The Clock Strikes Twelve and Other Stories

R. Wakefield

Description

THE CLOCK STRIKES TWELVE was H. R. Wakefield's first collection of original supernatural fiction since 1929's OLD MAN'S BEARD, and was to be the last book the author had published in Britain during his lifetime. Originally consisting of fourteen stories, the book contained some of Wakefield's most memorable supernatural tales, such as 'Lucky's Hrove', 'From Outer Darkness', 'The First Sheaf', and 'Farewell Performance'.

Sujets

• Ghost
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 03 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456636579
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Clock Strikes Twelve and Other Stories

by H. R. Wakefield
Subjects: Fiction -- Ghost Stories; Horror

First published in 1946
This edition published by Reading Essentials
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The Clock Strikes Twelve and Other Stories






H. R. WAKEFIELD

Why I Write Ghost Stories

DR MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES, who wrote the best ghost stories in the English language—but not the very best one, which is ‘The Upper Berth’—said that such tales were meant to please and amuse. If he meant to imply by this dictum that they are just arbitrary exercises in ingenuity, the baseless phantoms of a rather perverse imagination, I heartily disagree. Unless I believed there are inexplicable phenomena in the world, marshalled under the generic term ‘psychic’, I should never have bothered to write a single ghost story.

Actually I am convinced there are perfectly authenticated cases of most versatile psychic phenomena, for the very good reason that I have experienced them myself. Quite recently I was living in a ‘disturbed’ area. Believe it or not, two days before I left, a spoon hopped from the kitchen shelf and fell to the floor—the last of many such oddities! I defy anyone to find an orthodox explanation of this. A story I wrote, called ‘The Red Lodge’, was most displeasingly founded on fact.

I once had the honour of seeing through the press Professor Richet’s classic work, Thirty Years of Psychical Research . Richet had the finest type of scientific mind, and he devoted much of his working life to the book. In it he chronicles hundreds of what he considered undeniably authentic psychic phenomena. He did not doubt that the persons who had experienced and recorded such happenings were telling to the best of their ability the truth and nothing but the truth. His explanation of all such things? He had none, and neither have I. He did not for a moment accept that they are necessarily spiritual or other-worldly in origin, and neither do I. I am a sceptic of sceptics, but not, I hope, a wooden one. That there are many things in Heaven and on Earth for which we have no explanation, and for which, in all probability, we shall never have an explanation is certainly part of my philosophy; and I have never written a tale in which are recorded happenings that I do not believe could occur. I admit I have stretched the Long Bow hard at times, but never, as it were, to breaking point.

There are many things we experience every day that are quite inexplicable. If Einstein is to be believed, the dissemination of light defies all the laws of dissemination known to us. Gravitation is completely unexplained; it is the supreme enigma of the universe. What is electricity? A hundred years ago the belief that by turning a knob in a little box we could hear the actual voice of a diver deep under the sea six thousand miles away would have been deemed absolutely incredible by the finest scientific minds of that time. In the last analysis, it is a mystery to this day.

There are mysteries we have learned to accept and to some extent control. There are others—telepathy, for example—which we are in process of generally accepting, I fancy. It is established to many people’s satisfaction. It is probably purely physical in its nature; that is to say, it will be studied and developed in accordance with physical laws. I may be quite wrong, and we may never understand it, but I am inclined to think the man of 2100 will. Its study is comparatively recent.

Psychical phenomena are another matter. They have been observed and brooded upon for, literally, thousands of years. In more recent times the most exhaustive attempts have been made to treat them scientifically by many first-class brains. Yet not the slightest progress has ever been made in elucidating them— not the slightest . In the end, Richet realised that they were not susceptible to scientific treatment; and if you cannot treat a subject scientifically, you can never learn of its nature. Of that which science can tell you nothing, you must remain forever ignorant. The mystic, of course, would accept that statement, but his lucubrations are singularly unrewarding. I think psychic phenomena will forever remain recalcitrant before scientific analysis, for they lack certain characteristics without which our present-day science is impotent in application; a priori we know nothing certain of them, we cannot experiment with them ( pace the Spiritualists), we cannot classify or codify them. Pious guess-work is a poor substitute.

We have to remember and face the fact that we have not, and cannot have, any acquaintance with, let us say, more than a millionth part of what is loosely called ‘reality’, or the final truth about the universe, which may be, indeed, from our point of view, fundamentally irrational. Remember that we can see only one octave of all the myriad wave-lengths. We are almost totally blind. It is said that bees can see infra-red rays. If so, they are a little less blind than we are, and they see an entirely different world from ours. We can see only what we are capable of seeing, and our minds have nothing more than their sensory data to work with. Therefore we can understand so much and no more, for our apparatus of cognition is utterly inadequate to grasp the whole. We see perhaps only one octave of the rays of reality, and ghosts, it may be, lie outside that octave, or rather just in and just out of it; they are Dwellers on the Threshold. The realm in which they have their being lies just outside our area of comprehension, but not absolutely and at all times, though there is evidence that some persons are quite blind to all suggestive psychic phenomena. Animals, apparently, are more susceptible than we are, which is odd.

Everything known about these happenings tends to support the view that they are frontier things. Fully to understand them we should have to possess a very different mental equipment. Yet some people at some times are conscious of vague intuitions about, and tiny tantalising intimations from that unknown country. It is quite possible that to the inhabitants of another planet, the map of that country would lie open before them, and the forces at work might be plain to see, but for us there are only those faintest of glimpses and softest of whispers. Sometimes I fancy I see something flicker and hear something stir. And that is why I sometimes write a ghost story. There is, I believe, something there, but I shall never know what; and, rest assured, neither will you. As a character in one of these stories says, ‘I have no explanation whatsoever to account for it. It merely serves to reinforce my conviction that the mind of man must forever remain baffled, fooled, and frustrated because the key to the Final Riddle—if there is one—why should there be?—is necessarily and eternally denied to it.’ To know not and know that you can never know is one of the finest panaceas for human doubts and fears, and an excellent recipe for humility.

Many people say, I accept the fact that such things can be, but can they be malignant? Most of the best ghost stories are based on the supposition that they can be, but how is that possible? I cannot answer, but since Hiroshima even the least scientifically-minded person has been compelled to recognise that strange forces can work unseen, that the contents of a hollowed-out baseball could annihilate most of the inhabitants of the island of Manhattan. But if you could look into that baseball at the moment of ‘fissioning’ you would see absolutely nothing at work. If we had been a little ‘blinder’, the realm of atomic physics might have remained till the crack of doom entirely unexplored by us.

Yes, say the objectors, I grant you that there may be vast unknown forces, but can they be purposeful ? Well, there is excellent evidence of a sort that such things have been. The ‘curses’ attaching to Egyptian tomb relics, mummies, certain jewels, and so on. There are such tales in the folklore of every land under the sun, and there are persons alive today who believe they have only too good reason to take such things seriously. Once accept that these forces are unknown, one can accept the rest if one chooses. Qua ghosts, we’re in an awkward position, but we must just make the best of it.

I know one man who did. I once worked with a person of high intelligence and great curiosity about the world. We worked in one of the oldest and quietest buildings in London, since pulled down. He used to labour late when all the rest of the staff had gone. Quite frequently he heard footsteps going up and down the stairs. I know they did, because I heard them once, too—footsteps made by no visible human agency. I asked if they worried him. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘why should they? They appear to be harmless So far , and in any case, what can I do about it?’

Well, fortified by his example, have a glance inside this book at your leisure, and then defy my hardest efforts to bring upon you the odd, insinuating little sensation that a number of small creatures are simultaneously camping on your scalp and sprinkling ice-water down your back-bone.

Envoi !

H. Russell Wakefield

London

May 1946

Into Outer Darkness

‘ALL RIGHT,’ said Richard Lytton, ‘I’ve promised to come. I’ve told you I consider the whole thing futile and pointless, but I’m not backing out.’

‘I know how you feel,