The Other Passenger Read online

  JOHN KEIR CROSS

  The Other Passenger

  with a new introduction by

  J. F. NORRIS

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Other Passenger by John Keir Cross

  First published in Great Britain by Westhouse in 1944

  First American edition published by Lippincott in 1946

  First Valancourt Books edition 2017

  Copyright © 1944 by John Keir Cross

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by J. F. Norris

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  Cover by Henry Petrides

  INTRODUCTION

  A Little in Love with the Macabre

  On the first pages in the original edition of The Other Passenger John Keir Cross dedicates his collection of short stories to the memory of S. T. McF. “a man now dead” and he composes his epitaph:

  Here lieth a sad boy

  O, he was haunted haunted

  By terrible dreams

  He knew not what he wanted

  And he was a bad boy

  Yet, lady, it seems

  There were glorious times

  When he was a glad boy

  And made little rhymes

  Here lieth the mad boy

  Who made little rhymes

  Is it a real epitaph for a real person? No, I very much doubt that. You see, “Stephen MacFarlane” was the pseudonym that Keir Cross adopted for his first venture in fiction as a children’s author. With the success of The Other Passenger many of those first books were reissued (some were even revised and expanded) under his real name while other books as MacFarlane have all but disappeared. Assiduous hunting through the catalogs of used bookstores led me to all of his early work as MacFarlane and within those pages were the seeds of greatness. Delving into these early books reveals the genesis for the utterly bizarre, wickedly cruel and thoroughly imaginative stories Keir Cross invented for the collection we know as The Other Passenger.

  For decades I only knew of John Keir Cross as the author of this single volume of unique short stories. I had no idea he had written anything else. My mistake was thinking of him only as a writer of adult fiction. Subsequent research revealed no less than seven books as Stephen MacFarlane and a handful of other children’s novels under his own name. All of them show hints of the surreal and eerie worlds he would visit in the stories of The Other Passenger. One can find a wealth of the burgeoning talent that would be on display in the mix of crime, supernatural and just plain bizarre stories clearly intended for an adult audience.

  His gang of amateur detective youngsters collectively known as the Studio J Kids who appear in a series of three books are menaced by Nazi spies, traitorous Brits and ruthless murderers. The children in The Owl and the Pussycat (retitled The Other Side of Green Hills in the U.S. edition) are befriended by an elderly gentleman and his little girl companion, both from another dimension, and together they literally do battle with a powerful wizard in search of missing pages from a Book of Secrets that has the power to meld the other dimension with the world we know. This latter book, his last children’s book published prior to the collection of his adult stories, is rife with the types of wanton cruelty and dark impulses that flood the pages of The Other Passenger.

  It seems Keir Cross was spending time honing his craft in the relative safety of a child’s world before diving deep into the darkness of human depravity in tales such as “Music, When Soft Voices Die” and “Hands”. His love of the supernatural and the power of magic so eerily and often beautifully captured in the scenes between Owl and the children of The Owl and the Pussycat transmogrify into nightmarish displays of selfishness and vanity in “Petronella Pan”, an especially creepy tale of the desire for eternal youth. One can see echoes of the misanthropic Titus the wicked sorcerer and even a darker version of The Owl in Keir Cross’s bitterly pessimistic story “Esmeralda” about a father perversely devoted to his fantasy daughter.

  Keir Cross, though not as well known as he should be, has been well respected by some of the more prominent members of the genre fiction community. Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction novelist, remembers him as “the first, I think, professional writer I got to know” and someone “who had quite an influence on me, and encouraged me, I think, to become a pro.” From the horror and supernatural community Ramsey Campbell recalls that a seminal anthology edited and with some insightful commentary by Keir Cross preceding each tale “helped shape my view of [horror fiction]” as “a branch of literature.” Best Horror Stories (Faber & Faber, 1960) was Campbell’s introduction to the rich variety that could be had in the macabre short story from literary greats like Graham Greene, Faulkner, and Herman Melville to ghost story and weird fiction masters like Bradbury and M. R. James.

  Not long after the publication of the stories in The Other Passenger Keir Cross turned to freelance script writing and assisting in radio production at the BBC. In 1949 he landed work as a script writer for the radio program The Man in Black for which he adapted several short stories from the work of horror and crime fiction giants like John Collier (“Thus I Refute Beelzy”), Ambrose Bierce (“The Middle Toe of the Right Foot”), Bram Stoker (“The Judge’s House”) and M. R. James (“Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You”). Richard J. Hand in his study of British horror radio programming Listen to Terror (Manchester University Press, 2014) discusses in great detail the skill with which Keir Cross managed to cull the essence of the original writers’ stories (often using their own words and dialogue) with the perfect placement of sound effects and musical cues. The distillation of the original work melding with the host’s narrative voice (all Keir Cross’s own writing) who gave the program its name was one of Keir Cross’s hallmarks as a radio script writer. Hand praises Keir Cross’s talent—especially his adaptation of William Fryer Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers­”—and calls the entire series one of the highlights in British horror radio shows. Though short-lived at only eight episodes it was a program that had long-lasting influence. Hand points out that three of Keir Cross’s The Man in Black scripts were re-broadcast forty years later during the long run of the Fear on 4 series.

  As for the eighteen stories you are no doubt about to devour in this volume I can assure you that John Keir Cross is a devil of a dreamer himself. The range of subject matter is as diverse as those writers whose stories he selected for radio adaptation or the writers he admired in the anthologies he assembled. His work runs the gamut of horror fiction consisting of stories of crime and murder; surreal nightmares and macabre fantasies; one odd blending of science fiction and psychological horror; and two genuine ghost stories. He can be ingenious and chilling (“The Glass Eye” and “Petronella Pan”), witty and poignant (“The Little House”), indulge in black humor (“Absence of Mind”) and shock even a modern reader with unnerving examples of wanton cruelty (“Esmeralda”, “Hands” and several others). Nearly all of the stories are drenched in a pathos for lonely haunted individuals doomed to cursed lives of their own making. Some of them learn dreadful lessons and pay the price of dreaming too big while others are led down a path of desperation leading to their purgatory or a fate worse than Hell.

  Has there ever been a more insanely perverse story of a ventriloquist than that of Julia and her love for Max Collodi in “Th
e Glass Eye”? Not even Ray Bradbury’s Riabouchinska or the mad vaudevillian in the film Dead of Night come close to the fiendish ingenuity in the finale of Keir Cross’s tale.

  Tattoos have been a relatively modern subject of terror for writers of the macabre. From H. Rider Haggard’s novel of a will tattooed to the back of a woman (Mr. Meeson’s Will) to Roald Dahl’s satire on art collectors (“Skin”) to episodes of popular TV series (The X-Files’ “Never Again”) tattoos have always tempted the fertile imaginations of horror fiction writers. “Music, When Soft Voices Die . . .” may sport an elegiac allusion to Shelley’s poetry but Keir Cross’s tale of bewitched African drums, the eerie design etched into their skins and later tattooed on human flesh is anything but a paean. For those with a taste for the exotic this story also has the lagniappe of Zulu mythology along with its lethal inking art.

  Keir Cross gives us several variations on deadly sins leading to deadly consequences. Envy and wrath rear their ugly heads in the story of bitterly jealous Adrian Hagerman who lives in the shadow of his brother Charles, a successful poet. “Couleur de Rose” is Adrian’s story, the title of a volume of Charles’s poetry, and Adrian’s poetic way of describing his newfound philosophy. The final paragraphs twist the metaphor into a gruesome literal truth.

  In “Clair de Lune”, one of Keir Cross’s genuine ghost stories, the conflicted and confused narrator muses on the existence of ghosts in this mix of eloquence and prosaic observation:

  “Ghosts are not things—I doubt if they are even people: they are feelings. They are all unaccountable essences—they are your own self sitting gravely and accusingly on your own doorstep. That is why this story is vague and nebulous—all the time it is groping to describe something that is literally indescribable.”

  Do not be misled by this seemingly obvious statement or its hint of anticlimax. John Keir Cross is a master at capturing and evoking the indescribable, of exposing the forbidden desires and the criminal impulses, of showing us the people who fall in love with the macabre. The Other Passenger will take you on a whirlwind tour from dizzying heights of delirium and whimsy to the chasms where lie tortured souls forever lost.

  J. F. Norris

  August 2017

  J. F. Norris’s most recent essays on crime fiction have appeared in the anthologies Murder in the Closet and Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats. His writing on forgotten writers and their books has led to reissued books from publishers like Canada’s Véhicule Press and La Bestia Equilátera in Argentina. You can read about obscure supernatural and crime fiction (mostly by long dead writers) on his blog, Pretty Sinister Books. He lives in Chicago.

  to S. T. McF.

  a man now dead,

  with this epitaph:

  Here lieth a sad boy

  O, he was haunted, haunted

  By terrible dreams

  He knew not what he wanted

  And he was a bad boy

  Yet, lady, it seems

  There were glorious times

  When he was a glad boy

  And made little rhymes

  Here lieth the mad boy

  Who made little rhymes

  PART ONE

  PORTRAITS

  Why, ’tis the devil;

  I know him by a great rose he wears on’s shoe,

  To hide his cloven foot . . .

  The White Devil

  The Glass Eye

  There are things that are funny so that you laugh at them, and there are things that are funny but you don’t laugh at them at all—at least, if you do, you aren’t laughing because they amuse you: you are doing what Bergson says you do when you laugh—you are snarling. You are up against something you don’t understand—or something you understand too well, but don’t want to give in to. It’s the other side of the familiar thing—the shadow turned inside out—the dog beneath the skin of the dog beneath the skin.

  You can take, for example, the case of Julia. Is it possible to laugh at people like Julia? I have never been able to. Yet Julia is funny—there is something monumentally funny in that terrible gaunt shape, in those wide and earnest eyes, in the red, moist tip of that nose of hers that seems longer than any nose in the world. There is something funny in her uncanny genius for saying the wrong thing—but when she does say the wrong thing a whole world of tragic miscomprehension comes to the surface. The blue eyes smile seriously—the whole pose and attitude register the fact that a remark had been made. Behold! Julia seems to say—a remark, my friends, a remark! . . . And everyone shuffles a little and looks the other way, or hastily talks about something else.

  For example: Some people with a young baby came to see my wife and me just after we were married. The mother went out for a walk, leaving my wife to look after the child. She suddenly said, glancing at the clock:

  “Heavens, it’s time I went upstairs to feed Celia’s infant!”

  And Julia (the blue eyes smiling) looked up from the magazine she was reading.

  “Is it bottle-fed?” she asked . . .

  Julia is over forty—forty-two, to be exact.

  A friend of mine, a man who makes up verse for the magazines, wrote a poem about Julia. He called it:

  To Julia: A song for a lost, mad girl.

  O, she thought she was in China

  And a million miles away,

  All among the tall pagodas

  Where the shining geishas play;

  And the mocking-birds were singing,

  And the lanterns burning red,

  And the temple bells were ringing—

  Softly, softly in her head.

  And those high and frozen mountains

  Brought her comfort in the night—

  Golden fish in silver fountains

  Wove her garments of delight;

  And the rich mimosa blossoms

  Scented all the shining air,

  And the mocking-birds were nesting—

  Quietly, quietly in her hair . . .

  Now, I want to tell you a story about Julia. Is it a funny story? I don’t know—I just don’t know. There are two people concerned in it, and in a sense they were both funny—Julia and this man, Max Collodi, I mean. But I don’t think the story is funny. It is grotesque. There is one small twist in it, one odd and unaccountable thing . . .

  I must tell you something first. If you call on Julia in her little flat in West Kensington where everything is just so—where the Burne-Jones panels by the mantelshelf harmonize so beautifully with the William Morris design on the wallpaper, where the volumes of the Tauchnitz edition of the Best English Authors smile on you from the bookshelves like rows of well-kept false teeth—if you call on her for tea, say, from the Japanese handpainted cups—you will see, on the mantelpiece, something that will haunt you more than any other thing in that room of ghosts. You will go away with your brows drawn together in a frown and your lips pursed up in an effort to understand, to piece things together. But you will see no more than it can see.

  It is the story of that thing that I want to tell you—the story of that unaccountable Glass Eye, nestling on its little bed of black velvet on Julia’s marble mantelshelf.

  Somewhere in one of the philosophic books of the East there is another story about a Glass Eye. It concerns, if I remember rightly, a beggar who one day asked a philosopher for alms. The philosopher refused and went on his way. But the beggar was a trier and pursued him, shrilly demanding money. He pursued him right out of the city, till at last the philosopher stopped in exasperation and said:

  “All right, I’ll give you money. But on one condition. One of my eyes is a glass eye. Tell me which eye it is and you shall have all I possess.”

  The beggar looked at him intently, and at length said solemnly:

  “Your right eye, Master, is the glass eye.”

  The philosopher was astonished.

  “Tell me how you knew,” he cried. “That eye was made by the greatest craftsman in the world—it should be impossible to tell it from a real eye. How d
id you know that my right eye was the glass one?”

  “Because, Master,” said the beggar slowly, “because your right eye was the one that had a compassionate look in it.”

  Five years ago, when Julia was thirty-seven, she lived in a bed-sitting-room in a narrow-shouldered house between West Ken­sington and Fulham. It was a small room, with yellow wallpaper stained with damp at the corners. There was a marble-topped washstand with a flowered basin and ewer on it. The pictures on the walls were coloured engravings of old sailing ships—the landlady’s father had been captain once of one of those long, slender vessels that had paddles as well as sails. On the mantelshelf was an eight-day clock, and in the tiled hearth stood a rusty gas-ring on which Julia did her cooking.

  At this time Julia did not have the reasonably good job she has now. She was clerk to an old-fashioned solicitor, a man named Maufry, who even in the 1940s still wore a square black top hat and wrote to his clients by hand, taking copies by the old moist paper method.

  The loneliness and desolation of Julia’s life were appalling. She did not know any of us in those days, so she did not have even the slight companionship and relief we afford her. She got up in the mornings, made herself tea on the gas-ring and cooked a slice of toast before the gas-fire. She lunched cheaply at an A.B.C. tea shop, with a book propped up before her. In the evenings she cooked a simple meal—fried some gammon, perhaps, or a chop, and boiled some vegetables (all on the same gas-ring, of course—a complicated conjuring trick this, involving much juggling with pots and pans). Then, having washed up, she read, or wrote letters to her sister in Leicester. And went to bed, generally at ten or half-past.

  What went on in her mind? Did she ever gaze at the engravings on the walls and wish she might sail in those vanished ships to unimaginable places? Did she, as she read her books—dull novels by dead authors about people who had never lived—did she ever permit herself to be wafted away in fancy to some other and more picturesque life, in Spain, Italy, Morocco? Did she long for a knock at the door? Did she hope that the young man in the flat above might come home drunk one night and enter the wrong room? Did she look back on the past and speculate on why it was that things had slipped so unnoticeably away from her?