Short Fiction

Mr. Villiers

Villiers moves easily through Piccadilly and the clubland of men who know things, but it is a beggar in the street he cannot forget: Herbert, ruined, who said his wife had destroyed him body and soul. Where his friend Austin counsels caution and Clarke's letter begs him to burn the portrait and blot out the story, Villiers reads both as dares. His restless curiosity is the engine that drags polite society toward the abyss it would rather ignore.

Mr. Dyson

Dyson is the kind of man who notices a name above a shop and a lamppost's lettering at the same moment, and who enjoys watching perplexity dawn on a stranger's face. He wields a phrase about grass and lasses and maple-trees like a weapon, invoking a shadowy figure called Q until the terrified Travers surrenders a brown-paper parcel. His appetite for the queer and the hidden makes him a useful ally — and a man who cannot leave a locked box unopened.

Mr. Clarke

Clarke's character is an odd mingling of caution and curiosity: he repudiates the occult in his sober hours, yet pines for the unseen and secretly compiles his Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil. The horrors of Raymond's laboratory left him clinging to the commonplace for years, but the old passion reasserts itself, and on a foggy December night he cannot resist the bureau. His letter of warning to Villiers reveals a man who has peered over an abyss and drawn back in terror.

Mary

Mary sits hand in hand with Darnell in the dusk, and as the ugly walls of Shepherd's Bush dissolve into shadow, she seems to know something of the secret of the wood and the valley shut in by high hills. Her relations share the modern world's instinctive horror of the true country, so her knowledge comes from no experience but from some deeper intuition. In her eyes Darnell sees water-pools in the still forest and hears the music of the winding river — she is the human anchor of his visions.

Mrs. Darnell

A character involved in the domestic life of the Darnell family.

Edward Darnell

Darnell is an English City clerk flourishing toward the end of the nineteenth century, equipped with a commercial education that left him unable to articulate any thought worth thinking. Yet on certain mornings he grows certain that common sense is the smallest item in an ant's equipment, and that he and his fellow-workers are like fair stones of an altar serving as a pigsty wall. He knows, dimly but certainly, that man is made for mysteries and visions — and he is preparing himself for a great experiment.