we’ve already got God and the Ten Commandments to live by. So, as far as I’m concerned, no news is good news.’

The truck rumbled on. Cornfields, bleached brown and gold by the merciless sun, gave way to a thick forest of oak where each tree seemed to grasp for its neighbour across the road. The road itself soon became little more than a dirt-track. Jeremiah was trying to work out how long it had been since they had passed another vehicle (certainly an hour at least) when the farmhouse came into view.

***

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

The things that scared us as children tend to stick with us all our lives; just ask the good people at Kindertrauma. Many adults retain a fascination for things such as the Daleks and Pennywise the clown, to name two common examples.

But there are other, more subtle terrors. I read The Kraken Wakes when I was about 12 (in a lovely 1950’s penguin edition, too), and didn’t think it was too scary. Aliens, end of the world- I’d heard it all many times before. In this case, the unseen creatures cause mankind trouble on a scale that is simply geographic- they melt the ice-caps and flood the world.

But shortly after reading it I fell into a strong flu, during which I experienced intense, Kraken Wakes- influenced fever dreams. To anyone who’s never had a fever dream, it’s something like having dreams when you’re awake, and also something like an unpredictable bad-trip. My dreams revolved around floods and earthquakes, and they were horribly real. So, even though I thought the book was none too scary, it obviously resonated with me subconsciously on some level. Ever since, I’ve associated that terrible time with Wyndham’s book, perhaps affording it a gravitas far above its actual content.

Returning to the book many years later, how does it hold up?

Let’s have a little background on Wyndham first. He’s kind of like a very 1950’s version of H. G. Wells: an Englishman, he wrote some great high-concept science-fiction, and he wasn’t shy about the kind of destruction he wreaked on the world in his stories. Like Wells, Wyndham’s novels feel like big-budget summer blockbusters. His most famous novel, Day of the Triffids, is a classic that’s right up there with anything Wells wrote.

Even though Wells was writing fifty years earlier, during the prudish Victorian era, today it’s Wyndham who comes across as more of a stereotypical stiff-upper-lipped Englishman. Wells was originally working class, and had lots of politically radical ideas (he was a thumping great socialist, and was in favour of a world government). Wynhdam, on the other hand, never lets us forget his middle-class origins in his books, and is frequently criticized for this.

The most common dismissal of Wyndham is that his plots are ‘cozy catastrophes’. As far as I can see, this accusation results largely from two (broadly similar) books- Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes. In both books, terrible circumstances cause London (read: society) to break down, and though death, destruction and horror are all around (and Wyndham is not stingy with these themes), a decidedly middle-class hero will survive the catastrophe without much physical or emotional trauma. He will pick up a pretty girl somewhere along the way, and they will eventually make a new life for themselves in some quiet part of the country- a sort of simple-life pastoral paradise.

While this is broadly accurate for both books, and while they may be read as a kind of simplistic middle-class wish-fulfillment fantasy, this view really ignores many of the novels’ unsavoury elements.

In Triffids, suicide and depression surround the hero. He genuinely needs to find the strength within himself to survive this nightmare world. He learns constantly that in this new world, the morals and scruples of the old one are the first casualty. Is it right to smash a shop window to steal food? He does it. Is it right to help a blind person to commit suicide? He does it. Is it right to live in a society where everyone gets to impregnate your girlfriend for the continuation of the human race? Now wait just a minute…

Triffids was published in 1951, and was a huge hit. Wyndham decided that he was onto a good thing, so as early as 1953 he released the broadly similar Kraken Wakes.

Kraken begins as the narrator and his wife are among the first humans to notice the falling of unexplained ‘fireballs’ into the sea. It’s treated as a kind of anomalous phenomenon, similar to the then-current flying saucer craze. Later, characters theorize that it’s in fact the beginning of an invasion by some intelligence from a high-pressure world (Neptune and Jupiter are posited, but we never find out for sure). Over the course of several months and years, it becomes clear that something has taken up residence in the deeps of the world’s oceans. First deep-sea scientific expeditions, and then commercial ships become targeted by these intelligences. Worldwide sea travel ceases (in a move eerily similar to the Europe-wide lack of air travel that’s happening now as a result of that Iceland volcano business). And after that, things really get strange…

When Kraken works, it’s really creepy. I think that part of the reason I’ve always been fascinated by it is that we never find out a damn thing about those underwater critters. They might not even be aliens, they might just be Earth intelligences that have lain dormant until the 1950s. All we do know about them is that they like to screw with us. Some of the violence of the sea-disasters in the first half of the book is quite astonishing- hundreds and hundreds of people perish horribly (and off-screen, too). The horror is rarely in the protagonists’ faces the way it is in Triffids- it’s more of a paranoia thing: the thought that mankind has lost his method of long-term travel is oddly creepy.

And when the creatures do begin to show up on our beaches, they do so in a manner that answers no questions about their nature.

There are problems with the book, mostly linked to the ‘humour’. There’s loads of running jokes about how the narrator’s wife wears the trousers in the marriage, and they feel even more out of place than the bizarre joke about Josella’s book in Triffids. There’s also a joke about people confusing the narrator’s company, the fictional EBC, with the real-life BBC. In case you’re wondering, EBC stands for ‘English Broadcasting Company’.

There are tonnes of 1950s artifacts in the book- aside from the obligatory Red Scare scenes, both Britain and the US seem to lob nuclear bombs about quite cheerfully in an attempt to wipe out the undersea menace. And of course, it wouldn’t be Wyndham without his trademark 1950s British-ness; it’s almost impossible to read his prose without hearing someone with the received pronunciation speak it- and you know that’s worth something.

Pro.

Centurion

The howl rang out twice again that night, so that even the most battle-hardened legionaries began to fear what lay beyond the confines of the camp, where the forest grew thick and gnarled and brooding.

***

Dawn found Tacitus standing red-eyed before his tent. He pulled his wolfskin tunic closer about his body; the weak morning rays did little to dispel the chill.

'Did you sleep, domine?' The use of the title for addressing a superior indicated formality, but there was no disguising the warmth of the voice. Tacitus turned to see the squat form of Jerius, the lieutenant. His metal armour winked in the sun as he walked from his tent.

'In this place? No. Not for these three nights past. My eyes grow sunken and my mind is clouded. It is as if this excursion is but some kind of dream- I feel as though at any moment I will wake to find that I am in Nimes, or Carthage, or even in my villa in distant Rome… Anywhere but in this strange place.'

Jerius' eyes widened. His mouth struggled to express an appropriate sentiment.

'You are surprised at my frankness, Jerius?'

'Domine- yes, domine. That is, I mean-'

'There is no need, old friend.' Tacitus smiled. 'You and I have been through too much together for that. If I cannot confide in you, then I have no friend within several thousand miles of here, save those insolent tacticians in Brittania who sent me here, surely plotting my demise. If that be the case, I might add, then Jupiter help me.'

Jerius visibly relaxed. 'Sir, if I may also be frank, I had noticed that this place has been affecting you. I mean, how could it not? The isolation; the cold; and now these terrifying sounds during the hours of darkness…' A moment of silence, as the portly lieutenant debated the merits of revealing more. 'To me… it is as if we have wandered into the realm of myth- as if this island of Hibernia were in truth one of the fabled isles- Hy-Brasil, or the Ultima Thule spoken of by the Greek, Pytheas.'

Tacitus idled the grass with his foot. The standard soldier's sandal was certainly not adequate this far in the temperate north, he thought. 'The Greek is known to have lied about his travels, Jerius. Do not be tempted to compare his flights of fancy with… our situation here.' It was the standard dismissal of Greek achievements that Tacitus had been taught since childhood, but on this particular morning his voice lacked conviction. Perhaps this wind-swept isle was getting to him.

Looking back at the ranks of tents that comprised his century's castra, or temporary camp, Tacitus' mind drifted back to the larger camp in Brittania where his fate had been sealed. That camp had been large and well provisioned, with over one hundred centuries of legionaries being drilled every day in anticipation of the campaign to come…

***

It had been warm inside the tent. The smell of tanned hide mingled with the aroma of sweat as three men perspired, secretly deciding the fate of this remote outpost of the empire.

'We simply cannot tolerate any further excursions by the Celts into our affairs here. Trade with the local tribes will go to Hades if we cannot guarantee the safe passage of goods through our territories. An armed mission to Hibernia is the only answer.' That was Lupus, his small piggy eyes glinting in the darkness of the tent.

'Of course, we cannot spare more than a single century for this outing. But eighty men should be enough to make our presence felt on that forsaken island. After all, what are those savages next to our highly-trained soldiers?' Thus spoke Maximus, his bony fingers twitching incessantly as he did so.

Lupus appeared so uncomfortable in the stifling heat that Tacitus wondered how he ever had tolerated the weather in their native Italy. 'It occurs to me,' he spoke, his face shiny with sweat, 'that we have but one man present who could do justice to such a task- the hero of Carthage, Gregorius Tacitus.'

Tacitus' blood ran cold. His fame since his North African heroics had caused him trouble on occasion in the past, but this mission to Hibernia struck him as some kind of plot. 'With all due respect, domines,' he began, 'a single century seems a trifle meager for the task at hand. The Celts-'

'The Celts are savages, and will be planned against as such,' said Maximus irritably. Tacitus growled beneath his breath- Maximus had not been present at the ambushes in north Alba, where the Hibernian Celts had wiped out entire garrisons. He remembered all too well the stark, terrifying figures emerging from the night as though they were part of it, tall and hairy maniacs who butchered trained soldiers as expertly as would a gladiator in the coliseum. But the moment had passed- Maximus and Lupus were already planning his next brush with the Hibernian hordes, and any further protesting would be interpreted as insubordination.

***

'It will be glorious, don't you think?' Tacitus' reminiscing was broken by the sudden appearance of Julius Agricola. 'When we have tamed this place as we have done with Brittania, the entire Northern Isles will stand as a testament to the power of Rome.' Agricola, a centurion himself, was as dark and intense as Tacitus was open and fair. His intrusion threw Jerius into a brief confusion; the short lieutenent became embarrassed and left, returning to his tent mumbling an excuse about starting breakfast.

'Imagine it, Tacitus,' continued Agricola, 'forests cleared, straight roads running the length of the island, and planned towns- all in territory which previously only nature had claimed as her own.' His tanned face flashed a smile in which there was no joy.

But by now the sun was high in the sky, and it was becoming more difficult to hide the particulars of their true situation. The castra, settled uneasily between the sea and the forest, was but a fly on the lion's lip of this impenetrable, unknown land. Besides the vague records of the Greek travelers from centuries ago, no civilized men had ever come this far northwest, and Tacitus was becoming painfully aware of their isolation. Now, looking at the green hell that lay before him, he felt as though the forest would swallow him up.

Jupiter, he thought, no empire will again try to tame this heathen land.

Our Lady's Hospital.

I went up the Lee Road a friend for to see,
They call it the mad house in Cork by the Lee.
But when I got up there the truth I do tell
They had the poor bugger locked up in a cell.
Johnny Jump Up, Cork folk song.

Christ, and people sometimes ask why I'm fascinated by Victorian shit- growing up in a town where this Gothic monstrosity glowers down upon all and sundry from atop its gloomy hill! If ever there was a place that was haunted, it's Our Lady's Hospital on the Lee Road. It's a (partly abandoned) real-life Victorian asylum complete with sinister towers, belfries and circling ravens. Even on a bright cheerful morning, this place oozes a delicious malevolence. It's positively eldritch, as Lovecraft would say (ever notice how the word eldritch is only ever used when talking about Lovecraft?). Our Lady's is famously the longest building in Ireland, at nearly a mile in length. Cork people often refer to the entire structure as St. Anne's, and they also tend not to diffrentiate between the grey section, Our Lady's (which is today partly renovated as apartments) and the red section, St. Kevin's, which is out-and-out abandoned.

The grey part of the building (the long part) was built in 1852 as Eglinton Lunatic Asylum, a Gothic-style building. It is situated atop the steep hill that runs alongside the Lee Road. From the asylum, there is a great view of the south side of the city. It continued to operate as an asylum under several different names before closing following almost a century of damning reports regarding the care of its patients. Today, about two thirds of it have been renovated as Atkins Hall.


You can see here where the disused wing begins...







This is St. Kevin's, the completely abandoned building. This is as close as I got on this occasion...