Five Fathoms of Pearls by James H. Beard (Unknown, December 1939) opens with Peter Hume staring at a wall in his house as if he can see something there. He subsequently goes out and rides through the wind and rain and dark to an inn, where he finds a cousin of his called Allen Dorn. Hume tells Dorn to return to the house with him, a property that was once owned by a witch, Elsie Dorn, a grandmother to both men.
Inside the house Dorn sees that the wall which Hume was staring at has a window which shows a sundial in the distance illuminated by moonlight—quite a different view from the other window in the room that shows the rain that they have just ridden through. While all this is unfolding we also learn about (a) a ship that the cousins pirated for gold and whose skipper they drowned, (b) a note from Grandmother Elsie about a chest at the foot of a sundial containing a string of pearls five fathoms long, and (c) instructions to look after a relative called Harriet Dorn, or suffer her vengeance (needless to say, neither of the men have done so).
The final part of the story sees the two climb through the window to get the chest but, during their journey, they see two dead girls from the ship pass by on a lane before seeing the cutlass wearing captain. The captain stares at the men but is scared off by the returning girls. By now the men have recovered the pearls and flee when the girls approach and touch them. Dorn falls but Hume makes it to the window. Then (spoiler), Dorn shoots Hume so he won’t be stranded outside the window. When Dorn reaches the window Hume uses his remaining strength to stab him.
There are too many moving parts here for such a short story (the pirating of the ship, the supernatural window, Harriet Dorn, etc.), and the ending is too abrupt. I’d also add that the men’s downfall is down to their own distrust and has little to do with the vengeful dead grandmother.
* (Mediocre). 3,900 words. Story link.
Bloody Man by Avram Davidson
Bloody Man by Avram Davidson (Fantastic, August 1976) begins with Jack Limekiller, a Canadian ex-pat living in British Hidalgo (British Honduras), asking Archbishop Le Beau, who is scaling fish, for work:
“They tell me . . . ” Limekiller hesitated, briefly. Was it My Lord? Your Lordship? Or was it . . . it was, wasn’t it . . . Your Grace?
Some saints levitate. Some are telepathic. It was widely said and widely believed that William Constance Christian Le Beau was a saint.
“Just ‘Archbishop’ will do, Mr. Limekiller,” the old man said, without looking up. Scrip . . . scrop . . . scrip. . . Jack found himself looking covertly around. Perhaps for loaves.
“Ah . . . thank you, sir . . . Archbishop. . . . they tell me that I might be able to pick up a charter for my boat. Moving building supplies, I understand. Down to Curasow Cove? For a bungalow you want built?”
Flop went the fish into the basket. p. 6
After receiving the Archbishop’s agreement and a letter of introduction, Limekiller sets about obtaining the materials he requires. He soon finds out, however, that there aren’t any supplies in sleepy Point Pleasaunce, so his travels take around the town and beyond, which provides the reader with a number of delightful picture-postcard descriptions of the places he visits and the people he meets:
Well, there was the Royal Telegraphy. Her Majesty’s Government did not exactly go to much effort to advertise the fact that there was, but Limekiller had somehow found the fact out. The service was located in two bare rooms upstairs off an alley near the old Rice Mill Wharf, where an elderly gentleman wrote down incoming messages in a truly beautiful Spencerian hand. . . . or maybe it was Copperplate. . . . or Chancery. . . . or Volapiik. What the Hell. It was beautiful. It was, in fact, so beautiful that it seemed cavalier to complain that the elderly gentleman was exceedingly deaf, and that, perhaps in consequence, his messages did not always make the most perfect sense.
Gambling that the same conditions did not obtain at the Royal Telegraphy Office in Port Caroline, Limekiller sent off several wires, advising the Carolinian entrepreneurs what he wanted to buy, and that he was coming in person to buy it.
“How soon will these go off?” he asked the aged telegrapher.
“Yes, that is what I heard myself, sir. They say the estate is settle, sir. After ahl these years.” And he shook his head and he smiled a gentle smile of wonder. p. 11
Stepping out into the pre-dawn was like stepping into a clean, cool pool. Already, at that hour, people were about . . . grave, silent, polite. . . . the baker setting the fires, the fisherman already returning with their small catch. The sun climbed, very tentatively, to the edge of the horizon. For a moment, it hesitated. Then, all at once, two things happened. The national radio system, which had gone off the air at ten the night before, suddenly awoke into Sound. Radios were either dead silent or at full-shout. In one instant, every radio in Port Caroline, and in the greater Port Caroline Area, roared into life. And at the same moment, the sun, suddenly aware that there was nothing to oppose it, shot up from the sea and smote the land with a blast of heat. p. 17
Most of the first part of the story is travelogue like the above, but Limekiller eventually begins to hear mentions and rumours of a ghostly mystery, the “Bloody Man” of the tale:
“An’ one day, me see some-teeng, mon, me see some-teeng hawreed. Me di see eet, mon. Me di see di bloody mon—”
“Hush up you mout’,” said Piggott. But the other, a much older fellow, did not hear, perhaps, or did not care, perhaps. “Me di see di blooddee mon. Me di see he, ah White-MON, ahl cot een pieces ahn ahl blood-dee. Wahn, two, t’ree, de pieces ahv heem dey ahl come togeddah. De mon stahn op befah me, mon. He stahn ahp befah me. Ahl bot wahn piece, mon. He no hahv wahn piece een he side, mon. He side gape, mon, gape open. Eet bleed, mon. Eet BLEED!”
And now other faces than the proprietor’s were turned to the narrator.
“Hush up you mout’, mon!” other voices said, gruff.
Brown man, glass of brown rum in his brown hand. Sweat on his face. Voice rising. “Ahn so me di know, mon. Me di know who eet ees, mon. Eet ees de blood-dee Cop-tain. Eet ees Cop-tain Blood!” p. 15
This supernatural thread slowly develops through Limekiller’s subsequent trip down to Curasow Cove with his shipment—he witnesses a fishing grounds dispute between the locals and Arawak tribesmen from the south, displaced because of sightings of the apparition—and then Limekiller himself sees the Bloody Man when his boat enters a supernatural mist. Then (spoiler) after talking to Harlow, one of the locals who provides information about who the apparition might be (there is talk of Blackbeard and the Flying Dutchman, etc.), Limekiller asks the Archbishop for help in laying the ghost to rest.
In the climactic scene, and after fighting off the Fallen (who summon waterspouts and sharks), the Archbishop administers the sacrament to the Bloody Man and he disappears.
There is an interesting historical postscript where the ghost is revealed as Captain Cook (who met his death in Hawaii, thousand of miles away), and whose ghost has supposedly returned to the area because of a light-hearted oath made by Cook before his death.
I really enjoyed the wonderful description and colourful detail of this story (it is probably my favourite of the ‘Limekiller’ series1) but I suspect the average genre reader’s enjoyment will depend on whether they take to the sprawling travelogue that occurs before the fantasy elements come to the fore.
**** (Very Good). 19,250 words. Story link. Book purchase link UK/USA.
1. The ‘Jack Limekiller’ series of stories (which were later collected into a book) at ISFDB.
Spirit Level by John Kessel
Spirit Level by John Kessel (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Michael, the story’s middle-aged and maritally separated narrator, waking in his parents’ house in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. On his way he sees the ghost of his wife Lauren—who asks why he left her after twenty-eight years, and demands the truth. She then walks into the living room and disappears:
He touched his hand to his head. He took a deep breath.
Yes, he was awake. He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, then returned to the bedroom.
He told himself it was some vivid fantasy, but lying on the air mattress, hearing the furnace turn on and then off, he felt a bone-deep uneasiness. Lauren was not dead. She was alive and living in the house they had lived in for the last twenty years. p. 53
The rest of the story sees Michael haunted by the ghosts of other failed or troubled relationships: the first is his (dead) father, who ends up striking Michael with a spirit level; then his (live) teenage son Trevor, whose ghost visits just after Michael has sex with his current girlfriend, says, “I smell her on you . . . You stink of her” before fleeing.
Alongside these encounters we get more backstory about the failure of Michael’s marriage and his unhappy relationship with his father, and we also come to see that most of Michael’s relationships are unsuccessful (we see this at his work, with his current girlfriend, and with the care staff where his senile mother lives—and whom he hardly ever sees). We begin to realise that Michael is part of the problem, something put in sharp focus when he dumps on his girlfriend Donna about a troubling visit to his mother:
Donna sighed. “I think you need to ask yourself a few questions, Michael. Is this about your mother or is it about you? If you can’t stop beating yourself about the head and shoulders, you shouldn’t expect someone else to stop you. You certainly shouldn’t expect them to give you sympathy for something you’re doing to yourself. Your mother’s situation is tragic, but it’s what happens. If you wanted to visit her more, you would, though I doubt it would make much difference.”
“That’s cold.”
“I don’t mean to be cold. You know I like you. You’re not a bad guy. But I can’t solve your problems for you. I’m sorry about your mother. At least you can be with her at the end, if you want to be.”
He looked her in the eyes; she took a sip of coffee.
“I don’t think we ought to keep seeing each other,” Donna said. p. 72
Eventually, Michael’s late-life crisis worsens (as well as the previous events, he starts taking drugs he has found in his parent’s home), and (spoiler) the climactic scene sees him entering his parents’ house to find himself in his childhood home, his mother still in her mid-thirties, and his father’s spirit-level lying beside an unfinished doorway (the spirit level is obviously some sort of symbol, as it appears on a number of occasions throughout the story).
This is fundamentally a literary short story about late life problems and angst (the spirit level, the references to Moby Dick, etc.) with a few fantasy tropes thrown in. For the most part this works pretty well—there is a lot of good observational writing—but the problem the story has is that the genre features are not used consistently, i.e. we go from ghostly apparitions to an ending where the protagonist is apparently transported back in time to his childhood home. This (perhaps dying fantasy) makes for a dissonant and inconsistent ending (I can see why he may want to return to when he was younger and start over, but why to his parents? And how does this ending flow from ghostly apparitions?)
I think this piece will mostly appeal to males in later life, who may recognise some of the situations and appreciate the story’s insights1—but, even if the ending doesn’t throw them, they may tire of a disgruntled protagonist who seems to be unable to get out of his own way.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,700 words.
1. Re the story’s observations, a couple of passages that struck me:
Nobody had a soul, Michael knew. All you had was the face you prepared to show to other people. Your character was a performance, a persona you put on; by the time you were a teenager, under the pressure of other people’s expectations, you worked out who you were supposed to be. You lived your invented self to the point where you imagined that was who you were. Everybody thought they knew you—you thought you knew yourself. Until something happened, like Michael walking out on Lauren, to reveal that there was nothing inside you but a few desires and an echo chamber. p. 71
He couldn’t blame anybody, and he realized that the sadness overwhelming him was not a result of things he had done or failed to do. It was the result of the simple passage of time. Things changed. When you were young, you thought the past could be recovered, or if not, corrected by the future. When you were old, the silent, inexorable slide of now into then, and its associated accumulation of losses, small and large, crushed any future. p. 76
Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo
Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo (The Dark #69, February 2021)1 opens with Ana driving to a park in Canada, during which she recalls (a) her arrival in the country as the child of West Indian immigrants, (b) her early days in school, and (c) the birth of her sister Sab. Ana then recalls a childhood family camping trip where her younger sister disappeared during the night (Sab left the tent—against Ana’s wishes—with Greg, a boy she had been playing with earlier that day). Sab was never seen again, nor was the boy—and there was no evidence he had ever been at the campsite.
The story then moves forward in time to when Ana has grown up, her father has died, and her mother is in a care home. During one of Ana’s visits to see her mother, the old woman talks about the disappearance of Sab and shows Ana a picture of a boy that looks like Greg—it materialises that Greg was a cousin of Ana’s mother who drowned back in the West Indies in 1962 when Ana’s mother wanted to go swimming in a flooded river. She tells Ana, “‘dis go haunt you here.’ You can’t outrun the past, Ana, even if it’s dead and drowned in another country.”
The story closes with Ana going back to the camp site. Then (spoiler), on the second night, a ghostly Sab appears and tells Ana to follow her. They go to a cave, where Ana finds Sab’s remains and later lies down beside her bones. The story closes with Ana feeling a dense cold, and something gripping her throat.
This is reasonably well told, but it seems to be more an autobiographical slice-of-life than a ghost story (the immigrant background, the family accounts, and the dysfunctional relationship with her sister, etc.). I’d also add that the internal logic of the haunting doesn’t really convince: I can see why Greg would kill the mother or Sab for revenge, but why would Sab lead Ana to the same fate given it was her own childhood stupidity and wilfulness that got her killed?
Finally, there are one or two sentences or word choices that could do with being changed, e.g. the very clunky first sentence:
The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound.
What’s a “Laurentian Plateau”? Do wounds become “dessicated”? Why distract your reader with this kind of thing? Wouldn’t, “The highway to the campground cuts through the plateau like an old wound” be a simpler and more apt beginning (the story is in large part about an old wound)?
** (Average). 5,950 words. Story link.
1. This was a 2022 Nebula Award finalist in the short story category. Another mystifying choice.
The Breakdown by Marjorie Bowen
The Breakdown by Marjorie Bowen (Kecksies and Other Twilight Tales, 1976) sees a young man called Murdoch get off an unserviceable train. Then, rather than wait for a conveyance to his acquaintance’s house, he decides to walk. During his journey we find out that part of the reason for Murdoch’s visit is that his friend owns a portrait of a young woman who Murdoch is attracted to—although she is long dead.
Later, the winter weather worsens, and Murdcoch comes upon a spooky house called The Wishing Inn. Murdoch decides to stay the night and, when he asks the proprietor about the inn’s name, he is told that wishes come true on Xmas Eve. Sure enough, the woman in the portrait arrives at the inn looking for her lover.
Murdoch speaks to her, and goes to help her look, and they later end up in a carriage riding to an unknown location. Then Murdoch realises she is not really there and jumps out. He ends up in a village graveyard, and stumbles upon the woman and her lover’s gravestone.
Fortunately, Murdoch’s friend is at the church, and takes him home. The next day Murdoch gets told the story of the woman and her lover. The final twist comes when the narrator meets the acquaintance’s sister—who looks like the woman in the portrait.
This isn’t bad but it’s a contrived sequence of spooky events that you can mostly see coming—with a convenient co-incidence for an ending.
* (Mediocre). 3,200 words.