Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales Read online

  Tales of the Grotesque

  L. A. Lewis

  introduction by

  Richard Dalby

  Table of Contents

  The Quest for Lewis

  Lost Keep

  Hybrid

  The Tower Of Moab

  The Child

  The Dirk

  The Chords Of Chaos

  The Meerschaum Pipe

  Haunted Air

  The Iron Swine

  Animate In Death

  The Author’s Tale

  The Quest for Lewis

  By Richard Dalby

  Leslie Allin Lewis (1899-1961)

  I FIRST HEARD about the Creeps series during the twelve months of my first job, working in the London office of Harper & Row at 69 Great Russell Street, a hundred yards from the British Museum.

  We often received mail for Philip Allan Co. Ltd., but no one knew anything about this company, and there was no forwarding address. They had apparently moved away in the early days of the war. None of my colleagues at Harpers realised that Philip Allan himself was still alive and active, and living in Bishop’s Stortford, serving as Editor-in-chief of The Journal of Criminal Law which he had founded in 1937 and continued to run until his death in 1973 aged 89.

  Already an aficionado of M. R. James, E. F. Benson, and Cynthia Asquith’s Ghost Books, I gradually began to discover and acquire secondhand (usually very worn) copies of the Creeps for a few pence each.

  It gave me much satisfaction to know that I was working in the very same rooms where the three Allan directors - Philip Allan, A.D. Marks, and C. L. Birkin - worked in the 1930s, and where so many anthologies and collections of ghost and horror stories, including They Return at Evening by H. Russell Wakefield and Who Wants a Green

  Bottle? by Tod Robbins, plus several non-fiction titles by Elliott O’Donnell and the fascinating Oddities and Enigmas by Rupert T Gould, had come to fruition in the past.

  The selection of stories in the Creeps series was very ‘curate’s-eggish’, with a few excellent gems secreted among the dross.

  But one title stood head and shoulders above the rest - a truly memorable and original collection, Tales of the Grotesque, by a completely unknown author, L. A. Lewis. Unlike so many stories in the genre which soon fade from the mind, these ten stories were truly unforgettable.

  I soon found one more solitary story by Lewis, namely ‘The Author's Tale’, in Christine Campbell Thomson’s anthology Terror by Night (1935), reprinted in The *Not at Night’ Omnibus (1937), but could discover no more. I wrote to both C.C. Thomson and Sir Charles (Lloyd) Birkin, enquiring about L.A. Lewis, but they could tell me nothing, beyond surmising that he/she was a male author. Further lines of enquiry proved equally fruitless.

  Eventually, thirty years ago, I unexpectedly made direct contact with Lewis’s widow through a newspaper advertisement. She had no remaining copies of her husband’s Tales of the Grotesque and I was able to give her a recently acquired spare copy.

  Following a short correspondence, I went to visit her at the Manor House, Hingham, near Wymondham in Norfolk, where she lived in one of the flats designed for senior citizens. She was very sprightly and amiable, looking younger than her 85 years.

  As no biographical details of any kind had ever appeared in print, I naturally tried to learn all I could about the mysterious L.A. Lewis. Initially she was very guarded with personal details about her husband, but I quickly realised he had suffered much tragedy and mental anguish (with brief references to padded cells and suicide attempts) throughout his life.

  By degrees, however, I was eventually able to piece together the basic details of his life (with additional confirmation at the Registry of Births & Deaths at St. Catherine’s House in London).

  Leslie Allin Lewis was born on 6th February 1899 at 94 Ruston Road in Sheffield, and raised on the family estate at East Hendred in Berkshire. He was an enthusiastic writer from early childhood, and several of his stories and articles appeared in ephemeral, long-forgotten magazines. During his school days (at Royce’s, in Abingdon) he wrote - and had bound into three volumes - a series of stories about “Blackie”, a fantasy panther. He also illustrated these tales, being a talented artist in his youth.

  In 1916 Lewis joined the Artist’s Rifles and was later commissioned in the Royal Flying Corps, training at Hendon to become a pilot (alongside John Metcalfe, another budding master of macabre fiction). In April 1917 he went to France, remaining on active service there for a year and flying Sop with Camels. After the war Flight-Lieutenant Lewis took a course in Aero Engineering, and also obtained his ‘A’ and ‘B’ Licences as a pilot. Later he took his instructor’s licence. For a short period he was engaged in Circus Flying.

  His long experience as a Squadron-Leader, and his belief that aeroplanes had souls, resulted in some of his most memorable stories, notably ‘Haunted Air’ and The Iron Swine’. The latter was based on a Junker aeroplane which Lewis took to Germany for a friend, as all German machines required a Certificate of Airworthiness in Germany as well as in Britain.

  ‘Animate in Death’ was written after a pike fishing expedition to the Norfolk Broads. He greatly enjoyed angling and boating.

  Many autobiographical touches can be found in all these stories, especially ‘The Tower of Moab’ where an ex-pilot’s vision of a whole galaxy of unearthly creatures and ghosts spanning the space between heaven and hell leads to terrifying consequences.

  Possible basis for the Tower of Moab: Jezreel’s Tower, founded in Gillingham, Kent, in the late 19th century, but still under construction well into the early 20th century

  Lewis never doubted the existence of demonic creatures and elementals on the other side of the ‘web’ which divides the astral from the physical. Some of these monstrous gremlins and evilly alluring entities, which continually strive to break through into our world, are graphically described in this book - almost as if the author genuinely thought he had witnessed these sights, rather than their merely stemming from an active imagination.

  Mrs. Lewis confirmed that her husband had suffered from ‘hallucinations’, and these became worse as the years passed. She told me that ‘The Tower of Moab’ was based on a real tower which was being built by an American religious sect, but never finished, at the time Lewis first saw it, supposedly somewhere in South London.

  Some of his stories, including ‘The Chords of Chaos’, originally appeared in magazines published by the Theosophical Society, but it was not until September 1934 that his ten Tales of the Grotesque were collected together in Philip Allan’s Creeps series. Curiously, the book was never published in the U.S.A., then enjoying a boom in supernatural and macabre literature, the golden period of Weird Tales - Lewis's tales would surely have appealed to readers of that magazine.

  Lewis apparently wrote quite a few more stories in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but none of these were ever accepted for publication. They may have been far more horrific and ‘grotesque’ than his earlier tales. We will never know for sure. After he was invalided out of the RAF in the early 1940s, facing permanent unemployment, he destroyed all his remaining work during a fit of manic depression.

  His later years were much blighted by deteriorating physical and mental health, but he found solace with his long-time friend Elizabeth Yeardye Rickell. In the late 1940s they lived in Lowestoft, before marrying and settling in their final home at Ealing. After succumbing to blindness and myocardial degeneration, he died from a heart attack in St. Bernard’s Hospital, Southall, on 28th October 1961, aged 62.

  Elizabeth Lewis had already given her only remaining photograph of Leslie to the RAF Museum a
t Hendon by the time I first met her. and no manuscripts (not even ‘Blackie’) or letters had been preserved.

  She was completely unaware that any of his stories had ever been reprinted since the war in anthologies (which by then were out-of-print). Knowing my interest in reprinting her husband’s complete tales, she thoughtfully bequeathed his literary copyrights to me on her death in 1988.

  Leslie Allin Lewis undoubtedly earns a high place among the best masters of supernatural and macabre literature that Britain has ever produced.

  With the addition of ‘The Author’s Tale’, the present collection represents the first complete edition of the unique and stunning Tales of the Grotesque.

  Lost Keep

  PETER HUNT was barely seventeen when news reached him of his Aunt Kate’s death in a North London hospital, and, knowing that she was almost penniless, he entertained no expectation of benefits as her only surviving relative. It was with some surprise, therefore, that he read in the Matron’s letter of the dispatch of a small, locked box, recently brought from a safe-deposit to her bedside, to which she had evidently attached great importance. By the same post there also arrived a package from his Aunt herself addressed in the weak, spidery calligraphy of extreme age, enclosing a key and a brief note which read:

  ‘To my nephew, Peter Hunt. Open the box and make what use Fate wills of its contents.’

  The box arrived by delivery van in the evening of the same day, and was carried upstairs by Peter himself to his mean back bedroom in a Tilbury lodging-house. It was not very heavy, and any hope of hoarded coin vanished as soon as he lifted it, though there remained, of course, the slender chance of banknotes or bearer bonds. He cut the cords with which its lock had been reinforced and, taking the key from his pocket, opened it. It contained three objects only: a small-scale model of a stone fortress mounted on a pedestal shaped to resemble a rocky hill, a folded sheet of paper, and something which looked like a silver-framed magnifying glass, except that its lens was opaque - almost black, in fact - and nearly impervious to light.

  Peter drew the miniature towards him - it was no more than three inches high - and examined it as closely as the poor light from the dirty window would allow. It was too early to use the gas. The meter was always ravenous for his pennies.

  Even to his untutored eyes the workmanship of the model was exquisite, the degree of finish seeming to represent a lifetime’s labour.

  Every single stone block - and there were thousands - in the structure of the building had been faithfully reproduced, and even such detail as patches of lichen had not been overlooked. With luck the thing should be worth several pounds as a curiosity. Perhaps he would have it valued by Christie’s; it wouldn’t do to trust ‘Uncle’ Abe at the corner shop. He pushed it aside and reached for the folded paper, recognising his father’s characteristic handwriting as he smoothed it out. It related to the contents of the box, and read as follows -

  ‘I, Vernon John Hunt, having been given by the doctors three months to live, have determined to put in writing what is known of “Lost Keep”, of which this scale model has been handed down from parent to child for many generations.

  ‘Tradition has it that the miniature was made under pain of death by an Italian craftsman condemned by an early ancestor to imprisonment in the original stronghold until such time as he should complete the task. That he did complete it the miniature itself testifies, but history does not relate whether his release followed or whether, with the callousness of feudal days, he was left to rot in his prison. There is, I regret to say, some ground for the latter supposition, for he is credited in the Latin manuscript, now destroyed, with having laid some kind of curse on this piece of craftsmanship. A peculiarity of the whole matter is that there have been so many female heirs that the name of the original title-holders is forgotten, the heirloom having passed haphazard from male to female issue and so transferred itself to various different families. Even the locality of the original site is unrecorded - hence its name of “Lost Keep” - and the curse of the modeller is concerned with this fact. The fortress, if it still stands, may be in Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, or, for that matter, any part of the world; but, translating from the Latin script, it is supposed to be rediscoverable by anyone who has “the wit or fortune to combine glass and facsimile with understanding.” Whoever solves the riddle, however, is threatened with “greater temptations of the Devil than have beset any other of Adam's descendants,’’ and, if he succumbs, will find “ in the home at the hand of his son.” Doubtless each successive holder of the heirloom has attacked the problem, though there is no rumoured instance of its solution. I in my turn have wasted hours in speculation as to the purpose of the dark glass, shaped so like a lens, yet so obviously useless as such, and have examined every point of the model’s surface with a normal reading-glass for signs of engraved lettering, but have learned no more than to marvel at the delicacy of the work. On the latter count the model would probably be of considerable value among collectors, but its secret, if it really possesses one, is well hidden.

  ‘So, being under sentence of death, I entrust this sole heirloom of a family whose fortunes are at ebb to my sister Kate requesting her to hold it for my son Peter until her death or his majority.’

  The document was neither dated nor signed.

  Peter leaned back and looked, with a distaste that familiarity had never conquered, round the shabby room. So his father had believed the model to be of value too? So much the better. He’d have no false sentiment about parting with it since he’d never even heard of it till today, and he’d certainly get it valued at an early opportunity. It ought to fetch enough to pay for a course of night classes at a technical school, or - with great luck - a real college career, for which he could drop his present job as warehouse packer and fit himself to enter those higher spheres that his hereditary instinct craved. Meanwhile, his day’s work was finished and he could not afford to go out looking for amusement. He might as well have a shot at the dark glass problem.

  Picking the apparently useless thing up, he studied it closely. It certainly looked like a lens, being a circle of some vitreous composition thick at the centre, thin at the sides, and mounted in a metal ring. Lighting the gas-jet - an old-fashioned fish-tail burner - he held the thing to the light, but through its opacity’ could distinguish only a shapeless blur. Perhaps distance, either from the eyes or the object to be focused, would sharpen its outline. He experimented thus, standing at arm’s length from the jet, and gradually advancing the glass towards the flame. At really close quarters it did seem to let through a little more light, and he was so occupied with this discovery that he never thought of the effect which the accompanying heat might have on the glass until a sharp snap followed by a tinkle on the in linoleum informed him that he had cracked it.

  With a muttered expletive the boy turned it over, and at once noticed an interesting fact. The glass appeared to be built up in layers, and the heat had split off a piece of the outer one, revealing a second and seemingly undamaged surface beneath.

  He pursed his lips in a whistle. The discovery might have some bearing on the apparent uselessness of the object. It was a natural conclusion that a perfect lens might be hidden under the dark covering, though the purpose of all the secrecy and mystery woven around glass and miniature was more than Peter could guess. He found his pen-knife and, carefully inserting it under the broken edge, split off another fragment. Once started, the remainder came away so easily that in a few minutes he had completely exposed the underlying surface, the layer on the other side flaking away with equal facility after a light rap with the handle of the knife. The now transparent lens - tinted, as far as he could judge against the twilight with his back to the gas, a kind of smoky blue - possessed an astounding power of magnification when he tried it on the back of his hand. The hand, as such, in fact, completely disappeared, and the circle of glass showed only a portion of the skin enlarged to a degree which he would have thought only a microscope could achi
eve. As he watched, the enlarging process seemed to continue as though concentric rings of the tissue were rolling out from the centre and vanishing through the rim. He had a sickening sensation of being about to sink bodily into the glass, and, hastily shutting his eyes, put it down on the table. The queer sensation passed off rapidly, but left him with a mixed feeling of giddiness, excitement, and fear. There was something uncanny about the lens - damned uncanny - but his faults did not include cowardice, and he resolved to complete his experiments single-handed.

  With this decision he proceeded to lock the door and, pulling the table as near as he could to the gas-jet, sat down to test the effect of the lens on the miniature.

  The grey, perpetual twilight had neither brightened nor darkened by one iota when Peter completed his seventh circuit of the mighty battlements. Dizzily far below him the waves of an apparently tideless sea broke and hissed back along the same bank of shingle, neither advancing nor retiring, each followed by an interminable succession of troughs and crests sweeping in from a vague horizon that seemed infinitely distant from the high eminence upon which he stood. But for their maddeningly regular beat no sound whatever broke the silence, no breeze moved the cold and stagnant air, and throughout the gigantic mass of masonry he was the only thing that lived. Above him the sky was a leaden monotony, broken at one place alone by a mere pin-point of light which appeared to be a far-off beacon. It shone where the diminishing thread of a titanic causeway merged into the sky-line.

  Peter drew a clammy hand across his eyes and leaned wearily against the ramparts. Was he mad? Or had some unbelievable miracle literally transported him in a flash of time from his dingy back-room to this far-distant and eerie place? That he was not dreaming his sore knuckles proved, where he had struck them hard against unyielding stone in the panic frenzy of his incredible translation. He said aloud, 'O God!’ in a meaningless sort of way, and repeated it several times, partly for the love of any sound other than that of the waves, and partly to focus his attention. Though he could not then have put it into words, the panorama, to his rather limited mind accustomed to concrete surroundings, savoured alarmingly of the Abstract.