An ‘exclusive’ today, listeners, as we’re privileged to have some powerful fiction for you. Following our recent, very popular interview with author Sam Gafford, discussing William Hope Hodgson, we present Sam’s fictionalized account of Hope Hodgson’s last days, ‘The Land of Lonesomeness’. Although this story appears in his collection The Dreamer in Fire, we believe this is its first outing on the web. The story is a moving evocation of those times, and a reflection on Hope Hodgson’s fictional creations, one that you shouldn’t miss…
The Land of Lonesomeness
By Sam Gafford
April 16, 1918
It had rained for most of the night before and, when the sun finally rose, the clouds were still heavy with impending downpours. Slowly, a hole opened in the clouds and a single shaft of golden sunlight broke through and brought the battlefield into sharper relief. No one moved. It was possible, from my position, to see the dead lying between the lines. Most lay where they had fallen with limbs and heads and bodies making a grim seascape along the fields. I could see in their hills and valleys the oceans of my youth, turning dull and grey before a coming storm or hurricane. If you looked long enough, you could swear that they made waves that peaked and dived with the wind.
I sat in the mud and tried vainly to get some sleep. The German artillery had increased in velocity and there was not a man among us who did not feel that they were bracing for an onslaught on our lines. No one said it but we all felt it coming. We had held Mont Kemmel on the French line for weeks now but I had long ago given up trying to understand why the British Army had felt this mound of earth was so important. The Great War, begun among cheers and vainglorious boasting, had become a massacre over inches of useless, blood engorged dirt.
The men of the 84th Battery of the Royal Field Artillery all wore the same look of hopeless resignation. We could keep going until we were told to stop or else just fell over dead at our posts. Whether death came by way of sniper bullet, artillery shell or sheer hopelessness made little difference.
Only one face showed any type of life and that was Lt. Arthur Worth. For that reason alone, no one else ever even spoke to Worth. His spirit was more than any of us could bear. It seemed unlikely but I was probably the same as Worth four years ago when my wife, Bessie, and I made the mad escape from France back to England at the outbreak of war. I sent her to live with my mother and sister in Borth even though I knew that there was no affection between them. My decision had been made and, even at my advanced age of 36, I was determined to join the British Army and do my part.
With my second mate’s certificate, I could have joined the navy but I had vowed to never again serve upon a ship in any capacity. Even the channel crossings put me in a foul mood as I watched the crew run back and forth on deck. Every second at sea brought back the memories of that decade of my life and I would call no man “captain” again so long as I lived.
I had no idea where Worth had come from. He vaguely mentioned a youth in Cornwall and a childhood around ships but, when seeing that I would not hear a word about the sea, never spoke about it again. Worth had joined the 84th a little over a week ago while I was briefly laid up in the hospital unit. An enemy shell had exploded near me and, while I was not seriously injured, it had knocked me briefly unconscious and delirious. When I awoke, I was told that, in my stupor, I had begun shouting that the Great Redoubt was being attacked by the Watchers and that I had to get back to my observation post in the upper levels or else humanity was doomed.
It took some time to convince the doctors that my remarks were nothing more than a brief memory of my old novel, THE NIGHT LAND, and that I was in full possession of my faculties. They showed nearly as much interest in the plot of the novel that readers had back in 1912 when it was published. Its commercial failure was essentially ended my serious imaginative writing. Although unsatisfying to write, bland adventure tales sold far more easily and I had a new wife and hopefully a family to provide for in the future.
When I returned to the 84th, Worth made me welcome and often sat with me during the long night watches. Although young and clueless, he loved to hear me tell my stories. I would recite them late into the night for I had rarely forgotten a word I’d ever written despite the nearly fatal head concussion I had suffered back in 1916 while training new RFA recruits on Salisbury Plain. Even when I was interrupted, Worth would remember exactly where I had left off.
As I spoke, I recalled the events behind every tale and their inspiration. The days and nights, so far away now, spent working away at my typewriter as I tried to capture my imagination on paper. The endless rejections as my work came back over and over again until the day when the dam finally burst and first one and then another and then another story sold. The hopes which rose with the publication of each of my four novels which would be eventually dashed as the low sales figures would slowly trickle back to the publishers. In a way, the war had come at an opportune time for me and I abandoned my writing career for that of a soldier.
Except, there were times when my stories refused to let me go.
I have seen them. Out there, on the fields, rising from the dead bodies. Those ‘Ghost Pirates’ of mine walk amongst the corpses. I don’t know what it is they are looking for but they search endlessly for something that hides from them. Occasionally a low moan floats over the ground but I cannot tell if it is them or the dead that is calling. Several times I have caught them staring at me. Across the dead, we glare at each other, daring the other to make a move. I have sat this way for hours, feeling their fingers reach across and tug at my mind. Once, I caught myself bringing my revolver up close to my head. Unaware, I was about to fire when my senses returned. Since that point, I keep my ammunition in a separate pocket.
Once, these fields were green and alive with flowers and birds. Now only corpses are planted here and the only singing comes from the mortar shells as they descend upon us. Their high pitched screeches echoed across the fields in an unnatural mechanic choir punctuated by the explosions. The sounds of our artillery were different and with a lower timbre so the shelling would become a strange symphony of fighting voices.
Worth had stopped over to see me and brought a warning. He had seen the units preparing the guns for movement. We were either preparing for a push or a defense. There seemed to be little difference between the two. I walked to the rear where the draft horses were quartered but each step I took was like sinking into a soft sponge which took almost all of my strength to step through.
“It’s just like the ship in your story, Hope,” Worth said to me with a smile on his face as he ran off again. In truth, he was right. Once I had written a story where a ship had become lost in sea and, through the mixture of chemicals in its hold and the centuries of elements upon it, had become alive. The seamen who found the ship were attacked by it like an invading germ. Their boots were ripped off by the soft mass that was the ship’s flesh. Only a few escaped alive. This death ground had become the same as that ship’s deck. The parallels were disturbing.
Around midday, the Germans attacked with a sudden ferocity. Their guns began with a devastating barrage on our front line making our soldiers retreat quickly while their fellows were blasted to bits. The order came to withdraw and I led our men onto our horses as we pulled the guns back to the pullback position. The horses strained as the guns sank in the mud and I had to order several foot soldiers to push the wheels forward. The German army ran up quickly when their shelling subsided and pushed their line forward.
In a matter of minutes, the ground that we had found and died to defend for most of 1918 fell back to the Hun.
We had to move the guns quickly into position and the artillery teams were there waiting. There was barely any time to take the measurements before they fired their barrages into the German troops. The shelling slowed their advance but did not stop it. That task fell to the British Army who, after retreating, set up a new line further in back of Mont Kemmel.
For hours, the air was filled with the high pitched screeches of the shells and the screams of the men and machines exploding. The men enforced their positions and we moved the horses further back. I spent as much time as I could with my own horse, Monarch, cleaning and feeding him. This was my third horse since being in France. Most could only take so much of the sounds of the shells and the screams and the dying. I could look them in the eye and see when they were about to break. It’s one of the skills which had made me effective as a Lt in the RFA. My lifetime with horses had come into good use but, lately, I had seen the same looks in the eyes of the soldiers around me. So much so that there were only a few men who did not have that look and Worth was one of them.
I sought him out during dinner and found him, once again, alone and not eating.
I admonished him for not eating and keeping up his strength. More than anyone, I knew the importance of eating to one’s overall fitness. Without another word, I set to and quickly ate my own dinner as he stared at me in disbelief.
“How can you eat such food?” He asked. “It’s disgusting.”
I laughed and told him that this food was a luxury compared to what I had eaten in my youth at sea. I’d dined on slabs of hard tack that crawled with maggots and flies. Often the officers would bet on which of the starving seamen would break down first and eat from the open barrel. With pride, I remembered striding defiantly to the barrel, breaking off a large piece of tack and biting down to the cheers of the cabin boys and sneers of the officers. The vomiting and bowel distress after had been worth it.
That night, I told Worth the tales of my own hunting ground, the Sargasso Sea. I told him of the ships caught helplessly in the grip of the seaweed choked sea and the monstrous creatures that lived there. The story of the survivors of the Homebird, which had been one of my early successes, touched him deeply. “Did they ever escape?” he asked hopefully.
I looked in his eyes and saw the real meaning of his question. Instead of the truth I told him that their escape was a story that I had simply not written yet but would someday. But, in truth, there was no escape from the Sargasso. The rescue I had written in my novel about the ‘boats of the Glen Carrig’ had a fake ending. One tacked on because my editor had requested an uplifting end that would please readers. It hadn’t seemed to make any difference in the sales.
Like those helpless, doomed characters, so were we marching towards an inevitable end. I knew in my heart that those fictional characters on my stranded ships would eventually succumb to the sea monsters around them or starvation. That was why I never wrote the final chapter. It was too much to deal with characters who, no matter their efforts or their enthusiasm or hopes, would never escape.
There were Watchers out there, in the dark, just waiting beyond the firing line.
Later that day, the Commanding Officer gathered us all together. We were a rag-tag group, standing in the mud and the blood, patched together with bandages and grit. The line would be retreating in the night, he said, but that we needed to set up a Forward Observation Post on the base of Mont Kemmel. He could barely look us in the eye because he knew what he was asking of us. Volunteers were needed, he explained, he would not order any man to take the risk. It would surely mean death for any who stayed.
I volunteered immediately although I had no idea why.
The C.O. nodded gratefully at me and paused. Finally Northrup also volunteered and we set out to prepare. I’d known little of Northrup and spoken to him less. He was a strong, strapping lad when he joined the 84th. Now he had shrunken and his clothes hung on him like a child’s doll. His eyes were dull and, though he would follow any order you gave him, the rest of his mind had walked away in the hopes of coming out again someday when the sun shined again and there were birds singing in the air instead of bombs.
April 18th
The 84th has retreated further back from the line. We watched them leave with a sense of stern resignation. Under darkness, we moved forward and set up our post. Northrup said nothing and I lost interest in speaking to him. I put him in charge of sending our messages back to the company and tried to get some sleep.
When I awoke, a grey dawn had already broken and I was surprised to find Worth sitting by my side. “You didn’t think I’d leave you here with that great sausage, did you? That’d be a fate worse than death!”
I laughed and he asked me to tell him one of my Carnacki stories. I’d always enjoyed writing them and still couldn’t understand why they didn’t sell better. It would be a long, painful day so I told him the story of the hideous ‘Hog’ from the outer spheres which I always considered to be the best Carnacki yarn even if I couldn’t sell it anywhere.
As I told him of the battle between Carnacki and the ‘Hog’, I described the oppressive atmosphere that bore down upon the Ghost-Finder and the way it tried to influence him to create his own undoing. Worth asked if it was the same atmosphere as the one we felt there, dug into Mont Kemmel like ticks on a dog. I replied simply that it was the same atmosphere as I have felt all my life whether in Ireland, on the deck of a ship sailing around the Horn, on a stage in Blackburn as I faced down the greatest escape-artist of all time, at a typewriter wrestling with my inability to express in words what I dreamed in my mind or here, on a battlefield that had lost all meaning. I carried it with me always.
The Germans made another advance with a volley of artillery later that day. The rest of the night was spent hiding low from the bursts and the singing bombs. We sent back several messages that alert the 84th with no idea if they were ever received. Through the night, we tried to sleep as much as possible but little rest was claimed.
I feel old and that is not something I have ever felt. I look at Northrup and I feel our lives draining away from us. Only Worth remains upbeat. Sometimes his nature keeps me going but, other times, I swear I could kill him.
April 19th
The barrage has been endless. I do not know how we have not been killed already. By the afternoon, a haze falls over the battlefield and all we can see are vague shapes moving back and forth. Northrup has been busy sending messages back to the 84th and I find myself praying that we will receive withdrawal orders soon but the C.O. has been silent.
I have no more words. Worth asks for more but I have none to give him.
My sight is riveted to the grey shapes coming closer in the mist and haze. The Ghost Pirates are there, running back and forth, stopping, running, crouching and crawling. Their eyes penetrate me. I cannot tell if they are stalking me or beckoning me to join them.
Then, in the dim background, behind the grey shapes and booming crashes, I see it moving forward like a mountain walking. I have seen it before in my mind and in my dreams but now it stumbles towards me.
I see the Watching Thing of the North-West from my land of future night eclipsing the dull circle of the sun. It strides forward. The sounds of the exploding bombs echo his footsteps. I try to tell Northrup but he sees nothing.
I cry out for Worth to bear witness and then Northrup finally speaks. There is no Worth, he says, who am I talking to? But Worth is there beside him, smiling. I point at him but, again, Northrup sees nothing. “You’ve gone mad again,” Northrup says, “you’ve been this way since you took that blow to your head. Talking to yourself. Telling tales. I tell you there is nothing there!”
I look back at the battlefield and see the Watcher even closer this time. So close that I can see its huge maw opening and closing to the sounds of battle. “It’s coming!” I scream and Worth moves away, apologizing. He had only come for the stories, you see, and didn’t want to see the end. Suddenly, as if he had moved behind a curtain, Worth is gone and Northrup is pulling on my sleeve.
We have to leave, he says, withdrawal or not. It’s too dangerous as the German shelling comes ever closer and closer. I begin gathering up our gear when I hear the Watcher’s voice speaking to me. It comes in a high pitched shriek. I look back in a terrified peace as I see the great mouth screeching at me. The sound of the bombs comes closer. I stand still, arms outstretched. Northrup grabs at me but I do not move. The Watcher speaks me out of existence.
(On April 19th, 1918, William Hope Hodgson and another officer sustained a direct hit from German artillery. They were blown to pieces.)
THE LAND OF LONESOMENESS: Copyright Sam Gafford 2013/greydogtales 2018
The interview referred to at the start of this post can be found here:
Sam Gafford’ s The Dreamer in Fire, from Hippocampus Press is available now:
Coming up – something light; something heavy. We’ll probably rummage through some recent books we’ve explored, and Paul St.John Mackintosh joins us with an essay on writing, politics and psychology in ‘The Weird, Horror, Supernatural and the Occult’. Plus more William Hope Hodgson related material to come… and those lurchers will return!