Hauntings by A Derleth, M W Wellman & R Aickman

If you search for "Aickman" at the internet archive, one of the results is the 1968 anthology Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural, edited by a Henry Mazzeo.  Hauntings is Mazzeo's only credit at isfdb, but the book includes a high volume of illustrations by a man with a list of publication credits longer than your arm, Edward Gorey, whom all the cool kids go gaga over, so if you are one of those Gorey fans, you should definitely check Hauntings out.  Gorey's interior illos are actually based on the stories themselves--he must have actually read them.  

Besides Robert Aickman's contribution to the book (which we'll be leaving for last), we'll tackle stories by Weird Tales habitues August Derleth and Manly Wade Wellman.

"The Lonesome Place" by August Derleth (1948)

"The Lonesome Place" debuted in an issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries that features a pretty good cover by Virgil Finlay depicting mass destruction, a sexy babe, and a bespectacled man in some distress, as well as a reprint of a 1934 novel by major mainstream writer C. S. Forester.  "The Lonesome Place" has been embraced by anthologists, and has reappeared many times, including in books edited by foremost expert on the weird S. T. Joshi and critical darling Joyce Carol Oates.

I've attacked quite a few weak and some just plain bad stories by Derleth on this blog, so it feels good to read a story by the co-founder of Arkham House that I can honestly say is well-written and quite effective.  Two boys, like seven years old, live on the outskirts of a small town, and are regularly sent on errands downtown around sunset.  One leg of the trip, when they have to walk along a dark section of street by a grain elevator and a bunch of trees after the sun has disappeared, strikes fear into them.  They can feel that some monster lurks in that blackness by the elevator, and that by running at their best speed through the island of darkness that lies between the corner street lights they have only just barely escaped being devoured.

Derleth does a good job describing the boys' fear, and their interactions with incredulous adults.  The lion's share of the story is a realistic nostalgic thing, but, as is foreshadowed on the first page, in the end we get a weird and perhaps surprising supernatural twist--as adults, the boys hear that a child was killed, apparently by an animal, on that dark stretch of street, and the narrator suspects that he and his friend somehow created the monster with their overactive imaginations and are this complicit in the child's horrible death.

Mazzeo, Oates and Joshi were right to pick this one out of Derleth's large and uneven body of work; thumbs up for "The Lonesome Place."   

"'Where Angels Fear...'" by Manly Wade Wellman (1939)

When this story first appeared in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Unknown it had quotation marks and an ellipsis in its title, but for its appearance here in Hauntings that additional punctuation was dispensed with.  It has appeared in numerous anthologies besides Hauntings, including Helen Hoke's More Ghosts, Ghosts Ghosts and the German volume Frankenstein wie er mordet und lacht.

"'Where Angels Fear...'" is a competent filler story.  Two people, Scotty McCormack, he of the "fine, bony, Gaelicly wide" face, and Muriel Fisher, she of the "spectacled, good-humored young face," decide to go investigate an old abandoned house that is reputed to be haunted around midnight, a house in which there have been multiple suicides--all of them hangings and all of them in the same room.  In the house, by means undisclosed to us readers and incomprehensible to McCormack and Fisher, the explorers, like their predecessors before them, end up hanged to death in the suicide room.  Scotty and Muriel are sitting there in the room, holding hands, waiting for the stroke of midnight, when they see some vague visual phenomena they think must be optical illusions and hear some equally mysterious sounds; then, somehow, they see their own bodies hanging--they have, almost unnoticed, become disembodied souls.  They soon drift apart and lose sight of each other and of this universe.

Acceptable.  Wellman includes direct references to Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle which perhaps helped win the hearts of the many Holmes fans out there.

"The Visiting Star" by Robert Aickman (1966)

Colvin is an academic, and "The Visiting Star" takes place during his extended stay in a drab coalmining town where he is doing research on the history of the town's now defunct lead and plumbago mines.  (I've never heard of plumbago; I guess it is what I have always called graphite or pencil lead.)  He spends much of his time in libraries and archives, and in exploring abandoned mining shafts and pits.

Colvin has gotten to know one of the few people in this dirty working class town who has any kind of education or culture, the guy who heads the local theatre company, Malnik.  Malnik is obsessed with 19th-century British drama, and one of his heroes is the nearly forgotten playwright Nethers, who was born in this very town.  Nethers killed himself at age 22.  Malnik, this Christmas Eve, is going to put on a performance of Nethers's most successful play, Cordelia, and he has managed to secure the services of the once famous actress Arabella Rokeby, who played the lead in Cordelia when it was put on in London during Nethers's lifetime.

Three odd characters show up in town, first a strange little man who looks like some kind of foreigner (his face is "brown" and "sharp," like that of a "Levantine.")  He acts like Rokeby's manager, but describes his relationship to the star in very vague terms, and is rarely seen after taking his room in the same hotel where Colvin is lodged.  Then arrive Arabella Rokeby herself and her constant companion.  Though Rokeby must be elderly, she looks like a short and slim young woman.  Her companion is a sort of weak- and sick-looking tall young woman.  These skinny women also get rooms in the hotel, and Colvin has some interactions with them over the days before the big performance.  In a series of strange episodes, which feature the apparent suicide of a local actor, an adventure in an abandoned mine shaft, and the dashing of Malnik's hopes, Colvin gains insight into the weird relationships that bind together, perhaps unwillingly, and certainly uncomfortably, the three queer visitors, and the possible truth about the death of Nethers and the recent "suicide" of that actor.  Colvin becomes fascinated with Miss Rokeby, and will never forget her, but immediately after the play, at which she delivers a performance of astonishing power, comes a cataclysm.

To put it bluntly, and here comes the big spoiler, the little dark man is some kind of wizard or mad scientist, and he has split Rokeby's body and personality--the tall skinny girl is the real Rokeby, the creature presented as Rokeby is an animated but empty shell, a series of masks.  This body, bereft of its personality, does not age.  When Colvin asks if she means that the tall fragile woman is her soul, Rokeby tells him she uses the word "personality" because "Artists don't have souls."  The dark man manipulates Rokeby and guides her career from behind the scenes--Rokeby doesn't see him for years at at time, and she is deathly afraid of him, believing that he does not balk from slaying those who might hinder her career, like Nethers.

I'm not sure exactly what happens at the end of the story, but it seems that right after her smashingly successful performance that Rokeby dies; I don't know if she commits suicide or is somehow murdered by the dark man.  The motive or trigger for her destruction may be that Rokeby's career has reached its pinnacle and has nowhere higher to go, or perhaps jealousy on the part of the dark manipulator.  

Quite good; Aickman does a great job on the one hand of presenting sharp and clear images and believable emotions and on the other of offering up beguiling mysteries--everything feels real, authentic; there are no nonsensical surprises or cheap manipulative tricks.  The idea that creative people are essentially fake and artificial, that their success depends on them having no personalities of their own but instead taking on the personalities of others, is sad and compelling. 

After first appearing in the collection Powers of Darkness, "The Visiting Star" has been reprinted in a number of anthologies, including one edited by Aickman himself, The Third Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, and one with a holiday theme edited by Richard Dalby.   

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Three stories that achieve a level of emotional realism and focus more on creepiness and the mystery of the unknowable than on shocks and gore; worth the time of fans of the weird.    

No doubt we will be seeing more of Messrs Derleth, Wellman and Aickman here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  But first, a return to the 1930s and science fiction stories which I expect will actually be about science.