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That's at the end. You'll be there soon
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ashlyme: The Cicerones (2002). I have not read the original story by Robert Aickman, but it reminds me once again that I should know more of his work than "The Stains," much as I love it. This one is an even more indirect narrative, barely more than a suggestive sketch of encounters, but it chills.
Mark Gatiss looks terrible in a pencil moustache, but it suits his English traveler1 with his Brylcreemed hair and his spotted scarf, his Baedeker and his insistence on getting into the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in time to see its famous painting of Lazarus. The time is unspecified, as is the setting—perhaps mid-century, as perhaps somewhere in Central Europe. (The sign on the cathedral door appears to be written in Czech.) Patrick Leigh Fermor might have walked through this country on his way to Constantinople, but he would have known at least a few words of the language and he wouldn't have treated an ancient sacred place as just one more box to tick on his tourist's progress. He would have said a prayer for the young couple on the train (her so heavily pregnant, fingers running a constant rosary). Gatiss' traveler doesn't know what to do with people. His small talk is evasive and unconvincing, his smile an embarrassed grimace. We're not so sure he knows what to do with art, either.
In fact, we're not sure about much in this story, which is why it works. In a conventional tale of the supernatural, each of the cicerones of Saint Bavon's would reflect or challenge something about the man they purport to guide, but nothing here is direct, only unsettling. A slim young gentleman with dove-colored gloves and the local accent discomfits the traveler by referring to the cathedral as "holy, holy, holy," an expression of the numinous that echoes like a threat. A brash American youth in a T-shirt as tight as Stanley Kowalski's whisks the dropcloth off a painting he didn't want to see—the bloody martyrdom of a saint—but his provocative assessment of the traveler is even worse. A silent altar boy with the red mouth and dark brows of a fairy tale points him toward a clock, which is made of stone. And at last an English boy dressed in the same oddly bright, rich garments as the altar boy and the heavy, faceless figure the traveler saw or thought he saw slumped in the pulpit like an optical illusion or a late delivery from the Cadaver Synod emerges from behind a catacomb door carved caveat intra muros tacet desine fata deum flecti and offers at last to show the traveler some of the treasures of the cathedral he came to see: "Would you like to see one of the other bishops? There might not be another chance." The traveler, who lives by his timetable, who was so impatient with the cathedral's inconvenient hours, cannot refuse. Turning back would acknowledge a wasted day, even when every instinct of the horror genre screams at him to get out before God knows what. And so deeper he goes into the crypt, led by his insistent, insouciant, unexplained countryman. We are encouraged to expect a nasty shock: some whiplash turn, some appropriate punishment for an unimaginative art-seeker. High in the hollow-lit stained glass of the chapel, we saw a blood-red devil with wasp wings, seizing a pale human figure by the arms and neck. But the sudden stop of his story is even more unsettling. The more you try to make the different pieces of strangeness fit together, the more it diffuses. I have my theories about some of what the traveler walked into, but I cannot make all of it cohere and I don't want to. It's a mood, not a moral. It's thirteen minutes of your time. Surely you can spare that. The cathedral is not yet closed.
1. The character is credited as "John Trant," but I do not believe he is ever addressed by name onscreen. I assume it's a holdover from the original story.
ashlyme: The Cicerones (2002). I have not read the original story by Robert Aickman, but it reminds me once again that I should know more of his work than "The Stains," much as I love it. This one is an even more indirect narrative, barely more than a suggestive sketch of encounters, but it chills.Mark Gatiss looks terrible in a pencil moustache, but it suits his English traveler1 with his Brylcreemed hair and his spotted scarf, his Baedeker and his insistence on getting into the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in time to see its famous painting of Lazarus. The time is unspecified, as is the setting—perhaps mid-century, as perhaps somewhere in Central Europe. (The sign on the cathedral door appears to be written in Czech.) Patrick Leigh Fermor might have walked through this country on his way to Constantinople, but he would have known at least a few words of the language and he wouldn't have treated an ancient sacred place as just one more box to tick on his tourist's progress. He would have said a prayer for the young couple on the train (her so heavily pregnant, fingers running a constant rosary). Gatiss' traveler doesn't know what to do with people. His small talk is evasive and unconvincing, his smile an embarrassed grimace. We're not so sure he knows what to do with art, either.
In fact, we're not sure about much in this story, which is why it works. In a conventional tale of the supernatural, each of the cicerones of Saint Bavon's would reflect or challenge something about the man they purport to guide, but nothing here is direct, only unsettling. A slim young gentleman with dove-colored gloves and the local accent discomfits the traveler by referring to the cathedral as "holy, holy, holy," an expression of the numinous that echoes like a threat. A brash American youth in a T-shirt as tight as Stanley Kowalski's whisks the dropcloth off a painting he didn't want to see—the bloody martyrdom of a saint—but his provocative assessment of the traveler is even worse. A silent altar boy with the red mouth and dark brows of a fairy tale points him toward a clock, which is made of stone. And at last an English boy dressed in the same oddly bright, rich garments as the altar boy and the heavy, faceless figure the traveler saw or thought he saw slumped in the pulpit like an optical illusion or a late delivery from the Cadaver Synod emerges from behind a catacomb door carved caveat intra muros tacet desine fata deum flecti and offers at last to show the traveler some of the treasures of the cathedral he came to see: "Would you like to see one of the other bishops? There might not be another chance." The traveler, who lives by his timetable, who was so impatient with the cathedral's inconvenient hours, cannot refuse. Turning back would acknowledge a wasted day, even when every instinct of the horror genre screams at him to get out before God knows what. And so deeper he goes into the crypt, led by his insistent, insouciant, unexplained countryman. We are encouraged to expect a nasty shock: some whiplash turn, some appropriate punishment for an unimaginative art-seeker. High in the hollow-lit stained glass of the chapel, we saw a blood-red devil with wasp wings, seizing a pale human figure by the arms and neck. But the sudden stop of his story is even more unsettling. The more you try to make the different pieces of strangeness fit together, the more it diffuses. I have my theories about some of what the traveler walked into, but I cannot make all of it cohere and I don't want to. It's a mood, not a moral. It's thirteen minutes of your time. Surely you can spare that. The cathedral is not yet closed.
1. The character is credited as "John Trant," but I do not believe he is ever addressed by name onscreen. I assume it's a holdover from the original story.
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(He died in 1981, not that that's remotely relevant.)
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I have just realized what the Welcome to Night Vale Twitter has been trying to do.
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The thing is, it's not all quotations from Aickman's writings, which would, God help us, be bad enough. I was skimming it on that assumption and drew up with a screeching halt at negotium perambulans in tenebris, which is by E. F. Benson, thank you. Nothing in the corpus of horror is safe from Robert Aickman's Twitter.
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That is profoundly
I WAS GOING TO SAY UNFAIR AND THEN I WAS SCROLLING DOWN AND I FOUND THIS SENTENCE
There was nothing inside but blood.
I AM GOING TO BED. I AM GOING TO BED BEFORE IT GETS WORSE. IT WILL GET WORSE.
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(The Twitter feed, of course, crashed my computer the first time I tried to post an entry linking it. What was I even expecting.)
I have Cold Hand in Mine, but, while it produces a profound sense of anomie, confusion, and incapacity to deal, it only contains two of the really great ones ('The Hospice' and 'The Same Dog'). The reprint collection The Wine-Dark Sea is a good bet.
On an individual level, the stories that are best/worst, at least for me, are 'The Trains', 'The View', 'Ringing the Changes', the two I mentioned above, 'The Wine-Dark Sea', and 'Hand in Glove'.
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A quick Google for either of these stories does not produce full texts, but the Guardian talks about "The Hospice" in ways that spoil nothing about the story—I don't think it's possible with Aickman; that's not how he works—but make me simultaneously impatient to read it and certain I will not like the experience. This is a fascinating way I am experiencing obsession about a new writer. I wonder if it's peculiar to Aickman. Probably. A lot of things seem to be.
(The Twitter feed, of course, crashed my computer the first time I tried to post an entry linking it. What was I even expecting.)
(I am, in fact, not surprised by that. It didn't come back as anything else, did it?)
On an individual level, the stories that are best/worst, at least for me, are 'The Trains', 'The View', 'Ringing the Changes', the two I mentioned above, 'The Wine-Dark Sea', and 'Hand in Glove'.
Check. I've just listened to a radio adaptation of "Ringing the Changes" (same team as The Cicerones) and it is one of the least typical zombie stories I've encountered, if you can even call it that. I'd like very much to see what they altered for dramatic purposes and what they didn't have to change. Also, aaaagh.
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Nine
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Rush, you mentioned Aickman's work with the Inland Waterways Association; I've always found it curious that it never seemed to emerge in his stories.