Ghostland Read online

  I perch on the seaward side of the new defences that have allowed this fragile stretch of coastline to evade the worst ravages of the waves for the past six years – enormous boulders shipped in from Norway that already are dotted with barnacles. I watch as a herring gull picks lethargically at the gouged-out shell of a crab near the water, and can’t help wondering whether I have been here before, whether it is possible we visited on our 1978 Snowdonia family holiday – because I possess unlabelled photos of my brother and me on a not dissimilar beach from that trip. I have no way now of knowing – and there must be other Welsh resorts that fit the bill – but still, it does not seem impossible.

  Offshore, long inundated by the waves, is said to lie the lost land of Gwaelod, a kind of Welsh Atlantis that dominates the final part of Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising sequence – Silver on the Tree, to me the least satisfying of the five fantasy books I loved so much as a boy. The stronger, more atmospheric and landscape-rooted fourth book in the series, The Grey King, is set just a few miles away in the valleys inland from Aberdyfi, and around the regal mountain of Cader Idris.

  A light turquoise post that rises fifteen feet from the sand is plastered up to its high-tide mark with seaweed and a skin of encrusted shells, reminding me of Hodgson’s sea-based strange fiction. In addition to various short stories he also wrote two novels of maritime horrors. His first book, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, published in 1904, is an adventure in which the weed-choked Sargasso Sea harbours all sorts of marine monstrosities, giant crabs, abandoned hulks, and peculiar islands; The Ghost Pirates, which came out five years later, features supernatural (perhaps even inter-dimensional) beings that haunt the high seas, and is to my mind the superior work as it manages to retain its ominous, claustrophobic atmosphere throughout. I first read many of these tales on that cruise through Scottish waters, periodically lifting my eyes from the pages to scan for whales, which added to the experience of reading about Hodgson’s grotesque krakens – like Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad before him, he drew on his own first-hand nautical knowledge to confer authenticity upon his writing.

  Hodgson’s finest short sea-set tale of the fantastic, ‘The Voice in the Night’, was published in the November 1907 edition of the Blue Book Magazine. In it, the lone sailor awake on the deck of a fishing schooner ‘becalmed in the Northern Pacific’ – the story’s narrator, George – is shocked by a voice that drifts upwards out of the blackness. The occupant of the unseen rowing boat, who claims to be an old man, insists that George and his now-alert crewman stop shining the beam of their lamp out onto the waters. He asks, in ‘a voice curiously throaty and inhuman’, for food to take to his starving female companion, who is waiting on a nearby island. In an act of kindness the two sailors float a box of provisions to him, which the old man gratefully receives. Later, still under the cover of darkness, the speaker returns alongside, and tells the men the story of how, some four months previous, he and his fiancée – he is not, it transpires, old – were abandoned by the crew of their doomed vessel the Albatross, before they managed to construct a raft and escape. Days afterwards the pair found a deceptive haven in a lagoon housing a ship shrouded in a ‘grey, lichenous fungus’ that also covered the entire island.

  ‘The Voice in the Night’ is an intense, powerful work about infection and altered bodily states; most certainly, the couple ‘suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange’ that would make Ariel in The Tempest – or the film director David Cronenberg – proud. The moment the fiancée discovers the beginnings of the thing that will consume her is horrifying and resonant: ‘It was on the thumb of her right hand that the growth first showed. It was only a small circular spot, much like a little grey mole. My God! how the fear leapt to my heart when she showed me the place.’

  Hodgson’s story spawned two of its own on-screen adaptations: an episode of the 1958 US television series Suspicion, and, very loosely, the 1963 Japanese horror movie Matango. Released in the States the following year as Attack of the Mushroom People, the film was nearly banned in Japan as some of the facial disfigurements it depicts – presumably the more subtle effects revealed in the film’s denouement – were said to bear an unnerving resemblance to those of survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  I crunch up the shingle to the back of Glaneifion, where now just three people – a middle-aged couple and a woman – are enjoying the spring sunshine at the boundary of beach and garden. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I ask, ‘I was wondering if you knew whether an Edwardian writer used to live in this house …’

  ‘Do you mean William Hope Hodgson?’ the woman replies, and I nod, surprised. ‘My husband’s who you want to speak with. He’s watching the rugby at the minute – are you around this evening?’

  ‘I’ve got to head up the coast later, but it’d be good to talk to him.’

  ‘Hang on. I’ll go see.’ She heads inside and I’m left chatting to the couple who, I work out, must be friends of the owners here on a visit.

  ‘Who’s this author?’ they ask me, and I reel off more detail than they require, eulogising about The House on the Borderland until the woman re-emerges with her husband, a man I’d guess is in his early sixties, with shoulder-length, silvery-grey hair and thick white eyebrows. He greets me with a smile and asks me to follow him inside.

  ‘I’m Anthony,’ he says, and as we climb the stairs I thank him, apologising for disturbing his rugby viewing.

  ‘Don’t worry, it isn’t much of a match.’

  I explain what I’m doing and Anthony wonders whether I have all of Hodgson’s books – in the brief period before my entrance he’s already gathered a collection of lurid 1970s and 80s paperbacks in a pile on the floor of the lounge. He gestures to the sofa and then disappears to fetch more ephemera. And I am sitting alone in this room overlooking the beach and it’s so exciting and unexpected to be here that I half expect time to start cascading forwards and back as it does in The House on the Borderland. I realise that in just a few days it will be the centenary of when Hope was lost: 19 April 1918 (though like most things with Hodgson even this date is not clear-cut, as official contemporary reports erroneously stated the seventeenth was the day of his death).

  My host returns with various items of correspondence, including from R. Alain Everts, an American who compiled one of the few biographical pieces on Hodgson. There are also the transcribed reminiscences of a neighbour of Hope’s mother and sister from when they relocated a mile inland to their newly built hillside residence called Lisswood – Hope visited the pair there when he was on leave from the war. Anthony tells me that despite being from Borth, he hadn’t heard of Hodgson when he moved back to the village twenty-two years ago. But afterwards people would keep mentioning that they were in the house where William Hope Hodgson used to live, and although Anthony wasn’t a particular fan of horror or science fiction he searched out and bought all of his books. Since then, a few waifs and strays like me have swept up unannounced, including, once, two Americans. Probably because of the posthumous praise accorded to Hodgson by H. P. Lovecraft, and later, August Derleth, who reissued his works under his Arkham House imprint, Hodgson enjoys a much higher profile in the States than in his native Britain.

  Anthony asks if I’m familiar with the region, and I admit I’m not. Just behind the village there’s a flat amphitheatre-like area of bog, not unlike the topography of ‘the Plain’ that features so strikingly in The House on the Borderland. After a pint or two in the pub, Anthony says, talk sometimes turns to whether it was Hodgson’s inspiration for his novel’s enigmatic arena. And in February 2014 this wild expanse at the back of Borth was temporarily transformed into a Hodgson-esque vision of hell, when a peat fire engulfed the land.*

  The strangeness of The House on the Borderland has stayed with me ever since I first read it a few years ago, and I still can’t quite believe I’m in the place where Hodgson signed off its introduction under his
guise of editor of a mysterious handwritten journal that had come into his possession. Apart from his brief overview and a few footnotes, we have no more interventions from Hodgson; in the atmospheric prologue, we learn of the manuscript’s discovery from our initial narrator, a Victorian gentleman tourist, Berreggnog, who is on a fishing trip to the west of Ireland with his equally oddly named companion Tonnison. Having arrived the previous evening at the nearest train station of Ardrahan – the Galway village to which Hodgson and his family were sent – the two men travel all of the next day, some forty miles over rugged tracks, before they reach the fictional hamlet of Kraighten. ‘Far around there spreads a waste of bleak and totally inhospitable country; where, here and there at great intervals, one may come upon the ruins of some long desolate cottage – unthatched and stark.’

  Kraighten, where the locals speak only Gaelic, is not depicted on any maps, which should serve as a warning. Neither is the village’s fast-flowing river, which Tonnison discovered on a walking tour the previous year, noting that it looked to offer decent fishing for a future angling holiday. Exploring downstream, the two men find that its waters disappear abruptly into the ground, emerging more than a mile away in a spray-filled chasm concealed in a long-overgrown area of gardens and orchards. An arm of rock projects above this abyss – ‘the Pit’ – holding the faintest traces of an ancient house, in which Tonnison uncovers the manuscript. As the pair explore the domain they hear a foreboding wailing from among the crowded fruit trees, causing them to hurry back to their camp; they vow never to return to the malevolent vicinity. Over supper in their tent Berreggnog reads aloud from the dusty, part-illegible book, and it is this narrative that fills the remainder of the novel’s pages, save for a short concluding chapter.

  ‘I am an old man. I live here in this ancient house, surrounded by huge, unkempt gardens.’ Thus begins The House on the Borderland proper, as the story of what befell the mysterious, nameless ‘Recluse’ and his sister, some seventy years or so previous, is revealed. It’s a novel of two distinct halves: the first, in which the man’s isolated house – said by the local country people to have been built by the Devil – is held under siege by otherworldly humanoid ‘Swine-creatures’; and the second, a visionary astral journey through the outer reaches of the cosmos to a parallel dwelling on the borderland, set among a vast, alien amphitheatre-like plain overlooked by madness-inducing mountains that swarm with colossal demonic forms. During this epoch-traversing vision the hands of the clock in the Recluse’s study hurry forwards until they are a blur – a scene reminiscent of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, a book Hodgson himself owned.

  As I glanced about, it seemed to me that I could see the very furniture of the room rotting and decaying before my eyes. Nor was this fancy, on my part; for, all at once, the bookshelf, along the sidewall, collapsed, with a cracking and rending of rotten wood, precipitating its contents upon the floor, and filling the room with a smother of dusty atoms.

  We get hints too within the fragmented manuscript of the Recluse’s semi-spiritual, but all-too-abrupt reconciliation with his dead lover in the so-called ‘Sea of Sleep’. This theme is explored further in Hodgson’s final novel The Night Land, a kind of heroic quest of redemptive love set on a dying Earth peopled with vicious entities that assail the last human survivors. Much as I admire the later book I prefer The House on the Borderland, which I find easier to connect with. This, I think, is largely down to the strength and tangibility of its setting – even though I have never visited the wild Galway landscape where its mysterious residence is located.†

  In some ways The House on the Borderland is an unbalanced novel, an odd juxtaposition of events. And yet – perhaps partly because of this structure – it works wonderfully. I prefer its beguiling first half – the swine-creatures, the apocalyptic atmosphere of the house straddling two planes, the devastatingly sad fate of the Recluse’s dog Pepper – but the uncanniness of the imagined second-act journey to the outer reaches of time and the universe, and the seeming chaos and decrepitude at the heart of existence, is the vital ingredient that elevates the work into a classic of cosmic horror.

  As to what it all means, Hodgson’s own introduction leaves that up to the individual reader, which is just as well, given there are so many possible interpretations, so many unanswered questions: what, for instance, is the relationship between the desolate dwelling and its twin on the plain at the periphery of the universe? Why is the Recluse’s sister so apparently insensible to what’s taking place around her – is there a Cabinet of Dr Caligari-esque explanation that all the happenings are merely the construct of an unhinged man? And if not this, then why are the Recluse and his sister impervious to the ravages of time while his dog is not? Even if Hodgson’s editorial intro is something of a cop-out, it’s a clever one: ‘Of the simple, stiffly given account of weird and extraordinary matters, I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire.’

  The novel’s end comes with a brutal suddenness, as we read the Recluse’s tailed-off final words. In a fate like that which befalls the island-marooned couple from ‘The Voice in the Night’ we learn that a ‘foul growth’ has also come to affect the Recluse, though in his case it began with a growing, other-dimensional speck of phosphorescence on his wrist, rather than rampant fungal spores. I can’t help wondering whether the spreading cancer on his father’s throat played into these fearful depictions of contagion. (According to his youngest brother, Hope Hodgson was something of a hypochondriac.)

  Despite the generous modern-day critical acclaim afforded The House on the Borderland, and the earlier praise heaped upon his work by commentators as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, George Bernard Shaw and C. S. Lewis, Hodgson’s four novels did not sell well. The commercial failure of the book he considered his masterpiece, The Night Land, led him to abandon the genre, though not before his publisher Eveleigh Nash brought together the six John Silence-like occult detective tales he’d written for magazines in the excellent Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.

  Hodgson turned to the ocean again for his last stories, now stripped of the supernatural. These were collected, in 1917, as Captain Gault: being the exceedingly private log of a sea-captain, and feature at their heart the eponymous British smuggler, as he goes about outwitting US customs officers. Hodgson also delivered lectures about the maritime life to paying audiences as a way to supplement his meagre writer’s income – he was an outstanding early amateur photographer and used the images he had taken during his far-flung travels in the 1890s to illustrate his talks. Some were sold at the time to periodicals and others, after his death, to the Meteorological Office, including shots of phenomena rarely before captured at sea, such as cyclones, leviathanic waves, fork lightning and the aurora borealis.

  Having relocated to London from Borth a couple of years earlier – a move he hoped would ignite his career as an author – in February 1913, aged thirty-five, Hodgson married Bessie Farnworth, a girl he’d known from school in Blackburn, and who now worked on a women’s magazine in the capital. Shortly afterwards, the newlyweds settled in the south of France on the Côte d’Azur, where Hodgson continued to plug away at his writing.

  When war was declared the couple returned to England. Rather than go back to sea with the navy, Hodgson was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery. As well as letters and articles about French spies, Hodgson also sent home patriotic poetry. He recovered from a serious head injury suffered after being thrown from his horse in June 1916 – though he did subsequently experience the intermittent effects of concussion – and rejoined hostilities on the Western Front. Events might have turned out differently if Hodgson had not been so stoic – indeed, just a week before his death he was briefly hospitalised once again after a heavy German attack. Instead, he volunteered as a Forward Observer (FO), the precarious role responsible for directing artillery fire onto a target; bravery
was nothing new for Hodgson, as in 1898 he had been awarded a Royal Humane Society medal for diving into shark-encircled waters off New Zealand to rescue a fellow seaman.

  Having managed to survive in his hazardous FO duties until April 1918, Hodgson’s good fortune finally expired. A direct hit from a German shell on the nineteenth of the month, near the village of Kemmel in the borderlands of Belgium, transformed him into fragmentary pieces. His remains were said to be unidentifiable, though a helmet bearing the name Lt. W. Hope Hodgson was retrieved by French soldiers.

  ‘If I live and come somehow out of this (and certainly, please god, I shall and hope to),’ he had earlier written home, graphically describing the otherworldly desolation and destruction of Flanders, ‘what a book I shall write.’

  After leaving Glaneifion I climb the clifftop path that skirts the headland at the northern end of the village. The sky could hardly be bluer, with only a few wisps of white high above the sea. There, with a glorious view of the sweep of the bay, the brightly coloured houses of the resort and the hills of southern Snowdonia, stands a memorial to Borth’s Great War fallen. A ‘Roll of Honour’, as the grey slate proclaims. Anthony told me about how the monument had been struck by lightning in 1983 and reconstructed the following year after a public subscription, with locals hauling the new stones up the steep route by hand.