Strayers From Sheol Read online

  STRAYERS

  FROM SHEOL

  H. R. Wakefield

  STRAYERS FROM SHEOL

  ISBN: 9781553101949 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553101956 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2012

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 1999

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume any responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  Introduction © Barbara Roden 1999, 2012

  Cover illustration © Paul Lowe 1999, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Barbara Roden

  Strayers from Sheol

  Farewell to All Those!

  The Triumph of Death

  Ghost Hunt

  The Third Shadow

  The Gorge of the Churels

  Mr Ash’s Studio

  Woe Water

  A Kink in Space-Time

  Messrs Turkes and Talbot

  ‘Immortal Bird’

  The Caretaker

  ‘Four-Eyes’

  The Sepulchre of Jasper Sarasen

  The Middle Drawer

  Monstrous Regiment

  Uncollected Stories

  The Animals in the Case

  The Last Meeting of Two Old Friends

  Death of a Bumble-Bee

  Appointment with Fire

  Notes on the Text

  Sources

  STRAYERS FROM SHEOL

  Introduction

  THE ‘GOLDEN AGE’ of the ghost story (if such a time period can be arbitrarily named and defined) is generally held to have been from the last years of the nineteenth century—say 1893, when M. R. James read two ghost stories, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘Lost Hearts’, to a group of friends at Cambridge—to the Second World War, when horror and science fiction supplanted the more humble ghostly tale. It was almost as if a world which had seen first-hand the real horrors of the German death-camps and the devastation at Nagasaki and Hiroshima had no need for fictional ghosts; and the late 1940s saw the last flourish of the classical ghost story (as written by such authors as A. N. L. Munby, L. T. C. Rolt, M. P. Dare, and Andrew Caldecott) until the genre underwent something of a revival in the 1970s.

  Among the authors considered to be among the best working in the genre during the ghost story’s Golden Age was Herbert Russell Wakefield (1888–1964). His first work of fiction was a non-supernatural novel, Gallimaufry, published in 1928, and in the 1930s—his most productive period as an author—he wrote three detective novels and two full-length studies of notorious true-life crimes of the day (the reference to Monsieur Landru and his poele in the story ‘Appointment With Fire’ is a reminder that one of Wakefield’s two crime studies was about this notorious French murderer). Yet it is his ghost stories upon which Wakefield’s fame lies. His first such collection, They Return at Evening, was published in 1928, and a second volume, Old Man’s Beard (known in America as Others Who Returned) followed in 1929. In 1930 Wakefield left his position at the publishers Collins, and the following year saw publication of his third collection Imagine a Man in a Box. It contained a mixture of stories, of which about half were supernatural in content; and two volumes issued by Jonathan Cape—Ghost Stories (1932) and A Ghostly Company (1935)—contained a scattering of new material among the (mostly) reprinted tales. It was not until 1940 that Wakefield published another all-new collection of supernatural fiction: The Clock Strikes Twelve, which was reprinted (with four additional stories and an introduction by the author) in 1946 by August Derleth at Arkham House in the United States.

  The 1930s witnessed Wakefield’s jump from securely-paid publisher to freelance author, and also saw him casting about style-wise, experimenting with different types of fiction (and non-fiction). The author’s personal life also changed dramatically during that decade: in 1936 his American-born wife, Barbara, filed for divorce. Wakefield’s tendency to include overbearing, domineering, and (frequently) thoroughly unpleasant female characters in his writing could easily have made readers think that he was writing from personal experience. According to Wakefield’s niece, Eirene Beck, however, Barbara was devoted to her husband, and the pair enjoyed a happy marriage (despite Wakefield’s claims of having had affairs with various of Collins’s female authors during the 1920s) until the author’s drinking got steadily worse. During the 1930s he had to take various extra jobs in order to supplement his income as a writer; one of his main sources of income was as a salesman of Charneaux rubber corsets.

  The ending of the marriage was amicable but sad: Barbara was, according to Eirene Beck, in floods of tears. She returned to America and spent the war years there, but returned to England in 1945, and in 1950 married His Honour Judge Alfred Tylor. Tylor had been a lifelong and very close friend of Wakefield, since the time the two were at school together at Marlborough and University College, Oxford. Wakefield took this development in his stride, only remarking to his niece that he couldn’t believe that his ex-wife was ‘married to that ugly man’. Tylor died in 1958, and Barbara remained in England for many years, only returning to America for a final time a few years before her death around 1986.

  Unbeknown to anyone, however, Wakefield had returned to the married state four years before his former wife did. The registers of St Catherine’s House confirm that on 26 September 1946, Herbert Wakefield married Miss Jessica Davey, and the two were to remain married until the author’s death in 1964. Absolute secrecy surrounded this marriage: none of Wakefield’s relatives knew anything about it while the author was alive, and Wakefield’s only surviving relative, Eirene Beck, only learned of it in 1996. Although Wakefield continued to meet, dine, and take tea with members of his family throughout his remaining years, he always did so in restaurants, never at his own house; and he never made any mention of his second wife.

  Two clues to his silence may be supplied by his second wife’s situation. At the time of her marriage to Wakefield, Miss Jessica Davey had a daughter, also named Jessica; and in the 1940s being an unwed mother carried a stigma which is almost unimaginable today. Eirene Beck describes her uncle as being a snob—see the narrator’s comments on Professor Canopy in ‘“Immortal Bird”’ —and the son of the Bishop of Birmingham could well have been ashamed of the fact that his wife had had a child out of wedlock.

  He may also have been ashamed of her status; in England, even today, status plays a part in ‘being accepted’. Some time after her husband’s death in August 1964, Jessica Wakefield made a visit to Isabel Jeans, the actress who was the widow of Wakefield’s playwright brother, Gilbert. She informed Jeans of Wakefield’s death, but identified herself only as ‘Mr Wakefield’s housekeeper’. If Jessica was from a different, ‘lower’, class than her husband, it could have provided an added incentive for the author to keep silent about the extent of his relationship with her.

  The years of his second marriage were difficult ones financially for Wakefiel
d. Until 1930 he had had a steady income from Collins, and until 1936 his wife’s income had helped to keep the family finances stable. With the loss of this support after their divorce, however, the drying-up of much of his literary income, and his health problems (exacerbated by his heavy drinking), Wakefield was dependent upon financial support from other family members, and Eirene Beck recalls her mother, Mary, ‘bailing out’ her uncle on more than one occasion. Robert Bruce Lockhart, who married Eirene’s sister Frances in 1948, tried to arrange for Herbert to visit Rome and take up work as a secret agent; but this never came to anything. The proposition is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Lockhart himself was well known as a secret agent and writer: in 1915 he had been appointed Acting Consul-General in Moscow, and in January 1918 he had been head of a Special Mission to the Soviet Government. In September 1918 he was arrested by the Bolsheviks and imprisoned in the Kremlin, and was released in October of that year in exchange for Maxim Litvinoff, the Diplomatic representative of the Russian Soviet Republic in Great Britain. Lockhart’s 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent was the first of several well-received volumes from his pen.

  Wakefield spent brief periods of time in various positions (including a stint as the commissionaire at the front door of the Spanish embassy in London), and finally found permanence of a sort working part-time (and sometimes full-time) in a post office near his home at 13 Coleherne Road, London SW10. (Various Arkham House blurbs state that Wakefield wrote teleplays for the BBC, but no evidence of this has been traced.) It was in many ways probably far different to the life that Wakefield might have envisaged for himself in 1934 or 1935, when his literary star seemed on the ascendant and his marriage to Barbara was still intact.

  * * * * *

  Although Wakefield’s literary career might have seemed down in 1946, it was not quite out. He may not have realised it at the time, but the author had acquired a champion in the person of August Derleth, whose Arkham House firm published an expanded version of The Clock Strikes Twelve in 1946. Derleth reprinted ‘The Gorge of the Churels’, which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1951, in the Arkham anthology Night’s Yawning Peal: A Ghostly Company (1952), and also placed three of Wakefield’s stories as the lead tales in editions of his ill-fated entry into the fantasy/horror/supernatural magazine market, The Arkham Sampler. ‘Messrs Turkes and Talbot’ appeared in Volume I, Number One (Winter 1948), ‘A Kink in Space-Time’ in Volume 1, Number Three (Summer 1948), and ‘The Triumph of Death’ in Volume II, Number Four (Autumn 1949). The magazine’s launch unfortunately coincided with a falling-off in the market and a steep rise in production costs, and Wakefield himself admitted that the market for his type of fiction was in decline, as was the ghost story itself. In a letter to Derleth dated 21 December 1954, the author wrote:

  I can quite see the Ghost story is finished. There will be occasional brilliant odd stories published, I dare say, but the genre has had its day; & that day, bar a few outcrops like Lefanu [sic], coincided roughly with my life-time, James, Bierce, Benson, the other James, Marion Crawford, ‘Wendigo’ [Algernon Blackwood], etc., etc. None left really.

  In another letter to Derleth, this one dated 1 April 1956, Wakefield says that he understands and sympathises that ‘you are sick of trying to place this outmoded form of fiction . . .’ However, by 1958, when he was discussing preliminary matters to do with the book that would become Strayers from Sheol, Wakefield is more confident: ‘There seems some revival in Ghosts & Horror stuff, & we should make some sales from “Strollers”.’ (All letters quoted from are part of the Derleth holdings in the possession of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin).

  Derleth also seems to have acted as an American agent of sorts for Wakefield. Weird Tales was especially appreciative of the author’s stories, and while it is not known how far Derleth helped Wakefield with that particular market, he does seem to have had a hand in placing ‘The Sepulchre of Jasper Sarasen’ with Fantastic Universe, where it appeared in September 1953. A letter dated 9 November 1953 from Wakefield to Derleth asks, ‘Has that “Sepulchre of J.S.” come out yet? Don’t forget to send me a copy!’ Derleth apparently did forget, for another letter from Wakefield, dated 22 April 1954, has a distinctly tetchy tone to it:

  Now. I’m sorry to go back on this, but is it out of the question for me to get a copy or two of ‘Jasper Sarazen’? [sic] (1) I want to see what it looks like in print. (2) So do a number of other people to whom I mentioned it was coming, my few but faithful fans. ‘Are the resources of civilization,’ they ask, ‘in the “H” age, really incompetent to permit a magazine to be dispatched from Sauk City, Wis., & to arrive safely in London, ENG.?’ They don’t believe it—& nor do I. Can I write the publishers? What can be done? There are Canadians & New Zealanders staying in my house & they get scores of magazines. Now let’s make one more effort!

  Another letter finds Wakefield asking Derleth for the names and addresses of magazines in America which publish supernatural fiction; a further indication that the author had no direct contact with the magazines publishing his work in the States, and that all negotiations were handled through another party, most probably Derleth. Story sales were apparently not the only thing that Derleth handled; in a letter from Wakefield dated 13 September 1954, it appears that the prospect of sales to television has been raised in a letter from Derleth:

  As for T.V., don’t do a stroke of work unless you believe it would be worth it. I only thought the Conjurer tale [‘Out of the Wrack I Rise’, published in Weird Tales in November 1949] might do &, perhaps, one or two others. What d’you mean by ‘terms’? Between ourselves? 50–50 will suit me. Terms with T.V. people I leave to you entirely. Take 50% & know you’ve a right to it.

  On 18 August 1958 Wakefield mentioned that he had recently sold the T.V. rights to ‘Frontier Guards’ (in Imagine a Man in a Box) for £50; and although no trace of a TV version of this story is known today, a television version of ‘Farewell Performance’ (from The Clock Strikes Twelve) was made for the American anthology series Moment of Fear, and was broadcast in December 1960. Derleth may well have had something to do with this sale; and it is perhaps this which Wakefield refers to in a letter of 30 April 1959, when he mentions in closing, ‘It’s about time you sold another play of mine!’

  Throughout this period, Wakefield was sending stories to Derleth for his consideration. They were not necessarily sent with a view to possible publication, although this thought must have been in the back of the author’s mind. For example, on 9 November 1953, Wakefield wrote:

  For months I’ve been doing a few words a week (!) of a story. I’m writing it purely for my own amusement with no thought of publication, but if I ever finish it, I’ll send you a copy for fun. It’ll have to come right, though, and it may very likely not.

  Whether or not Wakefield finished and sent the story is not known, although he could be referring to this tale in the letter dated 22 April 1954 in which he took Derleth to task for not sending a copy of ‘The Sepulchre of Jasper Sarasen’. That letter begins, ‘Thanks for yours. Don’t waste a moment on the story. I wrote it just to amuse myself. I’m not over sure I’ll have it typed. It’s quite unsaleable.’ In September 1954 Wakefield wrote about a tale which he refers to only as ‘Limb of S.’, saying that it ‘proceeds very slowly but surely. I’m taking a lot of trouble over a very tricky and difficult tale.’ Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any other references to ‘Limb of S.’, and the title, at least, bears no relation to any of Wakefield’s surviving tales. (I am indebted to Jack Adrian for suggesting that the title refers to the British phrase ‘limb of Satan’ or ‘limb of the Devil’, slang for a mischievous rascal or young imp, and that the story could have involved a malignant or possibly even diabolical child.) The same letter makes reference to an article on the ‘Perennial Insoluble’ which Wakefield has had accepted for publication, presumably in England, as he says that Derleth has not seen the article in question. Unfortunately,
the intended publisher’s name is not legible.

  In December 1954 Wakefield wrote that he might send Derleth a ‘weird thing’ next summer, but not before. Whether he did or not remains uncertain, but on 1 April 1956 Wakefield wrote about a story which he had completed, but was uncertain about sending to Derleth:

  I have done a story of about 5,500 words but, quite frankly, I do not want it to share the secluded fate of the last 2 I sent you. Those may have been impossible propositions, this one isn’t, & it is to receive the verdict of editors & at once . . I will let you read it if you want to, which I doubt, but if you don’t feel confidence in it, then I have only 2 small favours to ask of you. (i) Send it to an editor. (ii) Let me have a list of those periodicals printing, or possibly, prepared to print, G. stories & their addresses, & I will do the rest. It is a quite good one & the Indian part of it I have fully verified. . . . It is being typed & will be ready about April 20th. If you don’t want to see it, just send me the names & addresses. I am doing this just as much for your sake as for mine. There’s no jam at my table for you, I know it.

  The two stories which suffered a ‘secluded fate’, in Wakefield’s opinion, were ‘A Kink in Space-Time’ and ‘The Triumph of Death’ in the issues of The Arkham Sampler. These two stories saw their first publication in the Sampler, whereas the first story which appeared there, ‘Messrs Turkes and Talbot’, was a recycled tale which had originally appeared in the Jonathan Cape volume Ghost Stories in 1932. Whether or not Derleth knew this is discussed in more detail later. However, Derleth obviously did want to see the story which Wakefield mentioned (albeit ungraciously), and on 27 April the author wrote, ‘Here you are. I meant it to leave a hard, sour taste behind, a tale of lust & evil & death! (Hurrah!!) It amused me to write. It is just 5000 words—a good length.’