AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
I spent last weekend in the cottage of a barmy friend not far from Oxford. I arrived very late at night and was immediately im- pressed by the peace and comfort of it: the flames of the log fire flickered round a soot- encrusted pothook, the heavy carved cupboards caught the firelight and threw moving shadows on the rough plaster ceiling, there were beams and old books and red curtains, and it was altogether a perfect refuge from the more dis- tressing aspects of twentieth century life. It was not until about half-past one in the morn- ing that there was any lull in the enthusiastic exchange of seamy anecdote and nostalgic reminiscence, as we had not seen each other for some time. It was then that I became aware of a strange succession of noises in the wood- work of the cottage, not unlike someone tip- toeing about on a creaking floor.
I paid no great attention to it at first, as they say in the tales of mystery and suspense, but then my friend remarked on it himself, saying that it was the noisiest house he had ever lived in, and that it had a bad reputation in the village. The housekeeper, for instance, would not come here after nightfall. I drew comfort from the heat of the log fire, listened to the intermittent creaking, and tried to find out why the housekeeper would not come here after nightfall. He refused, however, to tell me any more, looking mysterious in a slightly barmy but good-natured way, and suggested that as I was tired I might like to go to bed.
My room was up a narrow wooden flight of stairs, at the end of a short passage with a sloping floor. The door frame had become warped as well, so that the door no longer quite fitted, and the bedroom floor sloped down- wards towards one corner. As far as I could see in the light from the passage, the room contained an enormous wardrobe with a shield- shaped mirror, leaning to one side because of the floor and blocking an older door with a wooden latch in the corner, an oil painting of two rather plain girls, dressed in the style of about 1810, one in a long white dress and one in a long black dress, a black chest of drawers with an oval mirror, and a rather high bed in the opposite corner to the wardrobe and the concealed door. My friend explained that the electricity did not work in that room, lit a candle by the bed, said goodnight and closed the door behind him.
I read for some time, occasionally looking across at the shield-shaped mirror, where the reflection of the candle-lit room wavered and swayed, or at the blocked-up door, and listened intently for the next creak. Eventually I blew the candle out. The odd thing about such a situation, rich as it was in comic possibilities and manifest absurdities, was that the ancient fear of the unknown still to some extent asserted itself. Perhaps it is only because I ain a weedy and uncourageous person, lacking in the fibre necessary to psychic researchers who are prepared to sit for hours on end in ruined houses with Geiger counters and infra- red cameras waiting to record the appearance of the Headless Horror. But it seemed to be a fear beyond the control of the imagination—flimsy apparitions in Elizabethan costume with bale- ful eyes always appear rather ridiculous when transferred from an individual's imagination to paper, and anyway have little to do with the experience itself as generally described—and certainly beyond the control of the wild en- thusiastic courage required for winning the Victoria Cross. It was also clearly beyond the control of reason.
To the reasonable man most ghost stories, although they may provide from time to time an agreeable tingle of excitement, have some- thing inherently comic about them. Scottish tales in which phantom pipers are heard playing dismally in underground dungeons, having dis- appeared centuries before leaving behind them only a trembling wee dog—all its hair had fallen out and it never barked again—or stories of horrid spectres so terrifying that those who see them are struck dead with shock and have to have their fingers broken to release their grip on the bannisters, all share a common element of exaggeration, so that they have, in order to be effective, to be read out in a melodramatic Scots accent or in some other ham voice. Like the drawings of men sitting up in bed with their eyes standing out like billiard balls and their hair flying upwards as in a wind tunnel, they fail to convey the general experience of ghosts, the vague uneasiness, the very rare moment when the skin creeps on the back of the neck.
To make matters worse, our reason in the main accepts the existence of some forms of ghostly activity—most intelligent people believe in poltergeists and things that go bump in the night even if they refuse to believe in the Head- less Horror—and it is therefore more con- cerned with explaining the phenomenon than with directly dismissing it. And even if the so far inexplicable happenings are eventually proved beyond doubt to be the effect of some kind of deposit of still-active energy left be- hind by the dead and only picked up by a sensitive living receiver, our fear of what un- known horrors must have taken place in the past will still be almost as great as our fear of what unknown horrors may be happening in the present. If, on the other hand, it is proved that the force tapping the table really is the surviving intelligent spirit of a corpse rotting somewhere in the earth we tread on, then a ghastly gulf inevitably opens under the feet of the complacent atheist, and probably under the feet of most complacent Christians. Understandably, however, these thoughts soon lulled me asleep. In the morning my barmy friend seemed much less mysterious about the whole business, expressing the hope that I had spent a peaceful night and telling me he thought the creaking sounds were probably due to the expansion and contraction of the wood when the hot water ran through the pipes. Per- haps he is not quite so barmy as once I thought
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