Under a Watchful Eye(58)
Strangely, as often occurred whenever Seb tried to research anything online, he’d also found himself gradually moved away from what he wanted to know. Anything close to relevant about the SPR was inevitably old and buried in the archives of long-abandoned websites. But he did have more luck online when searching for M. L. Hazzard.
The Wiki entry on Hazzard was brief but far more interesting because it had been edited by someone frequently, and recently. Seb quickly recognized four of Ewan’s online reviewer monikers too. So had Ewan considered himself to be the proprietor of the writer’s legacy? If so, why was so little information included in the entry?
Hazzard was listed as the ‘unique and influential author of two collections of strange episodes based upon the author’s actual experiences, while employing his extraordinary ability to travel outside of his physical body’.
Hazzard’s books were listed: Sinking in the Dark Room. Rising in White Light and Hinderers in the Passage. The revelation of the title of the second collection gave Seb such a shock that his vision had blurred. He’d gone and fetched a drink, which he’d consumed while sitting on the toilet, after feeling a hot, urgent need to find one in a hurry.
When he’d calmed down and returned to his office, still dabbing his brow with tissue paper, he’d forced some composure and continued his consideration of the Wikipedia entry. Hazzard wasn’t influential. He’d hardly been read in his lifetime, let alone afterwards. Unique was also an attribute that Seb, at one time, would have considered debatable, though he didn’t question it now. The year of the author’s death was cited as 1982, ‘from cancer’.
Once he’d worked his way past the sales information for the surviving copies of Hazzard’s two anthologies, on antiquarian and book collector sites, and on sale for eye-watering sums, Seb discovered the occasional reference to Hazzard’s curious stories amongst weird tale aficionados.
Most posts of that nature had been online for years. The fact that so few people had read Hazzard’s work, beyond the two anthologized short stories in the early seventies, must have been responsible for the paucity of discussion amongst the writers and collectors who frequented the message boards.
A more recent thread, though still eight years old, on a ‘Classic Weird Stories’ forum began with a question: ‘Anyone read the book: Theophanic Mutations? I hear there’s a section on M. L. Hazzard and his cult? Didn’t even know he had one.’
The thread lasted for two pages:
‘Aren’t we his cult? Or still trying to be?’
‘You gotta write more than two stories to have a cult.’
‘He wrote two collections.’
‘True, but who’s read them?’
‘And it wasn’t a cult. It was a research group that studied astral travelling.’
‘Still no ebook editions.’
‘You’ll be waiting a while. Last I heard his stuff is still in copyright. No relatives can be traced.’
‘Why doesn’t someone scan his books?’
On the second page of the thread, someone calling himself Charles the Dextrous Warden of the Weird claimed to have read Theophanic Mutations:
‘Yes, read it. It came out in Numinosity Press, when they were still going. Limited to 300 copies of a pretty shoddy trade paperback. I was sent a review copy. Good read for the best part, though. Most of it is about The Golden Dawn and The Temple of the Last Days, rehashing the Levine book, but with more detail about their weird-ass medieval belief system. The section on Hazzard is pretty far out. Apparently, he was a con man and his organization – which was a kind of cult btw – shook a lot of old ladies out of their cash. He seemed to have been something of a scientology, sociopath type. Very dodgy guy who used all kinds of aliases. Author makes some outrageous claims. Definitely worth checking out, though, and it made me want to read Hazzard’s stuff, which remains, as we all know, frustratingly unavailable.’
Seb found only six copies of Theophanic Mutations on sale, from between seven hundred and nine hundred pounds. It had been published eleven years before. The author’s name was Mark Fry and his website was still current: a WordPress site called ‘Noise, Notions and Notations’.
Seb found the site comprised of reviews of electronic noise, obscure films, small press occult publications, psychic geography, folklore and art, or anything weird that attracted Mr Fry.
Seb used his credit card to buy the cheapest available copy of Theophanic Mutations from Abe Books. What choice did he have? Losing seven hundred quid was less money than he imagined he would have lost had Ewan lived. He’d have to wait two weeks for it to arrive, though, because the seller lived in New Mexico.
He then introduced himself to Mark Fry in a message via his website, mentioning his interest in Hazzard’s SPR. In order to improve his chances of provoking a response, he added the footer from his standard author email and mentioned that ‘some SPR files have come into my possession’.
Once he’d progressed as far as he was able to with internet searches, the phone recharger for Ewan’s old Nokia phone arrived from an eBay seller and Seb charged the handset.
Even though the screen was faded in the lower half, and probably damaged, Seb was able to operate it. There were seven contacts in the address book, but the text messages had been deleted. The phone was too old to have a camera or graphics, and the memory was minuscule.