Chapter 7

GOBLIN CITY

When, exactly, the word was first whispered I cannot say. It was dressed up for my benefit to begin with, I’m sure. A check-up, a procedure. A lump.

Just a pea-sized lump.

I wasn’t, though, as guileless as all that and realised the gravity of what was beginning to unfold around me. The defining incident occurred when I was at my aunt and uncle’s – I had been left there while my parents went to a hospital or doctor’s appointment, so it would have been during the school holidays. I think I was thirteen, but it might have been a year either way: how is it that the timing of something so momentous can now prove so elusive? Mum phoned with an update and I could tell from my aunt’s stilted side of the conversation – I was listening from behind the lounge door – that the news was not promising. I imagine Dad took me aside that evening – certainly that became the later pattern, signalling the start of the familiar feeling that would rise in my stomach – which must have been when the word broke cover. ‘Mum’s found a little lump. They’ve done a test and it needs to come out so she’s going to have an operation. Good thing is they’ve got it early, so they’ll be able to sort it.’ Or words to that effect.

Two syllables, that’s all.

Cancer. The Crab, the fourth sign of the Zodiac. And the illness my mother now had, which would not be so simply sorted.

Her own luminous speck.

The disease’s name is attributed to the classical Greek scholar Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BC), the Father of Medicine, who is said to have first described the appearance of a tumour as akin to how a crab digs itself into the sand with its legs circled around its hard carapace – the ten folded limbs resembling the engorged blood vessels that nurture the destructiveness. (Though, perhaps, Hippocrates was likening the pain to the pinch of a crustacean’s claw?) I could add that the progress of the illness might seem as inexorable as the processionary movement of the migrating Christmas Island red crabs I found so fascinating on natural history documentaries, or its grip as tight as those two oversized crustacean front fingers. Whatever its exact etymology, my mum now had it – this word I hated to hear spoken aloud – and life in our house would not ever be the same: the disease would not bury its way back below the sands, even if my head were to.

After the initial diagnosis comes a fog. Mum went into the same Pilgrim Hospital that shimmered, so full of malevolence, out of the flat emptiness when you gazed across the Wash from the saltmarshes of Shep Whites. There she underwent a partial mastectomy, which clearly was not a roaring success; my sister-in-law recalls her saying quite matter-of-factly as she visited her at her bedside in the immediate aftermath that the surgeon admitted they hadn’t got everything so they were going to have her back for another go. I guess I should be angry when she tells me this – it is a detail I’d wiped from my memory, or else forgotten – but I’m too resigned after all this time to feel any rage.

I do just about remember Mum returning to hospital, which was presumably when the follow-up procedure was carried out. After she came home she had to be driven each day to the outskirts of Lincoln, the nearest location in the county where she could undertake her next course of treatment. (As a young boy I had, years earlier, been excited to see the city’s famous stone imp, carved into a pillar in the cathedral – though, expecting a huge statue, I was underwhelmed by its small size, more of a goblin than a devil.) While Mum underwent her punishing daily journey, a round trip of ninety miles, I was at school, so only got to keep her company once. I have a photo in which she stands grinning in front of a pointing arrow on which the words RADIOTHERAPY CENTRE RECEPTION are spelled out in capitals – she delighted in the incongruity of the ramshackle nature of the place and used to enjoy telling everyone that she was having radiotherapy in a portacabin. After a month or six weeks (I can’t recall exactly how long), her visits to the borders of that goblin city were done with. There followed courses of various drugs before she was given an all-clear.

She was going to be fine, they said. She was a fighter.

The word had been defeated.

Coming off the M4 into the urban sprawl of Newport, the ancient Roman fortress I’m aiming for is surprisingly difficult to locate, with counterintuitive road signs seemingly sending me the wrong way before, at last, there’s a gap in the incessant straggle of houses and I’m crossing a muddy-banked tidal river. Finally, I’ve arrived in the small town of Caerleon – still in Wales, though a little over a hundred miles to the south-east of William Hope Hodgson’s Glaneifion. The location is steeped in history and archaeology with its impressive Roman ruins, and its later associations – it’s the site where Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century chronicle of British monarchs, Historia regum Britanniae, places the court of King Arthur, and where, some 350 years on, Thomas Malory staged the legendary figure’s coronation in Le Morte D’Arthur. Tennyson came here too, in 1856, apparently writing part of the epic Idylls of the King in the town’s Hanbury Arms. And a nearby cave is said to harbour the sleeping monarch and his knights until the day they are needed by the nation, a local variant of the same piece of folklore that was to spawn Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen trilogy.

This too is a place on the borderlands: the ancient Kingdom of Gwent (now covering Monmouthshire and Newport) once spanned the area between the Usk and Wye rivers, while the course of the latter, twelve miles to the east, still forms much of the modern-day boundary between Wales and England. Caerleon and its surrounding hills, and tracts of timeless woods, was also the childhood home of one of the most remarkable writers of the supernatural: one whose work reaches out with an inherent strangeness, straddling a landscape of the recognisable and another, concealed world of the sort of ‘sequestered places’ and beings that M. R. James alludes to in ‘A Vignette’.

The writer is Arthur Machen (pronounced ‘Macken’), born a year after James, in 1863, although he made his literary name earlier, during the decadence of fin-de-siècle London, with his novella The Great God Pan. Much to Machen’s delight the Manchester Guardian described the book as ‘the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a work advertisement.’ The 1895 review’s level of criticism appears harsh today, and Machen’s novel, though far from his best, remains effective and atmospheric. In it he sets out many of the themes that were to become key features of his writing. Most noticeably, we are introduced to Machen’s search for the meaning of life’s hidden mysteries – ‘the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes’ – and the timeless pagan forces of (and beyond) nature, embodied as a carnal, faun-like deity, which corrupt both the flesh and the spirit of those exposed to them: those who ‘see the god Pan’.

The appearance of Pan reflected the zeitgeist, as the goatish figure (depicted rather androgynously in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration for Machen’s first edition) was to become prevalent in literature over the course of the next three turbulent decades, celebrated by writers as diverse as Aleister Crowley, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. Perhaps most notably (and unexpectedly), a gilded, horned Pan appears on the cover of Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel of anthropomorphised badgers, moles, toads and water voles, The Wind in the Willows, in which he takes the form of a protective god of nature and the wild – the ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’.*

A number of supernatural short stories of the period feature a more ominous, feral Pan, however, including two of my favourites. Henrietta Dorothy Everett’s ‘The Next Heir’ contains an eerie vision that reminds me of the unearthly boatman glimpsed in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, while Saki’s (the pen name of the Edwardian English writer Hector Hugh Munro) ‘The Music on the Hill’ warns against treating local rural folk traditions with disdain. Jumping a century forwards, the Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro’s admiration for Machen can be seen in his Spanish Civil War-set fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth.

Photo (Arthur Machen) Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images

Arthur Machen was, like M. R. James and William Hope Hodgson, the son of an Anglican clergyman. (In an odd twist of fate, he was to share another familial tie with the Borth-based writer – Machen’s only son, Hilary, was to marry Hodgson’s niece.) His father John Edward Jones had adhered to the family tradition, studying Divinity at Jesus College, Oxford and thereafter becoming curate at Alfreton in Derbyshire before taking over as the interim vicar of St Cadoc’s in Caerleon on the death of Arthur’s grandfather in 1857. In the following year John Jones was given his own parish, Llanddewi Fach with Llandegfedd, a sprawling rural collection of farms and cottages five miles north of the town. In March 1863 Arthur was born in his grandmother’s house on Caerleon’s main street: a blue plaque marks the site, though there is little other obvious commemoration of the author elsewhere in the town today. He was christened Arthur Llewellyn Jones-Machen, as his father incorporated the surname of his Scottish wife into their name as part of a family legacy settlement; Arthur would later drop the Jones.

Contemporary Caerleon is dominated by its three grand reminders of the Roman legionary fortress of Isca: the amphitheatre on the edge of the town – lauded, by the reign of Elizabeth I, as the site of King Arthur’s Round Table; the Fortress Baths, which remained buried in Machen’s day, being painstakingly uncovered between 1964 and 1981, and now housed inside an impressive edifice; and the Roman Legionary Museum – known in Machen’s time as the Museum of Antiquities – which, along with many items from its collection, features in The Great God Pan, and in his semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams. Here in this hard-to-classify novel we can explicitly see the influence the landscape of Machen’s youth had upon his writing. I particularly love the atmosphere of the scene in which its protagonist Lucian takes an unfamiliar route home across the Gwent fields: ‘A dark wild twilight country lay before him, confused dim shapes of trees near at hand, and a hollow below his feet, and the further hills and woods were dimmer, and all the air was very still.’

The house in which Arthur Machen grew up is tricky to locate, and even more difficult to get a decent look at, perched as it is on the upslope of a hill climbed by a narrow minor road with no passing places. Eventually I manage to abandon my car in the least dangerous spot and proceed down the blind track until I am standing at the cast-iron gates of the former Llanddewi Fach Rectory. From this angle I’m looking at the side of the solid two-storey, grey-brown building designed by Machen’s father. On its impressive chimney stack he inscribed the year it was built; fittingly, given the location, this was carved in Roman numerals – MDCCCLXIV – alongside his own initials.

I drive the short distance to the church of St David’s where Machen’s father preached – and where both he and Arthur’s mother are buried – a private home since the mid 1990s. From here I can look back across undulating fields of grass and brown-wooded gullies to the rectory, whose cream-edged windows are just visible through the leafless trees. Another winding lane, down which half a stream appears to be flowing, past various cottages, and I arrive at an ‘old foot bridge tremulous with age’. This is the country where Machen, an only child with an invalid mother, grew up, finding entertainment in his love of reading and explorations of impressive local landmarks such as Twyn Barlwm, his ‘hill of dreams’ six miles to the west.

In addition to the Gwent countryside, Machen’s work is dominated by the vast mystery of London – the place where he was to spend the majority of his of adult life.† The seventeen-year-old Arthur was enchanted by the city from the off, after taking the six-hour train journey from south Wales with his father for the first time, in June 1880. On that foremost evening they walked along the Strand: ‘it instantly went to my head and my heart, and I have never loved another street in quite the same way.’

Machen returned the following summer for his initial attempt to become a journalist and learn the craft of writing, a time spent living alone in Turnham Green, which he described later as ‘rather a goblin’s castle than a city of delights’.‡ Things were gradually to improve for the young Arthur after he moved to Clarendon Road in Notting Hill Gate and procured a job at a small publisher’s. One of his tasks was to catalogue a collection of esoteric works on the occult, though he still occasionally terrified himself by trudging northwards through grim suburbs to the ‘goblin city’ of Kensal Green Cemetery – ‘a terrible city of white gravestones and shattered marble pillars and granite urns, and every sort of horrid heathenry’. This was a vast Victorian land of the dead, like Glasgow’s Necropolis; its famous under-the-earth dwellers would come to include Wilkie Collins, author of the sensation novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone.

In August 1887, only a few weeks after the death of his father, Machen, who by this time had been living on and off in London for six years, married the bohemian Amy (Amelia) Hogg. Thirteen years his senior, and an acquaintance of Jerome K. Jerome (soon to find fame with his comic novel Three Men in a Boat) and A. E. Waite, she introduced Arthur to Waite – a folklorist and member of the so-called Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society devoted to occult, alchemical and spiritual study – initiating the two men’s lifelong friendship. Algernon Blackwood was also to join the Golden Dawn towards the end of 1900, having recently returned to London from his first trip along the Danube that would lead to ‘The Willows’. However, the order’s most notorious adherent was Aleister Crowley, ‘the Beast’ – later, perhaps, to inspire the demon-summoning Karswell in M. R. James’s story ‘Casting the Runes’, and the title character of Somerset Maugham’s The Magician – whose involvement and rivalry with fellow adherent William Butler Yeats would splinter the Golden Dawn into factions. Maugham’s novel was made into a 1926 silent movie of the same name, directed by Rex Ingram and starring Paul Wegener – who had previously played The Golem – in the role of Oliver Haddo, the figure inspired by Crowley.§

The Machens were married for twelve years, for half of which Amy was engaged in a struggle against an unspecified form of cancer. This trying time happened to be a period of surprising creativity for Arthur, during which he wrote many of his best works of fiction. Yet mentions of Amy in his autobiographies, written a quarter of a century later, are notable by their absence. Just a single sentence in the second volume, Things Near and Far, alludes to the enormous sense of loss and grief that overwhelmed him following her death in 1899: ‘Then a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more alone.’

In his own memoir, Jerome K. Jerome (who two years after penning his most famous book wrote Told After Supper, a collection of ghost stories that fuse humour and the supernatural) recalled visiting the couple at their Gray’s Inn house shortly before Amy’s death:

The windows looked out onto the great garden, and the rooks were cawing in the elms. She was dying, and Machen, with two cats under his arm, was moving softly about, waiting on her. We did not talk much. I stayed there until the sunset filled the room with a strange purple light.

The Hill of Dreams was written between the autumn of 1895 and the spring of 1897, although it remained unpublished for a decade; three years before it came out in book form it was serialised in Horlick’s Magazine and Home Journal for Australia, India and the Colonies, issued by the manufacturer of the famous malted hot drink.¶ Many critics regard the novel as Machen’s finest literary achievement, a view Arthur himself shared. The Anglo-Irish fantasy author Lord Dunsany, who provided an introduction to a later reissue, commented how ‘clearly and beautifully’ Machen transferred his vision to paper. I too can appreciate its aesthetic, visionary qualities, though I will admit finding The Hill of Dreams a more difficult work to enjoy than some of his others. Perhaps its subject matter – its depiction of isolation and of artistic rejection – is too close to the bone? I suspect it’s one of those books that reveals more of itself on re-reading – and on each subsequent revisit the quiet power of its cryptic pages have resonated more strongly with me. At its heart is the struggle of its central character Lucian Taylor’s quest to perfect his art – and his struggle against crippling depression and self-doubt – swapping his native Caermaen (a barely disguised Caerleon) and the ‘the faery dome of Twyn Barlwm’ for the loneliness and brooding menace of London and the life of a writer.

It’s a journey that mirrors Machen’s own, though Machen avoided the doomed, opiated Dorian Gray-esque demise of his novel’s alter ego and managed to emerge from the despair of Amy’s death; for most of the first decade of the new century he successfully took up the less solitary career of acting (in a touring repertory theatre company), marrying his second wife, Purefoy, in 1903. The pair remained happily together for the rest of their lives, eighty-four-year-old Arthur following his beloved into the hereafter nine months after her death, in December 1947. Their shared headstone in the graveyard of St Mary’s churchyard, Amersham, contains a cross bearing the Latin inscription OMNIA EXEUNT IN MYSTERIUM. Everything ends in mystery.

The first two words, at least, we know hold true.

After university I too moved to London for my own adventure, half-fancying myself as a writer, though doing little to pursue it other than enrolling on an evening scriptwriting course in Ealing, just up the road from the studios where two of my favourite films of the supernatural, The Halfway House and Dead of Night, were made. Indeed, Dead of Night, a portmanteau movie from 1945, features a groundbreaking (and still influential) framing device linking together its disparate strands that wouldn’t be amiss in one of Machen’s early books. The most remarkable episode stars Michael Redgrave in a performance which captures a similar fragility and nervousness to that of his lighthouse keeper in Thunder Rock. Here he plays a disturbed ventriloquist increasingly under the spell of the wooden half of his act. ‘What sort of dummy do you think I am? You shot him, didn’t you?’ taunts the terrifying, undersize figure of Hugo in the final scene of the segment.**

I also find the more low-key Christmas-party storyline in which a teenage Sally Ann Howes ends up consoling the ghost of a young boy particularly affecting, with its dreamlike tone and setting reminiscent of the children’s fancy-dress games from the aborted wedding festivities of Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s 1913 masterpiece. The French author wrote just that one solitary, magical novel – an exploration of how our adolescent dreams can never live up to their unrealistic possibilities – before, like William Hope Hodgson and countless others, his own youthful promise was extinguished in the all-consuming conflict of the Great War.

Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images; Richard Dadd photographed in the act of painting Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, c. 1856 (Wikimedia Commons)

I was twenty-two when I came to the capital, a decade fresher than Machen when he began The Hill of Dreams. I spent those two years in west London localities frequented more than a century before – though I did not know it at the time – by the young Arthur, and not far from Chiswick where the nineteen-year-old Henri Alban Fournier (the French novelist’s real name) lived during the summer of 1905, working in the unlikely setting of a large nearby factory that manufactured wallpaper. My first shared flat was located in a former council house on the seedier fringes of Ladbroke Grove, a short walk from the Clarendon Road attic that Machen moved to in 1883 and close to the famous market which forms the backdrop for Muriel Spark’s terrific narrator-reversing 1958 ghost story ‘The Portobello Road’.

Machen’s predilection for nocturnal rambles intensified after his arrival in the city – ‘the habits of the country, unlike those of London, generally fail to give reason or excuse for night wanderings’ – an experience vividly captured in The Hill of Dreams and in his oddly compelling 1904 novella of suburban domesticity, ennui and transcendence, A Fragment of Life. Somewhat eerily, the name of the main character of the story, Edward Darnell, is only one letter different to my own. I too had taken solace in late-night walks through the more mundane surroundings of the Fenland town in which I grew up, as I tried to make some sense of what was happening around me; Lincolnshire, though, lacked the magic of the hills of Gwent, and shared nothing of the atmosphere of the capital that so captivated my near-namesake:

London seemed a city of Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its long avenues of lighted lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity became for him an image of the endless universe.

On a late winter’s evening, aged seventeen, when I could no longer stand the suffocating sorrow of our family house, I went on one of my circuits of the town, orange-washed under sodium streetlights. I passed through the stillness of the centre – it must have been the middle of the week as the place appeared so empty it might as well have been deserted – along the artificial straightness of the river and over the disused railway bridge where, as a young boy, trains had still crossed before the line was closed during the early 1980s. I can recall the feeling of lying in bed searching for sleep, listening for the far-off sound of the train’s horn while I waited for my father’s footsteps to fall on the drive. Sometimes, when he was back very late from whatever work meeting or committee he’d been away at, snatches of muffled speech would float up from the street below my room. I loved hearing these odd splinters of conversation in the darkness, usually men walking home from the pub; there was something reassuring about their banality, something that reminded me that the world was as it should be.

My route pressed on past countless diminutive terraces and a 1960s housing estate where the identikit streets were named after royal palaces. Somewhere near the church, in which a few years before I’d wasted far too many Sundays as a choirboy, there was an old, white-haired woman standing in front of her house, staring across at me through the darkness. She was only there for a few seconds before she slipped back inside, but she had an unnaturally pale, lime-lit look, which I found unnerving.

I half-wonder now whether I imagined her. Whether she had even been there at all.

I love Machen’s autobiographical writing, with its meanderings around the capital, but it’s his earlier supernatural work to which I was first drawn, particularly that which relates to the ‘Little People’ who dwell beneath the hills of our wild, ancient places. To me, the most memorable of these dark tales is ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’. Often printed as a self-contained story it originally formed part of The Three Imposters, a collection of linked narratives that takes its title from an apocryphal heretical work (De Tribus Impostoribus) mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne – a favourite of Machen, and later of W. G. Sebald – in his Religio Medici of 1642. The structure of Machen’s book was influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, with one of its stories, ‘The Novel of the White Powder’, containing a sickening, chemically induced bodily transformation reminiscent of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

I prefer ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ as a standalone story, which is how I first encountered it. Despite the undoubted manic energy of The Three Imposters, Machen ends up undermining the power and authenticity of its various plots through the trickery of the device he employs to bring them together. Yet even here, as a separate work, ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ utilises several stories-within-a-story as a way of conferring validity upon its hyperreal goings-on. After the opening framing section showing the interchange between Miss Lally (stripped here, in the standalone version, of the duplicity she is revealed to possess in The Three Imposters) and the amateur detective Phillips, the distressed young woman recounts her version of events before reading out an expositional account left by the now-vanished William Gregg.

A chance meeting with Gregg, a noted professor of ethnology, on a London street results in Miss Lally becoming the governess of his children and his unofficial secretary. She accompanies the professor on a trip to ‘a country house in the west of England, not far from Caermaen, a quiet little town, once a city, and the head-quarters of a Roman legion’.†† There, having completed his monumental ethnology textbook, he aims to solve a mystery connected to the small black, rune-inscribed stone in his possession.

I wasn’t familiar with any of Machen’s work until a few years ago. My introduction came with ‘The Shining Pyramid’, another short story in which the existence of a race of hideous fairy folk sequestered beneath our hills is uncovered by a pair of amateur gentlemen detectives.‡‡ Its climactic scene, in which the two men witness a writhing mass of hidden beings upon an ancient summit, is mirrored in a tale by L. T. C. Rolt – Robert Aickman’s co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association – set in the Welsh borderlands. Rolt’s atmospheric ‘Cwm Garon’, which takes place north of Abergavenny in the Black Mountains, sings from the same unholy hymn sheet as Machen’s dark tales with its midnight rites populated by squat, guttural-sounding figures that the protagonist initially confuses with children: ‘Their bodies, however, belied this impression, as did their faces, for their countenances were such that Carfax was grateful for the smoke which prevented him from seeing them clearly.’

I was not alone in coming late to Machen. His literary star, which had risen fleetingly in the 1890s, was already waning once the twentieth century got under way. Ironically, his re-emergence into the popular consciousness was the result of a rather slight story – Machen thought it ‘an indifferent piece of work’ – composed while a journalist on the Evening News. ‘The Bowmen’ first appeared in the London newspaper at the end of September 1914 and is Machen’s own piece of unintentional Great War myth-making, written in response to the British army’s retreat from Mons at the beginning of the war. In ‘The Bowmen’, Saint George and a division of shining Agincourt archers materialise just in time to beat back the German onslaught; later Machen was to say he was inspired by Kipling’s Afghanistan-set ‘The Lost Legion’, a tale with a similar premise.

For a period after ‘The Bowmen’ was printed (it was subsequently published in a high-selling standalone edition), events took on a life of their own, and it came to be widely believed that supernatural forces really had come to the aid of the embattled Tommies in the trenches, despite Machen’s insistence there was no factual basis behind what he’d written. This didn’t seem to matter though, and in the fake news of the time the Agincourt archers morphed into a more divine form of assistance, the so-called ‘Angel of Mons’ – with numerous people reporting that their soldier sons, brothers and uncles had been witness to the Heaven-sent help. Unfortunately Machen, who throughout much of his life walked a precarious financial tightrope, did not fully benefit from the story’s popularity, as the copyright was held by the paper.

Machen’s work draws on Celtic and northern European folklore – of changelings and of hidden fairies, of the Welsh ‘Tylwyth Teg’. Less mystically, in Dreads and Drolls, a 1926 anthology of his writing that deals with historical mysteries, Machen entertains the euhemeristic view that his little people of the Welsh hills are subterranean-dwelling ‘small, dark aborigines who hid from the invading Celt somewhere about 1500–1000 B.C.’ This chimes with the major theme of Kazuo Ishiguro’s surprising fantasy novel The Buried Giant. Set in the Dark Ages and taking place after the death of King Arthur, the book explores how we are capable of jointly forgetting – or burying – unwholesome truths about our shared past: in this case the earlier ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons that has been obscured behind a fog of enchantment emanating from the breath of a dragon. One of its most powerful scenes could be straight out of Machen’s fairy stories, when a swarming mass of malevolent pixies emerges from a river to take Beatrice, the wife of the novel’s central character Axl: ‘He knew more and more creatures were rising from the water – how many might have boarded now? Thirty? Sixty? – and their collective voices seemed to him to resemble the sound of children playing in the distance.’

In ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ we see something of the horror of these hidden creatures that have always shadowed us in the ‘not too keen-witted’ boy Cradock – a boy born of a human mother and fairy father, like another supernaturally conceived abomination Machen gave us in The Great God Pan (or like the satanic offspring of Rosemary’s Baby). Miss Lally is shocked one afternoon to watch the boy having an apparent fit and to hear him talking in awful, guttural, half-sibilant whisper, a language the local vicar says is most definitely not Welsh: ‘I should say it must be that of the fairies – the Tylwydd Têg, as we call them.’§§

Machen’s ‘Little People’ are responsible not just for scaring children, but for their disappearance: the unfortunate Annie Trevor in ‘The Shining Pyramid’ who vanishes on a walk over the hills to visit a relative, or the ‘servant-girl at a farmhouse’ who is lost without trace in ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’. Machen is working, albeit more darkly, with the same strand of folklore that a few years earlier fuelled the Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’, written in 1886, when Yeats was twenty-one. The two men were acquainted with one another, as both were concurrent members of the Golden Dawn in London – Machen for a short, grief-stricken spell after the death of Amy in 1899. At least, however, in Yeats’s poem the hope remains that the beguiled boy might have a better faery future in store – in a place perhaps preferable to that of the tumultuous fin-de-siècle human world – which we can assume is not the case for the missing girls in Machen’s stories.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

In appearance, Machen’s fairies, too, are of an altogether darker persuasion than the classical, angelic winged figures that dominated the Victorian fairy-painting craze which flourished between 1840 and 1870. The ‘little stunted creatures with old men’s faces, with bloated faces, with little sunken eyes’ described in Machen’s later story ‘Out of the Earth’ do, however, bear a resemblance to some of the figures depicted in Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke. The schizophrenic artist’s tour de force was undertaken over a decade while he was incarcerated in Britain’s most notorious asylum for the insane; he was to languish in Bedlam for the rest of his life after stabbing and murdering his father, who he thought had been transformed into a demon.

The paintings of the less well known John Anster Fitzgerald, a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1845 to the first years of the dawning century, occasionally offer an even more disturbing vision of the ‘fair folk’, who appear as grotesque spirits and demonic hobgoblins conjured straight out of a laudanum-induced nightmare, or borrowed from the oils of Bosch.

Both artists’ work would seem a fitting match for the ‘loathsome forms’ that inhabit Machen’s dark fairyland.

At the conclusion of ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, Professor Gregg goes up from his own rented house on the borderland into the ‘Grey Hills’ – which appear to be a gateway into a more foreboding netherworld – to ‘meet the “Little People” face to face’. And though there is no geographic range of peaks in Machen’s home country that shares the name, just seven miles to the east of Llanddewi’s rectory, looming above an ancient wood, stands Mynydd Llwyd – the Grey Hill. Machen’s friend Fred Hando’s 1944 guide The Pleasant Land of Gwent – in which Machen was to pen his last published piece, the book’s brief but lyrical introduction – refers to the word llwyd (grey) as being ‘associated here, in other parts of Wales, and in Brittany with elves, with ghosts, with death itself.’

Heading towards the Grey Hill’s invisible peak I weave around a narrow road that rises northwards from the plain of the coast. Halfway up I pass an emptied reservoir, its gothic tower emerging forlornly from the muddy dregs of a languishing puddle. The waters were drained in 2017 so that maintenance work could be carried out on the late-Victorian structure; during the process the body of a local woman murdered twenty years previously by her husband was found.

As the road presses higher and the woodland becomes denser, the visibility drops to next to nothing: thick, low cloud has brought a shrouded, stilting opaqueness to the world. I’m in another location Machen fondly namechecks in his work: the ‘green, great and exalted’ Wentwood. At one point a roe deer bounds in front of me, terrified yet drawn by the twin pinholes of my headlamps in the ghostlight. And without warning I am arrived at the site of the infamous Forester’s Oaks where, in ages past, poachers were executed for daring to take a stag or steal a sheep. The vast trees, including the hollowed-out hanging-oak itself, have been gone for more than a century, but as the only living soul among the white-out I am suitably impressed by the eerie ambience. There is no spring birdsong; indeed, hardly a sound at all, except the quiet drip of precipitation onto the undergrowth. I start on the muddy track that climbs to the Grey Hill, but soon realise it’s futile in the mist and that I will see little from its peak should I even find it; I return to my car, relieved when I’ve descended out of the whiteness.

Because in this place white is significant, I’d like to think.

En route to my night’s accommodation I stop off at dusk in another nearby Roman settlement, Caerwent, where I walk along the top of dark stone walls that date from the third century after Christ. I watch a black rabbit hopping among the ruins, which brings to my mind the film Watership Down. Our class crowded together into the hotel lounge to be shown it one evening on a week-long primary school trip to London and its ending caused the supposed toughest boy to cry; were I to see the death of Hazel again now I’m sure it would have the same effect on me.

The next day I try for the Grey Hill once more. This time the cloud has cleared and the woodland is transformed by birdsong, yesterday’s ominous stillness replaced by the pleasant haze of a spring afternoon. Now I can ascend to the ancient rocks on its summit like Professor Gregg before me. And, perhaps, like the central character in my favourite of Machen’s stories – and the reason the whiteness of the Wentwood last night struck me so vividly. Because surely Machen had this place at least a little in mind when he described his Grey Hills in ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, or ‘the hill of the grey rocks’ above the woods in ‘The White People’.

Written in 1899, ‘The White People’ is a masterful naïve narration by a bewitched adolescent girl (or perhaps just a girl possessing a furiously overactive imagination?) that brings its strangeness to the page in a formally surprising way. It feels ahead of its time, anticipating the modernist first-person streams of consciousness that two decades later – when employed by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner – would seem so innovative. Like the stories from The Three Imposters, this one is bookended by a framing device – in this case a dry scholarly discussion about the nature of sin and evil. I find myself skimming through this opening discourse to get to the good stuff, the embedded ‘Green Book’: the journal in which we learn of the unnamed girl’s disconcerting childhood. It’s a remarkable read, full of cryptic words that put me in mind of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’ – the ‘Aklo letters’, ‘Dôls’, ‘Jeelo’, ‘voolas’ – words we can only half-guess the meaning of.¶¶ There are also references to various arcane rites that are never explained: ‘the White Ceremonies, and the Green Ceremonies, and the Scarlet Ceremonies’.

‘The White People’ is a rambling, mesmerising piece of writing that does, I think, effectively capture the voice of a young teenage girl of the period. It’s not easy to take in, given that it’s rendered in large blocks of text with barely the concession of a paragraph to assist the reader, but it has a hypnotic quality that takes us deep inside the narrator’s dreamlike world:

When I was very small, and mother was alive, I can remember remembering things before that, only it has all got confused. But I remember when I was five or six I heard them talking about me when they thought I was not noticing.

The girl recalls overhearing the adults discussing her when she was a toddler, a time when she babbled phrases no one else could understand – words in the ‘Xu language’ about ‘the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle’. Later, aged about five, she remembers being taken by her nurse – who, we infer, is complicit in the events that are to come – to a deep pool in a wood. The nurse leaves her there while she goes off with a tall man who has followed them. And the little girl is alone on a patch of moss as ‘out of the water and out of the wood came two wonderful white people, and they began to play and dance and sing’.

It’s a haunting image of two nymph-like creatures, but the more I read it the more I wonder whether the girl has in fact witnessed her nurse and the man emerging naked from the pool, with their subsequent dancing and singing in fact being the couple engaging in sex. Because when the nurse returns ‘she was looking something like the lady looked’ and she is angry and upset when the girl tells her everything she has seen, making her promise not to say a word about it to anybody. If this is what has happened then, unlike Leo in The Go-Between, the girl seems enchanted, rather than horrified, by this window into an adult future.

After this, the girl’s journal records the momentous ‘White Day’, just before her fourteenth birthday. Her description of her walk up through the woods and into the ominous country beyond resembles the scenery around Wentwood and the Grey Hill, and paints a powerful picture of this history-ridden landscape:

I went up and up a long way, till at last the thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the top of a big bare place, where there were ugly grey stones lying all about on the grass, and here and there a little twisted, stunted tree came out from under a stone, like a snake.

My own ascent of the Grey Hill is less dramatic; I do not snag myself on thorns, and the path, though in places eroded by people’s footfalls and streams of rainwater, is well-marked. It’s a pretty view from the summit, which measures just under nine hundred feet in height, with the Wentwood stretching off to the north and west. The forest is impressive, largely consisting of conifers, with blocks of russet larches bringing colour to the greenness. Up here, at the plateau of the hill, the palette is mainly brown rather than grey, a wide carpet of dead bracken punctuated by leafless dark-branched birches. From somewhere nearby a willow warbler’s slurred song tries to mask the growl of distant traffic – the first of these returning songbirds I have heard this spring.

I search among the undergrowth for the hill’s stone circle; eventually I locate it, surrounded by the stumps of hacked-off trees. According to Hando’s guidebook it is ‘older than Stonehenge’, and although low-key – there are just two standing stones, with the rest of the boulders lying close to the ground – it is humbling to have such history to myself. The tallest menhir is plastered with lichens of varying colours – lime green, mustard, black – and pockmarked with penny-sized indentations that hint at its age.

The stream of consciousness of ‘The White People’ continues in the same vein as the girl progresses through her mythic hilltop world, before descending into a secret wood where she glimpses something ‘so wonderful and so strange’; we learn only later, in the clumsy framing epilogue, what this cryptic thing is. The girl goes on to recount the dark fairy tales her nurse used to tell her, as well as stories handed down from the nurse’s great-grandmother, who lived alone in a cottage on a hill. Some of the witchcraft-like rituals the old woman used to partake in, and the archaic secrets she knew of – like how to create the power-imbued figure of a clay man, or of the archaic maze game of ‘Troy Town’ – are passed on to the girl, who at the story’s end, more than two years after her nurse has unaccountably gone away, returns to the pool in the wood.

I love ‘The White People’, partly, I think, because of its sheer elusiveness. I still don’t know what exactly is taking place – and it’s better for that. As to whether Machen actually wants us to believe the girl is privy to real forces of witchcraft and fairy other worlds, or whether the story is more of a parable about the loss of innocence, I’m not sure. (It could, of course, be both.) What isn’t in doubt, however, is the peculiar, lingering impression ‘The White People’ leaves.

All these are most secret secrets, and I am glad when I remember what they are, and how many wonderful languages I know, but there are some things that I call the secrets of the secrets that I dare not think of unless I am quite alone, and then I shut my eyes, and put my hands over them and whisper the word …

They lied.

She hadn’t won.

My mother’s tumour had not been completely cut out, despite that second visit to the Pilgrim, and the targeted sci-fi radiation, which did not have the desired effect. The secret word had not been defeated. Instead, over time, it re-emerged and mutated. Metastasised. Like the spreading phosphorescent speck at the end The House on the Borderland, or the creeping spot of fungus from ‘The Voice in the Night’.

I cannot produce an exact mental map of when and where the all-clear became unclear, the distance is too long. But I remember Dad taking me aside, telling me Mum’s illness had come back, and that she was going to have more treatment. This time chemotherapy in some form was involved, and steroids, which left her face bloated and caused her to put on weight. I know I didn’t want my friends to come round and see her like that. Because I didn’t want them to be callous, didn’t want other people to know my mother was unwell. So, I said nothing.

I was a master of secrecy.

Perhaps it was a kind of denial – a magical thinking that by not giving the illness mention, it would be kept at bay – though I think it was more me being protective: she was my mum and I didn’t want anyone else gossiping about her, or offering up false platitudes. It was us against the world.

Me against the world. And fuck all those others wanting to stick their noses in.

There were definite peaks and troughs over the next few years – around three years if my estimations possess any validity. Dark moments when Dad would take me aside and talk about a setback, then more positive episodes when the treatment had seemingly taken effect, when the bad cells were shrinking away. At some point, however, Mum became much more frail. I think her lungs had become involved, making her wheezy; she started carrying an inhaler – your puffer you called it – that she would turn to with increasing regularity. And that was when she got a wheelchair, so if we went shopping I could push her – though she would still scoot out, surprising onlookers, if we reached a high kerb or some similar obstacle.

Then came the secondary tumour in her brain that pushed down onto her optic nerve, causing her to lose the sight in one eye. She wore a patch sometimes when she was out, and didn’t care what people thought – once a little boy asked his own mother why that lady was like a pirate and you could tell the woman was mortified, loud-whispering to him to be quiet, though Mum just laughed and told him it was because her eye was poorly. She was good like that.

You were a ghost pirate, I think.

Later still, the cancer in her brain caused occasional epileptic fits, which were terrifying to witness, and which I hadn’t thought about for years until I started writing this. But she was determined. She would keep battling on, just like my nan had with her arthritis, even though her body was starting to disengage from the world around her.

And she did keep going. Until the sky finally fell away.

Down below me to the south, I see the curve of the Severn Estuary; somewhere to the east will be the border between Wales and England formed by the Wye, though the haze is too far-reaching to make that out, even if the contours of the land were to allow it.

A slant of sunlight angles down from a dark-grey cumulus cloud, like a ray from the heavens drawn in a comic strip.

In a clearing among the Wentwood a white farmhouse glimmers in the vaporous air.

The scene is akin to one in the 1944 Ealing Studios film The Halfway House, a ghostly piece of wartime propaganda (not dissimilar in tone to the previous year’s Thunder Rock) that I first saw aged about ten or eleven. I watched it after returning from Sunday dinner at Nan and Grandad’s – I loved settling down in front of black-and-white afternoon matinees on the telly, sprawled on the sofa knowing that Dad was pottering about outside in the garden. It’s a film that lingered with me long after that initial viewing: it must have had something about it to lodge so firmly inside my head because I didn’t watch it again until a week before I came to the Grey Hill, yet I had retained a vivid sense of its odd ambience.

I’ve always associated the distinctive chimes of the inn’s clock with the near-identical ‘Westminster Quarters’ sounded by the clock in my other aunt and uncle’s front room (they lived in Boston, where that fateful cormorant had alighted – we only visited them a couple of times a year). The doorbell on my current house gives out a simple two-tone chime if somebody rings it, but it has another setting – the full eight-note Westminster Quarters – which can only be activated by fiddling with a tiny switch inside. Something I never do. Very occasionally – as first happened in the early hours of the morning, causing me, illogically and in a state of fright, to search each room for intruders – these troubling tones play of their own accord; I’m almost used to it now, though the sporadic sound causes a wide-eyed, raised-ear look of surprise to appear on my cat’s face, and a slight quickening of my heart. I guess it must be the result of some random radio-wave interference, but it is odd that the standard chime never plays for these phantom rings, nor the other unselected sound the doorbell is capable of playing.

The Halfway House is a low-key production that has an out-of-time quality a world away from modern films. It’s set around the Halfway House of its title, an inn (that has nothing whatsoever to do with the lonely watch-house on Blakeney Point) nestled in a Welsh valley close to the village of Cwmbach. The name translates as ‘Little Valley’, though I suspect it’s chosen here for the play on words of how it sounds in English: ‘Come back’.

The war is in full swing and a disparate group of travellers are making their way to the place for a summer weekend break: the well-known conductor David Davies, returned to his homeland after a long absence, harbouring the secret that he has been given only a few months to live; a couple in the process of splitting up, though their daughter (the young actress Sally Ann Howes from Dead of Night) is doing her best to prevent it; an Irish diplomat keen to defend his country’s neutrality, despite the rift this causes with his English fiancée; a gruff Merchant Navy sea captain and his French wife, both struggling to come to terms with the loss of their son; and an ex-con army man and his black-marketeer friend – they scan the scene from the hillside with their binoculars as they approach, the inn shimmering into view where an instant before the valley was empty. All the guests are attended to by the innkeeper Rhys – played by Mervyn Johns, who also features as the figure haunted by a recurring, nightmarish sense of déjà vu in the central framing device that so effectively links together the disparate stories of Dead of Night – and his daughter Gwyneth, Johns’ real-life daughter Glynis. From early on we realise there is something odd about this pair – Rhys seems to materialise out of the air when he first appears, neither of them cast a shadow, and both have a good line in portentous dialogue.

‘Quite a lot of people who don’t know where they’re going end up here,’ Rhys says to Fortescue, the disgraced army man, as he waits to check in. ‘You were expected, sir.’

The Halfway House is a quiet film full of poignancy, its beautifully shot scenes adding a magical quality to the proceedings, though the location work was actually carried out on Exmoor – another of our childhood summer holiday destinations – rather than Wales. It’s a film, I think, at least partly about living in the moment, and reminds me a little (although it’s far less flamboyant and smaller in scope) of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, which was to be released at cinemas eighteen months later.

As The Halfway House draws to its conclusion, we learn that time has flipped back and become frozen in a repeat of the weekend a year before when the inn was bombed and destroyed: Rhys and his daughter are well-meaning shades.

Standing on top of the Grey Hill I feel like one of the guests in the film. Drawn to a place offering a fleeting hope of reconciliation with the ghosts of the past.

* The Piper at the Gates of Dawn also gave the title to Pink Floyd’s psychedelic 1967 debut album, which seems rather apt given that the band’s founder member Syd Barrett could himself be said to have seen Pan after excessive LSD consumption opened the singer’s doors of perception.

† Further details can be found in The London Adventure, Machen’s final autobiographical volume, published in 1924.

‡ Machen’s struggles at the time put me in mind of two unnerving London garret-set stories that deal with the disconcerting loneliness of the writer’s existence: Oliver Onions’ ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ and Robert Aickman’s ‘Meeting Mr Millar’.

§ Perhaps the most notable thing about The Magician today is that it was the first film the future director Michael Powell worked on from start to finish (as a kind of production assistant): he even features in a cameo as a balloon-holding onlooker when Haddo is having his silhouette drawn by a fairground artist.

¶ The debut appearance of The Hill of Dreams in this unlikely periodical is less surprising when you discover Machen’s friend A. E. Waite was the London manager of Horlick’s for most of the first decade of the new century. Waite edited and wrote for the journal, which he filled with stories featuring occult and related themes that interested him, such as mesmerism and hypnotism.

** The German actor Frederick Valk, who plays Redgrave’s Freud-like psychiatrist Dr Van Straaten in Dead of Night, also appeared in Thunder Rock as the ghostly Austrian anaesthetist Dr Kurtz.

†† It’s interesting that Machen locates the house in England, because quite clearly Caermaen represents Caerleon; a similar coyness about its Welshness is displayed in The Hill of Dreams, though by the time of Far Off Things – the first of his autobiographical works from the 1920s – there’s no such ambiguity.

‡‡ Despite my earlier ignorance of Machen, I would have seen references to him among the ‘weird fiction’ of H. P. Lovecraft, who I was obsessed with during my first years at secondary school; two of his best stories, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, owe a considerable debt to, and even namecheck, the Welsh writer.

§§ The harsh ‘hissing syllables’ of Machen’s fairy language are mirrored in Lovecraft’s ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, where we learn of ‘Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travelers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods …’

¶¶ This use of esoteric terminology is something Lovecraft is fond of too – he even co-opts the ‘dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity’, mentioning it in two of his stories.