Under a Watchful Eye(74)
The author always recounted stories from the point of view of the ghost, the astral double. The leaps of the imagination into fantastical spheres and celestially lighted realms had reminded Seb of Machen’s Hill of Dreams. But Hazzard’s spectral visitants were depicted as visionaries, explorers, sirens and femmes fatales, or playboys turned revenant. Authorial wishful thinking, perhaps, which failed to rid the works fully of the ordinary, mundane and unpleasant settings in which they must have been written, like prison.
The fetishistic adoration of female archetypes and their fashions, and the sinister voyeurism, persisted in each anthology.
By the last four stories in the first collection, the celestial light was dimming from the ethereal landscapes and had become grey and misty before fading to black; places filled with shadowy forms and strange cries from unseen faces.
The rising and flying ‘doubles’ stopped soaring and ascending to the heavens, their inner power and sense of greatness diminishing to what appeared to be a sickening habit. They began to stagger and crawl, not fly. Eventually, the narrators became captives to something they accessed against their wills. They were no longer tethered to the body or to the earth and its conditions. They were stricken and only saw one ill-defined region superimposed over another.
By necessity, life then became a struggle to keep the darkness from intruding upon the world. And separation from the body could happen randomly, at any time. Leaving the body became a permanent affliction, and the very promise of a dreadful destination. But it had all stirred a sense of awe within Seb too.
As Mark had alluded, the tone of the stories altered radically in the second volume. Those tales didn’t suit beginnings, middles and ends either, because all three conditions were often the same thing and there were few resolutions to the situations described.
In Hazzard’s final stories, the transcendent quality of the first collection had entirely degraded into the grotesque. An obsession with piercing light had conversely become an obsession with light’s absence. A peculiar terror akin to vertigo and of falling into the sky from the earth, and then falling even further beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into a cold and endless space, was a dominant theme. As an idea, travelling through space at dizzying speeds was soon replaced by a confinement in dreary rooms. Memories of places and situations were stuck on repeat.
The scale of infinity was transformed into an enclosed maze without end or purpose. The damp tunnel became a much-used metaphor. This was also the very realm that Seb now appeared to be glimpsing against his will.
The final tales degenerated into pure studies of claustrophobia, panic, shock and fear, but all leading to a terror that was mindless in the narrators.
Much of the horror came from the characters accepting their inevitable confinement within the ‘greylands’. They were witnesses, near-passive observers, not active entities in control of their destinies. The end.
But there was tension and suspense, though it never arose from a character’s resistance to such a ghastly fate, but through their full acknowledgement of the dreadful eventuality before it occurred.
In the stories ‘Broken Night’, ‘Flight from Malignant Forms’, ‘Second Death’ and ‘Incertitude’ the astral doubles had even watched their earthly remains buried and cremated, then crawled around gravesides and the dark places where their ashes had been sprinkled, unaware of how long they had been keeping vigil beside a door that had closed forever. Eventually, they forgot who they had once been. The spiritual entropy was the most terrifying thing of all for the reader to grasp.
The tales were often master classes of apprehension, but few would have been as affected by Hazzard’s literary output as Seb had been. You had to be a participant in the subject matter for the writing to achieve its full effect.
There were a few lines in ‘Flight from Malignant Forms’ that Seb doubted he would ever forget: ‘In the greylands we found others in different form. They wept in our faces or clawed us from out of the mist. If they are angels or the souls of the departed, then none should be hasty for the dark.’
Hazzard must have wondered if he were shouting down a well when he wrote the books.
Even with Mark Fry in the room, Seb was still fighting a need to collapse onto the bed. Tiredness and the nauseous dregs of his hangover had made him too weak to do much beside remaining prostrate all day. His hands were shaking again.
He knew how uncomfortable he was making his visitor. Perhaps Mark thought him an alcoholic or mentally ill, and perhaps he was both of those things.
‘I have to go there,’ Seb said quietly.
Mark never spoke and was probably suppressing a mad giggle. Seb wouldn’t blame him.
‘I need to take the files back. Find out what they want.’
‘Sorry?’ Mark ventured.
Seb faced the floor as if in defeat. ‘They were here. Last night. They followed me here. They can follow me anywhere. In the stories . . . There’s a connection between the stories and me.’ Seb pointed at the two volumes of stories. ‘I am the image that they focus upon. He knows about me. He knows.’
‘Who, sorry?’
‘Mark . . . There’s a lot that I haven’t told you about why I am here. Why I am not at my best right now.’
‘The blackmail?’
Seb nodded. ‘Yes. But you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘I’d like to hear it, all the same.’