The Wish Dog: Haunting tales from Welsh women writers

The Wish Dog

Haunting Tales

from Welsh Women Writers

Edited by Penny Thomas

and Stephanie Tillotson

HONNO MODERN FICTION

Other short fiction anthologies available from www.honno.co.uk

All Shall Be Well

Coming Up Roses

Cut on the Bias

Laughing Not Laughing

My Cheating Heart

My Heart on My Sleeve

Safe World Gone

Written in Blood

Is there anybody there?

What makes a good ghost story? When we first discussed publishing a new anthology of ghost stories by women from Wales, we had no idea what would come to haunt us. We hoped that others would share our fascination with the ‘evocative and the eerie’, with ‘the shiver induced by the thunder of a black, stormy night’, could imagine being held spell-bound by a mysterious and, perhaps, macabre tale as the clock strikes midnight: the hour when all light has been extinguished and we poor mortals are most acutely aware of our human limitations. Might not the dead come back to glide silently across our paths, or to scream out of the walls, demanding justice or revenge?

‘Is there anybody there?’ is a question that most of us have asked at some point or another. The question lies at the kernel of all good ghost stories – and in this collection the unknown answers back! All the tales raise the possibility that we do not finish in eternal silence, that there may be a mysterious purpose to life’s arbitrary unfairnesses and disappointments. That there may even be the chance of reunions with those we have loved and lost – or the possibility that we are not to blame for our failings, that there are indeed powerful, sometimes malignant forces that shape our destinies.

So we keep on being fascinated, drawn to poke into our imagination’s darkest corners, where we keep thoughts that have no place in our daylight worlds. Let such fears surface and we might struggle to function. Yet, when repressed, our imaginations bubble and boil and another world rises through the floorboards of our daily lives. And so writers continue to question their darker instincts: ‘Is there anybody there?’

You may be of a more sceptical nature. Perhaps for you ghost stories are all flapping sheets and Scooby Doo. Fun and occasionally scary but holding nothing of any allure. Maybe you prefer the supernatural setting of fairy tales peopled by snow queens and wild swans. Remember though that you can’t have such fascinating creatures without the wicked witches and dangerous beasts that come along with them, lurking at the edge of the seductive dream.

What then turns a bunch of clichés into truths that touch the core of our deepest hopes and fears? What makes a good ghost story? We offer just one suggestion – pick up this book and read on.

We hope you will discover intriguing stories of the weird and wonderful. They are all surprising, thrilling, full of suspense and very different each from the other. We think there will be something here to satisfy all tastes: from the beautiful, poignant and tender to the downright horrific. These are stories that will take you to somewhere else, maybe just a stone’s throw away. Here are crumbling old houses, gothic to their core, such as the mansion of I, King, with its Miss Havisham-style rotting fruit, its elusive but open door, appearing suddenly when least expected, always beckoning at the end of a line of trees. Here is the atmospheric: the oppression of heat as beautifully created in Ants and Shade, the eerie cold of The Pull of the North, the significance of Seashells. Every slight flicker in the ambience takes on a new import as you read, offers glimpses that may tempt you to look over your shoulder, just for a moment… Here are stories that present, to quote Henry James (a past master of the form), ‘The strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.’

Many, inevitably, work around loss, facing life’s tragedies, as in Broad Beach and The View From Up Here. Here the voices of the dead yearn to teach the living lessons about life, the mystery that is The Girl in the Grass, the call for humanity and justice in The Soldier’s Tale and a Matter of Light. There are also the outrageously funny – the bawdy melodrama of Sovay, Sovay and the downright naughtiness of Ghosts. And, yes, there are even flapping sheets in Making Ghosts, a tightly wound tale that subverts conventions, reminding us that we are as numerous as the blades of grass on the great plains; like the one grain of sand on a broad beach that even so cannot exist without its singularity.

A word of warning though: watch your step, much may not be as it seems in this anthology. There are unreliable narrators, apparently friendly guides, who may take you by the hand and lead you onto treacherous ground. Should we trust the narrators of the gloriously crafted The Wish Dog and Caretakers? And it is only ever a short distance to what we may call madness, touchingly and hauntingly evoked in stories such as Mad Maisy Sad and Convention is the Mother of Reality.

Preparing this book, what mattered most was not which secret of the otherworldly our authors chose to conjure for us, but the dexterity (even sleight of hand) with which they exposed it. Whether your taste is for fireside shivers or for the exploitation of the ‘other side’, a few words perfectly placed, a theatrical incantation, or a glut of gothic adornment, this collection offers so much that is wonderfully and entrancingly told. In Harvest there is even a haunting, primordial myth promising a terrifying end for those who live for language, stories and the telling of them.

But I think we may have said too much; it will be light soon and you’ve not begun to read yet…

Penny Thomas and Stephanie Tillotson

Sovay, Sovay

Chrissy Derbyshire

You seem surprised to see me sitting in your chair. I suppose that’s why you’re brandishing a poker. And may I say how dashing you look, haloed in firelight, all black and flaming red? Why ruin the tableau by doing anything so boorish as bashing my head in?

Quite right. A gentleman never brains a lady with a poker. Besides, it would hardly work. I’m a ghost, you see. Hence, breaking and entering without the breaking. I turned my body into smoke and snaked through your keyhole to haunt you, beautiful. Because I want you. No, not like that. And by the way an incubus is a male demon. I suspect you mean, succubus.

I want you for an audience. I want you for an eager ear. My name was Sovay, and I have such stories. You’d never believe them if I told them a thousand times, and that’s fine with me because I can’t say they’re all entirely true. Some are. Most are. Most of what I say is almost entirely true, minus embellishments and outright lies. You look confused. Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

I am an aesthete, and a sensualist. Where you see the fire, I see blazing colours of sheer, hot light, breaking and sparking against a deeper black. I see welcome warmth against glowing, goosebumped skin. I see demons and salamanders. That is what I see. Perhaps I’m shallow. It’s been said, and no doubt if I am remembered it will be said again. And yet I think I can see deeper than most, when I want to, when I can be bothered. The best I can say for you, whoever you are, is that I love you as I love my favourite book. And like my favourite book, it is the little details of you that excite me – deftly written turns of being that titillate and challenge.

Even the love of study is aesthetic, if not carnal. When I read bold or wise ideas that fit so beautifully into place in my mind, it is a secret thrill. The thrill is silent, wispy as a cobweb, caught between the pages of a secondhand book. All my knowledge of the world, I am sorry to say, is aesthetic, fragmentary and insubstantial – a series of imagined sights, smells or touches lingering around my tremulous body and gaspingly sensual mind.

So. You have been warned. I’m not an amoral Dorian Gray or a solipsistic Humbert Humbert (yes, while I was haunting you I also read your books – I hope you don’t mind) but I’m still waist-deep in my senses and my imagination when you think I’m listening. And, though I only ever committed one act of violence in my short life, I fear I may somehow still be a little dangerous.

My mother was an actress with the Grand Guignol. She was beheaded every night. A consummate professional, she never missed a performance. I was born on stage to a headless woman, and the audience applauded. She paid me little attention but once, in a fit of drunken motherly affection, passed me her wealthy dead grandmother’s locket. I never took it off. I wasn’t schooled – not in the commonplace sense – but I grew up in the wings and dusty backrooms of the theatre in Pigalle, and I saw enough. The myths about that place are true. The boxes had the air of a confessional. It had been quite a different place of worship before it was transformed into a shrine to bloody violence. Two great angels still presided over the scenes of rape and murder on the stage, blessing every assassination with impassive grace. Luckily they never peeked, as I did, into the boxes. There, respectable folk would re-create the actors’ poses in various states of sweaty undress. I never saw anyone beheaded there, but I did see many a gentleman with his head quite hidden under a lady’s skirts. When I wasn’t snooping and exploring and pilfering pretty things from ladies’ bags, I was reading. This and that, novels, playbills, anything I could find. They called me la gosse Grand Guignol – the Grand Guignol brat – and I spent my nursery years climbing round the gothic architecture like a dirty-faced spider.

So I grew, half-feral but indiscriminately well-read, until one day it became clear that under the dirt I had grown into an attractive young woman. Not beautiful. Gap-toothed and a little coarse, but with the brightest eyes… Of course…you can see. I was given a play script and measured for a costume – just a simple inmate’s gown, coarse on my naked skin. I was to be a young lunatic, mostly cured and soon to leave the asylum. I was pale, red-lipped, cheeks modestly rouged. Every bit the innocent who might be made a victim. My role was not a profound one. I was to talk meekly to the nuns and to the doctors, making my eyes round and sweet like marbles. Then I was to be accosted by two grotesque shrews – fellow madwomen, but not so near curing and with faces like storybook witches – who put out my marble eyes with scissors as punishment for my beauty. The blood-rigged scissors fascinated me. I was scolded time and again for stabbing dolls and apples just to watch the inanimate things gush blood.

Really, none of this is important. History hasn’t remembered me. Not even when I changed my given name – Anne-Laure – to Sovay. I named myself for the heroine of that strange English folk song.

Sovay, Sovay, all on a day,

She dressed herself in man’s array.

With a brace of pistols at her side,

To see her true love away she’d ride.

The romance of it! She dressed as a highwayman and challenged her lover to stand and deliver. When he refused to give up the ring she’d given him as a love token, she knew she had no need to shoot him stone dead. I always kept a small gun on my person in those days. When you’re a pretty young thing who makes eyes at the audience and then bleeds from those eyes all over the stage, people tend to think they own you. A gun in the back is a fair deterrent. ‘Those days…’ I say, as if I ever passed twenty.

So how would I characterise the genre of this piece? Let us call it a gothic romance. Even better, a ‘penny dreadful’ with a romantic bent. I’m trying to define it in a way you’d understand. If you were there… Oh, if you were there, in my little palace of violence, all I’d need to say would be that it is pure Grand Guignol. Picture the scene: a young actress, still in costume and make-up, steps out into the cold Paris air. It is a strange, smoky night in November. She is bored. The thrills of the night’s entertainments have paled, and all at once she must feel the chill pavement under her feet and the gritty walls under her hands. The sky is touched with light, fool’s gold of stars and a milk-pale moon swathed in cloud. Somewhere there is music, an owlish mezzo-soprano from a high bedroom. And she steps, and she steps, on and on, and it’s like a scene from Perrault – or a dream.