Fear Read online

  Roald Dahl

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  FEAR

  Contents

  Introduction Roald Dahl

  W. S. L. P. Hartley

  Harry Rosemary Timperley

  The Corner Shop Cynthia Asquith

  In the Tube E. F. Benson

  Christmas Meeting Rosemary Timperley

  Elias and the Draug Jonas Lie

  Playmates A. M. Burrage

  Ringing the Changes Robert Aickman

  The Telephone Mary Treadgold

  The Ghost of a Hand J. Sheridan Le Fanu

  The Sweeper A. M. Burrage (Ex-Private X)

  Afterward Edith Wharton

  On the Brighton Road Richard Middleton

  The Upper Berth F. Marion Crawford

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FEAR

  Roald Dahl is best known for his mischievous, wildly inventive stories for children. But throughout his life he was also a prolific and acclaimed writer of stories for adults. These sinister, surprising tales continue to entertain, amuse and shock generations of readers even today.

  For James Kelly

  Introduction

  by Roald Dahl

  My wise and venerable old friend Alfred Knopf, the American publisher, had a half-brother called Edwin. Edwin was a film producer in Hollywood, and a long time ago, back in 1958, I went to him with the idea that we should do a television series together of nothing but ghost stories. I pointed out that no one had done this before. I said there existed a whole world of ghost stories to choose from and that it wouldn’t be difficult to come up with a stunning batch of tales. All one needed for a series like this was twenty-four stories.

  Eddie Knopf thought it over. He talked with his associates and everyone agreed that it was a splendid idea. Emlyn Williams was approached and he agreed to be the introducer of each episode. My own primary task was to search out the twenty-four super ghost stories. I was also to write the screenplay for the first one (the pilot) and for several others.

  On the face of it, my job didn’t appear too onerous. In the second half of the last century and in the early part of this one, ghost stories were very much the fashion. Dickens had written one. J. M. Barrie had done several. So had Bulwer Lytton and D. K. Broster and George Eliot and Anatole France and Mrs Gaskell and Théophile Gautier and L. P. Hartley and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy and Washington Irving and Henry James and Walter de la Mare and Maugham and Maupassant and Poe and Sir Walter Scott and Mark Twain and H. G. Wells and Elizabeth Bowen. Even Oscar Wilde had written one called The Canterville Ghost. Great names all of these. I looked forward very much to making my selections.

  One of the first things I did was to call on Lady Cynthia Asquith who was an acknowledged expert on ghost stories and had published several anthologies. She was old and frail and she was in bed when she received me. But she was as bright as ever and gave me lots of good advice about how to start the great search.

  After a tremendous amount of scuttling around, including several visits to the British Museum Library, I managed to collect just about every ghost story that had ever been written. My house was filled with books and piles of old magazines, both bought and borrowed. Then I began to read.

  I got a bit of a shock. The first batch of fifty or so stories I read were so bad it was difficult to finish them. They were trivial, poorly written and not in the least spooky. Spookiness is, after all, the real purpose of the ghost story. It should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts. The stories I was reading did none of this. Some of the worst ones were written by the most famous writers. I read on. I couldn’t believe how bad they were. Nevertheless, I carefully recorded every single story I read in a notebook and I gave each one of them marks. Most of them got nought out of ten.

  Then suddenly a bright star flashed across the murky sky. I had found a good one. The end of it gave me the shivers. It was called Harry by Rosemary Timperley. That bucked me up and I went on with my labours.

  I read another hundred or so bad ones. Then I found a second good one. It was The Open Door by Mrs Oliphant.

  After I had read altogether some three hundred published stories, I had succeeded in discovering six good ones. That was not many, but it was anyway a beginning. The six, including the two just mentioned by Rosemary Timperley and Mrs Oliphant, were The Telephone by Mary Treadgold, Afterward by Edith Wharton, Spinsters’ Rest by Clemence Dane and The Four-Fifteen Express by Amelia B. Edwards.

  Hang on a second, I thought. What was going on here? Every single one of these stories was written by a woman! What an extraordinary thing. I began to wonder whether the really good ghost story belonged solely to the female. Was she perhaps more sensitive in that small delicate area than the male? It was beginning to look like it.

  With a feeling that I was perhaps making a rather remarkable literary discovery, I ploughed on. And by golly, if the next good one wasn’t also by a woman! It was Cynthia Asquith’s God Grante That She Lye Stille. I got rather excited.

  But alas, the next excellent one was by a man. It was Playmates by A. M. Burrage. And what a good one it was. After that, there followed a whole group of men, L. P. Hartley, Dickens, E. F. Benson, John Collier and the rest. The men were catching up.

  At the end of this marathon reading session, I counted that I had read seven hundred and forty-nine ghost stories. I was completely dazed by reading so much rubbish, but as I staggered away from the piles of books and magazines, I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had found twenty-four good ones and another ten possibles for Eddie Knopf’s television series.

  The male ghost story writers did eventually catch up with the females, but only just. Out of my best twenty-four (there is not room to include all of them in this book), the final score was thirteen to the men and eleven to the women. These figures were intriguing and I’ll tell you why. Many people have been fascinated and perplexed by the failure of women to reach the top rank in two of the three major creative arts, music and painting. With writing it is different. Ever since the Brontës and Jane Austen got them going there have been plenty of fine women novelists around. But this is not true of music or of painting and sculpture. In the whole of history there has never been a woman musical composer anywhere near the top rank. There hasn’t really been one in painting or sculpture either. The greatest woman painter was probably Popova, followed by two other Russians, Goncharova and Exter. There was also Mary Cassatt, Barbara Hepworth and possibly Georgia O’Keefe. But none of them could hold a candle to the huge mass of great male names in painting, from Dürer to Picasso.

  But to go back to women as writers. For about a hundred and thirty years they have been producing good novels, even some great ones. But they don’t seem to be able to write plays or top-rate short stories. I don’t think a woman has ever written a classic play. And as for short stories – no, not really. By this I mean great short stories. The greatest twenty-five short stories ever written (if it were possible to agree on which they were) might conceivably include one by Katherine Mansfield, one by Willa Cather and one by Shirley Jackson. But that would be all. The score would be twenty-two to three in favour of the men.

  And yet – and here is the interesting thing – ghost stories, at least the kind I am talking about, are short stories. And in that particular and very special category the women run the men very close indeed, a lot closer even than in the novel, with the score at thirteen to the men and eleven to the women. But it is the women who have written some of the very best ones.

  So perhaps there is something after all in the theory that women have an unusual flair for writing about the supernatural. Who can forget Shirley Jackson’s marvellous story, The Lottery? Admittedly it isn’t a ghost story. But i