The Dulwich Horror & Others Read online

  THE DULWICH HORROR & OTHERS

  by

  DAVID HAMBLING

  Foreword by S. T. Joshi

  For Caroline, of course

  Foreword

  In the decades—long history of pastiches of or elaborations on the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, one of the most interesting phases was what might be called the “British invasion” of the 1960s, precisely paralleling the British invasion of American rock music led by The Beatles and other bands. In our realm, such writers as Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Colin Wilson led the charge. Campbell, at the tender age of fifteen, submitted his earliest Lovecraftian tales to Arkham House’s August Derleth, who quickly resolved to publish them in a book; The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) appeared when Campbell was eighteen, although these early tales could hardly have presaged the titan who would emerge in the following decades—a titan whose collected weird writing may now surpass Lovecraft’s own in overall substance and merit. Lumley, a decade older than Campbell, began publishing his Lovecraftian work in the later 1960s, and by the 1970s was writing fast-paced adventure novels such as The Burrowers Beneath (1974) and The Transition of Titus Crow (1975). Wilson, a respected philosopher, had spoken harshly of Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream (1961), and was challenged by Derleth to write his own Lovecraftian tale; he did so with The Mind Parasites (1967) and other works. In later years, such distinguished British writers as Neil Gaiman, Brian Stableford, Nicholas Royle, and David Langford have contributed to the ever-growing universe of Lovecraftian fiction.

  We can now add David Hambling to that list. A well-known journalist who has written for the Guardian and the Economist, Hambling has produced, in the volume you now hold, some of the most distinctive and intellectually challenging neo-Lovecraftian stories in recent decades. In a sense, Hambling fuses the best elements of his British predecessors—Campbell’s deep knowledge of Lovecraft, Lumley’s thrilling narrative pace, Wilson’s philosophical depth. Along the way, Hambling makes more than a few tips of the hat to such writers as Arthur Machen, Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Bernard Russell, and a number of others.

  Let it not be thought, however, that Hambling’s work is a mere echo of his predecessors. These tales are not simple pastiches; they are genuine and provocative elaboration’s of the themes, motifs, concepts, and imagery found in some of Lovecraft’s greatest tales, from “The Shadow over Innsmouth” to The Whisperer in Darkness,” from “The Dulwich Horror” to “The Shadow out of Time.” Hambling’s journalistic experience has no doubt contributed to the acuity of his character portrayal, and his profound knowledge of science and philosophy allows him to hint at Lovecraftian cosmicism while simultaneously conveying the emotional plangency of human beings brought face to face with their own insignificance.

  And just as Ramsey Campbell took Derleth’s advice and fashioned a British analogue for Lovecraft’s constellation of imaginary New England cities, devising the distinctive Severn Valley towns of Brichester, Severnford, and Goatswood, so Hambling has enlivened the South London suburb of Norwood with a series of narratives that stretch from the later nineteenth century to the present day. It is certainly convenient for Hambling that the town of Dulwich—so close in spelling to Lovecraft’s central Massachusetts village of Dunwich—is in the general area. The tale that opens this book, “The Dulwich Horror of 1927,” is not only a take-off of “The Dunwich Horror,” but it deliberately alters the spelling of Lovecraft’s baleful Whateley family, since Hambling knows that the spelling Whatley is more typical of British usage.

  These tales constitute David Hambling’s initial foray into the realm of Lovecraftian fiction. The fertility of imagination, the crisp character delineations, and the smooth-flowing prose that we find in these seven tales leave us wishing for more of the same, and Hambling will no doubt oblige in the coming years. For now, we can sit back and relish a brace of stories that not only evoke the shade of the dreamer from Providence, but which that dreamer himself would have enjoyed to the full.

  —S. T. Joshi

  INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO SOUTH LONDON, MR. LOVECRAFT

  The high point of Norwood park gives a spectacular panoramic view of London. The BT Tower, the wheel of the London Eye, the dome of St. Paul’s are spread out in front of you like toys, with a growing cluster of new skyscrapers: the Gherkin, Shard, Cheesegrater, and the rest. But look closer. A trick of contours, lighting, and terrain darkens the stretch between you and the City. It’s as though there were shadows, reaching out from Norwood. It can be a persuasive illusion.

  Norwood, once the great North Wood, has a dark reputation. The area now overlaps Dulwich, Gipsy Hill, Penge, Crystal Palace, and Sydenham. It was a sparsely inhabited forest until the nineteenth century, whose trees sheltered gypsies, smugglers, highwaymen, and fugitives. But there have always been a few settlements, some dating back to prehistory. The area at the top of the hill is Penge. This place name sounds strange and comical to modern ears because it’s a Celtic original, predating the more familiar Saxon names that dominate the rest of England. Londinium was a new city created by the Romans at the river crossing, but the Celtic settlement of Penge or Pen-Ceat, “Hilltop-Wood,” was here centuries earlier.

  The past comes bubbling up here from great depths. There are spas and springs and wells, many of them going back to mediaeval times or before. They were sacred to pagan gods before the saints took them over. There is the River Effra—another Celtic name, of unknown etymology—a buried tributary of the Thames which has run underground since Victorian times. You can still follow the course of the Effra and hear it rushing and gurgling beneath manhole covers and gratings.

  The ancient shadowed wood has seen its share of dark dealings, and they form one strand that links these stories. But something else also joins them together.

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is hailed by many as the greatest writer of horror tales in the twentieth century. He took up where Edgar Allan Poe left off and brought science into the horror genre. Many of his stories feature the “Cthulhu Mythos,” an invented mythology of bizarre and terrible beings. These are not supernatural, but so alien as to seem so, inhabiting the planet long before man came along. Some of them remain, dangerously easy to call up or disturb by accident. Lovecraft encouraged other writers to take up the Cthulhu Mythos, and there has been a living and growing (not to mention writhing and seething) body of stories ever since.

  Lovecraft was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, a part of the US which prides itself on its antiquity. His stories feature old houses and family lineages with dark pasts. From a British perspective this is all wrong: in America, history barely runs back more than a few centuries. Anything truly eldritch belongs in the old World, where you can go back a thousand years, and then another thousand years, and keep going, a place where building work turns up worked flints, where the genes of the locals can be traced back to the Palaeolithic.

  Lovecraft was proudly Anglo-American, with English-born grandparents, and wrote fondly of his imagined homeland and his Anglo-Saxon forebears. His roots are here, and Lovecraft’s weird creations are well reunited with their true source.

  There are also reasons for wanting to update his Mythos. Lovecraft was an enthusiast for modern science and a keen astronomer, incorporating the latest discoveries into his work—continental drift, now an accepted fact, was still a controversial new theory when he used it in At the Mountains of Madness. Most of those who followed him have, sadly, ignored the science element and instead presented routine horror dressed up in Mythos clothes, an approach untrue to the spirit of Lovecraft.

  Science has, of course, moved on a bit since the 1920s and 1930s. In some tales L
ovecraft refers to Piltdown Man, then believed to be the missing link between humans and apes. In fact, Piltdown Man was a hoax fabricated out of a human skull and the jaw of an ape, but the fakery was not discovered until 1953. Many other new discoveries also affect the Mythos and just need the hand of a writer to weave them around it.

  Finally, Lovecraft’s works are marred by racism. This was not unusual for his time and class, but it makes uncomfortable reading for a modern audience. You should not have to apologise for reading a book, and the Mythos does not need references to ‘inferior races,’ or the anti-Semitic asides that infest Lovecraft’s work. Similarly, female characters are largely ignored in his works, and they deserve their chance.

  Hence these seven tales, each inspired in different ways by Norwood and Lovecraft. The seven can be read individually, but they also fit together with recurring themes and characters. Like a jigsaw, when combined they present a bigger and more dangerous picture.

  THE DULWICH HORROR OF 1927

  Dulwich, South London

  Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will

  be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only

  recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

  —Charles Mackay, “Popular Delusions

  and the Madness of Crowds”

  And even madmen manage to convey

  Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.

  —W. H. Auden, “The Useful”

  I

  That lost world of 1927 is a Fantastic dream, an impossible place. You can imagine distant worlds and alien landscapes, but you cannot imagine England as it was in my youth. Change breaks over the world like waves on a beach, erasing the sandcastles which seemed so solid. But even in this age of miracles, this account is published as fiction. If I called it a memoir, you would discard this book as the work of a lunatic. But if you will read it as fiction, then please read on. And you may well find yourself asking whether these horrors truly are wholly imaginary.

  What a brave, fresh, vital time it was to be alive! How proud we were of our new era. We were too young to remember the war to end wars. Whatever a handful of free-thinkers might say, few truly doubted that mankind was the apex of creation, that Earth was the sole abode of life, and that Britain was its crowning glory. Order, logic, and timeless values prevailed. We basked in the sun and ignored the shadows.

  Now the Empire that astonished the world has gone. Scientists assure us that humans are a mere twig on the tree of evolution, and astronomers listen in to radio waves from the universe, expecting signs of other civilisations. Darker, much darker forces are moving in the world than we dreamed of. The land fit for heroes is set to be obliterated in another war, and what comes out of the rubble will not be bright or gay. We can only hope it will be human.

  Let me take you back to the perfect summer, that last mad summer of my youth. Here is a picture of us in Dulwich Park, enjoying one of our frequent picnics. Tom took the picture of course, Tom the famous photographer, his talent obvious even in a banal group portrait. He captured me with cruel exactness. I’m smiling as though I have just delivered some nugget of wit and wisdom, gesturing with an empty champagne glass. My hair is wild, I sport the tortoiseshell glasses and worn tweeds of a radical intellectual, and at my side is a leather satchel bulging with my latest reading. How often had I produced a volume mid-conversation, deftly opening it at a bookmarked page with “Well, according to Gödel …”—or Watson, or Marinetti, or whichever new idol I had discovered that week. How tolerant my friends were.

  Tom arranged us for the picture; looking now I can see how carefully it was done. Jovial George is there at the centre of the group. He is seated on a wicker hamper, grand and in charge as always, a bottle of champagne in each hand. George had been middle-aged since he was fourteen. Jessica is close behind me, a healthy and athletic girl, serious behind her spectacles. Beside her is Sophie, sleek and plump, cigarette holder in her outstretched hand, smiling wickedly at Tom as though she knows something—which doubtless she did. Sophie knew everything. And there is Daniel, our pet mathematician, stooped awkwardly, with Daisy; she is in the corner, but her beauty is a magnet that traps the eye after you have scanned the rest. There were a couple of dozen of us all told, but the seven of us were a group within a group. The others might have thought they were in the frame, but Tom cut off those surrounding us to unidentifiable feet and shoulders. We were the ones that counted, and how we knew it.

  All old photographs of young people have a bittersweet savour: “Oh, if only we had known then…” This is worse; this is a group smiling on the deck of the Titanic, like the formal photograph my father showed me of the officers in his regiment taken in 1914. He counted them off:

  “A sniper got him. He died going over the top. He was killed by a shell during a bombardment. He was caught on the wire. He just disappeared…” he said, going through the whole row. Except that nothing as clean and quick as machine guns scythed through my friends, nothing as friendly as a human foe.

  We were in a hurry; we were fast people living in a streamlined age. We wanted to set the world to rights as soon as possible. The General Strike of ’26 had been a thrilling diversion: it changed nothing, but proved that change was in the wind. We did not know whether the answer was electrification, socialism, or spelling reform, and we pursued them all. Pacifism, the unconscious, and the latest findings of anthropology were all grist to our mill. We devoured the latest journals greedily, argued over Futurism, the New Woman, vitamins, and aeronautics. We expected knowledge would bring enlightenment. We did not think it would lead to undreamed-of horrors.

  We all believed in something.

  We were George’s people, and his passion was political. He saw, as many did, the need to break out of our national paralysis. He spoke approvingly of the young Communists in Russia, the Italian Fascists, and the Kuomintang in China. He said it was not their ideology but their youthful drive he admired, the drive that England so badly needed. Any idea would do for him, so long as it blew in the direction of the new; he could catch its wind in his political sails. He was a true opportunist at a time of enormous opportunities. We all believed he would one day be Prime Minister.

  Tom believed in the power of photography. He thought that the gaze of the camera would uncover the truth which would set us all free. If only there had been a cine camera at the Crucifixion, there would be no arguments or religious dogma; how different the world would be. Wars, injustice, and poverty would be impossible when people could actually see what was happening for themselves.

  Jessica believed in the power of the built environment. Better housing, better cities would change us all, and women in particular. She was a powerful swimmer and a ruthless tennis player, and wanted women to become strong and vital and independent so they could mend the world. That would need more swimming pools and tennis courts, as well as workplace nurseries and rooftop gardens.

  Daniel, of course, believed that ultimate truth could only emerge from mathematics. He only believed in numbers. He had a remarkable talent for killing debate stone dead with a well-directed statistic or mathematical aperçu.

  I believed more than any of them. For me, the great achievement of the age was Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, published a decade or so earlier. That towering work built the foundations of a new rational world by showing how pure mathematics could be used to support logic. My dream, which I hardly dared to speak aloud, was that it could be taken much further. From this first foundation a whole unassailable logico-mathematical empire could spread out, conquering law, politics, economics, art—the whole span of human activity. Just as fire and the wheel had transformed our world, so could this blazing new intellectual torch. I could see a future where rational thought annihilated greed, ignorance, and stupidity. What mattered was the drive forwards: the enemy was dogma and rote learning…Forgive my rambling. Even now I still feel an echo of that old thrill. Even though that dream died forever with my friends.
r />   Daisy, dear, pretty Daisy, believed that we were all fantastically intelligent and wonderful. She wanted to be an artist and had some skill at calligraphy, but lacked coherent views on art. She was not an original thinker and never had an idea of her own, but believed implicitly in the rest of us.

  As for Sophie, it was harder to say. She had perhaps the sharpest brain, and the sharpest tongue, of any of us. She was always quickest to say when anyone was talking rubbish, which we very often were. She could argue a case in any field, artistic or scientific, and from any side. Her rigorous interrogation kept us on our toes. She was the only one who seemed to escape unharmed, but who ended up suffering the worst of any of us.

  A pack of lawless intellectual hooligans, our contempt for anything old or simply not modern was breathtaking. We thought we were the terror of the establishment. We were all poised somewhere in semi-employment as we sought those magic doors into the world that would surely open for us. In the meantime we threw cocktail parties and drowned out dissent with jazz records on the gramophone. The more we drank the wittier and more perceptive we became.

  I had come down from oxford and was engaged as a tutor at Dulwich for a few months. George had arranged it; his father was on the board, and he wanted to keep the group of us together. I was considering my future. A doctorate was in the cards, but settling on a Ph.D. topic was a substantial undertaking.

  In the meantime I was a tutor, a remedial teacher really, for boys who were failing exams. Dulwich was the perfect place for us. It exists in a kind of bubble, an exquisite arrangement of lovely architecture and lawns set in the middle of the South London suburbs. The school, with its expanses of smooth cricket pitches and stately Victorian Gothic buildings, might have been placed there by some godling who wished to transplant a piece of the Home Counties to this suburban wilderness. Dulwich is a world of its own. Or perhaps we all live in our own isolated bubble of perfection at that age. I was no great hand at teaching, but once out of the classroom and chatting to someone nearer their own age, the boys proved capable enough. Most of them were bored at school, but the slightest spark of enthusiasm seemed to ignite them. Once I showed them how Newton’s equations could be used to predict the trajectory of a space rocket, or how probability theory applied to gambling, they took off on their own.